In the 1960 George Pal opus, Atlantis, the Lost Continent, the Atlanteans have solar-powered crystals that can be used for heat and light and other things (like powering fish-shaped submarines, evidently). They can also be used, one ambitious politician finds, to make Death Rays to use in Conquering the World.
But, in fact, you never actually see them used for such purposes. When they show a scene in the Royal Baths, it’s lit by a plethora of oil lamps. There’s a giant Benevolent Crystal atop a pyramid in Atlantis’ capital city (which blows up with finality when Atlantis sinks – it’s not the Evil Death Ray Crystal), but it’s not shown actually doing anything. Furthermore, even with all the solar crystals they have, they don’t seem to use them to do anything obviously useful, like propelling land vehicles – they rely (and depend) on Slave Labor for all the grunt work to be done. In a rational world, Crystal Power would’ve replaced slave labor – for practical reasons if not for humanitarian ones.
You can blame a lot of this on the way MGM forced the film through in a hurry (to cash in on the “Hercules” film craze while it was still hot), coupled with a Writer’s Strike that meant they had to use the unfinished, unpolished first draft of the script. But that still doesn’t completely excuse the inconsistencies.
I have a love/hate relationship with the film. It’s one of my favorite Bad Films largely because of its clear vision and gorgeous effects. But I hate it for the unbelievable technical illiteracy, dumbing down of Heinlein’s equally beautifully worked-out science fiction, and for the complete subversion and inversion of his underlying philosophy. It’s a weird mix. I can’t think of another movie so completely removed fro its (at least nominal) source material.
In Heinlein’s book, "The Bugs’ have high tech, including interstellar travel and FTL drive. For the film (which, as noted, started life not as an adaptation of Heinlein), they wanted The Bugs to be low tech, using their own biological capabilities to wreak havoc. This requires stupidities like literally hurling rocks across galactic distances, plasma-weapon bugs, and the like. It also requires starship captains too damned incompetent to see a Big Rock coming at their ships until literally on top of them, then unable to make effective avoidance maneuvers. Yet the Rock hits them just badly enough to compromise their communications link to earth.
That’s pretty breathtaking stupidity. It’s kinda like having the modern US fighting a primitive enemy who uses a catapult to launch a Big Rock across the ocean at Washington, D.C. and having it break off the communications mast of a Navy ship at sea so it can’t warn the Capitol of the incoming missile. It’s such a stupid, impossible scenario that it’s hard to figure out where to begin refuting it.
And the whole damned movie is like that.
So if you want to understand the rage of SF fans towards this, imagine if some filmmaker released a movie ostensibly based on a Tom Clancy novel with such a scene in it.
Yeah, I pointed out before that PPGs are a good example of a device that’s worse than our current tech. The station hull and and bulkheads should be strong enough to survive a pistol bullet in the first place, as they have to stand up incidental debris from all the high-velocity ships in the area (especially after space combat), and a bullet sized hole in the hull wouldn’t do much anyway - you get a slow air leak as long as nothing covered the hole, but nothing that would depressurize a section before maintenance could slap a patch on it. PPGs also set fires internally, which wreak way more havoc with the air supply and can spread if not put out. And regular firearms have low penetration options (though it shouldn’t be needed) like glaser rounds which are designed not to penetrate an airplane hull.
Meanwhile PPGs don’t seem to do much more damage than 20th century firearms in fights and require significantly higher technology so presumably are much more expensive. They also use an easily detected energy cell, while conventional firearms don’t have something that easily scanned for. Plus PPGs are hard to manufacture and have an unchangeable serial number when made, while conventional guns can be made with low-tech and the serial number is just etched in metal if you even put one on. Like a lot of SF guns, they look cool and high-tech on screen but really are inferior to what we have now.
It’s seriously over-praised. I’ve read it, and the best thing about it is that it led me to search for and find vastly better Harry Potter FanFic, like the works of the writer known as little0bird. A number of her books are better than several of Rowlings books.
PADDs (Personal Access Display Devices) in Star Trek. They’re portable flatscreens used for multiple purposes. Precursor to the iPad and other tablets, definitely - except that whenever someone is trying to sort through a lot of data, you see them running around with stacks of them piled up (and teetering).
Nowadays we’re comfortable with the idea that either your device has enough memory to handle anything you put on it, or everything is backed up to the cloud and accessible that way - but either that approach wasn’t on the radar at all or was thought to be too alien to viewers in the late '80s/early '90s, who were used to paper books.
Clockwork doesn’t really buy you anything – it’s alternative power that does that.
And you can’t really call Hieron’s experiments practical steam power – they were experiments and curiosities, not anything to base an industry on. From Prehistory to the 18th century all Mankind had to rely on were the power of animal and human muscle, aided and abetted by some water power and windmill power, neither of which were portable. They were used mainly for milling grain and the like. The Romans and most other people , even with knowledge of these, generally used animal muscle power for milling grain. It wasn’t until steam power came along and provided a relocatable and sometimes mobile source of reliable power that the Industrial Revolution got started.
The Greeks didn’t have steam power, they were able to make some steam-pwered toys but lacked the metallurgy to make boilers for any kind of widespread, heavy use steam power.
