Bad science in fiction Hall of Shame

[SunlitZelkova]

On 1/30/2022 at 10:14 AM, Nazalassa said:

  Reveal hidden contents

#include <stdio.h>

int main(){

    printf("Would it hurt someone to check Wikipedia during the making of Sci-fi films?");

    return(0);

}

:p

This is not the real problem. The real “issue” is time and money, and how businesses operate. It costs money and time to put details in. Not only will very few notice or care, in some cases it could even overload the viewer and turn them away.

These are businesses after all, asking them to put detail and accuracy in their works is like asking a space agency to use their time and money to put disco lights and swimming pools on their space station.

On 1/30/2022 at 9:32 PM, Gargamel said:

Most movies are made to make money.   And that means appealing to the biggest audience possible for a given story.   So they have to have a bit of creative license to make it work dramatically.     And what’s a movie without some creative license?   A documentary.    I love me some good documentaries, but honestly Ken Burns is the ultimate cure for insomnia.

If we were really asking for “accuracy” though, it would be extended to the entire premise of books and films themselves because their plots are often overly dramatic and as such, “unrealistic”.

Take for instance an “accurate” sci-fi space war movie. It can’t have a realistic ship but then have swashbuckling heroes and moving romance scenes- it needs to be hours of bureaucratic work, meetings, arguments, and basic relationship stuff and issues in between in order to be “realistic”. Then instead of a Hollywood action sequence you have an hour of quiet patrolling or logistics and then five minutes of violence and misery, followed by a withdrawal and more logistics for the next hour. It would be completely unworkable as a story, and would also cost enormous amounts of money.

———

The way I see it, it should be remembered that all of these “mistakes” we criticize come from works of art. It is fine to pick out inaccuracies as their own little discussion (as we do in this thread), but to actually criticize a work based on its “accuracy” is futile.

After all, no one criticizes van Gogh’s The Starry Night because the stars are way too big in the sky to be stars.

To give an example of this, I enjoy For All Mankind very much as entertainment/a work of art, but simultaneously find its historical and technical inaccuracies egregious. One need not see in black and white 

[Nazalassa]

Well, they should check their maths and physics anyway.

e.g in Star Wars, how many fuel does the Millenium Falcon carry? How efficient are its engines? What's their ISP and thrust in newtons? Are they ionic? Or do they use mundane fuel? How long can its engines burn? Because every time it moves, its engines ae thrusting. Let's say, it takes a few days, with it, to go from somewhere to somewhere else, even if it's unrealisticly too short. If we apply logic deduction from the movie, its engines will have to provide thrust for at least one day. Only ionic engines can do that. But they need a lot of electricity, where does it come from? And, they have to be very powerful to lift the whole thing above an Earth-like planet, which it's seemingly capable of. The electricity needs would be reeeeally high, so high that you'll need a heavy nuclear reactor and appropriate anti-radiation equipment. This leaves little room for everything else. Therefore, the only explanation is that the Millenium Falcon uses two types of propulsion: ionic propulsion and "classic" propulsion. To reach orbit they need a lot of fuel, so it needs to be very fuel-efficient. That's weird if we see the amount of fuel needed to put a 10-ton satellite in orbit. It's definitely unrealistic.

[KSK]

And absolutely none of that is relevant to a story which also includes antigravity engines, spacecraft behaving like WW2 era fighter planes, planet destroying superweapons, FTL travel, plasma sword fights and psychic powers.

The short answer is that if you check the maths and physics, nothing about Star Wars makes any kind of sense. It was never intended to and it’s never pretended to.

Science fiction is a broad church and that’s why I love it. There’s room for realistic or nearly realistic space travel (2001: A Space Odyssey or The Expanse), and there’s room for pure rule-of-cool space opera (Star Wars) and there’s room for everything in between. 

Edited February 2, 2022 by KSK

[kerbiloid]

SW is a Lego universe.

Matrix is a psychodelic sci-fi.

[DDE]

6 hours ago, KSK said:

The short answer is that if you check the maths and physics, nothing about Star Wars makes any kind of sense. It was never intended to and it’s never pretended to.

Oh, before the Disney Reset, people actually tried to inject maths into SW. It ended up really bad.

So, almost all engines you see on the screen are fission/fusion fragment rockets. Here's the fluff for the Millennium Falcon:

Quote

The SRB42 was fueled by energy-efficient, yet hazardous, radioactive, explosive liquid metal from four slug tanks in the center of the ship. Upon entering the engine, the fuel was mixed with a reactant in an intermixer before being released into the primary thrust pressure manifold, where it was ignited to start a fusion reaction that broke down the fuel into charged particles, the resulting energy providing thrust.

