Stars, planets and other Sci-Fi peeves

[JoeMorgue]

I can only imagine a couple of WWI fighter pilots looking at F-22 and wondering where its propellers are. Or a B-52 pilot in 1960 looking at a picture of B-2 and declaring that such an airframe could never fly combat missions. I mean they already tried the flying wing design twice a decade earlier and they could barely stay in the air for a test flight.

Even in realistic sci-fi I think it's an error if stuff looks like we expect it is going to because that make the core mistake of assuming there aren't major design/technologies leaps still to be made.

It's the balance that sci-fi always has to walk. Slap together any random nonsense and call it a ship and just go "It's all science we haven't discovered yet" and you are treating the science like magic.

But the future of technology and design are not going to play out exactly as we predict it now so we have to let our science fiction play out the same way to at least some degree.

 

[3point14]

Pfft. You were totally Ninja'd, man.

Yes. I was going to curse you for a thousand years but got distracted and had to make coffee

 

[Darat]

So as a way to put this all into context can anyone point to an example of a good design of a deep space / long voyage spaceship in fiction?

The Skylark




.......

 

[Belz...]

Yes. I was going to curse you for a thousand years but got distracted and had to make coffee

A thousand? Talk about a slap on the wrist!

 

[HansMustermann]

First of all, I said 99.95, not 99.5, and I specifically put the decimals there to avoid nitpickers dodging the main point of my post with irrelevancies. I wasn't trying to be precise with my comments, but to make that point.

And the point is simple: no system is perfect, but the movie treats this one like it _has_ to be either perfect or discarded.

Do you have any idea how imprecise real-world justice systems are? How many guilty people are let go on technicalities or other issues, and how many innocents are held up or put in jail? My point is that the idea of pre-crime could have been useful in that universe even if it wasn't perfect.

Sure, let's go with 99.95% instead of 99.5%. Why not? The maths is the same, you just remove a zero at the end. Now for every actual person guilty of any kind of homicide or realy non-negligent manslaughter, you lock up 10 (TEN) innocents.

I think that for all its faults, the RL justice system CAN'T physically do worse than put away an innocent instead of an actual murderer. You know, because it can't even go to trial until it actualy has a murder.

Even if every single person condemned by our justice system were the wrong one, your 99.95% good-enough predictive system is still TEN TIMES worse.

The question isn't whether it's perfect. The question is whether it's TEN TIMES WORSE. That's the difference between actually NEEDING a murder, and being able to go into dada land lock someone up because they might do one in the future, even if you actuallly had 99.95% accuracy.

In fact, I'll even one-up your ante on accuracy. Let's say your system is a whole 99.99% accurate. That seem good enough to you? Well, that's still TWICE as bad as botching every single conviction with our current system. As in if we had a justice system that NEVER EVER condemned the right person, the 99.99% accurate predictive one would STILL put TWICE AS MANY innocents away.

I dunno about you, but I don't feel any kind of problem with dismissing a system that's 10+ times worse than the alternative. It's not about whether it's perfect or not,, it's just that it's stonking stupid to even consider the alternative that's worse by a whole order of magnitude.

I mean do you also feel that it's unfair to dismiss homeopathy and animal magnetism? Because it's the same issue. It's not whether it's perfect or not. It's just that it's worse than the sane alternative.

 

[HansMustermann]

I can only imagine a couple of WWI fighter pilots looking at F-22 and wondering where its propellers are. Or a B-52 pilot in 1960 looking at a picture of B-2 and declaring that such an airframe could never fly combat missions. I mean they already tried the flying wing design twice a decade earlier and they could barely stay in the air for a test flight.

Not exactly.

- That kind of turbine goes back all the way to 1791, and the first self-sustaining one had been built in 1903. And the simpler thermojet (which looks the same from the outside) had flown at least as early as 1910.

Plus, turbine-like fans had been used for hundreds of years at that point, had been used even on steam engines for decades, and even on an airplane, again, since 1910. (Coanda-10 used such a compressor in the front instead of a propeller, for example.) Hell, even the combination of an axial compressor in front, driven by a turbine in the back, was used for more conventional engines since 1885. That's, what, 30 years before WW1?

The thought that highly trained pilot, which at the time also meant knowledge of engines and mechanics for most of them, would look at the compressor at the front and would totally be unable to at least surmise that it's SOME kind of compressor instead of apropeller, is... silly.

- Flying wing airplane designs also were tested at least as early as 1910. Although technically without the powered flight part, they're actually older than the more common airplane configuration.


BUT, and it's a big BUT, here's the more important part: even if they didn't understand the engine or physics or the wing, I think they could still very well figure out it's an airplane. Other than the angle of the wings and such, it actually very much resembles the first WW1 airplanes.

