What is your biggest science pet peeve in movies?

[Tex_NL]

2 hours ago, Firemetal said:

I don't think so. He was going at supersonic speeds so he is going to have to do a full loop to kill off that velocity.

Fire

He was absolutely, without a doubt, categorically NOT going super sonic.
The clip portrays the red tailed Tuskegee Airmen, flying P-51 Mustangs, during WWII. Yes, with Mach 0.57 the Mustang was fast but no WWII plane was capable of going past Mach 1. Not even the German jet fighters at the end of the war. (The Messerschmitt Me-163 topped out at Mach 0.86.)

I won't say the manoeuvre is or is not possible. But they did NOT fly supersonic.
If you're going to discuss (in)correct science in movies, at least get your facts right.

Edited November 18, 2016 by Tex_NL

[monstah]

41 minutes ago, James Kerman said:

Ant Man would have been better if he asphyxiated on being shrunk due to the fact his lungs are now smaller than oxygen molecules.

But, then, there would be no movie!

Wait. Yes, you're right.

[Firemetal]

1 minute ago, Tex_NL said:

He was absolutely, without a doubt, categorically NOT going super sonic.
The clip portrays the red tailed Tuskegee Airmen, flying P-51 Mustangs, during WWII. Yes, with Mach 0.57 the Mustang was fast but no WWII plane was capable of going past Mach 1. Not even the German jet fighters at the end of the war. (The Messerschmitt Me-163 topped out at Mach 0.86.)

I won't say the manoeuvre is or is not possible. But they did NOT fly supersonic.
If you're going to discuss (in)correct science in movies, at least get your facts right.

Hmmm alright. Almost supersonic.

So it was a prop plane, hmm? Makes sense. I guess I didn't pay enough attention to the video then.  Alright I did a MatPat on this one. I will research my arguments better next time.

Fire

[mikegarrison]

44 minutes ago, Tex_NL said:

no WWII plane was capable of going past Mach 1.

There have been claims that some WW2 planes may have broken the sound barrier in steep dives, but generally these claims have not been accepted because they are not very plausible.

[Tex_NL]

39 minutes ago, Firemetal said:

Hmmm alright. Almost supersonic.

Almost? Since when is 0.57 almost 1?

[Firemetal]

Just now, Tex_NL said:

Almost? Since when is 0.57 almost 1?

Oh. Hey. I was thinking of mach 0.86 as that plane's top speed. You have a great point and I am very VERY wrong here. But I still don't think a plane could make a maneuver like that.

Fire

[Tex_NL]

4 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

There have been claims that some WW2 planes may have broken the sound barrier in steep dives, but generally these claims have not been accepted because they are not very plausible.

That part is true for as far as I know. Or at least they got close to Mach 1. But those were indeed extreme situations.

2 minutes ago, Firemetal said:

Oh. Hey. I was thinking of mach 0.86 as that plane's top speed.

The Mach 0.86 was for the Me-163. Mach 0.57 was for the P-51.

Edited November 18, 2016 by Tex_NL

[NSEP]

5 hours ago, Firemetal said:

I don't think so. He was going at supersonic speeds so he is going to have to do a full loop to kill off that velocity.

Fire

Supersonic? World War 2 fighter planes cant even go near supersonic speeds. A plane like that can never break the sound barrier, and when it does, it would break apart.

woops already said sorry bye.

Edited November 18, 2016 by NSEP

[Firemetal]

Just now, NSEP said:

Supersonic? World War 2 fighter planes cant even go near supersonic speeds. A plane like that can never break the sound barrier, and when it does, it would break apart.

I assume you haven't read the previous few posts where someone actually called me out on that one. But thanks.

Fire

[NSEP]

Just now, Firemetal said:

I assume you haven't read the previous few posts where someone actually called me out on that one. But thanks.

Fire

I just added that in. Sorry.

Edited November 18, 2016 by NSEP

[Tyko]

On 11/15/2016 at 1:44 PM, parameciumkid said:

I used to care a lot more about sound in space, but that part's actually surprisingly easy to "fix" in my headcanon: for one, sound actually does exist in space, albeit in most cases far below human hearing range; and perhaps the ships have radios that pick up the electromagnetic emissions from engines and explosions and they just so happen to resemble the sounds of jet planes xD

My solution is to imagine that in a fighter (xwing, viper, etc) they were using speakers and audio queues to assist the pilots with situational awareness. The pilot's vision is completely tied up with targeting and flying, Why not use sound to help pilots know that there's someone on their tail that's shooting at them?

