Bad science in fiction Hall of Shame

[ARS]

Read this:

http://www.angelfire.com/ego/g_saga/kaijubiologyarticle.html

note: (reload page if it isn't responding)

It's a pretty good read, attempting to scientifically explain how things such as Kaiju operates (Hello Godzilla and Pacific Rim). For those who want a shorter version, in a nutshell, it basically explains that kaiju cells are basically cellular-level fission reactors

Edited March 1, 2019 by ARS

[DAL59]

In DS9, the station rotates... and the gravity is parallel to the axis of rotation.  

[KerbMav]

20 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

In DS9, the station rotates... and the gravity is parallel to the axis of rotation.  

Gravity in Star Trek is generated by ... gravity generators.

[DAL59]

16 minutes ago, KerbMav said:

Gravity in Star Trek is generated by ... gravity generators.

So why does the station rotate then?

[razark]

17 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

So why does the station rotate then?

Because someone built a 3D model, and movement on screen looks better than treating an expensive model as a stationary matte painting.

[kerbiloid]

3 hours ago, DAL59 said:

So why does the station rotate then?

They don't know how to stop it.

[Treveli]

4 hours ago, DAL59 said:

So why does the station rotate then?

So shields are rotated to better spread the load, and so structural features aren't constantly in the way of weapons/sensors.

And as already stated, it looks better rotating. Plus it was bulit by the Cardasians, so different requirements than star fleet has.

[lllmaxlvllll]

Basically any movie with a gunfight :

Apparently you would fly back several feet if you get shot.

One bullet to a car's gas tank will cause a giant explosion.

A shooting a car's wheel will cause it to violently roll , and then explode.

And apparently silencers make a gun sound like a puff of air.

 

[kerbiloid]

11 hours ago, lllmaxlvllll said:

Apparently you would fly back several feet if you get shot.

... while even the shooter's arm stays still. Conservation laws? Never heard of it.

Though, it's another evidence of the aethereal nature of the Universe of Imagination depicted in every movie instead of the real one.

A bullet moving through the Aether causes a massive shockwave which hits the target and throws it away.
While the shooter just fill the usual recoil.

So, by measuring the distance of the target backflight we can calculate the Aether density in every particular movie.
Where it's thin, the shot characters just get holes. Where it's dense, they fly away.

11 hours ago, lllmaxlvllll said:

One bullet to a car's gas tank will cause a giant explosion.

Again, because the imaginary cars have compressed Aether inside the tanks. The fuel just helps to push it into the engine.
So, when a bullet causes a shockwave in the Aether, the tank always explodes. The fuel just adds some flame.

11 hours ago, lllmaxlvllll said:

A shooting a car's wheel will cause it to violently roll , and then explode.

Probably, the same. A jet of air causes the Aethereal thrust pushing the car sideways.

11 hours ago, lllmaxlvllll said:

And apparently silencers make a gun sound like a puff of air.

Guess, what? Yes. While the Aether enhances strong hits, it blurs weak hits. 
Ideally it totally supresses the shot sound, throwing the target back against the wall with a silent shockwave.

[roboslacker]

How about bad science in fantasy?

Spoiler

 

[wumpus]

On 3/26/2019 at 4:19 PM, kerbiloid said:

They don't know how to stop it.

I thought it was "because we can't find reverse".

[ARS]

One of my favorite bad science is when a car careening straight through cliff and explode midair (aka before the car even hit the ground, even if it isn't colliding with anything before and just jump into the cliff). It's like the car itself said "screw it, I'm out"

[kerbiloid]

Kungfu movies. And any fantasy with swords.

That sound of hit after every motion even when nothing was hit. A supersonic fist?
That clanging metallic sound after every sword motion even when nothing was touched. A poorly fixed sword?

[sevenperforce]

On 3/28/2019 at 8:17 AM, ARS said:

One of my favorite bad science is when a car careening straight through cliff and explode midair (aka before the car even hit the ground, even if it isn't colliding with anything before and just jump into the cliff). It's like the car itself said "screw it, I'm out"

One of the worst films of all time...

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0183620/videoplayer/vi3282960665?ref_=tt_ov_vi

I think fully 40% of the budget for this film was the gasoline they used to detonate buildings, vehicles...everything they could.

[lllmaxlvllll]

Apparently you can charge an AA battery simply by throwing it in your mouth and sucking on it for a minute. That can give it an extra 10% charge.

Gotta love those SYFY channel B movies.

 

[kerbiloid]

"The Time Machine" (1960).

1900, probably London. (As it's in England, and there are big houses).

