Dana said: "perhaps the preference for exile on prison planets instead of execution is an officially atheistic regime's version of a "fate worse than death"--since the Federation doesn't believe in eternal damnation, they want to give you years and years to regret annoying them"

This is very possible and kicks straight into the debate you get today over the death penalty; which is worse, the electric chair or life imprisonment. The ST: Voyager episode we saw on Sky in the UK a week ago tackled the same debate. They were helping transport some prisoners who were sentenced to death and discovered that one of them had psycological disorders due to a physical problem in the brain, which they fixed. However, he's still done the crimes, should he still be sentenced to death? It was made more relevant with Seven of Nine, who had also committed attrocities while she was Borg, but hadn't been punished at all.

Sorry, drifting off topic. So, is a life on Cygnus Alpha better or worse than execution? And who decides? Also, in the 100 to 150 years that it had been going, the religion had developed. It also seems that, apart from dropping of prisoners, the Federation leaves the planet alone. How long then before it develops a different, more advanced civilisation? Also, how is it guarded? Surely Blake wasn't the first person to think about breaking out some prisoners. The drug cover story also falls down if you have a strong enough force; you go down and steal the drug when you free the prisoners and then manufacture more of it, as Blake at one point was planning to do.

-- cheers Steve Rogerson http://homepages.poptel.org.uk/steve.rogerson

Redemption 03, 21-23 February 2003, Ashford, Kent Celebrating 25 years of Blake's 7 and 10 years of Babylon 5 http://www.smof.com/redemption