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How Star Wars Trumped Star Trek For Scientific Accuracy
An anonymous reader writes "When George Lucas added the 'ring around the Death Star' effect to his 1997 re-release of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, the revision was almost as hated as Greedo shooting first, and to boot was seen as a knock-off of the seminal 'Praxis effect' in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991). But a debunking astronomer claims that the Federation got it wrong and the fan-boys should thank Lucas for adding some scientific accuracy to his fictional universe."
Sadly, upon closer inspection, we see that ILM blew this rare opportunity for scientific realism in the Star Wars universe ...
Indeed, if you're familiar with Docking Bay 327, it is inside a large maitenance trench where the structural weaknesses should have created a horizontal ring exploding outward. Instead the movie gave us a vertical ring exploding outward.
I hate most of Star Trek and basically considered Star Wars a religion as a human larva & pupa (see above docking bay reference). Being as how I was hatched after the last (real) Star Wars movie came out, my nipples exploded with joy at the prospect of seeing the originals on the big screen -- special edition or not. I was confused by the Han/Greedo exchange, found not a whole lot of added value in the other aspects but must have been the only person pleased with a more satisfactory Death Star explosion.
But a debunking astronomer
Yes, it's Phil "Bad Astronomer" Plait. Look, it's great you get people into astronomy via sci-fi religious flamebait stoking but ... I think you put it best in the last slide of one of your presentations.
My work here is dung.
Cue the guys with pointy latex ear extensions flipping off the guys with the neon glowing plastic swords.
A good bitchfight is about to emerge here. I for one have my popcorn ready. BTW, Star Wars is waaayyy better than that sissy star trek.
Apparently this is regarding a book published in 2002 which talks about the 1997 edition of Star Wars vs a 1991 Star Trek - comparing the way an explosion appeared on screen.
Which portion of this 8 year old book about a 20 year old movie is news?
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Ring around the Death Star? Greedo shooting first? You mean, people actually watch the butchered editions of Star Wars?
I had no idea.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
When George Lucas added the 'ring around the Death Star' effect to his 1997 re-release of Star Wars episode IV: A New Hope, the revision was almost as hated as Greedo shooting first ...
No. Greedo shooting first is far more hated. Enhanced explosion effects and cgi starfighters are the sort of thing expected not a major character personality rewrite.
Adding ridiculous numbers of storm troopers to corridors is probably far more hated. The death star explosion is most likely pretty far down the list.
Which would win in a fight, the Millennium Falcon or the Enterprise?
Just made Star Wars totally unrealistic.
It sure would be nice if the author could figure out how to write something that anybody BESIDES a raving, rabid fanboy of either series could make any sense of. I haven't memorized either of those movies, I'm ashamed to say...
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
One of the things that Star Wars had over Star Trek is the fact that the science, or lack of it, was never a critical point of the story. Nothing wrong with bad science with your fantasy, but Star Trek tried making the bad science part of the plotline which was idiotic. Making up a particle that causes some problem, then making up another particle that fixes the problem caused by the first fake particle is beyond stupid. You don't gain anything from it.
I don't see how one small example from 1 movie out of thousands of hours of star trek lets star wars "trump" it. For christ sakes.. in star wars you could alter someones mind by waving at them. You could move objects by REALLY wanting them. Death? Thats for losers. Need I go on? /fanboy
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
Pff I should hook you up with my girlfriend. She will fix that for you and I finally can watch a decent movie like the Godfather 1, 2 and 3 in peace.
Lucas still didn't get it right that noise doesn't carry through the vacuum of space. Every time anything explodes we still hear it.
I care about the integrity of a work of art, cheesy pyro effects and all.
Digital remasterings that go beyond color correction and noise reduction suck. JMHO.
Acceptable? Getting rid of the matte outlines that were visible in VHS Star Wars IV. Not acceptable? Adding a CGI tauntaun.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Star Trek is science fiction while Star Wars is science fantasy. There is far more real science accuracy in Star Trek than anything in Star Wars. They even got the Ipad right more than 20 years before it became real. Star Trek explains the science whereas Star Wars is just fun fantasy stuff.
