Bad science in fiction Hall of Shame

[DAL59]

 

http://www.businessinsider.com/genetic-engineering-goats-spiders-2016-4

So you need one billion spiders, just a goat farm to collect your supply.  

So, apparently its completely possible.  EXCEPT YOU NEED TO WEAR A HARNESS THATS NOT TOO MUCH OF AN INCONVENIENCE TO ADD TO A MOVIE

[kerbiloid]

They should give a try:

• Earthworm with pig and cow genes. A ready to use self-growing sausage. Just catch and fry.
• Tomato with mustard genes. Best use with the sausageworm.
• Vegan mosquito. Eats only plant food. Hates the bloodsuckers. Sometimes you will hear in the silence of the night, how they bother each other across the room.
• Butter-fly with cow genes again. Just catch it and spread on bread.
• Shrimpfly. A fly with genes of shrimp. When they are bothering you, just catch them and eat,

[Gargamel]

17 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Shrimpfly. A fly with genes of shrimp. When they are bothering you, just catch them and eat,

As long as they don't use a mantis shrimp.  that little sucker will punch back. 

17 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Earthworm with pig and cow genes. A ready to use self-growing sausage. Just catch and fry.

[kerbiloid]

Btw.
All kinds of action movies, including sci-fi, where a scientist (or not necessary a scientist) puts a gun on somebody.
This usually looks pathetically.

1. True scientists never extend the finger along the barrel in such case, they put it on the trigger.

2. True scientists let the safety off before putting the gun on somebody, not after.

(Both things are because true scientists care about their teeth and other places of body which can get harmed, if the enemy opponent uncooperative interactor prefers to snatch out the scientist's safe pistol and put it somewhere).

Upd.

3. True scientists have in mind that the best pistol to put at somebody is poilceman's.
Because a true scientist always has a lot of papers to write and doesn't want more.

Edited May 7, 2018 by kerbiloid

[p1t1o]

On 5/7/2018 at 5:56 AM, kerbiloid said:

They should give a try:

• Earthworm with pig and cow genes. A ready to use self-growing sausage. Just catch and fry.
• Tomato with mustard genes. Best use with the sausageworm.
• Vegan mosquito. Eats only plant food. Hates the bloodsuckers. Sometimes you will hear in the silence of the night, how they bother each other across the room.
• Butter-fly with cow genes again. Just catch it and spread on bread.
• Shrimpfly. A fly with genes of shrimp. When they are bothering you, just catch them and eat,

 Is there a Nobel prize for food?!

(But we already have vegan mosquitos: greenfly. What you want is a mosquito that bites another mosquito, latches on, binds, reacts and falls to the ground as a skittle or an m&m)

[mikegarrison]

Not all mosquitoes species suck blood, and those that do only suck it in order to help make their eggs. They actually feed on plant nectars. And I hate them all.

[kerbiloid]

40 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

And I hate them all.

So, you are not a racist.

[Superfluous J]

On 4/25/2018 at 3:15 AM, Gargamel said:

I remember an episode of Star Trek TNG that used a black and dekc cordless drill as a phaser. 

The original medical scanning that McCoy used that fit in his hand, the tiny cylinder? That was a salt shaker from craft services.

[roboslacker]

A while ago I saw X-men First Class, and it was extremely annoying how the big bad kept saying, "We are the children of the atom". That phrase is just dumb. Also, Professor X should be able to tell the difference between mutation and genuinely anomalous phenomena.

[wumpus]

On 5/8/2018 at 1:43 PM, kerbiloid said:

So, you are not a racist.

Also not a sexist.  Only female mosquitoes suck blood.

[Bill Phil]

1 hour ago, roboslacker said:

A while ago I saw X-men First Class, and it was extremely annoying how the big bad kept saying, "We are the children of the atom". That phrase is just dumb. Also, Professor X should be able to tell the difference between mutation and genuinely anomalous phenomena.

Children of the Atom? That's from Fallout. 

Including that would look a lot like a joke.

Edited May 9, 2018 by Bill Phil

[mikegarrison]

30 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

Children of the Atom? That's from Fallout.

Fallout was hardly the first.

[Bill Phil]

7 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

Fallout was hardly the first.

Sure, but at this point it's likely more widely known than any other franchise or work with that name appearing in it.

[kerbiloid]

As usually Fallout memes are a parody, googled that.
Looks like 1953 sci-fi book was the first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_the_Atom

Edited May 10, 2018 by kerbiloid

[Bill Phil]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

As usually Fallout memes are a parody, googled that.
Looks like 1953 sci-fi book was the first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_the_Atom

Well it's more a reference to Beneath the Planet of the Apes, what with worshipping an atomic bomb.

[beomagi]

I thing the most annoying is when science or tech is explained completely wrong.

 

"if you magnetize a nail with a battery, it holds a charge" 

Amazing spiderman 2

I facepalmed so hard. Not sure if I was more sad that this was in a big budget movie, or if a high school physics blunder went over most people's head. 

[kerbiloid]

3 hours ago, beomagi said:

"if you magnetize a nail with a battery, it holds a charge" 

They still believe that magnetism is a magic, and a magnet shares with a nail its magic properties if create an astral contact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathetic_magic

[mikegarrison]

18 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

They still believe that magnetism is a magic, and a magnet shares with a nail its magic properties if create an astral contact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathetic_magic

In a sense, a magnet can share its properties with a nail. If you run strong enough a magnetic field through a nail, the magnetic dipoles of the grains in the nail will tend to align to the field, and then when the field is turned off the nail will still be magnetic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permeability_(electromagnetism)

[ARS]

Some sfuff about military vehicles in movies

One-crew vehicle: In movies and games, tanks and other AFVs are by far the outstanding demonstrator of "a character being able to fully operate multi-crew vehicle alone at full capacity"; more often than not, a single person will be able to drive, aim, and fire the main weapons of an armored vehicle (the most common depiction of this is tank) on their own. Even if the tank in question has fully automated loading of its main gun (most don't), every tank that has a turret has the driver seated in a separate compartment with no ability to control the weapons, and everybody in the turret likewise has no ability to drive the tank. Several kinds of vehicles are so complex and require such multitasking that they cannot be operated by a single person: tanks, trains, certain airplanes, etc.Take the typical tank, for example. If you're in the driver's seat, you have limited visibility and you can't load or fire the main gun. If you're in the commanders seat, you can see all around you, but you can't drive, shoot or load the gun. If you're in the loader's seat, you can't see well or drive (you might not even be able to shoot the main gun). The training points out the fact blatantly: The Captain has to sit, look around and give orders, each crewman has a single task to perform and has to do it at his best, this is why absolute trust in your buddies is the most important thing you have to learn in the military. There were real-life attempts to create one-man armored fighting vehicles back during the 1920s and 1930s; they belonged to a class of vehicles known as "tankettes." The French, for example, wanted to create a sort of infantry replacement; one man would drive the vehicle and take care of everything, and he'd also be armed with a machine gun. In practice, it was unworkable, and the concept was abandoned. To be perfectly fair, during the past century there has been a significant trend towards smaller crew sizes, due primarily to automation. However, the minimum crew size in a turreted vehicle is still three, because the only crewman who can realistically be replaced is the loader. And most western armies have avoided autoloaders because a good human loader is much more reliable, faster and more flexible. An autoloader can't help change a track, pull maintenance, stand guard, or sub for another crewman, either. He also serves as an extra pair of eyes to watch your back when he isn't loading. Also, an autoloader can break down. Or, in the case of some Russian tanks, inadvertently load the gunner's arm instead of a shell. And then break down. Furthermore, reducing the crew to just one is probably inadvisable simply for morale reasons. One might say the ideal number of people for any given vehicle is one: one human to handle the tactics and the moral decisions, and computers to handle the rest of the more mechanical tasks like navigation. The limiting factors, of course, are the amount of multitasking still left to the pilot, and how long the pilot can function at that level.

Incorrect depiction: Writers often play fast and loose when it comes to vehicles. This applies to armored vehicles as much as anything else, either getting details wrong or using stand-ins. One of the most common mistakes is to treat all armored vehicles as tanks. Armored cars, self-propelled guns, armored personnel carriers and several other types of armored fighting vehicles can be and frequently are misidentified as tanks, just as every warship is a "battleship" to most civilians. In real life all of these vehicle types and more are commonly lumped together under the catch-all term "Armored Fighting Vehicles" which is usually contracted to just "armor" or, if you want to be all snooty about it, AFV. Despite the common logic of "if it looks like a tank, acts like a tank, smells like a tank, it's a tank (or even, if it moves on treads, it's a tank)", many AFVs that look like tanks don't fit the definition, as tanks are usually characterized by being more of a product of old warfare, therefore way more heavily armoured and generally built to take the brunt of enemy fire than their AFV cousins, which usually possess lighter armour and rely more on indirect combat. Of course, this makes tanks rather expensive to make and maintain compared to other armoured vehicles, which is why we're seeing fewer actual tanks portrayed by the media these days. In most war films, particularly those set in the Second World War, historical tanks and armored vehicles will be replaced by either modern or more widely available contemporary vehicles that have either been painted in appropriate (or at least stereotypical) color schemes or given cosmetic makeovers to disguise their foreign or anachronistic features. The amount of effort that goes into this varies rather wildly.There are many very good reasons for this. Firstly, most survivors are historical artifacts belonging to museums and obviously cannot be used recklessly or destroyed. Moreover, many types of antique armored vehicles are actually quite scarce, and some were quite rare in the first place - the WWII Axis were the worst offenders as they favoured shorter production runs and a far greater number of variants. Just 492 King Tiger panzers were produced, as against 47k M4 Sherman tanks (all variants), and many contemporary Italian or Japanese vehicles were produced in even smaller numbers. In many cases surviving examples aren't available (e.g. submerged in a Belarussian swamp) or simply don't exist due to the ravages of combat, the temptations of scrapping/salvage, and the passage of time. Most of the WW2 axis tanks are destroyed in combat, so it's very difficult to obtain an authentic surviving example. Next, as the Sherman production numbers above suggest, Anglo-American filmmakers naturally took advantage of the huge glut of cheap surplus U.S. Army equipment in the immediate postwar period (and one of the reason why WW2 movies mostly comes from U.S.). If a studio has running vehicles in their prop inventory that are available for filming without much hassle, then simple convenience means they'll get used, accurate or not. These days, most armored fighting vehicles that don't meet their end on the battlefield will probably be scrapped before anyone else can get their hands on them. Tanks have never been particularly attractive on the surplus market since they are huge, heavy, fuel-guzzling lumps of steel that can easily cost more to restore and preserve than recycle. Even contemporary vehicles in operating condition can be prohibitively hard to find and incredibly expensive to hire, transport and maintain for filming. After all, tanks tend to be just so big and in part because military vehicle collectors are often understandably leery of renting their rare and often irreplaceable treasures to people who are just itching to crash them, burn them, blow them up or drive them off cliffs. Then there's the matter of politics, where vehicles you'd ideally want for realism simply can't be obtained at all since they're currently being used or held by an unfriendly power. It's easily forgotten today that prior to The Great Politics Mess-Up, getting realistic Soviet or Eastern Bloc military vehicles for filming many a Cold War thriller was darn near impossible unless you were an Eastern Bloc filmmaker. Whereas today, you can just phone the Russians and ask them nicely (and offer to pay cash up front). Similarly, out of practicality more than anything else, especially if you're not supported by the Pentagon and just don't want reality to get in the way of depicting a tank in your works, just find something vaguely tank-like, add a coat of stereotypical (but historically inaccurate) panzer gray paint and a few crosses and voila! instant Tiger. And—let's be honest here—aside from a few vehicle enthusiasts and history buffs, most viewers wouldn't even notice (or care), anyway. If it has tracks and a gun, it's a tank as far as they are concerned. To those who know what to look for, however, it can quite jarringly break it. For producers who care, there are a number of ways around it. One is to use surplus or 'backup tanks' from modern armies such as Russia or Spain: Most T-34 and Sherman tanks used in WWII films were not actually from the war but modernized vehicles from the immediate postwar period. Another is to take a more common modern or contemporary vehicle and give it a cosmetic makeover to give it the appearance of the correct historic vehicle; sometimes these conversions can be quite sophisticated with only a few detail differences such as turret location and suspension design that only dedicated military vehicle enthusiasts would likely notice (these folk are often called "rivet counters" in the trade and are usually considered to be very annoying and hard-to-please people). Finally, there are always models of both the real and the Computer Generated variety, which naturally come with their own sorts of problems.

[kerbiloid]

6 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

If you run strong enough a magnetic field through a nail, the magnetic dipoles of the grains in the nail will tend to align to the field, and then when the field is turned off the nail will still be magnetic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permeability_(electromagnetism)

Yes, that's how they breed the magnets.
But "charge"? Magnetic or electrical?

3 hours ago, ARS said:

a good human loader is much more reliable, faster and more flexible. An autoloader can't help change a track, pull maintenance, stand guard, or sub for another crewman, either.

So, the crew of 3 carries in their tank a peasant for dirty chores.
Just not to upset him, they call him "loader" instead of "hey, you, lazy boy".
And as they already have him onboard they save money on an autoloader. 
"Have you changed the track? Pulled maintenance? Now begin loading, you are not in Russia, these shells can't load themselves."

