Bad science in fiction Hall of Shame

[KSK]

On 9/9/2020 at 6:35 AM, DDE said:

No, it means we have our work cut out for us.

We're not going to make it are we? People, I mean.

[DDE]

4 hours ago, ARS said:

Made even worse when you know that those very same maneuvers are reserved for airshows and technology demonstration, and that no competent pilot would actually be stupid enough to attempt one in an actual dogfight.

Actually I did come across an explanation for its combat utility: it's meant to match velocity with a ground-based pulse-Doppler radar, so that the jet gets caught by the minimum relative velocity filter (rejection speed), and dismissed as chaff or immobile ground clutter. Basically this means a few seconds of invisibility at the cost of all of your speed.

Something similar has been suggested as an application for Su-57's side-looking secondary radars, where the jet would maintain constant distance from a radar and similarly vanish, while, unlike any other fighter, retaining the ability to aim and fire with its own radar.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20434/no-the-su-57-isnt-junk-six-features-we-like-on-russias-new-fighter

28 minutes ago, KSK said:

We're not going to make it are we? People, I mean.

Not with collaborators in our midst.

Spoiler

 

 

[kerbiloid]

17 minutes ago, DDE said:

Not with collaborators in our midst.

John Connor considered compromised and has been terminated.

A rare and unusual character. By definition being the main hero of the whole franchise, is actually an episodic background role.

[jimmymcgoochie]

The 100- just watched series 1 of it and have some serious issues with it:

• The basic premise of the show is that a nuclear war has rendered Earth (almost said Kerbin there ) uninhabitable so 12 orbiting space stations joined together as the last surviving humans. First of all, twelve stations!? Secondly, some of those ‘stations’ are huge, vastly larger than the ISS, and yet somehow they are able to stick them all together. The combined station orbits for almost a century, somehow never running out of anything important like medical supplies, life support or air, supporting a population of several thousand, until the whole thing suddenly starts to collapse.
• The station has gravity throughout, but only one ring structure actually spins- the rest would be in microgravity like the ISS and yet every scene on the station is in full gravity. When people from the station get down to Earth’s surface (surprise surprise, it’s habitable) they have no ill effects at all from going from a lifetime of low-G to full Earth gravity.
• At the end of the first series, the entire station is deorbited (minus the spinning ring for some reason, unclear why as the deorbiting thrusters- ridiculously large for any space station to use for station keeping- are firing directly down the axis of the ring’s rotation) and yet some sections manage to not only survive re-entry intact but also engage rockets to try and control their descent for a relatively soft landing of a mere 70mph; as if crashing a space station into the ground at motorway speed is going to be anything other than lethal for anyone who didn’t burn up. Crashing a car at that speed is nasty enough and they’re built to withstand those sorts of forces, never mind a century old space station that’s just gone through atmospheric entry.
• Exactly how much nuclear fallout do they think there was? If they think it’s enough to render Earth hostile to life a hundred years later then the levels of radiation would have to be truly staggering, implying the use of enough nukes to produce a nuclear winter that would freeze the entire planet for many years. Clearly nobody ever looked down, though, or they would have seen the huge forests; forests which glow in the dark, Pandora-style, despite this having no basis in science as trees can’t magically mutate and start emitting bioluminescence.

[StrandedonEarth]

1 hour ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

The 100-

Yeah, there’s no science there

[kerbiloid]

70 mph = 130 m/s look like a normal terminal velocity for any space object (in KSP usually ~150).

So, I don't see any effect from their rockets, and the science is perfect here, lol.

The relatively safe (20 g) stopping distance = 130² / (2 * 20 * 9.81) = 43 m.

As the station is enough huge, and a half of it has been visibly smashed, their stopping distance looks enough long to be relatively safe.
In a car the stopping distance after a collision is just about 1 meter, so the comparison is irrelevant.

(Also, we can obviously see the consequences of their landing, from their stupid behaviour through the series, lol.)

***

The hydrazine bomb in season 1 is also a something.

***

The presense of a round rotating thing onboard blesses the whole station to be in gravity.

Also, in s5 a spaceship doesn't have any rotation, but the gravity still presents.
So, probably actually they had invented the real artificial gravity, and the toroidal part is just an relict.

***

The radiation lives her own life in The 100.
It's clearly some magic substance, and the heroes got the ability to manage it on their own.
Don't try to understand, just imagine that the whole series is probably https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeadAllAlong, so strange things may happen there, it's normal. Imagine, it's a limbo for scouts.

Spoiler.

Spoiler

Btw, the very final episode has something like that, and also virtual reality parts look so.
And notice, there is almost no children in the series.

 

Edited October 8, 2020 by kerbiloid

[kerbiloid]

What's the point of the pointed ears when the elves can't wiggle them?

It's a bad biology in the movies.

[Shpaget]

Remember how you think that Terminator 2 is the best movie ever in the history of past, present and future?

Well, it almost wasn't. Thank the scissors, they cut this part out:

Skip 3:34 - 3:37 if you don't want to have the movie spoiled, destroyed and cast to the oubliette for eternity.

Edited November 8, 2020 by Shpaget

[kerbiloid]

1. Strange. Why does the Enter key breaks the show, unless it was a screensaver?

2. When she enters the room, the b&w text is on the left monitor, while he's typing.
When they speak, the left one is colored, with some charts.

3. The left monitor still keeps working when they exit the scene.

I have a feeling, the black&white tables are just a "Boss" screen.
The guy was playing on the front monitor looking left to see if the wife comes in.
Before he entered, he pressed the "boss" key to hide the game on the front monitor, and stopped the screensaver on the left one, so it started showing the actual work he must do.
When he pressed Enter, the front screensaver disappeared, and we can the blank screen of the paused game.

P.S.
She could bring him the second glass of the orange juice for better thinking, but even didn't care. 

[wumpus]

On 10/7/2020 at 6:22 PM, jimmymcgoochie said:

The 100- just watched series 1 of it and have some serious issues with it:

• The basic premise of the show is that a nuclear war has rendered Earth (almost said Kerbin there ) uninhabitable so 12 orbiting space stations joined together as the last surviving humans. First of all, twelve stations!? Secondly, some of those ‘stations’ are huge, vastly larger than the ISS, and yet somehow they are able to stick them all together. The combined station orbits for almost a century, somehow never running out of anything important like medical supplies, life support or air, supporting a population of several thousand, until the whole thing suddenly starts to collapse.
• The station has gravity throughout, but only one ring structure actually spins- the rest would be in microgravity like the ISS and yet every scene on the station is in full gravity. When people from the station get down to Earth’s surface (surprise surprise, it’s habitable) they have no ill effects at all from going from a lifetime of low-G to full Earth gravity.
• At the end of the first series, the entire station is deorbited (minus the spinning ring for some reason, unclear why as the deorbiting thrusters- ridiculously large for any space station to use for station keeping- are firing directly down the axis of the ring’s rotation) and yet some sections manage to not only survive re-entry intact but also engage rockets to try and control their descent for a relatively soft landing of a mere 70mph; as if crashing a space station into the ground at motorway speed is going to be anything other than lethal for anyone who didn’t burn up. Crashing a car at that speed is nasty enough and they’re built to withstand those sorts of forces, never mind a century old space station that’s just gone through atmospheric entry.
• Exactly how much nuclear fallout do they think there was? If they think it’s enough to render Earth hostile to life a hundred years later then the levels of radiation would have to be truly staggering, implying the use of enough nukes to produce a nuclear winter that would freeze the entire planet for many years. Clearly nobody ever looked down, though, or they would have seen the huge forests; forests which glow in the dark, Pandora-style, despite this having no basis in science as trees can’t magically mutate and start emitting bioluminescence.

No science here.  But possibly being right by accident...

Attitudes will be similar if space stations require Baikonur access.  Altitudes can be matched (eventually) by any station with similar attitude selectively not firing station keeping rockets until they are all at the lowest common orbit.  Or you could  move the lowest one up (using up all onboard stationkeeping fuel) to conserve fuel.  And it would be unlikely that all of them had enough station keeping fuel (let alone air) for the duration.

