The Starlost: Difference between revisions

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* [[Ramscoop]]: The ARK's drive system, as described in the Series Bible, is a classic Bussard ramjet, but no details actually made it into what was broadcast.

* [[Really Seven Hundred Years Old]]: All of the titular "Children of Methuselah".

* [[Schizo-Tech]]: Although the show was canceled ''long'' before it could have shown any, the possibility of societies with Schizo-Tech on the Earthship ARK was explicitly allowed for in the [[Series Bible]]:

{{quote|Each of the individual cultures inside the various environmental domes will, of course, have developed weapons consistent with their own cultures. But here too there should be not-too-subtle differences. For example, you can make a crossbow that will stop an armored personnel carrier out of a truck's leaf spring and some of the connecting rods from the steering System. it's been done, in Biafra.}}

* [[Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale]]: Every writer but Ellison and Bova. The broadcast version of the ARK is allegedly ''13,000 kilometers'' long, although the model ship seen throughout the series didn't look anywhere that big. The Earth itself is only 12,756 kilometers in diameter. (One suspects a couple numbers got swapped somewhere after it left Ellison's hands.) Worse, the domes are repeatedly described as fifty miles across, but as you can see from the image on this page, the domes on the model have diameters about a fifth or sixth of the ship's total length. So either the domes are actually over 2000 km across, or the ship's only about 300 miles (482 km) long. (According to the [[Series Bible]] linked above, written by a real SF author with a clue, the ARK is two hundred miles long.)

** Similarly, despite being on a random course, the out-of-control ARK manages to be on a collision course with a star; given the sizes and distances involved, this is practically impossible.