The Most Dispicible Use Of Technobabble?

[M'Sharak]

USS KG5 said:

J. Allen said:
It's been said before, but making poor Jimmy say all of the technobabble that he had to say in Generations should be a crime. Scotty didn't talk about phase inducers, he just damn well made them work.

There was a lot to be said for the fact that most shipboard modifications and repairs could be made by playing with the wiring under Spock's console too.

Well, what good is being Science Officer, if you can't mess with everyone else's systems without leaving your station?

 

[Cyke101]

Dusty Ayres said:

StarMan said:
From your memory, what is the most obscene use of technobabble? I'm talking about disgusting, lazy technospeak that saves the crew or scenes involving an unbearable amount of gibberish.

Compared to the medibabble on ER, Chicago Hope, Grey's Anatomy, St. Elsewhere, House, Quincy ME, CSI and the legalbabble on Law & Order and every other cop/lawyer show, what Star Trek did is a minor sin. It was just part of their universe, much like the terms on the old BSG. Again, big deal!

The big difference there, though, is that those shows usually don't make up medibabble or legalbabble. They're mostly confined to using actual terms, labels, and concepts that are in modern use. Not so with Trek

 

[stj]

"Technobabble" is really just a weasel word (well, phrase.) It's supposed to represent critical disdain for using nonsense jargon as a plot crutch. In my experience, it's almost invariably means a resentment of big words. BSG (always a rich quarry for incompetent writing practice,) studiously avoids big words in science even though the characters are supposedly flying through space. This is to avoid genuine realism. As the same time, BSG is loaded to the gills with contemporary military jargon!

The real problem with technobabble is not the size of the words but the badness of the science. Or at least, the refusal to tackle the hard job of exposition.

 

[Balthier the Great]

Dusty Ayres said:

StarMan said:
From your memory, what is the most obscene use of technobabble? I'm talking about disgusting, lazy technospeak that saves the crew or scenes involving an unbearable amount of gibberish.

Compared to the medibabble on ER, Chicago Hope, Grey's Anatomy, St. Elsewhere, House, Quincy ME, CSI and the legalbabble on Law & Order and every other cop/lawyer show, what Star Trek did is a minor sin. It was just part of their universe, much like the terms on the old BSG. Again, big deal!

I think it's a different case than L&O. L&O never based entire plots around the legalese. That's Trek's biggest sin. I don't mind technobabble when it's sorta incidental to the plot -- which is how L&O and CSI handle the babble.

In CSI they may offhandedly mention some technical term, but they aren't expecting their entire story to be made or broken on whether the hair is type X or type Y -- at least without showing the stupid hair. With Trek, in order to get much drama out of the babble, you have to know and care about what a "phase inducer is" what he's doing with it, and exactly why "reversing the polarity" is supposed to help.

I think most Treknobabble should be replaced by showing the engineer actually fixing the machine. Such a bizaare idea.

My new Trekkie Motto -- Shut Up And Fix It!

 

[Dusty Ayres]

Cyke101 said:

Dusty Ayres said:

StarMan said:
From your memory, what is the most obscene use of technobabble? I'm talking about disgusting, lazy technospeak that saves the crew or scenes involving an unbearable amount of gibberish.

Compared to the medibabble on ER, Chicago Hope, Grey's Anatomy, St. Elsewhere, House, Quincy ME, CSI and the legalbabble on Law & Order and every other cop/lawyer show, what Star Trek did is a minor sin. It was just part of their universe, much like the terms on the old BSG. Again, big deal!

The big difference there, though, is that those shows usually don't make up medibabble or legalbabble. They're mostly confined to using actual terms, labels, and concepts that are in modern use. Not so with Trek

But the technobabble is related to the kind of science that would exist in that time that the show exist in. Who knows what we will develop in the future, for example? And I'll bet that the technobabble is based on current day science-science that most North Americans don't give a shit about except when it applies to cell phones, sat TV, and all the other junk that we flood our living rooms with. No wonder space travel and the space program isn't doing well with the public as it should.

 

[Cyclopean]

^^Yeah, but it's gibberish.

Star Trek isn't a science lesson. It's a television show. "Depolarizing the EPS conduits to transmit a baryon cascade into the multi-phasic shields" (e.g.) informs the audience of nothing. It's just boring dialogue that precedes some sort of special effect.

Technobabble is ST's attempt to emulate the old 'engineering-problem' sci-fi of the 40s and 50s. It's not about 'future science.'

 

[Blueicus]

Certainly, Picard using the large asteroid to accelerate the Enterprise past the aceton assimilators in Booby Trap is a good use of contemporary science while having the three Enterprise activate static warp shells to close an anti-time fissure is far less satisfying (It's fortunate that the episode was so strong and didn't really detract from the story).

 

[darthraidr]

The over reliace on technobabble was pretty bad. Futurama sums it up nicely...

Fry: Well, usually on the show someone would come up with a complicated plan then explain it with a simple analogy.

Leela: Hmm. If we can reroute engine power through the primary weapons and reconfigure them to Melllvar's frequency that should overload his electro-quantum structure.

