Bad science in fiction Hall of Shame

[Gargamel]

1 minute ago, tater said:

I saw the actual Space Shuttle in the season 2 trailer and decided from that alone not to watch season 2 at all, lol.

I enjoy the show.... I just suspend my disbelief at most of it.  

[Jacke]

8 hours ago, DDE said:

A right and proper moonblaster?

  Reveal hidden contents

I know that's for forced air cooling. Humor me.

 

Despite the looks, that is an air-cooled Lewis Gun.  A real water-cooled machine gun has the jacket closed at the front and an expansion vessel connected by hose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_gun

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickers_machine_gun

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1917_Browning_machine_gun

(In its later air-cooled Canadian versions, Machine Gun C1 and MG C5, I used the same Browning Machine Gun for many years. )

[SunlitZelkova]

3 hours ago, Gargamel said:

Yes.... but they weren't spaceflight capable.... just.... ehhhhh.... I watch it for the story more than the science...

Presumably they have done more work on it and made operational versions.

The thing that bothers me most is that it is on a Space Shuttle which will return to Earth. NERVA was supposed to generate a huge area of contamination (at least in space). NASA had an analyst review all of the different company's (North American Rockwell, Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas) proposals for a NERVA space tug, and he still ended up recommending not having crewed spacecraft anywhere near within 100 miles of the spacecraft.

Also, something they don't mention at all in the show, quoted from the excellent Spaceflight History Blog, plus the thing about the exclusion zone-

Quote

Osias postulated a maximum allowable radiation dose for an astronaut from sources other than cosmic rays of between 10 and 25 Roentgen Equivalent Man (REM) per year. Astronauts riding an RNS would, however, receive 10 REM each time its NERVA I engine operated. An astronaut 10 miles behind or to the side of an RNS operating at full power would receive a radiation dose of between 25 and 30 REM per hour. Osias noted that the NFSD contractors had recommended that no piloted spacecraft approach to within 100 miles of an operating NERVA I engine.

So considering that this show is supposed to time jump a decade or so every season, all of the characters who are onboard (two fictional astronauts and Sally Ride) may end up with cancer.

I still find the show entertaining as entertainment, i.e. I am not watching it because I want to see realistic space operations, I am watching a show about entertaining characters and plotlines that happen to be set in space and involve rockets.

3 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Where has that fancy Sea Dragon gone?

I can't recall it since the end of s1.

They have had two launches so far. The recent one was actually in episode 9 and was at night, but the scene was only like 45 seconds long.

Edited April 17, 2021 by SunlitZelkova
Unit conversion

[kerbiloid]

6 hours ago, Jacke said:

Despite the looks, that is an air-cooled Lewis Gun.  A real water-cooled machine gun has the jacket closed at the front and an expansion vessel connected by hose.

(He mentioned this in the spoiler, btw).

But that's even better.
It's a hydrogen-cooled lunar machine-blaster.

6 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

proposals for a NERVA space tug, and he still ended up recommending not having crewed spacecraft anywhere near within 100 miles of the spacecraft.

NERVA made them so NERVous...

6 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Osias postulated a maximum allowable radiation dose for an astronaut from sources other than cosmic rays of between 10 and 25 Roentgen Equivalent Man (REM) per year. Astronauts riding an RNS would, however, receive 10 REM each time its NERVA I engine operated. An astronaut 10 miles behind or to the side of an RNS operating at full power would receive a radiation dose of between 25 and 30 REM per hour.

Some totally insane plans. Nuclear plants personnel is allowed to get 5 rem/year.
And 25 rem at once is a "conditionally safe" dose in nuclear war plans, meaning that the biohuman unit still can be used as a soldier or a worker, and nobody cares how long.

6 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

They have had two launches so far. The recent one was actually in episode 9 and was at night, but the scene was only like 45 seconds long.

Oops, I must rewatch it without fast-forwarding.

 

Edited April 18, 2021 by kerbiloid

[SunlitZelkova]

http://spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-last-days-of-nuclear-shuttle-1971.html

Link to the entire article about the NERVA, its dangers, and cancellation in case anyone is interested.

EDIT- Links don't work it seems but just copy paste it.

EDIT 2- And now it works.

Edited April 18, 2021 by SunlitZelkova
Link is just text, it works now (No. 2)

[DDE]

9 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

The thing that bothers me most is that it is on a Space Shuttle which will return to Earth. NERVA was supposed to generate a huge area of contamination (at least in space).

