Even if you do accept that chunk of change, you still have to get past the fact that NOBODY in the Federation could figure out they were speaking in metaphors.
Seriously? That took me all of five seconds to figure out.
For fusion plants based on real-life designs, yes; but it is possible to come up with designs that explode.
Real life designs have only a very small amount of fuel being fused at a time; they can’t explode because there just isn’t enough material there to make a meaningful blast. But a fictional design that’s more like a “star in a bottle”* could *well explode; a large mass of extremely hot and dense matter is by nature prone to exploding if given the chance after all, fusion or not.
And a fusion power plant that produces enough energy to explode with 40 megatons of force is not only of very different design than a real world one, but has a far higher power output. If it’s putting out that much power even if it didn’t explode I expect an uncontrolled shutdown to involve something more dramatic than just shutting off; all that energy has to go somewhere.
Actually no, that was a different book-only race. And to be fair they couldn’t read the label.
Where did you get “the early 1950s”? IIRC, one episode – not of Galactica: 1980, but of the original series – had a broadcast coming in of Neil Armstrong announcing that The Eagle Has Landed, which I figure marks it as the late 1960s (or later, if we figure they’re light-years away from Earth; but not sooner).
Are we supposed to guess which plot points? I’d love to flame but I need some kindling.
The only one that bothered me in a “jumping the shark” kind of way was:
The orchestrated and choreographed jail murders. There were other fantastical elements I could let slide, but that was just ridiculous. On a lesser show I would have given up at that point.
To me, it needs the elements of “post apocalyptic, low on resources” to get to “completely nuts.” I could buy that central premise as the crown jewel of a rich society, to be used for the enjoyment of the very richest.
Remember that it was originally printed in serial form, and it’s painfully obvious that Dumas was getting paid by the instalment. You also need to accept that God is pulling the strings in order for a lot of the plot machinations to make any sense at all. But it remains a favorite of mine.
That, at least, made a certain amount of sense…unlike the ending set in Bolivia’s new Ford Pinto Hotel, in which a minor fenderbender in the parking lot results in the ENTIRE HOTEL EXPLODING.
I actually prefer, as a change of pace, that not every Bond movie has to have him saving the world. But I agree that water prices in Bolivia are not quite the kind of issues 007 ought to be dealing with.
There’s a much more fundamental flaw in Darmok which reflects a misunderstanding of how language works. That is, if you speak solely in metaphors, they stop being metaphors.
The universal translator should have been able to translate the language according to what the intended meaning was, like it does with every other alien language, regardless of what the individual words might have originally literally meant historically.
ISTR it wasn’t really the reason he was on the case in the first place. Mostly it was “this evil organisation killed my girlfriend (and, later, the token punny-named, badly-acted totty) and they all must die”, concentrated into him foiling their Bolivia operation.
No, the Federation did know they were speaking in metaphors, they just didn’t know what the metaphors meant. It was either Dr. Crush or Troi who explained the whole problem to Riker in the conference room, using Romeo and Juliet to explain the issue. Unless you know Shakespeare, you have no idea Juliet on the balcony is referring to a romance.
This was explained to me once before by a nuclear industry spokesperson. Test reactors have low energy, but an actual fusion power plant could put out a ton of energy. If the magnetic-bottle containment were to fail, the plasma would expand until it touched the physical containment structure (most likely concrete and steel) and then the plasma would “lose its energy” and there would not be a “nuclear” explosion.
Of course energy does not cease to exist, it converts. What this advocate was deliberately glossing over was that the PLASMA would go inert, but there would be one hell of a “concrete” explosion. It just wouldn’t count as “nuclear” by a technicality.
Well, that is because there IS no balcony in Romeo and Juliet .
One of those things that was added later on.
The balcony scene turns up in Otway’s The History and Fall of Caius Marius, in 1679, which also included the line “O Marius, Marius! wherefore art thou Marius?”
Covertly? They’d overtly pick him up as soon as they recognized him, and shoot him. Whether or not they used some polite fiction like “shot while escaping” would depend on how nice they were feeling that day.
