Worst sci-fi science gaffes?

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2002-07-11 07:56pm

What's the worst?

"Armageddon" has an asteroid the size of Texas (orders of magnitude bigger than the dino-killer) that gets blown cleanly in half by a tiny nuke (which accelerates each piece to hundreds of km/s!)
"ID4" has aliens who travel across the galaxy to strip-mine the Earth for minerals found on thousands of barren planets they passed during their trip here. And if that isn't enough, their starships have open listening ports, they use modern wireless LAN cards, and they run on MacOS.
Star Trek has too many problems to count, but here's my favourite: in one of the DS9 episodes a device is made which changes the laws of probability. Unfortunately, the laws of probability are mathematical. They are a simple matter of counting permutations and/or combinations. A device that changes the laws of probability is akin to a device that changes the laws of multiplication or addition.

And perhaps more importantly, who green-lights this stuff?

Post by **Mr Bean** » 2002-07-11 08:13pm

Drunking Hobos Writting Plot lines of Sandwhichs?
Mike I thought you knew how Holliywood works

TrailerParkJawa · Post by **TrailerParkJawa** » 2002-07-11 08:15pm

Good topic!

Anyone remember the TV series "V" ? They travelled all this way to get water from our oceans. Liquid water might be rare, but I think the components to make water should be easier to get elsewhere right?

Enlightenment · Post by **Enlightenment** » 2002-07-11 09:13pm

I spawned a thread about his kind of thing a few months back over on SB: http://kier.3dfrontier.com/forums/showt ... adid=29209

Just be sure to ignore all the 'rationalizations' that everyone and his dog coughed up just to defend their favorite universes....

There's also been a few good historical threads on rec.arts.sf.science. Google groups should have them archived.

adam warlock · Post by **adam warlock** » 2002-07-11 10:41pm

inner space

Post by **Mr Bean** » 2002-07-11 11:10pm

The Prime Example

Radition Vacccine

David · Post by **David** » 2002-07-12 12:19am

That show Lexx. Same principle as ID4.

Sienthal · Post by **Sienthal** » 2002-07-12 12:43am

Well, I am not certain where this is from, but I saw a 60s Sci-Fi in which an army of nearly 20 heavily armed and armored people attack this one girl one at a time, and then spent a good 10 seconds helping their fallen comrades up, while she just stood there, waiting for the next one. Oh, and later the chick gets into this tunnel, and a scene that was meant for a magnitude of suspense and freakiness equal to Psycho happened when two common house spiders were dropped into the tube.

This was the 60s however, so it can be forgiven...To a degree...I suppose.

On a more positive note, Star Wars Galaxies will be opening their Beta doors soon, I hope!

Crown · Post by **Crown** » 2002-07-12 01:04am

Originally posted by Darth Wong
"Armageddon" has an asteroid the size of Texas (orders of magnitude bigger than the dino-killer) that gets blown cleanly in half by a tiny nuke (which accelerates each piece to hundreds of km/s!)

Ha! There is an even BIGGER stuff up on that movie, and it's totally obvious.....

When the explosion occurs, people from different places on Earth look up into the sky to see it. From India, Europe, the U.S. and many other places... So what is wrong with this? Well despite the fact that I don't believe the explosion would be that visible, the major screw up was in each of the locations it was the same time of day! Hehe I mean it was all like noon! Ahhh the tragic comedy that is Armageddon

Post by **Mr Bean** » 2002-07-12 07:29am

Simple fact is all the extra useless multi-million doller rock shots and sucked up the Travel Budget and they could not afford to get a flight a few hours later

Crown · Post by **Crown** » 2002-07-12 12:09pm

Originally posted by Mr Bean

Simple fact is all the extra useless multi-million doller rock shots and sucked up the Travel Budget and they could not afford to get a flight a few hours later

Hehe

Crayz9000 · Post by **Crayz9000** » 2002-07-12 01:23pm

TrailerParkJawa wrote:Good topic!

