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Scifi silly science

Well, what I was trying to say is that stuff like that is simply a sensory cue to bridge that void between the media and the viewer.
Like it says at that TV Tropes link I posted about the Rule of Perception...

The audience of a movie will know only what they can see and hear. This means that nothing really exists in a movie unless you can see or hear it. As a result, a kind of accepted audio-visual shorthand has been created over many years, to help the audience understand what they're looking at and what's going on. A small number of these cues follow:
[I'll just include a couple - CJ]


  • Bullets will spark when they ricochet, to make it obvious where they hit.
  • Lasers are visible to show their path, and may be slowed down so the audience can follow the direction they move.
 
Though not in every case. Serious movies (war movies, dramas) don't tend to show sparks from bullets--at least as far as I can remember.

A serious science fiction film could get away with not showing lasers or (my pet peeve) gamma ray bursts from antimatter weapons, I'd suspect--the secondary heating and/or destruction of the target should be sufficient.
 
Why Is Hard Science Fiction So Unrealistic?

io9 has up an article about hard SciFi

And most movies and television series, when they strive for realism at all, tend to embody the literary definition of realism rather than the scientific accuracy of hard SF. This is certainly the case in Star Trek, where we encounter a lot of ordinary people planetside (even the villain of the JJ Abrams Star Trek movie is basically a regular guy gone insane) - but the technology is usually powered by handwavium, if you know what I mean.


hard science fiction is one of the most unrealistic subgenres of SF.


Why Is Hard Science Fiction So Unrealistic?
http://io9.com/5454093/why-is-hard-science-fiction-so-unrealistic

the comments are quite interesting too.

I wasn't sure if I should put this post in this other thread but I'll link here for you:
Why is there no pure Sci-Fi on TV today?
 
dropping Magic Red Goo into a supernova will magically turn it into a black hole.

you can time-travel through black holes

you can drill into a planet's core from space just with a Freaking Huge Laser Beam on the end of a Freaking Huge Chain

dropping Magic Red Goo into a planet's core will magically make the planet eat itself in a black hole

Supernovas threaten All Life In the Galaxy!

*cough*
 
Starships meeting each other in the same plane and the same way up as if they're sailing on an ocean, rather than travelling through a frictionless 3-dimensional space.

Ships always travelling with the "front" facing forwards, rather than sideways, backwards, upside down, etc.

"Fighter planes" in space, especially when they swoop around, banking to turn as if they're travelling in air. Babylon 5 made an attempt to get this right, when a fighter turned round on its own axis whilst still continuing to travel in its original direction, so it could shoot at an enemy on its tail. Makes a mockery of all those "he's on my tail, I can't shake him off" scenes in things like Star Wars.

Space battles in general, especially in Deep Space 9. Where capital battleships have to fly right past each other firing broadsides like they're warships of the Nelson era - rather than sitting back out of visual range of their enemy and using guided missiles to attack them, as indeed real naval warfare does today.

Asteroid fields in things like Star Trek and Star Wars being huge jumbles of rocks swirling around each other at ridiculous velocities making them hazards to navigation - rather than say being mostly made up of empty space with an asteroid every few thousand kilometres, like in the real asteroid belt.

Alien civilizations all being humanoid I can live with - what bugs me is when they're all at roughly the same level of social and technological development, as if they all evolved at the same time and at the same rate - there's such a narrow window of time for these things to happen, in the vast and infinite universe, it's quite implausible that you have so many at comparable levels. That's one reason why we'll probably never meet aliens - because another civilization won't rise during the time that humanity exists. Either they've already been and gone (we might find their artefacts), or they've yet to evolve.

All these things bother my science head, and yet I can still enjoy the shows in question. My favourite outer space show though is Space: 1999, which has a much more intelligent and challenging grasp of science.
 
Even in '79 when I was 14, classic BSG's habit of using 'galaxy' and 'star system' interchangeably in their scripts made me want to punch a baby.

dropping Magic Red Goo into a supernova will magically turn it into a black hole.

you can time-travel through black holes

*cough*

I can cut them some slack on the Red Goo. It was mentioned in some damn TNG episode that Romulan ships are powered by artificial singularities. So it kinda makes sense that they'd have a way to generate them artificially (just like the Federation can create anti-matter for their warp engines).
Of course I'm still trying to figure out why if only a drop can create a massive black hole, why Spokes ship was carrying so damn much of the stuff.

I agree with the time travel thing (as well a teleporting across the galaxy as in TMP. Didn't Trek come up with Wormholes for that sort of thing?
Ah well, at least Trek has never gone to another universe via a black hole like so many crappy series and movies.
 
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