Poorly conceived movie and/or SF inventions/technology

Cafe Society
101

I think the whole idea of a “Self-Destruct Mechanism” on a space ship has been very badly thought out and executed. One of the high points of the TV movie Something is Out There comes when the Earth guy asks the alien woman why she doesn’t just use the Self-Destruct to blow up the ship and get rid of the Monster, and she asks “What self-destruct mechanism? If you had a ship, would you put one on it?” Which sums it up pretty well.
I can see it making sense in some situations – really big ships that are expected to go into orbit and which would be in a position to wreak havoc if they fell, reaching thye ground in big pieces despite atmospheric friction, and which might not have the best control and guidance around. The ore freighter in the original Alien is actually a pretty good candidate. Various small military ships might want them, too. But there’s not a lot of point to putting one on, say, the Enterprise (despite “The Corbomite Maneuver” – and that was a hoax, anyway). We saw in ST III that the Enterprise would burn up on its way in (although her successor under Picard evidently wouldn’t). And do we put such devices on our own ships and planes today?
A bomb big enough to take out a big ship is a terrorist device waiting to happen, a grave temptation to the crew, and a pain in the neck to keep in guaranteed workling order. (A lot of places I’ve worked had trouble keeping the fire extinguishers fully charged. If we ever had to use the Self-Destruct to blow up a building, I guasrantee it wouldn’t have worked). The accountants would bitch about how much usable capital was tied up in a device that would probably never be used.

About the only moviwe I’ve seen where such a Self-Desttruct Device was used properly was Robinson Crusoe on Mars, where the Mars expedition had one on the ship, and it was used (as the original RC used his) to get rid of a device that indicated his presence to unwelcome visitors. Also the only time it wasn’t played up and used at the climax of the film, but dispatched in a businesslike fashion.

102

[QUOTE=Tuckerfan]
In the Star Wars universe, no one seems to have heard of the terms “network security” and “wifi.” Droids roll up to commports, stick a dealie in, and they’re surfing the net in no time. Kind of funny that they can jump through hyperspace, fire high energy weapons, but none of them can plunk down in a local Ureelbucks and surf the web without plugging into a commport (and they don’t seem to have laptop PCs either).
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Well, you have to make allowances. That scene with R2-D2 hacking into the Death Star computer is from the original SW movie, released in 1977. By that year, SF writers had been dreaming for decades of all the standard space-opera technology – blasters and warp drives and robots and artificial gravity – but nobody (in Hollywood) had heard of the Internet nor imagined the possibility of wireless communication with computers. Nor PCs, let alone laptop PCs.

103

My take on the Fremen would be that they wouldn’t use lasers because they wanted simpler weapons they could maintain in the desert, and they wouldn’t use shields when they attacked the settlements because they might get shot with a laser.

104

[QUOTE=Mangetout]
Well, OK, but MrDibble quoted something on the last page about the disaster that happens when coherent light impinges on a shield. That sure sounds like a laser to me (and the name ‘lazgun’ doesn’t exactly help), but I’m not a fan, so I’ll probably just wind my neck in now.
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Yeah, that was from the Dune Encyclopedia – which, while interesting, definately includes large portions of non-canon material. And since it’s written in-character, as it were, there’s no way to tell what came from Herbert, and what was made up because the authors thought it was cool. Herbert never says what lazguns were, but probably did choose the name for its familiarity to “laser-guns.”

105

I believe that the U2 spy plane had a self-destruct. I remember hearing that that pilot who was captured by the Soviets supposedly activated it, but it didn’t go off. (Or maybe he just forgot, which would be perfectly understandable under the circumstances.) Anyway, ships can be scuttled if need be, and for nuclear-powered ships, you could set the reactor to go critical if you really wanted to.

106

[QUOTE=Max the Immortal]
I’ll second pretty much every hand-held weapon in sci-fi. The Star Trek phaser pistol (and rifle) is a major pet peeve of mine. They’re supposed to be able to disintegrate people, but I’ve seen that happen once (and I don’t think it was even a starfleet phaser). They usually just knock somebody over, or (in the case of the monster of the week) just slow them down (if that). …
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Say that to the poor Mugatu!

107

Scuttling and reactor going critical aren’t the same thing as blowing-up-self-destructuin, though. Even a critical reactor won’t blow up, in all likelihood. Certainly it won’t give you a nuclear explosion. All these things do is send your ship to the bottom. Nobody, AFAIK, puts lots of explosives on their ships to do them the kind of all-encompassing damage the movies depict.

(I find it hard to believe that the U2 had a self-destruct on it. If it crashed from that height it would do a prettty good job of self-destruction. And weight was an issue for those planes. I can believe , maybe, that they had small charges to destroy certain items, but even in that case I’d be concerned about accidental detonation.

Chekov: Look, Captain, my lottery number won the Magaverse Prize!

Kirk: TJ324LPT

Spock: Captain, isn’t that the same as the Self-Destruct Sequence?

Kirk: Oops! Does this mean we have to run through the Mashers?