Not contamination. NERVA and other NTRs feature a directionally shielded reactor that shined radiation in every direction. Approaching it from anywhere but the front of the spacecraft would have been as suicidal as gazing down the hole in the roof of Chernobyl Power Block 4. Radiation for the crew of the Shuttle itself is likely due to the prohibitive mass of shielding with a sufficient reduction factor.

However, this contamination would not persist, so once on the ground the reactors could be retrieved by something like this:

And stored in properly shielded containers. A solution in prior rocketpunk novels were taillanders that would put the NTRs below the level of the pad structure, thus providing fairly effective shielding to operations above.

Question is, why are you bothering with all of this on a Shuttle?

[SunlitZelkova]

7 minutes ago, DDE said:

Not contamination. NERVA and other NTRs feature a directionally shielded reactor that shined radiation in every direction. Approaching it from anywhere but the front of the spacecraft would have been as suicidal as gazing down the hole in the roof of Chernobyl Power Block 4. Radiation for the crew of the Shuttle itself is likely due to the prohibitive mass of shielding with a sufficient reduction factor.

However, this contamination would not persist, so once on the ground the reactors could be retrieved by something like this:

And stored in properly shielded containers. A solution in prior rocketpunk novels were taillanders that would put the NTRs below the level of the pad structure, thus providing fairly effective shielding to operations above.

Question is, why are you bothering with all of this on a Shuttle?

Thanks for the correction. Re-reading the article I linked, I realize it probably would have been better to say something to the effect of "produces a radioactive environment".

No one knows what they were thinking. Judging from the show's reddit, even the fans of the show who are generally lenient on their lack of realism find the Shuttle to the Moon and the NTR on a Shuttle, among other things, annoying. The show has yet to state the point of putting it on a Space Shuttle, but there is a theory it is a technology demonstrator before using it on a Mars spacecraft. As to why (an in-universe reason) a Shuttle is needed instead of something resembling the RIFT or Reusable Nuclear Shuttle, beats me. The show has a Twitter post about it stating nuclear engines allow for "faster space travel" though so I guess that shows the level they decided to drop realism and logic to (Garrett Reisman is the show's technical advisor, perhaps it was deliberate).

[derega16]

For me it's sounds like someone in the production heard the term "Nuclear Shuttle" form the original STS program and misunderstood it.

[kerbiloid]

Spiderman.

Just watched it first time (a parody, but the video itself is native).
When the protagonistist comes to the mad one-handed scientist and shows his a paper with some formula.

Does he show a mathematical formula to the biochemist?

[jimmymcgoochie]

Stowaway- the fastest stage burnout in history (first and second stages in less than a minute) followed by a transfer burn to Mars which is apparently done whilst still inside Earth’s atmosphere (someone calls out Max-Q in the middle of it, which only happens much lower in the atmosphere, plus I wouldn’t want to be riding in a capsule with open windows going at over 11km/s in the atmosphere point first). And for some reason the ‘third’ stage for trans-Mars insertion looks like it has landing legs and engines that look like they’d be more at home at sea level than vacuum.

Spoiler alert- there’s someone else on board, somehow crammed inside a piece of the life support module which is inaccessible from inside and outside and with no obvious means of getting there; he says he was working on the second stage, which regardless of what rocket was used on the launch is well below the payload (there’s an entire stage in between which is a key part of the whole design) so couldn’t have just slipped and fallen into that module. Now the life support system is damaged and there’s only enough oxygen for 2- with three crew and one stowaway on board.

It’s incredibly bad planning to include just one of any critical system, especially something that the crew needs to stay alive, and doubly so when the ship was only built to sustain a crew of 2 and a single failure will be fatal to at least one of the crew. It’s not even a particularly big component that’s damaged so I see no reason why they wouldn’t have included a backup.

There are a few occasions where they go out on EVA but don’t lower their visors (which would be blindingly bright in full sunlight), except for that one time when someone lowers their visor to look straight at the sun...

And why are they aiming for 1g of spin gravity, which can be very disorienting even with that ~200m radius, when a mere 0.3g will be sufficient to prevent health issues and matches Mars surface gravity?

[Spacescifi]

3 hours ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

Stowaway- the fastest stage burnout in history (first and second stages in less than a minute) followed by a transfer burn to Mars which is apparently done whilst still inside Earth’s atmosphere (someone calls out Max-Q in the middle of it, which only happens much lower in the atmosphere, plus I wouldn’t want to be riding in a capsule with open windows going at over 11km/s in the atmosphere point first). And for some reason the ‘third’ stage for trans-Mars insertion looks like it has landing legs and engines that look like they’d be more at home at sea level than vacuum.

