I was going to let this one go but since I wrote it up I'll give it a try. I may just decide to give up after this one, so feel free to reply or not as you choose.
Sea Skimmer wrote:The board died because of the senate fiasco in my opinion which started the ball rolling down, though the vs mentality being applied to N&P certainly didn't help. Also every time school semesters started again we had a net outflow of members for a long time which is just life. The actual sci fi vs. debate seemed awful secondary. In any event, I am still around in no small part because of some personal connections that run longer and deeper then this place itself, so maybe I shrug off more then others.
I only really stick around for the 40K stuff, and I avoid N&P like the plague. But the senate stuff, the fallout between the testing and all that other 'factional' shit was simply a symptom of the larger problem. I suspect the board 'got along' as long as it had someone to unify and direct its aggression towards. During the SW vs ST days it was other trekkies (like Darkstar), after that there were still other warsies to fight over, but once that was all gone and N&P and other 'nonfiction' became more dominant that's when the infighting started in. People obviously have different views/opinions/beliefs, but this is a board stemming from logic and science and argument over whose position is 'right', and in stuff like politics and religion and other 'personal' issues its going to always be messy.
The simple fact is the board has always stressed more of an 'adversarial' nature, but its never been very clear cut on what 'stupidity' is (even though that's one of the pillars of the forum as well.) and so if you get people going with their individual version of 'stupidity' or how the board 'should be' or whatever.. you're going to get conflict. Part of it too I suspect is simply that people conflate criticims with bashing far too much, and that creates even more communication problems (either because someone misinterprets criticism AS Bashing or hate, or because someone things going 'ha ha trek is stupid' is actually criticism.)
Reasons exist why I tend to focus my criticisms on blatant design problems that basically exist independent of specific numbers. But when it gets time to get specific, you work from known points and see what happens.
Yeah and that can kind of create problems, because people don't look at this shit the same way, and 'diffrence of opinion' is not automatically 'someone is irrational.' YEs, sometimes people do use stupid arguments to justify shit - I grow tired of people who trot out tropes or RULE OF COOl to justify stupidly huge firepower for 40K, because that isn't consistent. But on the other hand people argue over SW firepower for very good reasons. I mean the ICS says that all those ground forces in AOTC have nuclear-grade firepower, antipersonnal weapons that put out gigajoules of energy at max, shit like that... its rather hard to justify that when you actually WATCH Geonoisis, isn't it?
Same with ship to ship firepower figures. Some actually view the ICS as 'bad' because they think the firepower figures present scientific and logic problems relative to the rest of the setting - does that mean they're 'fucking illogical idiots', or is it they have an opinion different from the ICS? Hell *I* don't even believe as fanatically in the ICS numbers as I used to.
I could go on and on, but there's lots of examples I've had, personally, from doing my own math and analysis shit in SW, ST and lots others, where its more than just 'one side right, one side wrong.'
Again the whole 'criticism vs bashing' thing can come in here, because its not always clear to me which you think YOU'RE doing. Sometimes it comes off as it you're just outright bashing it (and that has shaped my reactions, I'll admit) but for all I know you think its just criticism and you're a very blunt person about it.
As I said, premise, unless all evidence is in utter contradiction with itself anyway. FTL, say SW hyperdrive, will never work, but we can still apply something liek the scientific method to conclude for example from the evidence in the EU ect, that faster/more powerful ones have a greater ship impact then slower ones, that fuel is required and ergo more performance will require more fuel. Now if you have a universe in which it is proclaimed that more energy takes less fuel, and that say, going faster actually makes travel take longer, and the vokda powered diesel engines are sucking air out of hard vacuum, then we have a real problem that may defy any useful examination.
But thats the thing. We apply a 'modified' version of the scientific method.. but how is it modified? I dont think there's an objective standard to how its actually applied. I've liked Mike's approach because it is largely consistent and doesn't require much modification.. but it has still required modification to deal with visuals (which he himself has admitted - inconsistent ship sizes, etc.) but that doens't mean its the ONLY or the BEST way to analyze all of sci fi, either. It's what HE developed to deal with STar Wars and Star Trek, that's all.
Likewise, it also depends on how the evidence is viewed. On this board its often assumed 'EU is largely crap except for the bits we find convenient' and while thats a less flattering view, its essentially true because thats precisely what I used to do - and the ICS was paramount. And for a while it was, and even canon agreed. But over time the 'canon' has diverged much from what SoD advocated.. nowadays (at least prior to the Disney buyout) SoD style analysis ran actually CONTRARY to canon (because of the whole GTCSN crap). So how do you resolve that?
Another good example is something as 'simple' as 'firepower'. traditionally we define it as 'which side has more joules behind its guns than others' yet that's an absurdly simplistic way to go about it. Mechanical damage mechanisms are generally more efficient than thermal, so a weapon with lower energy (but more mechanical damage) could actually BE as destructive, or more. Or lets say you have a burn ray thta puts out lots more energy than a bullet. So much more.. that it cauterizes the wound it makes, preventing bleeding. But bleeding is rather a useful mechanism for stopping a living being, is it not? It would make more sense to blow a bigger hole in the target than burn them to death but... still you get heat rays (esp in Star Wars.)
