Quote:
Originally Posted by nyrath
Years ago I got tired with all the email I got, which were all along the lines of "but maybe a scientific breakthrough will allow it, they thought man would never fly..." Now I just direct them to another section of my website.
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3al.html |
This is a great link. I just read the whole thing.
A couple of quotes from the link:
"Imagine a historical fiction novel where Napoleon at Waterloo defeated the knights of the Round Table by using the Enola Gay to drop an atom bomb. It's OK because it is "fiction", right?"
and:
"However, to make an analogy... How would you react to a game that purported to be about, say, Marines and their tactics and utilizations that insisted that the best formation for them to attack in was walking on their hands, with their rifles clenched between their knees, shoulder to shoulder, in tight formations, through beaten zones for artillery strikes and into machine gun kill zones?
Would you accept it if I told you that this was the result of a heretofore unknown doctrinal innovation made at some point 600 years in the future?
Or, would you demand to know WHAT doctrinal innovation made this the best way to conduct an assault with Marines on the ground?"
Reminded me of a rant I made about how movies reflect horribly poor science eduction on the part of everyone involved in making the movie. This particular rant was in reference to the (at the time unreleased) movie 2012-- but the same could apply to pretty much everything that comes out of Hollywood. I had to search it down (originally posted at
www.cgsociety.org, a site for computer graphics artists and wannabes-- I'm strictly a wannabe):
"Let's pick an analogy to this. Say you make a WWII movie. Nobody will (or should) complain that there were no actual soldiers central to the plot of the movie going by those names in those specific battles-- it is perfectly okay to invent the characters for your setting. But if you have all of the American soldiers fighting using Uzis with laser sights, you better have a damn good, plot centric, explained reason why those soldiers are using Uzis with laser sights and it not simply be because you didn't know that Uzis and laser sights hadn't been invented in WWII.
What 2012 is doing is the equivalent of giving those soldiers Uzis with laser sights and mounting them on 20-foot tall cyborg battle-elephants from which they fight the Nazi Flying Death Monkeys and their Telekenetic Venusian Bloodsnail allies. And when people complain that, in WWII, soldiers did not use Uzis with laser sights, ride cyborg battle-elephants, and fight Nazi Flying Death Monkeys and Telekenetic Venusian Bloodsnails, others (after being shocked to find out that none of that is true because of their failed basic educations) tell you "it is just a movie maaaaaaan. Turn off your brain and enjoy it.""