If you can't MacGyver together a crash pod to survive a 70mpg  deacceleration with years of warning, you don't belong on  a space station.

There couldn't be that much fallout, although I admit I know almost nothing about cobalt bombs (bombs designed to "salt the Earth" during the cold war).  Wildlife around Chernobyl generally does better than in places near humans, although presumably predators find animals with cancer before humans notice them.  Pretty much by definition, the worst fallout decays the fastest, leaving low-level stuff after a year (and the worst should be gone within a few days).  Also, assuming the space station can be reached by a straight shot from Baikonur, pretty much everywhere in the world is an  option:  The Nile river valley obviously was a great place to live in ancient times, along with anywhere with a sufficiently mediterranean climate.  New Zealand might be glowing less, and presumably less heavily mined for future generations (well, less "used up" by industry and agriculture).  Or you could be like the Pilgrims (early American colonists) and essentially graverob a fallen culture to build your own (presumably the least glowing and most intact cities RADAR/LIDAR can find).

And no.  If things are glowing, you already have a lethal dose of radation poisoning and only have a few minutes (in the unlikely event you are still alive) left.  Stuff just doesn't glow like that (nor is there a likely path to allow humans to mutate to "see" radiation).

[Pds314]

Star Trek definitely doesn't deserve to get by scot free here either. There are various episodes of TNG where they clearly state a direction and speed between real, actual stars such as going to Wolf 359, and warp speeds are given a formula in canon, i.e. not an empirical formula derived by fans, then completely break their own rules and get there way faster than reasonable. You can't go that distance at that speed in that time. And it can't be relativistic effects since that pretty much never happens with warp drives in any other examples and isn't mentioned ever by a character in the show.

 

Similarly, I think in ST generations they send a star-killer missile of some sort straight at a star from the surface of a habitable (or at least, survivable) planet and it reaches the star in all of 15 seconds. Fair enough, very powerful FTL is definitely allowed in ST and that's "only" warp 3-4 or something as an average speed. I wonder a bit about how it escaped the atmosphere so quick since warp within the atmosphere sounds pretty crazy but I'm sure Treknology can do it. My problem here is that this star is way more than 15 light seconds from the planet in question, so it should have minutes of delay before we see the star react at all and in any way.

 

ST also has severe graphical inconsistencies in range and distance. Often times ships are shown within under 10 km of each other visually from outside the craft, with easily traceable perspective and camera movements that constrain the maximum camera distance, or are shown with considerable perspective, i.e. as viewed from a few kilometers or less, on displays inside a ship. They are not usually shown onscreen with the near-orthographic projection you might expect if you are indeed viewing the ships from hundreds or thousands of kilometers away, even if viewing with very strong optical zoom. However, stated ranges by characters, while sometimes just hundreds of meters or a few kilometers are often well in excess of a hundred thousand kilometers. Star Trek ships in subluminal combat appear to be able to accurately target torpedoes at about half Earth-moon distance against an actively maneuvering target with nonzero chance to hit if stated ranges are to be believed. There is no combination of camera movements, field of view, fisheye, or anything else you can do to get the visual results to match the stated range, as this would make ships the size of skyscrapers or somewhat large look as they would at Earth-moon distance, which is to say, almost totally orthographic. Unless their screens on the bridge and the story camera outside the ship are wrong or a tac view and do not represent any direct imaging method with a real camera much of the time, this  doesn't really make any sort of sense. Either the visuals or the dialogue *must* be wrong on range.

 

Edited November 9, 2020 by Pds314

[kerbiloid]

Robot Riot (2020)

It's normal when an EMP hand grenade kills a six-meter high bipedal mecharobot.
But when it kills the robot by cutting the wire pole with explosion and dropping the electric wires on the robot and burning it with short circuit, it's twice as normal.
Though, I can't see why then bother with hi-tech EMP grenades instead of XIX century dynamite.

***

When you develop a robot with akimbo machine guns, aim every arm separately.
Otherwise the heroes will be running between the bursts, and all you hit is the road tar.

***

It's wise to not
(spoiler)

Spoiler

turn with your back to the friendly Beauty, even when you feel like Beast,

but why does the EMP rifle cause a blue electric flash,
(spoiler)

Spoiler

hitting her head with something like electric bullet (?),

when it looks like a beam weapon when they are shooting the robots?

