6 Baffling Flaws in Famous Sci-Fi Technology
As a species, we are tool makers first and foremost. That's why we love to see gadgets in our movies, and to watch our Captain Picards and Batmans and David Hasselhoffs defeat the bad guys with technology we know we'll never own.
But in the course of trying to dazzle us with their fancy spaceships and battle vehicles, sometimes Hollywood forgets to make sense.
#6.
The Imperial Walker
The dreaded Imperial Walker, or All Terrain Armored Transport, is frequently considered the single coolest vehicle in the entire Star Wars universe.
The moment the rebels spotted these things on the horizon in The Empire Strikes Back, the only question was exactly how much of their stuff they could pack before they flew screaming off the planet.
"Fuck it! Leave the porn, leave everything! RUN!"
The Flaw:
In addition to being huge battle robots of death, the Imperial Walkers also boast a blind spot in excess of 300 degrees. The thing can't turn its head. Specifically, it can only turn its head this much:
This is not a minor issue. That up there is an AT-AT trying to shoot an enemy ship that's flying past it. That's as far as it gets; it's like a huge, muscular guy who happens to have his head frozen in a neck brace due to a crippling spinal injury. The only difference being that guy could still conceivably punch an enemy by swinging at him wildly. Meanwhile, all of the AT-ATs guns are glued to that non-swiveling head.
"Two targets for the price of one. Nice design, Kuat Drive Yards."
This would not be a problem if, say, the walkers were extremely fast and maneuverable. For instance, in the real world, jet fighters have all of their weapons pointing forward, too. But they also go faster than the speed of sound. These bastards, on the other hand, have the top-speed of a Geo Metro driving across a river. It takes them what looks like an entire day to execute a full U-turn. That's good news for you if you're Luke Skywalker, because if you get within 20 yards of one, it can't hit you to save its life.
Years of additional weapons development actually lead to shittier war machines.
Also, the Empire seems to have constructed the Walkers without considering that most militia battles are not fought thirty stories above ground, so the tank commanders spend the entire day on Hoth with their chins to their chests trying to see what the hell they're supposed to be shooting at.
The only reason the rebels had such trouble with them is because the speeders insisted on using what Luke referred to as "Attack Pattern Delta", which appears to mean, "fly directly at the enemy in the one single spot where they are able to shoot us."
#5.
The DeLorean Time Machine
While Doc Brown may not have been entirely up front about the potential dangers of time travel, it is possible that he simply ironed out the DeLorean's disastrous defects off-screen when be built that steampunk time-train.
Sure, Dr. Brown probably could have invested all that time and effort into solving the world's energy crisis but, fuck, sometimes you gotta make yourself happy.
The Flaw:
One of the major plot points of Back to the Future, Part III is how they can't start the DeLorean without some gasoline.
This is not just a case of bad luck. This is pretty much a fatal flaw for any time machine.
The DeLorean DMC-12 was built by douchebags for douchebags, with sleek lines to murder air friction and gull wing doors that flared open like a peacock's tail to attract more douchebags.
We don't know who owns this gold-plated DeLorean,
but we'd be willing to bet they wouldn't look out of place on the cast of Jersey Shore.
It's the kind of car that can only exist in a society with paved roads and a steady supply of the specific kind of refined fuel the engine is capable of burning. Both are things that 99% of the places you would go in a time machine will not have.
A utility vehicle with a diesel engine would have probably been a better choice to attach the Flux Capacitor to, or at the very least a DeLorean with a converted diesel engine. They can take a beating and are capable of running on a huge range of volatile, comparatively crude chemicals from vegetable oil to bathtub gin. Doc, Marty and even Biff could have traveled to just about any point in recorded human history and found (or made) something to run their car on.
Above: the one constant in human history.
Though, all of this just begs the question of why the DeLorean had an internal combustion engine at all. Before Doc Brown went back to the future he spent his first trip tricking out the DeLorean with a hover refit and a Mr. Fusion generator. Great. So why didn't he rig the car up so that the generator turned the wheels, too?
Mr. Fusion could supposedly convert any organic matter into enough raw energy to molest the fabric of time and space. If it can spit out 1.21 gigawatts, it can sure as hell generate enough juice to replace the gas engine. Plus, he'd have had unlimited fuel no matter where he went.