I’ll give the PPG credit that at least they had some justification for energy weapons, even if the justification doesn’t actually hold up. That’s more than most science fiction shows.
Or then there’s Firefly, where hand-held laser weapons exist, but their only advantage over lead-throwers is that they’re cool and shiny, and are therefore only used by people who value coolness and shininess over practicality, like that asshole nobleman in “Heart of Gold”.
Heck, if a rock that size was travelling at nearly light speed, it would have destroyed a lot more than just one city. Even a generous (compared to typical meteor speed) clip of 100 km/s is only about 0.00033c, so the rock would have to be targeted 120 *million *years in advance. Clearly the bugs’ original dispute was with the dinosaurs, humans are just caught in the aftermath.
There is a similar meteor-as-weapon bit in The Last Starfighter, with the similar plot hole of how it manages to cross interstellar (or at the very least, interplanetary) distances with pinpoint accuracy within the timeframe of the film. We even get to see the asteroid being launched, after the bad guys create a small breach in “The Frontier”, an immense protective force-field. It’s not clear how big The Frontier actually is - it’s described as protecting the worlds of the Star League - but under the most favourable interpretation, assume The Frontier is not a sphere hundreds of light-years across and enclosing multiple star systems, but actually a series of smaller installations around individual planets such as Rylos - the Star League capital and home of the Starfighter Command base which is attacked. If Rylos is about the size of Earth, its protective Frontier might be the size of, say, Jupiter. An incoming asteroid (at 100 km/s) could get from the edge to the center in about ten minutes. One would think a ship approaching the Frontier, let alone one lingering long enough to breach the force-field and mass-drive an asteroid, would set off all kinds of alarm bells, but it’s soon established that there is least one suicidal saboteur at Starfighter Command, so possibly the detection system was partly blinded or disabled.
With enough generosity, the asteroid attack in The Last Starfighter can be lampshaded. I don’t know what excuses can be made for Starship Troopers.
I’d think the biggest justification for using energy weapons on a space station would be that, in areas with no gravity, they wouldn’t produce recoil that could push you in a direction you don’t want to go.
Except that was back in 1987, when I had an Apple //e on my desk.
So complaining that they suck worse than an iPad misses the point. There was no such equivalent device in 1987 that was better. And yeah, back in the old days nobody, especially Hollywood TV guys, expected being able to store terabytes of information in a thumbnail. Let alone ubiquitous wireless data transfer.
So it the answer is that it just wasn’t on the radar at all. We were barely out of “Computers are giant things that take up whole rooms and are ministered to by a special cult of priest-technicians.”
As for phasers, eh, the in-universe explanation is “Starfleet is not a military organization”. At least, that’s what Starfleet officers like to tell each other. So whether true or not, it’s something that they either believe or pretend to believe. Which means they don’t have military small arms, they have purposefully sucky “civilian” sidearms, despite that causing horrible tactical problems for the “non-military” personnel every other episode. I suppose the guys back at headquarters would say that if you’re trying to shoot people with hand phasers every other week you’re doing it wrong.
Now, back to Starship Troopers. Of course in the book, the Mobile Infantry armor as presented combines the roles of infantry, armor, artillery, and air support all into one. You could technically fly in those suits, the only thing is you wouldn’t want to because if you were airborne for more than a few seconds you’d be killed. So you had to stay close to terrain. The suits have the protection of a tank, direct fire, indirect fire, tactical nukes, mobility of infantry combined with rockets, and so on. Whether it would work is one thing. But even though the troopers are called “infantry” and think of themselves as inheritors of the foot sloggers tradition going back to Ancient Sumer, they aren’t really infantry.
The troops in the movie are, of course, light infantry with small arms only, no crew served weapons, no mobility, no communications, no training, no tactics, no leadership, no nothing. Except that’s deliberate I guess. Verhoevan wanted them to seem more like the colonial troops at Isandlwana than a modern army.
And of course, pretty much every movie that features combat between space ships is a lot more like the golden age of sail than modern naval or air combat, let alone our best guesses about what space combat would really be like.
PPGs use electromagnetic energy to rapidly push a cloud of plasma at the target, that would still cause significant recoil. Laser weapons wouldn’t have much recoil (not technically zero, but negligible), but PPGs are actually firing a solid mass at high speed. Also the situation where your troops are fighting in 0g, do have space suits, but don’t have any means of movement or magnetic clamps to hold them in place would be pretty rare, and it’s likely you’ve already lost the fight if you’re in that situation.
In [del]1966[/del] 2266 Spock was able to record roughly half of human history on his tricorder, sound and video, and didn’t seem to be wanting for memory space. That’s a lot more data than any number of technical journals that Picard and co needed to pass around. The only reason they used stacks of PADDs was for comic effect. We primitives of 1994 knew that you could store a lot more data on a PADD that apparently Star Fleet (or the writers) did.
Just a nitpick, but PPGs wouldn’t be firing a “solid mass” if they fire plasma. Still I get your meaning wrt that particular weapon, but I was more addressing the statement that there wasn’t any justification for using energy weapons in an SF scenario. There is, just not that particular one. Also, you may have magnetic clamps but not everything is going to be ferrous metal that you want to attach to. You may have MMUs, but a projectile weapon could impart a spin you don’t want in a tactical situation.
