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Post a part of scifi fluff that really annoys you. Mine is the fact that in doctor who when they travel to the space station in the year 200,100 the security forces are still using g36s.

 psychadelicmime wrote:
when they travel to the space station in the year 200,100 the security forces are still using g36s.

They are ceremonial weapons

What really annoys me in sci-fi is when you have advanced technology but don't have people using it "properly". Star Trek is a huge one for this, even when the "advanced technology" isn't rendered inoperative by some electrical storm or something they do the most derp things. Why isn't your ship computer making micro warp jumps all over the place and firing its weapons etc rather than just sitting there getting pounded by incoming fire while the helmsman apparently waits for orders to roll the ship over or hide in a nebula or something and the weapon officers are all asleep at their posts or on the holodeck?

Why does the future never seem to have proper wi-fi?

Everyone knows that the "mcguffin deus ex machina mark X" navi computer used in all federation Ships is a traitorous peice of kit, ergo no automated control, red shirt only.

My biggest issue also related to this sort of thing is the fact that they also design this and similar controls systems in all universes with small explosive charge behind them. Not only that is that the technology for surge protection and fuses seems to have been phased out.

More Redshirts have died from defective equipment than the combined efforts of the Klingons and Romulans!

 notprop wrote:
Everyone knows that the "mcguffin deus ex machina mark X" navi computer used in all federation Ships is a traitorous peice of kit, ergo no automated control, red shirt only.

My biggest issue also related to this sort of thing is the fact that they also design this and similar controls systems in all universes with small explosive charge behind them. Not only that is that the technology for surge protection and fuses seems to have been phased out.

More Redshirts have died from defective equipment than the combined efforts of the Klingons and Romulans!

That is very true. And their ship design is really inefficient too. I know they are approaching post-scarcity levels of technology but that doesn't mean you just ignore efficient design.

And their marines/security forces (the limited amount we see of them) are just pants. Their guns are pants, they have no armour, no equipment, no vehicles, etc.. and they all appear to have had no training what so ever.

Who needs armour when you have heroes who hide behind unnamed redshirts - anyway what armour does exist also seems to have thise same sxplosive charges in them too.

Weird note - my iPhone predicta text wants to replace heros (sic) with jerks. Which seems very apts to me.

Inter-species romance and crossbreeding.

You expect me to seriously believe that two species not only managed to randomly evolve close enough to make the mating rituals and behaviors attractive both ways... AND make the plumbing mutually compatable... AND make the DNA mutually compatable as well?

Bull.

The whole balance of good-v-evil is piss poor.
Evil can never be defeated and good always looses. It´s getting tiresome by now.

 Vulcan wrote:
Inter-species romance and crossbreeding...

Not to mention space-aids would be way worse than normal earth-aids.

That no matter what, be it an alien zombie apocalypse, alien locust swarms or any other sort of fallout, the bad guys are still trying to get away with money. What use is money gonna have?

 Vulcan wrote:
Inter-species romance and crossbreeding.

I suppose that some breeding/romance could possibly occur, especially if you have an alien which reproduces parasitically with a wide range of native species, or one which has a very fluid and mutable genome.

In terms of plumbing... it is possible I suppose.

 Vulcan wrote:
Inter-species romance and crossbreeding.

You expect me to seriously believe that two species not only managed to randomly evolve close enough to make the mating rituals and behaviors attractive both ways... AND make the plumbing mutually compatable... AND make the DNA mutually compatable as well?

Bull.

They did a story arc in TNG to explain that one in the Trekverse - all the 'main' races of the time were seeded by another race a long time before for some reason, which is why they're all remarkable similar to poor human actors with rubber glued to their heads... Intelligent Design apparently

Technology in general. Especially in things like Star Wars and Star Trek. This is god knows how many generations of tech ahead of us and they have things that have been obsolete by today's standards. For instance, in Star Trek when any ship is under attack the ship itself doesn't do anything besides whine and complain with alarms. We have better counter systems on todays planes and battle-ships than that. You would think an advanced star-ship should be able to shoot it's own guns if it's under attack.