Bender: Like putting too much air in a ballon!

 

[Cyke101]

Dusty Ayres said:

Cyke101 said:

Dusty Ayres said:

StarMan said:
From your memory, what is the most obscene use of technobabble? I'm talking about disgusting, lazy technospeak that saves the crew or scenes involving an unbearable amount of gibberish.

Compared to the medibabble on ER, Chicago Hope, Grey's Anatomy, St. Elsewhere, House, Quincy ME, CSI and the legalbabble on Law & Order and every other cop/lawyer show, what Star Trek did is a minor sin. It was just part of their universe, much like the terms on the old BSG. Again, big deal!

The big difference there, though, is that those shows usually don't make up medibabble or legalbabble. They're mostly confined to using actual terms, labels, and concepts that are in modern use. Not so with Trek

But the technobabble is related to the kind of science that would exist in that time that the show exist in. Who knows what we will develop in the future, for example? And I'll bet that the technobabble is based on current day science-science that most North Americans don't give a shit about except when it applies to cell phones, sat TV, and all the other junk that we flood our living rooms with. No wonder space travel and the space program isn't doing well with the public as it should.

Balthier makes a wonderful point, though, something that all the Trek spinoff series are guilty of on a few occasions: technobabble as conflict resolution.

You watch Law & Order and the conflict resolution doesn't depend on Title 15, Chapter 3 of the Tax Evasion code, the conflict resolution depends on the cops and lawyers outwitting the accused, or a supporting character fessing up, or the accused's guilty conscience. In ER, the conflict isn't solved with a Triple Coronarial Renal Transplant, but rather how the doctors get through their personal issues and ethics.

Besides, talk to any scientist who grew up with Star Trek, who was inspired to pursue their careers because of the show, and they'll out-and-out tell you that the show uses almost no scientific fact at all whatsoever. They love it to death, for sure, but it's more along the lines of Science Fantasy than Science Fiction. There's also Babylon 5, Farscape, Firefly, and the Stargate franchise, which use very little amounts of technobabble and are all very highly regarded despite your rolling-eye smiley.

Let's use Star Trek VI as an example of how technobabble really isn't needed: Uhura comes up with the idea of tracking Chang's cloaked ship by its exhaust fumes. Spock and McCoy proceed to modify the torpedo. The most technical words used in that exchange were 'plasma,' 'ionized gas,' and probably 'echo bar.' We see Spock and McCoy work on it, we hear Kirk desperately demanding that torpedo. Heck, we even hear McCoy with some colloquial speech. The torpedo fires, tracks the ship, hits it.

At no point in that entire sequence did we ever hear an exchange like, "Photon torpedo tracking charged ionized impluse trail with eighty-seven percent accuracy! Torpedo will hit in approximately five seconds at a speed of twenty kilometers per second! Projected yield calculated at 30 gigatons!"

No, Uhura came up with the plan, we *see* Spock and McCoy at work, we hear Kirk yell out basic orders. That's all we needed, really, and the lack of technobabble greatly helped with the pacing of that wonderful scene. And I doubt we would've learned anything realistic about ionized gas, either.

 

[The Laughing Vulcan]

I'll increase power to my comms device to open a channel to the closest cell, then enter his specific code to see if I can't get through to him on the decentralised communications network...

equals

I'll call him on my mobile.

 

[Forbin]

^And why the Enterprise didn't have exhaust-tracking torpedos in the first place, I'll never know. Some of the writers need to study up on the kinds of weapons we already have today.

 

[Cyke101]

^It's also struck me how centralized everything is on a starship in Trek, and how it's almost always a bad idea when power goes down. In real-life, if NASA had adopted such a policy on their spaceflights, Apollo 13 would have been doomed.

But we still love Trek anyways

To be sure, I just want to point out that technobabble *is* necessary, but only when required, a la TOS. If one thinks that ALL technobabble is not only necessary but also innocent, then there are storytelling issues right there that have to be addressed.

Spock didn't talk about the humpback whales sonically remodulating their vocal vibrations to match the signal receptors on the alien probe. The whales just SANG! That's good enough for me

 

[Nebusj]

Cyke101 said:
^It's also struck me how centralized everything is on a starship in Trek, and how it's almost always a bad idea when power goes down. In real-life, if NASA had adopted such a policy on their spaceflights, Apollo 13 would have been doomed.

Er ... decentralized like how the explosion in the number two oxygen tank also damaged the number one tank, destroying utterly the ability of the Service Module to supply power (and oxygen)?

After Apollo 13, NASA wisely added a third oxygen tank away from the first two, and batteries capable of providing Serice Module power for an entire if abortive trip, but that wasn't thought of and would almost certainly have been deemed unnecessarily fussing over impossible cases before Apollo 13.

 

[USS KG5]

M´Sharak said:

USS KG5 said:

J. Allen said:
It's been said before, but making poor Jimmy say all of the technobabble that he had to say in Generations should be a crime. Scotty didn't talk about phase inducers, he just damn well made them work.

