Stars, planets and other Sci-Fi peeves

Gene (much like Lucas) was a wonderful storyteller and world builder without being all the great of a writer or scripter, so he paradoxically wound up being the best and worst thing about his own work most of the time.
 
Well, he didn't actually write much of the script for TNG. Most of the time he more or less just forced the script writers to respect his canon, and not do the usual soap-opera dumb drama except in SPAAACE.

And he was only there for the first three seasons of TNG. Already the end of the third season he had stopped doing much for it.

But if we're talking his WRITING for the show, the last time that's mentioned in the credits is episode 13 of the first season. ("Datalore") That's it.

He wasn't even ALIVE for the last three seasons of TNG. And certainly not for DS9, VOY or ST:Enterprise, where the worst infusions of dumb soap-opera drama happened.

So I'm not sure exactly why people blame HIM blanketly for the sins of "post-TOS Trek", when he wasn't even alive for most of those. Unless he haunted the sets or something ;)
 
HansMustermann said:
So I'm not sure exactly why people blame HIM blanketly for the sins of "post-TOS Trek", when he wasn't even alive for most of those. Unless he haunted the sets or something ;)
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Because he's the one who pushed for Trek's latter goody-two-shoes, utopian feel. He's the one who made Trek, and there was an incentive to respect his "vision". TOS wasn't much affected, but TMP sure was, which is why Roddenberry was kicked upstairs afterwards and didn't have much to do with the following movies. He put his paws on the show when TNG was made, and it shows in the first season, and even though as you said he had little to do with the creative process afterwards, his presence was still felt. Luckily, DS9 went for a more human approach, with more conflict and issues, even among the main cast.

"Gene Roddenberry's Vision" is an oft-uttered phrase in fandom and among the people involved in the shows.
 
Thanks for replies. Wesley never struck me as bad character back when I saw TNG. (~15 years ago)

Well, when I get to rewatch it, I'll see if I get to change opinion or not... ;)
 
Mind you, the "hate" is mostly taking the mickey. I don't think anyone actively HATES him, but he felt annoying and out of place. Kinda like putting truck nuts on the Enterprise would feel.
 
I think it's informative and interesting that some dislike the early season character and some dislike the late season character.

Wil Wheaton grew up into a genuinely awesome fellow though.
 
Not even that he was a genuinely awesome actor even during his Star Trek run. His role on Stand By Me was amazing and a full year before his debut on Star Trek.

He just had a poor luck to play a not spectacularly written character during the growing pains part of a show's run in a genre that tends to overly latch onto to less than perfect characters and make them hate sinks.
 
JoeBentley said:
Not even that he was a genuinely awesome actor even during his Star Trek run. His role on Stand By Me was amazing and a full year before his debut on Star Trek.
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Meh. I've found his acting to be pretty ordinary most of the time. I'm much more of a fan when he's off the cuff, like on his show Tabletop. That is a great show.

JoeBentley said:
He just had a poor luck to play a not spectacularly written character during the growing pains part of a show's run in a genre that tends to overly latch onto to less than perfect characters and make them hate sinks.
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Does the science fiction genre really do that? I can't think of any other examples.
 
arthwollipot said:
Meh. I've found his acting to be pretty ordinary most of the time. I'm much more of a fan when he's off the cuff, like on his show Tabletop. That is a great show.
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Pretty much any podcast he winds up on is guaranteed to be good.

Does the science fiction genre really do that? I can't think of any other examples.
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Jarjar, Neelix, Orko, Scrappy Do, Minya, Venus Del Mio, Robin (at times), the Ewoks...
 
JoeBentley said:
Pretty much any podcast he winds up on is guaranteed to be good.
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I'll give you that.

JoeBentley said:
Jarjar, Neelix, Orko, Scrappy Do, Minya, Venus Del Mio, Robin (at times), the Ewoks...
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Okay... I'll grant that a lot of people dislike some of those characters even if I don't (and I don't recognise some of them anyway). Your point is made.
 
I don't think it's inherent in the genre, though. Well, except in as much as the writers do occasionally feel like they have free hand to not just jump the shark, but do cartwheels and somersaults over the shark. You know, supposedly to make it more interesting or alien.

Jar-Jar and generally the gungans were a spectacularly bad minstrel stereotype, and Jar Jar didn't reallly contribute anything except brain-dead antics. Seriously, even a cat doesn't stick its tongue on a live wire. How'd that species get to be sentient at all? You'd be hard pressed to find a reason to like that character even if you wanted to.

The Ewoks break suspension disbelief spectacularly, not the least by defeating tanks with sticks and stones.

Neelix is just one of the symptoms of Voyager jumping the shark, but he'd be a tolerable bit of alien colour, if not for the thing that made him super-creepy for a lot of us: his relationship with the ocampa child. He even gets to try to impregnate her at an age where it is stated point blank that it's IIRC like a third of the age where her species normally becomes fertile. In human terms, and doing the proportion, it's like impregnating a 4 year old. Not only that, but the rest of the crew is super-ok with that. And the rationale that, yeah, but she may not get to be pregnant later is... really not cutting the mustard.

