I wasn't just talking formal here, though. just as the slang of A Clockwork Orange isn't the way the newscasters say things in that world, how people casually communicate is sure to be pretty peculiar.
7 Questionable, Yet Widely Accepted Devices in SciFi
- Thread starter jefferiestubes8
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Shit, the Roomba does that, just not nearly as quickly. Turbocharge the Roomba's motor and put the device into different casing, and you've got a mouse droid.
<ahem>
But this doesn't address making an object invisible to the naked eye. Is the idea here that if one type of plasma can diminish an object's radar cross section, then another type might be able to diminish its presence in the visual spectrum?
Some of the article from the OP doesn't make sense and demonstrates a bit of ignorance regarding some of the shows it refers to.
It claims that we are never given an explanation of how cloaking technology works. On the contrary, we know that Romulan cloaking devices work by bending the light around them. Other stories have created "invisibility" devices by using hundreds of tiny cameras to photograph the background behind an object and project it onto the front surface of the object. Die Another Day & G.I. Joe both used this technique and I suspect it may be the root of the cloaking abilities of Predators and the Jem'hadar as well. What I never understood was how Suliban cloaking devices somehow used "radiation" to turn invisible.
The article also claims that we don't know what the other 14 phaser settings do. It's been strongly implied that "stun" & "kill" merely reside on a spectrum of settings, with 10 being a standard setting for "kill." However, some beings are stronger or weaker than others and require higher or lower settings to achieve the desired effect.
As for matching the lip movements, I always assumed that that wasn't what the characters were literally seeing but rather a convention to help convey the story to us.
As for understanding a language it's never heard before, we have to remember that, in the Star Trek universe, there is a lot of parallel evolution going on. We've got planets that directly resemble Earth ("Miri," "Bread & Circuses"). Then "The Chase" established that most humanoid species in the galaxy share some common ancestry. It could be that, ultimately, there are a finite number of language types in the galaxy and that, given a sufficiently sophisticated computer and a large enough sample set of known languages, a computer could quickly learn to translate any new language it encountered in the galaxy. However, a few more first contacts like with the Skreeans in "Sanctuary" would be more plausible.
In my opinion, the most questionable has to be the transporters. But only when they are working like they do in episodes like Rascal (TNG) where some change to the person's structure results in them being kids, or old, or combined into a functional being - rather than them materializing lumpy, misshapen, and dead like the poor people toward the beginning of ST:TMP.
I would give 2nd place to any form of FTL that doesn't use something like Warp Drive or wormholes to cheat, or else doesn't involve building speed over a long period of time to avoid inertia destroying the people (and other matter, for that matter) onboard.
I would give 2nd place to any form of FTL that doesn't use something like Warp Drive or wormholes to cheat, or else doesn't involve building speed over a long period of time to avoid inertia destroying the people (and other matter, for that matter) onboard.