Also, running off of the inter-race thing, why do all species happen to speak the same language? And it happens to be English? I guess the Federation has translators for ship-to-ship communications, but when talking face-to-face how do they communicate so well? Again, I guess Federation species know a common language but not every species is a Federation species. If humans have translators built into their brains (or something stupid like that ), they may understand the alien but how does the alien understand the human...

Some of the aliens in Star Trek speak languages which cannot be handled by the universal translator and they need to have some kind of manual translation using an interpreter.

I don't really know how it works for face to face.

Mine i either the rejection of AI or it's underutilization.

They're either helpless or evil.

Lizard women with breasts.

R.

Why are there only 4 members of an SG team and thus they are outgunned the second It gets even a tiny bit hairy. That goes for Federation away teams as well.

They will in the face of an enemy armed with sharpened pineapples surrender without a second thought to preserving Earth security (here have a DHD code thingy everyone). Backed up by a company or so of soldiers we wouldn't have to put up with half of O'neils half arsed wisecracks. It's not like there's airfayre to pay. Deploy some resources Hammond for gods sake.

If the queen ever heard about the stargate program you can bet your arse there would be a few hundred Royal Marines headed to every planetary hit there was; true spreading goneria and staling resources would make for a very PG series, but god dammit we have a space Empire to build here!

Err sorry old habits die hard I guess.

It's easy to criticise shows made 20 years ago for having seemingly low-tech solutions to things, but they can only extrapolate what they have or know at the time. I find it fascinating to watch old sci-fi (and yes, Next-Gen is old) to see how they imagined the future would be.

Also a point on languages, writers realise that episodes that spend a lot of time with 'exciting' translation scenes aren't all that fun, so unless the episode demands it for plot purposes (see TNG: Darmok) then we get the convenience of the univeral translator.

This can actually be seen in Star Trek: Enterprise, which actually had a linguistics specialist on board as the writers initially wanted to represent humanity's first steps into the stars, but after just a few episodes they dropped that angle and hastily had the universal translater 'invented'.

My own personal annoyance is how time gets standardised. Someone on one planet (Earth, probably) talking to someone on another says "I'll see you in two weeks" or something - how does that other person know what an Earth week is, or how to go about calculating it?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 notprop wrote:
Why are there only 4 members of an SG team and thus they are outgunned the second It gets even a tiny bit hairy.

This was actually lampshaded in the show (I've literally just finished watching through SG1 a couple of days ago). At least twice someone raised the point "there's no rule that says there has to be 4 people in a team" (although in one case Jack was actually arguing to allow SG1 to continue as a 3-piece without him).

Riquende wrote:
It's easy to criticise shows made 20 years ago for having seemingly low-tech solutions to things, but they can only extrapolate what they have or know at the time. I find it fascinating to watch old sci-fi (and yes, Next-Gen is old) to see how they imagined the future would be.

I have a lot of science fiction books from the 1920's, through the 40's, 50's 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's up to today - it is really interesting seeing hyper spacial ships with positronic brains being programmed using punch cards

My own personal annoyance is how time gets standardised. Someone on one planet (Earth, probably) talking to someone on another says "I'll see you in two weeks" or something - how does that other person know what an Earth week is, or how to go about calculating it?

Having a universal timing system actually makes sense for any large federation of different species, or even a single species over several planets/systems/etc. Something based on the decay rate of carbon 14 or some other constant would make sense.

Riquende wrote:
I
My own personal annoyance is how time gets standardised. Someone on one planet (Earth, probably) talking to someone on another says "I'll see you in two weeks" or something - how does that other person know what an Earth week is, or how to go about calculating it?

They actually explained this in Star Trek when someone asked about the star-dates being out-of-sequence. Something like the time is standardized around what quadrant of Space you are in, and most facilities have multiple clocks/calendars that mark the dates/times in all quadrants (similar to how multi-national corporations today have clocks that display the different time-zones)

 Pyriel- wrote:
The whole balance of good-v-evil is piss poor.
Evil can never be defeated and good always looses. It´s getting tiresome by now.

