KSP Has Spoiled My Enjoyment Of Hollywood Space Movies

[Hobbes Novakoff]

3 minutes ago, Kosmognome said:

Why would a supercomputer not be able to interface with a laptop for access? I have not yet used a really big supercomputer yet, but every high-performance cluster I could work with had access by desktop or laptop, I never needed to use a specific terminal just for it.

I know that you can usually interface with a supercomputer through a desktop or laptop, but the scene involves him literally going into the supercomputer room (also, aren't those things usually supercooled?) and plugging a USB-WTF cable into his laptop. Then drama for 10-15 seconds followed by "CALCULATIONS CORRECT" flashing up in giant green letters on his laptop screen. 

And one final thing. This one is about Interstellar.

WHY DOES A SPACESHIP HAVE AN EJECTOR SEAT, AND WHY DOES THE SHIP COMPUTER THINK IT'S A GOOD IDEA TO EJECT AN ASTRONAUT INTO A BLACK-HOLE-INDUCED DEBRIS FIELD?

Edited April 3, 2016 by Hobbes Novakoff

[John JACK]

2 hours ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

It's called a "Cobra turn" also know as "Pugachev's Cobra."

Nah, Cobra is possible only with thrust-vectoring engines. And it's done by turning nose up, and back down again, without backwards flip. That scene is just Nesterov's Loop. Performed with impossibly tight radius and at ground-car speeds. More realistic and Messer would just zip past by the time Mustang pitched nose up by 30⁰ and be long gone at the end of loop thirty seconds later. It better would be barrel-roll or scissors.

2 hours ago, spacebrick3 said:

Doctor Who is susceptible too

Doctor Who is a fairy tale to Star Trek and Star Wars science fantasy. Because stuff.

In space anime there is common trope. Things can low orbit indefinitely, no trace of atmosphere, but go closer to a planet by several METERS and find yourself in a reentry, swiftly turning deadly. No exceptions, from Gundam to hard and realistic Planetes. And of course all action is near that very real border.
At other hand, Gundam series have at least many visual nods to science. From zero-g scenes to planetfalls with inflatable heatshields not unlike 1.1 and spaceship launch with strap-on solid boosters.

[Guest]

Meet "Red Planet".

GG KSP, one more ruined movie.

[Robotengineer]

40 minutes ago, Hobbes Novakoff said:

I know that you can usually interface with a supercomputer through a desktop or laptop, but the scene involves him literally going into the supercomputer room (also, aren't those things usually supercooled?) and plugging a USB-WTF cable into his laptop. Then drama for 10-15 seconds followed by "CALCULATIONS CORRECT" flashing up in giant green letters on his laptop screen. 

And one final thing. This one is about Interstellar.

WHY DOES A SPACESHIP HAVE AN EJECTOR SEAT, AND WHY DOES THE SHIP COMPUTER THINK IT'S A GOOD IDEA TO EJECT AN ASTRONAUT INTO A BLACK-HOLE-INDUCED DEBRIS FIELD?

Cooper did that himself, and the ship he was in was meant for atmospheric use as well so it's not completely off base. That whole scene/series of scenes has issues beyond ejection seats.

[Frybert]

42 minutes ago, Hobbes Novakoff said:

WHY DOES A SPACESHIP HAVE AN EJECTOR SEAT

Gemini and the first shuttle launches had ejector seats.

[GDJ]

I think everybody here needs to take a deep breath and relax.

Movies are not designed to be accurate. They're designed to be entertaining. Yeah they're going to have plot holes, or suspicious science behind them, but that's how it's always been since day one of motion pictures. If you all are going to nit-pick the crap out of every movie, you're just taking away entertainment value from yourself. Life is too short as it is to pick the heck out of everything.

If you want accurate, watch Neil Degrasse Tyson. That guy will science your butt off.

Don't sweat the petty things.....and don't pet the sweaty things.

Also if playing KSP has ruined movies for you.....well, all I have to say is..

Get a life already!!

Go for a walk, sniff the flowers, ride your bike.

Edited April 3, 2016 by GDJ

[Guest]

Oh, another trope that I've noticed: rocket engines having spool-up times and sounds, as if they were jet engines.

[Vanamonde]

Since the thread has wandered from KSP itself, it has been to The Lounge. Or General Discussion. Whatever we're calling it now. 

[Camacha]

You people are ruining it for yourself. You make the concious decision to watch a Hollywood movie with the expectation of watching a documentary. It is fake and you know it.

[Spaceception]

Just now, InterCity said:

The 100: ERMAHGERD! I got irradiated! *immediately gets burns and dies*.

