Bad science in fiction Hall of Shame

[kerbiloid]

(Just in case somebody haven't seen.)

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[Hummingbird Aerospace]

But how is the laser so strong just up until a certain point where it just... stops?

[cubinator]

4 hours ago, Hummingbird Aerospace said:

But how is the laser so strong just up until a certain point where it just... stops?

Magic space wizardry. The same people carrying those lasers also make rocks float, control other minds, and turn into ghosts when they die.

[kerbiloid]

They say it's a magic plasma.

[sevenperforce]

On 8/20/2018 at 9:27 PM, ARS said:

A laser that's strong enough to be seen by naked eye would ionize the surrounding air so much that it would be  as dangerous for the user as for the enemy

Viewed from real life physics about how laser works, having a laser so powerful to cut metal doors and strong enough to be seen with naked eye but only projected with limited length is kinda absurd. This is also my pet peeve whenever there's a laser blade weapon (not just star wars), it's explicitly named laser, but laser do not work that way, having only one emitter that projects steel-melting beam on such a short distance (except when there's some kind of containment field, but that would be way out of context.

Visible light does have a fair bit of energy. If there was a way to create a crystal with a sufficiently high refractive index and superconducting properties, you could create a lossless closed loop of visible light bouncing inside the crystal forever.

It's not a fatal stretch of scientific imagination to suppose that some sort of photon interference within the refractory matrix could create a standing wave of photons which would propagate out of the surface of the crystal. The maths would be far beyond even what we can do at the cutting edge of optical physics, but it's at least conceivable.

Force propagation (i.e., where two lightsabers bounce off of each other, or where a lightsaber bounces off of cortosis or beskar) is trickier. If the photon standing waves are themselves transferring inertia, then that's a pretty damn high photon density. But hey, you need a high energy density.

On 8/20/2018 at 9:27 PM, ARS said:

Also, regarding laser beams as projectile weapons, laser beams are light. Visible light. Anything that stops visible light will stop them – anything visible light can pass through, they can pass through. So how on Earth do they get knocked aside by invisible deflector shields?

Lasers with high enough energy to cause injury can zip right through stuff which would stop lower-level visible light.

With a lot of heat involvement.

Presumably the "laser" bolts involved in fiction are some sort of standing wave of light enclosed in a powerful magnetic field, and a superconducting magnetic deflector shield could cause it to bounce away.

Calling that a "laser" isn't entirely out of the question, incidentally. A laser is formed by creating a standing wave of light in a crystal and then pumping that standing wave until it collapses and emits a confined, phase-standard beam of photons. Any system which involves the creation of a standing wave of light which involves an emission could be termed a laser.

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

It's also possible that the sabers are simply telescoping quartz plasma containment tubes. Like a nuclear light bulb, but in tubular form. The only problem with that the saber appears to only heat things touching or almost touching it, and by definition nuclear light bulbs stop almost none of the energy from escaping.

I've always maintained that what they shoot from the "laser" guns in Star Wars are simply tiny light sabers.

[mikegarrison]

10 hours ago, Hummingbird Aerospace said:

But how is the laser so strong just up until a certain point where it just... stops?

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/lightsaber.png

[razark]

Arguing over the minute details of how a lightsaber works, in a FTL, force-using, galaxy-spanning civilization.

When part of the story is based on pure unexplained magic, and another on impossible unexplained science, you just kind of go with the magic impossible sword, too.

[YNM]

3 minutes ago, razark said:

When part of the story is based on pure unexplained magic, and another on impossible unexplained science, you just kind of go with the magic impossible sword, too.

And they should have done it in the most wonky way possible.

Flash Gordon

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

[kerbiloid]

Iirc in SW s01e4 A New Hope they say: "The Force holds the galaxy together".

Do the nowadays astronomers already count this input in their equations?

Or did the jedi mean that Jedis and their Force were keeping various civs together forcingly, like Pal and Darth?

[magnemoe]

6 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Iirc in SW s01e4 A New Hope they say: "The Force holds the galaxy together".

Do the nowadays astronomers already count this input in their equations?

Or did the jedi mean that Jedis and their Force were keeping various civs together forcingly, like Pal and Darth?

Pretty obvious they ment galactic civilization.
Now an major mistake was trying to bring balance to the force.
Your side has dominated for an very long side and none has not seen anything of the dark side for a long time 
Balance would obviously make the dark force stronger and the Jedi should not want that. 

