John Scalzi returns to the well of nerd bile (see last week’s geek-disturbing here), this time he’s aiming at Star Trek:
Me: Star Wars design is so bad that people have to come up with elaborate and contrived rationales to explain it.
Star Wars Fanboy: YOU ARE SO VERY WRONG AND I WILL SHOW YOU WHY WITH THESE ELABORATE AND CONTRIVED RATIONALES.
It’s a little much to hope for (or fear) the same result two weeks in a row, but nevertheless I promised everyone I’d point and laugh at Star Trek design, so here we go. I’ll confine myself to things in the movies. There are eleven of those, so it’s not like this will be a problem.
V’Ger
In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a Voyager space probe gets sucked into a black hole and survives (GAAAAH), and is discovered by denizens of a machine planet who think the logical thing to do is to take a bus-size machine with the processing power of a couple of Speak and Spells and upgrade it to a spaceship the size of small moon, wrap that in an energy field the size of a solar system, and then send it merrily on its way. This is like you assisting a brain-damaged raccoon trapped on a suburban traffic island by giving him Ecuador.
He had me at “Sasquatch’s ball gag”.
Comment by Lickmuffin — August 27, 2009 @ 19:53
Not a bad list, but not quite as funny as the Star Wars list. He missed a few glaring ones that have ticked me off over the years, like:
Vulcans never die. (STIII) At least not as long as they can find some poor schlub to park their ‘katra’ in. Despite having the ability to preserve their immortal soul and and transfer it at will, the vast majority… don’t. And Vulcan technology does not extend to stuff like clone or cyborg bodies. Immortal Vulcans pretty well destroys whatever pathos the death scene in the previous movie had.
The Borg can time travel, have threatened the development of human warp technology, but gave up after only one attempt. (STVIII) Yeah these are the implacable badasses of the galaxy, all right. Maybe AI constructs just don’t know they can make multiple attempts at earlier points in history; this is a problem that afflicts Skynet (of the Terminator series) as well.
Borg accessories. Despite looking like they would pack a multi-tool’s worth of additional capabilities and gear, not one of them ever uses their cybernetic enhancements to lethal effect. Instead they do it the old-school zombie way; slow, steady movement followed by hand-to-hand grappling. Things would be a whole lot easier if only they could assimilate advanced crowd-disabling technology like tear gas (c. 1915) or flashbangs (c. 1960).
Magically increasing AU distance. (STIV) The Earth is only eight light-minutes from the Sun. Yet when having to slingshot themselves said star and already travelling at the speed of light multiplied by a factor of seven or eight, the trip takes a whole lot longer than few seconds.
One could go on. That said pretty well all scifi and hell, movies of any genre, have a couple of functional idiocies built into the plot or setting.
Comment by Chris Taylor — August 28, 2009 @ 10:53
It figures . . . I carefully plant a story to attract the aviation geek, but foolishly place an even geekier story ahead of it . . .
And yes, I agree that the Star Wars post was funnier.
Comment by Nicholas — August 28, 2009 @ 16:05