I actually like The 100, the radiation part is... weird, but it's a good show overall

Just now, GDJ said:

Get a life already!!.

NEVER!!!!!!

[Hobbes Novakoff]

1 hour ago, Frybert said:

Gemini and the first shuttle launches had ejector seats.

Yes, but not for space. Those were for if everything went wrong during launch/landing.

1 hour ago, Robotengineer said:

Cooper did that himself, and the ship he was in was meant for atmospheric use as well so it's not completely off base.

Yes, but IIRC the computer is going "Eject. Eject. Eject." when it should be able to tell that it's in space. (On that note, if the computer knows that the pilot should eject, why doesn't it just eject him? He shouldn't have to pull a handle.)

Edited April 3, 2016 by Hobbes Novakoff

[HebaruSan]

18 minutes ago, Camacha said:

You people are ruining it for yourself. You make the concious decision to watch a Hollywood movie with the expectation of watching a documentary. It is fake and you know it.

Sometimes a story about people and their adventures and relationships is set in space and has inaccuracies and simplifications to keep things fun and accessible. That's fine, and it's a well established formula for an entertaining, even classic, movie. I can enjoy Star Wars and Star Trek without getting too worked up about hyperspace or the strange evolutionary convergence on something approximating the genus homo (though the latter does seem like a wasted opportunity to do something interesting).

Sometimes a story is about space and is riddled with glaring errors. Screen time is spent encouraging you to marvel at the majesty and terror of trillions of miles of inhospitable vacuum dotted with points of light, but meanwhile impossible thing after impossible thing happens and none of the characters who are supposed to be experts in the topic mention them or even notice. When the physics is part of what the film is trying to do, that kind of thing becomes a reason to pull out the Bad Movie card.

[nobodyhasthis2]

I love it when people point out cutting shortcuts and over simplification shots. Yet don't spot massive gaps. Working on a movie set kind of spoils they way these are hidden. It does however make you appreciate it when they cut the real life boring stuff. It is always a battle to deal with the minority. Most of the audience will follow the Rule of Cool. Mistakes will mostly be forgiven by Bellisarios Maxim 

However some people who are experts in a particular field will use a mistake to make themselves feel superior

 

Edited April 3, 2016 by nobodyhasthis2

[Camacha]

7 minutes ago, HebaruSan said:

Sometimes a story is about space and is riddled with glaring errors. Screen time is spent encouraging you to marvel at the majesty and terror of trillions of miles of inhospitable vacuum dotted with points of light, but meanwhile impossible thing after impossible thing happens and none of the characters who are supposed to be experts in the topic mention them or even notice. When the physics is part of what the film is trying to do, that kind of thing becomes a reason to pull out the Bad Movie card.

The thing is, every single space movie does it. What does that tell us? Apparently it is rather hard to do an interesting space flick without cheating with the rules. Just think about how boring Gravity would be if changing orbits would not be possible. The whole thing would be short and fairly unappealing. There are a couple of proper real world mechanics you could use to spice things up, but those would more than likely not be exciting for the general public. However, those are counter intuitive, which makes educating them during the movie impossible. Just have a look at the forums here: it takes a little while until people forget about Earth logic and get a feel for space logic.

Plus, again, you are not going to see a documentary, so there will be intentional inaccuracies.

Edited April 3, 2016 by Camacha

[SSgt Baloo]

ISTR that in the eighties, any chase scene where a car went off a cliff, it would explode in mid-air. My friends and I made a drinking game out of that trope. We also joked that Hollywood cars were crafted from plastic explosives, and were wired to explode if they bumped anything or became airborne (except when jumping over obstacles).

[Andem]

21 minutes ago, HebaruSan said:

I can enjoy Star Wars and Star Trek without getting too worked up about hyperspace or the strange evolutionary convergence on something approximating the genus homo (though the latter does seem like a wasted opportunity to do something interesting).

You know, they actually did that in an episode of the original series... It was one of my favorite episodes.

[HebaruSan]

5 minutes ago, Camacha said:

The thing is, every single space movie does it. What does that tell us? Apparently it is rather hard to do an interesting space flick without cheating with the rules. Just think about how boring Gravity would be if changing orbits would not be possible. The whole thing would be short and fairly unappealing.

I actually think the core storyline and its points of emotional impact could be salvaged. What's it mainly about? Internal and external shots of space hardware, space walks, Kessler syndrome, fear, reentry, the feeling of relief when you can stand on solid ground again.

