1 Helium can freeze, it just requires extra pressure... 25 bar worth, to be exact... and a temperature of ~ 1 Kelvin.  In other words, it takes a lot of doing.

2

Obviously not the case in that book (since you said "star drive"), but you could be more than 70 light years father from one than the other if your FTL thingamajigs run on one-way wormholes, like you can drive one block and be 3 blocks from where you started on a grid of one-way streets.

(I apologize for the imminent shortage of catgirls.)

3 Wonderduck pedanted before I could!

4 Yeah, well, here's one that's been bugging me since the late '70s.

At the end of the final episode of the original Battlestar Galactica series, they receive a transmission of the Apollo 11 moon landing. This is meant to make the audience feel that our intrepid explorers are nearing their destination.

However, *earlier* in the episode, they had received another transmission. This one was accompanied by video that showed the LEM *without its landing legs*.

In other words, they were flying away from Earth.

5

The "without landing legs" means it was in space after landing. It left the lower half behind when it took off.

The landing legs were part of the "descent stage". The "ascent stage" left the legs behind when it boosted into orbit.

In other words, film of the LEM with legs is earlier than film of the LEM without legs.

6 I think Anachronda meant to say "away from the moon".   Which would be confusing; it does not make sense that they're headed towards Earth, because that transmission would have crossed their path after the one of the moon landing. 

In other words, they have missed the Earth and are headed away from it now.

7 I read his post wrong, and he has a point. Sorry.

8 Actually, now I see that we both read it wrong, but in different ways.  I thought he meant Apollo 11 was flying away from the moon; he meant Galactica was headed away from Earth.  Damn English and its unclear pronouns!

9 Hmmmm...if anyone in the "Lensman" universe would be likely to encounter -- or engineer -- frozen helium, it would probably be a race like the frigid blooded Palainians, so maybe Kinnison picked up the "image" from his fellow Second Stage Lensman Nadrek(sp?).  (There's almost nothinig you can't rationalize if you try hard enough!)

10 Has anyone else seen the old Lensman anime movie?  It wasn't too bad, really.  Cutting edge CG for the time.

11 I saw the dubbed version (it's available on Amazon and BakaBT). The director made it too much like Star Wars.

In the original series, how are the Boskone as villains?

12

Something like 25 years ago, my then-girlfriend gave me a VHS tape of a half-hour anime called "Lensman". I gather that it isn't the only show ever based on the series, because what I vaguely remember about it doesn't match what anyone else says about it.

In that one, Kimball Kinnison is just another guy. A lensman crashes near him, and Kinnison finds the lensman as he's dying. He gives his lens to Kinnison, who thus becomes a lensman.

Which directly violates Smith's canon. A lens is tuned to one particular person. It vanishes when he dies, and while it exists, if anyone other than the owner touches it, they die.

And it went downhill from there. I thought it was terrible, and only watched it once.

"Boskone" is a good enemy in the actual series, but it isn't a person. Ultimately this is about a fight to the finish between two competing ideas about how living things should be governed. One is known in the series as "Civilization" and it's roughly based on classical liberalism, and is led by Arisia.

The other side is Boskone and is led by a race called the Eddorians. Their vision of how things should be run is based on power, cruelty, and terror.

But the interesting thing is that the true nature of the struggle is never totally clear to most of the main characters in the series. It is only in the last book, Children of the Lens, that the Eddorians are finally defeated. And aside from Arisia, it is only the aforementioned Children who know the truth. All of the lensmen in both galaxies know that a final battle takes place, because they all help fight it, but none of them ever find out the true reason it was fought.

For a number of reasons, Christopher Kinnison decides that it's better that way.

13

This seems to be the one I had.

There seems to have been a TV series, too. I haven't seen it and don't know anything about it. But just from the description in ANN it's obvious that it ran roughshod over the canon, and I'm not interested.

14 Grumble. I'm reading Children of the Lens now. The word "Ploor" has shown up three times so far, and every time the stupid spell checker changed it to "Floor".

15 That was the one. Apparently, the anime mixed in the silver age Green Lantern origin, which is ironic since the Lensmen pretty obviously inspired the Green Lantern Corps.

Boskone itself doesn't seem to, but are there antagonists for Kinnison among them that meet the "attractive" criterion for villains? (I'd say that Nero Wolfe's Arnold Zeck doesn't.)

On scientific errors, do E.E. Smith's inertialess ships hold up once you accept the basic concept?

16 While I don't know if the concept would actually work as shown, Doc Smith gets major points from me for continually and rigorously exploring the consequences and utility of his inertialess drive.  The evolution of warfare between inertialess ships actually feels like the kind of things that would happen between two warring parties using the same basic tech.

17

Muon, any FTL drive, no matter what it is, tosses all of Relativity into the shredder. But if you grant that from the very beginning, I thought he did a pretty nice job with it.

For instance, the inertialess drive isn't infinitely fast. Instead, the force from the thrusters balances against the resistance of passing through interstellar gas -- which ain't very thick, usually, which is why the ships are so blisteringly fast.

But it turns out that intergalactic space has even less gas, so the inertialess drive is even faster between galaxies. And  that all makes sense.

He has a lot of fun with the "intrinsic momentum" of objects using the inertialess drive. Basically, when the drive is turned off, it resumes the velocity it has when the drive was turned on. If that's not in a direction you like, too bad for you.

Which means that docking with a ship from another system nearly always is pretty complex. Both ships have to turn their drives off, and then match intrinsics.

Yeah, I think it works pretty well. I've seen worse.

18 I'm actually not totally sure that's the case, though it certainly is here.  Wormhole-based FTL and similar ideas certainly violate the causal ordering postulate, but the COP is on a lot more shaky ground than relativity proper ( there's a reason its a postulate, and not a theory ).