A great disturbance in the Force - Disney's buying LucasFilms

Pop Junk.

You can almost feel the countless Star Wars fans crying out in terror. Also, they plan on doing a Star Wars Episode VII, which I doubt will be based on any of the novels and will only serve to destroy the post-movie canon. This is why we can't have nice things!

God, this is worse than that one time I watched the Star Wars porn parody and saw Vader banging his own daughter.

THERE.ARE.FOUR.LIGHTS! Or why Picard is a better character than Kirk

First off, let's appreciate Sir Patrick Stewart's acting chops, shall we?



That was from Chain of Command Part II and is without a doubt, one of the best scenes in Star Trek and television ever. How does this make Jean-Luc Picard a better character than James T. Kirk? Simple: He's more realistic. Kirk strikes me more as one of those "infallible heroic" characters that were practically a stereotype from the old days of scifi. He was always assured to pull his ass and the Enterprise out of danger and never showed any deep emotion. I mean, when Spock died, he didn't cry. During his eulogy at the funeral, his voice cracked like he was going to, but he didn't. Hell, even Saavik had tears in her eyes and she was a Vulcan! When his son, David, was killed in Star Trek III, there was nothing.

On the flipside, you have Picard, who restrains himself on normal accounts, but does show emotion, nonetheless. There's an episode that takes place after Best of Both Worlds, Family, where Picard visits his brother and his family while recovering from the events of those two episodes. There's a scene near the end where Picard and his brother get into a fight that ends with them sitting on the ground, covered in mud, laughing at themselves. Suddenly, Picard goes from laughing to crying as all the emotions he had pent up inside him about his ordeal finally come out. In Star Trek: Generations, when he receives word that his brother and nephew were killed in a fire, he cries. In First Contact, he showed a vengeful side, that he was willing to do almost anything not only to stop the Borg, but to get a measure of revenge for assimilating him all those years ago.

It's not just crying that makes Picard more realistic, though. At the end of Chain of Command Part II, Picard reveals to Deanna Troi during a therapy session that he had come close to breaking, that if that Cardassian officer hadn't walked in when he did, Picard was going to give in and tell his torturer what he wanted to hear - that there were five lights, not four. Can you imagine James Tiberius Kirk giving in under torture? Me neither.

That's not to say that I don't like Kirk. He's a damn good fighter and leader and if I had to choose which captain I'd want commanding a ship during a battle, I'd go with him and not Picard. However, I'd much rather serve under Picard during exploration and first contact missions than Kirk.

Plus, you gotta love a guy who gets stabbed through the heart and laughs at it.

Holy frak! This is the greatest Star Trek thing ever!

Behold! The most awesome thing ever to awesome!

Click to embiggen.

By dusty-abell, who is some kind of mad genius and a Class-A Trekkie. This is just mindblowing. Wow.

Meanwhile in space...holy frak, it's a planet!

Looks like Star Trek and science fiction in general were right all along - There is a planet at Alpha Centauri! Astronomers announced it today, though I wish they had come up with a better name than Alpha Centauri Bb. Unfortunately, while the planet has about the same mass as the Earth, it's too close to its Sun to be of any use.

Imagine if it wasn't though, if it was in the right orbit and habitable? The human race would have a reachable goal to set its sights on. True, at four light years, it would take far too long to reach it by conventional means, but it could be the motivation mankind needs to push itself. We could set up a globally-funded science organization to work on building generation ships and the best, fastest propulsion systems possible, while working on making relativity and physics as a whole our bitch, and invent an FTL system.

I dig Vulcan starships

Because they're just so cool looking! Check out the D'Kyr type, a combat cruiser, for example.

Memory Alpha.

Lovely ship. One of my favorite things about Star Trek: Enterprise were the Vulcan's navy. Their cruisers were decidedly unique and original. The most unique feature, of course, is the ring. Believe it or not, that is their warp engine, because screw nacelles! It's more than a shame that this feature was never adapted by Starfleet after the Federation's formation. There's another configuration, as seen in the Suurok-class, a combat cruiser and science vessel combo.

Let's all look at this awesome artwork of Jean-Luc Picard

Click to embiggen.

By Sebastian Ciaffaglione. You can check out his website here.

h/t SyFy City.

Which scifi universe has the most realistic space battles?

Some magazine called Foreign Policy asked a naval analyst named Chris Weuve and his answer were Babylon 5 and the Battlestar Galactica remake.

FP: What about ships turning in space like airplanes?

CW: Babylon 5 was closer in that it understood that there is no air in space and you don't bank. But even on that show, the ships would be under thrust, and then they decide to go back the way they come, they would spin around and almost immediately start going in the opposite direction. That doesn't work. They ignored the fact that acceleration is cumulative. But I do like that they can rotate in flight and fire sideways. Babylon 5 and the new Battlestar Galactica are far and away the best in trying to portray vector physics. There are a lot of problems with the way they do it, but I'm willing to give them an A for effort.

I have to agree. BSG also scores points for not having sound effects in the airless vacuum of space. On the other hand, Space warfare doesn't have to be realistic. I enjoyed the hell out of the battles they showed on Deep Space Nine during the Dominion War.

Via Neatorama. h/t SF Signal.