Now, here's the problem: in order to achieve the kind of transit seen on-screen during the attack on the first Death Star, which is helpfully timed, X-Wings needed to achieve constant acceleration of 1700 g. Similarly, by taking Han's quote about a thousand Star Destroyers being able to chew up a planet, plus the way asteroids got completely vaporised in Episode V, translated into gigaton-class yields for turbolasers, and small cannon-like blasts for small arms.

@Nazalassa, I look at it this way: realistic warfare - realistic anything, perhaps - is not what the absolute majority of people are looking for on the silver screen. If it extends to the modern day, why set a higher bar for the speculative future?

[kerbiloid]

7 hours ago, DDE said:

the problem: in order to achieve the kind of transit seen on-screen during the attack on the first Death Star, which is helpfully timed, X-Wings needed to achieve constant acceleration of 1700 g.

No problem, some UFO are doing this irl.

7 hours ago, DDE said:

the way asteroids got completely vaporised in Episode V, translated into gigaton-class yields for turbolasers

If a giant purple lizard with horns had suddenly appeared in your room in the night, started dangerously talking to you, but once you attacked it with a laser tag, disappeared like a cloud of smoke, this doesn't mean that it has vaporised.

This means that the beverages from the Mos Eisley cantina are too strong for you, and sometimes not just this.

The worm living in one of those asteroids just proves that.

Looks like irl they were driving away from the Tatooine road police which was trying to stop them .

Spoiler

Han Solo and Luke (desert hat) with Chewbacca (hairy) in Millenium Falcon,  from another scene.

 

The Imperial officer is interrogating captured Luke.

 

Edited February 3, 2022 by kerbiloid

[Gargamel]

Injecting math into Star Wars is like telling soccer players they can no longer take a dive.   Just won’t happen. 
 

We’re talking about a series that made an entire movie simply to Retcon the fact the original creator did not know the difference between a unit of time and a unit of length.  

[KSK]

Quote

The SRB42 was fueled by energy-efficient, yet hazardous, radioactive, explosive liquid metal from four slug tanks in the center of the ship. Upon entering the engine, the fuel was mixed with a reactant in an intermixer before being released into the primary thrust pressure manifold, where it was ignited to start a fusion reaction that broke down the fuel into charged particles, the resulting energy providing thrust.

Well that certainly puts Leia's 'you came in that thing - you're braver than I thought' snark into context.

But yeah, fluff is about right. Throwing together a word salad of vaguely technical terms to 'explain' something that can't be explained. 

[DDE]

4 hours ago, Gargamel said:

We’re talking about a series that made an entire movie simply to Retcon the fact the original creator did not know the difference between a unit of time and a unit of length.  

The Kessel Run existed for decades before that.

Spoiler

Anyway, this is why they made that movie

Can't link the actual RLM clip due to profanity.

 

[kerbiloid]

Even the Ancient Greeks were aware of the Kessler syndrome calling it Lernaean Hydra.

[Admiral Fluffy]

8 hours ago, Gargamel said:

We’re talking about a series that made an entire movie simply to Retcon the fact the original creator did not know the difference between a unit of time and a unit of length.  

A PARSEC IS A UNIT OF DISTANCE. 

I learned that from years of playing lego star wars. It says so on a billboard in one of the mobile games.

[rmaine]

One of my favorite bits of science ignorance is people talking about quantum jumps as though they were big things. Instead, a quantum jump is the smallest jump that something can physically take.

[benzman]

4 hours ago, Admiral Fluffy said:

A PARSEC IS A UNIT OF DISTANCE. 

I learned that from years of playing lego star wars. It says so on a billboard in one of the mobile games.

As an aside, for that few of us who don't already know, a parsec is the distance a star has to be from the Earth tp show one arc second of heliocentric parallax. It is equivalent to 3.26 light years. Old-time astronomers often spoke in megaparsecs (1000 parsecs) but I don't think modern astronomers do. That line in Star Wars always makes me wince. 

[magnemoe]

5 hours ago, rmaine said:

One of my favorite bits of science ignorance is people talking about quantum jumps as though they were big things. Instead, a quantum jump is the smallest jump that something can physically take.

More fun in that the mosfet transistors uses it to operate, and they are likely the most manufactured component in history, short lifetime but you owns some billions of them. 

1 hour ago, benzman said:

As an aside, for that few of us who don't already know, a parsec is the distance a star has to be from the Earth tp show one arc second of heliocentric parallax. It is equivalent to 3.26 light years. Old-time astronomers often spoke in megaparsecs (1000 parsecs) but I don't think modern astronomers do. That line in Star Wars always makes me wince. 