"Look, Marty! I crammed a goddamned dinosaur dick in there!"
#4.
Space Ships With Oddly Unstable Reactors
Powering up starships and space stations requires a lot of juice, we get that. We peons in the real world still depend on burning dead plants and mutated fish to generate steam, while fictional geniuses are literally conquering the universe on fusion, antimatter, and alien poop. It can't be easy to keep things from going wrong.
Borg happens.
Still...
The Flaw:
All of these supposedly advanced systems have an inexplicable tendency to explode at the drop of a hat.
"God dammit, who put tin foil in the microwave?"
For instance, when the main reactor fails in Star Trek they call it a "warp core breech" and it happens so often there's an entire page listing times it has happened on the Star Trek wiki. Seriously, it was like every third episode.
Their only safety measure against this was, hilariously, to "eject" the warp core out into space to allow it to explode (taking anyone nearby with it) and leave the ship utterly disabled. You know, like how when you have engine trouble on your car, your only option is to punch a button that makes your engine go flying out of the hood.
Do we even need to talk about the Death Star? Or what happens when their main reactor takes any kind of damage?
In the future, everything is 400% more explosive.
Or, for that matter, the alien ships in Independence Day? We're talking about a structure the size of a city--or larger--and the whole thing goes up like the fourth of July if you kick it in one single spot.
Why should the reactor always be the weak point of a starship, in any case? If you were designing something like the USS Enterprise, wouldn't it make more sense to make the reactor as stable as possible? After all, are the power generators of the future truly more unstable than what we work with today? Look at this thing:
That's concrete. Thick concrete. You know what would happen if you crashed a fully-fueled 767 into that? Absolutely nothing. Worst case scenario, they have to turn it off while they wash the dark smudge the plane left on the side of one of the cooling towers. See, because we know the process can be volatile, we design the shit out of it to make sure it doesn't explode.
In case you can't watch the video, it features an F4 Phantom ramming a concrete barrier. We'll give you a hint, the jet doesn't win.
You can say that it's not fair to compare a reactor on board a space vessel with one sitting on the ground, but it's actually the opposite--you'd want to engineer in even more precautions because you have millions of people effectively living in the same building as the reactor.
Imagine if they announced that they were going to build a power plant right in the center of Tokyo and that, oh by the way, if just one hillbilly crashes his airplane into it, it will result in a mini-supernova with about three seconds' warning. It would be time to send that shit back to the drawing board.
In defense of "Independence Day," I'd always understood it as Randy Quaid's plane being in the way of the weapon so that it detonated inside the ship and that city-sized explosion happened inside instead of waiting until it hit the ground. Kind of like if you stuck a rock into the barrel of a rocket launcher or something.
ReplyOf course it still doesn't make a whole lot of sense because we saw the weapon seemingly travel through all the floors of a skyscraper before detonating at ground level, so a plane shouldn't have given it much trouble...
Joker fired an armor-piercing bullet straight into the engine. Try that with any plane and you'll see similar results, no matter how slow it's going.
ReplyYou want embarrassing? Imagine if the first Burton Batman had him against Penguin instead. Batwing, meet birdwing. "A noble sacrifice my child! The Bat is gone, onwards, we claim this city now!" "Wak wak wak wak!"
You've awaken the nerds.
ReplyYou forgot that the power sources fueling these vessels are either massive fusion plants or antimatter (both of which, if containment is ruptured, are apocalyptic levels of destructive). Two, yes our stuff is durable--against simple impact. Factor in the fact that weapons on the scale of small nuclear warheads (for example, the most common space to space missiles in fiction are usually quoted at the 15-60 KILOTON range) are being tossed at it and unless you're flying a brick ($#%^ing Borg) you just can't build enough safeguards to keep it from going critical. Sure it's all well and good to point out immobile reactor complexes on earth, but they're not designed to sit in the center of a warship and provide power to energy weapons, life support, engines... the list goes on.
Replyroddenberry's space vessels had warp AND impulse engines. loss of a warp core would only hinder the ability to achieve faster than lightspeeds. hell, nuclear submarines have a deisel backup generators just in case.
