Bad science in fiction Hall of Shame

[Nuke]

8 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Do you still wonder why their Earth is destroyed?

The efficiency of the antibiotics against the radiation is limited only by the thickness of their layer.

they haven't exactly said that earth was destroyed, and last we see it still appears habitable though war torn and likely infested with genocidal androids. humans are said to be an endangered species though.

 

Edited September 9, 2020 by Nuke

[kerbiloid]

3 hours ago, Nuke said:

they haven't exactly said that earth was destroyed

3 hours ago, Nuke said:

it still appears habitable though war torn and likely infested with genocidal androids

I start doubting, at which side you are...

[DDE]

53 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

I start doubting, at which side you are...

No, it means we have our work cut out for us.

[Nuke]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

I start doubting, at which side you are...

its just one of those things, when you colonize another planet you usually don't kill everyone on the old one first. 

[jimmymcgoochie]

Just watched the whole series of Away and a few things really bothered me:

• Real time communication. Three weeks out from the Moon en route to Mars, but their video calls are still in real time despite the light seconds of distance between the ship and Earth. This is particularly conspicuous because later they say the crew can’t do video calls any more because the delay is too long. Also mobile phones in space!?
• Why use one spaceship for everything- first flying to the Moon to load fuel and water (instead of carrying the fuel and water up from the Moon to the spaceship in orbit), then land the whole thing on Mars when even a minor mishap will strand them there permanently? Where’s the dedicated lander? More importantly, building a spaceship with a deployable centrifuge and then aerobraking it in Mars’ atmosphere sounds like a very dangerous thing to do even with the centrifuge retracted.
• The ship needs 3 solar panels to operate at Mars, and has 3 solar panels total. One of them malfunctions really early in the series and has to be fixed or the mission is doomed- why are there only 3!? Where’s the redundancy? What happens when they’re landed on Mars and it’s night?
• Nobody bothered to bring any RCS jet packs for use during EVAs even though those would be an eminently sensible thing to include for a 3 year mission in space. At least two incidents occur where astronauts have to untether and float around near the spaceship, and where those jet packs would have made everything trivially easy.
• There are only 2 water recyclers, one breaks and the spare doesn’t have the capacity to supply the mission at full output; yup, the spare goes kaput as well with gradually decreasing output. Who designed this thing exactly? And their plan to solve the water problem- poke a hole in the hull to get the water from the radiation shielding- fails when they miss and poke a hole in the hull, but nobody tried to plug the leak and instead they abandon their crew quarters. There are TWO centrifuge modules, but they decided to poke a hole in their bedrooms instead of the other one...
• They use the InSight lander’s seismometer to listen for the robotic supply droneship’s sonic boom as it arrives on Mars ahead of them, but nobody thinks to scroll forwards a few minutes to listen for a) a big boom or b) a sustained rumble from the super-sensitive seismometer on the geologically inactive planet, to check if the drone ship actually landed in one piece. And apparently none of the satellites around Mars could look at the intended landing site to see if there were any new craters, scorch marks etc. or any visible signs at all of the drone ship on the surface.
• The spaceship has three landing legs. For something that tall and heavy, three legs seems inadequate and prone to falling over, especially as two of them take the full force of re-entry heating. Their landing site is perilously close to some substantial rock formations as well.
• It’s also unclear how the ship manages to hold enough fuel (looks like kerolox to me from the few instances where the engines fire) to get from the surface of the Moon all the way to the surface of Mars and back again, especially with a fully powered landing as the ship has no parachutes. The only other possible source of fuel would be the drone ship, but hauling many tons of rocket fuel a quarter of a mile over the surface of Mars sounds like an accident waiting to happen
• The second supply ship is scheduled to arrive after the crewed ship gets there. Besides the bizarre transfer window involved in that scenario, it’s also reckless to send only one supply ship before the crew arrives because so many landings on Mars fail and it’s literally a matter of life and death.
• They brought a greenhouse and grew some plants in it, but then the water supplies go kaput so they let all the plants shrivel and die. Those super sturdy, drought tolerant plants that are going to be grown on Mars, wilt and die in a couple of weeks without water...

