SciFi movies and pathetic misconceptions of tech failing for the story line.

[David Hess]

This discussion reminds me of something I wondered about in the movie Aliens.  Why did the "Colonial Marines" exist and why were they armed the way they were, including nuclear weapons?  What threat justified their existence?  Were they regularly fighting other aliens or humans?

[coppercone2]

I think they make sense because if you say hijack a ship and program something like a Nostromo to crash into a planet at high speed, it could be a country destroyer, easy bargaining chip for separatists or terrorists. I imagine you would want to nuke something like that. Explains the whole self destruct thing too.

And I think they had nations all over space, it seems part of MAD.

And you need to figure asteroid weapons are probobly popular by then, i.e. after piracy scrap a space ship then mount engines to asteroids to make kinetic energy weapons. If there are nukes floating around space then enemy leaders know they might get wiped out if they try something big.. and it seems that when you are spread out on alot of worlds, having anti asteroid capabilities is important.

Standard procedure for.. liberating a colony might be to steal nearby ships, turn them into massive kinetic energy weapons, decapitate the colony government and then start making demands to the major players. That is like becoming north korea overnight without the giant R&D program. If you design big things that can move through deep space in a reasonable amount of time, that can be misused. The hardest part for me is to imagine the issues which cause the desire for this behavior, but if I know humans, they can always find SOMETHING. I figure it has something to do with supercorporations and corruption though, you figure something like WY is NOT popular with everyone. Maybe they raised the retirement age to 82 on one of the less profitable colonies. One thing I imagined is if humans are so spread out, you might have government funded travel. Like part of pension is a guarantee to have so many trips off world per year, to stay in touch with family and stuff like that. The only thing I figure from that universe is that metal is very cheap. 

[coppice]

This discussion reminds me of something I wondered about in the movie Aliens.  Why did the "Colonial Marines" exist and why were they armed the way they were, including nuclear weapons?  What threat justified their existence?  Were they regularly fighting other aliens or humans?

The whole tone of the conversation between the marines in that movie makes it seem like they are quite experienced with encountering and fighting a variety of aliens. The conversations between everyone else makes it seem like encountering an alien is a huge novelty. Things never quite seemed to gel.

[coppercone2]

What quotes are you talking about?

I thought they were used to fighting people like pirates and PMC and stuff. The comic books and games lean towards HEAVY PMC activity in the known alien universe. It was in the 80's so I imagine they imagined communist guerillas, space pirate locations like african coastline in space, religious colonies (thats not hard to imagine!) banana republics and other 'problems'.

The motion trackers and other gear seem very well suited towards finding sabatours, squatters and so forth in space infrastructure equipment (company relays, seldom used space stations/ports, etc).

[mendip_discovery]

"Just another bug hunt"

They seemed to be at the whim of a private company so they would be very well kitted up and be used to quash the revolts etc that would possibly happen on the mining worlds.

[coppercone2]

"Just another bug hunt"

They seemed to be at the whim of a private company so they would be very well kitted up and be used to quash the revolts etc that would possibly happen on the mining worlds.

Oh yeah I forgot about that quote. I think Prometheus screwed up the canon, because there was like a huge amount of comic books and stuff that explained the universe quite well. Maybe they were used to fighting like prehistoric life forms (big mosquitos and shit) on newly colonized places. Not hard to imagine if you have a world that is semi-evolved and you start pumping O2 in there and stuff, maybe the wild life has a propensity for going crazy, combined with radioactive mutations, I don't think their planetary power sources were super clean..

And they were quite ready to adapt the xenomorph for I guess bio/ecological warfare, I guess that they already had some experience breeding 'pests' for warfare. Just this one was too much for them. Or just for colonization purposes, like that old simpsons episode, someone decided to breed flying snakes to kill off the gopher like creatures that were harming agriculturalr activity on nice planets, and that sometimes got out of hand. At the end, when you introduced the armored bears to deal with the 5 other things that were introduced, you need to send in the space marines to clean them out..


Before prometheus 're explained' everything, I had the feeling the eggs were designed kind of like landmines to prevent some places of space from being colonized. Maybe even like keeping away trespassers from minerals and stuff that were in someone 5000 year plan.