[Codraroll]

My biggest gripe with science in movies is how science itself is treated. Specifically, how it is treated in relation to old-time, low-tech ideas, solutions or equipment.

Many blockbusters feature some huge government or private agency, well-funded and full of incredibly smart people with long experience in the field, usually in a large and opulent headquarter (which for some reason is furnished more like a car mechanics shop than a lab - with chemistry/biology/engineering experiments being performed on small desks lining the edges of large halls, for instance).

Then The Disaster happens. All the scientists and engineers are dumbfounded.

But here comes The Protagonist, a down-to-earth man without academic credentials, whose work usually centers around physical labour (mining, farming, oil drilling, etc.). He walks up to the headquarter's big wall monitor, squints, and finds the solution immediately. All of the scientists are dumbstruck, they never thought of that obvious solution. They either argue against the idea (only to be proven wrong shortly after, possibly via a funny incident, like: "We always check all our numbers twice, we're never wrong" - cue something scientific exploding or falling apart in the background), enthusiastically agree and hail the protagonist as a genius, or just stand there looking stupid. Some scientists might even try to state some mathematical formula, or technobabble, only to be shut up with a quip from The Protagonist, after which they meekly slump back into a corner.

The Solution invariably involves bringing out The Museum Piece. The advanced and modern technology failed, now we must go back to the Good Old Method! Roll out the WWII aircraft, or the "dumb" rocket, or a reliable firearm. In extreme cases, swords or bows and arrows. Rule of thumb: If any aspect of it is computer-controlled, or it was designed using computers, it's too modern, unreliable or flawed to work. The Museum Piece will somehow overcome some contrived obstacle with triviality, such that the antagonists can't detect/hack/shoot it, or it remains functional after The Disaster has blacked out all recent technology.

Then The Protagonist turns out to be the best man for the mission and hand, rather than relevant pilots/soldiers/astronauts. The Protagonist tends to have some experience in the field himself, and even though he retired years ago, he can still do the job better than any people who have currently been working with it for years. This might extend to The Protagonist's friends (or crew), they are always the ideal people to bring along. As he/they is about to embark on the mission, some of the experts try to give last-second advice: "Remember to _____". The Protagonist replies with a quip whose meaning boils down to "You're an idiot, I know this a thousand times better than you do".

 

A different spin, but with basically the same message, might involve a hyper-technological antagonist, whose futuristic soldiers and machinery are helpless against the wits of The Protagonist and his technologically outdated equipment. Rock beats laser and all that. The battle of Endor is the ultimate example here.

Or The Doctors are helpless to save the Sick Little Child, but Grandma's or The Wise Old Man's ancient remedy proves to be a perfect and reliable cure overnight.

 

Basically, science and engineering is seen as wasteful toying around, always producing ideas and products inferior to those in use back in some nostalgic period (usually, when the director/producer was in his early teens). Science never marches on, it strays away. Engineering even more so, any piece of equipment designed after 1970 can barely hold together against the force of gravity, and will break apart when you look at it funny. Experts with fancy degrees, or professionals with decades of experience, are morons, the common sense and intuition of your everyday rural worker is superior in every possible setting, situation or instance. In several cases, science or technology is even the cause of the problems, or stated/implied to be decadent or evil. Best-case scenario, the new science/technology is created by well-meaning "scientists" (there is only one science profession in movies), and initially appears superior, but comes with a horrible side effect or gains sentience and turns evil.

 

So yeah, scientific inaccuracy isn't my biggest peeve in movies. It's the tendency to portray science as dumb, worthless and/or evil.

[wumpus]

On 11/18/2016 at 2:29 PM, mikegarrison said:

There have been claims that some WW2 planes may have broken the sound barrier in steep dives, but generally these claims have not been accepted because they are not very plausible.

I was under the impression that this had been attempted with disastrous and often fatal results, leading to the fear of the sound barrier.  Not only that, but the "flight envelope" implies that the plane can structurally handle slower speeds at lower altitudes (like the end of a dive) than at higher ones.

