Rewatching Blake's 7

[Candlelight]

People not recognising Avon, or the others, makes more sense though I think. It’s like Bin Laden, everyone knew who he (Blake for sake of argument) was, he was the face of Al-Qaeda and most people would have recognised a picture of him, but show people a picture of al-Zawahiri and I imagine the % who recognised him would be significantly less.

Good point, however Al Qaeda are a terrorist organisation with many splinter cells and factions all over the world consisting of several thousand members and sympathisers.

Blake's group were never more than six humans and a whopping great big space ship.

 

[Marc]

Blake's group were never more than six humans and a whopping great big space ship.

Here's a thought. Was there anything in the series that gave an indication of how big the Liberator was? (in the re-imaged radio series it was 2lm long but I don't think the original was that big).

 

[Guy Gardener]

During Iraq, US Forces were given 52 playing card sets with the faces of Saddam's top operatives as characters in the playing cards...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most-wanted_Iraqi_playing_cards

Effective but insulting and condescending. Some suit in Washington decided that this is how they will trick the grunts into learning, because their soldiers are so full of vice and sloth that they are expected to gamble endlessly more so than ever study the necessary information to be competent at their job.

Blake's group is 7 cards.... Maybe 12 with alternates, but they're not going to count Zen, and they will not want to acknowledge that ORAC exists to the rank and file.

Who is in the rest of the deck?

Can you imagine Federation Troopers on folding chairs playing Gin Rummy with a Deck of "Federations most wanted cards"?

 

[Marc]

During Iraq, US Forces were given 52 playing card sets with the faces of Saddam's top operatives as characters in the playing cards...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most-wanted_Iraqi_playing_cards

Effective but insulting and condescending. Some suit in Washington decided that this is how they will trick the grunts into learning, because their soldiers are so full of vice and sloth that they are expected to gamble endlessly more so than ever study the necessary information to be competent at their job.

Blake's group is 7 cards.... Maybe 12 with alternates, but they're not going to count Zen, and they will not want to acknowledge that ORAC exists to the rank and file.

Who is in the rest of the deck?

Can you imagine Federation Troopers on folding chairs playing Gin Rummy with a Deck of "Federations most wanted cards"?

On a tangent, in Harvest Of Kyros, Servelan says Zen is "every bit as impudent as I've heard"

Wonder who told her the Liberator's central system impertinent nature cos I don't think Federation personel where on the ship that much.

 

[Candlelight]

Was there anything in the series that gave an indication of how big the Liberator was? (in the re-imaged radio series it was 2lm long but I don't think the original was that big).

You can do the math yourself:

I doubt it was 2 miles.

 

[Marc]

Was there anything in the series that gave an indication of how big the Liberator was? (in the re-imaged radio series it was 2lm long but I don't think the original was that big).

You can do the math yourself:

I doubt it was 2 miles.

Damn typos - in the audios it's 2Km

But I'd forgotten about that there was the shot of the London next to the Liberator.


The other comparison I guess would the space station (XK-27?) in Breakdown but wasn't sure because we are talking about 1970s BBC SFX
So yeah big ship.

 

[diankra]

When I tried to work it out from the Space Fall fx shots I got about 900m. Scorpio comes out at about 40-50m (docking tube in Gold). Must redo it though as the Dvd'S clearer than the vhs, and I did the workout 25 years ago...

 

[Candlelight]

Wouldn't it have been a dull show if Blake had succeeded in taking over the London and used that as his ship, never finding the Liberator...

 

[Guy Gardener]

But every time on the spaceradio that he says "LONDON CALLING!" you have to take a shot.

 

[Candlelight]

But every time on the spaceradio that he says "LONDON CALLING!" you have to take a shot.

What about "Avon calling"...?

 

[Guy Gardener]

2 shots!

 

[Starkers]

Wouldn't it have been a dull show if Blake had succeeded in taking over the London and used that as his ship, never finding the Liberator...

I doubt they'd have got very far unless they chanced upon some alien/advanced tech to beef the ship up ala Scorpio. On the other hand I'd wager there are hundreds of that class of ship out there, so if they had taken the London they might have been very anonymous...it'd be like driving around in a Ford Focus as opposed to a Lamborghini.

I guess the other alternative would have been to break into a Federation base and nab a pursuit ship. I'm not sure what scale pursuit ships were though, they seemed to have minimal crews so might not have been practical. Somewhere at home I have a B7 role playing game that I think Horizon, the official fan society (at least I think they were official) put togeather. Must dig it out.