[BrianHG]

Just started watching the series 'The Ark'.

Just in the first minutes, how the stop and go of the rotating section for the artificial gravity was completely off, impossible and on top of all that, also upsidedown. 

I mean, should I continue watching the series and just F-it, or just F-it and stop before I get a headache?

I mean, everything upside-down is hard for my mind to ignore.



Why aren't these guys being flung upwards smashing their heads in this image.
It's even backwards in the next scene with an exterior view looking into the space ship.

[Monkeh]

Just started watching the series 'The Ark'.

The acting is worse than that mistake.

[mwb1100]

This discussion reminds me of something I wondered about in the movie Aliens.  Why did the "Colonial Marines" exist and why were they armed the way they were, including nuclear weapons?  What threat justified their existence?  Were they regularly fighting other aliens or humans?

The whole tone of the conversation between the marines in that movie makes it seem like they are quite experienced with encountering and fighting a variety of aliens. The conversations between everyone else makes it seem like encountering an alien is a huge novelty. Things never quite seemed to gel.

My take away was that the Colonial Marines were often tasked with eliminating dangerous, but unintelligent alien beings: "What do you mean 'THEY cut the power'? How could they cut the power, man? They're animals!"

Ripley, Burke, and Newt knew otherwise.

[coppercone2]

Ripley knew more about what the xeno does, if you consider the extended version, where it shows the xeno crafting eggs out of dead bodies in Alien. Newt got to study them for a few weeks (god knows what she saw) and Burke might be the only one that had non filtered information about them.

Based on Burke, I almost wonder if the company used like psychological profiles (or some kind of other means, like getting the marines really drunk before deployment) to try to put together a marine squad that was learning averse or something, IIRC they pretty much refused to listen to her personal report in the briefing and its unknown what was in or if they even bothered to listen to (I guess its a video?) of what Ripley had to say in her deposition. Alien 3 kind of tells us that the company might have been behind the attempt to capture them, and that it was not just a mad get rich plan Burke came up with on the spot. Every movie after that featured mr weyland seemed to show him pulling tons of strings and being deeply involved in conspiracies.

IIRC Burke kinda shushed her and told them to watch the video or something? I feel like behind the scenes he was telling them something along the lines of "she is some crazy woman that's under investigation don't let her put any crazy ideas in your head you don't want to be involved in the subsequent hearings, face court marital for being an accessory, etc"

But I also did not take too much weight in the dialog after the survival situation started, because they were sleep deprived, adrenaline filled, injured, and probobly had severe tinnitus. It made me feel that Burke had to have been coached on the possible situations by someone, because he still maintained a shit load of composure all things considered, most uh... c-level execs would be hiding under the table as soon a 1 bullet was fired. Or he had previous experience working for military intelligence or something, like a crooked military spy. Like, psychological training on dealing with trauma victims too, he convinced her to go again.. thats like a skill set a military interrogator has... so if you consider the whole universe and games and everything, I think Weyland hired some PMC to impersonate a corporate officer. 

[tszaboo]

This discussion reminds me of something I wondered about in the movie Aliens.  Why did the "Colonial Marines" exist and why were they armed the way they were, including nuclear weapons?  What threat justified their existence?  Were they regularly fighting other aliens or humans?

Nukes are like firecrackers when it comes to sci-fi. When you have ships that can do interplanetary missions, they have energy levels that can destroy planets just by accelerating rocks towards them. Even in the expanse (which is low tech compared to alien), the small corvette class ship (looks up the number) could output 5 TW power constantly. Use it to accelerate something for a day, and the kinetic energy of that is now more than any nuclear bomb ever built.
And that's just a small 5 man ship, which doesn't even have FTL.

