Most common errors found in mainstream movies?

[AstroManLuca]

No, gravity is achieved in Star Trek via some sort of powered flooring. Deep Space 9 mentions gravity net flooring or something like that in the episode where he builds the solar sail ship.

Yes. And besides, there's perfect gravity on every starship you see in Star Trek despite them not using centripetal acceleration to generate it.

Ships can dock at several places on DS9, but the most common is on the outside of the ring. And when the passengers step onto the station they just walk straight in. If gravity were being generated by spinning, they'd be climbing out of the floor if they docked that way. They'd have to dock perpendicular to the plane of the ring if they wanted to step right onto the station.

Babylon 5 did actually address artificial gravity - some ships as well as the Babylon 5 station had large spinning sections to generate gravity. Other ships had no artificial gravity but every shot of the interior showed that the crew was securely strapped in their chairs. More advanced aliens had artificial gravity like in Star Trek.

 

[NikolaeVarius]

I thought this was whether or not stealth was possible, not whether it works effectivly or not?

Lets say in this case, you have 2 ships nearly on top of one another, then once stealthed, one of them course corrects, leaving 1 ship still going to its destination unknown to the enemy.

It is. Stealth isn't possible. I was just saying another reason why the thermal heat sink method/ really any stealth method would fail.

Your example hinges on the fact that 100% stealth is still possible.

Also lets say they have some sort of stealth device, if we assume that both ships were going along the same vector and then one cloaks and the other course corrects, we can still figure out what direction the cloaked ship was traveling because the cloaked ship can't maneuver at all. Also as soon as someone detects the heat signatures, once again, every optical camera will be looking for you, and with a pretty easily figured out course, you go boom again

On another note (Artificial Gravity) I did find humorous that on ships where they use artificial gravity, they'll claim that all power is out or they're running low on power or something similar, yet artificial gravity is still on and doing perfectly fine.

 

[MikeyLSU]

the point is from that distance, it would looke like 1 heat source took off and changed directions.

But it doesn't matter, to me the discussion should be can you get a ship at a standstill that is undetectable. Doesn't matter if you already know it is there, that is not the point so coming from far away and cloaking doesn't matter, just whether or not you can actually cloak.

 

[foghorn67]

How every movie, commercial, music video, etc. has that stupid whipping hissing sound anytime they show a fire.

 

[ShawnD1]

cant you people suspend belief for 90mins during a movie?

Within reason. Movies like Star Wars get away with things because they clearly explain that magic is real in that universe. Shows like CSI do not exist in a galaxy far far away. They are supposed to be the world we live in. When the plot makes absolutely no sense, it ruins the show.


A show being retarded is only ok if the show becomes funnier. Usually this means actions movies. There's one scene in True Lies where a truck gently falls off a bridge and has a huge explosion for no reason at all. There's also a scene in that movie where the bad guy somehow is hanging from a rocket on a jet which is then fired through a building before it hits a helicopter filled with even more bad guys.

 

[grohl]

I'm not going to read this whole thread, but my number one pet peeve - everytime a medical scene is shown there is ALWAYS a chest x-ray in the background and 80% of the time the film is UPSIDE DOWN or BACKWARDS. It would cost the produced like $50 to hire a medical student to make sure this simple detail was right.

 

[Homerboy]

I'm not going to read this whole thread, but my number one pet peeve - everytime a medical scene is shown there is ALWAYS a chest x-ray in the background and 80% of the time the film is UPSIDE DOWN or BACKWARDS. It would cost the produced like $50 to hire a medical student to make sure this simple detail was right.

I'm looking at you Scrubs!

 

[ShawnD1]

I'm looking at you Scrubs!

It might have been mentioned in that cracked article, but apparently a lot of med students were doing really stupid shit because they saw it on TV. The way TV shows putting a tube in a patient's nose is completely wrong because they obviously can't be jamming tubes in the actor's nose; the way it's done on TV is to make it at least look like it's going in there. They also do CPR wrong because the real way to do is is a bit dangerous and it will often break your ribs.


One I thought was wrong was how people in movies drive cars. They shake the wheel back and forth. Then I found out that wasn't wrong. My Ford Tempo really did drive like that.

 

[Blintok]

How about the walk-through air ducts? C'mon, every building has ductwork at least 4-6 feet high and well lit, to boot. Also it miraculously leads to any room in any building on any floor almost instantaneously.
Peace
Lounatik

not only that but all the ducts are as clean as a NASA satellite assembly clean room.
and there are no sharp pointy screws sticking into the ducts anywhere.

To add some of mine. Love how in the older movies as paratroops are heading to the drop zone on D-Day they can talk at normal volume. - compare that to the D-Day shots from the HBO series Band of Brothers. Same for battle sounds and people talking like normal. Compare that to Blackhawk down where they had to scream an inch from each others ear to be heard over the battle sounds in a few scenes.

