What's some dumb science you've seen in fiction?

[credoconsolans]

Any time an airlock goes SNAFU and people are hanging on for dear life trying not to get sucked into outer space.

Why is that bad science?

 

[credoconsolans]

Lot of bad science out there.

Most recent one comes to mind is Prometheus. Supposedly a sci-fi movie, but what a mess.

Fuck, I can catch a flesh eating bacteria here on earth just getting in the water with a scratch. The morons in this movie breathe the air and touch everything on an entire alien planet without so much as a glove or mask or eye protection on.

Viewers can be relied upon to recognise a complete stack with a nice jet of flame coming out of it as 'a nuclear missile'*; show them a final stage on a ballistic trajectory, and 85% of them would be confused, and wouldn't know what the fuck they were looking at, or why James Bond was worried about it.

I remember when Gene Roddenberry, creator of ST:TOS, was once asked why the series does not show any of its spaceships upside down. It's a concession to an Earthbound audience, like noisy explosions and the like. If an explosion was soundless, some people might wonder what happened to their TV's sound.

That reminds me of the Star Wars Star Destroyer, with a superstructure and lots of guns on one side, and not much on the other side. Much like an Earth surface warship, and not what one would expect in outer space.

Yet Star Wars is the one series that actually did show a ship upside down. Beginning of Episode 2 - The Clone Wars. Senator Amidala's ship arrives on Coruscant, then has to turn upside down to be right side up to the landing pad.

 

[Davka]

Any time an airlock goes SNAFU and people are hanging on for dear life trying not to get sucked into outer space.

Why is that bad science?

An airlock is a pretty small space. The air in it would be gone in a split second, a single "poof!" and it's all over. No air, no pushing people into space.

If it was a huge warehouse-sized area, it would make more sense. But in SciFi movies the air keeps rushing out until the door is shut, no matter how large the airlock.

 

[Keith&Co.]

But in SciFi movies the air keeps rushing out until the door is shut, no matter how large the airlock.

I imagine on the NSEA Protector, the aliens have extra air pumped into the airlocks during all air leak emergencies, in order to keep that hissing going...

 

[Davka]

But in SciFi movies the air keeps rushing out until the door is shut, no matter how large the airlock.

I imagine on the NSEA Protector, the aliens have extra air pumped into the airlocks during all air leak emergencies, in order to keep that hissing going...

Thanks you for clearing that up. Pesky aliens.

 

[Keith&Co.]

I imagine on the NSEA Protector, the aliens have extra air pumped into the airlocks during all air leak emergencies, in order to keep that hissing going...

Thanks you for clearing that up. Pesky aliens.

Pesky?
No, that's the ship from Galaxy Quest. The aliens would have engineered their ship to provide the TV effects even if the science said 'No.'

 

[Derec]

Yet Star Wars is the one series that actually did show a ship upside down. Beginning of Episode 2 - The Clone Wars. Senator Amidala's ship arrives on Coruscant, then has to turn upside down to be right side up to the landing pad.

They also showed (in one of the prequels) everybody falling sideways as the ship turned 90 degrees if I remember correctly.

 

[Derec]

But you want to protect the data more than the hardware. Explosives in the hardware are not worth the efforts.

I did not say it was necessarily practical but it has a degree of in universe explanation and thus is not in the same league as some examples here. Besides, things exploding or catching fire are cool in a visual medium. Kind of like overly graphic GUIs mentioned upthread.

Every time i've handled ordnance, i've had to complete a qualification card and regular ordnance handling training. There's usually a safety observer and often radio frequency protections. I can't imagine going through all that in order to boot up a laptop.

You don't have to go through all of it order to turn on your car either. And yet you have an explosive charge right in front of you.

 

[Derec]

Computer hardware alone cannot detect anything at all.

It would obviously have some firmware to go with it.

It's a s useless as a chai or a rock, without electricity and software/firmware. Software/firmware can be bypassed.

You could make it tamper-resistant.

Even in the extremely unlikely event that firmware has been installed in the circuit-board physically attached to the drive, all that's needed is to replace that circuit-board.

Removing which could be made to trigger the self-destruct.

Again, I am not saying this is particularly practical, just not as utterly absurd and impossible as many other things discussed in this thread.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Any time an airlock goes SNAFU and people are hanging on for dear life trying not to get sucked into outer space.

Why is that bad science?

There's not that much wind.

Mythbusters tackled this to a lesser degree--what happened with various degrees of damage to a pressurized airplane. Buster (their crash test dummy) never left his seat even when they did quite a bit of damage to the plane wall right beside him. (Obviously they didn't blow up a plane in flight. It was a scrap plane in the boneyard but the pressurized it to the normal differential for a plane in flight.)

