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So I've been rather depressed lately. In fact, one could almost say ridiculously depressed.
What does that look like?
Kinda like this:
[video=youtube;57ta7mkgrOU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57ta7mkgrOU[/video]
So, as I often do, I clear a bit of the clutter out of my head to cheer myself up.
In this case, comments on a bunch of Sci-Fi tropes and why they're just incredibly stupid.
Trope #1: The Plucky Human Resistance Overthrows the Robot Overlords.
Now, this I blame in part on the same mentality that gave us films like Wargames (in which a 1983-era computer gains sentience) and Alien (in which a relatively simple computer takes up a whole room), which is to say the following: Hollywood has no idea how technology works, and what is likely to happen with it in the future, let alone the present.
Let's imagine a scene functionally out of the Terminator universe; A squad of ragtag human Resistance fighters is planning to ambush a patrol of Terminators. Now, in the Hollywood mentality, the ingenuity and nonlinear thinking of the humans will trump the purely logic-driven, linear thinking of the machines. The humans spring a clever trap, they all pop up and gun down the unsuspecting robot drones, and the audience feels good about how awesome humans are.
If the Terminators were really designed by a hyper-intelligent computer bent on world domination?
Yeah.
The human scout moves into position. Unfortunately for him, he's human; he makes noise when he moves. He can't help it, it's inevitable. Against other humans, this wouldn't be a big deal. But he's not fighting other humans; he's fighting robots. The robots can hear him despite his best efforts. Not only can the robots hear him, they posses the capabilities to filter that information and accurately determine that what they're hearing is, in fact, a human scout. And the best part is that two or more of them can hear him, share the information, and triangulate his position to the inch before he ever reveals himself, or even sees the machines he's hypothetically stalking.
So the instant he pops his head up to take a look, he gets a bullet between the eyes. Because the robots are also not limited by the reaction speed of a human being; even if the humans somehow manage to get the drop on them in an ambush, the robots can easily overcome them simply through sheer reaction speed and targeting accuracy.
Hollywood fantasies aside, if the robots ever do take over, I plan on finding a way to make myself indispensable to them. Because there will be no human Resistance after the first week or so.
Trope #2: The Dominance of the Space Fighter.
This one of those nearly ubiquitous tropes in sci-fi. You'll see it in Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Space Battleship Yamato, and even in shows that try to at least pay some minor attention to inconvenient things like physics such as Babylon 5. Space fighters as a major, and highly effective, weapon of war.
Hell, they used fighters to blow up the Death Star, after all.
The problem, of course, is that all of these things involve the use of directed energy weapons. And once you have those, the concept of the fighter becomes... difficult at best.
Again, we run into a variety of problems with technology. Pretty much all energy weapons are either light-speed, or near light-speed weapons. Which means that you cannot dodge them; it's not possible. Even if you had some magical way of knowing that the shot was coming, human reflexes are insufficient to manage the attempt, and even if you take human frailties out of the equation, the act of maneuvering the craft will take too long to force a miss.
So, really, when the Rebels begin their trench run, the turrets snap around and kill every last one of them. Instantly. Not just that poor fat bastard Porkins.
Trope #3: On the Dearth of Seat Belts on the Bridge.
So you've got your starship, right? Can get you from one planet to another in the same system in a matter of hours, from one star to another in a matter of days (or hours, depending on how inconsistent your universe is and how important the trip is). The second one we can let slide; interstellar travel is a mystery to us, after all, but interplanetary travel we can rather understand.
What we're talking about here is an inertial compensator. Something that prevents the ship from turning the fragile bags of mostly water that crew it into beef stroganof when it pulls that 10,000 G acceleration that gets it from one planet to another faster than you can say "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot."
Why do they never work when someone is shooting at the ship? Seriously, you're talking about something that can withstand the sort of forces that will turn a human being into a fine paste spread over the aft bulkhead; the chances of enemy fire inducing a significant enough level of force to overwhelm something like that is functionally zero.
I suppose it wouldn't look quite so dramatic if the crew just sat, sipping their mimosas while the space outside their ship looked like the cauldron of hell. But it still bugs me.
Meh. That's enough for now. And probably enough for the half-dozen or so people who will actually read this one; I've noticed a certain variability in the number of views on these things. Still trying to figure out how/why the "Kirk, Spock, or Bones?" blog got over 3000 views.