I've always loved pursuit ships.

 

[Guy Gardener]

I liked the Mutoid Pilots.

Mutoids are Hot.

(I don't remember seeing any male Mutoids, were there any? Very Stepford wives if you think about it, or Dollhouse since they were turned into soldiers and not sex slaves.)

 

[Starkers]

There were male mutoids, I think we saw them very rarely though. I find the idea of mutoids quite terrifying.

I often wondered why the Federation were bothering to ship all the criminals off to Cygnas Alpha when they had the mutoid option. I'm surprised they hadn't scheduled Jenna in particular for that fate.

 

[Marc]

There were male mutoids, I think we saw them very rarely though. I find the idea of mutoids quite terrifying.

Maybe they found it was more cost effective to send the men into slave labor than convert them to mutoids.

Or simply not everyone was suitable for conversion. It probably wasn't that cheap and you had to be sure the mental processing work.

We saw with Blake that with a bit of prodding he was able to break the conditioning. The Mutoid we saw in Duel wasn't able to break hers despite Travis's goading.

 

[Starkers]

I think the difficulty with Blake was that they had to leave his personality and memories in place, if supressed, so they could fool people that he'd recanted. With a Mutoid they could do a full wipe of all memory and personality.

 

[Candlelight]

I guess the other alternative would have been to break into a Federation base and nab a pursuit ship. I'm not sure what scale pursuit ships were though, they seemed to have minimal crews so might not have been practical.

From "Duel".

 

[Starkers]

Good catch.

That would seem to imply that Pursuit Ships are pretty damn big, I dunno maybe its just the fact that we only ever saw minimal crew that suggested they were small?

Of course I doubt very much that the BBC effects people had given much thought to the relative scales (I could be wrong but given they'd originally designed the Liberator to fly backwards who knows )

 

[Guy Gardener]

I would expect a pursuit ship to be sleek and tiny, choosing speed and endurance over weapons, manpower and armour... A pursuit ship would be several orders of magnitude smaller than a Federation Battle Cruiser.

Is it possible that the Liberator was tiny?

(Think how much smaller, yet more powerful, the White Star Fleet from Babylon 5 was compared to almost everything it encountered in battle.)

 

[diankra]

The size of the Pursuit Ships is a bit of a problem; that shot makes it pretty clear that if Liberator is as big as it has to be from the Space Fall shots of it linked to the London (and with 20-odd prisoners and as many crew aboard, the London has to be pretty substantial), then the pursuit ships are huge - maybe 500 meters long, which is much larger the original Enterprise, for comparison, almost up there with the Enterprise-D.
Yet everything else - the script descriptions and the cramped interior set which echoes the cylindrical design of the central hull - implies they should be much smaller; basically just a three person cockpit (with presumably a small sleeping/mess compartment behind as they aren't always crewed by Mutoids; Travis asking if the mutoid has to change her plasma in front of him implies there must be somewhere else she could have gone), with weapons systems in the front, and engines to the rear. About the size of a jet fighter or a B2 bomber at most, maybe 24m-ish.
I guess we could say that the pursuit ships are huge, but there's only a tiny amount of habitable space; the rest is taken up with the immense engines they need to have a hope of matching Liberator's speed. But it's a bit of a fudge. (And think how big Space Command must be if it's able to store these huge pursuits ships internally, which we have to assume as we never see any docked to the exterior of the station).

Another oddity is in Seek-Locate-Destroy, Travis says that the new Starburst-class pursuit ships are the only ones that will given him a chance of catching Blake, and Servalan has to pull strings to get the first three assigned to him. So really, there should have been one model for Travis's squadron, and another for the older model pursuits ships on routine patrol (with more of the Starburst-class ships coming into regular service in later episodes till eventually they become standard).
Again, we just have to assume that the Starburst class looked little different on the outsideand just had new generation systems inside. But it's a but messy, as it means the Federation had these humongous great pursuit ships before they had Liberator to worry about, rather than as a response to its threat. (Maybe it's best to go with the Bird of Prey retcon; two identical ships of totally different sizes).

Really though, I wish we could just ignore the Duel shot and go for the small pursuit ships option (will have to check the shot sof pursuit ships passing Liberator from Hostage, reused in Aftermath to see if it matches); if nothing else that model shot makes a bit of a nonsense of Blake's dialogue about Liberator being able to come through if they take the impact on the lower hull; there's no way Liberator could survive an impact with a ship as big as it is onscreen.