The Nieuport company was building monoplanes since at least 1910. Morane-Saulnier H and L models entered service in 1913, i.e., actually BEFORE the war. The Blériot XI was in service from 1914. The German Taube was also there since 1914. The Fokker Eindecker (Eindecker meaning pretty literally monoplane) was built in 1915. The Brits had the Bristol M1C flying in 1916.

And that's not counting several later models that entered service in the war, like the Sopwith Swallow in 1918, or the Junkers Cl.I also in 1918.

But let's look closer at one of those later ones, namely the Junkers D.I, also from 1918. It already features a duraluminium skin, and a low wing design. It wasn't the only one. The Zeppelin-Lindau (Dornier) CS I for example was also all metal, except for the tail control surfaces.

I submit the idea that if you had fought all through WW1 and saw a metal-skinned, low-wing monoplane like the F-16 or even the F-22, you'd have NO problem recognizing at the very least that it's an airplane. And if someone told you that it sucks air in front and blows it out the back, it wouldn't seem like magic at all.

In fact, I submit the idea that what it would instantly evoke in the mind of said pilot is the push-type airplanes at the beginning of the war, before they had synchronizer gear for the guns. The idea of blowing the air behind the plane to push it (as opposed to pulling it with a propeller in front) was how the first fighter planes worked. Probably all that said pilot would think is, "hmm, ingenious idea sucking the air from below (for the F-16) or the sides (for the F-22) to avoid some of the pusher issues. Why'd you need it though? Did synchronizer gear technology get lost in your universe?"

 

[Belz...]

Sure, let's go with 99.95% instead of 99.5%. Why not? The maths is the same, you just remove a zero at the end. Now for every actual person guilty of any kind of homicide or realy non-negligent manslaughter, you lock up 10 (TEN) innocents.

I think that for all its faults, the RL justice system CAN'T physically do worse than put away an innocent instead of an actual murderer. You know, because it can't even go to trial until it actualy has a murder.

Even if every single person condemned by our justice system were the wrong one, your 99.95% good-enough predictive system is still TEN TIMES worse.

The question isn't whether it's perfect. The question is whether it's TEN TIMES WORSE. That's the difference between actually NEEDING a murder, and being able to go into dada land lock someone up because they might do one in the future, even if you actuallly had 99.95% accuracy.

In fact, I'll even one-up your ante on accuracy. Let's say your system is a whole 99.99% accurate. That seem good enough to you? Well, that's still TWICE as bad as botching every single conviction with our current system. As in if we had a justice system that NEVER EVER condemned the right person, the 99.99% accurate predictive one would STILL put TWICE AS MANY innocents away.

I dunno about you, but I don't feel any kind of problem with dismissing a system that's 10+ times worse than the alternative. It's not about whether it's perfect or not,, it's just that it's stonking stupid to even consider the alternative that's worse by a whole order of magnitude.

I mean do you also feel that it's unfair to dismiss homeopathy and animal magnetism? Because it's the same issue. It's not whether it's perfect or not. It's just that it's worse than the sane alternative.

You understand that we're talking about a work of fiction, right?

Look, I just pulled a number out of my ass. It wasn't supposed to be a precise number. I said so in the previous post. You're staying stuck on the number and over-analysing it but you're missing the point while doing so. And the point is that the movie makes the silly implication that less than 100% is worthless. No justice system has a 100% success rate. The movie has the only single example of the system failing, because someone familiar with the system managed to fool two out of the three psychics.

 

[phunk]

It would actually be AWFUL at 99.5% accuracy. In fact, bloody frikken insanely awful.

Let's look at all non-negligent homicides and manslaughters. You know, from premeditated murder all the way to felony murder. Well, that was 4.9 per 100,000 population in 2015. A system with 99.5% accuracy would give you 500 false positives for 100,000 population, i.e., a whopping OVER A HUNDRED TIMES MORE false positives than accurate predictions. Pretty literally for every 1 murderer you preemptively put away, you'd also be putting away 100 innocents.

NOW do you see the problem with 99.5% accuracy?

That assumes predictions are made about every single person in the population. What if the prediction rate is closer to the murder rate?

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

That assumes predictions are made about every single person in the population. What if the prediction rate is closer to the murder rate?

How exactly could the rate even be assessed?

 

[John Jones]

I was disappointed with Starship Troopers when I first saw it, mainly because I assumed there was some connection with the book.
I have come to love it though and can watch it anytime.

I had the Starship Troopers board game.

