Starfleet Jedi

Since this is definitely an analysis topic, I'll put it here.

What scientifically implausible - or incorrect - things really bug you when they crop up in SF?

My pet peeve is when authors appeal to gravity being instantaneous, e.g., as in Weber's Honorverse, where gravitics are used to provide instant sensor data and communications. Gravity propagates at the speed of light.

The last new ep of Stargate to air in the US. One of the ancient warships can't use their hyperdrive. It's kaput or something. So, their plan is to travel as fast as they can in real space. They slow down time for themselves and thousands of years have past, since they started and the crew seems to be about the same age they were when they started. We don't see any elderly ancients. The primary problem I have is the level of energy that would have taken them to get the ship to go that fast. I'm fine with time slowing down for them and an object getting close, but not exceeding light speed...but...that's one big honkin' warship. They use reaction drives for sublight, so they're interacting with real space. Traveling at such speeds would make contact with even tiny tiny dirt blobs big problems with the ship. Even the hull of an ancient warship can be taken out by the weapons of a wraith and its hull can't take a nuke detonating in it and has shown problems against rail gun emissions from Earth ships, rail guns that are perceptively slow and actually very fast. Therefore, the idea that ancient warship hulls are supposedly super tough is out.

The shields, you say. The stronger the shields, the more power it takes. The visuals of ancient shield tech says it's a brute force stopping of attacks, however it does it. And yes, they could have multiple ZPMs, but they're only gonna have so many and these aren't ascended ancients, either. They are ancient-wraith war era ancients.

When a ZPM is dead, it can't be recharged.

Not just gravity, but pretty much everything in scifi happens in real time even though it shouldn't (the exploding stars in ST: Generations is a good example). There are exceptions, but they are used as plot devices rather than being consistent.

Also, sub-space and warp drive. A "real warp drive" bends space-time around the ship to negate relativity, but sub-space would be the domain of a tunneling FTL drive (like hyper-space).

Rail guns. Real world rail guns rip themselves apart. The viable way to magnetically accelerate a projectile is with a coil gun, also called a gauss cannon. That is the one with the tube and wire coils. Since the Governator's film Eraser, pretty much all magnetic accelerator weapons are referred to as rail guns.

Interspecies breading. It really shouldn't work most of the time. In ST at least they shared a common ancestor, but that was like 4 billion years ago so it is still a lame excuse. I can see humans, vulcans and betazoids being compatible, though everything else seems like a stretch to me.

Hubris. This is basically the explanation for why the bad guys always lose (except in Star Trek). It is the most over used literary device in scifi, even more so than deus ex machina.

That's it for now, I'm sure I'll think of some more things when I'm more awake.

GStone wrote:The last new ep of Stargate to air in the US. One of the ancient warships can't use their hyperdrive. It's kaput or something. So, their plan is to travel as fast as they can in real space. They slow down time for themselves and thousands of years have past, since they started and the crew seems to be about the same age they were when they started. We don't see any elderly ancients. The primary problem I have is the level of energy that would have taken them to get the ship to go that fast. I'm fine with time slowing down for them and an object getting close, but not exceeding light speed...but...that's one big honkin' warship. They use reaction drives for sublight, so they're interacting with real space. Traveling at such speeds would make contact with even tiny tiny dirt blobs big problems with the ship. Even the hull of an ancient warship can be taken out by the weapons of a wraith and its hull can't take a nuke detonating in it and has shown problems against rail gun emissions from Earth ships, rail guns that are perceptively slow and actually very fast. Therefore, the idea that ancient warship hulls are supposedly super tough is out.

The shields, you say. The stronger the shields, the more power it takes. The visuals of ancient shield tech says it's a brute force stopping of attacks, however it does it. And yes, they could have multiple ZPMs, but they're only gonna have so many and these aren't ascended ancients, either. They are ancient-wraith war era ancients.

When a ZPM is dead, it can't be recharged.

What bugged me the most in this episode was actually the display of a ship going much faster than the Daedalus. That is, a blur. But not a fast blur. No. One that is so sluggish that even a Wraith blast shot at the Daedalus in Pegasus Project looks millions of times faster than the Tria and its magical ZPM.

Talking about ZPMs and power, it seems people oftenly underestimate the power of such power sources.
Remember, the high end of such devices is able to destroy our solar system in just one unfocalized big blast. People talk crap about the tainting chemicals, but it's just rubbish. They can't account for the level of energy that is mentionned there, especially since these chemicals would then represent a power source and, eventually, an asset in war much more formidable than even naqahdria, not even talking about naqahdah.
There's still the low end reference for the ZPM that says it could destroy a whole planet in its entirety just by overloading and exploding.

Sounds big, but it's not when you compare this to the Tollans and the power source they gave to their intrastellar neighbours, which once it exploded literally destroyed Sarita and kicked Tolla off its axis by a few degress. Only that.

And it'd be logical that, if there was some kind of containment field or something to keep the supposed huge amount of energy inside, while not making the container extremely radioactive, they'd use it on the outside of all their stuff: buildings, jumpers, the walls of the gate room...but they don't...even if it was a material property and not a self-generating energy field.

I should say on the plus side for Weber's Honorverse, he does try to treat physics fairly well.

There are a lot of things, I suppose.

Tie Fighters buzzing like Messerschmidt's - and this in space!

When Soran launched the trilithium missile in Generations. Picard looks up, watches the missile go... and suddenly the sun goes dark. They have to wait for, what, 15 minutes until the shock wave travels from the sun to the planet, a shock wave which travels at the speed of light, but apparently the light is much faster than light...