[QUOTE=II Gyan II]
It’s highly improbable that television, radio have been phased out.
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Yeah, but the reception sucks out past Alpha Centauri. Not to mention the difficulty of picking up a TV signal that travels at the speed of light when you’re traveling at warp 9. I seem to recall episodes where someone walked in when a character was in his cabin looking at something on a flat-panel screen. The Enterprise probably has a large video-on-demand library.
[QUOTE=OneCentStamp]
[QUOTE=Unintentionally Blank]
we cheer when the puppygod makes it into the tunnel in L.A.
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May I please use that as a screen name?
[/QUOTE]
Puppygod In A Tunnel – Band name!
OK you helicopter snipers, what kind of distances are we talking about here? What I meant was that a helicopter can easily get quite close to an antelope even if it was at full gallop, and maintain a fairly steady position over the antelope for the shooter to fire, where as if it were an armed human opponent, it would probably be a bad idea since he would have opened up on the helicopter (even with a rifle) and at least put a few rounds through the cockpit and engine before the helicopter got close enough and slow enough to get a good shot at the guy on the ground. Of course if the chopper starts to zigzag it can dodge the ground fire, but then the shooter in the helicopter would have a hard time hitting anything.
I can’t believe we’ve gotten to 140 posts, and no one’s mentioned the recent King Kong.
Okay, so I’m fine with the Giant Monkey. And the living dinosaurs. And the whole native population on the island that appears out of nowhere and just disappears again. No problems with any of that.
But…
The heroes get caught in a dinosaur stampede, and instead of just standing aside and letting them go by, they run along with them, between their legs! And pretty much everyone makes it out okay! Nope. Not buying it.
Okay, I can buy Kong picking up the girl, hanging on to her, and tossing her from hand to hand, all while fighting off several dinosaurs, without droppng her, squeezing her to death, breaking every bone in her body, or letting any other harm come to her. No problem. Disbelief suspended.
But…
Her outer clothing comes off immediately, and all that’s left is a flimsy slip. A slip apparently made of KEVLAR! It never rips, tears, or comes off. Not so much as a glimpse of Naomi Watts’ booty. Damn it.
Okay, I’ll accept the giant insects (although by this time the suspension on my disbelief is getting pretty shaky). But when one of the good guys has several of them climbing all over him, the other good guy (with only one or two on his back) helps him out by shooting at him more or less randomly with a Thompson submachine gun! While the other guy is writhing and dancing around trying to get the things off him! And the only thing that takes a bullet, of course, is insects.
[QUOTE=Lemur866]
I’ll take a crack at the “no money in Star Trek” argument.
Thing is, in Star Trek you have replicators that can produce literally anything. Food, clothing, consumer goods, anything except living beings.
.
[/QUOTE]
Ugh. Don’t even get me started on the replicators. Now there’s something to strain credulity for you: a magical little box that will produce anything you want, at no cost to you, thus freeing society from all its material wants. Sure, Mr. Roddenberry, whatever you say.
Have you ever thought about how much energy is consumed by replicators? I have. I’ve even calculated how much energy would be required to create a cup of coffee out of pure energy. (It was a slow day at work.) I weighed my cup of coffee to determine its mass, and then I used Einstein’s equation E=mc[sup]2[/sup] to determine the energy contained within that mass. It was a huge number. For comparison, I went online and looked up some figures on the amount of electricity generated by the United States last year. The upshot is that you would need all the electricity in the US for about 1.5 days to get enough energy to replicate that cup of coffee. Just one cup. Now imagine a society in which everyone uses replicators to supply all their material needs. And then add in the transporters, warp drives, phasers, and other gizmos that are commonly used in the Federation. Their power requirements must be unimaginably huge! Where is all that energy supposed to be coming from?
[QUOTE=MGibson]
Likewise I remember seeing a movie in anthropology about a group of San who had a major conflict because one member of the group had more blankets then another. They accursed her of cheating on her husband and called her daughter a whore.
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I remember a movie about a group of Kalahari tribesmen that have a major conflict when one of them finds a coke bottle!
[QUOTE=Skald the Rhymer]
Also, there was definitely actual, physical money on DS9: gold-pressed latinum (the latinum was what was valuable, not the gold, and it was valuable because it could not be replicated; the gold was just for containment.)
[/QUOTE]
Laff. Yeah, we can disassemble living creatures and reassemble them thousands of kilometers away (including the various quantum states of…everything) but there’s some magic element that we can’t recreate?
Oh, right, because even with writers who can rerrange things however they like they still can’t get away from money.