108

[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
But there’s not a lot of point to putting one on, say, the Enterprise (despite “The Corbomite Maneuver” – and that was a hoax, anyway). We saw in ST III that the Enterprise would burn up on its way in (although her successor under Picard evidently wouldn’t). And do we put such devices on our own ships and planes today?
A bomb big enough to take out a big ship is a terrorist device waiting to happen, a grave temptation to the crew, and a pain in the neck to keep in guaranteed workling order.
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Actually, it does make sense on a ship like the Enterprise. Consider :

  • It exists in a universe with such nasties as flying, mind controlling monsters, and all sorts of other things that you do not want to let take over your ship, even if it means killing all on board.

  • It’s fairly easy to implement, given that it’s an antimatter powered and armed ship, it’s already a giant flying bomb. Which leads to my next 2 points :

  • There are a number of situations where it’s better to blow up your antimatter-filled ship before it hits something you don’t want vaporized.

  • While you do need to take precautions to keep someone from using it to destroy the ship without authorization, given the dangerous nature of antimatter, you need to take such precautions anyway, or they could just blow the warp core without a dedicated self destruct device.

[QUOTE=Diceman]
I believe that the U2 spy plane had a self-destruct. I remember hearing that that pilot who was captured by the Soviets supposedly activated it, but it didn’t go off. (Or maybe he just forgot, which would be perfectly understandable under the circumstances.)
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IIRC, it was just a small explosive or incendiery device designed to destroy classified equipment; not a Hollywood style planes-goes-up-in-a-fireball SDD.

109

Wasn’t the Nostromo’s self-destruct simply allowing its nuclear reactor to go critical and then boom?

110

[QUOTE=Diceman]
I believe that the U2 spy plane had a self-destruct. I remember hearing that that pilot who was captured by the Soviets supposedly activated it, but it didn’t go off. (Or maybe he just forgot, which would be perfectly understandable under the circumstances.) Anyway, ships can be scuttled if need be, and for nuclear-powered ships, you could set the reactor to go critical if you really wanted to.
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Supercritical. When the reactors on a Navy ship are running, it’s critical, meaning that the same amount of neutrons are produced at the end of this cycle as in the cycle immediately preceding this one - in other words, self-sustaining.

And it’s incredibly unlikely that you could do it anyway, use the reactor as a self-destruct mechanism. It won’t explode, merely contaminate a portion of the ship, and it would take days for it to happen.

111

Actually, this brinmgs up an interesting point – when the Enterprise went boom at the end of ST III, it wasn’t nearly enough of a boom for an anti-matter-filled ship. For that matter, none of the ships in the Star Trek Universe ever seem to go boom with the awesome amounts of energy you’d expect from the liberation of huge quantities of antimatter (when the Reliant went boom, it was the Genesis Device that did the damage). Evidently, then, for whatever reason, you don’t really have to worry about liberating all the antimatter energy at once in the Star Trek Universe, and I ought to be able to let the ship burn up in the atmosphere.

No big all-encompassing Self=-Destruct needed.

112

The U2 and modern spyplanes–like the one forced down by China a couple of years ago do have self-destruct mechanisms. But these aren’t giant explosives that vaporize the plane, they’re more like a grenade stuck to the computer. I believe the self-destruct mechanism on some of these things is an attached hammer that you’re supposed to use to smash the computer if you’re about to be captured.

113

[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
Actually, this brinmgs up an interesting point – when the Enterprise went boom at the end of ST III, it wasn’t nearly enough of a boom for an anti-matter-filled ship. For that matter, none of the ships in the Star Trek Universe ever seem to go boom with the awesome amounts of energy you’d expect from the liberation of huge quantities of antimatter (when the Reliant went boom, it was the Genesis Device that did the damage). Evidently, then, for whatever reason, you don’t really have to worry about liberating all the antimatter energy at once in the Star Trek Universe, and I ought to be able to let the ship burn up in the atmosphere.

No big all-encompassing Self=-Destruct needed.
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Yeah, that’s something that has bugged me, in terms of inconsistent tech. When the Warp Core breaches, everybody has to pretty much go to warp speed to get away in time (in Generations, the Enterprise D’s saucer was able to get far enough away to avoid being destroyed, but was still crippled in the blast, and crashed soon after.) We’ve seen space battles where ships in close proximity to eachother (hell, we’ve seen space battles with tight formations of ships flying close together) where ships would be destroyed, but the warp core would evidentally not be breached in the process.

This suggest either that Warp Cores are made from the same stuff as Little Black Boxes, and thus can actually survive the destruction of the rest fo the ship, or that they have to somehow go supercritical before a breach would happen, but we’ve never really seen anything that said how it worked.

And yeah, modern ships can be scuttled, and I recall reading references to the Bismark’s crew setting off scuttling charges, which were presumably explosives placed at key structural places and points in the hull. Army bomber crews were required to destroy the Norden bombsight before evacuating their plane, to keep the Axis powers from getting it. The strict sci-fi equivilant to scuttling a ship would be to change it’s velocity so that it would fall into a gravity well (a star, or a planet, or whatever you have handy) and be destroyed or rendered unusable apon landing. This has problems if you are near a populated planet, or not near a gravity well.