Unless, of course, Praxis had a trench round its circumference too (visible or not). Strip-mining is a viable extraction method.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Alien (1979) http://io9.com/355353/you-have-ten-seconds-to-reach-minimum-safe-distance By the shape of the nostromo and the large flat platform at the base I'm going to say that they had it right before any of those others.
I work in the visual FX business, and "Praxis rings" have been mocked as cliche for well over a decade now.
Praxis is their key energy production facility...
Galactica would trounce both without batting a lash.
But a debunking astronomer
Astronomy grants getting a bit thin? Don't they need to be gathering gravity wave data to work out whether or not the universe is a hologram and dark energy radiates from evil mirror branes or something?
claims that the Federation got it wrong and the fan-boys should thank Lucas for adding some scientific accuracy to his fictional universe
Yeah, I'll get right on that. Oh, wait, I'm not a fan boy! I'm exempt! Yay! :-D
You know I realize CmrTaco founded slashdot, so maybe i'm looking a gift horse in the mouth here, but come on dude!!!! The book cited was published in 2002. This following an article on Falconry that has been in use for at bare minimum 70 years??? Is it the slowest news day in history or what??
Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh argue about whose accounts of President Obama's secret worship of Allah is more accurate.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
sir we're receiving a message from Praxis
If you look at the dynamics of the Enterprise during the Far Point episode, you can see at least 16 maneuvers that violate physics. I think it's pretty clear that the people who do Star Trek don't have any respect -- whatsoever -- for any kind of physical realism. On the other hand, if you look at the way the Millennium Falcon moves, especially the way it goes into hyperdrive, it is WAY more realistic.
It really bothers me that Trekkies/Trekkers/whatever you want to call them think that Star Trek is so great. What really gets me is how Earth-centric it is. Like, as if Earth would become some marvelous utopian society and yet the Klingons (note: Black people?) are so freakin violent.
The whole idea in Star Wars of a struggle between good and evil is far more realistic, and I think that's why so many kids aged 7-9 relate to Star Wars so well, because it reflects the reality of the world, as any child can see. I vowed never to watch any more Star Trek about 3 years ago, and honestly it was the best decision I ever made. Even my work performance improved.
So, if I'm reading the summary correctly, Star Wars was edited to include an effect that had already been included in Star Trek. So for copying Star Trek, Star Wars wins?
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Send to Klingon High Command: "This is Excelsior, a Federation Starship traveling in beta quadrant. We have monitored a large explosion in your sector. Do you require any assistance?"
You know I will admit I do get angry when I watch a news clip or history channel documentary and find the information presented to be flat wrong or terribly misleading... it makes me sad. However getting angry over application of reality to the pure fiction of Star Wars and Star Trek? really? What is gained by comparing the force to a transporter or light saber to cloaking fields? How is it that anyone on earth is even capable of knowing with any certainty how a fricking death star will explode? What is it even made out of and what are the properties of its explodey core? I would gladly forgive any and all scientific transgressions made in Star Wars if the script is changed so that all we remember of jar jar is that he was stepped on and killed by one of those shield carrying dinosaurs.
- Star Wars uses laser weapons. Any advanced space-race would never use laser weapons as they are readily re-mediated by the use of reflective materials. Star Trek uses Phasers (phased energy weapons), which at least sort of makes sense.
- An entire planet existing as a city? This makes no sense from a material logistics point of view, at all. There is nothing like this in Star Trek.
- Need I mention the force? Microscopic life forms (midichlorians) giving magical powers to people? It is an interesting plot device, but rooted in any kind of science? No.
Absolutely wrong, at least for connoisseurs. "Hard" science fiction, or SF for short, is very different from fantasy.