[QUOTE=InvisibleWombat]
It comes from my extensive experience battling a bloat of psychotic hippos in the Ngoro-Ngoro crater in Tanzania, using only a collection of musical instruments and my mad improvisational weapon-making skills. Buy me a drink and I’ll tell you about how to fight off a 7,000-pound bull hippo using only a $19.95 Shure microphone, four triangular guitar picks, the sustain pedal from a grand piano, and a set of used ukulele strings.
[/QUOTE]
You know, this reminds me of a funny story that happened while I was on Safari in Tanganyika back in… well, it was after all that business with the Zulu, but before that little adventure in the Sudan, so I guess it would be around '82 or thereabouts- when my Native Bearer, M’Boko, fought off a Rhinoceros with Lady Hampshaw’s violin and Lord Fotherington’s regimental trumpet. My word, you should have seen the expression on that fellow’s face! I don’t know who was more terrified, M’Boko or the Rhinoceros. Of course, we all had a jolly good laugh about it back at the Colonial Club afterwards, but I can tell you, things were looking pretty dicey for a few moments there!
[QUOTE=kawaiitentaclebeast]
OK you helicopter snipers, what kind of distances are we talking about here? What I meant was that a helicopter can easily get quite close to an antelope even if it was at full gallop, and maintain a fairly steady position over the antelope for the shooter to fire, where as if it were an armed human opponent, it would probably be a bad idea since he would have opened up on the helicopter (even with a rifle) and at least put a few rounds through the cockpit and engine before the helicopter got close enough and slow enough to get a good shot at the guy on the ground. Of course if the chopper starts to zigzag it can dodge the ground fire, but then the shooter in the helicopter would have a hard time hitting anything.
[/QUOTE]
So, that’s a “Yes” on never seen a nature documentary with a gazelle running", then? They do not run in straight lines.
Hey, I never even said it would be easier to shoot a man, I was just questioning your assumption that a person shooting from a helicopter wouldn’t be able to hit a man on the ground. Let’s review parts of your original post, shall we?
[QUOTE=kawaiitentaclebeast]
Similarly, firing a rifle, even an automatic one, from a helicopter seems to me a very questionable proposition. To begin with, it isn’t particularly easy to hit a target with single shots that is moving laterally across your frontage, even when the shooter himself is stationary and in a supported position. To do so when the shooter himself is on a rattling, vibrating helicotper moving across 3 dimension at hundreds of miles/hour, well, my suspension of disbelief sort of stops there. Now, I stand ready to be corrected on this if anyone has actually done it in real life, but AFAIK hitting a moving target while moving generally requires either a) Computerized fire control and mechanically stabilized guns, such as on ships and tanks, or b) a weapon that puts a bullet in every square inch of a football field every second, such as the gatling guns that helicopters generall use. Now, I can accept the use of mounted machine guns firing tracers, even slow firing ones like the .50 cal, although I gather that .50s are not really used much in this capacity because of its slow rate of fire, but I have never seen or read any accounts of people using rifles to any great effect from a helicopter. To accurately fire from even a moving car would require a lot of practice and experience.
[/QUOTE]
My boldings.
There’s jack in there about the target shooting back. Are you going to stand by that first bolded bit?
Troy was full of them, but here’s the one that did in the movie for me. Our heroine is a daughter of the king who has chosen to be a virgin priestess when she’s captured by the Greek. She is originally going to be turned over to the troops to be raped when Achilles offers to take custody over her. Within 5 minutes, she goes from believing Achilles is going to rape her to being madly in love/lust with him. I’m sorry, but there’s no way I’m buying that.
There’s also the slight matter of thousands of troups but no supply lines, exploding great balls of fire and the sun rising in the west 3 times.
[QUOTE=Siege] Troy was full of them, but here’s the one that did in the movie for me. Our heroine is a daughter of the king who has chosen to be a virgin priestess when she’s captured by the Greek. She is originally going to be turned over to the troops to be raped when Achilles offers to take custody over her. Within 5 minutes, she goes from believing Achilles is going to rape her to being madly in love/lust with him. I’m sorry, but there’s no way I’m buying that.
[QUOTE=Diceman]
Where is all that energy supposed to be coming from?
[/QUOTE]
Hamsters. It all runs on hamsters. That’s the ugly secret of the Federation: when Scotty says “Ah’ll increase thu poower flow to th’engines, cap’tin” he’s actually taking a little whip and beating them. That’s why there’s a limit to his skills: when the hamsters start dying, he’s knows they can’t run any faster.
Interestingly, the same technology is used to power the SDMB. Makes sense of a lot of things.
Here’s mine, and it’s bothered me since I was seven years old:
The Star Wars movies, where small fighters, in the vacuum of space, bank and maneuver like airplanes. I understand why they have wings, since they’re frequently seen taking off from planetary surfaces, but in space, they should be maneuvering more like the little triangular protagonist in Asteroids than the Red Baron.
