SF Stuff that Really Annoys You!

[psikeyhackr]

I have a bit of an issue with single ecosphere planets.

I don't know if I can express my annoyance with Star Wars in this thread since I do not regard it as SF.

 

[JunkMonkey]

! To be able to skip around like in Star Trek you’d need to be doing hundreds or even thousands of times the speed of light, surely.

There is so much of Star Trek that annoys me. An episode of TNG I watched the other night had Jean-Luc's 'Filling in the audience on what happened before the commercial break log' telling us the Enterprise was en-route to "GreekName-GreekName LowNumber' solar system - just over four point two light years away," while lots and lots of stars zoomed past the ship - suggesting, to me at least, that stars in that 'quadrant' were very very close together and/or very very numerous and/or very very small.

 

[JunkMonkey]

I don't know if I can express my annoyance with Star Wars in this thread since I do not regard it as SF.

Go on. You know you want to...

(It'll give me an excuse to join in!)

 

[Brian G Turner]

There is so much of Star Trek that annoys me. An episode of TNG I watched the other night had Jean-Luc's 'Filling in the audience on what happened before the commercial break log' telling us the Enterprise was en-route to "GreekName-GreekName LowNumber' solar system - just over four point two light years away," while lots and lots of stars zoomed past the ship - suggesting, to me at least, that stars in that 'quadrant' were very very close together and/or very very numerous and/or very very small.

I figure those can't be stars you see moving by, but instead dust and rocks and anything else that happens to get illuminated. Otherwise Trek ships would be travelling at something like 5 light years/second, and that would be completely inconsistent with what they actually tell us!

 

[Bick]

Really?

I get 2.5 million ly is 157,783,680,000 AU.

0.0000000006%

OK, Data can handle that but he is trying to be human so he has to practice sarcasm.

Sarcastic androids annoy me too.

Ah, yes million light years… I calculated light years

 

[Bick]

There is so much of Star Trek that annoys me. An episode of TNG I watched the other night had Jean-Luc's 'Filling in the audience on what happened before the commercial break log' telling us the Enterprise was en-route to "GreekName-GreekName LowNumber' solar system - just over four point two light years away," while lots and lots of stars zoomed past the ship - suggesting, to me at least, that stars in that 'quadrant' were very very close together and/or very very numerous and/or very very small.

And all the stars are bright white in color. Surely the Doppler effect from relative motion exceeding light speed would affect the observable wavelength (or something similar, which a physicist could explain properly). Wouldn’t the stars that the ship rushes past be in the far ultraviolet (and be unobservable) ahead of the ship, and go into the far infra-red ( and be unobservable) as the ship whipped past them, with appearance in the visible spectrum only occurring for a very, very short time, as they were ‘level’ with the ship?

 

[Bramandin]

I figure those can't be stars you see moving by, but instead dust and rocks and anything else that happens to get illuminated. Otherwise Trek ships would be travelling at something like 5 light years/second, and that would be completely inconsistent with what they actually tell us!

And that effect was expensive, as in any excuse to bring them out of warp.

Nothing about Sci-Fi really annoys me because I can't tell what's realistic, however I think we're done a disservice with ships having to bank when they're not in an atmosphere. Babylon 5 seemed to have ships turning in relation to their direction of travel and then fire thrusters to send them in a new direction.

 

[Pyan]

I figure those can't be stars you see moving by, but instead dust and rocks and anything else that happens to get illuminated. Otherwise Trek ships would be travelling at something like 5 light years/second, and that would be completely inconsistent with what they actually tell us!

I've always thought they were the bits of debris that the deflector dish has um... deflected.

 

[psikeyhackr]

Ah, yes million light years… I calculated light years

No no, Andromeda won't collide with the Milky Way for a couple of billion years.

 

[Fiberglass Cyborg]

There is so much of Star Trek that annoys me. An episode of TNG I watched the other night had Jean-Luc's 'Filling in the audience on what happened before the commercial break log' telling us the Enterprise was en-route to "GreekName-GreekName LowNumber' solar system - just over four point two light years away," while lots and lots of stars zoomed past the ship - suggesting, to me at least, that stars in that 'quadrant' were very very close together and/or very very numerous and/or very very small.

I'm more tolerant of such things now, but as a teenager I saw most TV and film SF as garbage because of its scientific illiteracy.

 

[M. Robert Gibson]

I have a bit of an issue with single ecosphere planets.

Following on from this, one annoyance is alien planets that have a single government/emperor/president/whatever they call their supreme leader. Have they really managed to unite a whole world under one ruler? OK, sometimes there's rebels involved, but still...

