So first your point was 'Discovery's way of doing technobabble is better than in the previous shows'...
Because the "way" of previous shows was to string together random technical-sounding terms into meaningless word salads that had only a tenuous connection to real science. There's nothing wrong with jargon as a narrative device, but it detracts from believably when the jargon is obviously gibberish and even the writers don't really understand what it means.
[qyote]when I criticised Discovery method of technobabble your answer is 'but the other shows did that too!"[/quote]
The "other shows" I'm referring to are mainly TOS and some of the better attempts at realism in Enterprise. The latter missed the mark more often than not, and Discovery and TOS are both favorable by comparison.
Also in Voyager deuterium was suddenly a super rare thing that needed to be mined. And that was painfully stupid. That is exactly the sort of thing that shouldn't happen.
That's kind of what I mean. Someone on the writing staff apparently forgot that deuterium was a REAL THING and it became clear eventually that they were attributing all kinds of weird properties to it because they assumed "Well we made it up, it can do whatever we want it to do."
It's not an example of bad science, really. It's an example of not actually taking science seriously. Even without turning Star Trek into a doctoral dissertation on theoretical physics, the writers could at least crack open a couple of popular science magazines and borrow some real world concepts for episode ideas, kind of like Law and Order and CSI with their "ripped from the headlines" theme episodes.
Hell, imagine if they did a Star Trek episode inspired by the dimming event at Tabby's Star. We'd probably get to see a cool story about an ancient civilization leaving behind an incomplete dyson sphere and maybe some intrigue about who or what destroyed them before it could be finished (also, Dryson would probably have an orgasm).
But the science in Discovery is blatantly completely made-up nonsense and doesn't even have a veneer of believability.
But it DOES have a veneer of believability; you'd have to have intimate and personal knowledge of the subject matter to notice the discrepancy in the first place, and even those of us who do can still roll with it. We basically do this every time someone in a movie or TV show says "Humans only use 50% of their brains" or "Humans evolved from apes." It's what literally EVERYONE did when they watched "Interstellar" and failed to wonder why the Ranger shuttle needed a two-stage booster to leave Earth but didn't need one to leave either of the other planets on the other side of the wormhole. It's why Most of us, when we watch Silence of the Lambs, never notice that Hannibal Lecter mispronounces "Chianti" when he brags about eating that one guy's liver.
It's believable, just as long as you don't look too closely at it.
For comparison sake: When someone in a TV show says "The human brain contains billions of neurolytic quantum superpositional nodes, of which only 50% are ever active at any given time..."
or "Early humans experienced a wave of multi-modal biogenic mutations some time during the isochromatic evolutionary phase"
or "The Ranger's engines use a gravitometric modulation with a sub-harmonic tachyon shunt to collect fuel... so this close to the black hole, our combustion manifolds will be three hundred and fifty percent more efficient than normal."
I would literally rather have bad interpretations of real science than ANY of this bullshit, and I do not think i am alone in that opinion.
Right, so they realised that using real terms and giving them fantastic properties would be a bad idea. That's why they changed lithium to dilithium and lasers to phasers.
Sure. Notice, however, that they DIDN'T change lithium to "tachyonic quauntum rectification matrix," nor did they change lasers to "magnetometric charged nadion emitters." Because those phrases, while they SOUND sophisticated, don't actually mean anything.
If you're going to slip some technical jargon into a line of dialog, you should have some idea of what it's supposed to mean. Don't just throw it in there because your character needs to sound really smart.