GW loves that and thusly I can't read any of their fluff because its all like that and sooooo tiring

Replicator technology.

Oh look it's the borg, we're fethed...

Wait a mo, I just replicated 20,000 Datas crewing 1,000 Defiants, why don't we all just enjoy these cigars and romulan brandy and watch the giant cube fireworks?

That works...

Also:


ALL TIME TRAVEL EVER.

 VanHammer wrote:

 Vulcan wrote:
Inter-species romance and crossbreeding...

Not to mention space-aids would be way worse than normal earth-aids.

There's a great Alan Moore short comic about that. (Or at least space STDs) From the 80's. I think Rick Veitch drew it. Also, disgusting.

Riquende wrote:
It's easy to criticise shows made 20 years ago for having seemingly low-tech solutions to things, but they can only extrapolate what they have or know at the time. I find it fascinating to watch old sci-fi (and yes, Next-Gen is old) to see how they imagined the future would be.

That's the exact reason I can never take the idea of "hard" SF seriously, or anyone who tries to seriously put forward idea X as the real future of humanity that's seriously going to happen any day now you guys. In a few decades, the fads of today will be on the pile with atomic rayguns, and mirrorshades-n-trenchcoats cyberpunk, under "looked good at the time". The only things that are consistent in our predictions of the future are how comically wrong they turn out to be. Yes, Arthur C. Clarke predicted orbital satellites, but he also predicted cargo transport with giant hovercraft, and using uplifted chimpanzees as domestic servants.

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
Replicator technology.

Oh look it's the borg, we're fethed...

Wait a mo, I just replicated 20,000 Datas crewing 1,000 Defiants, why don't we all just enjoy these cigars and romulan brandy and watch the giant cube fireworks?

That works...

For things like that, I assume there's a reason that they can't do that, which would take too long to explain. After all, imagine a writer in the 19th century predicting the invention of nuclear bombs. He might them extrapolate and say that the nation with the most nukes now rules the world, and nobody dares to oppose them in any area, lest they be summarily destroyed by these super-weapons. It's a reasonable prediction, but doesn't take into account the limitations of the weapons or the political, legal and other circumstances that surround them.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Mine i either the rejection of AI or it's underutilization.

They're either helpless or evil.

The problem is, you run into the situation where if AI's can do everything humans can better, you can't really write a story where a human does anything meaningful. It's even worse if they go the "strong AI" route, where if you give a computer a big enough processor, it essentially becomes a fantasy god.

I can forgive a lot a lot of tropes that are there to make the setting more interesting, and give humans stuff to do. Genre also matters, because a lack of scientific rigor often isn't a result of being lazy, it's just not the freakin' point of the story, and attempts to make it so come off as just showing off your own scientific knowledge to try and win geek points.

I remember a thread elsewhere, where people were posting how they hated FTL space travel, human-like aliens, resource shortages, space dogfights, etc. And then someone else posted a setting that took all of these ideas into account, where a space battle takes place between two spherical spacecraft at a million miles with invisible lasers over half a second, and the first the crew know of it is when the computer beeps to tell them they just won. Or they make contact with aliens, which turn out to be hyper-intelligent crystals who converse in exotic math and have no concept of "diagonal".

Okay, there is one that annoys me--the mixing up of "sentient" (has senses) with "sapient" (intelligent).

 SilverMK2 wrote:

 psychadelicmime wrote:
when they travel to the space station in the year 200,100 the security forces are still using g36s.

They are ceremonial weapons

What really annoys me in sci-fi is when you have advanced technology but don't have people using it "properly". Star Trek is a huge one for this, even when the "advanced technology" isn't rendered inoperative by some electrical storm or something they do the most derp things. Why isn't your ship computer making micro warp jumps all over the place and firing its weapons etc rather than just sitting there getting pounded by incoming fire while the helmsman apparently waits for orders to roll the ship over or hide in a nebula or something and the weapon officers are all asleep at their posts or on the holodeck?