SF is a genre written with a "what if" question. Suppose *one* and only one thing that's impossible today were possible, what then? Examples of authors in this genre are Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Arthur Clarke. There's very little true SF in movies and TV, it's too cerebral for visual consumption. A magazine that specializes in SF is Analog, published since 1930, when it was named "Astounding".
Fantasy is a genre where anything goes. You could say that SF and, as a matter of fact, all fiction is a sub-genre of fantasy. Star Trek and Star Wars are fantasy but not true SF, they have too many impossible things to qualify as true Science Fiction.
Personally, I see it as an apples and oranges thing. You'd be more accurate comparing Star Trek with Dr. Who and Star Wars with Star Ship Troopers (but I wouldn't even want those flame wars!)
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
not science fiction.
Can we mod the article as flamebait?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
*sigh* I was just kidding around. I'm on Phil's site every day. It's a fucking "science of Star Wars" topic not a the final round of talks to avert World War III. Cheer up. It's nearly, um, Christmas, or something. Or don't.
...Star Trek tried making the bad science part of the plotline which was idiotic. Making up a particle that causes some problem, then making up another particle that fixes the problem caused by the first fake particle is beyond stupid. You don't gain anything from it.
That's the nature of television. You have to make two dozen episodes a year; eventually, you run out of ideas. There's probably a thousand distinct Star Trek plots out there when you add up all the episodes of all the series and movies. Some of them are decent; some of them are just filling the network's quota.
George Lucas only ever had to come up with six coherent plots.
Star Wars < Star Trek <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< 2001
For my two cents. For realism copy nature! Planetary nebulae are good exemples off eject material, you see, they could make the ring centric to the observer, like a bubble, because in the border off the bubble, more material absorv more light. it would be much more natural and in commom sense. Nature is the best teacher.
It's not sourcery, it's Technology!!!
the internal composition of the death star. For all we know the whole thing is two vertical hemispheres joined together by cheez wiz. The maintenance trench might have little to do with the geometry of an explosion. The same goes for moons around alien planets that have been mined around their equators for minerals found only there that apparently despite other advances in science, can only be dug out of the ground and not made in a lab.
Nullius in verba
Please? Anything??
Huh, I always the ring was a knock-off from the end of Stargate. (movie, not series)
This argument seems totally pointless.
There would be no fight. Han Solo wasn't the sort to play fair if it meant he wouldn't win. Also, there is no moral or financial incentive to shooting up the federation.
The better question is who would win in a fight, Han Solo or Malcolm Reynolds...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
- An entire planet existing as a city? This makes no sense from a material logistics point of view, at all. There is nothing like this in Star Trek.
Wasn't the Borg cube-thing basically exactly this? (too small? The unicomplex better?)
Star wars blasters are actually (I can't believe I said that) bolts of superheated plasma, not lasers. The plasma is what does the damage, not the laser. That's why they call them "blasters" and not "lasers", as well as why they have visible flight time instead of being nigh-instantaneous. (It doesn't explain why one side's ships have orange bolts and the other side has green, though. That never made sense to me.) More details at [ http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Blaster ].
Similarly, a lightsaber is described as a blade of plasma, held in place by a projected energy field. It's not a laser either. ( per [ http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Lightsaber ] )
Is that Star Wars is a gigantic steaming pile of shit.
Eh. Picking nits in the "accuracy" of almost any media sigh-fie is pointless. The writers are Hollywood media types, generally not people with any knowledge of science to speak of. The directors and special effects people aren't any better. Star Trek generally made some attempt at plausibility, though it falls way short most of the time. (Red Matter? Please! Cuisinart of Doom? Give me a break!) Star Wars, on the other hand... as fun a ride as the IV - VI were, when it comes to scientific accuracy, you might as well discuss the scientific accuracy of Harry Potter.
Star Trek often hires science advisers, but they mostly ignore them. I don't think Star Wars has ever bothered.
The people doing Futurama do have a grasp of physics, but accuracy isn't their aim. They do have some fun physics "inside jokes" from time to time.