ReplyHad to stop reading once you said the longer barrel would make the bullet SLOWER. How could you screw that up?
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesIf you want your bullet to go faster, you need more propellant and a longer barrel.
If you take a gun and its round, and simply make the barrel longer, this will make the bullet go faster.
UP TO A POINT
The point at which the propellant is completely burned and the bullet has travelled so far down the barrell that the gas has dropped to a pressure that is no longer capable of accelerating the bullet down the barrel.
It is VERY hard to push a bullet down a barell, they fit very tightly, for a reason.
So, if you stuck a few inches of extra barell onto a handgun, you might actually get a faster bullet, but stickeing a few FEET of extra barell on, might in fact, as the author states, slow the bullet down.
Wow, I typed all that? I must really not want to do this "online learning" thing that Im supposed to be doing.
ahem. the length of a rifle barrel affects accuracy of the arc of travel not the initial speed, except a very small DECREASE in acceleration from the friction of the munitions as it travels thru the barrel.
more powder = more acceleration
more barrel = more consistent accuracy
That's most likely a .357 or .44 Magnum revolver with what looks to be a 24 inch barrel--which some companies market with a removable stock to make a carbine. However, you're all wrong. Firing a load not intended to travel down that length of barrel creates the inherent risk of lodging a round in place (for example, obtain a Lee Enfield Mk1, the .32 ACP chamber insert, and fire a few rounds; the friction causes the bullet to travel little faster than a paintball, which means you can see it's flight; and comes with a warning that the round may not have enough velocity to exit the barrel).
The fact that the media is the only source of firearms knowledge for so many just proves that the California method of sapping freedom is working.
Also, regarding the AT-AT; It may have some serious flaws, many of which could probably be solved by adding turrets to the sides. If I had to guess, I'd say their biggest flaw was with how they were utilized on Hoth. They are are heavily armored, sit high above most of the battlefield thanks to those legs, and have powerful weaponry.
ReplyIn a full military campaign, I could see those being highly useful in advancing the line of battle. Safely taking out key targets from the back lines while smaller units keep pushing forward. Walking artillery. But they are not the sort of unit that I would leave entirely exposed - they deserve to be flanked by an escort of something more agile like AT-STs to ensure anything that does get by them doesn't survive long.
TLDR; AT-AT may have flaws, but the empire's arrogance is what really did those machines in
arrogance.. and unskilled marksmen with plastic body armor.
arrogance lead to their creation in the first place. Tarkin's doctrine was crap. Fear can help, sure, but I think he forgot about WINNING. Article raised an interesting point about the prequels having seemingly more usable war machines than the future. It gets even worse if you go into the videogames with the Old Republic sections. Lucas needs to totally drop a retcon somewhere that everything in the future sucks because they're all starting again from square 1. Maybe an ultra-extremist pacifist noodly-appendaged the galaxy by releasing an Eldritch horror somewhere about 600 years before the movies take place, to avert a more disastrous war.
The article's "button that makes your engine go flying out of the hood" analogy is seriously flawed. If my engine breaking down meant vaporizing the vehicle, and the battery on its own had the capability to power the car to escape said ejected exploding engine, as well as allow me to limp to a service station... You're damn right I would push that button in an emergency.
ReplyA ship without it's warp-core is not entirely disabled - the remaining power systems are sufficient to run life-support and other key systems for a time - as well as powering the impulse engines. Generally speaking, within the alpha and beta quadrants, this should be more than sufficient for another friendly vessel to render assistance.
Voyager was a somewhat unique case in that they were so far out that the loss of their warp core WAS a problem. They were well outside the Federation's supply lines (never mind out of communications range and presumed lost/destroyed for at least the first half of their journey) and could not expect assistance.
Let us not forget KITT was also pretty emotionally unstable. To the point where he even got PTSD which pretty much neutered him and made his creators consider making him a show car for potential investors and doing away with the whole "One man can make a difference by saving a divorced mother of a pretentious preteen from the biker gang of evil ex-husbands" thing.
Replyamusing read, but a few points:
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesThe AT-AT? if you are marching at an enemy base (which is immobile) you don't need a large firing arc, just a wide enough one to hit the base. add in enough armor to deal with any oncoming attack craft, and infantry support, and it does its job. it works great, in ideal situations only, admittedly, but it does work. Also, with AT-ST support helps. fast, agile, good fire arc.