What does that look like?
Kinda like this:
[video=youtube;57ta7mkgrOU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57ta7mkgrOU[/video]
So, as I often do, I clear a bit of the clutter out of my head to cheer myself up.
In this case, comments on a bunch of Sci-Fi tropes and why they're just incredibly stupid.
Trope #1: The Plucky Human Resistance Overthrows the Robot Overlords.
Now, this I blame in part on the same mentality that gave us films like Wargames (in which a 1983-era computer gains sentience) and Alien (in which a relatively simple computer takes up a whole room), which is to say the following: Hollywood has no idea how technology works, and what is likely to happen with it in the future, let alone the present.
Let's imagine a scene functionally out of the Terminator universe; A squad of ragtag human Resistance fighters is planning to ambush a patrol of Terminators. Now, in the Hollywood mentality, the ingenuity and nonlinear thinking of the humans will trump the purely logic-driven, linear thinking of the machines. The humans spring a clever trap, they all pop up and gun down the unsuspecting robot drones, and the audience feels good about how awesome humans are.
If the Terminators were really designed by a hyper-intelligent computer bent on world domination?
Yeah.
The human scout moves into position. Unfortunately for him, he's human; he makes noise when he moves. He can't help it, it's inevitable. Against other humans, this wouldn't be a big deal. But he's not fighting other humans; he's fighting robots. The robots can hear him despite his best efforts. Not only can the robots hear him, they posses the capabilities to filter that information and accurately determine that what they're hearing is, in fact, a human scout. And the best part is that two or more of them can hear him, share the information, and triangulate his position to the inch before he ever reveals himself, or even sees the machines he's hypothetically stalking.
So the instant he pops his head up to take a look, he gets a bullet between the eyes. Because the robots are also not limited by the reaction speed of a human being; even if the humans somehow manage to get the drop on them in an ambush, the robots can easily overcome them simply through sheer reaction speed and targeting accuracy.
Hollywood fantasies aside, if the robots ever do take over, I plan on finding a way to make myself indispensable to them. Because there will be no human Resistance after the first week or so.
Trope #2: The Dominance of the Space Fighter.
This one of those nearly ubiquitous tropes in sci-fi. You'll see it in Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Space Battleship Yamato, and even in shows that try to at least pay some minor attention to inconvenient things like physics such as Babylon 5. Space fighters as a major, and highly effective, weapon of war.
Hell, they used fighters to blow up the Death Star, after all.
The problem, of course, is that all of these things involve the use of directed energy weapons. And once you have those, the concept of the fighter becomes... difficult at best.
Again, we run into a variety of problems with technology. Pretty much all energy weapons are either light-speed, or near light-speed weapons. Which means that you cannot dodge them; it's not possible. Even if you had some magical way of knowing that the shot was coming, human reflexes are insufficient to manage the attempt, and even if you take human frailties out of the equation, the act of maneuvering the craft will take too long to force a miss.
So, really, when the Rebels begin their trench run, the turrets snap around and kill every last one of them. Instantly. Not just that poor fat bastard Porkins.
Trope #3: On the Dearth of Seat Belts on the Bridge.
So you've got your starship, right? Can get you from one planet to another in the same system in a matter of hours, from one star to another in a matter of days (or hours, depending on how inconsistent your universe is and how important the trip is). The second one we can let slide; interstellar travel is a mystery to us, after all, but interplanetary travel we can rather understand.
What we're talking about here is an inertial compensator. Something that prevents the ship from turning the fragile bags of mostly water that crew it into beef stroganof when it pulls that 10,000 G acceleration that gets it from one planet to another faster than you can say "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot."
Why do they never work when someone is shooting at the ship? Seriously, you're talking about something that can withstand the sort of forces that will turn a human being into a fine paste spread over the aft bulkhead; the chances of enemy fire inducing a significant enough level of force to overwhelm something like that is functionally zero.
I suppose it wouldn't look quite so dramatic if the crew just sat, sipping their mimosas while the space outside their ship looked like the cauldron of hell. But it still bugs me.
Meh. That's enough for now. And probably enough for the half-dozen or so people who will actually read this one; I've noticed a certain variability in the number of views on these things. Still trying to figure out how/why the "Kirk, Spock, or Bones?" blog got over 3000 views.
