When does he not have the time? They've got nothing to do on the whole unless something happens. I see this as less of a point problem specifically because it seems that all Eli does anyway is review Kino footage (again, unless something important happens).
In theory, Eli is Rush's assistant. Rush doesn't seem the type to want an assistant, and the only person who he has even wanted to have around him is Eli in said instances. But I really don't think that Eli want's to be around Rush.
Young is perfectly willing to have Eli do his own thing because the Kino's are becoming to be a valuable resource. So, while Eli would be Rush's assistant in theory, he's really more doing his own thing.
As for reviewing multiple Kino footage on double speed until he finds something "good," that's probably what he actually does. He puts the Kinos out on patrol, where they wander around the ship and find something worth recording on their own. And since people know Eli is doing the whole documentary thing, if they think they're going to do something important (or they did), they'll probably grab a Kino as it floats by and/or tell Eli about it after they did it. Thus Eli knows he's looking for something.
With less than 80 people on the ship, if anything happens, Eli would know about it. And the first place anyone's going to look for confirmation (if there was only one person, or no one there) is a Kino. Justice is proof of that. Besides, most of the footage is just random stuff of people wandering around, or the Kino wandering the halls finding nothing.
This is especially so if you think that the Destiny has been on this journey for 4 months, and the 10 episodes show the only 7 'eventful' things to have happened. The rest could be mundane boredom. Which would make me come to terms as to why Spencer killed himself (that and they crazy bit).
edited 6th Dec '09 5:35:19 PM by Swish
Young left Rush for dead...next to a spaceship.
Oh come on, surely he knows Rush is gonna' fix the spaceship and zip right back? Surely he can't be that Genre Blind.
I'm guessing he expected Rush to die of thirst before he could get the space ship running.
Fight smart, not fair.Okay, so here's what I want to happen:
Rush comes back to Destiny for revenge on his repaired alien ship.
Young walks up to him and says: I knew you could fix that ship for us if you had the proper motivation of saving your own skin. Welcome back. You just got punk'd!
And then Rush stands there, speechless.
We're not just men of science, we're men of TROPE!Lol no. The Asgard hyperdrives are the best in the entire series. They can travel from their home galaxy to earth in a matter of minutes (When they calculated how long they would take with a Goa'uld mothership, they came up with several hundred years or so). The only problem earth has is a lack of power. When they had a ZPM at their disposal, their ship needed mere days to Pegasus, instead of weeks.
The shields of the Aurora-class ships also weren't shown to be that powerful. Of course, the shield of Atlantis is nigh-indestructible despite that.
Then, there's their beaming technology, which is better than the Ancients' crappy ring transporter (or their 'elevator transporters' in Atlantis) in every way.
edited 14th Dec '09 6:35:05 AM by Smokie
We don't know how far away that galaxy is. What we do know is that an Asgard hyperdrive, ZPM powered, can go from Earth to Atlantis in four days. Atlantis' hyperdrive, at full power, can do the same in four hours. Clearly, this is a rather large difference, and not just one of power. Same with the shields. Ancient shields are nigh-unbreakable with power. Not true of other ones. The Asgard beam weapons are just really good at punching through. Hence, while their weapons are better, they fall short elsewhere.
As for their beaming tech, the Ancients have that too. See Merlin's three different caves for examples. Also the Sudan obelisk. Atlantis' elevators are the same thing confined to a single spot, so they're not really worse so much as static.
edited 14th Dec '09 2:07:32 PM by TheRoguePenguin
That's the "Whormhole Drive", not a hyperdrive. And it's a complete Ass Pull. But the finale sucked horrendously anyway.
Gotta prove that, I've never seen Aurora-class shields show extraordinary defense.
Static is worse. It's one thing to teleport in a designated field. It's another thing to be able to beam a skyscraper into orbit or beam a Goa'uld out of your brain.
The wormhole drive was a complete asspull, no doubt, but that has no effect on the hyperdrive. The hyperdrive would have gotten them there in four hours, but it crapped out at the edge of the galaxy so they asspulled the wormhole drive to do the rest in a split second. Atlantis' hyperdrive is still far faster than an Asgard hyperdrive.