OK, so there were more than a few things...

And anything that suggests that the Soviets could have landed a man on the moon, ever, is utterly unbelievable for the simple reason that the N1 rocket would never have worked- over 40 engines on the first stage and every time (twice) they tried to launch one it had multiple engine failures resulting in the rockets exploding.

[Clamp-o-Tron]

30 minutes ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

And anything that suggests that the Soviets could have landed a man on the moon, ever, is utterly unbelievable for the simple reason that the N1 rocket would never have worked- over 40 engines on the first stage and every time (twice) they tried to launch one it had multiple engine failures resulting in the rockets exploding.

Well, the NK-15 was an ambitious engine, even recently its derivative the NK-33 AJ26-62 engine failed in the most hilarious rocket explosion since maybe the proton mishap. So even with 30 years of tinkering, a staged combustion cycle engine tends to RUD, rendering a vehicle with 40 of those  impossible when (I assume) engine combustion would destroy the stage. (Can I get a source? I thought I heard somewhere that destruction of 1 engine would doom the others.) There were, of course, other routes to a soviet landing that could have been taken but weren't, involving many launches with Soyuz boosters, or a couple UR-500 launches. I do agree, however, that N-1 was probably doomed with or without Korolev.

Edited September 9, 2020 by Clamp-o-Tron

[DDE]

9 hours ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

And anything that suggests that the Soviets could have landed a man on the moon, ever, is utterly unbelievable for the simple reason that the N1 rocket would never have worked- over 40 engines on the first stage and every time (twice) they tried to launch one it had multiple engine failures resulting in the rockets exploding.

Four times, and it wasn't the engine malfunction that caused it to explode. It's usually the fall.

9 hours ago, Clamp-o-Tron said:

I thought I heard somewhere that destruction of 1 engine would doom the others.)

The KORD was supposed to shut the malfunctioning engine down as well as the opposite engine, and there were several engines to spare.

Problem is, during the first flight KORD shut down everything but the engine opposite the malfunctioning one.

9 hours ago, Clamp-o-Tron said:

Well, the NK-15 was an ambitious engine, even recently its derivative the NK-33 AJ26-62 engine failed in the most hilarious rocket explosion since maybe the proton mishap.

The NK-33 was slated to go up on the fifth N-1. The NK involved in the accident was made for said flight, spent decades in a hangar while ostensibly having been destroyed, the was sold to Aerojet and underwent "refurbishment". Soyuz-2.1v doesn't seem to have any trouble with it, and have burned through much of the stock without a hitch.

[kerbiloid]

11 hours ago, DDE said:

Four times, and it wasn't the engine malfunction that caused it to explode.

Afair, it were engine malfunctions, which either honestly exploded, or created a parasite thrust too great to be outKORDed.

Though, the lunar ship was not more reduntant, so I believe the cosmonauts are lucky that the N-1 explosions cancelled the project before someone stayed in lunar orbit.

Edited September 10, 2020 by kerbiloid

[ARS]

Pearl Harbor (2001)

1. During the beginning of the attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese plane is shown dropping a bomb that falls straight down onto an American ship. In reality the bomb should fall in a parabolic arc due to having forward momentum from being carried through the air by the plane that dropped it

2. Rafe manages to fight in the Battle of Britain, Pearl Harbor, and the Doolittle Raid. Naturally, this wasn't true of any real pilot. It is ridiculous to suggest that a fighter pilot would be selected to later pilot a medium bomber in the Doolittle Raid, especially because of the unusual demands of taking such a large plane off a carrier. Rafe, Danny, and the rest are P-40 pilots. Retraining them for a different single-engine fighter would take weeks. Getting them to the point of being able to get a multi-engine bomber off the ground, much less landing it without dying, would take months. The level of proficiency needed to launch a loaded B-25 from a Yorktown-class aircraft carrier would take years to achieve. Doolittle really was qualified in every plane the Army Air Corps had, but only because he was a freaking test pilot. Furthermore, the crews on the Doolittle Raid were specially selected for their experience and proficiency with the B-25, not for their willingness to take on a suicide mission. Rafe flying for the RAF in 1940 while still serving as an officer in the US Army Air Force obviously wouldn't happen, as that would be a clear violation of American neutrality.