In any case, if the goal is to just keep the bad guys from capturing and using the ship, a scuttling device would only need to destroy key structural supports in the ship (assumign it was designed with specific key structural supports, of course) and vital systems like the engines and computers used for navigation and information storage (kinda like how age-of-sail ships captains would take any important papers, put them in a sack with some roundshot, and chick it out the window if capture of the ship was imminent).

114

If you think about it, it makes sense that a ship exploding doesn’t cause te warp core to go up al;l crazy like. Think of it this way:

A warp core breech would me like setting off an atomic bomb. Huge boom. But the ship exploding without the warp core breeching (like most of the time it explodes,) it would be like setting off a regular bomb right next to an atomic bomb. Yeah, you’ll release lots of radioactive material, but you won’t get an atomic blast.

115

[QUOTE=bouv]
A warp core breech would me like setting off an atomic bomb. Huge boom. But the ship exploding without the warp core breeching (like most of the time it explodes,) it would be like setting off a regular bomb right next to an atomic bomb. Yeah, you’ll release lots of radioactive material, but you won’t get an atomic blast.
[/QUOTE]
According to Trek science, Federation starships use antimatter as fuel for the warp drive. Because antimatter and normal matter annihilate each other on contact, the antimatter fuel is contained within a powerful magnetic field. Should a ship be destroyed, that field would go with it and all the antimatter fuel would be exposed, and thus annihilated. IOW, any explosion powerful enough to destroy the ship would also “ignite” the antimatter fuel, causing an even bigger explosion.

116

I’ve never understood the transporter. It is probably the MOST potent weapon that Starfleet has…all you have to do is transport a lit stick of dynamite into the Klingon or Romulan ship-kapow! No need for photon torpedos, or lasers, or any of that crap. You could also trnsport deadly bacteria or viruses into the Klingon ships with the trnsporter-no muss, no fuss! Heck, if we can do all the stuff that the ENTERPRISE can do (synthesize elements, travel faster that light, etc.0 who the hell NEEDs more planets, anyway??

117

[QUOTE=ralph124c]
I’ve never understood the transporter. It is probably the MOST potent weapon that Starfleet has..all you have to do is transport a lit stick of dynamite into the Klingon or Romulan ship-kapow! No need for photon torpedos, or lasers, or any of that crap. You could also trnsport deadly bacteria or viruses into the Klingon ships with the trnsporter-no muss, no fuss! Heck, if we can do all the stuff that the ENTERPRISE can do (synthesize elements, travel faster that light, etc.0 who the hell NEEDs more planets, anyway??
[/QUOTE]

The problem with using the transporter as a weapons delivery device is that it won’t work against sheilded ships, so you’d have to use conventional weapons (torpedos, phasers, disruptors, etc.) in order to hammer down the sheilds. By the time you get to that point, most ships don’t survive long getting hammered by phasers and torpedos WITHOUT sheilds for tactics like transporting explosives aboard to be needed (how long did the Reliant last once the Enterprise started firing on her in the Mutara Nebula? Maybe 30 seconds before she was out of the fight, tops?)

As for who needs more planets, they make handy places to pile up things so you don’t have to replicate them again, as well as handy places to pile up people so you don’t have them all crowded together in one place. Plus, there tends to be interesting things on other planets, which is largely why anyone goes to them in Star Trek (You’ll note that they’ve never gone to visit the Totaly Uninteresting Ice Rock of Iceturas XI in any episode of Star Trek)

118

The transporters, if used properly, can really mess things up.
Kirk: NOMAD, step into this transporter. We’d like to send you to the planet’s surface.

NOMAD; Yes, Creator.

(They use the Transporter to decompose NOMAD, but don’t send him anywhere. He’s still in the buffer).

Kirk:

OK, now where were we going?

-or-

Khan: From the Depths of Hell, I spit at Thee!

(Transporter shimmer around the Genesis device. It disappears.)

Khan: Damn!

Kirk: Scotty, you can take your time fixing those engines.

119

Yeah, but transporters/replicators totally break the ST universe. I mean, with a transporter/replicator you can do anything. Make anything, make anyONE. Duplicate people, edit people, merge people, store people, age them, reverse age them, cure any disease, fix any injury. You don’t need to build Starships, you just build a big replicator and replicate starships. Oh, replicators are too expensive? Just replicate more replicators. And if you’re replicating a starship, why bother training a new crew? Just replicate the starship with the crew already in place. Replicators solve every economic problem, eliminate scarcity. No wonder the Federation has “evolved beyond the primitive concept of money”. What do you need money for when you can get anything you need out of a replicator?

Fred Pohl had a set of stories where transporters existed…except he didn’t see the need to kill the person on the sending end just because you’ve created a duplicate of them on the recieving end. All interstellar travel was done by replicator. An unmanned probe would travel to a new system, turn on the replication system, and duplicates could be sent to the new system. But of course, there’s no way to travel back home except by sending a duplicate of yourself back and killing yourself. Not many volunteers for this.

120

This, ultimately, is the point of George O. Smith’s Venus Equilateral – they build the perfect Transporter, find they can use it as a Replicator, then realize that they’ve wrecked the world economies because nothing (except energy and space) is scarce anymore.