For an example of the invulnerable shields, look at the supervolcano episode. They sat in the eruption of a supervolcano for four seconds on almost no power without so much as a scratch, but admittedly it's been a while and I may not fully recall the details. Compare to the episode with the solar flare and the Daedalus-class ship with Asgard shields. The shields were up the entire time but the hull was still flaking off. This is the difference. Ancients shields will fail, but only when there's no power left. Otherwise nothing gets through.
I'll give you that the Ancients are never quite as creative with teleportation technology as the Asgard, but we never get to see them use it that much. Remember that Merlin's final cave where he made the Saangral could beam the entire contents of his laboratory and anyone inside instantly through a gate, which I don't think we've ever seen an Asgard beam manage.
Aren't those Asgard modified shields? The human ships are quite small, it's entirely possible that a larger mechanism is more efficient with it's power or that the Asgard have larger built in energy systems. The systems probably aren't integrated as well either.
Fight smart, not fair.In "Disclosure", Thor explains that the Asgard designed the shields and weapons (well, they didn't deliver on that latter one) for the Prometheus, so it would stand to reason future versions were derived from their designs or provided by them outright.
edited 14th Dec '09 9:21:44 PM by TheRoguePenguin
You cannot compare lava with the heat of the sun. The corona of the sun is like 600 times hotter. A solar flare would fire even more energy on the shield.
Yes, the shields nearly had no energy, but lava is really nothing special compared to super nukes and crazy energy weapons (even the Ha'tak cannons supposedly carry a firepower of 200 megatons per bolt).
What I don't get is why the Asgard never installed energy weapons on the Daedalus, if they did so on the Prometheus.
That's true, but it's merely a difference in shield type. I could imagine that the Asgard shields can endure longer in exchange.
Regarding the hyperdrive: If we are to believe the Stargate Wiki, the Ida galaxy is 4 million lightyears away from earth while Pegasus is 'only' 3 million lightyears away. And yet, the Asgard can reach earth ridiculously fast. I remember when they cried for their help in an alternate universe because of the Goa'uld and they arrived very quickly to kick the bad guys asses. So apparently, Asgard hyperdrives are at least equal to the hyperdrive of Atlantis. Why earth's ships are so much slower, I don't know.
Also, as Carter has shown, the Asgard beaming technology can actually be used like the replicator in Star Trek, which just creates stuff. That's pretty amazing.
This is just speculation, but I bet the Asgard could use their technology in similar ways with the Stargate. I mean hey, they can just activate a gate without any dialing or even the 'kawoosh' effect.
Perhaps the Asgard surpassing the Ancients in every technology was far-fetched, but they're at least equal.
edited 15th Dec '09 7:42:21 AM by Smokie
They didn't install weapons on the Prometheus. They were going to, but then decided it might be a bad idea. The only weapons ever given were the sweet beam weapons in "Unending".
Fair enough that lava doesn't really compare to a coronal mass ejection, but the point was that even though the shields block it in both cases, heat bleeds through one and not the other. Ancient shields are clearly better at holding out nearly anything. Lava isn't as hot, but it's very heavy.
The four million thing might be right, though the figure comes from the supernova episode and there's no clear evidence they were in the Ida galaxy aside from Replicators. Putting that aside, we don't know if the ships came directly from Ida. They have said that they keep an eye on Earth. The ship could have been closer.
The Asgard beaming tech is shown to be rather versatile, but it's at least shown that the Ancients have similar tech despite a lack of creativity in it. Also remember that the Asgard gained a great deal of knowledge from the Ancient database. As for the auto-dialers, the Nox had those, too. It seems farfetched that the race that built the gates couldn't do something similar.
I always thought they just beamed the matter in atom by atom and let it assemble there (did Matter Replicator launch?). Also, just because the shields were designed by Asgard, doesn't mean that they were designed to be produced by the Asgard. All the gizmos still have to be build by (mostly) earth tech.
Fight smart, not fair.

Domeone on /tv/ proposed that the show will now be about "Rush and his whacky adventures".
edited 6th Dec '09 2:48:22 PM by Smokie