3. When she capsized, USS Oklahoma did not turn 180 degree like what's depicted in the movie. She only rolled about 120 degrees before her superstructure came to rest on the shallow harbor bottom, with only the two starboard screws out of the water. Also, many of the more dramatic real life events aboard the battleships, (namely USS Nevada's attempted breakout and subsequent beaching, the emergency counterflooding to save USS West Virginia from capsizing, and the firefighting effort aboard USS California (whose magazines had to be flooded to save the ship from a catastrophic explosion)) are ignored. Which is ironic because West Virginia was Dorie Miller's ship.

4. The way Danny and Rafe fly, with zero maneuvering while flying on low altitude in a straight line while being tailed by Zeroes, would get them killed very fast in real life. It's only thanks to plot armor that the Zeroes somehow just keep missing. Rafe's line "We can't outrun them, we'll just have to outfly them!" is also pretty cringe-inducing, given that it is completely inverted from how the USAAF were supposed to dogfight Zeroes in P-40s, even at that point in the war: The P-40 was less maneuverable than the Zero, but could fly faster than it, meaning the best strategy was literally to outrun them and pick them off in fast hit-and-run attacks instead of trying to get into a turning dogfight with Zeroes, which is literally suicide. A little fun fact is, if you slow down the dogfight scenes (especially the "fly low to lure the Zeroes to collide"), you will notice that all aircraft does not have functional control surfaces, meaning they maneuver purely using the power of plot)

5. No carrier in the movie is accurate, since all have angled flight deck (which is only introduced after the war) and steel decks instead of wooden ones (only British carriers have armored flight deck in 1941). Then again, this movie isn't even trying to hide the rows of Spruance-class guided missile destroyers during the Japanese bombing scene, or the modern Kitty Hawk-Class supercarrier and modern attack sub accompanying the fleet during the Doolitle raid, or North Carolina-class battleship in one of the Japanese intelligence photos (she's not in Pearl Harbor at that time, she's on east coast (with USS Washington) still having her engine issues corrected), or even small things like the Arizona Memorial before she even sank, an M26 Pershing tank in stock footage (that tank isn't even on drawing board yet, the design started at 1942) and a large building with 'Est 1952' printed on the front

Edited September 13, 2020 by ARS

[DDE]

4 hours ago, ARS said:

No carrier in the movie is accurate, since all have angled flight deck (which is only introduced after the war) and steel decks instead of wooden ones (only British carriers have armored flight deck in 1941). Then again, this movie isn't even trying to hide the rows of Spruance-class guided missile destroyers during the Japanese bombing scene, or the modern Kitty Hawk-Class supercarrier and modern attack sub accompanying the fleet during the Doolitle raid, or North Carolina-class battleship in one of the Japanese intelligence photos (she's not in Pearl Harbor at that time, she's on east coast (with USS Washington) still having her engine issues corrected), or even small things like the Arizona Memorial before she even sank, an M26 Pershing tank in stock footage (that tank isn't even on drawing board yet, the design started at 1942) and a large building with 'Est 1952' printed on the front

"So what you're saying is that we need even more CGI?"

[kerbiloid]

6 hours ago, ARS said:

this movie isn't even trying to hide the rows of Spruance-class guided missile destroyers

Philadelphia Experiment... It works!

Spoiler

Not to get into politics, but isn't this the secret US weapon which was promised to tell in close future? A time machine

 

Edited September 13, 2020 by kerbiloid

[DDE]

12 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Philadelphia Experiment... It works!

