Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
I wouldn't class it as Space Opera, just as badly done science fiction.
|
Yes, when the spacecraft fly like airplanes while in space appears in otherwise "realistic" SF it just signals "bad author, bad author, no donut!", and it annoys me. In true Space Opera I expect such things and they don't disturb.
One in the "Bad SF" errors that I found laughable, even as a kid during the first run, is the repeated crisis of the "decaying orbit" in Star Trek/TFG. Here's an otherwise sensible SF structure (space craft that are true spacecraft and not single surface-to-interstellar space vehicles like the steel behemoths often seen in 1950s pulp, ...) where the navigators can't place the craft in a high enough orbit so that the decay rate is measured in decades or centuries instead hours, which would mean they were actually skimming the very high atmosphere.