Spoiler alert- there’s someone else on board, somehow crammed inside a piece of the life support module which is inaccessible from inside and outside and with no obvious means of getting there; he says he was working on the second stage, which regardless of what rocket was used on the launch is well below the payload (there’s an entire stage in between which is a key part of the whole design) so couldn’t have just slipped and fallen into that module. Now the life support system is damaged and there’s only enough oxygen for 2- with three crew and one stowaway on board.

It’s incredibly bad planning to include just one of any critical system, especially something that the crew needs to stay alive, and doubly so when the ship was only built to sustain a crew of 2 and a single failure will be fatal to at least one of the crew. It’s not even a particularly big component that’s damaged so I see no reason why they wouldn’t have included a backup.

There are a few occasions where they go out on EVA but don’t lower their visors (which would be blindingly bright in full sunlight), except for that one time when someone lowers their visor to look straight at the sun...

And why are they aiming for 1g of spin gravity, which can be very disorienting even with that ~200m radius, when a mere 0.3g will be sufficient to prevent health issues and matches Mars surface gravity?

 

Why can't they pay one of you guys as a science consultant to get it right for once.?

 

For crying out loud...I'm serious.

Email those jokers.

 

You need about a 1000 meters of tether for non-disorientating 1g spin.

 

Even I know that. Thanks to you guys.

Edited April 23, 2021 by Spacescifi

[jimmymcgoochie]

1 hour ago, Spacescifi said:

 

Why can't they pay one of you guys as a science consultant to get it right for once.?

 

For crying out loud...I'm serious.

Email those jokers.

 

You need about a 1000 meters of tether for non-disorientating 1g spin.

 

Even I know that. Thanks to you guys.

Apparently they talked to some random guy off the internet called Scott Manley... 

Spoiler

I didn’t want this spoiler but I can’t delete it because tablet UI is awful. 

 

[magnemoe]

5 hours ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

Stowaway- the fastest stage burnout in history (first and second stages in less than a minute) followed by a transfer burn to Mars which is apparently done whilst still inside Earth’s atmosphere (someone calls out Max-Q in the middle of it, which only happens much lower in the atmosphere, plus I wouldn’t want to be riding in a capsule with open windows going at over 11km/s in the atmosphere point first). And for some reason the ‘third’ stage for trans-Mars insertion looks like it has landing legs and engines that look like they’d be more at home at sea level than vacuum.

Spoiler alert- there’s someone else on board, somehow crammed inside a piece of the life support module which is inaccessible from inside and outside and with no obvious means of getting there; he says he was working on the second stage, which regardless of what rocket was used on the launch is well below the payload (there’s an entire stage in between which is a key part of the whole design) so couldn’t have just slipped and fallen into that module. Now the life support system is damaged and there’s only enough oxygen for 2- with three crew and one stowaway on board.

It’s incredibly bad planning to include just one of any critical system, especially something that the crew needs to stay alive, and doubly so when the ship was only built to sustain a crew of 2 and a single failure will be fatal to at least one of the crew. It’s not even a particularly big component that’s damaged so I see no reason why they wouldn’t have included a backup.

There are a few occasions where they go out on EVA but don’t lower their visors (which would be blindingly bright in full sunlight), except for that one time when someone lowers their visor to look straight at the sun...

And why are they aiming for 1g of spin gravity, which can be very disorienting even with that ~200m radius, when a mere 0.3g will be sufficient to prevent health issues and matches Mars surface gravity?

As I understand Scott Manley  was an consultant on the movie he did an youtube on it. Now I understand not having an kilometre long wire as it would look weird and they wanted normal gravity to make it cheaper to produce. Story is the cold equation, with the long trip to mars it make more sense than the original moon mission. 
But the life support would be on the crew part, you might put the lander on the other part of the wire with the engines and fuel as you want it as heavy as possible.
Now the lander will have its own life support and you will stay on mars until the return window and the stowaway might use this. 

However as described the launch sound weird, yes you could do an direct accent and then separate the modules and spin up. 

[Gargamel]

4 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Why can't they pay one of you guys as a science consultant to get it right for once.?

