What is your biggest science pet peeve in movies?

[Smillerthegreat]

On Tuesday, December 20, 2016 at 9:45 AM, Tex_NL said:

Start reading here (http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/136744-what-is-your-biggest-science-pet-peeve-in-movies/&do=findComment&comment=2877003) and you'll learn this is not as far fetched as it might seem.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.outsideonline.com/2023396/how-accurate-martian%3Famp?client=ms-android-att-us

[Eldrad_Ulthran]

Explosions/fire in space continuing even after the oxygen is gone (includes oxidiser ).

[Jonfliesgoats]

Lights inside the helmets of spacesuits: 

Useless glare that only serves to illuminate the star's face.

[Superfluous J]

11 hours ago, Jonfliesgoats said:

Lights inside the helmets of spacesuits: 

Useless glare that only serves to illuminate the star's face.

That's like being mad that there's music playing during the exciting scenes when in reality, there is no orchestra anywhere nearby.

[Ozymandias_the_Goat]

Eughh, there are so many!

1. Sound in space
2. Giant spacecraft-where do you find enough aluminum for a 20 km battleship? Not to mention the Ark from Halo
3. Explosions in space
4. Vaporizing enemies
5. Aliens looking like humans with a bumpy forehead, and talking English
6. People hacking "impenetrable" computers in 30 seconds
7. People surviving from being sucked into space by hanging on to something
8. Evading ridiculous amounts of gunfire. Probability would dictate you would get hit even if the enemy's "trained attack squad" was firing blind.
9. Starships leaning into a curve during a turn as if there was gravity pulling them "down"
10. Temporal paradoxes. So convenient when they just resolve themselves...

 

[kerbiloid]

On 25.12.2016 at 3:24 AM, LetsGoToMars! said:

Giant spacecraft-where do you find enough aluminum for a 20 km battleship?

Mmm, everywhere? Rocks are made of Si, Al, Fe, Mg, O.

On 25.12.2016 at 3:24 AM, LetsGoToMars! said:

Aliens looking like humans with a bumpy forehead, and talking English

They just learn it watching the Terran TV shows. Also maybe we have an illusion, while they are speaking their own.

More strange when they write captions.

(Also when in a translated movie or game captions are replaced with localized ones. Say, Cyrillic.)

On 25.12.2016 at 3:24 AM, LetsGoToMars! said:

People hacking "impenetrable" computers in 30 seconds

This is an average time to try all possible combinations: "12345", "password", "qwerty".
As you can see, this never fails.

On 25.12.2016 at 3:24 AM, LetsGoToMars! said:

Evading ridiculous amounts of gunfire. Probability would dictate you would get hit even if the enemy's "trained attack squad" was firing blind.

True hero has a probability mirror. All probabilities are reflected to enemies. 

 

On 24.12.2016 at 4:38 PM, 5thHorseman said:

music playing during the exciting scenes when in reality, there is no orchestra anywhere nearby.

A good idea for Martian spacesuits. Music style and volume depending on current activity, health parameters, illuminance, velocity, 

With external audio system. Costs nothing but makes fun.

[monstah]

On 24/12/2016 at 11:38 AM, 5thHorseman said:

when in reality, there is no orchestra anywhere nearby.

So, you're saying I'm crazy?  

[Mitchz95]

Whenever a vehicle explodes in a ball of flame (no debris, just a fireball) when it gets hit by gunfire. Not even exploding rounds, just a few shots from an ordinary gun that somehow blows the whole thing up, even if it doesn't hit anywhere near a gas tank.

[LN400]

So many things sci fi could have done better. Many have been posted  but regardless: Perhaps my number 1 pet peeve:

Humanoid aliens

and worse:

Humanoid aliens speaking English without the slightest alien accent.

 

They say it's so we the audience can relate more but if I wanted familiarity, I'd watch a docu, not a sci fi movie.

[Tex_NL]

24 minutes ago, LN400 said:

So many things sci fi could have done better. Many have been posted  but regardless: Perhaps my number 1 pet peeve:

Humanoid aliens

and worse:

Humanoid aliens speaking English without the slightest alien accent.

 

They say it's so we the audience can relate more but if I wanted familiarity, I'd watch a docu, not a sci fi movie.

Actually, some humanoid similarities can be expected. Aliens will be vastly different but there also will be some similarities.