The complete lack of ANY sort of military competance in the supposedly military forces of certain sci-fi. Star Trek is the biggest culprit.


Red Shirts. They're freakin marines on a Navy Ship! Yet they'll just walk right down the middle of the street on an Alien world with only pistols, NO form of body armor, and no attempt to take advantage of any sort of cover. Everyone seems to have completely lost any sense of military tactics, superior firepower, and armor.

Also, for how often Phasers are rendered useless you think they would carry some sort of combat knife. Instead they seem to be fond of using their phasers as a melee weapon, which almost always gets dropped in favor of some sort of pisspoor wrestling moves that never really work.

Star Trek: there is a big giant video screen on the bridge that can show them anything. The view outside, technical data, video chat. Every important person is on that bridge. All the computers are on that bridge. That screen could show them what is outside the ship wherever the bridge might be located.

But they always stick the bridge right on top center of the dang saucer. One hull between the brains of the ship and death.

 Elemental wrote:
That's the exact reason I can never take the idea of "hard" SF seriously, or anyone who tries to seriously put forward idea X as the real future of humanity that's seriously going to happen any day now you guys. In a few decades, the fads of today will be on the pile with atomic rayguns, and mirrorshades-n-trenchcoats cyberpunk, under "looked good at the time". The only things that are consistent in our predictions of the future are how comically wrong they turn out to be. Yes, Arthur C. Clarke predicted orbital satellites, but he also predicted cargo transport with giant hovercraft, and using uplifted chimpanzees as domestic servants.

There are a number of "hard sf" ideas which either exist today, or are on the way. Hell, we had large hovercraft routinely going between the UK and France until we developed better ferries, we have large airships being developed for carrying cargoes and while we don't have uplifted animals yet, there is a lot of work being done on both genetic and hardware engineering, as well as research into how the mind works which will eventually lead to that kind of technology.

The problem is, you run into the situation where if AI's can do everything humans can better, you can't really write a story where a human does anything meaningful. It's even worse if they go the "strong AI" route, where if you give a computer a big enough processor, it essentially becomes a fantasy god.

There are a few good "man against machine" stories out there although you are right that if you make AI's too powerful then humans don't really get too much of a look in. This tends to be why we see shackled AI's, or very subservient AI's in most fiction.

Germs, and how little they play a part in encountering alien species.

Using "War of the Worlds" as an good example of poorly planned alien enviroment preperation. In most other sci-fi settings, you never see something like this happening. It's like the go waltzing through a biological fire fight and manage to not get hit by anything.

That was one thing I priased Enterprise for was their emphasis on making sure no one brought anything back with them when they would go to alien worlds.

Large, non-satellite bodies being clearly visible in the sky, (usually moon-sized or bigger in the sky). Impossible. Even 'moons' that are way closer than our own in the sky.

The movie pitch-black and TES series of computer games (this one could be explained by distortion from the 'Camera' lens i guess) are the worst offenders.

With regards to SG1 i always thought that if it were such a super-secret deniable/black-op surely all the SG teams would have cyanide pills as standard and be subjected to some serious brainwashing.
EDIT: Forgot about the sarcophagus tech, hmm. Abdominal/cranial explosives or a contact solution that de-natures all the proteins in the body, rendering the operative into mush?

SilverMK2 wrote:What really annoys me in sci-fi is when you have advanced technology but don't have people using it "properly". Star Trek is a huge one for this, even when the "advanced technology" isn't rendered inoperative by some electrical storm or something they do the most derp things. Why isn't your ship computer making micro warp jumps all over the place and firing its weapons etc rather than just sitting there getting pounded by incoming fire while the helmsman apparently waits for orders to roll the ship over or hide in a nebula or something and the weapon officers are all asleep at their posts or on the holodeck?

I think it takes a second or two to actually engage the warp drive, as the gravity bubble it creates takes a moment to build up. Additionally, I seem to recall that you can't raise shields whilst in warp, so the combination of effects would essentially turn your ship into a whack-a-mole game.

The closest they can come to your solution is referred to as the "Picard Manoeuver".

/epic nerdery