6 Baffling Flaws in Famous Sci-Fi Technology
#3.
The Batwing
The Batwing is unlike anything to be found in Christian Bale's arsenal; a modified stealth jet complete with Gatling guns, missiles and a price tag that had to be somewhere north of $2 billion back in 1989. Because Batman won't hold a pistol, but he's apparently fine with missiles and vehicle-mounted mini-guns.
That's roughly a third of Bruce Wayne's net worth.
The Flaw:
Sadly, this piece of colon-evacuating awesome had two insanely glaring flaws, the first of which being its astoundingly useless targeting system. Sure, it manages to blast the crap out of some parade floats that are easily a city block wide apiece, but the damn thing can't manage to hit a man-sized target under literally ideal conditions.
Apparently those precision aiming red circles have a 10 foot margin of error.
If you watched the video linked in the above caption, you'll notice the Wright Brothers could have killed the Joker in that situation using their prototype airplane and a musket. Which brings us to the second flaw: The Batwing's armor was apparently constructed out of paper mache. It gets brought down by a gag pistol the Joker kept in his pants in the off-chance that he might need it for some spur-of-the-moment prop comedy.
Its barrel is so long that it probably slowed the bullet down to 15mph, yet it still manages to destroy the single raddest piece of Bat-technology in Wayne Manor. With one single shot.
We'll take Christian Bale's ridiculous, gravelly voice over this shit any day of the week.
#2.
The Technodrome
In the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles universe, the Technodrome is a futuristic doom base/horror tank from another world built by a gigantic brain with arms and a tripod.
It was able to withstand any environment--from the vacuums of space to the depths of the ocean--and came equipped with a robot army, deflector shields, interdimensional teleportation and even a time machine.
It also made a totally badass toy.
The Flaw:
Despite boasting some of the most terrifying technology our dimension had ever encountered, the Technodrome suffered from perhaps the most baffling design flaw in the history of fictional technology: It did not have a working power source. None. It was like a car without a gas tank or a Death Star that had to be powered by windmill.
Or a brain with no body.
We know this, because the Technodrome spent most of the entire 10-season run of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles stranded underground, trapped in Dimension X, encased in the Earth's core, frozen in ice or sitting at the bottom of the sea, always waiting for a recharge that simply never came.
Since the Technodrome could have potentially ruled the universe if given enough juice, the plot for the entire series boiled down to "the Technodrome needs a jump." Krang tried rigging it to Niagara Falls, sent the most brainless mutants on Earth to obtain power crystals, and even broke out some stationary bikes--the "Pedal Power Generator"--for Shredder, Bebop and Rocksteady to ride for a boost.
Hell, we feel bad for criticizing the Death Star's power source now. At least Darth Vader didn't spend the entire trilogy trying to get the damned thing to start.
After so many failed attempts to get the damn thing running, it was revealed in the last episode of the cartoon that the Technodrome was simply abandoned, cast aside to die like a Ford Expedition. Really, the logic of the whole show kind of falls apart when viewed from adulthood.
The toys are still awesome though.
#1.
Sentient Computers
Let's start with the HAL 9000. We'll go straight to the source:
"The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error."
"Also, humble."
The Flaw:
Well, in addition to cheating at chess...
...the HAL 9000 suffered from one hell of a emotional flaw that the good people at IBM have yet to own up to.
Let's recap: HAL tells the crew that a part on the ship is about to malfunction, but when they check it out everything seems fine. He suggests that they reinstall the part and wait for it to fail, but seeing as how suggestions like that are usually made with tons of alcohol and end in a trip to the emergency room, the crew questions HAL's logic and agree to switch him off if his idea doesn't work.
HAL "overhears" this exchange by way of lip reading and decides to kill the entire crew by casting one into space and freezing the rest in their sleep.
Now, we're obviously not complaining that they designed HAL to be murderous--we realize that was a bug, not a feature. But why give him a personality at all? What good did it do? Especially when it's the personality of a sociopath with an easily bruised ego (sort of like a murderous Kanye West). Nobody floating in space should have to depend on a neurotic killer douche for survival.
"Honestly? I'm starting to miss Windows Vista."
Which brings us to the Knight Industries Two Thousand, or KITT.
This car boasted enough high-tech equipment to commit a war crime with. It came with alpha circuit, an indestructible molecular bonded shell, a wristwatch communicator, a front mounted scanner, a microwave jammer, tear gas launcher, flame thrower, lasers and a supercomputer AI voiced by Mr. Feeny from Boy Meets World.
Our question: How many hours of AI programming did it take to turn KITT into a total dick? KITT and its driver spent half of the episodes bickering like an old married couple. There is one scene where KITT locks Michael out of the car, until Michael successfully debates him on the merits of their mission. Another time he allows Michael to literally fall asleep at the wheel after an argument and then advises Michael to lie to the police by pretending that he is deaf.
Imagine owning a cell phone, a laptop or a freaking car that was even just a fraction as condescending as KITT. It's played for laughs in the show, but only because we never got to see the inevitable situation where KITT's mistrust of its own driver finally gets the driver killed.
That's right, we're saying it right now: The only difference between KITT and HAL 9000 is the show didn't run long enough for KITT to finally go over the edge.
It would have spared everyone a lot of pain.
For a real-life comparison, check out 5 Real Historical Death Stars (Complete With Baffling Flaws). Or find out just what went wrong over at Cyberdyne, in A Series of Emails From Cyberdyne's New Tech Guy.
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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.