Armageddon (and other) Silliness

[Cocytus]

I read that NASA uses the movie Armageddon as a training video to see if their newbies can pick out all the things that are wrong with it. NASA identified 168 scientific inaccuracies. Some of these can be found pretty easily on Google, but I've yet to see a complete list. We're all nerds here, so how well can we do?

The movie is available on Youtube in 14 pieces.

1. During the intro scene with the Chicxulub impactor, the coastline is wrong. You can clearly see Cuba and the Yucatan Peninsula, neither of which existed 65 million years ago.

2. Charlton Heston describes the impact as being the force of "10,000 nuclear weapons." The most powerful nuke we ever detonated, Tsar Bomba, produced 57 megatons. At 100 teratons, Chicxulub was about 2 million times more powerful. So the smallest figure one could use and still be correct is 2 million nuclear weapons.

3. The asteroid itself is all kinds of wrong. It's described as being "the size of Texas." There's no asteroid that size in the belt. Texas is 790 miles at its widest point. The largest asteroid, Ceres, is only 590 miles across.

4. Dan Truman (Billy Bob Thornton) says a rogue comet hit the asteroid belt, thus sending the asteroid toward us. The largest comets we've identified are far smaller than the stated size of the asteroid.

5. The asteroid, being the size that it is, should be spherical.

6. Truman states there are only 9 telescopes in the world that could spot the asteroid before it arrives. It should be easily visible even to the naked eye as it approaches for anyone who watches the sky regularly.

7. Splitting the asteroid as shown in the film, with the consequent acceleration of its halves away from the planet, would require vastly more power than every nuclear weapon on earth could generate.

8. Planting a weapon 800 feet deep on an asteroid 790 miles across is so shallow as to be meaningless. You might as well detonate it on the surface.

9. Spinning the space station in the manner shown would be useless. Being at opposite ends of the station, the people in the shuttles would be walking on the ceiling. The station is simply not designed to be spun for simulated gravity (unlike the one in 2001).

10. The asteroid and its attendant debris is moving at 22,000 miles an hour, well above escape velocity for the moon. The moon should only intercept the debris which is pointed right at it. Everything else will be slightly perturbed but will sail past (as it indeed does in the movie).

11. Speaking of debris, why in the hell is there so much of it anyway. If this thing was struck by a rogue comet, 22,000 mph is vastly greater than escape velocity for the asteroid, so why is it trailing debris at all?

12. The shuttles bank in space.

13. There's fire in space when the one shuttle crashes.

14. The drillers never use the thruster suits for their stated purpose of moving around in low gravity. Instead they walk around like normal.

15. Not only that, they walk around inside the shuttle just like normal, even though they're in a reduced-g field.

16. Why are they drilling at an angle? That will just add extra depth.

17. Both Ben Affleck and Steve Buscemi's characters fire rotary cannons in space. Since gunpowder and primer both contain oxidizer they wouldn't require external oxygen to ignite, but there wouldn't be a muzzle flash as seen.

18. As the crew are pulling the tubing out of the hole, they're heaving it all into a pile, and it falls as it would in normal gravity. It should go sailing off a considerable distance.

There are many more. Anybody got any others, or ones from other movies you think are particularly egregious?

[Picard]

8. Planting a weapon 800 feet deep on an asteroid 790 miles across is so shallow as to be meaningless. You might as well detonate it on the surface.

I think we can ignore point 3 as it really doesn't make sense and assume that asteroid is some 1600 - 2000 feet in diameter.

On the other hand, bomb was not supposed to split asteroid but to change its course, if memory serves me well, so yes, they could have left it at surface.

[Mike DiCenso]

19.) There are so many things to list about that movie... For one thing, they were attempting to deflect the "asteroid" so close to Earth with literally hours to spare is so stupid to defy any rational explanation. Even if they had a nuke big enough to split it, it would not be enough to change the delta-v the two pieces enough to miss the Earth, and instead of one big impact site, you'd have two.

20.) Rockhound's "Space madness"? Come on.

21.) An asteroid that big would be spotted by nearly every telescope on Earth or in Earth orbit, not just a few, like Hubble.

22.) The asteroid took only 18 days to get from the asteroid belt to Earth? Yikes! That puppy is pulling a good fraction of light speed! But it remained detectable to only a few telescopes you say, but see #21. The asteroid had a pretty good albedo, so it should have been discovered long before it was ever knocked out of the asteroid belt. Which gets us to....

