Stupendous Stupidity in Science Fiction (open spoilers)

Cafe Society
1

Have you ever been watching or reading your favorite space opera when you notice a mind boggling act of dumbassery? My examples:
Space Above and Beyond.

I just finished watching this series and the last episode made me start yelling at the TV.

Ok so peace talks have begun with the evil aliens. The EA’s agree to send a transort full of prisoners to be returned to earth. Peace talks go horribly wrong and the Chigs(evil aliens) attack the transport, disabling it and taking out the fighter escort squadron. Proceed to the rescue mission, Oh yeah, I forgot to mention they are next to the alien’s home planet for all this too. So anyways, rescue mission, next to the home planet and they send out 1 (one) squadron of fighters for the rescue plus and rescue transport. Out of the whole Earth fleet, one squadron of fighters, against the chig’s home guard.
Stargate Atlantis, also the last episode of the series.

The Wraith have arrived in orbit over Earth with their own stargate on board which they use to render the one on planet useless. On board the hive ship, our plucky heroes do the sabotage thing and have x minutes to get off before the ship explodes. They discover they can’t dial the earth gate and immediately it’s the classic “We going to die, but we can take them with us.” Ummm… You have a working gate, you are standing in front of it, how about I dunno, using it to go somewhere other than Earth?

Now this next one is something I’ve wondered about since I was a kid.

The Empire Strikes Back

Rebel Soldier(RS)-Sir the Imperials have begun landing walkers and troops outside our shields!
General Riekaan- Ok evacuate all personal, and get the snowspeeders ready to go.
RS-Sir, the speeders lack the firepower to take down an AT-AT, may I be so bold to recommend launching our star-fighers. They are after all, the ships the took out the death star, hell we still have the very ship that fired the final shot, and the pilot too.
General Riekaan-Well here’s the thing, we got our new budget analysis after we had to bug out from Yavin. I mean did you see the end of the last movie? We had like 3 ships left and those speeders are just so much darned cheaper. Better mileage too.
RS-(craps pants, runs away)

I would do one about The X-Files, but that whole series is one big example. At least Maulder started carrying a back-up weapon after a while. (“I got tired of losing my gun.” best line ever)

2

I couldn’t watch Space Above and Beyond. They lost me early in the pilot. R Lee Ermey as a watered down version of his drill sergeant character, pilots being sent out to do grunt work, misidentifying Blitzkrieg Bop as a song from “The Pink Flloyd,” every single military cliche available right there on their ship. It was just too much.

I tried going back. kristen Cloke is the hotest thing that’s ever worn a flight suit and the Hammerheads are pretty cool. Beyond that, I just couldn’t watch it.

3

Come on, The Pink Flloyd thing had to make you at least chuckle. That’s like someone today mixing up Beethoven and Mozart. Or confusing Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman.

4

Ehhh, I could take it as a lighthearted stab at the Next Generation for having everyone on the ship be experts on everything from the 20th century, but nothing else was lighthearted in the show.

And it was the Ramones, man. How do you misidentify the Ramones? :wink:

5

Well played sir.

6

In the original Buck Rogers movies, everyone was wearing boots and capes and button-in-the-back shirts, except the cub reporter who had a pinstripe suit with bow tie, pleated trousers and a Dick Tracy hat.

7

The rescue mission was a token gesture. Didn’t the humans f-up the peace talks by trying to assassinate the Chig delegation? I think they were more concerned with immediate reprisal. They didn’t WANT to force the final battle at that time in enemy territory, which sending a larger rescue mission would have brought about.

The rebels are evacuating. They clearly DON’T have that many star-fighters (it can also be assumed that STAR-fighters work better in space rather than in atmosphere although the expanded universe uses most of the them as either/or craft) since each transport only gets TWO fighter escorts.
Two fighters against Star Destroyers.
General Rieken knew Hoth was compromised, the walkers and snowtroopers didn’t teleport there. That meant that all the evacuees were going to have to try to escape Tie-Fighters and Star-Destroyers. The ground troops and snowspeeders were doing delaying tactics. The Rebels weren’t trying to WIN. They were trying to survive.

There was no reason to send X-wings into the land battle.

