Spoilers DC's Legends of Tomorrow - Season 2

Discussion in 'Science Fiction & Fantasy' started by Commander Richard, May 22, 2016.

  1. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    "Rocks" in space move very fast. A micrometeoroid the size of a grain of sand can hit with the force of a bullet; spacesuits are essentially bulletproof because of that very risk. And of course asteroids and meteoroids hit the Moon and other bodies with enough force to leave craters. Kinetic energy is half the mass times the square of the velocity -- so the same mass moving ten times faster hits with a hundred times as much energy, a hundred times faster is ten thousand times as much energy, and so on. So yes, a "rock" moving fast enough can strike with as much energy as a nuclear warhead.

    Not to mention, of course, that the energy released by a nuclear explosion goes out in all directions, so the Waverider would only have been struck by a small portion of it. But it was enduring the full impact energy of the meteoroids.
     
  2. Beagleman

    Beagleman Commodore Commodore

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    The only smart decesion they made regarding this episode.
     
  3. Jax

    Jax Admiral Admiral

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    But a small portion of a Nuclear blast is more impactful than rocks in space? I know they can impact with the force of a nuclear blast but they have to be big like several miles across right? and I assume speed + size + entering the atmosphere has something to do with that and this was smaller pieces & in space.

    Also why is Sara still acting like the Captain? The Waverider is not her ship and R.I.P is still an expert on time.

    Also why couldn't they chill out in space for a while and fix the ship? all the danger seemed so forced.
     
    Last edited: Mar 16, 2017
  4. Tallguy

    Tallguy Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I keep telling myself I'm overthinking this episode. Then I realize that I'm just thinking it.

    That said, nothing in this episode is out of line with a silver age comic book. Of COURSE there is an asteroid shower mere moments from lunar orbit. This episode had the spacial proportion of a TOS episode. Everything happens HERE and NOW.

    The best part of the episode was Thawne shut down Ray from doing his Martian bit. Anything is better with Ray. Nice to see the suit as well. Wonder if Firestorm might have been useful as well.
     
  5. dahj

    dahj Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Competence trumps seniority :p
     
  6. sojourner

    sojourner Admiral In Memoriam

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    No. The important part of this is the kinetic energy, which is a function of speed and mass. The atmosphere actually protects us because it slows meteors down and in most cases they break up from the friction /heating on the way down. In space a very small rock moving at very high velocities can cause serious damage.
     
  7. Jax

    Jax Admiral Admiral

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    I was under the assumption despite slowing it down, the heat build up from the kinetic energy as it hits the atmosphere along with its mass turns it into a bomb with a nuclear force and in space while a direct hit would be fatal it would just smash you out of the way like a lorry hitting you rather than explode. I wasn't doubting the serious damage but the ship seemed to take less damage from a direct Nuclear explosion, where the heat alone would tear any object apart.
     
  8. Romulan_spy

    Romulan_spy Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    The damage caused by very fast moving rocks in space is not the issue. What was unrealistic is that they encountered a super dense meteor shower in lunar orbit right at the worst time in the plot.
     
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  9. Asbo Zaprudder

    Asbo Zaprudder Admiral Admiral

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    The energy released by only a 30 metre object travelling at 15 km/s would be equivalent to 1 megaton. The frequency of impacts by such objects is estimated to be about 1 per century. Many of them explode in the atmosphere and over water. Iron meteorites would likely survive to ground level. As the Earth surface is 30% land and the percentage of iron and stony iron meteorites is less than 2%, the frequency of ground impacts with this yield is perhaps about 1 every 15 thousand years. The proportion is hard to estimate as many meteors might well be composed of icy comet debris that wouldn't survive to the ground unless it were very large.

    http://www.spaceobs.com/var/spaceob...2/distribution/2236-1-fre-FR/distribution.gif (log scales so log 1 = 0, log 10 = 1, log 0.1 = 0.1 etc)
    http://www.spaceobs.com/en/Alain-Ma...urvey-Discovery-statistics-at-the-end-of-2002
     
    Last edited: Mar 16, 2017
  10. Jax

    Jax Admiral Admiral

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    Yeh that made me go :rolleyes:

    I know Legends is meant to be 100000% OTT and a real camp fest at times but this episode was just bad. They pull off stupid episodes like Camelot that I loved but this one didn't click for me.
     