 

[HansMustermann]

Well, that's kinda my problem with it. The actual accuracy can't even be assessed. You only have someone's word that those people would eventually commit a crime. How accurate is that prediction? We can't know. But even the slightest inaccuracy (hence my doing the maths even for 99.99%) will send a LOT more innocents to jail than the current system.

And I think that THAT is what most people instinctively feel about that scenario, even if they don't do the maths: that if there is ANY margin of error, then a LOT of people will get arrested for something that not only they haven't done, but wouldn't actually EVER actually do.

It's not Nirvana fallacy -- as in, if it's not perfect then it's crap -- but connecting the dots that in practice it would be worse than the current system. And there's no real reason to give the worse alternative a try, especially when we're talking about people's lives.

 

[arthwollipot]

You're forgetting about the Star Trek episode with the 2 aliens, with their faces painted black and white (but on different sides). See? Totally different!

Joking aside, that shouldn't be a big issue. As a species gets more technologically advanced, they get a greater ability to interact with others on the planet. Cultures would naturally blend over time. Heck, look how much English has become the dominant language for business in much of the world, and that's only been in a few hundred years since England started to build its empire (and only a few decades since air travel and long distance communication has been relatively cheap and easy.) Give it another century or 2 and everyone on the planet might be speaking English (or some sort of hybrid English-Chinese-Hindi mix). Things like the way people dress, or the foods they eat, would probably follow suit.

That's a very reasonable response to my statement, but at the same time I would point out that humans do expend quite a bit of effort to maintain their cultural integrity. While I'm not suggesting that cultural blending will never take place, I will suggest that it is not usually viewed by us as being a Good Thing and thus we will try to resist it for as long as we can.

The Expanse, to take an example, is partly predicated on the way the vastness of space separates human colonists such that they develop new cultures that can be vastly different from one another.

 

[Horatius]

The Expanse, to take an example, is partly predicated on the way the vastness of space separates human colonists such that they develop new cultures that can be vastly different from one another.

That's actually one of the few things in The Expanse that bothers me. The Belters in particular have, as you say, developed a new culture that is quite distinct from that of Earth or Mars. But, at the same time, Belter culture, including their new polyglot language, seems to be fairly uniform across ships, small stations, and asteroids.

How is it that the Belt is so isolated from Earth and Mars that they barely speak the same language, but these isolated Belt outposts all interact enough that they share this new language? That just doesn't make sense.

 

[Belz...]

Well, that's kinda my problem with it. The actual accuracy can't even be assessed. You only have someone's word that those people would eventually commit a crime. How accurate is that prediction?

Entirely irrelevant to my point. As I said, you over-analysed what I said and put too much emphasis on a unimportant number.

And I think that THAT is what most people instinctively feel about that scenario, even if they don't do the maths: that if there is ANY margin of error, then a LOT of people will get arrested for something that not only they haven't done, but wouldn't actually EVER actually do.

That's more relevant, but then pre-crime aims to stop crime. The issue is that in the movie they add a sentence to that. If they used it to save lives and then put an actual court in charge of judging and sentencing, it would add another layer of safety for citizens.

 

[HansMustermann]

Well, no, the bigger issue is that you're looking at only half the equation. Sure, a rape ruins someone's life, and a homicide even ends it, so of course preventing that is a noble goal. But THE OTHER HALF of the equation is that throwing someone in jail equally ruins THEIR life.

And I'm not even just talking about the jail time itself. You'll be discriminated for employment ever after. For some crimes you may even have certain jobs excluded ever after. You may be forbidden to live anywhere but under a bridge outside town, because anything else is too close to a school. Etc.

Now I can live with ruining someone's life as retribution for their ruining someone else's.

But when you end up throwing ten or a hundred times more people in jail than would commit a crime, you're actually making the problem worse. For each case where you prevented someone's life being ruined, you're ruining the lives of ten innocents.

That's not just "not perfect", it's making the problem worse.

 

[Klimax]

Explain how it is more inefficient then expending lots of energy on transport-based duplication.

They replicate coffee. Obviously they have the ressources to spare. And I've already explained it: faster, fewer ressources, no need to mine, no workoforce required, etc.

Assumption that energy requirement for replication scale linearly or similar scaling. MNot given. there are many processes that scale fairly nicely till certain scale is reached when things go horribly wrong and they become horribly inefficient or non-working at all.

Also having effectively mono-thinking army is not precisely good idea.

Have you ever seen army training? The whole point is to reduce individuality to a minimum and enforce a strict hierarchy.

Then skip transport-based replication and go outright Borg-way or robots,. Plenty of ways without needing inefficiency of transport replication.

Also, "all you need energy". Yes, but that amount of energy is on bit different scale by the time you get to starship sizes.

