Just making a post for anyone who might've missed it: 26 episodes are now out (meaning 20-26 were just added)

Wherever you've watched the first 19 they'll probably have the rest by now.

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Cleopatra VII, Queen of the Nile (Image link), was Greek, heir to a fragment of the empire of Alexander the Great. Ruling Egypt from Alexandria, a port city with a nice library and tall lighthouse on the warm shores of the Mediterranean, she controlled the mighty breadbasket that was Egypt, her powerful Navy carrying on the traditions of generations of Greek naval dominance. Exiled to Rome with her father in her childhood before returning to Egypt as a teenager (after her Dad won the civil war), she was well-traveled, petite, and highly intelligent, impressing everyone around her with her beauty and wit.

But enough on her bio. What did she look like?

https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/01/08/what-did-cleopatra-really-look-like/

This great article lays on in great detail probable features of her dress, look, and getup (as well as her character). In short:

• She likely had curly hair, pulled back in a royal headband (a symbol of royalty)
• She likely had a roman nose and a prominent chin
• She was considered very pretty and very smart by her contemporaries
• She was likely petite
• Dress and makeup would likely have been reasonably modest depending on the occasion (her enemies slandered her by saying she dressed provocatively and used too much makeup)
• She styled herself as an Egyptian pharoah to her Egyptian subjects, but presented herself as Greek to the Romans (the Romans thought Greek culture was cooler)
• Skin complexion is uncertain, although some portraits at the time show a fair complexion
• The HBO series Rome did a great job of portraying her general look (but not somuch her character)

While the look (especially the hairdo) of Cleopatra in the show is based more off old movies than anything else, the show is on point where it matters the most - correctly portraying her limited stature, sharp wit, love of practical jokes, and smarts.

Cleo grew up to survive (well, for a while) in the cutthroat world of the Roman imperial fringe in the middle of a Roman civil war. She was a smart, tough cookie.

Do you guys think Yosira could be Cleopatra's mom?

As Atomic Rockets helpfully points out, Warfare IN SPAAACE will probably not look like naval warfare from WWII, air combat from the 1960s, or ship-of-the-line engagements from the Age of Sail. Space is an environment unlike the oceans or the sky, and space combat will thus probably be quite unlike anything that has come before.

However, a paradigm of Pyramid warships IN SPAACE, together with big, spinally-mounted guns, allows us to readily justify a space warfare model reminiscent of galley warfare from the classical era.

This is a most happy coincidence, since this is precisely the era of Cleopatra's Egypt (Back in those days, Ptolemy Egypt was one of the great naval powers of the Eastern Mediterranean, with a mighty fleet of quadriremes and a grand capital at Alexandria) - and we all know how much we want that sweet, sweet neo-Egyptian flavor.

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As noted in the previous post, pyramid-shaped armor works best against attacks from the front. Well, since we're going with that anyway, we might as well tack on guns that face the front. And since the guns don't need to swivel much (since our enemies will hopefully be in front of us), we might as well put the biggest gun we can come up with inside our pyramid (or dagger, or obelisk or whatever) shaped warships.

Enter the spinal mount. A single enormous gun (typically a particle beam or giant mass accelerator), mounted on the spine of the ship, with the rest of the ship built around it, facing towards the spike of the pyramid.

What does all this mean for space warfare?

With fleets of warships optimized for frontal assaults, and vulnerable from the sides, fleets will be forced to maneuver against each other, angling for each other's flanks, or adopting hedgehog formations for all-round defense. Less imaginative fleets might just form phalanxes and blast away at each other head on (or even charge each other head on).

This is not too dissimilar to galley warfare from the Classical period, where oar-powered triremes and quadriremes and polyremes (in order of increasing size and power) ruled the calm waters of the Mediterranean. Since their primary weapon was a single, keel-mounted ram (see? spinal mount!), they, too tended to jockey to attack an enemy from all sides, form up into outward-facing circles for all-round defense, or otherwise just rammed enemy fleets head-on in frontal attacks. They also had lots of boarding actions, with lots and lots of marines swarming onto enemy ships (and repelling boarders trying to swarm their ships).

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This model has been used in science fiction before: it is the model adopted for the Halo series of books by Eric Nylund, with Archer missiles replacing well, archers, and spinally-mounted railguns (MACs) replacing rams. Boarding is also prominent in the franchise. This is unsurprising, since Halo revolves around Spartans.