3 hours ago, ARS said:

Also, an autoloader can break down.

Why a human loader can't? As any device, just biological. And the autoloader can't get ill and isn't vulnerable to radiation (it's hard to vomit and load at once).

3 hours ago, ARS said:

Or, in the case of some Russian tanks, inadvertently load the gunner's arm instead of a shell. And then break down. 

Why should the gunner hold his arm inside a drum cell?

3 hours ago, ARS said:

Furthermore, reducing the crew to just one is probably inadvisable simply for morale reasons. 

It at least needs a comissar to keep the gunnerdriverloader's morale. WH40k rules!

3 hours ago, ARS said:

One might say the ideal number of people for any given vehicle is one

It's two: driver and operator. Just because of two separate coordinate systems at once. They have to keep a commander because of limited abilities of the sights. If automate this, then who needs a commander.
When everything can be automated, then zero.

Edited May 16, 2018 by kerbiloid

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

So, the crew of 3 carries in their tank a peasant for dirty chores.
Just not to upset him, they call him "loader" instead of "hey, you, lazy boy".
And as they already have him onboard they save money on an autoloader. 
"Have you changed the track? Pulled maintenance? Now begin loading, you are not in Russia, these shells can't load themselves."

Why a human loader can't? As any device, just biological. And the autoloader can't get ill and isn't vulnerable to radiation (it's hard to vomit and load at once).

Why should the gunner hold his arm inside a drum cell?

It at least needs a comissar to keep the gunnerdriverloader's morale. WH40k rules!

It's two: driver and operator. Just because of two separate coordinate systems at once. They have to keep a commander because of limited abilities of the sights. If automate this, then who needs a commander.
When everything can be automated, then zero.

The problem is that an tank platoon is undermanned for maintenance so its little reasons to reduce the number of crew members. 
if the autoloader breaks tank has to get maintenance if one of the crew is down loader can take their spot, gunner can load, this reduce rate of fire a lot but you are still operational.  
In all it evens out.

Now next generation of tank is likely to have an unmanned turret, 3 man crew in body. using far more electronic and cameras. 
An unmanned turret can be lower and the hull is far safer for the crew. 
The reason why you want 3 over two is that driver drives, gunner uses the main gun and turret and is likely to busy with current target, commander keep watch for other targets and use the remote weapon station. Yes you could get away with two, but again reducing crew size is not an critical goal. 

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

if the autoloader breaks tank has to get maintenance

If it breaks, then one of the turret crew members starts loading the shells manually. As well as when the autoloader is gets empty, and they "unpack" additional ammo.
This is slower, but in local conflicts they usually have other problems than burst rate, while in a nuclear war a tank would live for several minutes, so unlikely they would even spend completely the autoloader shells.

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

The reason why you want 3 over two is that driver drives, gunner uses the main gun and turret and is likely to busy with current target, commander keep watch for other targets and use the remote weapon station. Yes you could get away with two, but again reducing crew size is not an critical goal. 

Yes, unless your tank is enough clever to let the commander point at the target, click, and forget. As gunner's work is mostly "formalizable", especially when the battlefield is digitized, while commander and driver are more creative.

P.S.
It looks funny how IRL they use multiple crewmembers, working places, numerous instrument panels,
where the gamers can operate with airplanes, tanks, spaceships, ships, and any multi-person vehicle or plant, using just a notebook sitting on a floor.
Something is wrong in this RL.

P.P.S.
A lot of crewmen is required in SW AT-AT tanks.
Also Skywalker needs his Force voodoo just to aim a rocket into the Death Star vent.
And most of SW robots clearly ask for a psychodoctor's help.
So, we can presume that computers get unstable in presence of Force, like it should be in Arcanum, magic and technology make each other unstable.

Edited May 16, 2018 by kerbiloid

[mikegarrison]

6 hours ago, ARS said:

Some sfuff about military vehicles in movies

[long post snipped]

All I'm going to say here is that if you have never read David Drake's books, you should. Drake served in a tank company in Vietnam and his futuristic tanks reflect that experience. Even with AI systems and advanced automation, his tanks still have a crew of two (driver and gunner). And yes, he differentiates between "tanks" and what he calls "combat cars" -- essentially an updated version of the M113 APC.

[KerbMav]

Did anyone already mention the 'Mutated Neutrinos' that heated up Earth in the movie "2012"?

Edited May 28, 2018 by KerbMav

[Guest]

 

this is why we don't nitpick science in fiction