Because, most of the time, real science is boring when portrayed on the screen.    It also can increase production costs by a lot.   It's much easier to film in 1g than .3g.   All the actors movements would have to mimic this lower gravity, plus all the sfx that would be required to make it look right.   Not many people understand a lot of the finer points of science, and so they choose to ignore them for better dramatic effect.  Armegeddon is one of the worst movies ever made scientifically, but it's still a fun movie to watch, merely for the ride it goes on.   They throw science out the window for the sake of entertainment.   I can get behind those types of stories.   Movies like Gravity, where they take science and twist it only a little and base the entire plot on this twist, takes me right out of the story.  Yes it was a stunningly well made movie, but the story is bunk and annoys me.    Stories that just accept a certain reality without trying to explain it, and it's plausible enough, might not be accurate or really doable, but they just go with it, those are the best ones.   Things like Star Trek's warp core, or phaser pistols, while have been explained in canon based stuff later, you just accept that they work. 

[cubinator]

Just now, Gargamel said:

Because, most of the time, real science is boring when portrayed on the screen.    It also can increase production costs by a lot. 

Doesn't seem to be stopping Tom Cruise.  

[kerbiloid]

Real science is about writing financial reports mostly. And about books publishing.

(Periodically about throat slicing, of course, but rarely. Usually about crapping into pockets.)

It could be a multi-season show like House of Cards.

[kerbiloid]

Stowaway.

(spoiler)

Spoiler

A stupid and disgusting ending.

They should throw out the ticketless character.

1. He is an excessive one.

2. He eats more that Anna Kendrick. Just look at them.

3. Anna Kendrick is funny, while him I don't know and don't care about.

0. Because he is he, while she is she.

Bad science: invalid dietology.

Edited April 23, 2021 by kerbiloid

[Spacescifi]

1 hour ago, Gargamel said:

Because, most of the time, real science is boring when portrayed on the screen.    It also can increase production costs by a lot.   It's much easier to film in 1g than .3g.   All the actors movements would have to mimic this lower gravity, plus all the sfx that would be required to make it look right.   Not many people understand a lot of the finer points of science, and so they choose to ignore them for better dramatic effect.  Armegeddon is one of the worst movies ever made scientifically, but it's still a fun movie to watch, merely for the ride it goes on.   They throw science out the window for the sake of entertainment.   I can get behind those types of stories.   Movies like Gravity, where they take science and twist it only a little and base the entire plot on this twist, takes me right out of the story.  Yes it was a stunningly well made movie, but the story is bunk and annoys me.    Stories that just accept a certain reality without trying to explain it, and it's plausible enough, might not be accurate or really doable, but they just go with it, those are the best ones.   Things like Star Trek's warp core, or phaser pistols, while have been explained in canon based stuff later, you just accept that they work. 

 

I know...it's just I don't think real physics would hurt this stort-the stowaway, and would make it look more awesome.

We get fake so much we come to expect it?

 

Why not surprise folks with reality if a story can allow for it?

 

As for graphics...I really think someone out to do voice acting with realistic CGI, as I know they can do that.

[Gargamel]

9 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

I know...it's just I don't think real physics would hurt this stort-the stowaway, and would make it look more awesome.

But see, that's the rub.   From what I recall seeing, one of the reasons they reduced the crew count was production costs.   Also, the story was more believable if a single stowaway made up a larger percentage of their consumables.    It might look more awesome, but it would cost a lot more to make.  

[Spacescifi]

4 hours ago, Gargamel said:

But see, that's the rub.   From what I recall seeing, one of the reasons they reduced the crew count was production costs.   Also, the story was more believable if a single stowaway made up a larger percentage of their consumables.    It might look more awesome, but it would cost a lot more to make.  

 

I meant with computer animation and voice acting, it would not make much of a difference...cost wise I hope?

As the actors and 'property' would all be digital.

 

The main bill you will get is from digital art and animation folks.

Anyone want to see a digital Anna Kendricks?

[kerbiloid]

When are they finally going to film a realistic psychological technothriller about the neutrino detector?

[Gargamel]

6 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

it would not make much of a difference...cost wise I hope?

That's the difference between a blockbuster and a B movie with bad CGI.   You want a realistic depiction of .3g?   Then everything has to be .3g.    The actors' hair, the way liquids flow, pencils move when placed down, blankets sit, etc. 

[Clamp-o-Tron]

9 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

When are they finally going to film a realistic psychological technothriller about the neutrino detector?

A high-energy particle detector at L1 would be a fantastic setting.

but in space.

Something goes wrong, as per the usual movie plot, and the crew of 5 (who manage the drones who manage the DOMs) has to get back to Earth- somehow.