But it's not the genre that makes people hate that kind of characters. The same characters would get an even worse reception if the show were set in some late 19'th century exploration setting.

A Jar Jar like brain-dead minstrel representing the locals would actually probably have a higher annoyance factor if it actually made some Filipino or African guy behave that brain-dead.

Or if you tried the Neelix stunt of making a guy from tribe A try to impregnate a girl from tribe B, who incidentally is WAAAAY underage, except with humans on a seafaring exploration ship, I think you'd see some hate that goes above and beyond what Neelix ever had.

And self-insert Garry Stu and Mary Sue characters like Wesley get dissed just as much if not more in other genres. In fact, apparently more, to the extent that a lot of people deliberately exaggerate the shortcomings (especially moral) of their characters, so they don't get dissed as Mary Sues.

If anything, it seems to me like the opposite of your point: SF gets more people to tolerate such badly written characters more than in other genres. A lot of the same people who'd be up in arms if you used a human girl instead of the fictive Ocampa with a Neelix-style character, are more likely to go, meh, it's just some aliens we don't know enough about.
 
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HansMustermann said:
BTW, about huge ships, while momentum has been mentioned already, let's put some numbers on it.

Let's take a wee little ;) ship, just a little over 240 km in length. It's barely 150 miles for you imperials. It sounds big, but it's not even the size of an Ultra Star Destroyer, which is 260km. An Ultra is what I'm basically building it to be like, but I'm going for round numbers for my back of the napkin maths. So basically 120km in each direction from the centre.

I'll also want it to be able to turn in a circle in, say, two minutes? Not very nimble. I'll even allow it to do so in the most economical way, which is to say, accelerate constantly for a minute and decelerate for another minute.

I'll aso pretend that PI is about 3, because it willl make no big difference for what I'm about to do.

Well, a full circle is 2*PI, so about 6 radians. Doing the full circle in 120 seconds, gives us an average angular velocity of about 6/120=0.05 radians/sec.

BUT we said it will accelerate half the time and decelerate the other half, so that means a top angular velocity of about 0.1/sec when it's turned 180 degrees.

BUT, now comes the fun part. Linear velocity is angular velocity times radius. Well our radius on either end of the ship is 120,000m, so we're peaking at 12,000m/s. We're accelerating to that speed in a minute, so divided by 60s, that gives us an acceleration of about 200m/s2 or about 20g. Not very easy on the crew, let's just say, nor cheap in terms of energy.

But that's not the funniest part yet. Sure, 20g is bad, but maybe you can put the crew around the middle and store the fuel and stuff at the ends where it gets that bad. But it gets funnier.

The funnier part is torque: each kilo of mass at either end, will push back with a force of 200N or so. On a lever 120,000m long. So that's 24,000,000 Nm. Yep, TWENTY FOUR MILLION. For each kilo of mass at the ends alone.

That's just short of 10 million lbft for EACH pound of mass at the ends, for you imperials.

Yeah, I'm not going to integrate that over the shape and mass of one, but you get the idea. Not sure what materials they make it of, that it doesn't even buckle, much less break as you'd expect.
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To be fair you're talking about a universe with repulsor fields so ubiquitous that cars don't even have wheels, they hover. While they're parked. And giant ships can hover instead of orbiting.

They have a pretty good handle on gravity manipulation and using that to turn a giant ship around by applying appropriate forces to its whole length isn't the most inconceivable part of star wars. Torque is only a problem if you apply all your force at one end. If you apply it everywhere as needed, big ships can move about without destroying themselves.
 
Once you allow gravity manipulation into your universe, it gives you license to make spaceships behave pretty much exactly how you want them to.
 
It depends on the universe, I guess. Antigravity is ubiquitous in SW, but not very common in ST, for example. And other universes don't have it at all, or at least some species don't have it.

Not every SF universe is star wars, is all I'm saying. I may have taken a SW ship as my random example, but it's not the only universe with huge ships, and in fact not even the universe with the biggest ships.

Edit: plus, even in SW, I don't remember the movies ever showing that they use antigrav for huge accelerations. Sure, they use 1g to keep the people on the floor, and bikes and cars can do 1g-ish (you see them used on smaller moons, but not on bigger things.) It's never stated in any movie that they use it to fight hundreds of gs.

Edit 2: we can surmise that they must have used some kind of antigrav to hold a whole city up on Bespin, although it's not explicitly stated. Well, Bespin is a wee little bit smaller than Jupiter, although it seems to have heavier gasses, so we don't really know. But we'll use the gravity in the upper layers of Jupiter as a yardstick, and IIRC that's about 2.5g. So we still have no data that requires them to be able to generate antigrav fields much stronger than that.
 
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So again I sort of have to ask is there anyway to do sci-fi the "right" way?

This thread has been on the "Never gonna make the fans happy" razor's edge for a good minute now.

At a certain point aren't just going to have to accept that you're not a fan of sci-fi as a genre instead of finding something "wrong" with every possible example of it, pretending there is some way it could be done "right" enough to satisfy you?

