That's when lipreading would help if we could see their lips...
What tropes in science fiction annoy you?
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
- Start date
That's when lipreading would help if we could see their lips...
I mean yeah. It will blow the doors off your house but it means nothing if you have a poorly set up surround sound system.
When sci. fi. theories are so stupid and ill-informed that even a child would realize it. Like in Mission To Mars when the astronaut misses the satellite (because he's too fast) but instead of moving away from it ad infinitum, he stops at a distance!!! I mean how ignorant do you have to be to not know that it's not how things move in space! In fact the whole movie is idiotic from beginning to end!
This is another one that isn't specific to SFF but does pop up there a bit. An animal, usually a horse or a dog or something along those lines, is completely wild and out control, to the point of almost killing anyone who gets near it, and the moment the main character gets near them they are instantly the nicest dog/horse/whatever you've ever seen.
Even when you have someone like that it's still going to take some work to get them to behave.
I was reminded of this while watching the first episode of the TV series Heartland this morning. In one scene the main character is out working with an out of control horse, and they implied that she had been at it for hours before he calmed down enough for her to eventually ride him.
I was reminded of this while watching the first episode of the TV series Heartland this morning. In one scene the main character is out working with an out of control horse, and they implied that she had been at it for hours before he calmed down enough for her to eventually ride him.
Silly but I had fun watching it. I watched it for fun knowing how silly it was.
I did like the props and prop design. Those wrist computers were actual working props and that rover had a nice design.
Same here. Nothing fancy. And it seems to be getting worse every year. Thing is, I've heard from people who have fancy setups that even they're having trouble hearing things at times. Recently, it was the 2nd season of Westworld. I had a heck of a hard time hearing dialogue at times to the point of it being unenjoyable. Asked around with friends who have fancy setups and they said the same thing.
One trope that really gets to me is air circulation failing and there's a short countdown to when people will start passing out for lack of oxygen. On a big ship or space station, it would take critical decompression for people to start dying within minutes or seconds. Excess carbon dioxide is a worse problem than lack of oxygen, and even then, the buildup is relatively slow.
^ That reminds me. The countdown to lethal radiation exposure, as if at 0:01 all is well but at 0:00 you're dead from radiation poisoning. Ugh.
Heck, most countdowns, for that matter.
Heck, most countdowns, for that matter.
We all know that the UT doesn't work. For one thing, languages are not arranged the same way. Some put the verb first, others put it last. When you have to translate from the former to the latter, you have to expect an important delay before you can hear the translation, that or the translation will be made in some broken language that will be barely understandable. Plus there are the myriads of cultural references, Quotes for example from a famous author that everyone in the country understands even when they are incomplete but someone from another planet might find some difficulty to, for example, a DA that says in their opening statement about a woman that killed someone in a fit of jealousy: "Hell hath no fury..."
Anyway, the UT can't work the way it is shown, then why keep the pretense that it does?
Anyway, the UT can't work the way it is shown, then why keep the pretense that it does?
^ That reminds me. The countdown to lethal radiation exposure, as if at 0:01 all is well but at 0:00 you're dead from radiation poisoning. Ugh.
Heck, most countdowns, for that matter.
Plus it's not coherent with the radiations we know. All cause irreversible damage at any dosage. Radiations are BAD!
Plus the dosage also often means the difference between an agony of several days or one of ten minutes. In both cases it's death!!
Oh, I had just assumed it was because I was a stereo setup for stuff meant for surround sound.
Convenience?
Why would it be less convenient to be more realistic?
If we're going to maximize realism, then we can't have warp drive, transporters, humanoid aliens, etc. In other words, we can't have Star Trek at all. Those things make storytelling more convenient. We can get to other planets, we can get around more quickly and easily once we're there, and we can depict aliens using actors with minimal makeup if need be. In short, being less realistic can make things way more convenient. Being unrealistic makes Star Trek possible in the first place.
A universal translator is more convenient by skipping right over the communication issues to focus on whatever the actual story is. There have been a few times in Star Trek when communication was the issue. In those cases, the UT was disabled, it was ineffective, it was first used, or whatever, and the story was about or at that moment focused on communication issues.
Do you really want to waste forty-five minutes of every episode with the humans trying to figure out what the aliens are saying and vice versa? As Corporal Captain says, better to just get to the story--unless the story is all about a language barrier.
I disagree wrap drive, for example, may be a little far fetched but it's not demonstrably impossible as the UT is.
The Transporter, on the other hand, is ridiculous in so many ways that it would take an entire book to describe them all.
However, there wasn't any reason to even use the transporter in the first place. They had shuttles, so why not say that people made the trip in shuttles and not systematically show the trip itself?
In realistic movies, you don't always see people travel in cars from place to place. Sometimes you just see them in one place and then another and people understand that they used their cars to get there!!!
Same thing applies to the UT, it's wrong and doesn't work, so pretending there is one is doing a disservice to the believability of the story.
Hell, how did we manage to make movies with people of all nationalities in them without a UT?
We did though, didn't we?
Your agreement or disagreement is irrelevant. There is no such thing as faster-than-light travel in the real world.
There isn't a demonstrable impossibility to warp drive or FTL in the real scientific world. Stephen Hawkings said that it wasn't impossible, he even validated the possibility of time travel. (which are somewhat linked, if you move in space and back in time at the same time it's conceivable that you can go faster than light)
That isn't true for the UT.
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