Name your biggest SF pet peeve, please?

[Riedquat]

I mean the orbiting star ship has stun settings?! o.O

Well... is there any reason why it wouldn't?

Captain Crimson said it. Having a stun setting overhead means so many ground battles are ended by who has orbital superiority.

I suppose you could try to handwave it away with the distance, allowing for atmospheric effects etc. making it very hard to tune it to the right point between doing nothing and vapourising everyone.

[Captain Crimson]

No sense of scale sure is a big one.

I'll pick: no sense of space physics. Not only having space wars be World War Two battles, but also everything else.

Amen to that one. Sometimes I can live with it (doesn't stop me loving Star Wars) but often things like that are accepted as "rule of cool", which leaves me banging my head in annoyance. "Caught in the gravity" usually demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of what gravity is, although I suppose you could be suborbital then have your engines knackered (in which case just say so!)

Should make all space science fiction directors, writers, and producers play Kerbal Space Program (and even that's scaled down to save time).

I have had debates among friends, and sadly a few turned toxic, but when they did not, this is when I coined the idea of "the Federation at full power." I see them as akin to Superman. Superman also likewise does not ever make use of the full range of abilities he's displayed over the years. Ditto the UFP. If they were to ever fight at full power, I'd contend they could beat the Asgard, the Culture, the Empire, the Vorlons and Shadows even possibly, and perhaps far more.

[Zargon]

Being WWII is quick and easily accessible for the larger audience of casuals. For the more initiated, however, that dissolves away, I think. Like how SG-1 is typically grounded in real science, yet it gets to be a bit mildly exasperating when, say, you see traditional explosions in space. Or something else like that.

WW2 is quick and easily accessible for the larger audience of casuals?! Maybe that was true once...like over 40 years ago...but it has not been true for a while. Sit down an watch a Pearl Harbor or Midway movie with a ''casual" younger person: and they won't get it at all. They sit there perplexed watching a Midway movie where the bombers are flying directly down towards the aircraft carrier (like that god awful bomber attack in The Last Jedi...).

Maybe if we just got everyone to play Asteroids? That did a good job with ''space ship physics". Fire your ship thrusters and the ship would zip along...but you could then turn the ship any way you wanted...and it would just keep going in the same thrusted direction.

[PapaPalpatine]

Hovering platforms hundreds of feet in the air...that have no safety railing whatsoever. Someone's going to fall off and go splat.

[TGLS]

I have had debates among friends, and sadly a few turned toxic, but when they did not, this is when I coined the idea of "the Federation at full power." I see them as akin to Superman. Superman also likewise does not ever make use of the full range of abilities he's displayed over the years. Ditto the UFP. If they were to ever fight at full power, I'd contend they could beat the Asgard, the Culture, the Empire, the Vorlons and Shadows even possibly, and perhaps far more.

The only problem I see with that is that it kind of reframes the post-359 response, the Dominion War, and to some extent, the Romulan Refugee crisis, in a harsher light. Unless you mean to say everyone could be acting really powerfully (which I doubt), the Feds not just demolishing the Dominion, or building ships that one-shot cubes after Wolf 357 makes them look kind of incompetent. Unless you mean to say this happens after some kind of Manhattan project to apply all the one time technobabble and that makes them ridiculously powerful.

[Captain Crimson]

I have had debates among friends, and sadly a few turned toxic, but when they did not, this is when I coined the idea of "the Federation at full power." I see them as akin to Superman. Superman also likewise does not ever make use of the full range of abilities he's displayed over the years. Ditto the UFP. If they were to ever fight at full power, I'd contend they could beat the Asgard, the Culture, the Empire, the Vorlons and Shadows even possibly, and perhaps far more.