GATTACA did a pretty decent job. For all its "Woodsy Owl/Fern Gully" stuff, "Avatar" wasn't too bad, though the magnetic fields necessary to levitate those superconducting mountains were flatly ridiculous.
I'd love to see a good SF movie which hired a staff of good science advisers, armed with assault rifles and a license to kill.
...all of this pales next to Dune.
The first. Not the second.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Should have made 3 rings if you're going to play along with this cockamamie logic stream.
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Death_Star
"Halfway between the equator and each pole were two supplementary trenches."
Where are the editors/moderators???
Now on a more "serious" tone... Scientific accuracy in SW? Like:
Jet engines with intakes (so that they can suck what? neutrinos?)
X-fighters banking on curves (I guess their x-wings generate some lift in the vacuum of space)
Things in orbit that start falling to on side and people inside them start falling too (yahoo!!!)
Screaming jets as they fly by in space (if only they had seen the movie 2001...)
Apparently submitter did not read the article to the very end:
"Sadly, upon closer inspection, we see that ILM blew this rare opportunity for scientific realism in the Star Wars universe"
more nerd fest.
In Space...Everyone can Hear you Whoooosh.
What is more scientifically accurate? Superman or Spider-man? They are both so wide of the mark it is not even worth noting the difference.
vi +
the idea that Star Wars is in any way scientifically accurate is just plain silly. Star Trek isn't perfect but at least they had physicists on set to help them stay marginally accurate... or at least use words that were remotely related to the subject they were talking about. Star Wars = SciFi Star Treck = Hard SciFi (ok, well not totally but a lot more so than Star Wars)
Star Trek will forever and always be better then Star Wars!!!
Don't mess with the Dark Helmet!
Shaka, when the walls fell.
Babylon 5. Far more accurate with science than Trek or Wars. Also, they had JPL engineers on staff to give thumbs up/down to spacecraft design and maneuverability. Also had a 5 year story arc planned out, not make things up as you go along.
Please hand over your geek card on the way out. Thanks.
Developers: We can use your help.
They're powered by quantum entangle dark matter nano flux..
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Harry Potter - Death is permanent, even for major good guys.
Star Trek III - Spock comes back.
For all these shows, you can reasonably debate whether a given point has scientific accuracy, whether it is 'realistic', or is 'rational' or even internally consistent. Try to average the conclusions on all those points and give the whole series a single rating, and you have left the realm where reason applies.
Who is John Cabal?
In the interests of scientific accuracy, a ship that can travel faster than light will also travel backwards in time. On the other side of the speed of light, it requires more energy to decelerate and less to accelerate, and an object at rest travels with infinite speed. Therefore, it makes little sense to compare the speeds of ships that can travel faster than light.
The problem of faster-than-light travel is navigation. You can't have any interaction with below-light-speed matter, so where the heck are you??? A more meaningful comparison would be accuracy as to where you end up after decelerating back below the speed of light. That is, distance from an intended target location is a much more meaningful measure of faster-than-light ships than speed.
Yes, yes, I know, there will be those who say that mistakes are intentional and that the movie was not intentionally correct, but these are not the Freuds you're looking for.
EPIC FAIL for those participating in a S. Trek better than S. Wars debate.
Especially on the Internet.
Especially on Slashdot.org.
Those who have failed, please take a toaster upstairs to your mother's portion of the house, bypass the GFI protection on the circuit, measure out a correct length of electrical wiring - and take a bath.
Instructions can be found via http://www.tinyurl.com/slashdoters .
Please proceed immediately, least you somehow fall into the genetic gene pool and continue this.
(same goes for mac vs pc holy warriors as well)
Both the Star Wars and Star Trek movie franchises are fantasy. It's great that Lucas (maybe) tried to interject a little realistic physics into his remake, but with all the other unexplained 'science' in both franchises, it really doesn't matter. Pretty much anything goes in both of these galaxies.
