Biggest Sci-fi pet peeves?

[Bomber]

Ahhhhh Zipacna. Kudos to them for that even if they had to grab from an Ancient culture for it rather than think it up on their own. hmmm I wonder if there's anything under that skirt... but that's another thread

Indeed it is, and an an increasingly wierd one at that (as you will agree!)

[Arga]

* In sci-fi, about cloning, they always have a way to make the baby clone RAPIDLY grow to reach the adult age of the person who is being cloned.
(notable exception: the teenager O'Neill, who stopped growing

* I hate when they magically enhance a digital very low resolution image, (security camera), after zooming to the person's face, or car plate numbers. We see clearly the big squared pixelized image of the extremely zoomed face, and I don't know how a program can guess the fine details that were not captured...

* Female scientists/ lab assistants are always beautiful in movies. In real life, it's rare to find a pretty female scientist.

* This is not only in science-fiction but also happens. When a car hit an obstacle on the road, it will always jump in the air, instead of just crashing. A jump can only be achieved if there is a sort of ramp to drive you in the air (just like those stunts are done).

* on shows that are taking place in the future, characters are following the fashion (hair, clothes) of the decade where the show was filmed.

* The way they use computers on movies. It's rare they use Windows, even if they are ordinary people. (in Jurassic Park, I had to laugh at the teenage girl saying "oh, it's a UNIX system, I know it! then the pretty pretty graphical interface didn't look anything like a normal unix console..)
Yes, graphical interfaces of computers on sci-fi movies annoy me.
It's funny also how they barely use a mouse.

* Using fast forward & Rewind with an audio tape or a VCR : the user always stops the FF or RW just on time to see the part they want to see. I wish I could do that!



However I don't have any grievance against technobable. I prefer an explanation that takes one word (even if it's a lazy way of explaining) than having no explanations at all and thinking their idea of sci-fi realism is rubbish.



My many other annoyances have been already mentioned:

* Physical laws on Earth do not apply in Space (sound in vacuum) Used to be my biggest one. But then I convinced myself the sound (explosions) was like part of the background music. I mean, the soundtrack isn't supposed to be really there either!

I agree that sound of explosions etc... in space is bad but if I was designing a dog-fighting class spaceship I would probably try to tie the sensors into some kind of positional audio system in the cockpit to allow the pilots to use an additional sense (hearing) to get a better idea of what was going on.
Just my $.02

That's interesting!

....
6. There is no "up" nor "down" in space. So why do spaceships always (and I do mean always) meet on the same plane? Why isn't one ever "upside down" or at angles to the other?

Very true! I would see it though on a spoof movie such as Space Balls.

* selective Out-of-phase matter interaction (the floor is unpenetrable)

* Language issues (no communication problems, unless it's important for the plot).

* Relationships & women in general (the hero-couple always have time to include romance in the most dangerous situations; most of the time, the male & the female hate each other at the beginning, typically because their jobs have opposite interests, but at the end, after fighting side by side a common enemy, they're as good as married; it's also predictable that when comes a mysterious stranger doing extraordinary things (good or bad) and surprise everywhere, and is wearing a helmet, he turns out to be a woman!)

* bad guys & non-heroes friends have so poor skills (especially at shooting & thinking of a plan).

* Alien civilisations compared to human societies. Other planets are never as multi-cultural as Earth. Usually aliens don't have several colour groups, but nowadays, we're seeing more multi racial aliens communities. But it's funny, that if aliens of the same planet have the same colours like on Earth (white, blacks), it's rare to see a green or blue skin ones, mixed with whites or blacks and being considered as the same race.
It's also rare that other planets have many countries (unless necessary for the plot), and that each country has their own language.
I find that sometimes in alien planets, the natives have some customs that is proper to american customs (but not other Earth countries customs).

* Assuming alien know what is specific human knowledge

Also note the fact that Aliens/Earthquakes/asteroids always seem to know what to blow up first. They always go for the recognizable national monuments, obviously they're disgruntled tourists. I don't see why they can't blow up Madison Square Garden instead of Lady Liberty, Paramount Studios, instead of the Hollywood sign, and the Louvre instead of the Eiffel tower.

Hahaha so true.
It's true they must have a traveling agency on their homeworld, and it must advise them to land preferably in the USA. (which is a bad advise because if they would land/crash on any other countries, there wouldn't be any one smart enough to defeat them).


