In a message dated 7/14/01 10:14:49 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
dshilling(a)worldnet.att.net writes:
<< If, for instance, there were only a dozen
habitable planets, it would be less surprising that they
all have quarries and only one building (an underground
bunker) per planet, and it would be possible to follow
the political currents of their relationship with the
Federation.
If the Liberator were an astonishingly advanced--but
tiny--ship (as if Scorpio weren't an interstellar Yugo,
for example) then it would make perfect sense that
Blake couldn't accommodate a larger crew and had to
be critically understaffed all the time. >>
Ah, so you're simply stating the truism that the nature of media Sci-Fi
universes are directly related to the budget allotted to the programme. Yes,
that's always been the case (which you the viewer are presumably supposed to
ignore or not question). TREK and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA and any number of
other SF standards had the same issue; almost every planet they encountered
in that wide, wide universe had bipedal aliens with an astonishing
resemblence to humans. I understand that in the case of Trek, Roddenberry
insisted on it for some reason. Even now, STARGATE SG-1, with its amazing
writing and opportinuty to go virtually anywhere in the universe, still finds
transplanted colonies of homo sapiens on almost every destination they
explore.
I often think that one reason why STAR WARS was so explosively popular when
it came out was that it had the budget and the moxie to show a universe
populated by many sentient, non-human alien species of all sorts.
Leah