And the warp core? ok, the system volatility was overplayed. but so are aliens with marginally different forehead ridges. star trek was far from perfect. but they make the point of saying that they only way to generate enough power was with a matter/antimatter reaction, which is marginally move potent than, say, a nuclear reactor. and thick concrete barriers in spaceships is just silly. and wouldn't stop a cascade antimatter reaction. all matter it contacts just increases the destructive nature of it. Additionally, star fleet has their standard containment fields for the reaction, followed buy something like 14 backups. the real issue is the backups that DON'T WORK as apposed to the reactors themselves. and ejecting the core to save the ship doesn't leave the ship useless, just unable to go FTL. Impulse drives can still power everything from life support to replicators. also, instantaneous communication via subspace means the interstellar AAA should be there for your dumb ass in a week or two.
good analogy. but still, if one was designed in real life, the design would have been to have the walkers with a turret on the top that could spin. Like a real tank.
@Bob
i whole agree. more guns with wider arcs would make it much more terrifying. but then it would look less like a giant grey metal tuskless mastadon
The AT-AT still sucks. This is the principle behind the 'assault gun' like the STuG and the Sturmmorser. They were a LOT more manueverable and faster too. And in the Sturmmorser's case, probably had thicker armour too. That thing was a BEAST. Fortunately mass production isn't one of Germany's strong suits.
Consider this, the AT-AT needs to keep its head and limbs flexible enough to move. This means it has to have lighter armour in these parts. (in fact any game with them points this out too.) Not to mention it wastes space that could be used for more weaponry/armour for gyros and springs and pistons and the like. It's far more vulnerable than an assault gun, which, once the tracks are removed, still serves as an upgraded pillbox, well armoured on all sides as it doesn't need movement. You are literally shooting at a block of steel with a cannon strapped on top. It would have been far more effective to scrap one AT-AT and turn it into several less armoured but full range firing martial walkers, as the joints give it a massively huge weakpoint. At least the walkers are fast, and they were light enough to go on while missing one leg. Everything about the AT-AT principle was done better elsewhere, either as a better walker, or as a better tank/APC hybrid.
Hal went crazy because he was programmed to lie to the 2 awake crew members about the nature of their mission, while the ones in cryosleep already knew the truth. HAL then attempted to kill Poole and Bowman because it was more important that he stayed active, than that they survived.
ReplyAlso, a longer barrel on a firearm gives the bullet a greater muzzle velocity, not a lower one.
The long barrel bit is only true to a point. I'm not saying it to be a douche mind you but if you get too crazy with barrel length the whole cartridge has to be changed to compensate. Gunpowder ignites, expands into a gas and pushes the bullet down the barrel. If the barrel is so long that the space between the firing point and the bullet actually begins to accommodate the expanded gas you start losing energy to that and the friction of the bullet with the barrel.
This is actually in response to PvtHopscotch above. You see, I am a qualified weapons engineer. You may google to know that the pressure inside a gun's barrel is on the order of a few thousands of atmospheres (e.g. at the muzzle of a .30 rifle it is close to 9000 atmospheres). Even if you make the barrel ten times as long, it is still hundreds of atmospheres. The friction inside that barrel is nothing, it's meaningless. Serious. It is hardly ever taken into consideration, seeing as that it is won over without a second thought to it.
In regards to #4, a warp core breach occurs when the magnetic containment that keeps the anti-matter away from real matter fails. No matter how "strong" you make it, that is going to make a pretty big boom. In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, they were going to do it on purpose to destroy V-ger which was 90 miles long, and some ensign asked Scotty if it would be enough. He looked at her like she was an idiot child.
ReplyI read a marvelous article about the space-faring feasibility of some of sci-fi's more famous ships. One physicist was baffled by the Star Trek universes use of warp nacelles, saying that if anyone was ever stupid enough to actually turn them on, the ship would go somersaulting end over end faster than the speed of light.
ReplyUmm, the warp nacelles are not rockets. They create a warp field and bend it to a shape to allow the ship to move through it. They do not provide thrust in the traditional sense and therefore their location in comparison to the ships axis is not really relevant. That physicist is an idiot.
i'm trying to figure out how Kyle Bartley got 2 thumbs down. there is nothing in his statement that is incorrect.