EDIT: just thought of one more peeve:
The fact that human can spend a short time in Space, without a space-suit, and survives. (just by holding their breath).
Space is not like going under freezing water! the pressure difference (damned, it's vacuum out there!), the cold... I don't think anybody can survive even 1 second.
If somewhere know better, please correct me.

[Rail'k]

1 theres no sound in space the 3 best examples of how space should sound is Firefly, 2001, and Battlestar Galatica

2. badly done made for tv movies you should make it good enough for theaters or not do them at all.

3. unfinished story arcs

4.incorect "wordige"

5.Anything with the rock in it

[Arga]

....
4.incorect wordige
5.Anything with the rock in it

I don't understand what you mean by wordige and rock...

help !

[Sam fisher]

EDIT: just thought of one more peeve:
The fact that human can spend a short time in Space, without a space-suit, and survives. (just by holding their breath).
Space is not like going under freezing water! the pressure difference (damned, it's vacuum out there!), the cold... I don't think anybody can survive even 1 second.
If somewhere know better, please correct me.

We had a discussion about this a few weeks ago, from what I remember, you would have at most 10 seconds.

[Rail'k]

I don't understand what you mean by wordige and rock...

help !

Wordige :using incorect terminology for sciantific explinations.

The Rock : former Pro Wrestiler turned Actor

[DetriusXii]

Someone beat me to the lack of diversity in alien cultures. I think it's one reason I enjoyed the Go'uld empire because they had many nations whereas the Ori, Asurans, and Wraith failed in that regard.

2) Capital ships versus capital ships are the only fights we ever see. There's no such thing as a squadron of bombers and any smaller vessel that is sometimes used in other episodes is left in the capital ship hangar than in providing extra fire power against the enemy ship. Likewise, in the case of defensive installations/satellites in orbit, capital ships will charge directly at them and some will get plowed down. It's considered better to spend resources letting some capital ships be blown out of the night sky rather than invest in a long-range seige ship to take out defensive structures.

Edit: I consider the Starcraft world brilliant. Because the game mechanics involved finite resources, it's better to conserve units and create unit specializations rather than sending something out as cannonfodder.

3) With some magical incantations, usually in the form of technical babble, reversing the polarity will solve virtually any problem from escaping enemy tractor beams, black holes, weapons fire, cloaking etc. Capital ships are completely amorphous and main operations of the capital ship change daily.

[full.infinity]

There is. no sound. in space.

Although it would be quit boring without it.

One word against that: Firefly.

[jds1982]

Sometimes the designs of spaceships annoys me. Usually they all look the same with the captains chair in the middle with the controls surrounding said chair and a window in front. Boring.

That's because it's a logical design.

[full.infinity]

I think himan superiority over the Aliens is my biggest bugbear. Startrek has the worst record, where we encounter an entirely new race who have had this problem for thousands of years, and CAPTAIN whatever solves it and tells them all off for being silly. In SG1 the Asgard, very advanced, intelligent, powerful ships, need our help to survive.
We are speciesist!

Anthrocentrism annoys me too.

Actually, the Asgard asking for our help(different people see things in different ways, their explanation actually made sense) doesn't annoy me nearly as much as our connection to the Ancients.

And to the person who mentioned the graphical UNIX system--that was an actual system used on some SGI computers.

[Rail'k]

Sometimes the designs of spaceships annoys me. Usually they all look the same with the captains chair in the middle with the controls surrounding said chair and a window in front. Boring.

lets see the only sips i can think of that are not like that are
1.borg ships
2.replicator ships
3.hive ships
4.most of them from Battlestar galatica
5.the alliance crusers in firefly i think
6.Red Dwarf
7. Mon Calamari Cruisers from Star Wars - the chair can go anywhere
so thease are the only ships that dont annoy you?

[Arga]

¤ Gender issues.
In 99% of alien species, females look female, males look male, from a human perspective.
Sometimes, alien females look even more female than human females...

Except in that Farscape episode i've seen today, where a guy was in fact the female of his species!

¤ Chemical products.
In every chemistry labs, all the liquid solutions will be very colourful, blue liquid, green liquid, pink, red, purple, yellow, orange... and not a single one will be transparent like water.
in real life, nearly all chemicals are colorless.