  Hide contents

Not to get into politics, but isn't this the secret US weapon which was promised to tell in close future? A time machine

 

 

 

[derega16]

On 9/8/2020 at 2:26 PM, ARS said:

The movie "The Wandering Earth" (2019) has stupidly ridiculous (and insulting) plot as if it's flipping the bird to the science itself before throwing it out of the window, and makes Deep Impact or Armageddon plot looks plausible by comparison. In the near future, the sun is exhausting its fuel, and will soon turn into a red giant, destroying the entire Solar System in three hundred years. Under threat of planetary annihilation, humanity bands together to construct 12,000 enormous "Earth Engines" on Earth's surface to propel it out of the Solar System to a new home (Alpha Centauri), Planetary Annihilation style. However, upon approaching Jupiter to make use of gravity assist, thousands of engines get knocked offline all across the globe, threatening to plunge the entire Earth into Jupiter

The idea that the entire Earth can be equipped with giant thrusters to push it out of orbit. The Earth Engines, each one is stated to be eleven kilometers tall, and the torque engines around the equator are even bigger. One Earth engine over Paris is shown to make the Eiffel Tower look like a blade of grass. There are ten thousand standard thrust engines and two thousand more torque engines. The 10,000 Propulsion Earth Engines are said to output a combined 150 trillion (1.5 x 10^14) tons of force to propel Earth to Jupiter's neighborhood in 17 years. However, according to NASA engineer John Elliot, this feat would require something more like 2.5 quadrillion (2.5 x 10^15) tons of thrust... FOR EACH OF 10.000 ENGINE

The Sun suddenly dying in a span of a few hundred years. In reality the sun would still shine for another five billion years. The technology (besides the Earth Engines) does not seem much more advanced than current modern era. The movie takes place in 2075, as shown by display monitor in one scene. This means that the Earth Engines were activated in 2058 at the earliest, since the prologue that takes place 17 years before shows the Earth in its usual position, before the engines were activated. In fact, Han Zi'ang states that no Earth Engine had failed in 30 years, which means that at least one was completed in 2045, and were being constructed earlier still

How the hell they carry a FREAKING MINIGUN as one of their loadout while they're transporting and replacing the engine's core!? What's the reasoning behind it!?.  It is explicitly stated that due to the Earth Engines' influence, the planet's rotation stopped, causing tsunamis all across the globe, devastating the surface and forces humanity to live underneath each of the engine city. By that point there's nothing alive on surface, only perpetual darkness and eternal blizzard that flash-freeze anyone wandering outside without protective suit. If the reason for minigun is for self-defense, a handgun is more than enough. To hammer the point of stupidity even further, the only legitimate "target" that's being fired upon by said minigun is JUPITER, LOOMING IN THE SKY when one of the team member gets frustrated after losing the core and began cursing while firing on said planet

Since the Earth has stopped rotating and it is being propelled away from the Sun, only the northern hemisphere is exposed to sunlight, while the southern hemisphere, facing away from the sun, is in permanent night. Since the Earth Engines that push Earth are facing towards the sun, this means that most of the Earth Engines are on the lit side of Earth, with only the torque engines approaching the dark side. However, the engines are also mentioned to be powered by ordinary rocks burned using "heavy fusion" technology. From John Elliot from the same article as above, it would also take 95% of the Earth's mass to power the entire 4.3 light year trip to the Alpha Centauri system. By the time Earth reaches it's destination, there will be nothing left of it to be considered "planet" anymore

The "gravitational spike" that Jupiter causes. No, planets cannot randomly increase in gravity. What's even more stupid is, the solution to escape from Jupiter's gravity? Ignite the atmosphere of Jupiter to propel Earth away. Igniting Jupiter's atmosphere would cause a shockwave strong enough to wreck the entire Earth. The plan's outcome is even more devastating for the people on the surface of the planet. Assuming such a powerful explosion can even happen, an explosion powerful enough to push Earth away to allow it to overcome Jupiter's gravity while it's 30 minutes from breaching its roche limit would crush all the Earth Engines on the side of the planet that the shockwave hits, killing everyone who is currently on that side of Earth, sending shockwaves through the entire crust and probably caving in every underground city on the face of the globe, and leaving the world with one hell of a dent. Of course, none of that happens and Earth simply continues on its merry way.

You can't expect any sense from Chinese blockbuster anyways. They're all CGI showcase to me.

[cubinator]

21 hours ago, ARS said:

1. During the beginning of the attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese plane is shown dropping a bomb that falls straight down onto an American ship. In reality the bomb should fall in a parabolic arc due to having forward momentum from being carried through the air by the plane that dropped it

Dude, that's literally a question on the entrance evaluation in Physics 1! "Which path does the dropped payload follow? a, b, c, d..."

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, cubinator said:

"Which path does the dropped payload follow? a, b, c, d..."

"... if you were a WWII Japanese pilot".

[Superfluous J]

I'm including this news story because the image is fiction

 

 

[cubinator]

well yes, most any planet is larger than a white dwarf, or neutron star, or black hole that it might be orbiting. Is this news?

[derega16]

44 minutes ago, Superfluous J said:

I'm including this news story because the image is fiction

 

 

Man oh man, if we have every bad astronomy and rocketery in news in ths tread, it should reach over three hundred pages by now even if we don't count other fields of science. Maybe, it might be a good idea to start a new topic about bad science in news.

Edited September 16, 2020 by derega16

[benzman]

23 hours ago, derega16 said:

Man oh man, if we have every bad astronomy and rocketery in news in ths tread, it should reach over three hundred pages by now even if we don't count other fields of science. Maybe, it might be a good idea to start a new topic about bad science in news.

I have a book called Bad Astronomy by Philip Plait. Some of it is quite funny.  Some of can make you weep at the gullible stupidity of some people.

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

I found some more!

Salvation (netflix)- asteroid heading for Earth in about 6 months; at least someone figured out that throwing nukes at it last-minute would fragment it instead of diverting it and cause more harm than good. Then they created a massless propulsion system to power a gravity tractor probe that was supposed to nudge the asteroid away, but the asteroid got hit by a smaller asteroid(!?) yet the big asteroid didn't change course at all so it must have a core made of iron. New plan: solar sail on gravity tractor which will somehow use its magic drive as an electromagnet instead- incidentally the solar sail manages to get there in mere days despite the last one needing a magic massless drive to get there at all- plus turn a particle accelerator into a railgun (like you could actually aim it) and the railgun will fire one-ton slugs at mach 30- barely orbital velocity, just FYI- to prod it away. Except for the whole 'fragmenting the asteroid' thing that would inevitably occur if you lobbed a load of giant railgun shots at a big lump of rock. Also a nuclear ICBM gets launched into orbit, retrograde; it has solar panels on it...

Oh, and some probes near Jupiter were controlled in real time (communication at the speed of plot, as I've seen it called) yet one of them performed an escape burn only to fall into Jupiter several days later... This probe had front and rear video cameras that worked to fairly high resolution despite being in space near Jupiter, and could see the asteroid while making the escape burn from Jupiter (in an attempt to ram the asteroid).

Spoiler alert- the asteroid is actually an alien spaceship of some kind, runs on neutrinos (apparently) and dodged the railgun fire but conspicuously didn't dodge the sizeable asteroid that hit it earlier. And someone stole the Mars colony ship.

There was the usual filler dross about political nonsense, secret plots to take over America/the world, angry hackers versus The Government, crazy cults, inexplicable time gaps to paper over some huge plot holes, and someone must have dropped a box of set squares into the plot machine to end up with that many love triangles... By the end of it I was rooting for the asteroid to hurry up and wipe everyone out, and take out the spaceship while it was at it.

[Gargamel]

On 9/9/2020 at 3:42 PM, jimmymcgoochie said:

Just watched the whole series of Away and a few things really bothered me:

Yup, I gave up after they untethered right next to a tether point on the solar panel.     And the refueling scheme... the KSP player in me was screaming "You're just wasting dV!"