Anyone remember the TV series "V" ? They travelled all this way to get water from our oceans. Liquid water might be rare, but I think the components to make water should be easier to get elsewhere right?

Well, the need for water was kind of a front. They also wanted a quick source of food... and you can guess who was on the menu.

Ther was another really big gaffe. The Sirius aliens were lizard-like, and to all extents and purposes genetically incompatible -- yet midway through, they have a human and an alien interbreeding -- with VIABLE offspring! Vulcans I can see, but not sentient lizards.

And finally, something that should have stuck out to any person with a good science background: chemical incompatability. The Sirius aliens should have evolved differently; the probability of a planet with an Earthlike composition in the Sirius binary system are very slim, and the odds of an oxygen-breathing species evolving in such a system are even slimmer. It's not as major as the previous problem, but it was bad enough.

SirNitram · Post by **SirNitram** » 2002-07-12 01:48pm

Philote transport(The name given to the means of transition used in Children Of The Mind). Now, think about it. If you move something from Point A to point B, there will be a change in potential energy. Yet there was never an issue here. Siiiigh...

Any example of armour soaking up a KE attack without any ill effects to the wearer. The KE must go somewhere, dammit!

Not really pure science, but the idea that a nation spanning three planets and three races can be totally technologically stagnant for tens of thousands of years(Harry Turtledove's Worldwar and Colonization series). It's just so implausible...

David · Post by **David** » 2002-07-12 02:18pm

Their stagnation came from their belief system, so I don't think it's entirely implausible. They just believed that advances were wrong without compoletely testing them and prepairing society for the changes brought by those advancements. And it's really just one alien race, the other two are slave races.

Post by **Lagmonster** » 2002-07-12 03:39pm

I'm not sure what the biggest gaffe in science fiction could be, since the list is extensive in any sci-fi movie. But the most *intolerably unwatchable* modern sci-fi I have seen to date is Battlefield: Earth, which was so bad that as I watched I could actually feel myself getting cleaner due to the billions of microbes dwelling on my skin fleeing in panic, because even they are smart enough to realize that the movie was crap (not to mention had gaps in logic large enough to pass commercial aircraft through).

I dare you to watch the scene where the cavemen people find and can become proficient with working thousand-year-old depleted uranium shells for their working thousand-year-old vulcan cannons.

Post by **Mr Bean** » 2002-07-12 03:51pm

Don't forget the fact the fighters where still working

David · Post by **David** » 2002-07-12 04:25pm

I'm not sure what the biggest gaffe in science fiction could be, since the list is extensive in any sci-fi movie. But the most *intolerably unwatchable* modern sci-fi I have seen to date is Battlefield: Earth, which was so bad that as I watched I could actually feel myself getting cleaner due to the billions of microbes dwelling on my skin fleeing in panic, because even they are smart enough to realize that the movie was crap (not to mention had gaps in logic large enough to pass commercial aircraft through).

The movie might have sucked, but the book was great. The problem with the movie was that they tried to cram waht should have been about 9 hours of movie into 1 and 1/2 hrs.

Post by **Lagmonster** » 2002-07-12 04:42pm

No question. A lot of things are a lot better in print than when you paint a big - yet concise - multi-million dollar picture of them. The human digestive tract, for example.

Okay, I know what you mean. And you're right. And on that topic, there are too many books out there that really OUGHT to be movies. I should start a thread on THAT.

LordChaos · Post by **LordChaos** » 2002-07-13 12:46am

Crown wrote:
Originally posted by Darth Wong
"Armageddon" has an asteroid the size of Texas (orders of magnitude bigger than the dino-killer) that gets blown cleanly in half by a tiny nuke (which accelerates each piece to hundreds of km/s!)
Ha! There is an even BIGGER stuff up on that movie, and it's totally obvious.....

When the explosion occurs, people from different places on Earth look up into the sky to see it. From India, Europe, the U.S. and many other places... So what is wrong with this? Well despite the fact that I don't believe the explosion would be that visible, the major screw up was in each of the locations it was the same time of day! Hehe I mean it was all like noon! Ahhh the tragic comedy that is Armageddon

Proof the earth is flat!