In shots of tanks that are movie thru a battle zone(say in the movie A Bridge Too Far) they are 5 feet apart where in real they would be 500ft apart.

 

[Homerboy]

It might have been mentioned in that cracked article, but apparently a lot of med students were doing really stupid shit because they saw it on TV. The way TV shows putting a tube in a patient's nose is completely wrong because they obviously can't be jamming tubes in the actor's nose; the way it's done on TV is to make it at least look like it's going in there. They also do CPR wrong because the real way to do is is a bit dangerous and it will often break your ribs.


One I thought was wrong was how people in movies drive cars. They shake the wheel back and forth. Then I found out that wasn't wrong. My Ford Tempo really did drive like that.

Well I was referring to the fact that for like X seasons the intro to Scrubs had the chest X-Ray that carried the shows title on it backwards. when they finally fixed it, IIRC, they acknowledged their mistake in some humorous way.

 

[AstroManLuca]

One I thought was wrong was how people in movies drive cars. They shake the wheel back and forth. Then I found out that wasn't wrong. My Ford Tempo really did drive like that.

It always bothers me how infrequently people watch the road while driving in movies. They shake the wheel side to side constantly but they also spend about 60% of the time looking at their passengers.

EDIT: Then again, based on how some people drive in real life, that may not be far from the truth...

 

[BurnItDwn]

I think star trek deep space 9 said the gravity was the result of the outer ring spinning. That's actually a pretty reasonable explanation.

You can try this at home. Put a pool ball in a sock and swing it around. It appears to have gravity in an upward direction because of centripetal force

I never watched any star trek stuff here. Saw a few bits and pieces of TNG and decided I didn't like it.

Anyhow, the spinnig ring is how they generated the gravity in 2001 A Spacy Odyssey... as well as how Rama generated it's gravity in the book Rendezevous with Rama.

Most movies, the ships have magic gravity that equals that of earth without spinning or any sort of explanation beyond "magic."

 

[Farang]

Romans have British accents. And the overuse of British accents in general. Although I admit I'm so used to it in Roman movies, I think I may dislike any attempt to use a different accent.

 

[QuantumPion]

Romans have British accents. And the overuse of British accents in general. Although I admit I'm so used to it in Roman movies, I think I may dislike any attempt to use a different accent.

Maybe the movie was made in Britain with British actors. It only seems strange because you're American. I had to point out this fact to my friend whom complained that all the Russian characters in Enemy at the Gates had British accents.

 

[DrPizza]

The space station just stays in orbit and has the lights on. It requires solar panels even bigger than the habitable areas on the ship. it requires very flimsy radiators to vent all that heat away.

You would essentially have to start sneaking as soon as you started traveling (Unless the journey took so long that the heat radiation you emit from the initial thrust stops registering on passive scanners at your destination) Thermal Radiation travels at c so you would have to be traveling faster than c to not be detected before you reach your destination. You would have to keep doing this for the entire duration of the journey as you can't let any thermal radiation to escape. Also, as soon as you cross the path of a star or any source of heat/light that the destination in questions knows is there, every single scanner will realize that the light/heat from deep space has been disrupted and every optical camera will point right at your direction and make you go big boom.

Also your enemy, with a couple of probes easily laid out in space, can passively scan all of surround space will be able to detect the flash of thermal energy from you trying to vent heat.

Huh?? What's the difference between the space station and some other space craft that is already up to speed? You seem to be implying the ability to scan an infinite distance. What instruments are you going to use that have that kind of resolving power? i.e. even the Hubble telescope isn't powerful enough to see the lunar lander on the moon. Thus, if the limit of technology had that ability, you could accelerate up to speed at 2 or 3 times the distance from the Earth to the moon away from your target, shut off your engines, flush your engines with liquid helium to cool them, etc., and drift along undetected.

On top of that, where are these magical detectors that are capable of scanning at that resolution in every possible direction? It amazes me that you deny technology the ability to keep the outside of a ship at 3K, while allowing the technology to scan 360 degrees in real time with an insane level of resolution.

 

[NikolaeVarius]

Huh?? What's the difference between the space station and some other space craft that is already up to speed? You seem to be implying the ability to scan an infinite distance. What instruments are you going to use that have that kind of resolving power? i.e. even the Hubble telescope isn't powerful enough to see the lunar lander on the moon. Thus, if the limit of technology had that ability, you could accelerate up to speed at 2 or 3 times the distance from the Earth to the moon away from your target, shut off your engines, flush your engines with liquid helium to cool them, etc., and drift along undetected.