 

[Keith&Co.]

Earthrise.

Some movie about miners on the moon, they were talking about going up to the surface at the next "earthrise." I said that sounded stupid. My leading petty officer lectured me for 15-20 minutes on why when the moon rises, it's moonrise. When you're on the moon, it's the earth coming over the horizon, so it'd be 'earthrise.' Like sunrise and so on. Got into the subjectiveness of human language persisting after science proves the underlying nature of all things was different.

When he stopped talking i pointed out that the moon always points the same face at Earth. So it never rises or sets, it's in the same spot in the sky the whole time. He made me go clean something.

 

[bilby]

If your mine is on the thin strip of lunar surface at the edge of the Earth-facing disk, then the Earth will rise and set over the course of a month, due to libration.

Go clean something else.

 

[Keith&Co.]

If your mine is on the thin strip of lunar surface at the edge of the Earth-facing disk, then the Earth will rise and set over the course of a month, due to libration.

Go clean something else.

How thin would this strip be? Is there really a spot where the Earth would completely disappear behind the horizon and completely rise or does it just play peekaboo?

Eh. You're coming to the rescue of the same LPO who believed people behaved differently during the Full Moon because of the increased gravitational attraction of a bigger moon.... "More mass, greater attraction!" he would insist.

 

[bilby]

If your mine is on the thin strip of lunar surface at the edge of the Earth-facing disk, then the Earth will rise and set over the course of a month, due to libration.

Go clean something else.

How thin would this strip be? Is there really a spot where the Earth would completely disappear behind the horizon and completely rise or does it just play peekaboo?

About 9% of the lunar surface is in this strip, which averages about 310km wide - much wider than that at the lunar equator, and close to zero width at the rotational poles. It's big enough for the Earth to completely rise and set, at least in the centre of the strip, close to the lunar equator; the time between the first sighting of Earthrise and the whole of the planet being above the horizon would be pretty long though.

Eh. You're coming to the rescue of the same LPO who believed people behaved differently during the Full Moon because of the increased gravitational attraction of a bigger moon.... "More mass, greater attraction!" he would insist.

What, and nobody threw him overboard? Submariners are an oddly tolerant bunch.

 

[Keith&Co.]

the time between the first sighting of Earthrise and the whole of the planet being above the horizon would be pretty long though.

So...even if the mine is magically located in the best possible spot for this effect, it's still not swift, and not terribly likely that two shiftworkers could sit outside between shifts and 'catch' the earthrise?

 

[bilby]

the time between the first sighting of Earthrise and the whole of the planet being above the horizon would be pretty long though.

So...even if the mine is magically located in the best possible spot for this effect, it's still not swift, and not terribly likely that two shiftworkers could sit outside between shifts and 'catch' the earthrise?

Only if they were lazy bums who took very, very long breaks between shifts, discussing celestial mechanics, when they should have been cleaning whatever their LPO just yelled at them to clean.

 

[Keith&Co.]

So...even if the mine is magically located in the best possible spot for this effect, it's still not swift, and not terribly likely that two shiftworkers could sit outside between shifts and 'catch' the earthrise?

Only if they were lazy bums who took very, very long breaks between shifts, discussing celestial mechanics, when they should have been cleaning whatever their LPO just yelled at them to clean.

So.... All in all, i actually feel vindicated. It's a stupid detail to put in the movie, and MOST LIKELY reflects a poor understanding of the orbital mechanics of our closest neighbor, unless you're willing to spend time explaining the actual mechanics of lunar orbit to the viewer AND place the mine very, very specifically on the lunar surface.

Which wouldn't take much. Name it the 'earthrise mine' and have someone brag to the new miners that they're hte only lunar facility that actually sees and Earthrise because we're situated in a very small spot where....

 

[lpetrich]

Earthrise and Earthset are indeed appropriate terms.

The Moon's orbit is approximately elliptical, and I say approximately because the Sun rather noticeably pulls on it ( Lunar theory). The Moon thus goes about 6.3 degrees alternately ahead and behind as it orbits the Earth. The largest of the Sun's periodic perturbation is called the "evection", and it produces an apparent change in the Moon's orbit's eccentricity. When the Moon's perigee or apogee points to the Sun, then the eccentricity effect is 7.6d, while when the Sun is halfway in between, then the eccentricity effect is 5.0d.

The Earth's angular size at the Moon is about 2 degrees, so the Earth can completely rise and set as observed from certain parts of the Moon.

 

[Potoooooooo]

In this novel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God's_Eye ferrets are refereed to as rodents the authors are hardly science illiterate , they should have known better

 

[James Brown]

Was it the authors identifying ferrets as rodents? Or was it a character?

(Yes, there's a difference.)