[Bill Phil]

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

Pretty obvious they ment galactic civilization.
Now an major mistake was trying to bring balance to the force.
Your side has dominated for an very long side and none has not seen anything of the dark side for a long time 
Balance would obviously make the dark force stronger and the Jedi should not want that. 

The jedi were losing capability in the force for a long time though...

[DAL59]

There was a very good episode of Enterprise where they turn up a section of the gravity plating to squish an intruder, which seems clever.  However, none of the dozens of times ships are boarded to they ever do that again!!!! Also, why can't they just use transporters to instantly cure any disease? 

[Gargamel]

59 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

Also, why can't they just use transporters to instantly cure any disease? 

Possibly by the way the data is encoded.   It might not be feasible to sort through all the data to find the one little bit they have to fix.    Plus, not only are they transporting the person, but all the microorganisms that live in them.  that would show up as foreign DNA too, and if you remove all the good bugs, you're pretty much dead. 

[mikegarrison]

1 hour ago, DAL59 said:

There was a very good episode of Enterprise where they turn up a section of the gravity plating to squish an intruder, which seems clever.  However, none of the dozens of times ships are boarded to they ever do that again!!!! Also, why can't they just use transporters to instantly cure any disease? 

Why can't they use transporters as "checkpoints"? Why do redshirts have to die?

Scene 1: Away team beams down to planet. Immediately natives kill two redshirts. The rest of the landing party escapes.

(more scenes)

Scene 17: The remnants of the landing party are beamed back to the ship.

Why not Scene 18?: The save file is loaded and redshirt 1 and 2 are beamed back into the transporter. They look around and realize: "Oh man, we were killed AGAIN, weren't we?" Everyone laughs.

[Gargamel]

21 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

Why do redshirts have to die?

Union by-laws.  Rematerializing a previously deceased crew member would result in a copy of the original, but since the copy has not paid his union dues, and is not properly on the payroll, he is not eligible to serve on the ship as his counterpart was. 

Edited August 24, 2018 by Gargamel

[magnemoe]

23 hours ago, DAL59 said:

There was a very good episode of Enterprise where they turn up a section of the gravity plating to squish an intruder, which seems clever.  However, none of the dozens of times ships are boarded to they ever do that again!!!! Also, why can't they just use transporters to instantly cure any disease? 

Yes artificial gravity will let you play all sort of tricks, just restrain or turn an hallway into an ball bearing mill, last was done in the deathworlders. 
 Replicators to fix the body was use in Nivens an world out of time its an more complex use however, but the redskirts could easy be backed up on transmit so you could brief again and reuse. Yes type of save scumming raises some ethical and religious objections but way less than throwing away lives.

The problem with Trek is that its an fast paced serial made by multiple writers who did not always think trough the implications of their inventions. 
This was also seen in the Star wars last Jedi there they used hyperspace ramming to kill an megastructure class ship. 
An obvious way to kill other mega structures like the death star. 

[StrandedonEarth]

2 hours ago, magnemoe said:

This was also seen in the Star wars last Jedi there they used hyperspace ramming to kill an megastructure class ship. 
An obvious way to kill other mega structures like the death star. 

In all fairness, that required a large cruiser and it still didn’t obliterate  the Dreadnaught (or whatever it was) although it did cripple it. Not sure how its size compares to the Death Star, but I suppose if you could get something to  penetrate to the reactor core.... The thing is, hyperspace ramming requires a large amount of mass. Maybe a hyperdrive on a chunk of neutronium? Still requires a large and expensive hyperdrive. 

Speaking of gravity and Star Wars, there was one book where a smuggler’s asteroid base had a Jedi trap: a room where the gravity vector changed radically and quickly to disorient the Jedi, while steel bars came out of all six walls to pin the Jedi, with the lightsaber (hopefully knocked out of the Jedi’s hand when the trap sprung) pinned in a corner where it could do no damage. Then the air was let out of the room. 

Of course, Luke manages to escape...

[kerbiloid]

Do the lightsabers work under water?

What happens if put the lightsaber's (ray? blade?) into a pool?