[RoGeorge]

Would  be enough to drop a rod of solid metal from the orbit, without any explosives heads, and you'll get the equivalent of a nuke:

[AndyBeez]

Point-of-order regarding Star Wars. Why did The Empire need to build the Death Star to destroy a planet when, having already mastered faster than light hyperspace travel, their technology horizon is so advanced, they can vaporise a planet in milliseconds using a transportable black hole? Plus, this civilisation makes five parsecs in two days, so why are they still shooting at each other point-blank with blasters? Something's not right in that galaxy

[BrianHG]

Point-of-order regarding Star Wars. Why did The Empire need to build the Death Star to destroy a planet when, having already mastered faster than light hyperspace travel, their technology horizon is so advanced, they can vaporise a planet in milliseconds using a transportable black hole? Plus, this civilisation makes five parsecs in two days, so why are they still shooting at each other point-blank with blasters? Something's not right in that galaxy

Because ---  well, just watch this and have a laugh:

[CatalinaWOW]

Point-of-order regarding Star Wars. Why did The Empire need to build the Death Star to destroy a planet when, having already mastered faster than light hyperspace travel, their technology horizon is so advanced, they can vaporise a planet in milliseconds using a transportable black hole? Plus, this civilisation makes five parsecs in two days, so why are they still shooting at each other point-blank with blasters? Something's not right in that galaxy

This doesn't seem so far fetched to me.  Your argument applied to today's world would be:

We have the technology to fly between continents in hours.  Why does anyone need aircraft carriers when they can just transport nukes.  And why are people from the same civilization shooting at each other with rifles and pistols.

The peak technology of an era is never applied uniformly.  Sometimes because of cost, sometime because of transportability, and often just politics and sapient nature.

[coppercone2]

This discussion reminds me of something I wondered about in the movie Aliens.  Why did the "Colonial Marines" exist and why were they armed the way they were, including nuclear weapons?  What threat justified their existence?  Were they regularly fighting other aliens or humans?

The whole tone of the conversation between the marines in that movie makes it seem like they are quite experienced with encountering and fighting a variety of aliens. The conversations between everyone else makes it seem like encountering an alien is a huge novelty. Things never quite seemed to gel.

My take away was that the Colonial Marines were often tasked with eliminating dangerous, but unintelligent alien beings: "What do you mean 'THEY cut the power'? How could they cut the power, man? They're animals!"

Ripley, Burke, and Newt knew otherwise.

I re watched the scene, the marines defiantly did not watch the disk. Maybe hicks, he looked at least slightly interested, he seemed suspicious about the situation. Smarter then most, puts up his guard when he sees a suit n tie in disguise. Their always selling something and hes not buying it

It looked to me like
1) freeze hungover people
2) ignore hysterical woman
3) decide to go down to the planet, it must be a coaxial cable

[AndyBeez]

This doesn't seem so far fetched to me.  Your argument applied to today's world would be:

We have the technology to fly between continents in hours.  Why does anyone need aircraft carriers when they can just transport nukes.  And why are people from the same civilization shooting at each other with rifles and pistols.

The peak technology of an era is never applied uniformly.  Sometimes because of cost, sometime because of transportability, and often just politics and sapient nature.

Valid point. Which is why Star Wars resonated with movie audiences. It has been said 'the empire' was a metaphor for the Soviet Union. Whilst the rebels represented everything that was American. As for the obligatory shoot outs, just a variation on cowboys and Indians meets sword and stone fantasy genres, in space. Which in '76 was about the coolest thing ever. Who needed all of that high brow Star Trek humanity in space cr@p when we could feel the force, of movie franchising.

PS .. I think still think the rebels would have no defence against hyper-space missiles. But hey, we're back full circle to that Evil Empire.

[David Hess]

Nukes are like firecrackers when it comes to sci-fi. When you have ships that can do interplanetary missions, they have energy levels that can destroy planets just by accelerating rocks towards them. Even in the expanse (which is low tech compared to alien), the small corvette class ship (looks up the number) could output 5 TW power constantly. Use it to accelerate something for a day, and the kinetic energy of that is now more than any nuclear bomb ever built.
And that's just a small 5 man ship, which doesn't even have FTL.

All, or almost all, Hollywood science fiction suffers from that problem.  It is known as the Kiznti Lesson and it is even its own trope now - A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive.