Even if the wings stay on after the dive (which itself is hardly certain), pulling out is another problem.  The P-38 had control issues that were never understood (even with Kelly Johnson himself working on them) until after supersonic flight was understood (the P-38 was sufficiently fast to have these issues).  Don't expect WWII control surfaces to work after (or even before) breaking the sound barrier.  - Note, presumably the German jets had the same issues only worse, but I've never heard how they handled them.

[DDE]

@Codraroll Asimov attributes the anti-science attitude to chemical weapons.

Quote

For a long period after 1752, throughout the nineteenth century indeed, science was generally considered the hope of humanity. Oh, there were people who thought this particular scientific advance or that was wicked, and who objected to anesthetics, for instance, or to the theory of evolution, or, for that matter, to the Industrial Revolution—but science in the abstract remained good.

How different it is today! There is a strong and growing element among the population which not only finds scientists suspect, but is finding evil in science in the abstract.

It is the whole concept of science which (to many) seems to have made the world a horror. The advance of medicine has given us a dangerous population growth; the advance of technology has given us a growing pollution danger; a group of ivory-tower, head-in-the-clouds physicists have given us the nuclear bomb; and so on and so on and so on.

But at exactly which point in time did the disillusionment with the "goodness" of science come? When did it start?

Could it have come at the time when some scientist or scientists demonstrated the evil in science beyond any doubt; showed mankind a vision of evil so intense that not only the scientist himself but all of science was darkened past the point where it could be washed clean again?

When was the sin of the scientist committed, then, and who was the scientist?

The easy answer is the nuclear bomb. It was to that which Oppenheimer referred in his remark on sin.

But I say no. The nuclear bomb is a terrible thing that has contributed immeasurably to the insecurity of mankind and to his growing distrust of science, but the nuclear bomb is by no means pure evil.

To develop the nuclear bomb, physicists had to extend, vastly, their knowledge of nuclear physics generally. That has led to cheap radioisotopes that have contributed to research in science and industry in a hundred fruitful directions; to nuclear power stations that may be of tremendous use to mankind, and so on. Even the bombs themselves can be used for useful and constructive purposes (as motive power for spaceships, for one thing). And missiles, which might have hydrogen bombs attached, might have spaceships attached instead.

Besides, even if you argue that the development of the nuclear bomb was sin, I still reply that it wasn't the first sin. The mistrust of science itself antedates the nuclear bomb. That bomb intensified the mistrust but did not originate it.

I find a certain significance in the fact that the play R.U.R. by Karel Capek was first produced in 1921.

It brought the Frankenstein motif up to date. The original Frankenstein, published a century earlier, in 1818, was the last thrust of theological, rather than scientific, sin. In its Faustian plot, a scientist probed forbidden knowledge and offended God rather than man. The monster who in the end killed Frankenstein could easily be understood as the instrument of God's vengeance.

In R.U.R., however, the theological has vanished. Robots are created out of purely scientific motivation with no aura of "forbiddenness." They are tools intended to advance man's good the way the railroad and telegraph did; but they got out of hand and in the end the human race was destroyed.

Science could get out of hand!

The play was an international success (and gave the word "robot" to the world and to science fiction) so its thesis of science out of hand must have touched a responsive chord in mankind.

Why should men be so ready, in 1921, to think that science could get out of hand and do total evil to the human race, when only a few years before, science was still the "Mr. Clean" who would produce a Utopia if allowed to work?

What happened shortly before 1921? World War I happened shortly before 1921.

World War II was a greater and deadlier war than World War I; but World War I was incomparably more stupid in its details.

Men have made colossal misjudgments in a moment of error and may make more to come. Some day, someone will push the wrong button, perhaps, in a moment of panic or lack of understanding, and destroy the world; but never has constant, steady stupidity held sway for weeks, months and years as among the military leaders of World War I. For persistent stupidity, they will never be approached.

A million men and more died at Verdun. Sixty thousand British soldiers died in a single day on the Somme while generals thought they could build a bridge of mangled flesh across the trenches.

Everything about the carnage was horrible, but was there anything which managed to make itself felt above that sickening spectacle of mutual suicide? Was it the new explosives used in unprecedented quantities; the machine guns, the tanks? They were only minor developments of old devices. Was it the airplane, first used in battle, in this war? Not at all! The airplane was actually admired, for it was in itself beautiful, and it clearly had enormous peacetime potential.