Crown · Post by **Crown** » 2002-07-13 12:53am

Originally posted by LordChaos
Posted: Sat Jul 13, 2002 2:46 pm Post subject:

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Originally posted by Crown:

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quote:
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Originally posted by Darth Wong
"Armageddon" has an asteroid the size of Texas (orders of magnitude bigger than the dino-killer) that gets blown cleanly in half by a tiny nuke (which accelerates each piece to hundreds of km/s!)
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Ha! There is an even BIGGER stuff up on that movie, and it's totally obvious.....

When the explosion occurs, people from different places on Earth look up into the sky to see it. From India, Europe, the U.S. and many other places... So what is wrong with this? Well despite the fact that I don't believe the explosion would be that visible, the major screw up was in each of the locations it was the same time of day! Hehe I mean it was all like noon! Ahhh the tragic comedy that is Armageddon
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Proof the earth is flat!

Quick to the Geography room! We must change the curiculum!!!!!

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2002-07-13 02:00am

Star Trek has too many problems to count, but here's my favourite: in one of the DS9 episodes a device is made which changes the laws of probability. Unfortunately, the laws of probability are mathematical. They are a simple matter of counting permutations and/or combinations. A device that changes the laws of probability is akin to a device that changes the laws of multiplication or addition.

There's an even bigger gaffe in that same episode. Allegedly, they detected the probability-manipulating device because they noticed that all the electrons in the room were aligned in the same direction. The problem? If all the electrons agree on which way is North, then the room would act like a giant magnet! It'd be something out of a Warner Brothers cartoon.

Another one was in the pilot of Stargate: SG-1. I love the show, but this is a horrible error, and it comes from the character who supposedly possesses a doctorate in astrophysics. When the team first realizes that the coordinates for various stargates aren't valid anymore, the doctorate-holding astrophysicist concludes that the solar systems' coordinates have been changed because of stellar drift or Hubble expansion. What's the problem? Hubble expansion only takes place on galactic scales! Our solar system isn't drifting apart from any others in our galaxy, but our galaxy is drifting away from other galaxies. Bad, bad writers.

IDMR · Post by **IDMR** » 2002-07-13 10:06am

I can not remember where exactly I read it, but somebody found some billion year old star charts, and could actually navigate by them.

The Universe must have reached steady state...

Doomriser · Post by **Doomriser** » 2002-07-13 10:15am

Darth Wong wrote:What's the worst?

"Armageddon" has an asteroid the size of Texas (orders of magnitude bigger than the dino-killer) that gets blown cleanly in half by a tiny nuke (which accelerates each piece to hundreds of km/s!)

Not only that, but remember how they have to drill a hole in the asteroid in order to blow it apart from the 'inside?' They dug down what, 800m? 1km? Which would be like Luke detonating the proton torpedo 1 km below the DS surface, _making no difference whatsoever!_

Post by **Mr Bean** » 2002-07-13 12:34pm

Ha Logic Error Doomriser

Did the Big Nasty Rock Have a Fault Line Running Through it? Did the Big Nasty Rock have a Reactor Core for the Nuke to explode?

Sam Or I · Post by **Sam Or I** » 2002-07-13 07:32pm

[quote]Star Trek has too many problems to count, but here's my favourite: in one of the DS9 episodes a device is made which changes the laws of probability . Unfortunately, the laws of probability are mathematical . They are a simple matter of counting permutations and/or combinations. A device that changes the laws of probability is akin to a device that changes the laws of multiplication or addition. [/quote]

This episode, I felt was a total rip off of Hitch Hikers guide to the Galaxy. (Some Trek writer took it seriously) The Heart of Gold, the main spacecraft in the book uses an Infinate Improbability drive. It ends up using the drive to dodge a couple of missiles, the two missiles spontaniously change into a whale and a pot of flowers. Its not impossible, just very very Improbable. Of course the whole book is making fun of Science Fiction, but still very fun to read.

StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Worst sci-fi science gaffes?

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