[ARS]

A lot of time, on movies that features aircraft from pre-jet age, especially WW2 aircrafts or biplane aircrafts, it's frequently shown that during the takeoff sequence, a pilot will jump into the cockpit, casually flip a couple of switches and moments later, the aircraft is ready to fly off the ground. This is pretty inaccurate, starting aircraft engines, particularly older ones, is often complicated and time-consuming. Even in newer aircraft with computers to help manage the process, there are still a series of deliberate steps so pilots can notice and diagnose engine problems before costly damage and/or safety risks occur. In fact, many jets don't even have the ability to start their engines, and have to be hooked up to a "starter cart" on the ground to get the engines spinning. Many piston-engine planes require either a ground crewman turning a starter crank or manually spinning the prop while the pilot does his thing in the cockpit. There are plenty of aircraft that can start without external help, but even those have a much longer startup sequence than you'll generally see on television

Now, on to the actual movies. Some glaring mistakes and bad sciences about aircrafts:

In Stealth, the F/A-37s would never be able to take off from a carrier. Aside from being based on a somewhat dubious concept aircraft which would likely have trouble transitioning between wing angles, there's the minor issue that they're apparently all but VTOL-capable, swing-wing CATOBAR aircraft with comically gigantic missile loadouts and utterly insane range; there's no way an aircraft with such a laundry list of capabilities would be able to take off from a standard Nimitz catapult, and it's doubtful if it could do so at all, especially not with the stated empty weight of nine metric tons for a 70-foot aircraft. And even if all that weren't true, there's the small matter of their rear landing gear being secured to the carrier's deck with tie-down chains when they're on the catapult. There's also the infamous exploding plane scene, where Jessica Biel punches out seconds before her plane explodes. Next, the pilotless-but-still-in-one-piece plane twists around and starts barreling after her (although it had been twisting around before she hit the eject). Then it explodes, and an enormous cloud of wreckage chases her down. The level of debris raining on her rather suggests she was carrying a Lockheed C-130 troop transport in her missile bay. Slightly less obvious but equally hilarious is how the F/A-37s are shown to outfly Su-37s using exactly the kind of cool supermaneuver those very Su-37s introduced in real life. Somehow, the Russian pilots in movies only know how to fly in straight lines. Made even worse when you know that those very same maneuvers are reserved for airshows and technology demonstration, and that no competent pilot would actually be stupid enough to attempt one in an actual dogfight. Made even more worse (worser?) that they are in a dogfight at all, when both sides are equipped with Beyond Visual Range missile technology, which means dogfighting is your last resort, not your go-to strategy for an engagement. Or the fact the non-stealth Faux-37s weren't even detected until they were only 25 miles out, etc. There's also the fact that these Su-37s are shown as two-seaters, when the only two Su-37s in the real world only have room for the pilot. The F/A-37's cockpit also has more elbow room than do passengers on commercial jets. A bit more forgivably, the joystick is in a between-the-legs placement; most American jets since the F-16 have a side stick.

In Moonraker, the sequence in which a space shuttle blasts off from the aircraft carrying it. The shuttle is never carried with fuel or live batteries, that would be far above the carrying limit of the carrier aircraft. Even if Drax somehow arranged for them to be onboard, the Shuttle is basically a glider — its engine and onboard fuel aren't enough to fly it any great distance as if it were a regular jet plane. It is also impossible to carry a shuttle on the back of a normal 747, even if you could add a cradle on top. The turbulence caused by it renders the normal rudder basically useless (the NASA 747 used to ferry the shuttles had additional vertical steering surfaces installed at the ends of the horizontal tail surfaces for this reason, this is also why An-225 Mriya used twin-tail design: in order to put the rudders away from the turbulence caused by Buran on top of it so it remains usable in-flight). The other problems can be explained with this being something more like an earlier design, which included air-breathing jet engines with a significant internal fuel store. You'd still never get enough fuel on board it without it being noticed to be overweight when it was loaded on the carrier, or at the very least when the carrier was being pre-flighted and the crew noticed the landing gear was reading thousands of pounds more weight than it should be. Additionally, if the shuttle firing its engines while attached to the 747 causes the latter to explode, why does the 747 have an indicator in the cockpit for 'Shuttle Ignition' (!) as if they were expecting it to happen?