The DeLorian time machine was just a prototype. It wasn't really designed to be Doc Brown's personal time machine to go anywhere. It was his "Can I make this thing work?" model. Simply proof of concept. If there was a 4th movie, he would've fixed the problems.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesKITT's dominant program is the preservation of human life. Because what the article failed to mention was that KITT has an older brother, voiced by Pater Cullen. KARR lacks the "preservation of human life" programming and is a total psychopath. So, they overreacted and built KITT to be all prissy and non-psycho. The episode where KITT locks Michael out it because Michael was no longer working for the Foundation and KITT is foundation property. He was preventing Michael from being able to steal him. That's not really a flaw.
The Star Trek thing is off... They don't use nuclear reactors. They use antimatter reactors. Matter-Antimatter reactions yield pure energy. And it would take a lot of energy to keep a star ship going. The only viable way to obtain such large amounts of energy quickly would be through antimatter reactors. The problem is, of course, that the antimatter has to be kept from touching whatever it's in, or it'll react with that, and explode the container.
Yeah! ....uhhh....what he said! ^^
Exactly, and they do this with magnetic fields. Power surge? Momentary magnetic field dispersion? By by Enterprise. There is no way to build it "stronger" like this article implies.
To be fair to the article writer building it 'stronger' really would apply to a lot of other universes. Just his bad luck to have not done the research and picked star trek. A lot of smaller series ships like for instance Wing Commander, they still use fusion-variant drives, in which case this would be accurate. (And since the originals were games, the only reason they even explode violently is because leaving all those hulks floating in space would eat memory unnecessarily. Not so in the novels.)
There was one, I think it was called Starlancer, which followed real physics more accurately. The explosions wouldn't come from the engines but further forwards, from the ammunition stores. Once those blew you'd be left with the rest of the ship sitting there. (I only remember it started with Star and was completely polygonal.)
Star Trek Turtles???? WTF did this happen??
ReplyThey were released in 1994.
Some of the old scifi stories have better tech than the new ones. The Skylark of Valeron was big enough to make the Death Star feel shame, and in one of the stories about it, the Skylark was basically so badly damaged that only a tiny portion of it was left, and still the people in it were safe.
ReplyIn relation to KITT going insane and causing someone to die: his predacessor did just that and that's why they made KITT. The evil one is known as KARR. They often battled through the series.
ReplyTo quote the wikipedia entry on the AT-AT walker:
Reply"...carrying "extremely heavy armor and armaments". The AT-AT, designed to favor "fear over function", is manned by two men to drive the vehicle and can carry up to five speeder bikes and 40 Imperial stormtroopers"
Just as the name says, it's an 'armored transport'. With such effective armor to protect 40 ground troops inside, it doesn't really need to be covered in guns & cannons. Having said that:
"Their armor is resistant to most standard blaster weapons; however, the "neck" column of the walker holds no such invulnerability and, if shot, can cause the entire walker to be destroyed."
That's a pretty big design flaw seeing as the heads don't even move that much. Thank God there's nothing like that on the Death Star!
If you've ever read some of the expanded universe short stories collections, their military-industrial complex is WAY worse than anything since the Soviet era. A stormtrooper that got bumped to At-AT commander found and solved all the flaws, but the military contracts and production lines were already in place. They transferred him out to some far-off ass of the galaxy so he couldn't blow the whistle on the epic retarded flaws. (Speaking of asses, he 'solved' the problem of aircraft flying overheard or beneath the legs by sitting it on its ass and turning it into a giant AA gun. His instructors were less than pleased at his 'misuse' of his given military property, even if he did win.)
Is anyone else totally distracted by the picture that accompanies the Gratuitous Sci-Fi nudity story?
ReplyHmm...the author starts out talking about how nuclear reactors are protected by "thick concrete" and then proceeds to show a picture of a goddamn cooling tower to illustrate?
ReplyThe cooling tower, which, while the most recognizable feature of a nuclear power plant, has as much to do with the reactor as your car's radiator has to do with its engine.
True, the cooling tower is centered in the photo but the reactor dome is in there too.