Even more so than kinetic-kill weapons, an actual warhead adds very little to the total damage inflicted. Note that at 86.6% the speed of light the amount of kinetic energy is equal to the rest mass, which means that the projectile will inflict upon the target the same energy as if it was composed of pure antimatter.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunexotic.php#id--Relativistic_Weapons

Point-of-order regarding Star Wars. Why did The Empire need to build the Death Star to destroy a planet when, having already mastered faster than light hyperspace travel, their technology horizon is so advanced, they can vaporise a planet in milliseconds using a transportable black hole? Plus, this civilisation makes five parsecs in two days, so why are they still shooting at each other point-blank with blasters? Something's not right in that galaxy

Star Wars is not science fiction.  It is space opera.

[coppercone2]

well the warp bubble thing means its not actually moving fast its just moving through like a alternate path.

In the Alien universe the thing has a tachyon shunt, which makes a negative mass field that supposedly decreases the mass of the ship to allow for superluminal travel, however you want to understand it.

I assume when you turn that off, it would lead to massive deacceleration. I wonder how dealing with inertia looks like in equations.

If its initally based on like inertia for power requirements, that might mean it needs to be still or barely moving to engage the field, then when it disengages the field it will go at the same speed it was going in to begin with. But as for dealing with conventionally accelerated very fast objects, I am not sure... I guess you need a hell of a planetary defense system. Powerful lasers should be able to vaporize it, but what trajectory would vaporized relativistic space ship matter take... would it bloom and disperse? or would you get hit with a massive plasma stream thats mostly coherent? Perhaps question for someone that works with heavy colliders. I guess you can shoot a very powerful particle beam at it, since that has mass and it would actually interact with vaporized starship on a matter to matter level rather then just change its phase via energy. But enough power should make it like explode on a nuclear level too, those explosions must unfocus the energy? Massive neutron beam to make it go critical mass via tons of radioisotopes being produced?

I would imagine they figure how to turn threats like that into aurora borealis

[SiliconWizard]

Star Wars is not science fiction.  It is space opera.

Agreed. And it's not even particularly modern in its structure. Possibly it did look cinematographically modern at the time, but the narrative itself is IMO very "Tolkienesque". I wouldn't call that science-fiction either.

[tggzzz]

Star Wars is not science fiction.  It is space opera.

Agreed. And it's not even particularly modern in its structure.

That's by design. George Lucas was inspired by the 30s Flash Gordon serials, and deliberately and explicitly set out to update the .

[.RC.]

At least parts of star wars was accurate.   The storm troopers running around unable to hit anything, was pretty accurate of how if you run and gun you hit only air.  Or in my vase when I went to a shooting range and fired a revolver while stationary, I hit nothing as well.

[coppercone2]

I thought poorly trained imperial cannon fodder are becoming more and more realistic by the day (if you follow international news). I believe they are officially referred to as 'zombies' now.

[coppice]

Star Wars is not science fiction.  It is space opera.

Agreed. And it's not even particularly modern in its structure.

That's by design. George Lucas was inspired by the 30s Flash Gordon serials, and deliberately and explicitly set out to update the .

In the 70s I went to a cinema, and among the trailers they showed the one for Star Wars. It was presented as science fiction, and looked pathetic. A few years later. when I finally saw it on TV. I thought it was pretty good, because it was fantasy hokum, with no pretensions to being science fiction at all. I've been put off a few movies that turned our ro be very watchable, because the marketing was so very bad I thought they were entirely different movies.

[Infraviolet]

Another one in Star Wars which is very wrong is the orbital mechanics during the crashing of the ship about 20 minutes in to Revenge of the Sith (III, in chronological order). The Jedi seem determined to burn thrusters the wrong way and make their situation worse, not that there's any reason a starship should begin to fall from orbit just because part of it gets blown up anyway.

The one time Star Wars got the science pretty right, where that first order wide angled star destroyer ( ep VIII chronologically) gets obliterated by the kinetic impact of another ship, apparently really p*ssed off many fans on account of it making all the fancier combat of the series seem pointless. But also, it means in the final film of the series that whole thing about a planet full of sith warships could have been dealt with in one nice Pellegrino/Zebrowski move(their novel "The Killing Star" is all about that tactic).