[ARS]

Independence Day:

1.The number of F/A-18s flying in the final battle was way more than have ever existed at any time in history. And this was after the aliens shot down the first counterattack earlier in droves. Also, RAF-marked F-16s in Iraq? (RAF don't use F-16) USAF using F/A-18s in the climactic battle at the end? (Only USN and USMC uses it) IAF with F/A-18 Hornets?? (Israel doesn't even use it)

2. During the film's climax, Eagle Twenty announces "Fox Two", which is NATO code for the launch of an infrared guided missile, but the missile shown is an AIM-120 AMRAAM, an active radar guided missile that would be launched with "Fox Three."

3. The attack on the alien ship with AMRAAMs and Sidewinders is pretty ridiculous, considering the sheer size of the target. Even the biggest air-to-air missiles in reality only have a 75-kilogram warhead - not much threat to a ship the size of a city. Air-to-ground weapons are closer to 500 kilos... or since the F/A-18 is cleared for the whole gamut of US Navy aircraft weapons, they could have led with something even bigger. Not that this would really have helped, since the entire nuclear arsenal of the world could only vaporise less than 1% of the volume of one of the saucers. Never mind the question of whether or not the missiles' guidance systems (programmed to look for airplanes) could actually recognize the damn thing as a target to be engaged rather than a mountain to be avoided.

4. The original ending for the film sees Russell being denied a place in the final counter attack against the aliens. So he takes one of the Air Force's missiles, straps it to his biplane and sends it into the cannon instead of kamikazing his F-18 after his missile jammed. If this was to be attempted in reality, the biplane would stall on its way up, making it the most awkward self sacrifice in history.

 

Stealth:

1. I don't know who's better, the one who designed a building that still stands after a bunker buster bomb penetrates through all floors in that building at mach 3+ , or the one who designed the bomb that could withstand mach 3+ impact through all floors in that building (plus reinforced concrete slab on top of that) and still functional

2. Speaking of the building, the explosion effect where the building collapses in the middle of dense population area produces a very neat collapsing sequence where NO DEBRIS strays outside of the building's footprint with NO COLLATERAL DAMAGE. Anyone familiar with how the building demolition works will know that demolishing building with explosives WILL get messy (and that's with controlled explosion with surrounding area evacuated instead of in the middle of Rangoon with mach 3+ bomb dropped through the roof)

3. Diving vertically at 2070 knots (roughly mach 3.1,  for comparison MiG-31 is mach 2.83) before opening the bomb bay doors would certainly mess up the aerodynamic, and at that speed, the Talon should've disintegrated from the sheer sudden drag induced by such action

 

The A-Team:

1. The fight scene with the Reaper drones is utter nonsense. A Reaper couldn't intercept the A-Team's plane to begin with: the normal cruising speed of a C-130 is 336 mph (540 km/h) but the Reaper tops out at about 300 mph (482 km/h). Also, they aren't armed with machine guns, only missiles (and air-to-ground missiles at that, not air-to-air missiles), nor are they capable of the dogfighting-level maneuverability seen in the tank scene. They're designed for long loiter time in low-velocity flight, and are known to lose their connection to the satellite if they bank too hard to right or left

 

Battlefield Earth:

1. the heroes find a hangar full of Harriers, all of which aren't used for a millennium. No aircraft should be working after about a millennium, it takes years, not weeks to learn to fly a plane, none of them have flight-suits and yet they're all stunt dogfighter material. On the positive side, they do mention that Harrier jets can hover. Note that Harriers are so unreliable that the fact that they can even be repaired after a millennium is implausible

 

Flight of Fury: 

1. They used so much stock footage that the type of aircraft varied between almost every scene, as well as having the stock footage of the SR-71 and the F-117 be fuzzy because it was not filmed in high-def, and changing from day to night and back again in a few minutes of flight time. But the worst parts were the aircraft travelling at the speed of the plot progression, with the only consistency being that higher real-world top speeds somehow translated to longer trips in the plot. To wit:

     -A C-130 (max speed 675 km/h) travels from California to Afghanistan carrying SEALs, in 3 hours (noted by the timestamps) without re-fueling

     -An F-117 (max speed 1,003 km/h) makes the same trip in less than 6 hours, again without re-fueling

     -An SR-71 (max speed classified, but listed as 3,540 km/h) makes the same trip in 48 HOURS, but requires re-fueling

     -All of them fly west over the Pacific and China, not even taking the polar route (a distance of 21,000 kilometers), which would have added a few thousand miles to their trip.