In GoldenEye, the real Eurocopter Tiger cannot survive an EMP and cannot lock missiles onto itself. The MC at the demonstration where it is stolen announces it as a prototype with new features. Another is during the scene where the MiG pilot killed when his aircraft augurs gets unresponsive in after the first EMP (hammering his fist on the canopy in a vain attempt to escape). He should have pulled his ejection handle. Aircraft ejection seats are specifically designed to function with no power source of any kind, and are largely immune to EMP, the phenomenon being reasonably well-understood as an effect of nuclear weapons detonations. Even systems with electronic initiation have a backup system. As a rule, much more concern is spent making sure the ejection seat doesn't go off when it shouldn't, such as when the plane is on the ground

In Tomorrow Never Dies, the Chinese planes that attack the stray British ship are repeatedly described as "Chinese MiGs". Although China does have MiGs, these aren't them; the aircraft are clearly recognizable as Q-5s, an indigenous Chinese type (admittedly partly based on MiG-19 technology, but very different in appearance). Apparently a case of the special effects department doing better research than the scriptwriters. On the other hand, a Qian-5 that drops a torpedo would be an extraordinary beast. They should have used the Chinese Harbin-5 bomber, based on the Ilyushin-28. In the teaser, when the Royal Navy frigate fires the cruise missile at the terrorist "flea market", M tells 007 he has four minutes to get clear. The target is 400 miles from the ship. A Tomahawk cruise missile (as shown) has a top speed of about 550 miles per hour. It should have taken the missile about 43 minutes to get there. The novelization blows it even more thoroughly, with a Harpoon missile being launched, and traveling 800 miles in 4 minutes 8 seconds. First of all, a Harpoon (an antiship missile) has a maximum range of less than 100 miles, and second, it travels at about the same (determinedly subsonic) speed as the Tomahawk. To do 800 miles in 248 seconds, it would have needed to achieve about 11,600 miles per hour, or about 3.2 miles per second - about half of Earth's escape velocity. Also, any object traveling that fast at low altitude would burn up like a meteor hitting the lower atmosphere - plus what the shock wave effects would do to anything along its path on the ground.

In Casino Royale, one scene features a prototype "Skyfleet S570", possibly intended as a fictional version of the then-new Airbus A380. The actual plane we see, however, is obviously a Boeing 747 with external fuel tanks hanging from the wings (specifically, it's the decommissioned 747 that lives on the Top Gear test track). This makes very little sense for any civilian aircraft. Also, a Czech Airlines plane is seen. That airline did not operate flights to Miami in 2006 (no doubt due to the scene being filmed at Vaclav Havel Airport in Prague, where the airline is based).

In Asteroid, a laser (judging by its size, geodesic; and of course, with the ray visible in space) fastened onto an F-16, manually aimed at a megameter or so, which blows up the big asteroid. Made even worse by the comment in-film that the lasers had to be fired from within the atmosphere to be aimed properly, as though having all that air in the way made it easier to target something in space. Though one could argue that it would be silly even with the Pentagon's "realistic" solution — an experimental laser cannon on a Boeing 747, which at least could take out missiles or aircraft. As opposed to the plain and sane original idea: arrange meeting of damn stone and little fusion device, the higher orbit the better (even better with a group of miners), then watch some fireworks.

 

[Gargamel]

You dare bring logic and science into a Bond movie??   

[kerbiloid]

Five cents more:
In Moonraker the python was not hungry.

[jimmymcgoochie]

46 minutes ago, Gargamel said:

You dare bring logic and science into a Bond movie??   

That scene in Casino Royale with the barrel rolling DBX though... They tried doing the stunt for real with the stunt car and it just didn’t flip because (surprise!) the fast car is actually quite stable when driven at moderately high speed. So they added an air cannon to MAKE IT FLIP- and in the process set a world record for the most car barrel rolls in a stunt...

But then again, compared to the space lasers and stuff in earlier Bond films, that’s pretty tame.