Irrelevant; you just scale up energy production and replicators.

You are assuming things just scale easily...

Are you asking me to imagine the use this magical technology realistically? That's like saying that the US can't just mass-produce cars by scaling up assembly facilities.

It's simple. For whatever reason Federation nor anybody else uses your proposal. One of many plausible reason is things just don't scale that well beyond certain sizes. There are too many real world examples to pick from that demonstrate same limitations. (And jsut because some things can scale, doesn't mean other can!)

Yeah, but that was always some "no one ever thought of this before" jury-rigged save-the-day thing. There was apparently never any real thought or study put into weaponizing them, as in actually developing tactics to use them effectively, or working on ways to overcome the "can't go through shields" problem (like, for example, transporter-equipped torpedoes that would transport themselves after firing, or stealthed mines that would sit idle until they detected a ship, then begin transporting bombs on board).

Objects cannot self-transport. (One of limitations) At least applicable to Alpha-quadrant technology.
As for stealth mines, already done:
Minefield

Oops, yes I meant to point that out: it's written as some thinking-outside-the-box strategy rather than something they should do all the time.

The Federation seriously needs to expand their tactical repertoire.

Actually they do. But most of it happens in DS9. Previous shows msotly tackled different things then militrary.

So as a way to put this all into context can anyone point to an example of a good design of a deep space / long voyage spaceship in fiction?

http://img.ceskatelevize.cz/program/porady/11276561613/foto09/rip1_06.jpg?1478887610&_ga=2.149395327.851278629.1505987457-1654639727.1498308620

 

[HansMustermann]

Basically here's the short version of the problem with proposing extreme systems: caring for the safety and wellbeing of your subjects should be about ALL subjects. INCLUDING those who end up victimized by the STATE, and including those who are victimized in the name of protecting others.

And frankly that's why we have so many safeguards and separations of powers and whatnot. Because the state can do the most harm. Now I'm not saying get rid of the state, but just that those safeguards are there for a reason. There are good reason why we require a jury of his/her peers, and evidence, and have an assumption innocence until proven guilty, and so on.

And to hammer some point some more, it's not even a new concept. The Magna Carta, early 13'th century, had this sentence, "No Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land." My emphasis, because this is what this is about: justice can destroy someone's life. And it was clear that far back in time.

Looking at just how many victims you prevent from having their life destroyed, is missing the concern for how many lives does your state destroy in the process.

 

[Belz...]

Well, no, the bigger issue is that you're looking at only half the equation. Sure, a rape ruins someone's life, and a homicide even ends it, so of course preventing that is a noble goal. But THE OTHER HALF of the equation is that throwing someone in jail equally ruins THEIR life.

And I'm not even just talking about the jail time itself. You'll be discriminated for employment ever after. For some crimes you may even have certain jobs excluded ever after. You may be forbidden to live anywhere but under a bridge outside town, because anything else is too close to a school. Etc.

Now I can live with ruining someone's life as retribution for their ruining someone else's.

But when you end up throwing ten or a hundred times more people in jail than would commit a crime, you're actually making the problem worse. For each case where you prevented someone's life being ruined, you're ruining the lives of ten innocents.

That's not just "not perfect", it's making the problem worse.

In response to my post telling you that you are focusing on an irrelevant number, over-analysing the situation and missing the point, you double down, then triple down, the quadruple down. Let go of the damned number. It's not important.

 

[Delvo]

But even the slightest inaccuracy (hence my doing the maths even for 99.99%) will send a LOT more innocents to jail than the current system.

You appear to be applying the 0.01% error rate to the entire population. But that's not what an (in)accuracy rate is. It's 0.01% of all predictions.

Your accuracy at a gun/archery range is hits on target divided by shots you took, not divided by the number of bullets/arrows in the city.

 

[Belz...]

Assumption that energy requirement for replication scale linearly or similar scaling.

Where have I made this assumption? I said it could be done but is never touched upon on the show. Where have I said that it's linear or similar?

Then skip transport-based replication and go outright Borg-way or robots,.

You have to wait _years_ for these guys to grow to adulthood, and you still need to imput a lot of energy into them from a great number of sources: food, education, clothing during their growth, etc. that you skip entirely with the replication process.

Plenty of ways without needing inefficiency of transport replication.

You haven't demonstrated that it's inefficient, and I've explained why it isn't.

For whatever reason Federation nor anybody else uses your proposal.

That argument might work in reality, but in fiction you have to deal with bad writing as well, which is more likely to be the explanation rather than some social, technological and legal mechanic that was never mentioned anywhere in the franchise but that you imply the writers have taken into consideration. No, they just didn't fully think through their fictional magic tech.