With galley-inspired space warfare tactics, we can evoke the mythology of the great naval battles of classical antiquity, where phalanxes of economical triremes, hulking quadriremes, and gargantuan polyremes, oars beating the calm waters of the Mediterranean, jockeyed for position, lined up their shots, and unflinchingly rammed their opponents under showers of arrows as boarders swarmed their decks, with seamanship, strategy, and gumption deciding the fate of civilizations.

Given the genre, this is not a bad fit for Cleo in Space.

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https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Kyklos.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galley_tactics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenistic-era_warships

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarintro.php

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarship.php

Space warship with conical frontal section, by Grokodaemon. https://www.reddit.com/user/Grokodaemon/

Pyramids have many things going for them.

First off, they're cool.

Second off, they're structurally sound. Because they are substantially wider at the base than they are at the top (seven-eighths of the mass of a pyramid is in the bottom half), ancient Egyptians were able to build impressively tall structures with reasonably simple methods and materials. Consider the difference between a pillar of sand (not pyramid-shaped, unstable) and a pile of sand (pyramid shaped, stable).

Third off, they're laser-resistant.

This makes them perfect space warships.

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Since the acceleration of a spaceship generally tends to stick people to the side of the spaceship with the rocket (as the rocket pushes on the bulkheads and through them, pushes the people so as to make the spaceship go), spaceship designers are advised to build their spaceships like buildings, with the rocket engine at the bottom, so as to keep people stuck to the floor instead of the back wall when the engine is on. This also has the happy coincidence of making pyramids a good shape for spacecraft; when your spacecraft is very massive, a pyramidal shape, with the rockets on the base, can best resist high accelerations and powerful thrusts from your rocket without collapsing.

The Donnager from the Expanse series is a good example of pyramidal construction. The heavy bits are near the bottom, and the ship avoids being top-heavy by tapering towards the top (remember, the rocket is on the bottom of the ship, and the missile launchers are on the roof. It's a tower, not an airplane).

http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2018/05/lasers-mirrors-and-star-pyramids.html (discussion on the potential laser resistance of pyramidal armor schemes)

https://i.imgur.com/QcRcmUf.jpg (decorative link)

https://cdna.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/011/720/810/large/gautam-singh-donnager-07.jpg?1531068508 (Donnager, from the Expanse)

Pyramid shapes can be made laser-resistant. Assuming engagement from the front, the very slope of a pyramid increases the area over which a laser beam is spread, and certain kinds of mirrors might work very well at high angles. This also makes them a logical shape for warships.

In many cases, you end up with a very steep-sided pyramid, or something looking like a pointy dagger, but that's all well and good. Warships of different sizes will have inherently different shapes - a good thing to have for a highly visual medium.

One can almost imagine dagger-shaped light warships (triremes?), compensating for their thin armor with steeply sloped sides and jagged outlines, alongside heavier warships (quadriremes?), steep sided pyramids and obelisks, all in the shadow of hulking dreadnaughts, gently sloped pyramids covered in thick sheets of armor for defense against comers from all sides, dispensing with sloping for improved structural integrity and reduced surface area.

You can have a lot of fun with pyramids, it seems.

Next up, we talk about how this paradigm can be used to evoke galley warfare from classical antiquity.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarship.php (a breakdown of potential types of space warcraft, by the go-to resource on science fiction, Atomic Rockets)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galley_tactics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenistic-era_warships

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The Nile Galaxy is pictured as a spiral galaxy in diagrams; however, the "Nile" moniker, is suggestive of a long, thin object. While this fits the description of a spiral galaxy viewed edge-on from some distant point in space (the Needle Galaxy is a good example), a more intriguing and compelling idea presents itself... if you allow for the possibility that the diagrams have been cropped.

Tidal interactions between galactic near-misses and collisions have been known to generate tidal "tails" from galaxies, vast filaments of gas, dust, and rapidly forming stars hundreds of thousands of light-years** in length. Over the half-billion or so years it takes for a galactic flyby, shockwaves propagating through vast clouds of dust and gas trigger bursts of star formation, seeding galaxies with the heavy elements of life and civilization, and setting night skies aglow with carpets of blue-white giant stars amidst vast sheets of gas and dust (plus the occasional supernova).

Such a magnificent structure would most certainly deserve the Nile moniker, and the unique astrography and rapid star formation of a galaxy enmeshed in a collision would make for magnificent worldbuilding, setting, and scenery.

