There are two inconsistencies in Star Trek artificial gravilty.
First is, as mentioned, the “edge phenomenon”. Wherever the end of the “gravity plate” is, you’re going to get weird effects. And putting two rooms next to each other with their gravity at 90 degrees to each other is going to be…really weird. I don’t think you could do it at all.
But the more important thing is that it isn’t just gravity the artificial gravity adds. It’s some form of “crash dampening”, that is, when the Enterprise turns suddenly, or stops suddenly, or gets blasted by space blasters, the 1 g static gravity generators aren’t going to be any help. You really need gravity generators AND repulsers on all six axes of any room. They need to be computer controlled so, like when you hit something at high speed, instead of everybody being smushed against the forward wall, the forward walls push back, the aft wall is adjusted to keep you standing up, and the sides, top and bottom are modulated so that the general effect is…no effect. I think in “real life” were such a system workable, you could feel it. You just get used to it.
Which is why you could never fool anybody that’s been on a starship that the planet based replica ersatz Enterprise is really in space.
In defense of the show, the reason everyone bounces around during attacks is that the gravity dampers aren’t quite fast enough to keep up. So instead of 200 gs against the side wall, you feel 2 gs to the side wall. Fanwankers to full power, Mr Scott!
Which is why there was a mighty laugh by fans during the premiere of ST:TNG “Encounter At Farpoint.” Picard calls Battle Stations, then the arms of his chair fold over his lap as a restraint.
Sure, plus it’s really hard to tell a story without facial expressions, intonation and body language an audience can understand.
It’s part of the essential conceit of all sci fi…
A genuine stab at trying to depict what advanced humans (let alone advanced aliens) would live and communicate like would be incomprehensible.
Hard to get across in a novel, and impossible in a TV show.
Even if there were a writer talented enough to imagine a radically different culture with totally different goals and limitations to our environment, they would have to greatly water it down to tell an understandable story.
It’s not that hard. They all have instantaneous translation devices and we’ll hear them speak in voices that sound like Harry Shearer and Dan Castellaneta. They wave tentacles and stuff for emphasis.
Paul Birch of the British Interplanetary Society had a similar idea. He imagined tiny artificial planets with small black holes at the middle. The inhabitants could live on a surface suspended at the 1 gravity level above the hole; for a 10 trillion tonne hole, this would be about 260 metres in radius. ‘Elongating and spaghetti-fying’ at this radius would be fairly negligible
A black hole of this mass would last longer than the current age of the universe, and be a hundredth of a nanometre across. Primordial black holes of this mass might exist somewhere floating around in the universe, or we might have to manufacture them.
I love this thread, and could expound on a few things more “science-y” based, but I’m currently bingewatching a series that kinda bothers me. The Walking Dead probably doesn’t neatly fit into “Sci-Fi,” but here goes.
[Sorta science-y] Zombefied bodies that still “walk” after months of decay and putrification? C’mon . . . Some of them have the structural integrity of slow-roasted, pulled pork right-off-the-bone. How’s there any stability, strength, or mobility for these things to keep walking after 6 months? Zombies oughtta be putrefied puddle of goo, especially after a couple of months’ exposure to the elements.
[Less-sorta-science-y] Shots that destroyed the brain stem were mentioned to be the only legit way if killing the walkers, yet eye stabs, or machetes to the cranium seem to work–how come? I should argue that a li’l napalm (or other methods of cooking a brain stem) would work just fine in an area weapon.
[Could-be near-future science-y] Just who the hell is doing all this industrial-level reloading? I’d love AI to run through the series to compute a shot count of all the firefights so far (I’m in Season 6). Granted, Rick Grimes’ team’s fire discipline has gotten much better through the Seasons, but they don’t seem to be hauling around enough spare ammo for some of these sustained firefights. I would think that caches of spare ammo would not have been left around for finding.
Tripler
What’s that? Oh. They’re using “Hollywood bullets” from 10 years in the future . . . got it.