No, no! If you want the supreme horror of the war, here it is:

On April 22, 1915, at Ypres, two greenish-yellow clouds of gas rolled toward the Allied line at a point held by Canadian divisions.

It was poison gas; chlorine. When the clouds covered the Allied line, that line caved in. The soldiers fled; they had to; and a five-mile opening appeared.

No gap like that had been seen anywhere before on the Western Front, but the Germans muffed their opportunity. For one thing, they hadn't really believed it would work (even though they had earlier experimented with gas in a smaller way against the Russians), and were caught flat-footed. For another, they hesitated to advance until the cloud had quite dissipated.

The Canadians were able to rally, and after the clouds drifted away, their line re-formed. By the time of the next gas attack, all were prepared and the gas mask was in use.

That was the horror of World War I, for before the war was over poison gases far more horrible than the relatively innocuous chlorine were put into use by both sides.

So grisly was the threat of poison gas, so insidious its onset, so helpless an unprepared group of victims and, what's more, so devastatingly atrocious did it seem to make war upon breathing—that common, constant need of all men —that after World War I gas warfare was outlawed.

In all of World War II, poison gas was not used no matter what the provocation, and in wars since, even the use of tear gas arouses violent opposition. Military men argue endlessly that poison gas is really humane; that it frequently incapacitates without killing or permanent harm; that it does not maim horribly the way shells and bullets do. People nevertheless will not brook interference with breathing. Shells and bullets might miss; one might hide from them. But how escape or avoid the creeping approach of gas?

And what, after all, is the other side of poison gas? It has only one use; to harm, incapacitate and kill. It has no other use. When World War I was over and the Allies found themselves left with many tons of poison gas, to what peaceful use could those tons be converted? To none. The poison gas had to be buried at sea or disposed of clumsily in some other fashion. Was even theoretical knowledge gained? No!

Poison gas warfare was developed knowingly by a scientist with only destruction in mind. The only excuse for it was patriotism, and is that enough of an excuse?

There is a story that during the Crimean War of 1853-56, the British government asked Michael Faraday, the greatest living scientist of the day, two questions: 1) Was it possible to develop poison gas in quantities sufficient to use on the battlefield? And 2) would Faraday head a project to accomplish the task?

Faraday said "Yes" to the first and an emphatic "No" to the second. He did not consider patriotism excuse enough. During World War I, Ernest Rutherford of Great Britain refused to involve himself in war work, maintaining that his research was more important.

In the name of German patriotism, however, poison gas warfare was introduced in World War I, and it was the product of science. No one could miss that. Poison gas was invented by the clever chemists of the German Empire. And the gas poisoned not only thousands of men, but the very name of science. For the first time, millions became aware that science could be perverted to monstrous evil, and science has never been the same again.

Poison gas was the sin of the scientist.

And can we name the sinner?

Yes, we can. He was Fritz Haber, an earnest German patriot of the most narrow type, who considered nothing bad if it brought good (according to his lights) to the Fatherland. (Alas, this way of thinking is held by too many people of all nations and is not confined to Germany.)

Haber had developed the "Haber process" which produced ammonia out of the nitrogen of the air. The ammonia could be used to manufacture explosives. Without that process, Germany would have run out of ammunition by 1916, thanks to the British blockade. With that process, she ran out of food, men and morale, but never out of ammunition. This, however, will scarcely qualify as a scientific sin, since the Haber process can be used to prepare useful explosives and fertilizers.

During the war, however, Haber labored unceasingly to develop methods of producing poison gas in quantity and supervised that first chlorine attack.

His reward for his unspotted devotion to his nation was a most ironic one. In 1933, Hitler came to power and, as it happened, Haber was Jewish. He had to leave the country and died in sad exile within the year.

That he got out of Germany safely was in part due to the labors of Rutherford, who moved mountains to rescue as many German scientists as he could from the heavy hand of the pedant psychopaths. Rutherford personally greeted those who reached England, shaking hands with them in the fraternal comradeship of science.

He would not, however, shake hands with Haber. That would, in his view, have been going too far, for Haber, by his work on poison gas, had put himself beyond Rutherford's pale.

I can only hope that Rutherford was not reacting out of offended national patriotism, but out of the horror of a scientist who recognized scientific sin when he saw it.

Even today, we can still recognize the difference. The men who developed the nuclear bombs and missile technology are not in disgrace. Some of them have suffered agonies of conscience but they know, and we all know, that their work can be turned to great good, if only all of us display wisdom enough. Even Edward Teller, in so far as his work may result in useful fusion power some day, may be forgiven by some his fatherhood of the H-bomb.

But what about the anonymous, hidden people, who in various nations work on nerve gas and on disease germs? To whom are they heroes?

To what constructive use can nerve gas in ton-lot quantities be put? To what constructive use can plague bacilli in endless rows of flasks be put?

The sin of the scientist is multiplied endlessly in these people and for their sake—to make matters theological once again—all mankind may yet be cursed.

From THE SIN OF THE SCIENTIST by Isaac Asimov (1969)

And the rest is anti-elitism.

Edited November 19, 2016 by DDE

[Tex_NL]

There's another one that will never cease to annoy me.

Many movies depict scenes on the moon. And of course a lot will place the scene at one of the Apollo landing sites. Flag, rover, equipment, lander. It's all there.
The problem is the lander. The COMPLETE lander. The only part that's still on the moon is the lower half with the descent engine and the legs. The top half with the capsule carried the astronauts back to lunar orbit. It most likely crashes some time later but in no case would it be left at the landing site.

Edited November 19, 2016 by Tex_NL

[magnemoe]

6 minutes ago, DDE said:

@Codraroll Asimov attributes the anti-science attitude to chemical weapons.

And the rest is anti-elitism.

Nuclear weapons was probably more important. 
Also as thing has grown way more complex and spread out, yes sufficient advanced technology is magic this was true with fire. 
and with the electric light http://420.thrashbarg.net/this_room_is_equipped_with_edison_electric_light_mwichary_flickr.jpg
However the specialization has grown more and more extreme. Even people who as very interested in science has no chance following it all. 
Now add media who focus on sensations and fear as it sells

However the greatest sinner is Hollywood the king of idiotic idiot plots.
They managed to do stuff like humans as heat generators in the matrix, yes anybody here understand this is stupid. The original was using brains for computing but this was voted down as audience would not understand it.
Going on using it brains as computers pretty beautiful in avatar who had its own idiot plots like the avatars makes no sense at all and an mine don't destroy a planet. 
Trying to explain the force in star wars scientifically for some weird reason. 
This was long after exploding cars was an old joke. 

Yes movies is visual, you want WW2 style dogfights.
Movies is about story you can get away with stuff who would not work in an video game. 
Books is more about inner thought and strategy, submarine warfare works much better in an book than in an movie. 
 

[Codraroll]

14 hours ago, DDE said:

@Codraroll Asimov attributes the anti-science attitude to chemical weapons.

And the rest is anti-elitism.

I think it's also a case of anti-intellectualism. For instance, just ask a kid who's bored with maths about what he thinks of maths in general: "It's stupid and I'll never use it for anything." Objectively, that's pretty wrong, everybody could use at least some maths at some point, but it's a very comforting lie. "Don't worry, not knowing maths doesn't make you inferior. Actually, you're better than them for not wasting your time." You could say the same about history, social studies, cooking or most other academic studies, or even stuff like reading user manuals. Gaining knowledge and expertise is hard, often frustrating, and it's easy to give up. At those moments, it's comforting to be told that staying invested is a waste of time, that your intuition is the right answer anyway, and that people who know this better than you actually don't know anything at all. Academic degrees are just words on paper.

And so Hollywood comes along with the idea that "Expert" = clueless idiot who doesn't understand anything. That knowledge itself is useless, that the pursuit of knowledge is dangerous, and that the only true virtue in face of danger is knowing how to shoot danger in the face. That the gut feeling of the uneducated is worth more than years of expertise. That a down-to-earth manual labourer can step into any role, and do it better than the guys who do it for a living, and the people who tells him otherwise are just elitists. See for instance Armageddon, where the chosen solution is to teach oil drillers how to be astronauts, rather than vice versa. Because anybody can learn how to operate spacecraft and work in zero G in a few days, but drilling is an art, which requires a specific mindset, nay, a lifestyle, to fully understand - or even functionally grasp. And where the mission planners of NASA apparently miss the fact that their chosen landing site is a kilometre-thick iron slab, which Bruce Willis' character can tell at a glance. And where the enormously complex space shuttle, with "a million moving parts", can be perfectly fixed by giving it a good whack.

