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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.
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.
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.
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??
All the interesting gaps in the Star Wars storyline took place between Episode III and Episode IV. We all know Anakin's going to fall to the Dark Side, and there was no need to spend two movies doing it. The unexplored part of the movie timeline is what life is like immediately after he becomes Vader, but before the events of Episode IV.
Agreed. However, I have my doubts that Lucas could have pulled off anything better than he did, regardless of his chosen timeline. He's just not very good, as he's proven time and time again. :\
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
I always liked this definition: "SF is a story about things that might happen, but we wouldn't want them to happen. Fantasy is about things that we would like to happen, but can't possibly happen." It's not an exact definition, but I thinks it's pretty good.
I don't remember who said it (Maybe Arthur C. Clarke?). If anyone remembers, please enlighten me. Thanks.
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
I know I'm going to be lambasted for this and let me say right from the start I don't like the majority of Star Wars, but I really liked Episode 3.
To me it was one of the few ones who's plot was reasonably believable. Reasonably good build up, some tension thrown in, no overwhelmingly painful, tediously dragged out love story, good depiction of a coup and to top it off, only a few unanswered questions about what had taken place.
Star Trek story lines usually had an air of believability to them. Granted some series had too many encounters with time travel (I'm looking at you Voyager), holodeck accidents (I'm looking at you TNG) and the Mirror Universe (I'm looking at you DS9), but you could usually find decent explanations for most things. To be honest I like the TV series approach better than the films, as was stated by others here, you have more time to develop characters, more time to develop lore and culture but you also invariably have more time to create garbage and bullshit. But overall I feel that the genius to bullshit ratio of Star Trek far exceeds that of Star Wars
There is no -1 disagree
No, it's for people who want an exception to there precious Fictional stories to seem 'more important' then others. Nothing more.
Name 1 book that is very different from fantasy? 1 story that would couldn't replace the fiction science with a fictional magic device.
Isaac Asimov
AI in rogot can easily be replaced by golems from fantasy.
Robert Heinlein
A immortal man? an AI, a talking car? Really? can't be replaced with magic?
Clones can be doplgangers.
and Arthur Clarke.
HAL could also be a Genie in a bottle,.
Just listing the Big Three does not an argument make. An dyes I have read most, if not all, of their works
"Fantasy is a genre where anything goes"
No, it's not. Like all stories it provides bounds and context. any story where 'anything goes' is crap.
The ONLY difference is how far removed it is from current understanding and technology.
IT's ALL still fiction.
" too cerebral for visual consumption.
and ther is it. NMY stuff is too smart for the unwashed masses. Hurumph. I should start to cal it the Hurumph fallacy. or maybe the "Petomane fallacy"
I am familiar with Analog. I was a long time subscriber, plus I had boxes of me grandfathers copies. I read a lot of them.
Fantasy is a sub genre of fiction.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
HAL isn't a good example of hard sci fi. Nor is the monolith for that matter. HAL was conceivable, not proven, but seemed plausible given what we knew at the time. You're right, though, Clarke and Kubrick didn't bother explaining in detail how HAl's AI was possible. The monolith was truly beyond comprehension, and is pure fantasy.
The depiction of weightlessness and motion in space, the silence in vacuum, and other aspects of 2001 are good examples of hard sci fi. Those were done to be as scientifically accurate as could be given our excellent understanding of newtonian physics.
In conclusion, I guess a story doesn't have to be all or nothing.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Amen. But that's not necessarily bad. To correspond with Yoda's code, there was also a Code of the Sith.
"Peace is a lie. There is only passion. Through passion, I gain strength. Through strength, I gain power. Through power, I gain victory. Through victory, my chains are broken."
A movie centered around Palpatine teaching Anakin/Vader something like that would have been an interesting story. In Episode III, Vader didn't even have the vaguest idea what he stood for. By the time Episode IV rolls around, he did.
I learned more about Darth Vader playing KOTOR than I did in all six Star Wars movies.
If Yoda's "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering" was the only accepted canonical phrasing of the Jedi Code, a simple correction, perhaps in the form "Fear leads to hate. Hate leads to strength. Strength leads to power." (with an implicit loop-closing "...and power instills fear, but only in others, like those wimpy Jedi!) would have sufficed.
Rod Serling has been attributed with the quote "fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible."
In the books the Monolith is just a very, very powerful computer + manipulator/nanotech created by a very, very advanced civilization. I think in the book 3001 they get into that quite a bit, as humanity had advanced to a point where they could begin to understand it. As the author himself said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - the monolith is a perfect example.
I don't know that HAL *needs* an explanation - it's a computer, an artificial intelligence, and that was something that people kind of got at the time: computers were seen as artificial brains, HAL was a big brain, albeit neurotic as hell thanks to bad programming. In any case, "explaining" HAL is as necessary as people "explaining" the cold sleep or the drive on the ship - it's a kind of logical (albeit extremely optimistic) extrapolation of tech we have in front of us.
Personally, the only book in the series that stretched my credulity to the breaking point was the ludicrous 2100 (I think that was the year) - why would people 90 years from now still care about *diamonds* as if they were valuable, when today we're able to make diamonds industrially and cheaply, and certainly could make artificial gemstone quality diamonds given more effort in a few years. Seriously, it would be as if someone in 1900 wrote a story about people in the year 2000 finding a cache of buggy whips or something.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
> Ah, but with the exception of telekinesis, everything you listed only existed in the Original Series.
Oh yeah? What about "Man of the People" on TNG where Alkar influenced Troi's behavior with his psychic powers?
What about "Transfigurations" where John Doe killed Worf, and then resurrected him?
Not to mention the quasi-magical powers of the Q... Star Trek has ALWAYS had a healthy dose of magic mixed with its science and pseudoscience!