The shuttle/Hubble and Tiangong parts just weren't necessary. Have her be a civilian visiting the ISS. She's a medical doctor anyway, so her mission is to help with the year-in-space type research, or if you want to get gimmicky, maybe one of the crew has an acute condition that makes an immediate return unsafe and needs treatment. The debris field now only has to hit one target, once, which still blows up dramatically and forces her to suit up and float around to get to the Soyuz. Maybe it has detached and she has to improvise a means of getting to it and getting inside. The station's communications are destroyed by the impact, and she doesn't know how to operate a space suit's radio because she was never intended to go on an EVA. Meanwhile the other crew are dying in exciting ways, one of which is Clooney, who she tries and fails to save. Eventually she gets to the Soyuz alone, and the ending is the same. Nothing is lost or left out with this change, and there's still plenty of room for plot twists and tense moments as the collision affects each module differently.

5 minutes ago, Camacha said:

Again, you are not going to see a documentary, so there will be intentional inaccuracies.

You're just making me want to watch documentaries now.

[Camacha]

18 minutes ago, HebaruSan said:

I actually think the core storyline and its points of emotional impact could be salvaged. What's it mainly about? Internal and external shots of space hardware, space walks, Kessler syndrome, fear, reentry, the feeling of relief when you can stand on solid ground again.

The shuttle/Hubble and Tiangong parts just weren't necessary. Have her be a civilian visiting the ISS. She's a medical doctor anyway, so her mission is to help with the year-in-space type research, or if you want to get gimmicky, maybe one of the crew has an acute condition that makes an immediate return unsafe and needs treatment. The debris field now only has to hit one target, once, which still blows up dramatically and forces her to suit up and float around to get to the Soyuz. Maybe it has detached and she has to improvise a means of getting to it and getting inside. The station's communications are destroyed by the impact, and she doesn't know how to operate a space suit's radio because she was never intended to go on an EVA. Meanwhile the other crew are dying in exciting ways, one of which is Clooney, who she tries and fails to save. Eventually she gets to the Soyuz alone, and the ending is the same. Nothing is lost or left out with this change, and there's still plenty of room for plot twists and tense moments as the collision affects each module differently.

Again, it would be a much shorter story, and for many people, much more boring. The objections we have are no objections for most people.

Not to be rude, but there is a reason this movie was made this way and there is a reason Alfonso Cuarón is a big time Hollywood director and most of us are (presumably) not. Of course, an argument from authority is worthless in itself, so we will need to look at the reception: the audience loved it, the critics loved it even more, astronauts loved it and it got nominated for 10 Oscars, winning 7. The proof is in the pudding, whatever way you choose to look at it. Saying the movie did not need that is hard to prove conclusively, but we do know that the movie was massively successful with the inaccuracies. I would say they certainly served their purpose. Cuarón did what he deemed necessary and hit the jackpot.

Funnily enough, the director is saying the very same thing I am saying here. I did not know about that

 

Quote

Cuarón has stated that Gravity is not always scientifically accurate and that some liberties were needed to sustain the story.^[111] "This is not a documentary," Cuarón said. "It is a piece of fiction." ^[112] The film has been praised for the realism of its premises and its overall adherence to physical principles, despite several inaccuracies and exaggerations. ^{[113][114][115]} According to NASA Astronaut Michael J. Massimino, who took part in Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Missions STS-109 and STS-125, "nothing was out of place, nothing was missing. There was a one-of-a-kind wirecutter we used on one of my spacewalks and sure enough they had that wirecutter in the movie."^[116]

When an astronaut says something like that, and KSP fans are talking about the inaccuracies, we really start to look like that Trekkie that asks oddly specific questions at conventions.

Edited April 3, 2016 by Camacha

[Kerbart]

32 minutes ago, Camacha said:

The thing is, every single space movie does it. What does that tell us? Apparently it is rather hard to do an interesting space flick without cheating with the rules.

Really... Space is not the special exception. Crime movies? Crimes hardly ever get solved by running around and shooting countless criminals on the spot (remember how much attention ONE police killing gets... let alone a dozen). Car chase scenes in American movies always seem to involve manual shift cars with infinite up shifts and screeching tires on dirt roads. Shoulder launched rockets get launched from inside cars and rooms without roasting the inhabitants alive (something we were told in the army to never, ever, do, even with the tiny LAW anti-tank weapon). Photoshop editing will take one click to select exactly the right pixels with all the feathering and masking required (something that usually takes a lot of work) and of course any police computer can enhance a reflection of 5×5 pixels into a 2000×2000 pixel razor sharp image. Decrypting always has a countdown counter (because if we knew how far away the solution was, why not just start there searching?) and a Macbook will log into the computer systems of alien space ships who happen to have an operating system using elaborate animations (luckily in a format understood by OS X)  and english characters.

And the list goes on...