The only problem I see with that is that it kind of reframes the post-359 response, the Dominion War, and to some extent, the Romulan Refugee crisis, in a harsher light. Unless you mean to say everyone could be acting really powerfully (which I doubt), the Feds not just demolishing the Dominion, or building ships that one-shot cubes after Wolf 357 makes them look kind of incompetent. Unless you mean to say this happens after some kind of Manhattan project to apply all the one time technobabble and that makes them ridiculously powerful.

My ultimate point was alongside what Mr. Chuck terms as "planet of the week" tech, the UFP have also demonstrated abilities in the past that are never to be used later on, even once. The Dominion War would be far different if they used what I termed "the Federation at full power." They would be using time travel to reverse their defeats, as Mr. Chuck observed. They could potentially send agents back in time to grab shield frequencies for enemy ships, and take 'em down en masse. But something like The Siege of AR-558 would also not happen since you have wide-beam stun settings. They are part of the verse history, but it's a way the UFP gets nerfed, like Superman, from ever using all the abilities or tech they have ever shown. It's a necessity or you get no drama.

[Aezetyr]

Something that has bugged me a bit about space battles, and this has gotten better in recent times, but a lot of the battles are done on the same plane. Ships facing each other, having to be directly in line with each other. When I saw the Enterprise drop down on the Z axis, and come up behind the Reliant in Wrath of Khan, that seemed like a revelation (then again I wasn't really grown up...). Even in the later Star Wars movies, things seemed to be just lining up on the same axis/plane for many shots. Like I said, it has gotten better, but I think we still have the limitations of practical effects vs CG effects.

[Riedquat]

Something that has bugged me a bit about space battles, and this has gotten better in recent times, but a lot of the battles are done on the same plane. Ships facing each other, having to be directly in line with each other. When I saw the Enterprise drop down on the Z axis, and come up behind the Reliant in Wrath of Khan, that seemed like a revelation (then again I wasn't really grown up...). Even in the later Star Wars movies, things seemed to be just lining up on the same axis/plane for many shots. Like I said, it has gotten better, but I think we still have the limitations of practical effects vs CG effects.

Definitely agree with this one. Funnily enough The Empire Strikes Back seemed to realise that in one scene (the Falcon escaping Hoth) where it dodges downwards between two Star Destroyers, and the angle is still shot with the Falcon level looking back downwards to the ISDs, no suggestion that the direciton is any more unique than any other, and it doesn't call out to it ( https://youtu.be/P1EDigGPVWk?t=19 )

[Captain Crimson]

Something that has bugged me a bit about space battles, and this has gotten better in recent times, but a lot of the battles are done on the same plane. Ships facing each other, having to be directly in line with each other. When I saw the Enterprise drop down on the Z axis, and come up behind the Reliant in Wrath of Khan, that seemed like a revelation (then again I wasn't really grown up...). Even in the later Star Wars movies, things seemed to be just lining up on the same axis/plane for many shots. Like I said, it has gotten better, but I think we still have the limitations of practical effects vs CG effects.

Definitely agree with this one. Funnily enough The Empire Strikes Back seemed to realise that in one scene (the Falcon escaping Hoth) where it dodges downwards between two Star Destroyers, and the angle is still shot with the Falcon level looking back downwards to the ISDs, no suggestion that the direciton is any more unique than any other, and it doesn't call out to it ( https://youtu.be/P1EDigGPVWk?t=19 )

B5 did the same thing when they were fighting the Shadows with the other alien ships. They dive into all other various directions, one sneaks up to hit a Shadow crab, and three more swing down from above, and you get the idea. It treats space as 3-D, which it is, and I can't help but feel it's superior to something of the same era, like, say, DS9, which had Cardies, UFP, and Dommies mostly playing the trope of 2-D space straight. No matter which angle you shot it from. And as a further illustration to the point, B5 had all CGI in this instance.

[Zargon]

Something that has bugged me a bit about space battles, and this has gotten better in recent times, but a lot of the battles are done on the same plane.

This falls under space physics. More "Space is only like WW2". Babylon 5 is just about the only one to do it even close.