¤ Heroes intelligence.
(i think it was said earlier but I repeat it because I saw it again today on episode 8.13 It's good to be King). It's valid for any action movie. When there is a problem somewhere, the locals are incapable of solving it, they've tried for years but never found a solution. Here comes the heroes, and just naturally find the answer.... I agree there would be no point writing a story otherwise, if it's well written, it can be ok. But sometimes, it's just crazy that the locals are so dumb not to have found the solution before, when it wasn't that hard to find.
The part I was referring on ep 8.13 is when Teal'c finds the puddle jumper in the woods. Apparently, no locals or Maybourne noticed it...

[Chricton]

1. Aliens. Besides Farscape and Stargate, to an extent, aliens usually make me hate watching scifi.

2. Technobabble. Ugh.

3. Ships with "Bridges" + a big window. Dumbess design for a ship ever. Yeah, put the heart of the ship in front for your enemy to blow away. Real smart.

4. Random firefights where a said ship takes heavy damage, yet in the next episode everything is OK. (I like BSG and Farscape, and again SG to an extent, because whatever damage is taken was pretty season-lasting)

5. Laser energy weapons in general. I have been doing research on lasers for over two years now and I've come to realize that, while they can be dangerous (like that new 300,000mW beast the military is working on), an old fashioned missile gets the job done much better. Lasers also have quite the limited range, their destructive power literally falls exponentially every foot travelled. A missile, in space, can go on indefinitely.

[The Signal]

One word against that: Firefly.

I thought the same thing when I saw that post, though Firefly is one in countless sci-fi's, and the only one that springs to mind that consistantly had silence in space.

[Wraith Scientist]

Overused Science Fiction Cliches

Aliens that look too much like humans, and are all completely uniform in attitude (ie. cowardly aliens, 'good' aliens, 'evil' aliens etc.)

Technology as a plot device ("oh no, there's a problem with the polarity inverter" .... and by the end "that's it, we can cross-calibrate the core interface and thus save the ship!"), where the problem is technology related and the problem is solved by more technobabble.

In fact, technobabble in general.

All spaceships agree on which direction is up, and all fly perpendicular to that direction in a flat plane. Even if they dive or in any way use the third direction they will use it as a temporary maneuver. No ships suddenly attack from the 'up' direction.

The 'humans as wonder of the universe' thing

'Energy weapons' are just neon-retro-bullets. Guns of the future will shoot hot glowy blobs of concentrated plot device that travel slower than regular bullets.

Sillytech 'shields', again made of concentrated plot device, that coat a ship and act somewhat like a recharging bulletproof vest

Starships just sit there getting pounded, even though they have demonstrated the ability to move fast enough to dodge enemy projectiles.

This isn't particularly annoying, but just an observation:
All ships look like fish. They are always elongated in a line, with a definite 'front' and a definite 'back'. The direction of motion is parallel to this line, and the direction of artificial gravity is perpendicular to it.

Teleporters are seriously underused. If I had a teleporter ...
- Getting attacked by a ship, just dissasemble it. Beam their bridge into the nearest sun, beam their entire crew into space etc.
- They're firing at you? Just beam their projectiles round right back at them
- Still firing? Put asteroids, huge lumps of rock etc. in their way
- Beam asteroids and huge lumps of rock at them at high speed
- Beam whatever you want straight into your hand
- The instant your kinetic energy projectiles have hit an enemy ship, you can recycle them just short of the energy ship again, like a scary teleporting yo-yo

Some sci-fi explains teleporters as 'scanning you, converting you into energy and then reassembling you'. Well, if I had one of those ...
- Whatever you can scan you can have. A billion copies of you? A billion copies of your ship?
- Energy problems are a thing of the past. Just convert large lumps of rock that no one's using into raw energy
- Convert every other atom of an enemy ship into energy/antimatter and stand well back, or just beam them straight into your engines
- You can instantly assemble anything you want out of spare matter. Got a few asteroids lying around? Hey presto: billion-ship-strong fleet with exact copies of your best commanders and crew, bristling with weapons and equipment
- Turn an entire planet/sun into energy to make a really big boom
- Live forever by beaming you up upon death and reverting to the copy of you recorded the instant before you died
- Repair yourself and your ship by beaming up the damaged portions and beaming back fresh parts.
- Add new parts to your ship on the fly. Need more guns? Your ship can become a flying pile of gun instantly. Why bother with a ship at all? Just have a teleporter and a computer that converts mass into engines/guns/spare genius commanders etc. as it needs them