Picking at plotholes

[Connell]

Don’t take this thread too seriously. This is Red Dwarf, after all.

A line that Howard said in Trojan got me thinking. He refers to how they all thought Rimmer had ‘gone down’ with Red Dwarf, so surely common knowledge to members of the Space Corps or possibly just Rimmer’s family that a radiation leak had occured… which begs the question why wasn’t the ship being monitored by any Space Corps personelle? The ship was in between Jupiter and Earth at the time, so surely it was close enough for someone to notice, or go ‘hang on, plonk that over there until the radiation dies down’ before it had the time to just casually drift so far away?

And incase anyone says they were under the impression that all the crew had died and they just thought sod it, let the garbage can drift off… you’d think somewhere it was on record who was in stasis on the ship.. and they could’ve seen there was a survivor?

I mostly created this thread to see if anyone could come up with any theories to satisfy my troubled fanboy mind, as I’m aware there’s probably no canonical explanation about.

Topic

[genericnerdyusername]

He doesn’t say anything about the radiation leak. Maybe Red Dwarf just disappeared in the eyes of the Space Corps.

[Sam Johnson]

Yeah, I assumed by his comment that the ship just went missing and that neither the Space Corps or the JMC actually knew where it had gone.

[Carlito]

I guess that the JMC were aware that a fatal accident occurred on the ship but let it drift off (maybe even considering Lister as collateral damage, not worth the expense or danger of attempting to rescue). Maybe Holly’s immediate and long-term actions following the accident were standard protocol in the event of this kind of incident.

[Ben Paddon]

I always assumed there weren’t any protocols for such an event, because it’d require someone to be so utterly incompetent as to do a half-arsed job of sealing the drive plate. My thinking is that Holly made it up as he went along. There may not have been any other ships in range to signal, either. I’d always assumed Red Dwarf was considered MIA.

[takerdemon]

We don’t know what happened to Earth or anything in our solar system after the accident happened so anything could have happened to derail the search/concern for the ship. A great question left unanswered.

[takerdemon]

Oooh I like the idea of an Earth or JMC cover-up for the loss of the Dwarf too!

[Danny Stephenson]

Well, isn’t it a thing that as soon as the radiation leak happened, Holly took the ship and fucked off out of the solar system as fast as it could to avoid spreading the problem locally…

[Sam Johnson]

I’ve always been intrigued by the repercussions of the Dwarf’s vanishing back on earth. I wonder how the Space Corps or JMC would respond to something like that.

Then again, this kind of catastrophe sounds fairly commonplace in the Dwarf universe. I mean the amount of fucking derelicts alone that the gang stumble across. The Space Corps must do a fairly shoddy job on it’s shipbuilding…

[Tarka Dal]

Well presumably the derelicts have had 3 million years to accumulate…

Which links in with a thought I had the other day. What if it hasn’t really been 3 million years, isn’t that a long time even for a radiation leak? What if Holly just made that up based on some unknown motive?

[NoFro]

I always liked the idea of the catastrophe happening and people knowing about it back home but, because there was no motive for recovering this colossal ship and the recovery would cost the company even more, the company just let the ship float off into infinity.

I imagine it almost like the Titanic. Something that would have had a rather large impact and would be known about by many but also something that couldn’t really be responded to once the event had happened. There was no use in recovering the Titanic because A) It couldn’t be done (and recovering the Red Dwarf would be a hell of a task) B) The ship would be of no use. If anything of use could be salvaged from RD it wouldn’t be worth how much it’d cost to salvage it and C) The ship itself is a symbol, a hallowed ground, a memorial to the lost that should remain untouched. It should remain in the deep.

[Ben Paddon]

Not really relevant, though along similar lines: I always wondered what the story was with the Oregon and the rabbits. I actually came as far as writing an outline for a story about it before abandoning it in favour of… I don’t know, immigrating or something.

[Tarka Dal]

Immigrating or sutin?

[bossk]

Who cares?? Pork Away!

[Author]

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