 

I can't remember many movies in recent years where the solution to a problem hasn't been "going primitive", digging up the Ancient Artifact (which of course is a lot more powerful, complex and fantastic than anything that can be created today) or otherwise returning to the traditions of old; rather than analyzing the problem, doing the calculations, and inventing something new. The Martian stands as a rare example, and even there much of Mark Watney's likeability comes from his tendency to tell the NASA experts to (expletive) themselves, and win the day with his intuition rather than trusting their expertise. In most situations, the new invention turns evil, showing that science is dangerous and not to be trusted (Angels and Demons, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Jurassic Park and all sequels, etc.). The problem isn't that the scientists have terrible security procedures, it's that science itself is inevitably evil. Or science is useless, the power of love is what trumps through in the end (Interstellar). Actually, just read this Cracked article rather than following my ramble.

[wumpus]

20 hours ago, DDE said:

@Codraroll Asimov attributes the anti-science attitude to chemical weapons.

And the rest is anti-elitism.

An easier answer is to look at the number of people who consider themselves to be "good at STEM (any discipline)".  Then compare those to people who might have issue with being told that they weren't smart enough for such things.

Now along comes Hollywood (and anybody else with something to sell) who will claim that everybody's opinion is as good as a fully trained scientist's detailed research.  It's a lie people want to believe, so Hollywood (and anybody else interested in a sale) tells them such.  I'd claim that you would see an upswing of "opinion>facts" propaganda in the 1970s, when the Sputnik/Apollo push had died (and thus there was no longer a pro-science propaganda push) but the resentment hadn't.  I'd say that there was such a resentment at the time, but its hard to tell.

But don't underestimate the power of a lie people want to believe.  Nukes, chemical weapons tend to be pretty abstract (well, nukes to the present generation.  Anybody who had to duck and cover might think otherwise).  Personal failure hits hard.

[todofwar]

@Codraroll Battleship was another example of this stupidity. A new state of the art ship couldn't do the job, so they get the USS Missouri and somehow get it moving again and that one does the job. They even ignored the fact that it was fitted with far more advanced weapons in the 80s, just stuck to the gun turrets. It's not hard to see why, WWII era battleships just look more impressive overall compared to modern destroyers.

And the idea of bringing in one guy speaks to a big problem in how science is actually done that Hollywood is not helping at all. We still think of scientists as being the lone genius, struck with inspiration from watching a tea ketlle boil or something. In fact, science takes teams and teams doing work over long hours. But we don't even reward science like that. Academic research centers on the professors and their egos. Funding is awarded to a person instead of a team. And the Nobel Prize can't go to more than three people. It recalls an era where noblemen did science in their spare time, and looked down their nose at the idea of being paid do do something. 

[wumpus]

6 hours ago, todofwar said:

@Codraroll Battleship was another example of this stupidity.

If you have a contract to make a movie based on the game "battleship" and use "battleship" as the title of the game (and presumably include the quote "you sank my battleship" to note a major plot point), you have two choices:

• Follow the classic "anti-hi-tech" Hollywood trope.
• Go into great detail about how the differences in countermeasures for the entire rest of your Navy don't help at all against battleships, and that is why they work well together.

One allows you to write the script in a matter of days and sell it to people who see game-based movies.  The other takes lots of research and probably needs Tom Clancy's name on it to find the people who would watch it.  I'm hardly surprised in the direction they took.  I'd worry more about "Jurassic Park" and other movies people might have seen.  Or even "Contact" considering the book was written by Carl Sagan and didn't seem to be anti-science at all (I remember people claiming the movie was "anti-god": the book ends with a message from the creator of the universe acknowledging his/her/whatever existence).

There really isn't much hope about fixing the second issue in Hollywood.  And it isn't Hollywood, it is all fiction and similar works.  The laws of conservation of characters mean that for any large group of people, they will be represented by a single character in a work.  It isn't just science, it is pretty much anything (and if you obviously need a larger group, don't expect to ever learn the extras names: they will be included in the required shot and never be seen again).

The fact that science is largely ignored by the population (and thus the understanding that such portrayals are the same as everywhere else) is the real problem.  You won't get an exemption to include 'the whole team' just for science (especially if the Nobel committee is perpetuating the problem).

 

Edited November 20, 2016 by wumpus
found missing keystroke

[cantab]

To be fair, while the Iowa-class have obvious shortcomings compared to modern warships, sometimes you do just want a Really Big Gun.