Think parces confuses others than astronomers, it makes sense for them as an unit but not for others. Its a bit like nautical miles 

[StrandedonEarth]

16 hours ago, Gargamel said:

We’re talking about a series that made an entire movie simply to Retcon the fact the original creator did not know the difference between a unit of time and a unit of length.  

Well, aside from the requirements of Hollywood in making the movie Solo and the resulting dramatization/stand-up guyization of the Kessel Run, it made a lot of sense as explained in the novels: fast enough to pass dangerously close to a black hole cluster without getting sucked in, thereby shortening the length of the trip. But the movie just made pure fantasy of it, as usual.

I would imagine a black hole cluster to just look like a seething cauldron of energy, generally invisible because it's all x-ray/gamma energies. You see very little, and then you melt from the radiation sleeting through you.

Edited February 3, 2022 by StrandedonEarth
lol, no edit, gotta love language filters

[Shpaget]

8 hours ago, benzman said:

megaparsecs (1000 parsecs)

Hate to be that guy, but:

kilo = 1 000

mega = 1 000 000

[Codraroll]

16 hours ago, benzman said:

That line in Star Wars always makes me wince. 

I once heard an explanation that sort-of fixed the issue in my eyes:

Han Solo is a smuggler and an opportunist, facing a prospective customer with several options (it's not like it would be difficult for Obi-Wan and Luke to find other smugglers to take them off-planet at Mos Eisley) but who are obviously in a hurry. He tests them, spouting some meaningless technobabble about his ship to see if they have any clue at all (it works, they are obviously confused by the figure), before asking a stupendous price. He wanted to see if he could get away with daylight robbery, or whether he had to bid low to get the job at all. Finding out that neither of them knew what a parsec was, he could easily name any price he wanted.

[Gargamel]

33 minutes ago, Codraroll said:

I once heard an explanation that sort-of fixed the issue in my eyes:

Han Solo is a smuggler and an opportunist, facing a prospective customer with several options (it's not like it would be difficult for Obi-Wan and Luke to find other smugglers to take them off-planet at Mos Eisley) but who are obviously in a hurry. He tests them, spouting some meaningless technobabble about his ship to see if they have any clue at all (it works, they are obviously confused by the figure), before asking a stupendous price. He wanted to see if he could get away with daylight robbery, or whether he had to bid low to get the job at all. Finding out that neither of them knew what a parsec was, he could easily name any price he wanted.

Ok, I can buy that, it's obviously not canon (Nothing outside the movies is canon IMO *prepares for wookiepedia editors to descend in furious rage*), but it really fits the character.    Especially since the, IIRC (and I probably don't), retcon they did in Solo was more about the pilot's / navigator's jump plotting skills than the ship itself. 

[kerbiloid]

If real Han knew who are his passengers, he could exchange them for amnesty or sell them to Jabba.

Not so insightful for an experienced smuggler.
See the end of Spartacus Spartacvs story, for comparison.

Edited February 4, 2022 by kerbiloid
Spelling corrected.

[benzman]

14 hours ago, Shpaget said:

Hate to be that guy, but:

kilo = 1 000

mega = 1 000 000

Oops. My bad.

[Spacescifi]

I was watching Transformers 3 because it was being played in a Mexican restaurant.

 

Anyway any suspension of disbelief I had disintergrated when I noticed enemy robot hover craft was using what looked like vectored jet thrust to hover.

Problem was that none of yhe exhaust effected it's environment.

The most telling moment was when they were hovering over the water with jet exhaust.... no disturbance whatsover in the water, whereas in real life any jet exhaust vectored toward the ground or water below will DEFINITELY disturb the surface of either, especiall given how low they were hovering.

 

Even helicopters disturb surfaces on landing but jet exhaust won't? Come on.

 

 

Edited February 4, 2022 by Spacescifi

[kerbiloid]

Birds attack the invaded transformer.

Spoiler

 

Hope, they later have washed the window outside and the seat inside..

[benzman]

If any of those birds had been sucked into the Harrier's intake it could have all ended in tears.

[magnemoe]

15 minutes ago, benzman said:

If any of those birds had been sucked into the Harrier's intake it could have all ended in tears.

Yes, fighter jets have small engines compared to large passenger planes and they don't have the turbofan to make it into paste before hitting the compressor. 
 

[Jacke]

5 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

Yes, fighter jets have small engines compared to large passenger planes and they don't have the turbofan to make it into paste before hitting the compressor.

Fighters have used for a long time mostly low-bypass turbofans.  The Harrier's Pegasus engine was a turbofan as well, with the fan powering the front 2 nozzles and the engine core the rear 2.