    Last edited: Mar 16, 2017
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  11. kirk55555

    kirk55555 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Well, this episode was just ok. But, as a JSA fan who thinks their version of the JSA was garbage, I like seeing them kill off so many of their "JSA". The Apollo 13 plot was ok. It seems like they changed the event a lot, though. I wonder if the probable changes to the movie Apollo 13 will effect history :lol:

    I also liked seeing Ray get the better of Thrawne. Even if the "no superspeed in space" was BS, it was still nice to see Ray get a win. He even predicted the standard "Villain always escapes the Waverider's brig" trope the show uses.
     
  12. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    No. Like I said, it's a function of mass and the square of the velocity. If something with a millionth as much mass hits at a thousand times as much velocity, it imparts the same amount of energy. With high enough velocity, a speck of dust can hit as hard as a nuke.


    Because she is. She earned that position and the crew accepts her in it. And as Rip said, he recognized here that she's better at it than he is, so he ceded the role to her.

    Plus, there's also the fact that Sara Lance is a more established character in the Arrowverse, and Caity Lotz is a more popular performer. So she, not Rip, is the central character of the show.

    It isn't Rip's either. He stole it.

    Spock is an expert on everything, but Kirk is still the captain. Ditto for Data and Picard. Knowledge and leadership are two different things. Rip was a terrible leader, lying to his team, using them for his own gain, and making unilateral decisions without consulting them. As Commander Steel said here, Sara has brought them together as a unit far better than Rip ever did. It's obvious why she's in charge, and this episode was all about affirming that even in Rip's eyes.


    Because Ray was running out of air?


    Physics doesn't work that way. At high enough velocity, the kinetic energy of impact is greater than the molecular binding energy holding matter together, so the impact instantly vaporizes the impactor and much of the target. The superhot plasma cloud would then punch a hole through the interior of the ship in a cone shape -- since it expands as it travels -- and leave a bigger hole going out than it made coming in. If the interior were pressurized, the heat and shock waves imparted through the interior atmosphere could blow the ship apart or certainly kill the crew -- which is why ships in Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda and The Expanse would depressurize most or all of their interiors in combat, since they don't have deflectors to prevent impactors from penetrating a ship. Moreover, if the particles were moving through the hull or the interior atmosphere at relativistic speed, they could trigger a cascade of neutron radiation or a burst of gamma rays, or both. Radiation is just particles moving at very, very high speed, and having a commensurately great amount of energy.

    The thing about the "lorry hitting you" analogy is that impacts at different speeds behave in very different ways, because of the ratio between the impact energy and the binding energy that holds the objects together. In a low-velocity impact -- say, if the truck hits a wall at 2 km/h -- there will just be a light bump that has little or no effect on the structure of the vehicle. But if the truck hits the wall at 50 km/h, it'll significantly damage the front of the vehicle. If it hits at 100 km/h, it could total the vehicle and damage the wall. And judging from one or two Mythbusters episodes, if it were launched on a rocket sled and slammed into the wall at nearly 1000 km/h, the truck would essentially disintegrate into dust on impact, because the impact energy then is much greater than its molecular binding energy, so it's as if it were just a truck-shaped cloud of particles hitting the wall and splashing. (Assuming the wall is strong enough to survive that.) So impact effects don't scale up with speed.


    Maybe the Waverider's shields are better at deflecting thermal energy and radiation than physical impact.


    I was philosophical about that. I reminded myself that the Arrowverse is basically a comic-book universe, and one of the laws of comic-book and cartoon universes is that there's always a dense asteroid swarm. Heck, they were staples of old B-movies too. I've seen '50s and '60s space movies from America, England, and Japan that all had their intrepid space crews en route to the Moon or Mars or Planet X or wherever inevitably having to deal with a meteor storm en route. Fictional outer space is just lousy with the things.
     
  13. sojourner

    sojourner Admiral In Memoriam

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    50's and 60's? Heck, Mission to Mars used the asteroid storm trope in 2000.
     
  14. Marc

    Marc Fleet Admiral Premium Member

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    I'm surprised they had some exposition that the story about the exploding oxygen tank was a coverup for the fact the Apollo 13 mission went pearshapped. Though they'd need to explain why three astronauts went up and 2 came down.
     
