Bad science in fiction Hall of Shame

[jimmymcgoochie]

3 hours ago, tater said:

Pretty sure they make hyperspace near a planet not a normal thing---wasn't it a big deal, like it was never done---in one of the recent movies?

That was doing hyperspace into a planet's atmosphere. I'm just saying they messed up the logistics of the Death Star by landing in the wrong place and then dithering for that long waiting to come into line of sight with the moon the rebel base was on.

[Treveli]

2 hours ago, tater said:

There's no way that spacecraft don't move at insane sublight speeds in SW.

MGLT (Megalights (per hour)) is the most used measurement, but it's pointless outside of the X-wing/TIE Fighter games. More recent lore books list the X-wings having a max acceleration of 3700 G, TIE's 4100, ISD's 2300.

42 minutes ago, tater said:

Where I do rip on fantasy is inconsistency, however. The jump to light speed ramming in whatever recent movie, for example. Same issue as fighters with the KE of thermonuclear weapons. If X-wings can jump, the solution to the Empire/etc is easy. Install droid. Have droid fly near ships. Jump to lightspeed. Profit.

Gets even more annoying when you read the comics. The Executor (Vader's flagship) had shields strong enough to survive two or three ISD's dropping out of hyperspace and impacting it. Vader didn't get a chance to Force choke there captains afterwards. The mega ship from TLJ was several times bigger than an SSD, so it's shields should have shrugged off the imptact. And then there's the ISD in Empire that lost it's bridge tower to an asteroid impact. Maybe a Rebel spy or suicidal crewmember lowered the shields.

I've assumed either safeties programmed into hyperdrives and nav computers (so heavily protected it can't be hacked) stopped ramming from happening. Or, something happened in the Old Republics time (or before) with hyperspace ramming that created a galaxy wide stigma against it, so major even the Empire and Sith didn't want to use it. It used to be the lore that ships couldn't jump to hyperspace while within a a sufficiently large gravity well/field. Maybe the same for the artificial grav fields on ships.

[kerbiloid]

They have lightsabers of fixed length.

Spoiler

Still can't get why "sabers" when they are straight. "Swords" would be clear.

 

[tater]

Wow, 4000g? For how many nanoseconds, lol?

After 102 seconds at 4000g, an X-wing would have some 8E16 J. That's 19 megatons TNT. After accelerating under 2 minutes, lol.

Starts becoming a planet killer at some point after an hour.

 

[kerbiloid]

In Star Wars we don't have a banana for scale.

What if all of them are mile high, and a megaton for them is like a gas canister for us.

[mikegarrison]

8 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

 

  Hide contents

Still can't get why "sabers" when they are straight. "Swords" would be clear.

 

FWIW, fencing sabers are straight.

[kerbiloid]

1 minute ago, mikegarrison said:

FWIW, fencing sabers are straight.

I know. But fencing sabers do not cut off hands.

[mikegarrison]

3 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

I know. But fencing sabers do not cut off hands.

Neither does CGI. (Except for CGI hands.)

By the way, did you ever see this?

 

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

 

 

[DDE]

On 12/3/2019 at 5:46 PM, tater said:

This means their average velocity has to exceed 200 km/s. If an X-wing is 10 tons, that's 200,000,000 mJoules. That's ~47 kT of TNT. Seems like they could make good use of missiles (or ships controlled by droids as kamikazes).

Don't forget 1700 g of acceleration required to achieve that. We have a literal countdown there.

Oops, ninja'd.

17 hours ago, Treveli said:

Gets even more annoying when you read the comics. The Executor (Vader's flagship) had shields strong enough to survive two or three ISD's dropping out of hyperspace and impacting it. Vader didn't get a chance to Force choke there captains afterwards. The mega ship from TLJ was several times bigger than an SSD, so it's shields should have shrugged off the imptact.

Well, we know that the rules on shields have been thrown out the window - again: the dreadnought in the opening battle doesn't have shields. Any shields.

[έķ νίĻĻάίή]

In a nutshell, Star Wars doesn’t make sense at all, in the science department 

[Nikolai]

On 12/3/2019 at 12:42 PM, jimmymcgoochie said:

There's no obvious reason why George continues to move away from the station

I disagree.  The picture shows that he is clearly further away from the axis of rotation.  When he decouples, he continues to move away in a tangent to the arc he was describing.

On 12/3/2019 at 12:42 PM, jimmymcgoochie said:

that parachute pulls Sandra back with a noticeable force of several metres per second but somehow doesn't do anything at all with George attached too

Right.  Because the centripetal acceleration offered by the parachute cords with both of them isn't enough to ping them both back.  With Clooney's greater mass (from himself and his more massive backpack) and his greater radius of curvature (being further away from the axis of rotation), it makes sense that he'd be tensing those cords quite a lot more than Bullock by her lonesome.

On 12/3/2019 at 12:42 PM, jimmymcgoochie said:

The angles don't add up either- both of them move in directly opposite directions when he decouples himself, which would mean there's no rotation going on at all.

I'll have to re-check the movie on that one -- I don't think there's a shot that clearly shows them simply moving in opposite directions.  All you can establish is that they're both in linear motion, which makes sense under the scenario you describe -- Clooney would keep going in a tangent to the arc he was describing, and Bullock would move back along some vector described by both her inertia before the decoupling and the tension of the parachute cords pinging her back.  IIRC, there's just a shot of one moving linearly, then a shot of the other moving linearly, but not with both in the same shot after decoupling (so that you can see that they're moving directly away from one another).

[PositronLance001]

Alright. There are so many bad ones. Shouldn't we just talk about the good ones instead?