[Kosmognome]

2 hours ago, Hobbes Novakoff said:

I know that you can usually interface with a supercomputer through a desktop or laptop, but the scene involves him literally going into the supercomputer room (also, aren't those things usually supercooled?) and plugging a USB-WTF cable into his laptop. Then drama for 10-15 seconds followed by "CALCULATIONS CORRECT" flashing up in giant green letters on his laptop screen.

Ah, you are right, now I remember the scene. Yeah, that was nonsense.

[HebaruSan]

20 minutes ago, Camacha said:

Again, it would be a much shorter story, and for many people, much more boring. The objections we have are no objections for most people.

Why would it be shorter? You could go through scene by scene and translate the events to something taking place on the ISS. The only thing that would go away would be the miracle MMU (and some of the redundancy of encountering two space stations and two reentry pods).

20 minutes ago, Camacha said:

Not to be rude, but there is a reason this movie was made this way and there is a reason Alfonso Cuarón is a big time Hollywood director and most of us are (presumably) not. Of course, an argument from authority is worthless in itself, so we will need to look at the reception: the audience loved it, the critics loved it even more, astronauts loved it and it got nominated for 10 Oscars, winning 7.

When authority fails, appeal to popularity? Not to be rude back, but this sounds like an argument for never criticizing any Hollywood movie on any basis. After all, they're all made by big time Hollywood directors who know better than we do and are watched by large audiences. Am I allowed to dislike Jar Jar if Phantom Menace made a lot of money?

20 minutes ago, Camacha said:

The proof is in the pudding, whatever way you choose to look at it. Saying the movie did not need that is hard to prove conclusively, but we do know that the movie was massively successful with the inaccuracies. I would say they certainly served their purpose. Cuarón did what he deemed necessary and hit the jackpot.

I assume that if you could think of a way my suggestion would make the movie worse, you'd mention it, so...

20 minutes ago, Camacha said:

we really start to look like that Trekkie that asks oddly specific questions at conventions.

... I think we're done here.

[razark]

1 hour ago, Camacha said:

You people are ruining it for yourself. You make the concious decision to watch a Hollywood movie with the expectation of watching a documentary. It is fake and you know it.

Good point.  When you go to see a Superman movie, you just have to suspend disbelief, and not complain that Lois Lane can't tell the difference between him and his normal person disguise, Peter Parker, the billionaire playboy with a secret hideout at a school for wizards.

Edited April 3, 2016 by razark

[Motokid600]

4 hours ago, regex said:

Common sense utterly destroyed my enjoyment of the Mecha genre...

Well crap... lol. It hasn't spoiled mine  Though I do understand the ridiculous nature of it. However I like to think given the right political conditions in the far off future and working with the manufacturing resources of an entire solar system could result is some otherworldly combat machines. The Armored Core video game series for instance had an interesting approach. These machines were developed during an interplanetary corporate tech-race which broke out into war.

[Camacha]

45 minutes ago, HebaruSan said:

Why would it be shorter? You could go through scene by scene and translate the events to something taking place on the ISS. The only thing that would go away would be the miracle MMU (and some of the redundancy of encountering two space stations and two reentry pods).

When authority fails, appeal to popularity? Not to be rude back, but this sounds like an argument for never criticizing any Hollywood movie on any basis. After all, they're all made by big time Hollywood directors who know better than we do and are watched by large audiences. Am I allowed to dislike Jar Jar if Phantom Menace made a lot of money?

I assume that if you could think of a way my suggestion would make the movie worse, you'd mention it, so...

... I think we're done here.

1) Boring! Yet again: you are not watching a documentary, but a 100 million dollar space adventure that needs to appeal to a broad public to earn its money back. People pay to be entertained. We can all agree the movie royally succeeded in doing that.

2) Authority has in no way failed. That might be the case if it were just the public that liked to movie, but it has been praised by every group, including astronauts. See my previous post. The popularity argument goes right out the window. It seems a very minor group has issues with the inaccuracies.

3) I never said such a thing, nor do I wish to discuss it and any of the thousands of other permutations that could have, would have and should have been. We know the product and we know how it was received by the various groups. Making the movie this way cannot reasonably be called a mistake. It was a resounding success in pretty much every way you look at it.

4) Please, keep conversation civil We might disagree, but let us at least disagree like gentlemen.

Edited April 3, 2016 by Camacha

[Skybird0]

I find that some shows or movies are just vague enough in there portrayal of scenes of interest to this thread, that they just can slip by...  Don't diss Dr. Who, it is a great show (Except for the 8th. season...).  The thing is, we all know that messing with time is impossible, there are discrepancys but it is for the sake of telling a story.  This is the same for most all shows or movies mentioned in this thread, only the difference with some is it is more glaring.