On top of that, where are these magical detectors that are capable of scanning at that resolution in every possible direction? It amazes me that you deny technology the ability to keep the outside of a ship at 3K, while allowing the technology to scan 360 degrees in real time with an insane level of resolution.

The difference is that the Space Craft needed to accelerate in order to get up to speed, which releases a significant amount of thermal radiation. While the range of thermal radiation isn't infinite, its still far reaching and easy to detect. Our current passive sensors can detect the Space shuttles maneuvering thrusters quite easily from the asteroid belt.

The hubble telescope analogy is flawed because it is designed to observe far away galaxies, not the moon. It would be like trying to see an entire basketball on a microscope, its just not meant for that purpose. Also, it seems to do just fine studying radiation emissions from galaxies light years away.

Also, assuming current technology

"A full spherical sky search is 41,000 square degrees. A wide angle lens will cover about 100 square degrees (a typical SLR personal camera is about 1 square degree); you'll want overlap, so call it 480 exposures for a full sky search, with each exposure taking about 350 megapixels.
Estimated exposure time is about 30 seconds per 100 square degrees of sky looking for a magnitude 12 object (which is roughly what the drive I spec'd out earlier would be). So, 480 / 2 is 240 minutes, or about 4 HOURS for a complete sky survey. This will require signal processing of about 150 gigapizels per two hours, and take a terabyte of storage per sweep.
That sounds like a lot, but...
Assuming 1280x1024 resolution, playing an MMO at 60 frames per second...78,643,200 = 78 megapixels per second. Multiply by 14400 seconds for 4 hours, and you're in the realm of 1 terapixel per sky sweep Now, digital image comparison is in some ways harder, some ways easier than a 3-D gaming environment. We'll say it's about 8x as difficult - that means playing World of Warcraft on a gaming system for four hours is about comparable to 75 gigapixels of full sky search. So not quite current hardware, but probably a computer generation (2 years) away. Making it radiation hardened to work in space, and built to government procurement specs, maybe 8-10 years away.
I can buy terabyte hard drive arrays now.
I can reduce scan time by adding more sensors, but my choke point becomes data processing. On the other hand, it's not unreasonable to assume that the data processing equipment will get significantly better at about the same rate that gaming PCs get significantly better.
Now, this system has limits - it'll have trouble picking up a target within about 2 degrees of the sun without an occlusion filter, and even with one, it'll take extra time for those exposures.
It won't positively identify a target - it'll just give brightness and temperature and the fact that it's something radiating like a star that moves relative to the background.
On the other hand, at the thrusts given above, it'll take somewhere around 2 days of thrust to generate the delta v to move from Earth to Mars, and the ship will be in transit for about 1-4 months depending on planetary positions."

http://www.adastragames.com/index.html

So yeah, in the future, assuming space wars even happen (This is debatable) imagine having more than a couple of scanners scanning the sky in real time.

Also, like i said, a ship that has its engines off still generates significant amount of heat. Unless you keep the entire ship at 3 degrees during the entire trip, you're going have heat being generated which in turn needs to go somewhere.

 

[zinfamous]

Within reason. Movies like Star Wars get away with things because they clearly explain that magic is real in that universe. Shows like CSI do not exist in a galaxy far far away. They are supposed to be the world we live in. When the plot makes absolutely no sense, it ruins the show.


A show being retarded is only ok if the show becomes funnier. Usually this means actions movies. There's one scene in True Lies where a truck gently falls off a bridge and has a huge explosion for no reason at all. There's also a scene in that movie where the bad guy somehow is hanging from a rocket on a jet which is then fired through a building before it hits a helicopter filled with even more bad guys.

this, exactly.

I'll never understand why people can't accept the fact that CSI is completely intolerable garbage BS and that Star Wars is perfectly acceptable when it comes to suspension of belief.

 

[zinfamous]

I'm not going to read this whole thread, but my number one pet peeve - everytime a medical scene is shown there is ALWAYS a chest x-ray in the background and 80% of the time the film is UPSIDE DOWN or BACKWARDS. It would cost the produced like $50 to hire a medical student to make sure this simple detail was right.

as far as medical stuff goes, I think the most damaging fiction comes about by perpetuating this myth of how CPR and other last-ditch methods tend to work 98% of the time.

utter fail. It's bad, because you end up with real patients, in real hospitals, with real dead loved ones who are pissed that Johnny is dead after CPR and claim that the doctors failed at their job.

I know that's a bit over the top, but it has become problematic when, despite the idea that we are exposed to so much more knowledge in general, that the patient population has become far dumber--or at least more skeptic--and hence more litigious from ignorance.

 

[CallMeJoe]

...I'll never understand why people can't accept the fact that CSI is completely intolerable garbage BS...

I just remembered the CSI trick of casting a detailed three-dimensional duplicate of a knife blade from a wound channel in soft tissue...