There was a lot to be said for the fact that most shipboard modifications and repairs could be made by playing with the wiring under Spock's console too.

Well, what good is being Science Officer, if you can't mess with everyone else's systems without leaving your station?

A joy I replicate at work as IT manager!

 

[Cyke101]

Nebusj said:

Cyke101 said:
^It's also struck me how centralized everything is on a starship in Trek, and how it's almost always a bad idea when power goes down. In real-life, if NASA had adopted such a policy on their spaceflights, Apollo 13 would have been doomed.

Er ... decentralized like how the explosion in the number two oxygen tank also damaged the number one tank, destroying utterly the ability of the Service Module to supply power (and oxygen)?

After Apollo 13, NASA wisely added a third oxygen tank away from the first two, and batteries capable of providing Serice Module power for an entire if abortive trip, but that wasn't thought of and would almost certainly have been deemed unnecessarily fussing over impossible cases before Apollo 13.

Actually, this is what I meant. Starfleet vessels tend to put all their eggs in one basket. Sure, there's a backup relay or subroutine waiting in the hatches, but oftentimes those fail as well, hence 'reroute power from structural integrity to the engines' whenever something goes wrong. In a Trek philosophy, that third oxygen tank would still be in the vicinity of the other two oxygen tanks, and would still be linked in some form or way.

I'm amazed at the number of times a vessel like the E-D or Voyager loses all power to its phasers, despite the fact that there are at least a dozen phaser arrays on each ship. Same deal with the shields and the impulse engines: multiple outlets, one vulnerable power source.

 

[Nebusj]

Cyke101 said:
Actually, this is what I meant. Starfleet vessels tend to put all their eggs in one basket. Sure, there's a backup relay or subroutine waiting in the hatches, but oftentimes those fail as well, hence 'reroute power from structural integrity to the engines' whenever something goes wrong. In a Trek philosophy, that third oxygen tank would still be in the vicinity of the other two oxygen tanks, and would still be linked in some form or way.

Er ... but there's always some weak point, some critical system running the closest to its margin, some point where things will break first if they break at all. You've read ``The One-Hoss Shay'', I'm sure. If the xenophobic hardheaded pointlessly antagonistic aliens' disruptor fire didn't put shields offline the damage would barely be worth mentioning in this context.

That there are reasonably convenient ways to work around damage and get back to approximately normal conditions is a good thing; it's just the blasted overuse in droning battle scenes of shields falling to 47 percent that have made it dull.

 

[Cyke101]

^I agree with you there. I mean, I do see the narrative and dramatic value of having ALL the phasers conk out at the worst possible moment AT the same moment, sure. But then I think that incessant technobabble during battle scenes helps make them 'droning,' ie the otherwise fun (if nonsensical) Battle of Chintoka. I would also argue, too, that engineering problems tend to be used as a crutch all too often. On a show like Voyager, sure, that makes sense, but during a routine survey mission or against a traditional foe? Mmmm... maybe not.

And... no, I haven't read The One-Hoss Shay prior to your post. Imagine my surprise when I found out that it was a poem! (that *is* what you meant, right?)

 

[Forbin]

Not really technobabble, but it always drove me nuts when one of our heroes was dogfighting in a shuttle, and spoke every single maneuver: "Computer, execute evasive maneuver theat six!" "Computer, accelerate to 3/4 impulse. When the enemy ship passes, cut speed and get behind him!" "Computer, come about to 114 mark 2!" "Computer! Fire phasers, target engines only!"

If our fighter pilots had to fight like this they'd be dead in a second. Hey Tom, just grab the joystick and fly the goddamn shuttle!

 

[JD]

darthraidr said:
The over reliace on technobabble was pretty bad. Futurama sums it up nicely...

Fry: Well, usually on the show someone would come up with a complicated plan then explain it with a simple analogy.

Leela: Hmm. If we can reroute engine power through the primary weapons and reconfigure them to Melllvar's frequency that should overload his electro-quantum structure.

Bender: Like putting too much air in a ballon!

I know this is fro Futurama, but it still helps me to make my point.This is why I've always thought it would have been better if they had simply skipped over the "science" and just used the analogy. IMO it's a waist of time to spout off nonsense crap if you're just going to use the analogy anyway.

 

[ancient]

NEMESIS had a lot of technobabble that:

1. Made no sense
2. Directly contradicted real science
3. Existed only because the plot required it.

None of it was long, but...The whole explanation of Thaleron radiation...gag. It 'breaks down organic matter at the sub-atomic level.' Sure. At the sub-atomic level organic matter is exactly the same as all other forms of matter.

'He needs your blood to live' :this gives Shinzon an actual reason for fighting Picard. However, a blood transfusion is totally unrelated to genetic breakdown. Maybe transplanting Bone Marrow would help for a while...or something.

Uber cloak: Troi (who is empathic - she knows what you feel, not what you think) can somehow suddenly use Jedi powers to find the Vicroy, do a remote mind-meld, mentally bitch-slap him even though he's the guy with the uber mental powers...


...and so forth.