You can look at it one of two ways: lots of energy is 'very powerful' or its 'fucking inefficient' depending on how the weapon works, but its also much more complex than just 'energy attack points depleting HP shield points' like some sort of video game.
You mean the grate in the cell block? I'd argue that if you have a clear contradiction like that, revise the assumption of what was vaporized for starters and look for ways to reduce the energy to something more plausible. What caused you to conclude it was metal, or whatever material you concluded it was? Maybe that grate was made of plastic and not metal, and maybe the vaporization actually was mostly micro scale fragmentation (this is real and all) that was directed down the presumably more strongly made chute by a directional impact. Maybe that grate was purely for safety, and not some armored security feature, since after all it simply leads to a death trap trash compactor in a hallway that normally has multiple armed guards. Stuff like this is certainly a time when argument is damn useful, because people do indeed take different interpretations, but that does not mean all interpretations are equally good when thought about. That is perhaps where we are in conflict. I don't think everything can be resolved, but I do think some things can be ruled out.
The people doing the calc actually use the same SoD style approach that Mike does (and from some information derived from Curtis as well WRT temperature and shit, as I recall.) There's apparently useful math behind it too, even though by that same methodology I find it improbable the way its described. Largely same methodology, different views on the evidence. And technically you probably COULD find some way to handwave a huge yield into it (just not by vaporization), but the question is - do you really NEED to and is that really the best thing for the situation? Again getting back to how 'energy' is viewed in the context of firepower and shit.
And indeed, I dislike a very large fraction sci fi ships that make it into movies and TV, all the more so because the internet is fucking awash in unpaid concept art for better designs that still look cool; but that didn't come up here until now. I do believe we'd had at least one thread on 'worst ships in sci fi' before. Maybe its time for another.
Please no. SB is already bloated with shit like that, and I find it non-helpful because it leads sci fi fans to think they KNOW more than the authors do, and thus they're more intelligent automatically. That's dangerous when it comes to analysis when you start thinking you know more, and thus can dictate what sci fi is. That's precisely part of the problem with the 'Hard sci fi' aspect of things - there's this perception that everything has been 'figured out' in some sort of coherent, structured way, when its just a bunch of guys deciding they think it might work out best this way (and which changes whenever one of those people changes their mind.) Its actually kind of amusing because that describes the whole SDN style 'Supsension of disbelief' stuff to a T as well.
But that's largely a value judgement, and it still doesn't impact on 'having to rationalize something even if its stupid' which is supposed to be what SoD is about. applying logic to something that is viewed as inherently illogical, to the best of your ability. That people can't always agree on what that 'logic' is does not change it, but it does complicate matters.
Somehow I think that yes, adding giant anchors onto your space fighter is just an extra kind of stupid. Like I keep saying, why ever walk when you can fly? Its like the number one dream of militaries that everything could fly and would fly all the time.
Same issue actually came up with the STarfuries because the thrusters on the ends look ridiculously huge compared to the cockpit itself (Brian used to argue this against the 'realism' of the design, I recall.) And yes, adding extra weight is bad, but whether its stupid or not can depend on the varaibles/assumptions. For example, is the weight added significant relative to the rest of the vehicle? Is the performance gain as a result worthwhile (or can it even be exploited? Not all fighters have magic 'acceleration nullifying' handwave, after all.) So what you're actually saying is 'Fighter with limbs is less effective than specialized design without' which is true, but whether that is stupid or not is going to depend on how you view those things. Its stupid to you, but that doesn't mean its stupid to someone else.
The Star Wars fighters are utterly nonsensical before we even think about any firepower issues, but hell at least they actually follow some logic like smaller more compact ones with bigger engines are able to go faster.
the smaller ones in the movies hardly seem to move any faster than the bigger ones (Prequel vs OT ones) - heck, they ALL move vastly slower than their purported acceleration figures if you haven't noticed (because its trying to go for that 'dogfight' vibe, out of universe.) We could probably 'explain' it, but it can also be viewed as 'fucking stupid' because they're under-uitlizing the capabilities of those craft, don't you think?
I hardly think this is unique to me, that some sci fi simply comes across as better thought out and designed within its own context, no matter how nonsensical it really is.
Again depends on who you ask. There are people who rave about the 'logic' of sci fi that has all sorts of super-uber powerful power armour (some of which actually is powerful enough to damage starships) and think thats the only case you could have for a 'proper' nuclear battlefield (one reason why SW numbers are 'wrong' I might add - cF Darksaber) and yet that paradigm of combat is utterly fucking stupid to me (Why would you bother with over-engineering your power armour to attack starships?)
But you've already gone and pointed out that in universe it still doesn't actually make much sense. I can accept stuff a lot more when its at least internally consistent. That at least provides some kind of solid basis to think about it from.
Again, it depends on your definition of 'sense'. People spend pages arguing Star Wars with ICS yields does not MAKE SENSE because of science, and some of them actually have some very good reasons. But this board has long held the opposite view... so whose is right and whose is the 'illogicla, moronic' view? Its all a matter of degree and how much bullshit an individual is willing to put up with/explain away for a given franchise. For stuff we like or even don't care about we might ignore alot of stupid shit or try to justify it. For stuff we don't like... not so much.