The hero enables the machine and starts watching the fast rewind of the world.

From T+27:00.

Left column
The star sky is rotating. The center of the rotation is right at the center of the window.
Ok, maybe the window looks right at the Polar Star.
But why some stars are moving faster than others, so the star pattern is constantly changing?

Middle and Right columns.
The Sun and the Moon.
Is it normal in England that the Sun and the Moon are crossing the Polar Star region?
(And btw they are moving along an arc, not along a straight line)
And are the Sun and Moon visible to the North? Or the Polar Star and the sky axis are visible to the South?

Does the Sun usually pass below the clouds in London?

And why does the Moon pass twice faster than the Sun?

Does London really have such nice red nights?

And why are the clouds curling so slowly, that the Sun passes across the whole sky while a cloud just curls a little?

Spoiler

Does the star navigation work there at all?
 

Edited March 31, 2019 by kerbiloid

[ARS]

From Pirates of Caribbean

1. Extensive yelling about naval maneuvers, which never accomplish anything, as all the ships in this film continually sail in any direction in every weather with main and topsails square to the masts at all times. Bonus points for Captain Jack Sparrow yelling for adjustments to pieces of rigging his ship does not even possess: "Scandalize the lateens!" (The torn and tattered sails of the Pearl and the Dutchman do not qualify, as they are both supernatural vessels).

2. Along with many films featuring 17th century old-school broadside ship combat, real life fully rigged sailing ships couldn't be turned simply by spinning the wheel like it's a car. There is a whole array of multi-man, complex procedures for doing so. Also bizarre is how Jack Sparrow managed to "disable the rudder chain" in The Curse of the Black Pearl - the cables (not chains) on a ship like the Dauntless would take a single man days to cut through even if he had a proper implement (which he doesn't).

3. Jack Sparrow's sinking ship at the start of the first film is impossible. Also, you can't pilot a large sailing ship like Dauntless and Interceptor with only 2 men

4. No lower-deck gun (or even a maindeck carronade) could possibly achieve the angle of elevation shown by the Black Pearl attacking Port Royal. If you want to fire that high, you're looking at small pintle mount weapons like swivel guns, or dedicated mortars (which tended to be either little 1-3 pounder boat mortar jobbies or fitted to specially built/modified bomb ketches). Anything else would rip a hole in the deck it's mounted on with the recoil (and bomb ketches had to sit the mortar on a hold full of coiled rope to compensate).

5. The Flying Dutchman's triple-guns cannot be reloaded, as cannon are muzzle-loading. Unless Davy Jones has invented breech-loading cannons. Which presents the additional problem of how the cascabel screw threads don't seize using 17th-century ironwork. Unless the guns are magical. Which presents the additional problem of why Davy Jones bothers to crew his gundecks.

6. The stunt with the upturned boat in the first film would not work. While you could overturn a boat and float it across the water, you could not drag it underwater like a poor-man's submarine unless you were inhumanly strong (and heavy).

[Gargamel]

23 minutes ago, ARS said:

6. The stunt with the upturned boat in the first film would not work. While you could overturn a boat and float it across the water, you could not drag it underwater like a poor-man's submarine unless you were inhumanly strong (and heavy).

Ah, I believe they were able to recreate that in Mythbusters.    The only video I can find of this is behind a pay wall sadly.  

23 minutes ago, ARS said:

3. Jack Sparrow's sinking ship at the start of the first film is impossible.

Not necessarily.   There are types of wood that are denser than water, so if you built your little skiff out of one of these (I don't know why you would, they are a real pain to work with, trust me), and the overall buoyancy of the materials that compromised the boat were just right, once the displacement was overcome by the leaks, it just might sink like that.  

https://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/top-ten-heaviest-woods/

Check out the Specific gravity of most of these.   This is a site I consult from time to time. 

[magnemoe]

26 minutes ago, Gargamel said:

Ah, I believe they were able to recreate that in Mythbusters.    The only video I can find of this is behind a pay wall sadly.  

Not necessarily.   There are types of wood that are denser than water, so if you built your little skiff out of one of these (I don't know why you would, they are a real pain to work with, trust me), and the overall buoyancy of the materials that compromised the boat were just right, once the displacement was overcome by the leaks, it just might sink like that.  

https://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/top-ten-heaviest-woods/

Check out the Specific gravity of most of these.   This is a site I consult from time to time. 

You need to weight down the boat if you want decent of air under it however. 

The old wooden sailing ships used an stone ballast so they would sink if taking in water. 
Yes you could dump ballast if carrying heavy cargo so an ship with an cargo of timber would probably float. 
Some earlier ship designs would probably also float guess an galley or viking ship would, but not the classical sailing ships. 

[Gargamel]

4 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

You need to weight down the boat if you want decent of air under it however. 

It's been many years since I've seen the episode, so I don't remember the method they had to use. 

4 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

The old wooden sailing ships used an stone ballast so they would sink if taking in water. 

Well, that's not why they used ballast, designing a boat to sink is a bad idea, unless it's intended to come back up eventually.   The ballast was used as a counterweight to act against the 'rotational' force caused by the wind on the sails, keeping the ship upright and the sails firmly in the wind.    But the type of ship in question was much much smaller, and would probably not have had keel ballast, more like a thicker, deeper keel than similar oar boats of the same size. 

But if the ship was built to normal, sane, standards, the boat would not have sunk like that.   Improbable, but not impossible though. 

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, Gargamel said:

The ballast was used as a counterweight to act against the 'rotational' force caused by the wind on the sails, keeping the ship upright and the sails firmly in the wind. 

Do they move the ballast lying inside a sailship (not a boat)?

I.e. is it an actively managed attitude control, too (not just lying there)?

Edited April 2, 2019 by kerbiloid

[ARS]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

Do they move the ballast lying inside a sailship (not a boat)?

I.e. is it an actively managed attitude control, too (not just lying there)?

It keeps the center of mass below water, preventing ship from capsizing.  On sailships, ballast is used to provide moment to resist the lateral forces on the sail, these are distributed across the ship and may be redistributed, depending on the design of the ship itself. They take many forms such as stones, sand or "live" ballast (aka the crew itself). Insufficiently ballasted boats will tend to tip, or heel, excessively in high winds. Too much heel may result in the boat capsizing. If a sailing vessel should need to voyage without cargo then ballast of little or no value would be loaded to keep the vessel upright. Some or all of this ballast would then be discarded when cargo was loaded. Modern ballast is closer to actively managed attitude control, being water tanks across the ship that can be filled with water and drained as needed. If a cargo vessel (such as a tanker, bulk carrier or container ship) wishes to travel empty or partially empty to collect a cargo, it must travel in ballast. This keeps the vessel in trim, and keeps the propeller and rudder submerged. Typically, being "in ballast" will mean flooding the ballast tanks with sea water. Serious problems arise when the ballast water is discharged, as water-borne organisms may create havoc when deposited in new environments.

It's basically ship equivalent of SAS reaction wheel, except you cannot move the X axis (yawing to starboard or port, you use bow thrusters for that) and it only provides stability

Edited April 2, 2019 by ARS

[kerbiloid]

Osmosis.

A cyberfuture.

Just let me unsee the first two episodes occasionally looked through. Now I see that Nightflyers were not that bad.

Edited April 2, 2019 by kerbiloid

[Green Baron]

3 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Do they move the ballast lying inside a sailship (not a boat)?

I.e. is it an actively managed attitude control, too (not just lying there)?

As @ARS has meentioned: in those times not, moving ballast was a recipe for disaster.

Modern sailing boats carry the ballast outside the hull in form of a ballast bomb made from high density metal and as deep as reasonably possible to keep the boat light (sails better ;-)). The resulting draught may keep the boat from entering shallow waters. Some modern sailboats can lower and rise the keel, for example to be able to fall dry in ebb time, or even swing it to the side to keep the boat upright, the keel bing almost horizontal (very sporty :-)). Some boats are constructed so that they assume an optimal speed at a certain heel angle. Classical Tall Ships still carry ballast inside the hull and it must not move. Other boats (multihulls) only have little ballast, they ise their form for stability.

Modern large ships indeed can pump water in ballast compartments for stability, passenger ships frequently have stabilizer fins that they can hydraulically control. Keeps some passengers from reconsidering their last meal :-)

Complicated matter, that is ....

[magnemoe]

7 hours ago, Gargamel said:

It's been many years since I've seen the episode, so I don't remember the method they had to use. 

Well, that's not why they used ballast, designing a boat to sink is a bad idea, unless it's intended to come back up eventually.   The ballast was used as a counterweight to act against the 'rotational' force caused by the wind on the sails, keeping the ship upright and the sails firmly in the wind.    But the type of ship in question was much much smaller, and would probably not have had keel ballast, more like a thicker, deeper keel than similar oar boats of the same size. 

But if the ship was built to normal, sane, standards, the boat would not have sunk like that.   Improbable, but not impossible though. 

Ballast is obviously to keep ship from tilting to far, that the ship sinks is an unfortunate side effect. Dont think I have seen the movie