[magnemoe]

53 minutes ago, cantab said:

To be fair, while the Iowa-class have obvious shortcomings compared to modern warships, sometimes you do just want a Really Big Gun.

Battleships are very good for shore bombardment, they have big guns as you say, they also has strong armor so most ground based weapons is no big danger. 
They are also an nice platform to put things on making them pretty easy to upgrade. 
Still ship to ship they are not much better than an destroyer even if fully upgraded unless you get into gun range of an hostile carrier or cruiser. 

Downside is that they require huge crews, they was build then it was conscription so huge crews did not cost much. As they are old they require much maintenance making it hard to reduce the crew requirement. The final nail in the coffin was that it was metal fatigue in the main guns, this was discovered after an accident. 
They would not survive the defense cuts after the cold war but might gone back to storage rather than being decommissioned without the gun problem. 

[Stargate525]

On 11/19/2016 at 9:15 AM, Codraroll said:

...any piece of equipment designed after 1970 can barely hold together against the force of gravity, and will break apart when you look at it funny...

To be fair to the trope, most movie producers, scriptwriters, and moviegoers are primarily consumers of smaller engineering products. For most of their adult lives, or the entirety of their adult lives, they've purchased and used products with planned lifespans and intentional obsolescence. Cars built in the sixties will still run, with care. I don't think anyone is going to be saying that in 2076 about modern cars. There is a perception that stuff build before 1970 is more reliable than stuff after it because, in a WIDE array of consumer-level products, it's ACCURATE.

[wumpus]

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

Battleships are very good for shore bombardment, they have big guns as you say, they also has strong armor so most ground based weapons is no big danger. 
They are also an nice platform to put things on making them pretty easy to upgrade. 
Still ship to ship they are not much better than an destroyer even if fully upgraded unless you get into gun range of an hostile carrier or cruiser. 

Downside is that they require huge crews, they was build then it was conscription so huge crews did not cost much. As they are old they require much maintenance making it hard to reduce the crew requirement. The final nail in the coffin was that it was metal fatigue in the main guns, this was discovered after an accident. 
They would not survive the defense cuts after the cold war but might gone back to storage rather than being decommissioned without the gun problem. 

Not sure if metal fatigue killed the Iowa, all the explanations I've seen center around the powder.  Did they discover that even creating new and safer powder would still be dangerous in old turrets?  Ship to ship the main point is likely more defensive, basically 60,000 tons of pure naval nightmare between friendly carriers and [large] hostile ships, but the real mission (that they were recommissioned for) was shore bombardment.

I don't think the US Navy ever drafted (in significant numbers), but I'm sure that plenty picked the Navy, over being drafted by the Army (one friend of my father joined Dec 8,1941 when told by a Navy recruiter that his line was significantly shorter than the Army recruiter's line).  Lack of a draft meant far fewer sailors.

[Bill Phil]

6 hours ago, todofwar said:

@Codraroll Battleship was another example of this stupidity. A new state of the art ship couldn't do the job, so they get the USS Missouri and somehow get it moving again and that one does the job. They even ignored the fact that it was fitted with far more advanced weapons in the 80s, just stuck to the gun turrets. It's not hard to see why, WWII era battleships just look more impressive overall compared to modern destroyers.

I think that was justified by them losing their other ships to an unknown enemy (and thus they were unaware of its weapons, capabilities, and protection) and that the other ships were unable to enter the combat area because of some magic alien technology. This would leave the battleship as a ship that they need. Now, is it battle-ready? I would say no, of course not. But they didn't choose it because it was better. It was the only ship they had available, and now that they understood the enemy better, they were able to win. Plus, it had big guns.

It is still kinda dumb, though.

On ‎11‎/‎19‎/‎2016 at 2:22 PM, Tex_NL said:

There's another one that will never cease to annoy me.

Many movies depict scenes on the moon. And of course a lot will place the scene at one of the Apollo landing sites. Flag, rover, equipment, lander. It's all there.
The problem is the lander. The COMPLETE lander. The only part that's still on the moon is the lower half with the descent engine and the legs. The top half with the capsule carried the astronauts back to lunar orbit. It most likely crashes some time later but in no case would it be left at the landing site.

I loved how Futurama handled this. It's a replica, there's a logo on the ascent module and everything.