Re: Battlestar Galactica: Season Finale. Who saw i
They DO have combat Marines on Battlestar Galactica, the guys in the black BDU's with the body armor and all the web gear. They just don't have very many of them since the fleet is comprised of who just happened to survive the holocaust. The Galactica only had a Marine security detachment aboard (Like a U.S. aircraft carrier does), but it was a skeleton crew as the Galactica was about to be decomissioned as a museum ship.
The Colonials certainly did have heavy weapons, but since they're just lucky to be alive, and their sole protection is a half-decomissioned battlestar, they're lucky to have the ammo they got from the space station depot in the first episode. I'ts kind of like if the United States were wiped out, and the sole survivors were on the USS Intrepid just off of Manhattan, and expecting it to have working cruise missiles in storage. They're lucky they have anything to fight with. They do have some missiles and nukes, #6 goaded Baltar into asking for one for his "Cylon detector", and [Spoilers]they sent Boomer with one to blow up the Base Star from the inside in the first season finale,[Spoilers] But while they have heavy weapons, they're never going to have any more missiles and bombs than they do now, so they'd better save them for when they really need them. It's the same for the bullets, and the flak shield the Galactica defends itself with, or whatever the fighters shoot, but they at least have more of them.
I'm not sure if we watched the same Babylon 5? I liked lots of the ideas in Babylon 5, you saw stuff like occasional realistic vacuum/zero-G manuvering, centrifugal "artifical" gravity on space stations and some ships, and the inside of such a space station where the parks, buildings, and ground curve up into the "sky". Stuff I admit you've never seen anywhere else on a show or most movies, but the CGI was pretty crude at times. Much of it barely looks better than "The Last Starfighter" from back in the 80's. And often, the interior set dressing looked as though it was supposed to be "Miami Vice in space", and didn't match a futuristic, or even a late-90's esthetic at all...
However, the CGI on Galactica is way more photo-realistic, and in the case of the space shots, barely looks like it's CGI at all. The only "weak" CGI, has been some distance shots of robotic Cylons outside, colors and light values didn't match the backdrop perfectly, but it was no worse than just about everything that's CGI in you're average episode of "Stargate SG1".
That's not a completely fair comparison to Babylon 5, as the state of the art is always improving, and animators can draw on past experience, but there are design choices and direction that have an impact too. Babylon 5 often looked too much like a overly colorful video game, and always seemed to have a bright neon nebula and three planets in the background for visual interest.
If you look at NASA footage and pictures from the windows of manned space craft, you barely ever see anything in space other than stars, and not even then if the sun is in view, just black sky, and the one planetary body you're near, usually the Earth or Moon. Asteroid belts are usually one or two asteroids at a time, the rest just looks like empty space, even when they're "close" they're too far away to see. It's never a "cloud of rocks" like on Star Wars or Star Trek.
I also love the way they show scale and distance in space on Battlestar Galactica. The way they use distance and jerky "hand held" camera angles to show how fast and tiny fighters are against the Galactica and Base Stars, or even when they pull away from the Galactica to show how tiny even it is against the infinite backdrop of space. There's none of this "capital ships 100 feet apart and nose-to-nose ready to use things more powerful than nukes" like on Star Trek. If you've ever been on an airliner, think about how tiny stuff like skyscrapers and large ships are, and that's just a few miles away. Such scales are infinitely worse in space, and the directors are giving you just a taste of that, and don't just compose shots and battles to make sure the screen is full of pretty stuff for every single frame. That sense of scale adds a lot to the feeling of the show.
And if you've ever seen the footage of the 1960's nuke tests the US Navy did in near space in the Pacific, BSG has even got the color of a nuke going off in the vacuum of space right. The purple-white camera flash with purple plasma streaming away as it cools is precisely what it looks like.
http://www.atomicarchive.com/Photos/LANL/image45.shtml