Skip to main content

Ralsina.Me — Roberto Alsina's website

Small Things Break Big Things

I have been watch­ing Galac­ti­ca (the new­er one) on and off for a few month­s. And there is one small thing that drives me nuts ev­ery time I see it. It throws me off the sto­ry, and com­plete­ly breaks the world-build­ing that's go­ing on.

Oc­tog­o­nal pa­per.

http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f158/Silent-Ninja/Battlestar%20Galactica%20paperwork/BSGPaperwork001.jpg

This. Makes. No. Sense. Nice font, though.

Why? Be­cause pa­per is square for func­tion­al and man­u­fac­tur­ing rea­son­s. You take a spool of pa­per, you cut it, you end up with rec­tan­gu­lar pieces.

Are you man­u­fac­tur­ing linen pa­per? Then you need to build frames to do it, and mak­ing oc­tog­o­nal frames is much hard­er.

To make oc­tog­o­nal pa­per sheets you need to cut ev­ery one of them from square sheet­s. That is stupid.

Oh, it gets worse. In the BSG uni­verse, they have oc­tog­o­nal *trac­tor pa­per*.

What sort of id­iot came up with that? How can that even work!

So, a fun se­ries but ev­ery time I see a piece of pa­per I want to scream.

Fede Heinz / 2012-10-21 14:11:

Don't worry. Wait until you get to the finale. Octogonal paper will look like the sanest plot device of the series.

You may want to stop watching after “Razor”, while the puzzles are still in place, and haven't yet been “solved” in the lamest way possible.

Nick / 2012-10-21 15:24:

It's a joke - the rumour is that in production of the mini-series they were forced/asked to "Cut Corners" everywhere.


Contents © 2000-2023 Roberto Alsina