Stars, planets and other Sci-Fi peeves

Ranb said:
That part never bothered me. When a submarine officer of the deck gives out that order the main engine throttles are merely closed. The ship continues to coast while the shaft rotates; the sub slows though. If he wanted to slow down faster he would order the shaft stopped with steam, or a more likely, a backing bell.

Ranb
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The difference is that in space you need not have the engines on at all. Once going at a certain speed the captain can turn off the engines and the ship will keep going without slowing down.

Ships are highly unlikely to come close enough to be more than a spot without a very good telescope. Remember from earth no telescope can see any of the landing craft that exist on the moon.
 
Argumemnon said:
What are you talking about? The Nostromo has faster-than-light technology, and the planet in the first movie was not in our system at all.
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Well I'll be damned. Yep. I don't recall this in the film but perhaps it was clear in the book.

Did the small vessel in which Ripley escaped also have ftl tech?

But it still leaves weird plot glitches, such as how did The Nostromo pick up signals from that planet while it was zipping along ftl? Can you change course and head for a different target while travelling ftl?

I don't mind such things when they're just a mechanism to get a good story going, I should add.
 
GlennB said:
Well I'll be damned. Yep. I don't recall this in the film but perhaps it was clear in the book.
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It was pretty clear in the movie, trust me.

Did the small vessel in which Ripley escaped also have ftl tech?
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No. That's why it took 57 years for it to be found.

But it still leaves weird plot glitches, such as how did The Nostromo pick up signals from that planet while it was zipping along ftl? Can you change course and head for a different target while travelling ftl?
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How is that a plot glitch? Isn't that just a matter of in-world tech?
 
arthwollipot said:
Alien races that have one single monolithic culture despite emerging on planets just as big as ours.
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Conversely, planets whose entire population appears to inhabit a single village.

There's a standard sci-fi trope, too, that the initial landing site on a new planet turns out to be perfectly representative of the climate and geography of the entire planet. It's very nicely subverted in Stargate SG-1 when Carter and O'Neill find themselves trapped on what they think is an ice world, but turns out to be Antarctica.

Dave
 
I dunno, I don't get too picky on movie mistakes, unless someone tries to claim they're based in reality.

Of course, it depends on what the mistake is. I'm more than willing to suspend disbelief for a good story. I'm not willing to have it hung, dismembered, burned, and the ashes mixed with salt to kill the ground it stands on (re: Signs).
 
Argumemnon said:
How is that a plot glitch? Isn't that just a matter of in-world tech?
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I think a lot of people discount the value of in-world tech in science fiction. I get annoyed sometimes with basic science fails such as the behavior and characteristics of black holes and relativity mentioned early in the thread. But a great many of the criticisms from later in the thread are easily handwaved away by tech.

In Star Wars, for example, books in the universe explain that the ships make no sound in space. The sound in the movies comes from the computers within each ship that detect the other ships and generate the sounds. A unique sound for each kind of ship coming from speakers surrounding the cockpit - this allows the pilot to have better situational awareness. I know it sounds silly, but it is also an easy way to explain away one of the more basically apparent science mistakes in that series.

I get most annoyed with movies that are presented as hard SF, which then make a whole lot of science errors - the 2013 film Gravity, for example, or Interstellar which is kind of hard science-fictiony with its presentation of the black hole and mention of time-dilation effects, but then takes a whole of liberties with said time dilation. That can be forgiven (in my opinion) due to the use of an actual great big pipe organ for the soundtrack (No Time for Caution, film version - listen to it loud!). The nitrogen-based crop blight in Interstellar also seemed unbelievable, as did the baseball field and low-density housing in the O'Neill cylinder near the end (they had to evacuate everyone on the entire planet, but they had room for baseball fields and suburban type houses?)

The amount of energy used by the transporters in Star Trek always bothered me, so I made up my own fan theory about that. In my theory, they work at the element, not nuclear, level. They destructively scan things, then beam the information somewhere, then reassemble it from elements already in the target environment. This explains the preference for beaming to or from transporter pads, as those are equipped to make sure that all uncommon trace elements are provided and available. The idea of converting all the mass to energy and then reconverting that much energy back into mass always seemed a bit hinky to me.
 
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Giant fleets of spacecraft maneuvering in "orbit", closer than any seagoing naval fleet would crowd together, so as to present easy clustered targets and be unable to maneuver effectively. One of the stupidest examples was in Starship Troopers.

Spacegoing fleets that disembark ground troops who then run around in a disorganized mob, rather than in any kind of tactical order. One of the stupidest examples was in Starship Troopers.
 
crescent said:
The amount of energy used by the transporters in Star Trek always bothered me, so I made up my own fan theory about that. In my theory, they work at the element, not nuclear, level. They destructively scan things, then beam the information somewhere, then reassemble it from elements already in the target environment. This explains the preference for beaming to or from transporter pads, as those are equipped to make sure that all uncommon trace elements are provided and available. The idea of converting all the mass to energy and then reconverting that much energy back into mass always seemed a bit hinky to me.
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But what about when they beamed things in or out of the vacuum of space?
 
phunk said:
But what about when they beamed things in or out of the vacuum of space?
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Then I close my eyes and stick my fingers in my ears and yell "Naananannnaananna I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!!!"

That just seems to be the most logical response, sometimes.
 
sts60 said:
Giant fleets of spacecraft maneuvering in "orbit", closer than any seagoing naval fleet would crowd together, so as to present easy clustered targets and be unable to maneuver effectively. One of the stupidest examples was in Starship Troopers.

Spacegoing fleets that disembark ground troops who then run around in a disorganized mob, rather than in any kind of tactical order. One of the stupidest examples was in Starship Troopers.
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Yeah, that movie was a disappointment.
 
crescent said:
... The amount of energy used by the transporters in Star Trek always bothered me, so I made up my own fan theory about that. In my theory, they work at the element, not nuclear, level. They destructively scan things, then beam the information somewhere, then reassemble it from elements already in the target environment. This explains the preference for beaming to or from transporter pads, as those are equipped to make sure that all uncommon trace elements are provided and available. The idea of converting all the mass to energy and then reconverting that much energy back into mass always seemed a bit hinky to me.
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Interesting. What would stop people using the technology to make clones instead of destroying the thing they scanned?
 
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