NEW WonderAmmo™ from Ronco - The makers of Little Nell, the pioneer women’s rifle that when fired into the air with the eyes closed will hit a brave on a fast pony 400 yards away! WonderAmmo - In all your favorite calibers.
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could select the voice yourself, rather than having the UT decide it for you? Imagine a Klingon speaking with the voice of, say, Donald Duck or Foghorn Leghorn. That’d really liven things up!
Charles Sheffield came up with a solution for the acceleration problem with the “balanced drive” in the McAndrew stories. Put a flat circular plate of superdense material at the front of the ship with a spindle extended from the center; the crew compartment moves along the spindle as the ship’s acceleration varies so that the plate’s gravity and the acceleration g-forces add up to 1g. Once you figure out 1)how to make the superdense plate and prevent it from collapsing and 2)provide enough thrust to get this immense mass up to any kind of useful velocity, you have a ship that can accelerate at a few dozen gees while the crew rides in comfort. Bonus: all that mass in front protects the crew compartment when you’re moving fast enough that the interstellar medium acts like hard radiation.
ever since 1982 (a teenager, still) … it bugged me to no end that they would be so stupid to cut open their thumbs to draw the blood for the Thing-test - in a crisis situation nevertheless… effectively crippling the whole crew with what looks like a 1" long slash.
Why not slash open their foot-soles or eye-balls - so they could only crawl around? /s
Seriously - every semi-smart (and up) guy would suggest the least-invasive body part to draw blood via syringe, but not crippling 50% of your opposing thumbs …
always struck me as a “Doh-moment” in the otherwise rather smart movie.
The reason that there aren’t more very non-human aliens isn’t because it’s hard to do – it isn’t, really. There have been series that use rod-puppet aliens, muppet-like aliens, etc. even before CGI became cheap and easy enough to let your imagination run wild.
It’s because we need relatable aliens. Using human beings as your aliens, who have foam rubber “appliances” glued around their faces and maybe on their noses and ears leaves the eyes and mouths still visible and available for emoting, and that counts for a huge amount.
We may want to talk about dealing with very non-human aliens, but it’s frankly hard for people to read emotion into them or even take them seriously if we don’t see and interpret the emotions written into their eyes, mouths, and facial muscles.
Hollywood tends to cast aliens along the following broad themes: Bugs - (Alien franchise, Starship Troopers, Independence Day, Ender’s Game, Avengers) - Useful for creating a terrifying mostly mindless alien army that can Zerg-swarm the protagonists and get mowed down with impunity without all the morality that comes with mowing down thousands of sentient creatures. Usually have a weakness where blowing up their hive or queen just shuts them all down.
Greys - (X-Files, ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind) Your standard tall, skinny, bug-eyed, big-headed, humanoid aliens. This design is usually chosen to connect the aliens with real life UFO lore.
Humanoids with shit on their heads - (Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Farscape, Doctor Who, the MCU, pretty much most sci fi) The mainstay of most sci fi and the reasons are obvious: 1) It’s relatively cheap to put some makeup and prosthetics on a human actor and 2) they want the audience to relate to the aliens on some human level. And who knows. Maybe convergent evolution on approximately Earth-like planets would result in humanoid shapes being the most efficient form for intelligent life.
Things that look like stuff we’d find on Earth - (Star Wars, etc all other series that feature “alien multicultures”) Ewoks (bears), Groot (tree), the things from The Arrival (squids / cephalopods ), Admiral Akbar ( also quids / cephalopod ) so on and so forth are different enough to recognize as “alien” and yet recognizable as something familiar to us. I suppose that’s so we don’t make Ford Prefect’s mistake in thinking their cars or other ubiquitous tool is actually the dominant species on their world.
Muppets - (Star Wars, Farscape, Alf) You can make a cute, endearing alien character that sells a lot of of merch out of a sock puppet.
