Starfuries as just too damn well-build

Yeah, Starfurires are pretty awsome. I've always used something simmaler to them in my space stories. Able to turn on a dime, strafe, go up and down and have the cockpit in the center of the ship to avoid gee force problems. The only problem is they explode a little too easily in the show.

Well, of course they explode easily, there's no 'shields' or 'deflectors' or 'hull plating at fifty percent!'

They're logical in that regard too.

The more I watched the Starfuries, the less impressed I was by Star Wars or Star Trek. Honestly, space fighters aren't just jet fighters in space.

You could do worse than just use Starfuries...

I wouldn't actually call 'em Starfuries, as such. NASA may be using it, but they're doing so with the permission of Joe Straczynski.

Just wondering, guys...should this thread be moved into the main SF/F forum? I mean, isn't the discussion more about how to use imaginary technology in a story, and that NASA involvement has in fact been, to date, merely a query of interest? And, near as I can determine, rumor?

I just spent the last half hour searching Google and NASA.gov for references to the claim. If anyone can locate something definitive about this B5/starfury rumor, I'd like to see it.

All the rumors seem to be from the JMS/Babylon 5 sites, Peter - I can't find anything substantive from NASA - then again, I wouldn't expect to.

Er...I can dig out the issue of the B5 magazine that had the photo of Joe Straczynski meeting with a bunch of blokes from NASA and discussing B5. I have boxes of issues.

It was real stuff, but it's just a number of years old now, I don't expect to be able to find anything useful about it online anymore.

But, move it where you will.

Oh! Oh! Call them Slippers! Cause they're slippery and fast...and stuff.

Bloodhounds! Accordians? I'd fly a starfighter called an Accordian, but only if I'm launched for the USS Tuba.

Don't do drugs, kids.

The only drugs I'm doing is negative coffee. I figured that if you drink negative coffee, which is grown by using negative soil to grow regular coffee bean plants (as we all know that growing a positive plant in negative soil equals to a negative plant). So I normally don't drink coffee, but now I've gone from 0 coffee...to negative 2.

HA!

Well, no doubt NASA (and other governmental agencies) consider the fantastic when there is even the remotest possibility of turning the ideas into reality. Helicopters come to mind. Radio. Television. Lasers. UAVs. Bionic limb replacements. So I'm not doubting that some folks from NASA consulted the B5 guys. Certainly all the B5 sites Google returned indicate that happened.

So before the tone of this thread slips entirely into the fantastic, how about continuing our discussion by listing other actual applications of what was at first dreamed up by fiction writers? I bet we could fill a couple more pages before we tire completely?

The homing device in Goldfinger inspired the GPS system. Isn't that neat? It came from the combination of "Wanting that cool homing device from Goldfinger, which has a range far longer than any in real life" and "Hey, if we use Sputnik's radio signal, we have one out of three necessary points of reference for triangulation! Let's combine those two ideas into something we'll call...the Trackertron 9000!”

Name changed later to be less stupid.

In the Wikipedia article, the referenced source for J. Michael Straczynski's contact with NASA is ... the Babylon 5 Tech manual, itself a fiction, and which is on the site b5tech.com.

The site's owner, Brandon Bray, says in dim gray print, "B5TECH.COM is meant to be an instrument/warehouse for academic research and discussion related to Babylon 5, and is not meant as an infringement upon any of the © TM of Warner Bros., Babylonian Productions, or related authors/companies."

Now, I haven't made an exhaustive search of his site, or for that matter, the web, but I can find no reference there to the NASA query. As PeeDee says above, the information is likely far in the past. But to cite a page of fiction as a reference for fact is, well, unacceptable.

Mind you, I want to believe NASA is hounding every hard SF writer for ideas they might actually implement. And I agree that the design of the Starfury has merit for maneuvering large masses in a micro-gravity environment. But I want documentation that isn't self-referent.

Pthom said:

Well, no doubt NASA (and other governmental agencies) consider the fantastic when there is even the remotest possibility of turning the ideas into reality. Helicopters come to mind. Radio. Television. Lasers. UAVs. Bionic limb replacements. So I'm not doubting that some folks from NASA consulted the B5 guys. Certainly all the B5 sites Google returned indicate that happened.

So before the tone of this thread slips entirely into the fantastic, how about continuing our discussion by listing other actual applications of what was at first dreamed up by fiction writers? I bet we could fill a couple more pages before we tire completely?

Click to expand...

Communication satellites in geosynchronous orbit first appeared in a short story by Arthur C. Clarke. That always impresses me no end.

Flip top cell phones were inspired by the communicators in the original Star Trek series. Oops, sorry, that wasn't writers...