An intelligent needs to sense its environment, It will need something similar to eyes and ears. At least two of each for stereo perception. But it won't have dozens of eyes as this will require too much brainpower to make sense of it all. 'Eyes' and 'ears' will most likely located near the top of the creature for optimum effect.
It needs to move around and manipulate so it must have something like arms and legs. A few of each for stability and dexterity but again not dozens as this would require too much brain power and energy. It will prefer some libs for locomotion and some for manipulation.
Any creature needs energy so it will need to feed somehow. It will need a mouth, and quite possibly a rectum.
And last but not least it will most likely be evolved from a predatory species and non aquatic for obvious reasons.

Language can be learned. Even and alien one.
It won't be easy but with the help of technology it should be possible.

Edited December 27, 2016 by Tex_NL

[LN400]

50 minutes ago, Tex_NL said:

Actually, some humanoid similarities can be expected. Aliens will be vastly different but there also will be some similarities.

An intelligent needs to sense its environment, It will need something similar to eyes and ears. Some sort of sensory organs would perhaps be a prerequisite for evolving into something one can call an intelligent being, that's true but there is no need for these beings to have these organs tuned into the frequencies and energy levels our organs are tuned to through hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Our own planet shows a wide range of sensory organs. Think of how sharks can detect pressure waves with pressure sensitive organs along its sides (sound is pressure waves after all). Light sensitive organs come in many shapes from insect eyes to they eyes of the nautilus or horseshoe crabs with its many different sort of eyes with different functionalities. There is no reason to think 2 eyes in a face is optimal for all intelligent alien beings. Then there is the fact that light is nothing more than EM waves, just like microwaves, radio waves, x rays etc etc and that eyes here on earth all are tuned in on a very small window in the entire EM spectrum. Radio antennas for eyes isn't that far fetched.

At least two of each for stereo perception. But it won't have dozens of eyes as this will require too much brainpower to make sense of it all. 'Eyes' and 'ears' will most likely located near the top of the creature for optimum effect. Even a snake or slug has a top and bottom and pressure sensitive organs can be placed pretty much anywhere but the bellyside.

It needs to move around and manipulate so it must have something like arms and legs. A few of each for stability and dexterity but again not dozens as this would require too much brain power and energy. It will prefer some libs for locomotion and some for manipulation. A squid can walk on the seabed just fine using its tentacles that are very different from jointed legs or arms. Intelligent species can very well evolve in an aquatic environment (even if 'aquatic' refers to any liquid other than water). We can not rule out such aquatic beings being capable of societies and technology. Our brains did not evolve out of nothing. There were species before us with brains that evolved into what we have today. Evolution does not have a plan or goal to aim for. It is entirely random within the limits of physics. We simply can not make even uneducated guesses what kind of brains evolution on other planets could possibly produce or if those brains would allow several sets of eyes at an energy cost matching what we pay for our eyes.

Any creature needs energy so it will need to feed somehow. It will need a mouth, and quite possibly a rectum.
And last but not least it will most likely be evolved from a predatory species and non aquatic for obvious reasons. We don't have any reason to believe having a mouth and rectum of sort is the only way for a being to feed. We have no knowledge of whether or not say, osmosis could replace our eating in an environment drastically different from what we evolved in.

Language can be learned. Even and alien one. True but there is nothing in the Star Wars saga that suggests anyone there went to Harward or Yale.
It won't be easy but with the help of technology it should be possible. Provided anyone spoke US English a long time ago in a galaxy far. far away.

Bottom line is, it is all too common to assume we are the end product of evolution, that evolution strives to produce humanoids everywhere it can. We tend to create imaginations in our own well, image.

Edited December 27, 2016 by LN400

[todofwar]

1 hour ago, LN400 said:

Bottom line is, it is all too common to assume we are the end product of evolution, that evolution strives to produce humanoids everywhere it can. We tend to create imaginations in our own well, image.

Only thing I will point out is the visible light spectrum is optimal for vision because many electronic transitions happen in that region, sometimes down to the UV or up to IR, but most spectrometers in chemistry labs operate between 200 and 800 nm because that's where you get the bulk of useful information. IR sensing eyes could also be useful, and some organisms can detect them, but usually in addition to visible light organs. Anything above UV is likely to be too damaging, and you don't gain much in the ultra ultra violet region anyway.

[monstah]

19 hours ago, todofwar said:

Only thing I will point out is the visible light spectrum is optimal for vision because (snip)

...and because there's a window of transparency in our atmosphere right there  (the others are at longer wavelengths/lower resolution, and not as transparent as this first one until radio)

[kerbiloid]

21 hours ago, Tex_NL said:

An intelligent needs to sense its environment, It will need something similar to eyes and ears. At least two of each for stereo perception. But it won't have dozens of eyes as this will require too much brainpower to make sense of it all. 'Eyes' and 'ears' will most likely located near the top of the creature for optimum effect.
It needs to move around and manipulate so it must have something like arms and legs. A few of each for stability and dexterity but again not dozens as this would require too much brain power and energy. It will prefer some libs for locomotion and some for manipulation.
Any creature needs energy so it will need to feed somehow. It will need a mouth, and quite possibly a rectum.
And last but not least it will most likely be evolved from a predatory species and non aquatic for obvious reasons.

Spoiler

Easy way

[LN400]

Our atmosphere, our G class star, the Sun... Those 2 factors were absolutely vital for the evolution here on this blue marble to take the turns it took. However these 2 factors are not absolutely necessary for _an_ evolution to take place on other worlds orbiting different stars. Ask: Are "earthly" eyes optimal on a planet orbiting say, a red dwarf, or a brown dwarf, or a white dwarf? A planet with an atmosphere no earthly organism could survive in? What atmospheres could support life, not as we know it but, let's stretch our imagination here, silicon based life? Lifeforms with "DNA" we would not recognize as DNA at first, or second glance? Organisms that evolved not one brain but several brains placed around the bodies, all with perhaps different but overlapping functions, or totally separate functions, or the same functions but for different parts of the body?

We can't make the same old a priori assumption that evolution everywhere always must lead to something we could easily recognize and classify in earthly terms.

[Guest]

 

On 25/12/2016 at 0:24 AM, LetsGoToMars! said:

1. Giant spacecraft-where do you find enough aluminum for a 20 km battleship? Not to mention the Ark from Halo
2. Explosions in space
3. People surviving from being sucked into space by hanging on to something

I won't try to justify the engineering unless these are slower-than-light interstellar ships, but as materials go, the Moon's surface is covered in alumina and there's no reason not to strip-mine everything useful off of dead worlds like this. Quoth the silicon mine description from X, "the surface is literally scraped away by great land-moving machines". I dunno why you'd make the majority of a ship using aluminium though; carbon is extremely common and far stronger.

Explosions in space are a thing, like if propellant tanks ruptured (especially hypergolics and nitro compounds); they just look like a flash followed by a bubble of heat distortion that rapidly expands and dissipates.

The drop from an Earthlike atmospheric pressure (14psi, and bear in mind a spacecraft may well use pure oxygen at a lower pressure) is not enough to suck much. From a large opening there would only be a brief impulse that, like a stiff breeze, would send papers flying but not people (if you watch the first Chinese EVA you'll see a few bits fly outside but the guys have to haul ass manually). From a small opening the air would seep out gradually like water down a drain (it could even go unnoticed). You could very well hold on against it. Vacuum exposure itself is not immediately deadly to humans either, though one would fall unconscious within about ten seconds and die after a minute.

Edited December 28, 2016 by Guest

[monstah]

1 minute ago, String Witch said:

and bear in mind a spacecraft may well use pure oxygen at a lower pressure

If it's a combat ship (or one built for any dangerous situations), then in fact that's likely the case, for precisely that reason.

[kerbiloid]

A pure oxygen atmosphere in a combat ship looks intriguingly...

Imho, technically, explosions (and lasers) in vacuum could sound under special conditions:
either a dense bubble of expanding burst gasses pushs our ship making "bumm"
or a radiation of an explosion or laser locally heats the hull, hots air inside and also makes "ppp-psh".

But that's just a guessing. No real experiments known to me.

[monstah]

14 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

A pure oxygen atmosphere in a combat ship looks intriguingly...

I know, but remember it's low pressure. The oxygen content is pretty much the same.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, monstah said:

If it's a combat ship (or one built for any dangerous situations), then in fact that's likely the case, for precisely that reason.

What reason, less suction? It isn't even enough of an issue at standard atmospheric pressure that operating in a low-pressure environment would make a meaningful difference in the safety concerns of decompression. Either way it happens very rapidly and a system may flood the room to give you some time to suit-up or find a door.

Pure oxygen is actually the low-mass high-risk option in that without being dispersed among inert nitrogen atoms (or argon if you're feeling fancy), it will combust much more rapidly, and when you're under fire from hypervelocity kinetics or nukes or pulsed lasers spalling plasma all over your ship (potentially raising various parts of it to autoignition temperature, eg. a lightweight magnesium or titanium structure) this becomes a problem where something that would simply burn in air might outright explode in pure oxygen. Admittedly this is like the difference between being in the Hindenberg disaster and being hit by a thermobaric weapon — people would quickly die from it either way, so maybe like the pressure difference it doesn't make much odds and pure oxygen would simply be used.

Still, the immense amount of stress and isolation involved in serving on a space warship and the skills required (it'll probably have nuclear power, nuclear weapons, etc., requiring some very technical maintenance) presumably makes the crew very difficult to replace and so very valuable. Ergo, I think an oxygen-nitrogen mix may at least be preferred during peacetime when the astromilitary would be more concerned about maintaining public image and crew safety over squeezing every last bit of delta-V out of their ships.

 

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

A pure oxygen atmosphere in a combat ship looks intriguingly...

Imho, technically, explosions (and lasers) in vacuum could sound under special conditions:
either a dense bubble of expanding burst gasses pushs our ship making "bumm"
or a radiation of an explosion or laser locally heats the hull, hots air inside and also makes "ppp-psh".

But that's just a guessing. No real experiments known to me.

Certainly you'd hear some very eerie sounds as stress propogates through the hull and parts fail. It'd be like being depth-charged in a submarine, though the volume of nearby explosions would taper off much more rapidly with increased distance.

Edited December 28, 2016 by Guest

[cantab]

4 hours ago, String Witch said:

The drop from an Earthlike atmospheric pressure (14psi, and bear in mind a spacecraft may well use pure oxygen at a lower pressure) is not enough to suck much. From a large opening there would only be a brief impulse that, like a stiff breeze, would send papers flying but not people

How do you square this assertion with the fact that people have been forcibly ejected from airliners that suffered a large fuselage breach in flight? I know the airliner is subject to a fast and powerful wind that a spacecraft would not be and that may have an influence, but I'm not sure that would be enough to by itself make a big difference to the behaviour. In particular Turkish Airlines Flight 981 demonstrated that an explosive decompression can be forceful enough to do structural damage. (Synopsis: The cargo bay door blew out, and although the cabin floor was vented that wasn't enough to stop the pressure difference from busting the floor, blowing out some seats with their passengers still in them, and also severing critical flight control cables leading to the aircraft's crash and the death of all on board.)

That said, the original movie trope seems to be that the 'suction' is not only powerful enough to remove a person, but sustained enough to have a scene of them grabbing something and holding on. That I think would at best require a particularly large spacecraft, if it's even possible. In an airliner the size of hole needed to generate a powerful wind is also enough to remove all the air in a fraction of a second.

[Guest]

8 hours ago, cantab said:

How do you square this assertion with the fact that people have been forcibly ejected from airliners that suffered a large fuselage breach in flight? I know the airliner is subject to a fast and powerful wind that a spacecraft would not be and that may have an influence, but I'm not sure that would be enough to by itself make a big difference to the behaviour. In particular Turkish Airlines Flight 981 demonstrated that an explosive decompression can be forceful enough to do structural damage. (Synopsis: The cargo bay door blew out, and although the cabin floor was vented that wasn't enough to stop the pressure difference from busting the floor, blowing out some seats with their passengers still in them, and also severing critical flight control cables leading to the aircraft's crash and the death of all on board.)

That said, the original movie trope seems to be that the 'suction' is not only powerful enough to remove a person, but sustained enough to have a scene of them grabbing something and holding on. That I think would at best require a particularly large spacecraft, if it's even possible. In an airliner the size of hole needed to generate a powerful wind is also enough to remove all the air in a fraction of a second.

There's a discussion on it near the top of this page.

http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.arts.sf.science/2008-04/

[Jonfliesgoats]

Airplane movies are like that too.  You can shoot a fist-sized hole in the side of a pressurized jet, and you will not see people turned to goo as they flush out the hole.  Carastrophic failures are another matter.

[maas1248]

Spaceships going to orbital stations by going straight up (Elysium).

[Vanamonde]

My peeve is when people argue about others' peeves instead of having fun griping about their own peeves. 

If the hint wasn't enough, get back on-topic, please.