Overused Silly Sci-Fi Science.

[GreenMonkey]

Originally Posted by sabredog

Captain Sheridan and Security Chief Garibaldi had a long conversation next to each other whilst using a urinal during an episode of babylon 5. The camera panned out and showed lots of public "little rooms" for all manner of alien races.

JMS went to a lot of effort to stick to real science when possible. Beam weapons that seem to travel at the speed of light. Ships that keep going with inertia even when the engines are off. The station itself rotates to provide gravity. Ships launched from the station with centrifugal force. Etc.

He said he couldn't get the silent-space thing to fly for a TV show. IIRC he said something like he self-justified the noise that when ships explode, there would be atmosphere there blowing up, so if you were close enough you could have heard something The reality was, you couldn't have silent space battles and have it fly on TV.

[sabredog]

Originally Posted by dworth

"How come humans aren't ever the evil overlord race slaving everyone?"

In the Warhammer 40,000 universe, the Imperium of Man is a galaxy-wide totalitarian regime run by xenophobic religious zealots.

Somehow, incanting a ritual of opening every time I wanted to use my ereader seems a tad stupid. Placate the restless spirit of my Sony? Hmmmm....

The series offers good reading though

[Shiromi]

Originally Posted by sabredog

Especially the roadrunner/loony tunes scenes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuFNZJe6PSM

That's pretty hilarious, I like that! As far as bad science goes... my fav must be in Look at the Princess part 2 when Crichton does his crazy space walk sans any kind of gear. Never mind silly things like the vacuum of space...

[pholy]

Farscape lost me in the very first episode when our intrepid test pilot got sucked into an obviously alien spaceship, comes to rest on the flight deck, and immediately takes his helmet off and pops his cockpit open!

Shortly thereafter he calculates a slingshot orbit using chalk on the bridge deck! Oh my?

[Penforhire]

Don't forget the microbe translator he was injected with. You have to like "teh silly" and soft SF (as opposed to hard) to enjoy Farscape.

[morriss003]

Originally Posted by EileenG

And of course, all aliens are humanoid mammals, perhaps with a sligltly different shape of nose, who find humans interesting and sexy. They are all able to speak English. Females all have two breasts, but strangely, rarely use them to feed babies.

I noticed how all those Earthlings on the Stargate planets speak modern English.

[QuantumIguana]

I don't really mind sound from the spaceships in space, so long as they characters don't hear it.

Why is it that the aliens, no matter how alien they are, always are attracted to human females. Like Jabba the Hutt making Leia wear that skimpy slave girl outfit. A Hutt isn't any more likely to find a human female sexy than a human would be to find a Hutt female sexy.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

So, you're the expert on the sexual preferences of Hutts, now? Star Wars surely should have cemented a new name, "science fantasy," into our lexicon, to describe soft SF (and barely-SF) once and for all.

[RobertLCollins]

All I have to say is, this is a fun thread to read!

[GlennD]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

I would've loved a moment on the original Star Trek episode The Doomsday Machine, when Kirk and co beam over to the "dead" USS Constellation: If the gravity had been dead, the guys could've beamed over, immediately gone adrift, and someone (McCoy, probably) could've said, "Oh, crap."

It could also be interesting to deal with the consequences of losing artificial gravity during battle manuevering - presumably artificial gravity is what allows the contents of a vessel to ignore intertia.

[QuantumIguana]

I would think that artificial gravity and inertial dampers are closely related. They are systems that you would want to have their own power. Life support, you can do without for a time, but in battle, a failure of inertial dampers would kill you. But inertial dampers may not be tital nonsense. When you accelerate in your car, you are pushed back into your seat, because the car is being accelerated, but you are only being accelerated indirectly, the seat pushes you forward. But if the whole car was accelerated, you wouldn't feel it. When we want to speed up a space probe, we can sling it around Jupiter. It picks up speed, and Jupiter rotates a very, very tiny bit slower. The thing is, every atom in that space probe is being accelerated simultaneously, so you wouldn't feel the acceleration. If there were a way to build an engine that could do that, you could have rockets that would allow you to have significant acceleration without being squished into your chair.

One funny thing is on TV, a shape ship in orbit will rapidly fall out of orbit when its engines fail. In reality, it would stay in orbit for years, the higher up, the longer it would stay.

Another funny thing is that on TV, when life support fails, people begin to die immediately. In reality, it would take a while before they even began to notice that the air was getting stuffy.

[Penforhire]

Well... even today the pilot (human) limits fighter jet performance. In the far future it is hard to imagine battles would not be fought with autonomous drones if any manuevering caused an advantage.

Given a similar level of technology and power source, you design a human ship with inertial dampers and I'll design an autonomous drone ship. Your ship will consume too much mass and power while still being less nimble. I'll have more mass for engines, shields/armor, and weapons. Then again, there was that Star Trek TOS episode with the "suicide mission" ship that attacked an Enterprise full of diplomats...

[QuantumIguana]

Perhaps, but I'll just recite a paradox to your autonomous drone, and it will explode.

Seriously, it all depends on how smart your drones are. Humans have advantages too. A human on Mars could do more science than the rovers we send there. It's just a whole lot cheaper to send rovers.

[sabredog]

Originally Posted by GlennD

It could also be interesting to deal with the consequences of losing artificial gravity during battle manuevering - presumably artificial gravity is what allows the contents of a vessel to ignore intertia.

They depicted a battle in 0G in Star Trek 6 - The Unknown Country, where the Klingon Leader was killed by assassins wearing magnetic boots. Quite well done.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by QuantumIguana

If there were a way to build an engine that could do that, you could have rockets that would allow you to have significant acceleration without being squished into your chair.

Aye. And if me grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon.