Silly Sci-Fi Inventions

[Klaus]

How about building your space stations and buildings with unfenced vertical shafts hundreds of feet deep?

 

[cultcross]

I never understood the obsession with automatic doors on science fiction shows, particularly in Star Trek. Doors really aren't a lot of effort to use, and I'd think that having doors you didn't have to use a special gadget to squeeze open when the power goes out might be a plus.

 

[auntiehill]

-And everyone's favorite: the decon chamber being used to screen out bad stuff rather than just doing it the easy way, with the transporter.

But then we wouldn't get the gratuitous scenes of Trip in his underwear. Priorities, people!

 

[Bob The Skutter]

I never understood the obsession with automatic doors on science fiction shows, particularly in Star Trek. Doors really aren't a lot of effort to use, and I'd think that having doors you didn't have to use a special gadget to squeeze open when the power goes out might be a plus.

I suppose they'd be electric doors, and probably have the problem you have with them now, either they lock, or unlock when the power goes out.
And sure they could have manual doors, but what's futuristic about that? Besides the the fact they've been round for hundreds of years without much change...

 

[Tom Hendricks]

First rule of government spending. Why build one when you can build two for double the price?

Great quote of Contact.

 

[Trekker4747]

I love it.

 

[The Comedian]

One thing that I've never understood is starfighters in capital ship combat in Star Wars. Besides smashing into the bridge of a ship or destroying the power core of a moon sized space station what good can they do against capital ships?

I can understand it in Battlestar Galactica since the ships don't have shields and fighters could do some major damage, but are Star Wars starfighters some how able to bypass shields on capital ships?

I don't think shields were all that powerful in the Star Wars universe.

 

[The Comedian]

The Death Star. I can see the budget meeting now:

PALPY: "With this superweapon we will be able to destroy any planet that harbours those Rebel sc-"

ADVISER: "Er, your Emperorness, wouldn't it be easier and cheaper to just load an old freighter with heavy junk, point it at the planet, and switch the hyperdrive on?"

PALPY: "What?"

ADVISER: "Well, a few thousand tons of mass moving at relativistic speed-"

PALPY: "Oh fuck off. I've wanted a Death Star since I was a Senator, and it's coming out of your paycheck, OK?"

And a few years later...

Rebel General: "The shaft is ray-shielded so you'll have to use proton torpedoes..."
Rebel Pilot: "Whoa whoa whoa...that's gonna be a hard one...by grandpappy once suggested getting a freighter filled with junk, jump it up to lightspeed and ram it into a planet. Why don't we just do that to this Death Star?
Rebel General: "A fine idea, but where are we going to find a frieghter?"
(Everyone looks at Han Solo)
Solo: "Now wait just a frakking minute..."

 

[Rackon]

The boxy shape of the shuttle craft has driven me nuts for 40 years - my excuse for everything.

 

[Hyperspace05]

So does it drive you nuts that all current aircraft don't look like the Wright flyer?

As others have said... The box shape is utilitarian. Practical. And sensible for a craft that is designed to spend most of its time in space.

So I'm game for critiquing much of Trek technology, but the shuttle is a practical design. Thrust/power isn't a problem, and with enough thrust a brick can fly.

 

[Christopher]

As others have said... The box shape is utilitarian. Practical. And sensible for a craft that is designed to spend most of its time in space.

No, it really, really isn't. For one thing, "most" isn't "all." If traveling through atmosphere is a part of the vessel's function AT ALL, then it needs to be designed with that capability in mind. Just as a jet plane needs to be designed with wheels and the capability to maneuver on a runway. A competent design has to account for ALL the functions that the craft regularly performs, regardless of how much time it spends doing them.

After all, entry, descent, and landing are by far the most critical and dangerous part of any spacecraft's operations; there are far more things that can go wrong in those phases than could ever go wrong in the nice, simple, weightless and airless environment of space. The relative amount of time it spends in atmosphere is a spurious consideration, because when it is in atmosphere, that's the most dangerous time, and therefore the most important to take into account in the design process. Just as the designers of a car put a great deal of care into its crumple zones, seatbelts, airbags, and other crash protection even though it won't spend "most of its time" crashing.

For another thing, a boxy design is not a sensible one for a spacecraft -- far from it. A pressurized spacecraft ideally has a shape that conforms to a membrane under tension, such as a cylinder or a spheroid. A box shape is a terrible design for a pressurized vessel, since the pressure would be concentrated at the seams and make ruptures very probable. Look at any design that has to deal with unequal pressures: a submarine, a scuba tank, a fire extinguisher, an Apollo capsule, a Soyuz capsule, the International Space Station. Are they boxy? No, they're based on cylinders and curves.

If you have The Art of Star Trek, check out p. 18. Matt Jefferies wanted the shuttlecraft to be a curved, aerodynamic shape. He had to settle for a box because the production couldn't afford anything else. But it was not what he wanted, not what he considered a good idea. A box is not a good design. It's completely indefensible. It's a piece of total nonsense that was forced on the show by the realities of low-budget television production. It is not something that makes any kind of engineering sense.

 

[Hyperspace05]

As others have said... The box shape is utilitarian. Practical. And sensible for a craft that is designed to spend most of its time in space.

No, it really, really isn't. For one thing, "most" isn't "all." If traveling through atmosphere is a part of the vessel's function AT ALL, then it needs to be designed with that capability in mind. Just as a jet plane needs to be designed with wheels and the capability to maneuver on a runway. A competent design has to account for ALL the functions that the craft regularly performs, regardless of how much time it spends doing them.

Oh please. All complex engineering is an exercise in compromises and trade-offs. Any vehicle (or complex machine) that experiences vastly different environments are designed with trade offs. Optimize too much for one, and the other suffer. You really ought to know that.

After all, entry, descent, and landing are by far the most critical and dangerous part of any spacecraft's operations; there are far more things that can go wrong in those phases than could ever go wrong in the nice, simple, weightless and airless environment of space.

Yeah because space is just such a benign environment in Star Trek.

For another thing, a boxy design is not a sensible one for a spacecraft -- far from it. A pressurized spacecraft ideally has a shape that conforms to a membrane under tension, such as a cylinder or a spheroid. A box shape is a terrible design for a pressurized vessel, since the pressure would be concentrated at the seams and make ruptures very probable. Look at any design that has to deal with unequal pressures: a submarine, a scuba tank, a fire extinguisher, an Apollo capsule, a Soyuz capsule, the International Space Station. Are they boxy? No, they're based on cylinders and curves.

So you are saying that any spacecraft that is not spherical or cylindrical is unrealistic? (You should perhaps pick a different universe to write for, one that lives up your 'realism' standard)

No by practical I meant useful. People like square stuff. People ship square stuff. Square stuff can be packed together *very efficiently*. (and shuttles packed in a shuttle-bay) Why are trucks square-ish? Or Mini-vans? Because it is practical. Now you might be driving a car which is just a tapered cylinder on wheels for the utmost aerodynamic efficiency - but I'm betting the rest of us don't. The engineering of a car is a trade off between cost, complexity, efficiency, and other factors. The same is true for atmospheric-capable spacecraft.

Given that the Trek universe clearly has A) strong enough materials in common use, a square shape is not a concern for such a small craft. And B) it has enough power to fly. So while it is a far from perfect atmospheric vehicle, why exactly are you making such a big deal about it?

 

[Lindley]

I mean, our space ships now aren't aerodynamic. The space shuttle drops like a brick to land, it doesn't glide or generate any kind of lift. Its wings are there just there to have landing flaps to raise the nose up

Any upward force on an aircraft qualifies as lift. This includes the action/reaction force of air hitting the underside. That's why plane wings tend to be slanted slightly upwards with relation to the line of thrust----it gives a bit of extra lift in addition to the Bernoulli effect.

 

[Hyperspace05]

The (current NASA) shuttle is actually a glider... Just a very poor one. It does generate lift.

 

[Christopher]

Given that the Trek universe clearly has A) strong enough materials in common use, a square shape is not a concern for such a small craft. And B) it has enough power to fly. So while it is a far from perfect atmospheric vehicle, why exactly are you making such a big deal about it?

