In Beyond This Horizon Heinlein got around sightless beam weapons by having the standard maneuver be chopping into your target with a hot beam. Every time I watched a red shirt on Star Trek try to hip-shoot a threat, I wanted to yell “Read a book, people!” at the TV.
IIRC, the hero of the book gets around such problems by being an antique freak who packs a .45 instead of a beamer.
Boom.
There are people who, due to physical disability, are unable to speak, but that doesn’t make them unable to learn language.
As long as the sounds are within your range of hearing, and the phonemes come out slow enough for your brain to recognize them, you can understand anything. The ticker symbols on a stock market computer don’t correspond to anything a human can pronounce, but some people can read those easily.
Granted, but at least they’re learning a human language, as opposed to a click-based language spoken by giant walking cricket-people.
A click-base language? Like Morse Code?
You’re not wrong, but, man, it feels wrong. I whisper this little prayer whenever something wonky gets in the way of my enjoyment.
If you’re wondering how he eats and breathes/
and other science facts/
la-la-la
Then repeat to yourself, “It’s just a show,”/
“I should really just relax”
I loved The Martian. One of the joys of the book was reading the actual science as he explained what he was going to do. I cracked up laughing when they reduced about 40 pages of book dialog down to one line: “I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this!”
They’ve made a point of showing Peter Parker having to take off his regular shoes and socks if he wants to cling to a wall. His costume is made of a special fabric??
In Star Wars humans can learn to understand Wookie or even astromech droid.
I dunno - perhaps the presence of human languages in South Africa that utilize clicks gives the people in South Africa a leg up in learning a click-based language of giant walking cricket-people?
Good point.
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Sooper Yooper!
…and several actual African languages?
Welp, let’s get over yonder to da helicopter and I’ll get ‘er fired up so we can get the doggone heck outta town, eh?
I wonder if the click people were ever recruited for code work in the war, like the Navajos.
I loved it too, and I’m not even that much into hard sci Fi. I was listening to an interview with Neil Degrasse Tyson and he was asked what the most realistic science fiction film was. He said, “The Martian.” (I enjoyed both the book and the film.)
The military did try it out on an experimental basis, but things just didn’t click.
Speaking of “science”, one of the most memorable lines of dialog I’ve ever heard in a TV show was in Fringe (which I’ve heard got really good later, but I gave up after half a season or so), in which, describing a variety of supernatural/parascientific happenings, a very serious government agent said “the events appear to be scientific in nature”.
my pet-peeve are “masks” …
like Ironman, and all those guys …
Have you ever worn an often metallic mask over your face and breath or sweat into it? … especially when running or doing the strenuous saving-the-planet thing? … smells god awfull, humidity dripping out of it and spoiling your costume …
I get RudyG flashbacks whenever I see a superhero
Robert Heinlein, in his juvenile Have Space Suit, Will Travelhas much to say about the realities of wearing a space suit, much of which applies to something like Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit.
Although Stark is supposed to be a mechanical genius. He must know that those mascot costumes have fans inside them to give relief to the wearers. I’m sure he could (and hopefully did) engineer some higher-tech air circulation mechanism to keep the sweat off his face.