  15. Jax

    Jax Admiral Admiral

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    Sara can remain central and not lead, it just seems odd that's all. He potentially sacrificed himself (he didn't know that his plan would work in regards to dealing with the Nuke) and when he returns he basically been demoted. Using what I will call the Doctor Who rule (he also stole the Tardis) my ship when I brought you onboard, so my ship all the time :p if I can be so childish about it :lol: I would like to see Sara command all the away missions due to her League training but when it comes to temporal matters & ship functions, RIP should take the lead.

    Sorry I meant after they picked Ray up, why couldn't they just stay in orbit? were the sub light engines/thrusters off line? even so that's a 3/4 day trip back to Earth right? and don't you have to be halfway there (from the moon) before the Earth's gravity will begin to exert a force on you. I just felt the writers went out of their way (These are the Voyages esq) to create a danger for the plot and it seemed excessive when the ship has been fixed in the past rather quickly.
     
  16. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    It's not odd to me. Sara is the more established and popular character. Rip's arc in the first season was too closely tied to the Vandal Savage arc (which audiences weren't thrilled with and even the producers found unsuccessful in retrospect), and with that resolved and the Time Masters gone, Rip has less of a role to play in the narrative. They've tried to give him a new role by making him the catalyst in the Spear of Destiny arc, but where do they go when that's resolved?


    And if Rip had done that, he would've been a jerk and the crew would've revolted against it. Come on, even Rip himself recognized in this episode that Sara had taken to the command role marvelously well and managed to unite the Legends behind her leadership more than he ever managed to do. As Heywood said, they'd been a bunch of bickering screw-ups under his leadership but are now a well-oiled machine bonded by mutual trust. So Rip recognized that if he tried to challenge Sara's authority, the Legends would've resisted it. His time had passed. So he chose to cede command to her. All of this was spelled out clearly in dialogue.


    As I said, knowledge is not the same as leadership. Rip's knowledge makes him valuable as an advisor, in the same way that Stein's and Ray's and Nate's do. But he's not as qualified to lead people, to win their trust and respect, to mold them into a unified team sharing a common goal. He failed in that and Sara succeeded.


    Obviously the engines had to be online in order for them to get to Earth at all. I don't recall, but maybe the life support systems were damaged and they needed to get into an oxygen atmosphere before their air ran out.

    The effect of an object's gravity extends to infinity, just growing weaker as the square of the distance. The Earth's gravity is what holds the Moon in orbit to begin with, so naturally it affects everything in the vicinity of the Moon. That's how Apollo capsules were able to get back from the Moon at all -- they were following orbital trajectories shaped by the interacting gravitational fields of the Earth and Moon.
     
  17. Jax

    Jax Admiral Admiral

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    I was just thinking of a line in Apollo 13, where one of the characters are explaining something about halfway there and moon does the rest of the job for you so I was just thinking if their were engine troubles that would help the ship get back. However I don't recall the status of the engines but if they were fine why the whole final arc about re-entry just orbit the planet until you fix the ship.

    A leader surley must have a degree of knowledge, what does Sara know about commanding a ship from the future and temporal mechanics. The writers have always rushed this aspect of the show, the technology must be so COMPLEX and somehow Jax became chief engineer with zero training because he works on cars back on Earth and Sara now commands the ship. I would like a split leadership role personally but I thinks its pretty clear Rip will be leaving by the end of season 2, maybe he could set up a new Time Masters organisation.
     
    Last edited: Mar 17, 2017
  18. Romulan_spy

    Romulan_spy Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    At this point, Jax is quite competent with the ship. And Rip was a below average time master student. He was never very competent in time travel mechanics back in season 1. So I think Rip's best use would be as "exposition man". He can give the legends some background info on something like the spear of destiny to kick off a new mission.
     
  19. Romulan_spy

    Romulan_spy Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    You might be thinking of the point in space between the earth and the moon where the force of gravity from earth and the force of gravity from the moon cancel each other out.
     
  20. Jax

    Jax Admiral Admiral

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    Thank god these writers don't write Doctor Who in that case, the poor chap would be cleaning the toilets of the Tardis :lol: