131–140 of 255 posts
I had sudden memories of playing Frontier: Elite 2. I wanted to go to Sol, buy luxury goods...and take them to Barnards Star
It can be summed up as "Ken Meets Jesus", "Ken Goes to Space", "Ken is a bumbling moron", "Ken's first friend". "Ken's White Savior moment" This appears to be the norm for US based scifi now. Glad I'm watching movies like The Wandering Earth and Alienoid instead. It had a good premise. But it also fell apart immediately. Like, they only sent 3 people, 2 whom died on this UBER CRITICAL SAVE THE PLANET idea? And Ryan G…
The thing about very smart people is that they can still manage to miss the bus.
And if you have read any of Andy Weirs other books they have a common theme of one person who’s in over their head who basically bumbles through by the skin of their teeth.
Elite Dangerous does it better. Pretty but idk.. get the AI generated feeling.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Biggest thing they all still get wrong for reasons of drama is showing humans wrestling with controls and flying like a fighter pilot. Real spaceships do not and will not have humans in the control loop except to specify a destination or target.
Would dead-reckoning work or using some galactic sextant?
Ultima (Proxima Book 2) by Stephen Baxter:
“Oh, come on. This is just great. An imperial Roman starship! . . . We know they lack sophisticated electronics, computers. I wonder how the hell they navigate that thing.”
“The drive isn’t always on,” said Titus.
Stef realized that a more precise translation of his words might have been, *The vulcans do not always vomit fire.*
“Every month they shut it down, and turn the ship.” He mimed this with his one good hand, like aligning a cannon. “The surveyors take sightings from the stars. Then they swivel the ship to make sure we’re on the right track, and fire up the drive again. It’s like laying a road, on the march. You lay a stretch, and at the end of the day the surveyors take their sightings to make sure you’re heading straight and true where you’re supposed to go, and the next day off you go. Works like a dream. Why, I remember once on campaign—”
“Navigation by dead reckoning,” said the ColU. “Taking sightings from the stars—simply pointing the craft at the destination. They have no computers here, Colonel Kalinski, nothing more complex than an abacus. And they have astrolabes, planispheres, orreries, sextants, and very fine clocks—all mechanical, mechanical, and remarkably sophisticated. But, Colonel, this starship is piloted using clockwork! However, if you have the brute energy of the kernels available, you don’t need subtlety, you don’t need fine control. You need only aim and fire.”Earlier quoted context omitted.
> White Savior moment ???
White people doing anything good is actually bad. Duh. /s, but I think I'm accurately describing the viewpoint you're responding to.
However in this example the contribution of the alien, not just to the whole saving the universe business, but to the actual story, the book, was huge.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Biggest thing they all still get wrong for reasons of drama is showing humans wrestling with controls and flying like a fighter pilot. Real spaceships do not and will not have humans in the control loop except to specify a destination or target.
>Real spaceships do not and will not have humans in the control loop except to specify a destination or target. Jim Lovell would like a word.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even sci-fi writers that try to get this right have a hard time wrapping their heads around it. "It's called space for a reason." When I saw the series adaptation of The Expanse, it was really obvious they played a lot of artistic license to make it exciting. A real space battle would be dots firing invisible dots at each other. "Close quarter battle" would be within something like 2000 kilometers, maybe more. That i…
I don't think the Expanse authors were going for "hard sci-fi." There's, you know, fiction elements -- gates, aliens, magic. And the TV series is itself an adaptation of the books for a visual medium. Showing almost nothing would make for kind of boring TV combat.
Setting aside magic, fictional science and technology aren't incompatible with hard sci-fi; in fact I'd argue that exploring those on "serious" terms is the entire point of the genre.
At some point I started seeing people advance this weird idea online that hard sci-fi means essentially nonfiction but that's not correct (or even sensible if you stop and think about it since at that point you're just writing a traditional character or political drama or whatever). It simply means taking a simulation style approach to various technological elements of the story. The deeper the simulation goes (ie the more nested levels of "okay and why does that work that way and what are the practical impacts on society") the "harder" the work is.
Magic is an interesting case. In theory it could be compatible with science but in practice the sort of phenomena that people usually mean by that term necessarily imply the intervention of some higher power.