Stargate Hyperdrives are too fast.

MUCH too fast.

So I’m doing research for this story, and looking up various bits of Star Wars and Stargate technology, and eventually I’m looking at Hyperdrives.

And I find the entries for the various races, and I’m reminded of how absurdly powerful their engine tech is.  The Goa’uld basically have the crappiest version, with the standard mothership turning out a mere 32,000 times lightspeed.

O_O

Holy.  Shit.

So basically, even the ‘slow’ hyperdrive lets you cross the entire galaxy in roughly three years.  Which gives the main bad guys access to something on the order of 200 BILLION star systems.  Then we have the Asgard and Ancient technology (which includes the tech Anubis incorporates into the Goa’uld ships later on) which are immensely faster, to the point of making jaunts to other galaxies a fairly trivial thing.

This is just silly, and will therefore be massively nerfed in my fanfic material.  Any System Lord would find plenty to keep him occupied in a territory just a few hundred light years across; lots of planets, lots of slaves, etc, etc.  So a top speed of say, 2500 times lightspeed or so would serve all their needs.  If you need to go further/faster, well, there are Stargates for that.  

What is it with writers and Glory’s hair?

(By ‘Glory’ I of course mean the character Glorificus from Season Five of Buffy)

I’ve seen multiple instances now of authors brutalizing the poor goddess’ hair, usually by having it ripped out of her head or torn away by the handful.

Buffy never suffered this indignity in all her seven years of battling evil.  Even though I’m sure there were a couple of instances of hair pulling, or someone grabbing and holding her briefly by the hair, there was never, ever an instance where handfuls of blonde locks came off in their hands.

Nor with Faith, not with Cordy, nor with Willow… and all three of them had tons of hair to grab.

Yet Glory, who is demonstrably more durable than any of them, has this happen to her.

I suppose it’s a case of the writer following along where the show has led them, since there IS a scene where Crazy!Glory tears some of her hair free?  Even so, poor form, authors, poor form.  For exactly the same reasons we don’t show our male heroes getting their noses ripped off or handfuls of teeth hitting the ground, we do NOT mess around with the female character’s hair.

Or, at the very least, if we do, there should be SIGNIFICANT reactions and consequences.

Granted, the example that prompted this entry is from ShayneT’s crossover story ‘Smallville Glory’, where it’s a nascent Superman doing the hair-ripping, but the same rules should still hold—Glory could just as easily have grabbed some hair and left poor Clark with a couple of large bald spots, but you don’t do that because you don’t want the reader picturing that for the rest of the story when they should be focused on the actual text.

Poor Glory; they really do hate that bad perm….