I don't know, I can't write a plot, maybe something goes terribly wrong with a propellant depot in LEO needed for fueling their return craft, and they have to find a way back into DLRO before rendezvous with an asteroid-mining rig, where something else waits them...

Yeah, it's terrible. But the setting is cool.

[SunlitZelkova]

8 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

 

I meant with computer animation and voice acting, it would not make much of a difference...cost wise I hope?

As the actors and 'property' would all be digital.

 

The main bill you will get is from digital art and animation folks.

Anyone want to see a digital Anna Kendricks?

I don't think so. CGI sometimes takes up half the budget of a film. Quoted from an answer to a question about CGI expenses on Quora (by someone else, not me)-

Quote

Let me try and breakup the various cost elements that go into a VFX production. Note that the numbers below are, if anything, on the conservative side and actual productions cost much more than this. The purpose of this exercise is more to give you a sense of perspective and help you to look beyond the headline number. Do not use these costs as a "rate card"

1. People
   Contrary to what a lot of people outside the business think, the VFX industry (high end VFX anyway) does not work like IT Services where you assign one module (shot) to an individual and they deliver a finished product which is integrated into the final release (reel) after passing testing. A better analogy is that of a factory assembly line. Rough shots enter at one end and go through a number of stages (Modeling, BgPrep, Dust Busting, Tracking, Animation, Lighting, FX, Compositing etc.) An average shot (of say 5 seconds) is often worked on by 10 - 12 people, each of whom devote AT LEAST 4 weeks (if not more) each on it. That's around 160 * 10 = 1600 person hours minimum (assuming zero overtime...a hopelessly optimistic scenario!) At $50/hr, that's $80K....for one shot. Given that your average tentpole production these days has 15 - 20 minutes of VFX, that's around 20million on VFX artists alone

In addition you have people responsible for keeping the assembly line (called the Production Pipeline) ticking, make sure that the IT systems, render farms and networks are working etc. And that does not even count support functions like Accounting, HR etc. An average production lasts 1.5 - 2 years these days so the total costs of these resources can easily account for another $10 million - odd

 

2. Compute & Storage Resources
   VFX is compute intensive. A single VFX frame can take upto 12 hours to render depending on complexity. There are 45 frames in a second so that's 540 compute hours for a SINGLE interation of a SINGLE second of VFX. Most shots see at least 20 iterations so make that 10.800 computer hours.

Now, building and running a render farm which can churn out this much compute power is not cheap. Even if you're running your Datacenter at Amazon levels of scale and efficiency (most studios are not and cannot), a single hour of compute will cost you around $0.65 (that's the current price of a GPU instance at AWS) so 1 second of VFX = $7000. Extrapolate to that 20 minutes of VFX we talked about above and you are looking at a little less than $10million. In reality, this cost will be closer to $20 - $25 million.

At this point, the accounting experts will probably be exclaiming, "Wait this is just Opex, what about Capex?" And you're absolutely right, this is purely Operating cost. I'm not even considering the Capital expenditure involved in deploying and maintaining a large render farm

Now, let's talk storage. A single interation of a single frame takes around 100MB or so. That's around 5GB per second. Multiply that by 20 iterations and it's 100GB/second or 12TB per show. Studios also need to maintain backups of all this data. It's difficult to put a dollar value on how much this kind of storage costs ( depends on the kind of tech you use and the tradeoffs you are willing to live with) but suffice to say that it is not trivial. For the purposes of this question, let's run with a cost of $20million (again, the Accounting hawks will complain that this is Capex and should not be accounted as Opex...humor me on this!)

Now, let's add all this stuff together. You get a nice round figure of $70 million.

Considering the usual budget for a Hollywood film with theater release is (or at least was until CGI heavy action movies like Avengers: Endgame became common) around 100 million USD, and that this is a film created for a streaming release (it wasn't originally intended for theaters like Wonder Woman 1984 or Godzilla vs. Kong) I doubt that they had the money to do more than they did. If they are already downsizing the crew to save money, I doubt they could afford more CGI than they ended up with in the final product.

Edited April 24, 2021 by SunlitZelkova
Giving credit for quote of answer for CGI expenses

[Gargamel]

16 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

If they are already downsizing the crew to save money, I doubt they could afford more CGI than they ended up with in the final product.

The downsizing wasn't the primary reason, the plot made more sense with a smaller crew, but the reduced budget was an advantage.    Just to clarify my previous statement.