And they all seem to have a single religion. I suppose if they can have a single ruler, then maybe that ruler could decree a religion

And for some reason, a lot of aliens/future humans wear robes and cloaks and not just for ceremonial purposes, but for everyday wear.
Even soldiers wear cloaks, which I imagine in the heat of battle are actually a serious encumbrance.
I'm sure any advanced civilisation would have their equivalent to jeans and t-shirts, or business suits.

 

[JunkMonkey]

I'm still trying to work out why the Enterprise needed a galley in the 6th movie when they've been happily eating food that comes out of 'replicators' for several decades. And why does the galley have a gun rack? I told my kids phasers have three settings: Stun, Kill, and Crème brûlée.

And don't get me started on "The Holodeck".

One of my real bugbears though is the 'Prison Planet', 'Penal Colony' or just about any totally unimaginative 'futuristic' prison that is merely every American penal system movie cliche turned up to 11 on an 'unescapable' asteroid or in an 'unescapable' super-facility. Alcatraz in space. It dooms whatever movie it is in to being sh*t; it's inevitable.

The only interestingly different 'future prisons' I can think of are Robert Sheckley's Status Civilization in which, basically, shiploads after shiploads of offenders are just dropped on the surface of a habitable planet and told to fend for themselves. "Come back when your sentence is up - if you survive that long - and we'll take you off".

Deadlock (aka Wedlock) - a 1991 film starring Rutger Hauer in which the prison is just a perimeter line painted on the ground. Prisoners are all fitted with that standard pulp device the exploding collar. The gimmick here being that each of the collars is linked with another in pairs. No one knows which collar is linked with which. If the collars get too far away from each other BOTH explode. The perimeter line is the safe area. Step outside and there is no guarantee your 'partner' is near enough to prevent you from instantly dying. Stay inside and you are safe. The prisoners are forced to become their own warders preventing their fellow inmates from escaping and possibly killing them in the process.

 

[Ursa major]

The only interestingly different 'future prisons' I can think of are Robert Sheckley's Status Civilization in which, basically, shiploads after shiploads of offenders are just dropped on the surface of a habitable planet and told to fend for themselves. "Come back when your sentence is up - if you survive that long - and we'll take you off".

There was, in ST-DS9, that alien prison where the prisoners were kept for a very short period (a few hours) but felt that they had experienced a 20-year sentence (or something like that). Chief O'Brien was one of the prisoners.

The episode was called Hard Time.

 

[Bramandin]

And they all seem to have a single religion. I suppose if they can have a single ruler, then maybe that ruler could decree a religion

Alien Nation actually had a line about the human being surprised that the Newcomers had more than one religion. Since it was a single slave ship like District 9, it wouldn't have been a stretch to have a monoculture.

the Enterprise was en-route to "GreekName-GreekName LowNumber' solar system

I was under the impression that Federation designations were orbital bodies and the number was which one. Like we'd be Sol-3

 

[farntfar]

And all the stars are bright white in color. Surely the Doppler effect from relative motion exceeding light speed would affect the observable wavelength (or something similar, which a physicist could explain properly). Wouldn’t the stars that the ship rushes past be in the far ultraviolet (and be unobservable) ahead of the ship, and go into the far infra-red ( and be unobservable) as the ship whipped past them, with appearance in the visible spectrum only occurring for a very, very short time, as they were ‘level’ with the ship?

There isn't any problem with a star still appearing white when you're travelling at such speeds.
We think of a star as being a Red Giant or a Blue Dwarf or whatever, but only when we restrict ourselves to thinking purely of its visible emissions. Stars generally emit infra-red and ultra-violet and other bits of the EM spectrum as well.

So some of its infra-red or ultra-violet emissions (etc.) could be shifted into our visible spectrum (depending on our relative motion) at the same time that its normally visible emissions are shifted out of it.

 

[psikeyhackr]

Science fiction is almost as annoying as the universe.

How Many Stars Are Within 10,000 Light-Years of Earth?

We've counted how many stars are within 10,000 light-years of Earth in 100 light-year intervals. You'll be shocked how many you can see with the naked eye!

lovethenightsky.com

Maybe we should just ban research outside of the galaxy.

 

[Ursa major]

Maybe we should just ban research outside of the galaxy.

Given that we haven't developed FTL travel (yet), that seems somewhat premature....

 

[JunkMonkey]

Given that we haven't developed FTL travel (yet), that seems somewhat premature....

It would be nice to have a regulatory framework ready for when we do though. If we play it right it could keep an awful lot of lawyers safely busy doing something pointless and not screwing it for the rest of us for a few years.

 

[Alex The G and T]

Isn't there already an international treaty which says that no single nation can claim to own the Moon, or Antarctica or... Hoboken or... I dunno?.... Magrathea?

 

[psikeyhackr]

Pull US troops out of Hoboken!