[magnemoe]

On 12/4/2019 at 5:09 PM, έķ νίĻĻάίή said:

In a nutshell, Star Wars doesn’t make sense at all, in the science department 

This, it however has to make sense in an lore point of view like any fantasy movie or game. Yes lord of the rings kind of ran into that to with the gigant eagle evacuation. Yes it could be because the integrated air defense was now down and that the original team fell apart. Any multi player game like WOW has to prioritize game balance over lore or they break the game and business model hard. 

 

[Jacke]

26 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

This, it however has to make sense in an lore point of view like any fantasy movie or game. Yes lord of the rings kind of ran into that to with the gigant eagle evacuation. Yes it could be because the integrated air defense was now down and that the original team fell apart. Any multi player game like WOW has to prioritize game balance over lore or they break the game and business model hard.

What the Giant Eagles in LotR did or didn't do is understandable, in light of them being rather powerful creatures with their own will, not a taxi squad, who couldn't necessarily enter Mordor without grave risk due to the threats there prior to Sauron falling.

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, Jacke said:

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

This, it however has to make sense in an lore point of view like any fantasy movie or game. Yes lord of the rings kind of ran into that to with the gigant eagle evacuation. Yes it could be because the integrated air defense was now down and that the original team fell apart. Any multi player game like WOW has to prioritize game balance over lore or they break the game and business model hard.

What the Giant Eagles in LotR did or didn't do is understandable, in light of them being rather powerful creatures with their own will, not a taxi squad, who couldn't necessarily enter Mordor without grave risk due to the threats there prior to Sauron falling.

Silly birds just remembered their prior flight with Gandie and a pack of hair-legged midgets (in "Hobbit"), and it took almost a year to ensure them that this time they surely will get a lot of tasty carrion as a reward.

Like always when you have a deal with Gandalf, they got nothing except inspiring speech.

***

Also if have a look at the MiddleEarth map, we can see that the Mt. Weathertop / Amon Sul is placed in three hundred kilometers even from the closest Misty Mountains, they were looking at from there.
So, the MiddleEarth planetary radius is probably greater than modern one (or it's flat), and it's a very clear air in MiddleEarth of 3rd epoch.

***

As under normal gravity the caves can't be deeper than ~1.5 km, this is probably the depth limit of Moria, so we can roughly define what geological epoch does the balrog belong to, and what minerals are typical for him.

Edited December 9, 2019 by kerbiloid

[DDE]

Bonus: @MatterBeam is also in the comments.

[Nuke]

today's star trek picard episode had one of the worst space battles in star trek history. so sick of seeing the cut your throttle maneuver they stole from top gun where inertia is immediately forgotten. only reason that worked in top gun was because of the lift induced drag. the mandalorian did it too, but in a much less lame way. and the crew acting out the slowness of the inertial dampeners seemed overly exaggerated from usual. 

Edited February 14, 2020 by Nuke

[Superfluous J]

Oh this thread! I thought of this thread while watching Lost in Space season 2 (the new one on Netflix) when someone said something to the tune of "Increase Delta-V 20%!"

Though now that I type that, they could have meant "increase acceleration from 100m/s²  to 120m/s².

But I think they were just throwing words around.

Edited February 14, 2020 by 5thHorseman

[Nuke]

4 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

Oh this thread! I thought of this thread while watching Lost in Space season 2 (the new one on Netflix) when someone said something to the tune of "Increase Delta-V 20%!"

i liked that there were some hard sci-fi elements in the design of the ships. despite the fact that the jupiters are all belly landers (which i consider acceptable because space shuttle with the jupiters being treated as shuttles), they dock with the resolute in an up is forward orientation. but they seemed to forget that pretty damn fast. but season 2 went and dumbed it all down even worse.

 

Edited February 14, 2020 by Nuke

[wumpus]

29 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

Oh this thread! I thought of this thread while watching Lost in Space season 2 (the new one on Netflix) when someone said something to the tune of "Increase Delta-V 20%!"

Though now that I type that, they could have meant "increase acceleration from 100m/s²  to 120m/s².

But I think they were just throwing words around.

Star Trek calls it "teching the tech".  You insert "tech" in the script where you mean "magic" and they run it past people in the right fields (trivial for a Star Trek producer) to insert the right words.
https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/ron_moore_calls_star_trek

But it sounds suspiciously like at least someone editing the script knows what they are talking about.

[Superfluous J]

29 minutes ago, wumpus said:

Star Trek calls it "teching the tech"

The third doctor in Dr Who incessantly reversed the polarity of the positronic flow. I read somewhere that the actor was terrible at technobabble and that was the only line he could deliver consistently.

[DDE]

4 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

I read somewhere that the actor was terrible at technobabble

...how did he get hired for the role of the Doctor, again?

5 hours ago, Nuke said:

despite the fact that the jupiters are all belly landers (which i consider acceptable because space shuttle with the jupiters being treated as shuttles)

I'd say it's downright unremarkable; NASA and ULA recognize the logistical utility of the belly-landers.

This is back from the 1990s LUNOX proposal... back when instead of the SLS, NASA thought it could have Energiya...

[kerbiloid]

"Increase Delta-V 20%!" = "Transfer money to the emgine manufacturer to unlock the Upgrade option of our engine."

It's normal. In KSPI there are original engines and upgraded ones.

Edited February 14, 2020 by kerbiloid

[Codraroll]

10 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

"Increase Delta-V 20%!"

In theory, this is possible, though. Cutting off a part of the ship and throwing it away to reduce mass. Air balloons do it all the time. Doing so in a spaceship might be a little more perilous, though.