General > General Technical Chat

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

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coppercone2:

--- Quote from: mwb1100 on April 11, 2023, 11:37:05 pm ---
--- Quote from: coppice on April 10, 2023, 07:40:41 pm ---
--- Quote from: David Hess on April 10, 2023, 11:49:00 am ---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?

--- End quote ---
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.

--- End quote ---
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.

--- End quote ---

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:

--- Quote from: CatalinaWOW on April 13, 2023, 04:54:19 am ---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.

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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:

--- Quote from: tszaboo on April 12, 2023, 03:46:41 pm ---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.
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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


--- Quote from: AndyBeez on April 12, 2023, 08:12:15 pm ---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 :-//
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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:

--- Quote from: David Hess on April 16, 2023, 01:13:09 am ---Star Wars is not science fiction.  It is space opera.

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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.

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