Stellvia 02

20 light years away will hammer the Earth with an energy wave; 200 years later, the follow-on plasma shockwave will arrive. Stellvia is a space station built to prepare for the second coming, which is expected to occur in a few months. The story is concerned with several teenagers recently assigned to the Stellvia school complex.

In episode 2, they get to experience space piloting of a one man craft ...

spoiler

space

one of the ships malfunctions, corkscrewing through space. The instructor fails to notice until one of her other students reports the problem, and then blames the pilot for the collapse of the control system, despite the fact that student pilots are supposedly incapable of altering it. The principle is clearly that the lowest person in the chain of command must accept blame for any mistakes; eg, shit flows downhill.

What fact? Shipon did manage to bypass what ever lockout there and deleted everything in the ship.

Just saw the first two eps... this isn't gonna become Stratos4, The Outer Space Years, is it?

Deleting any program whose function isn't clear wasn't a bright move, but a security lockout that can be inadvertently bypassed by a trainee without advanced technical knowledge is very poorly designed. Even if the primary mission of such ships requires that degree of flexibility, it should still not be possible to delete your operating system without being warned by the software that you are doing something which will cripple the ship. If she ignored such a warning, then she should have been immediately dismissed; if the system collapsed because a trainee operating her standard keyboard made an error in ordinary judgement, then she discovered a serious flaw in that system.

Then again, it is mentioned that these ships are cutting edge R&D, being used with green trainees because the vessels are so different from every other unit that previous training or experience would be of no use in learning to pilot them. The pilots have supposedly received extensive simulator training, and her decision to delete programs was not even vaguely reasonable or expected.

Still, we have the comment of her classmate that the pilots were specifically told that the system was protected against the mistakes of student operators; clearly, they were misinformed.

Either way, if the trainee does not know what she did wrong

You know, I just hate people who analysis a simple show like it is some sort of documentary of the space shuttle or the history of WWII.

It can be another Ryvius, or Azumanga in space. Probably not.

It's just a better-argued version of 'this show SUXX0RS!'.

Ah, don't you love new technology spaceships with operating systems by Microsoft!? Good thing that someone was smart enough not to put much fuel in the tank.

Azumanga in space would have been interesting. Only this time Osaka's voice is the genki character!

Ryvius, however, was 'Lord of the Flies', only with a top-secret spaceship instead of an island, stretched out to an agonizing 26 episodes, and with a sociologically unbelievable ending. I don't think that's going to happen. Please it damn well better not happen. I can't afford the plane ticket to Japan that would be needed before I could strangle the producer's neck if Stellvia turned into that.

Anyhow, best MST3K line that I came up with: when that woman in the space suit was paged about the newbies flying and said 'not now, I'm busy studying', the proper MST3K response is 'Hey, they're newbies on their first flight! We always lose at least one or two!' (The cool part is I was right!)

While it's a lost cause to expect realistic physical science from anime SF (or almost any other visual SF for that matter), it's still reasonable to demand realistic human interactions. Believable interactions, credible motives and workable power structures are hallmarks of good writing in any genre. Galen's criticism that the social structure portrayed is farcical is valid.

(I can remember various examples of people trying to do the equivalent of 'incident reviews' in the commercial software development world. What I was never taught, and it took me a while to figure out for myself, is that censure has to take place after the review is complete, not before. Most of the managers for/with whom I worked never got the idea.)

Let me take one more stab at presenting my arguments; this time, as a farce:

'During a routine student training exercise today, one of our spacecraft went careening through space without helm control due to a sudden loss of the control program. Remote command override failed, and the local fail safes failed. The cause has not been precisely determined, but we feel that this unexplained catastrophic failure of our most vital mission critical equipment does not require further investigation because of the involvement of a trainee during the incident. Since trainees are already incapable of affecting the control system software, we are confident that no further such incidents are possible, and determining how it happened in the first place would be a wasted effort.'

Of course, we are only at episode 2; perhaps episode 3 will find Miss Shipon strapped into a simulator until she can reproduce the problem under laboratory conditions.

Yep, sounds like a typical SNAFU situation to me.

Hmm, maybe this could turn into Dilbert, only with cute little girls instead of obese engineering types.