As someone mentioned earlier, true science fiction changes maybe one (or sometimes a little more) thing, then (if you've accepted the plausibility of that one change) the movie will try to tell a believable story using accurate existing science. The movie Blade Runner, for instance, as much as I wished it had been, was not Science Fiction. Even though it was set in the future (2014), there was a long list of astounding scientific advances the viewer had to accept in addition to the main premise that an android could become self-aware and, in some cases, not even know that it is an android (I mean c'mom, imagine the science needed to produce utterly accurate bodily functions. Or did androids just think they had amazingly efficient digestive tracts?
An example of a true science fiction movie is 'The Island' by Michael Bay released in 2005, the one premise that the audience had to accept was that human cloning was acceptable (not a stretch at all) and that the maturation of the clone could be accelerated and then slowed when it reached an optimum condition for organ donation. This movie is also set in the future, but the rest of the 'science' is not at all implausible and is used mostly to remind the viewer that it is the future.
With DVD and Blu-ray disks, it's possible to seamlessly stitch together the viewer's choice of scenes, viewing angles and soundtracks. The modern classic film Sex Drive comes to mind.
LucasFilm should offer original versions, Lucas versions, original versions with extra scenes but not changed scenes, etc, all on the same disks. I'm holding out for special nerd-pron edition with checkboxes and radio buttons to precisely tailor the experience.
Sci-fi obviously gets this wrong, with billowing clouds of burning petroleum shot on earth composited over CG or scale models, it's almost completely wrong on every level.
I'd love to see space battles done realistically some day. But here are some points.
Gas, debri, behaves differently and quite counterintuitive in a vacuum. Everything in space follows a parabolic/freefall trajectory, and unless it has anything to hit, it'll continue follow that vector. Gases and liquid much the same. Any explosion or rapid venting would see gas streaming out into space fast.
The closest example I can find is the rocket exhaust from a russian missle test that spiralled out of control over norway. http://paradoxoff.com/files/2009/12/norway-sky-spiral-phenomena-1.jpg
This gives you some idea of the odd way things behave in a vacuum. Rocket exhaust has a velocity of many km/s.
As for explosions, only ionized glowing gas would be visible, or ice particles reflecting light, as well as any debri.
In earths atmosphere explosives generate a shockwave traveling at many kilometres per second. In a vacuum this is relatively unimpeded, so would be faster.
Yet in a vacuum shockwaves from gas alone would be relatively benign after a short distance. There is no overpressure/underpressure effect the same as in an atmosphere. If anything the shockwave from explosives nearby would give a vessel a sideways shove with rather even pressure exerted by high velocity gas impacting the hull.
However in space, any debri or shrapnel is extra deadly.
Consider that Project Orion was intending to use nuclear warheads detonated behind a vessel to propell it along. They were talking about distances of 100 metres, which with a mutli-kiloton bomb would only ablate a thin layer of steel off the pusher plate with each pulse.
So a nuke could go off pretty close to the hull of a vessel and do little more than give it a nudge and a does of EM and gamma radiation - if enough nudge it might splatter the canned primates against the inside of the ship and cause some structural damage.
Considering lasers are defeated by a reflective surface it seems to me the only plausible space weapon is projectiles. A high velocity delta would mean putting your packed lunch out a airlock at a 8km/s differnce would give it it's own weight in TNT and put a hole through a foot of steel.
Thankfully Battlestar Galactica reboot got this right - they ditched lasers for more realistic old fashioned projectile rounds.
A smaller projectile accelerated to relativistic speeds would be almost impossible to dodge for anything large and slow moving. If you could detect it at tens of thousands of kilometres away you'd have only a split second to move your vessel.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Honestly, this is the first I'd heard about that change. I'm not Star Wars zealot, but I definitely think that is a ridiculous change. You're totally right about it being a bigger deal because it changes the character. I haven't even seen the movie in like 15 years and that bugs me.