Edited August 25, 2018 by kerbiloid

[ARS]

The 3 problems of FTL travel:

Let's say the idea of a spaceship carying 10 times its empty weight in fuel sickens sci-fi writers. They want the space aboard their space ship to house colorful characters, dazzling weapons, holodecks, shopping malls, and other fun and excitement — not deck after deck full of boring old propellant tanks. And they want it to allow for long patrols without having to refuel at every destination. Equip the spaceship with a gravity-manipulation Reactionless Drive that allows her to accelerate without throwing material out of her tailpipe. Problem solved, right? And now that they've given the civilization gravity-manipulation technology, that also eliminates the problem of having characters float around in zero gee; they can now spill liquids without spraying them all over the walls and play ping-pong to their heart's content while riding between the planets.

But hold on!

First, if you allow them to accelerate without pushing anything, they are now violating one of the most basic laws known to physics: the conservation of momentum. In the real world, you can't apply a force to an object in one direction without causing an equal-and-opposite force on some other object. Rockets fly up because their exhaust flies down. Jumping up pushes the Earth ever-so-slightly downward; falling back to the ground afterward pulls the Earth ever-so-slightly up. By letting your space ship violate this basic law, you're saying that momentum is not always conserved. What other circumstances in your universe will cause momentum not to be conserved? Do the laws of Newton simply get held in abeyance every time someone switches on a gravity generator? Are there natural phenomena that accomplish the same thing?

Second, are you also violating the conservation of energy? A 1000 tonne spaceship traveling 1/10 of the speed of light has a kinetic energy of 450 quintillion Joules, equal to 100,000 megatons of TNT. That energy had to come from somewhere. Did it come from burning some sort of fuel on board your space ship, to power the generators? If you used the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium as your fuel source, and you managed to build a fusion reactor technology that's nearly 100% efficient, you'd have to burn at least 350 tonnes of hydrogen to obtain that much energy, which is a third of your spaceship's own mass. (This isn't as bad a mass-ratio situation as if you'd used a plain-old momentum-conserving fusion rocket, but it's still pretty significant.) And you'll have to burn just as much again to slow your space ship back down at the end of your trip. If this is too much for you, and you decide your reactionless gravity drive simply works by tapping into the magical gravity waves of the universe and surfing along them with only minimal power requirements, then your space ship's kinetic energy is being created ex nihilo. You've got yourself a free energy machine! Just strap your space ship to one end of a long lever, strap the other end to a huge electric generator, and fly in circles. You can generate enough energy to power your entire civilization this way, with no cost in natural resources.

Third, if any 1000 tonne space ship can easily accelerate to a tenth of light speed, then every two-bit spaceship owner has in his possession a weapon of mass destruction. Those 100,000 megatons of TNT-equivalent kinetic energy will act like 100,000 megatons of actual TNT if they strike a planet. If you can ram a planet or another spacecraft while travelling at FTL speeds, you risk turning even the tiniest FTL shuttlecraft into a planet-killer that will put even the largest, fastest slower-than-light kamikaze to shame. Want a future populated by plucky tramp space-freighters and sneaky space pirates? It ain't gonna happen if every ship is a Hiroshima-on-steroids waiting to happen. Every spacecraft captain will be on too short a leash. Any spacecraft that even looks suspicious will be killed before it can become a threat. (And, yes, all fast-moving spacecraft, and even stationary spacecraft, will eventually be detected — there is no stealth in space.) 

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

Do the lightsabers work under water?

What happens if put the lightsaber's (ray? blade?) into a pool?

Boiling? If that's true then lightsabers are basically plasma cutter on steroid

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, ARS said:

Boiling? If that's true then lightsabers are basically plasma cutter on steroid

So, why they never use anti-jedi shower traps.

And explosive curtain traps as well.

Upd.
An anti-jedi gasoline shower trap.

Edited August 25, 2018 by kerbiloid

[ARS]

16 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

So, why they never use anti-jedi shower traps.

And explosive curtain traps as well.

This also bugs me out. If lightsabers can  melt and cut through steel doors with ease, that means it's plasma is hot enough to melt steel on contact (this still ignores the heatwave effect on the user wielding such a hot plasma in close range). If it's that hot, then any water particles touching the blade would be instantly vaporized. If it's a showering rain, the sudden vaporization of such large amount of water could only be described as explosive steam, which could blind or impair visibility of the user

[kerbiloid]

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[kerbiloid]

Just realized.
This is an anti-jedi protection.

Spoiler

 

[KerbMav]

Although the same would happen any time a Jedi lands a hit that draws blood.