Hexagons?

[Lorpius Prime]

All right, what's up with all the hexagons in the show? Cards, printouts, picture frames, hexagons everywhere in this show (though I've noticed the biggest picture frames in Adama's room are rectangular). Wouldn't that be a less efficient way to make things than what we use in our less-advanced society?

[Lorpius Prime]

[begin: think]

Or...reconsidering, most of the things are actually octagons, aren't they; rectangles with the corners sliced off...

[/end: think]

[Big Brother]

Maybe they had a lot of tort lawyers, so they got rid of all the sharp corners they could in order to avoid personal injury lawsuits?

<classic adama>No wonder our world fell apart...</classic adama>

[Lolua]

Probably has something to do with the law of non-vertical walls in sci-fi TV shows. They've all got to be curved or slanted or oddly shaped. I blame the trapezoid setup in the original Star Wars trilogy, though it likely goes back farther than that.

Big Bro?

[Big Brother]

Lolua said:

Probably has something to do with the law of non-vertical walls in sci-fi TV shows. They've all got to be curved or slanted or oddly shaped. I blame the trapezoid setup in the original Star Wars trilogy, though it likely goes back farther than that.

Big Bro?

Trapezoidal-cross-sections for sci-fi hallways goes back at least to Forbidden Planet.

In that film, it was due to aliens with a different body plan than human beings needing a lot more space at floor level than they did a few feet higher up. We never got to see what the aliens actually looked like, since they'd all been dead for millennia and apparently didn't belive in polaroids.

In later films, it may be an attempt to not look like a hallway in a particularly modern-architecture office building, or otherwise to simply look "futuristic'".

If the set designers think about "why" at all, they probably think it is to provide easy access to the umpteen GNDN pipes and wiring trunks and so forth that snake along every corridor of a ship, without having an ugly maze of pipes along the ceiling like on real-life ships (and also since most TV/Movie sets don't have ceilings so they can hang extra lights and boom mikes up there).

It also gives them an excuse to put a bunch of pretty lights along the floor and lower walls, and angles them to shine slightly upwards. This helps avoid sharp shadows under everyone's noses and chins, which makes the camera people happy. Cinematographers hate shadows on people's faces unless put there on purpose to look scary or artsy-fartsy. In other camera-angle effects, it reduces the likelihood that a shot from far down the corridor is gonna have the wall coming too close to the side of the camera in the near foreground and getting all out-of-focus fuzzy; keeps the actors from bumping their elbows and heads on the wall during fight scenes and gives them room to swing their fists and the ends of long-barreled/bladed weapons; and gives them space to move a steadicam around people standing in the middle of the corridor and talking to each other without removing a section of the wall.

On real ships where space is a premium, such as subs and aircraft carriers, the corridors are the usual upright-rectangle in section, and pipes are run along the ceiling or anywhere else they need to be run and the people simply learn to stop bumping their elbows into hard metal objects.

[Big Brother]

The actual hallways on Galactica look strongly like the passageways under the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Giza, Egypt. I swear those walls are tipped inward at the same angle, and the periodic supports (the designers obviously never read the Evil Overlord List) resemble those in the Pyramid as well.

(Goes to do a GIS andlook for pics to support this theory)

Okay, so they apparently look like some movie set of the inside of the pyramids, not the inside of the pyramids themselves. Dangit, this is the passageway I thought I remembered...



And that pretty well shoots that theory out of the water, unless the set designers had the same corrupted memory problem I did.

As for the octagonal com printouts and picture frames, it's probably just the set designer earning his pay by trying to make the stuff look subtly futuristic/alien but still be recognizable AND producable on a budget. I don't have a whole lot of faith in the BSG set dressers, for supposedly in one scene a copy of Reader's Digest is visible on Adama's coffee table, and in another a bottle of Jack Daniel's is visible on the shelf behind him.