BOTH are fictitious shows. I use to love watching the alt.starwars or alt.startrek news groups before at&t canned them. You would see arguments going on over how the phaser works, how a warp drive works, could a wookie actually fly a space ship and other such stupidity. You can probably guess that these people sit alone, virgins, in the basements of houses all over the world, and their only outlet in life is going to a star trek or star wars convention to see some old has been actor. The funniest movie ever made was the pun of star trek/wars movies "Galaxy Quest". You can spot these geeks miles away, wearing pointed ears, black glasses with tape over the middle. It's a FLIPPING MOVIE, get over it.
In Firefly, there's no goddamn sound in space. There's also no "warp speed," nor a full-blown AI (although I'm not sure about Star Trek on that one...)
Star Wars fans get the prettier girls! Ok, I stand corrected: Star Wars fans get GIRLS!
Carlos Niebla
Sense then his work has sucked big wet donkey balls.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Per the role playing game tech manuals, the Star Wars "blaster" (the hand weapon) is supposed to be firing a little bloop of highly excited gas/plasma/whatever exiting the gun at high speed. This all holds up pretty well: the visible motion, the light emitted, nearly endless ammo, and why the different guns make different colors. They do however call the big towers "turbolasers" which I blame on Jar-Jar because it makes no sense.
Light sabers, on the other hand, are pretty clearly just cool fucking swords.
The movie Blade Runner, for instance, as much as I wished it had been, was not Science Fiction. Even though it was set in the future (2014), there was a long list of astounding scientific advances the viewer had to accept in addition to the main premise that an android could become self-aware and, in some cases, not even know that it is an android (I mean c'mom, imagine the science needed to produce utterly accurate bodily functions. Or did androids just think they had amazingly efficient digestive tracts?
I always thought the implication was that the replicants were engineered biological organisms. Otherwise why would they bother with the Voight-Kampf test? Once you've accepted that they're biological, pooping comes for free. Really the only big leap is that such a level of bioengineering
that they could make something that is indistinguishable from a human, but so much stronger, resistant to heat, etc.
That doesn't sound like significantly more of a stretch than presuming you could somehow accelerate human growth to super-speeds. Mr. Clone inexplicably knowing things he couldn't possibly have known is the bigger leap imo.
And what makes Blade Runner (and to a lesser extent The Island) true Sci-Fi is not that they restrict the degree to which they extrapolate from existing technology. It's that they posit a type of technology and a type of future in which that technology exists, and explore how that affects the human condition as we see it today. True sci-fi is always about the present, not the future.
The enemies of Democracy are
Dumbest fucking slashot article, EVER.
I'm not even going to say why it's stupid, because that would make me as bad as the fucking dipshit that just wasted two minutes of my life.
Urgh!
This signature has Super Cow Powers
I enjoy both Star Trek and Star Wars as adventure drama, but there is not one iota of real science in either one. Might as well post an article about how the pot trumped the kettle for whiteness.
The original Howling Frog is a fictional character and has no UID.
Yeah yeah yeah, but you're all forgetting Jar Jar Binks. I don't care how scientifically accurate the explosions were, Lucas is a bad man.
the original deathstar explosion was a blown up scale model suspended from the ceiling of the Cow Palace in San Francisco. They have atmosphere in the Cow Palace.. so the smoke and all that was "real" not much you can do about it esp. back in the late 70's
I'd love to see space battles done realistically some day ..at least they got space flight right in BSG (the new one).. the Vipers used thrusters to turn on their axes (to do a 180 for example).. they even used a reverse thuster to counter the spin. SW and ST (and just about every other SciFi movie I've seen uses that WWII dogfight wide banking turn as if control surfaces (flaps) work in space. The flight scenes in Apollo 13 or From the Earth to the Moon also got it right, but I don't consider those SciFi.
And I guess we'll have to forgive the whole midichlorians explanation next.
I am not devoid of humor.
This was also in Alien (1979) before the other two movies. When the commercial towing vehicle Nostromo self destructs with a brighter explosive ring along the ecliptic.
*DrugCheese rants*
I almost jumped up and cheered when the Reaver ship in the first episode of Firefly backed into the atmosphere even if it had to happen at the speed of plot.