You're the one making a big deal out of it. I explained in quite simple and straightforward terms why an aerodynamic design makes more sense for a part-time atmospheric craft, something which strikes me as self-evident, and you chose to argue that a silly box design is somehow more intelligent. I elaborated on why that was wrong, and you continue in your bizarre resistance to simple common sense. And I'm sick of the whole thing.

 

[CommodoreKong]

Futuristic aircraft that don't have aerodynamic shapes, like Starfleet shuttlecraft. Why should our understanding of aerodynamics regress?

Well they are mainly designed to fly in space. I would guess that when they do fly in the atmosphere impulse engines are powerful enough that lift isn't required for them to fly.

But that doesn't make sense. A craft that's designed to be aerodynamic will work just fine in space, but a craft that isn't aerodynamic won't even be capable of functioning in atmosphere. This is why, as someone pointed out above, the Space Shuttle is aerodynamically shaped. Any craft that's designed with atmospheric entry and maneuvering in mind as even part of its function would have to be designed with aerodynamics in mind.

And relying on "powerful impulse engines" is incompetent engineering. Mr. Murphy was an engineer, and Murphy's Law is a basic principle of good engineering design: if your design allows for something to go wrong, then it will go wrong. If you design a shuttlecraft that depends entirely on powerful engines or shaped forcefields to keep from crashing, it's going to crash big-time whenever there's a power failure. That's inept design. You want a design that can still function as a glider and give you the chance to get the engines going again or glide to a safe landing (remember, the Space Shuttle's landings are entirely unpowered).

Yeah I agree that out of universe the early shuttle designs weren't great from a aerodynamic point of view, but in universe they seemed to be good enough for atmospheric travel. I know that shuttles did crash a couple of times in TNG and Voyager with the crews surviving, though I don't remember if the impulse engines had ever failed completely. I would imagine that shuttles are designed to keep their crew alive in the event of a crash landing.

Of course some of the later shuttles like the Delta Flyer and the shuttles on the Enterprise E did look more aerodynamic then many of the earlier shuttles.

And the shuttlepods on Enterprise. That's a function of improving budgets and construction techniques. It's costlier and more complex to build a shuttle mockup with curved, aerodynamic contours than it is just to nail a bunch of flat wooden boards together and cover it in paint. If you look at Matt Jefferies' prototype designs for the shuttlecraft, they were much more aerodynamic, but it just wasn't practical to build them on a TV budget. These days, there are probably fabrication techniques that make it easier to produce curved shapes, like vacuforming of fiberglas or something.

I totally agree. You can see that in Starship design also, some of the later Starfleet ship designs like the Sovereign class are more curved and sleek then the earlier ships.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I never understood the obsession with automatic doors on science fiction shows, particularly in Star Trek.

They should do it like this.

"SSH!" "SSH!"

 

[zakkrusz]

I'm going to have to go with "The 3 Seashells" from Demolition Man.

 

[Checkmate]

The first broadcast episode of Firefly had the dumbest thing ever. It was on some poor backwater moon-plant-thing where they apparently didn't even have enough energy to power ceiling fans or provide any kind of refrigeration or cooling (or anything else electrical for that matter). Yet, for some mysterious reason, they had a holographic forcefield generator for a single window... one that just looked like an ordinary piece of glass at that.

I really hate things like that with a passion. Beyond silly.

 

[Mistral]

I'm going to have to go with "The 3 Seashells" from Demolition Man.

"I'm going to have to declare a winner here! Wait, what? It's not a contest?" (Suicidal embarrassment sets in.)

*grabs his Tom Corbett raygun and attempts to blow his own head off, fails due to the unwieldy design and the pathetic Gattica vision he suffers from, throws himself onto the Tardis landing zone only to discover the damn thing doesn't actually move so he can't be run over, leaps onto a flux converter but is unable to fry himself because he didn't arrange for the proper number of gigawatts and finally gives up and goes to live as a hermit aboard a silently running space-borne green house carrying the last trees in existence-all 1.4 acres of them.*