8

Yeah, it’s more like:

“Holy Mother of Fuck, we’re being attacked!”
“Run away! Run away!”
“Yeah, but while we run away, let’s send a suicide squad to offer a token defense so at least some of us can escape.”
“Good idea. Should we send our best fighters? After all, we lost almost all of them attacking that motherfucking Death Star.”
“Wait, I’ve got a better idea. Instead of sending our fighters out to get slaughtered, tell them to run the fuck away too.”
“Then what do we use for the suicide rear-guard?”
“How about these fucking useless snowspeeders? After all, we’re never coming back to this fucking planet, so we’d just have to destroy them ourselves before we leave. Might as well use them to slow the Stormtroopers for a few minutes.”

9

They also mention at one point that they’re having trouble getting the snowspeeders to work in the cold weather. Which could be taken one of two ways - either the snowspeeders are total pieces of crap, or that Hoth is so cold that even cold-weather doesn’t function well. If it’s the latter, then the X-Wings probably wouldn’t function at all.

If it’s the former, of course, that means the Rebel leadership are major dicks for putting their guys out in such massively inferior hardware.

10

The X-wings that are meant to work in deep space? Where the temperature of an object can drop to 3 degrees Kelvin? If the carbon dioxide in the Hoth atmosphere hasn’t frozen out, then a spaceship should work fine.

I think it’s more likely that X-wings, for all that they have wings, aren’t meant as atmospheric fighters. They may be able to make a pass or 2, but the kind of maneuverability the snowspeeders had was beyond them.

11

I wondered why the snowspeeders didn’t chew up the ground in front of the snowwalkers. Which reminds me of another stupendously stupid thing in ESB: snowwalkers. Perhaps some sort of gear-driven endless-belt mechanism would be in order.

Or just bomb the damned generator from orbit. It wouldn’t be the only way to be sure, but it’d be the easiest.

12

I was going to post “It is very cold in space”, darn your eyes.

:slight_smile:

13

Space isn’t really “cold.” It isn’t really anything, because it’s space, i.e. the stuff that’s there when everything else isn’t. It’s a vacuum, and vacuum makes an excellent insulator. Objects in space take a long, long time to lose heat. In a solar system, the big problem is keeping things cool, because solar radiation will heat them up much faster than they can dissipate it.

Naturally, George Lucas was perfectly aware of this when he wrote Empire, hence the use of snowspeeders. :wink:

14

They explained this one. The admiral Vader force-choked? Vader was pissed because the admiral warped the fleet too close to Hoth at the beginning, giving the rebels a chance to raise a shield that prevented direct orbital bombardment, meaning he would have to engage in a time-wasting ground battle.

15

Space faring alienrace, crosses the galaxy. Lands. They have camouflage, and they talk over baby monitors. And they’re allergic to water. And they’re naked.

Thanks M. Night. Shamalamadingdong!

16

Cold vacuum is one thing. Cold air is another.

17

I remember that; it was why they had to go down and destroy the shield generator. That’s was the walkers’ target.

Meanwhile, a whole fleet’s worth of TIE bombers was sitting up there in orbit, doing nothing. Nah, the whole Battle of Hoth was stupid. It looked great, which was its real purpose, but it made no sense. It was a contest to see which side was the more stupid.

I vote for the guys with the tanks perched on tall, skinny legs.

18

I confess to being puzzled as to what exactly you expect they should have been doing, if you agree that the Imperials had to send in the walkers to take out the generator.

19

I don’t agree to that. I agree they had to take out the generators, yeah. Why they sent in ATAT’s eludes me (sounds like defense contract obligations to me).

But they did, so why didn’t the speeders just mess up the ground in front of them such that the snow walkers can’t walk over it?

20

Okay, I think I get you now. I’m sure the answer’s been fanwanked in more…ah, official publications, but if you’ll permit me to fanwank an answer, I think the shield they had was more like an umbrella; it prevented direct orbital bombardment, but dropships could drop off ground forces at the edge of the shield so they could walk under it. That, or it’s still a dome, but it’s a “the slow blade penetrates the shield” situation, where the shield reacts to fast-moving objects like bombs but not to slow-moving objects like walkers.

No defense here. Walkers look cool but are realistically a poor tactical choice. It falls under the Rule of Cool IMO.