 

Tears of the Sun: 

1. The jets during the finale switched between clean (no ordinance) to carrying HARMs (anti-radar missiles - against infantry, no less), then back to clean. And then when they do fire, they shoot missiles...that turn into cluster bombs...that are napalm. There are cluster missiles, but not for aircraft, and cluster napalm hasn't been a thing since WW2 incendiary bombs. Oh, and the rescue helicopters show up moments after the jets, despite the jets being several times faster

Edited November 12, 2020 by ARS

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Wow... You remember way more about this movie than I do.  All I recall is:

On 9/21/2020 at 11:24 AM, ARS said:

... :

In Stealth,

... 

Jessica Biel

...

 dogfight

... 

 

 

[kerbiloid]

Your memory is much better than mine.

There was a dogfight?
Okay.

Edited November 12, 2020 by kerbiloid

[AHHans]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

... 

Jessica Biel

...

 dogfight

... 

Shouldn't that be "catfight"? *duck & hide*

[kerbiloid]

Greenland (2020)

(Next to the beginning, when the male hero gets out from home).

Well, let's suppose that the birds can feel the approaching comet debris before they enter the atmosphere and start panically flying away...

...but why are these chickens birds crossing the road when seconds later the shockwave approaches to us along it?

[Kerbart]

On 11/8/2020 at 4:02 AM, Shpaget said:

Remember how you think that Terminator 2 is the best movie ever in the history of past, present and future.

I never thought that. The moment the T-800 is fixing the car together with John Conner and is asking for a torque wrench, all credibility went out of the window.

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, Kerbart said:

I never thought that. The moment the T-800 is fixing the car together with John Conner and is asking for a torque wrench, all credibility went out of the window.

Lol, had to read that a couple of times. 
Now its two reasons, Feedback system is not accurate enough to measure force on an wrench at various odd angels. 
He is trained / programmed to behave like an ordinary human outside of combat with them, he is an infiltrator after all, this is muscle memory deep so he will ask for an torque wrench

[kerbiloid]

12 hours ago, magnemoe said:

He is trained / programmed to behave like an ordinary human outside of combat with them, he is an infiltrator after all, this is muscle memory deep so he will ask for an torque wrench

But how he/it should self-repair without car service?

[cubinator]

Interstellar.

When Cooper's helmet cracks and the ammonia-rich air starts flowing into his suit, Brand simply tells him to not breathe too much while she comes to rescue him. But if the atmospheric pressure is not ridiculously higher than Earth's, he should be able to just flush his suit with oxygen and overpressurize it a bit - that way oxygen will flow out, and ammonia can't flow in. He'll still be losing oxygen at an increased rate and needs rescuing, but at least he won't be breathing poison while he waits.

[kerbiloid]

Also, a spaceman without duct tape at hands is not a real spaceman.

[magnemoe]

14 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

But how he/it should self-repair without car service?

No need for torque wrenches, they are mostly used then you need an series of bolts holding down something under pressure. Engine blocks, lots of pressurized or vacuum stuff. 

[Shpaget]

On 11/14/2020 at 4:18 PM, Kerbart said:

I never thought that. The moment the T-800 is fixing the car together with John Conner and is asking for a torque wrench, all credibility went out of the window.

He's just a stickler for details and imprecisely tightened fasteners are his pet peeve. 

[kerbiloid]

T-800 did an eye self-surgery, so probably his actuators arer enough precise to need no additional torque limiter, but hee tried to be a human.

So, first smiling, then using the torque wrench.

Next step would be putting toilet seats vertically, even when it doesn't need them at all.

Edited November 16, 2020 by kerbiloid