23.) Anything powerful enough to knock an asteroid out of it's orbit in the belt so quickly would likely have blown the asteroid to bits, and would have been easily detectable just about any telescope, optical and especially to microwave. Hell, people would have seen it from the ground unaided!

24.) The second military shuttle takes off later then the first, they are neck and neck when they clear the atmosphere.

25.) : During the scene where it shows people all over the world, just before the shuttles take off, it is daylight everywhere. It would actually be dark or near dark in parts of the world.

26.) After crashing on the asteroid, A.J. walks outside surveying the wreckage while debris is strewn out burning on the ground. This is wrong, as oxygen is needed to make something burn, and there is no oxygen on the asteroid.

27.) A.J. gets dirt on his face although he is wearing a fully sealed spacesuit.

28.) Drilling only 800 feet into the asteroid to plant the nuke in such a massive asteroid is useless for splitting it. They may as well have detonated the nuke on the surface for all that it would matter.

28.) Various sounds and fires in the near-vacuum of space. I suppose you could count each time that happens as an individual error.... In which case there are most of your 168 errors.

29.) Prepping the two military shuttles in such a short time.

30.) Speaking of shuttles, using winged LEO ferry craft to get to the asteroid is silly as all hell and grossly inefficient with all that extra weight of wings, landing gear, etc.

Anyway, this is all I'm willing to go into right now.
-Mike

[Praeothmin]

Ben affleck as an action movie lead... :)

[Picard]

OK, how many points stop being nonsensical if we ignore "size of Texas" statement?

[Mike DiCenso]

Pick a more realistic asteroid size, say no more than 5-6 km, then a good number of the problems go away and you can have the two shuttles "dock" with the asteroid rather than "land" on it. A lot of the goofy hardware also goes away as well, and the use of a 50-100 megaton nuke or the combined yield of several nukes is enough to shatter the asteroid in small pieces that will mostly harmlessly burn up in the atmosphere.

You also need to drop the insane relativistic velocity of the asteroid and like "Deep Impact", make it months before impact. Or just make the asteroid much smaller, say 1 km, and then have it's albedo low enough that it could be somewhat believable that it was missed when just a month or two out, and gives more realistic prep and training time with which you can milk for a lot of drama ala "Marooned".
-Mike

[Picard]

Thanks.

[Cocytus]

On the topic of "other silliness:"

I was rewatching the final cut of Blade Runner the other day and it hit me: How the hell did Roy Batty get anywhere near the Tyrell building?

He and his group are wanted criminals. They slaughtered 23 people and stole a shuttle. They've tried to penetrate Tyrell Corp twice: first a straight break-in, during which two of them died, and secondly attempting to infiltrate as employees, which is when Holden gets shot by Leon. Bryant shows Deckard the mugshots and info on the replicants. Now, with all that in mind, how did Roy Batty get anywhere near the building.

I can explain Leon's getting into the building for his interview simply by Tyrell Corp being overconfident or lax in their security. But after Leon nearly murdered a man, one would think they'd beef it up. The building has to have hundreds of thousands of people working in it. Okay, security for such a massive structure would require a small army, but Tyrell Corp's unfathomable resources should easily provide for one. The Blade Runners are on the hunt, their mugshots have been given to the police, and Tyrell Corp should certainly have detailed files on its own products. Even if security trusted Sebastian, they should have been screening everyone who tried to get in. Hell, a specialized company with so many contracts should have massive security just because. Each and every employee punching it, each and every visitor extensively screened. I can't just waltz into the Empire State Building and walk up to the deck. I have to go through security, have a ticket, etc. And the ESB doesn't exactly have a satellite office for DARPA. Cameras should have seen Roy, people should have gone "hey wait just a minute." Their mugshots should be everywhere in that building, or at least plastered all over every security office for the people who watch cameras. They don't even have to have people. Computers with facial recognition software would do just fine.

Maybe Sebastian and Batty snuck into the building somehow, maybe through sewers or something. But that doesn't really work since the elevator they take to Tyrell's rooms is obviously monitored. It's stopped mid-ascent, and Sebastian has to play mind chess with Tyrell himself to get up. So they know Sebastian's trying to see Tyrell, therefore there ought to be some record of Sebastian entering the building. And if not, someone should have said "hey wait just a minute."

So how the hell did Roy Batty get anywhere near the building? To say nothing of into an elevator bound for the CEO's penthouse?