... SGU is a little to soapy for me. ... It needs more characters.
That seems almost like a contradiction, what with soaps being entirely about big collections of overlapping groups of characters. I've long wondered when the Trek name-owners will find themselves with an entire cable channel to fill, and if that might finally give rise to a good soap with something like Star Fleet Academy or the Utopia Planitia shipyards as the central setting.
And I guess your complaint is one of the things that has me half-interested still in SGU. Many of my favorite speculative fiction stories are very strong on character stuff and use made-up science and settings for background and the occasional plot mechanic. TV seems weaker than books in that regard, though, because pretty much any show with spaceships or whatnot seems to feel obliged to have substantial amounts of "We need to re-spectacularize the shiny widget so we can compensate for the lack of imagination in the writers' room."
Re time dilation, why would that apply to any form of FTL? I thought the whole thing was about approaching the speed of light with the speed of light as an insurmountable barrier. Going FTL with a 'normal hyperdrive' vs. whatever-the-frak they're using on Destiny still wouldn't be like sublight travel with ramscoops or whatnot.
My main bump with the Destiny's drive is that they've said nothing about how or why it is "not hyperdrive." If the show-runners didn't have some clear ideas in mind before they made the pilot, I surely hope they can follow through on the teaser at some point.