 

[CallMeJoe]

as far as medical stuff goes, I think the most damaging fiction comes about by perpetuating this myth of how CPR and other last-ditch methods tend to work 98% of the time...

There's also the CSI effect in the criminal justice system with some jurors loath to convict unless there's a plethora of lab evidence, because everyone knows that there's good DNA evidence, fingerprints and other absolute proof of guilt at all crime scenes.

I should also note the 15 minute DNA match and the computerized fingerprint database that gives 100% certainty of match from three whorls off the side of a thumb...

 

[Jeff7]

They don't seem to miss THAT often with phasers, although they really should never miss. Then again, the ships are usually either traveling faster than light or they're using impulse engines that propel them at a significant percentage of lightspeed, so they should actually be able to avoid phasers.

So use the immensely-powerful computer to lead the target a bit. Hell, the AI characters in computer games were capable of doing that years ago.

Usually it seems they'll fire one phaser blast, it does nothing, and then their ship is damaged to the point where their weapons stop working.

That reminded me: How to find a ship that's firing at you while cloaked.
1) The ship has visual sensors that are hooked to a reasonably intelligent computer.
2) When the sensors detect incoming weapons fire, direct a huge number of low-power phaser bursts in that general direction.
3) Blow up the damn phaser-illuminated ship already.


Also, something I liked about Stargate: The engines usually survived past the first weapons salvo, allowing escape. In Star Trek, it seemed that a hit anywhere on the ship resulted in the warp drive going down. Maybe they shouldn't just use Bondo after every battle.

What makes even less sense is how "lasers" in Star Wars travel much slower than light. Slow enough that you can see them moving and they're not just continuous beams. But whatever, it's space fantasy! Even Star Trek, which tries to be a little more "realistic" than Star Wars, simply uses technobabble instead of "the force" to cover up anything that doesn't make sense. The only sci-fi that doesn't routinely break the laws of physics is super hard sci-fi, which only really exists in literature.

Also fun in Star Wars is how laser blasts can explode like aerial flak charges.

Or Star Trek, where phaser (light) blasts are capable of rocking the ship around. Yes, light can impart momentum onto an object, but to rock a ship like that, I think it would have to be so powerful that it would vaporize damn near anything in its path.

On the technobabble:
"How do the intertial dampeners work?"
"Very well, thank you."

I addressed that point. You have to keep the hull at a perfect 3 degrees kelvin.

Ok, gotcha.

Even if you could radiate heat specifically in a way you want to, you need to know exactly where the enemy is looking. Also by doing directional emission, you're generating even more heat trying to shift the already existing heat around. Also, directional heat means that the area that can be used to radiate heat is so small that the amount of heat being raidated would be insignificant to the amount of heat being generated even just trying to get heat only there. Also simply being alive raises the temperature of the ship to above 0c, which is a torch in space.

Use thermocouples or something similar to capture excess heat to power some manner of focused laser, or via some other futuristic technology for firing tightly-focused beams of photons. Yes, you'll have a powerful beam blasting out of the ship, but there's a darned good chance that it won't find its way into the sensors of someone who's looking for you.
There's nothing saying you need to remain cloaked indefinitely - just long enough to escape some threat, or to find a clever way of saying "Hey, look over there!"

 

[zinfamous]

There's also the CSI effect in the criminal justice system with some jurors loath to convict unless there's a plethora of lab evidence, because everyone knows that there's good DNA evidence, fingerprints and other absolute proof of guilt at all crime scenes.

I should also note the 15 minute DNA match and the computerized fingerprint database that gives 100% certainty of match from three whorls off the side of a thumb...

yeah, the finger print stuff is pretty damn bad.

and extracting DNA from a single hair fiber that was *not* ripped straight from the follicle.

yeah. fuck you: TV science!

 

[Kadarin]

Another classic one: The Star Trek TNG episode where Geordi and Ensign Ro are shifted out of phase with the rest of the ship along with that Romulan guy. They could walk through walls, panels, other people... But they didn't sink through the floor and could even use the turbolifts.

 

[PingSpike]

As some one else mentioned, the artifical gravity is silly enough but when the ship is on backup power and being blown up it doesn't make any sense that it still functions. Stuff like the engines and life support are of course more important.

One of the star trek movies, undiscovered country I think at least had a scene where they turned the gravity off and a bunch of assassins with magnetic boots shot the shit out of everyone.

 

[PingSpike]

As some one else mentioned, the artifical gravity is silly enough but when the ship is on backup power and being blown up it doesn't make any sense that it still functions. Stuff like the engines and life support are of course more important.

One of the star trek movies, undiscovered country I think at least had a scene where they turned the gravity off and a bunch of assassins with magnetic boots shot the shit out of everyone.