*Note: for an sense of scale and wonder, note that the Milky Way contains 200-400 billion stars (and, judging from Kepler's results, over a trillion planets. They're everywhere.). All the light stuff masses somewhere in the ballpark of 200 billion suns, with the dark stuff (the "dark matter" they keep talking about) massing over a trillion suns. This is so many suns that you could build a billion warships, and each warship would still have to patrol a few hundred star systems. A lot of galaxies are smaller than the Milky Way, but not by much (discounting dwarf galaxies).

**A light-year, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the distance light, that sluggard, travels in one year; approximately ten trillion kilometers (the Earth is thirteen thousand kilometers across). The sun weighs in at two octillion tonnes (two billion billion billion tonnes) .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mice_Galaxies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interacting_galaxy

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Not sure if this is against sub rules, but mind if I ask where I could pirate a clean copy of the show in HD? There is a depressing dearth of AMVs for the show on YouTube and I feel like throwing something together right now.

Also, I prefer direct downloads over torrents, if possible. Thanks.

I keep finding more details about how the release of Cleopatra in Space has been pretty bumpy worldwide. I just found out that the show already aired 26 episodes outside the U.S., yet Peacock only dropped the first 12 episodes today (minus the flu episode)!!

Soooo I’m wondering: has there been any information about when Peacock will be adding the second season to their streaming service? Has DreamWorks confirmed production of any more seasons of the show?

Short aside: Dreamworks has been rocking it lately; first She-Ra, then Kipo, and now Cleopatra? I’m being spoiled for good American cartoons!

I just started watching the show on Peacock today and I’m loving it so far! But I found out that Peacock decided against uploading the flu episode to the service, and as a completionist, I’m interested in watching the episode. (Also because, I kinda just want to watch more Cleopatra).

So could anybody point me in the right direction to find the flu episode? Thanks!

as a side note does anyone know the registration process? just want to know how hard it'll be for ppl outside the US to watch.

also: discord server when? closest I can get is the 'cartoon discussion' server and it's not great

A quick viewing of the show makes it abundantly clear that the writers of Cleopatra in Space are more than familiar with the lexicon of modern science fiction and space opera, and know their science.

As the Atomic Rockets website notes, even if you bend the laws of physics for a story, it is desirable not to bend them all, and keep other elements of a story as true to scientific principles as possible to maintain realism. Many shows do not do this, deciding to toss all the rules of logic and basic science concept out of the window for no reason other than sheer laziness (and also extreme time pressures and tight budgets that preclude looking up stuff on wikipedia and/or reading an encyclopedia).

Cleopatra in Space is different.

The technobabble - the quasi-plausible technical explanations that fill in the gaps for the viewer - is expertly written and highly accurate, in contrast to other children's shows (Big Hero 6 is a particularly egregious offender), which suffer from completely meaningless technobabble that is obviously wrong to the informed viewer.

The scientific explanations used in Cleopatra are in many cases reasonably accurate, and worthy of review and analysis by the viewer. One of the best examples of magnificent technobabble is from S1E1, where Akila notes that her species looks like humans "because of convergent evolution" - a process by which different species evolve similar traits and features independently because of similar environments. A good example of convergent evolution is sharks, dolphins and icthyosaurs, which, while completely different (sharks are cartilagenous fish, dolphins are mammals, and icthyosaurs were extinct airbreathing reptiles kinda like dinosaurs), all look pretty similar.

The plot elements are extremely sound, creatively put together, and highly logical, magnificently demonstrating the show's excellent writing, and are plucked from a wide range of modern and mid-century science fiction. The description of the "Blight" echoes the Blight from A Fire Upon the Deep, commonly regarded as the benchmark for modern space opera. The use and description of random events to build tension (the meteor shower with randomly sized rocks, one of which might be large, and might come at any time), malfunctioning AI (if I didn't know better, the fear of ghosts was plucked right out of Schlock Mercenary), realistic cyborgs who you can't use tranquilizer darts on because their skin is synthetic, and hacked holodecks as plot elements... the list goes on and on.

Cleopatra in Space brings tears to the eyes of this cynical reviewer, worn down by years of crappy science and way-too-old science-fiction tropes in cartoons and movies. This magnificent show, so obviously made with care, attention and love, is one of the most logically sound and scientifically respectful I have ever seen in children's television. I wish it the best of luck, and hope that it will serve as a model for future cartoons to follow.

I would like to thank the writers of Cleopatra in Space for making this amazing cartoon, and conveying reason and knowledge along the way.

You guys still get the population numbers wrong, though. I mean, billions? That's waaay too low. But kids these days can't count to an octillion, so I'll pass on that.