I get that genre fans, sci-fi fans especially, are bad about hating the things they love but there has to be a breaking point to that somewhere.
 
HansMustermann said:
Edit: plus, even in SW, I don't remember the movies ever showing that they use antigrav for huge accelerations. Sure, they use 1g to keep the people on the floor, and bikes and cars can do 1g-ish (you see them used on smaller moons, but not on bigger things.) It's never stated in any movie that they use it to fight hundreds of gs.

Edit 2: we can surmise that they must have used some kind of antigrav to hold a whole city up on Bespin, although it's not explicitly stated. Well, Bespin is a wee little bit smaller than Jupiter, although it seems to have heavier gasses, so we don't really know. But we'll use the gravity in the upper layers of Jupiter as a yardstick, and IIRC that's about 2.5g. So we still have no data that requires them to be able to generate antigrav fields much stronger than that.
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Here's the thing about the control of gravity in the SW universe. Watch the scene wherein the Falcon escapes the Death Star.




There's a subtle use of the artificial gravity there. When they first head for the turrets, Han and Luke are clearly climbing up/down the ladders. But once they get to the seats in the turrets, they're crawling along the ladders, and the gravity in the seats clearly pulls them in a "down" direction that is perpendicular to the ladders. So the gravity vector has been shifted by 90 degrees somewhere along the length of those ladders.

If they have such good control of gravity that a tramp freighter from the boondocks of the Outer Rim can play around with it that subtly, they likely can do almost anything with it.
 
There's a difference between generally being able to do X, and being able to do any amount of X, up to infinity. E.g., my cat certainly can kill, but it can't kill an elephant.

As I was saying, it's supportable from the movies that they can do antigravity up to about 2.5g. Let's say 3g. But it's equally supportable that they can't just shoot a fighter up by antigravity, or they wouldn't have thrusters. So there's some limit somewhere, where that control over gravity breaks down.
 
JoeBentley said:
So again I sort of have to ask is there anyway to do sci-fi the "right" way?

This thread has been on the "Never gonna make the fans happy" razor's edge for a good minute now.

At a certain point aren't just going to have to accept that you're not a fan of sci-fi as a genre instead of finding something "wrong" with every possible example of it, pretending there is some way it could be done "right" enough to satisfy you?

I get that genre fans, sci-fi fans especially, are bad about hating the things they love but there has to be a breaking point to that somewhere.
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Ah, THAT excuse. Life is so easy when you can do rationalizations like, oh, those guys aren't the REAL fans, only WE get it right, innit?

And "pretending"? Ooer. You should apply for Randi's million, if you're that good at knowing exactly how I ACTUALLY feel about a whole genre and what I may or may not fake :p

How about addressing my point that the exact same behaviours I criticized in some characters would actually be LESS welcome by the fans of any other genre? You know, if you're going to claim that SF fans are a different breed.


Anyway, to get to the point, I don't know about the others, but my expectation for ALL genres is: try to avoid stuff that breaks suspension of disbelief, or breaks the natural expectations (if you didn't sleep in school), unless you absolutely need it for the story. Kinda like the Chekhov's Gun principle, really.

And if IS needed, then please at least put a lampshade on it.

And I don't even care if it's SF or the Vikings or Game Of Thrones.

If an actual germanic shield wall would work just as fine as a funky Roman fulcum -- except without being an immobile anti-cavalry formation like the fulcum -- then why show the latter and pretend it's the former? That's from Vikings or, for that matter, Last Kingdom, not from some SF. Is there some story-related point in introducing that kind of inaccuracies?

Or unless changing the order of nobility ranks, so a viscount is way above a marquis, is actually going to play some role in the story, why reverse them? That's from Dragon Age Inquisition, so not exactly in space. Anyone from the UK or who paid any attention in history class in any west European country, is coming with some baggage of information about how those ranks work. At best you're asking them to do the extra effort to forget all that and learn the order of yours, and at worst you create a "wait, WHAT? A viscount is going to disown a marquis?" moment.

Does the story need that? No. Would it work any worse without that inaccuracy? No, not reallly. Then, really, WHY?

And I don't think it's that unfair a request that people at least hit Wikipedia and find out how something works or what it actually meant, before creating their own dumb BS. And I'm not even asking that they stick to the real thing. Just basically ask themselves what role is their going against reality going to play in the story, if any.

Again, no different than Checkhov's Gun as a principle. Is that gun actually going to be shot? Will it play ANY role in the actual story? If not, well, would the story work any worse if you left that gun out?

Same with reinventing reality, really.
 
Hans,
You raised many interesting points. Early on you discussed black holes and their event horizons, and the fact that given the technology of FTL travel one could even fly out from inside the event horizon. My first objection that popped into mind concerned tidal stresses, which you later addressed in the context of planetary masses. But you never went back to black holes, for which the tidal stresses near the even horizon would rip apart such a tiny object as a person. And so no spacecraft could safely pass through the event horizon; it would be nicely disassembled, even in freefall.
 
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