The Long Descent

I've been more than a little concerned about this season of Battlestar Galactica. Gregg Easterbrook, columnist for ESPN, summarizes this week's episode:

This Week's "Battlestar Galactica" Complaint: "Galactica" continues its descent from hot show to cancellation. Hey, producers, how about having Admiral Adama discover a planet where there are some writers? Friday's episode involved several ships being destroyed when the fleet decided to fly directly through the center of an active star-forming nebula of intense heat and radiation. But this is outer space, which is three-dimensional -- you don't need to go "through" anything, you go around! One character pronounced the nebula was "too big to go around," yet "Galactica" and its sister ships previously have been depicted as able to make instantaneous hyperspace jumps covering thousands of light-years. Flying directly through a dangerous area of space rather than simply going around it is a running theme of bad science fiction. As the conclusion of the "Deep Space Nine" Star Trek serial, a Federation battle fleet had to reach DS9 station to prevent a calamity; the sinister Dominion placed all its ships tightly together at one point between Earth and DS9; the Federation force blasted through the center of the bad guys, rather than just go around! As Douglas MacArthur said of ocean tactics where there is a lot of open territory and a few heavily defended positions, "Hit 'em where they ain't." This will someday be the rule of space combat.