Makeshift Python wrote: ↑Sat Dec 22, 2018 6:28 pm
I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a distractingly bad fake beard like that anywhere else. You’d think the producers would have had the sense to NOT use it. Wouldn’t have helped the guest actor, it would have just had us even more focused on his disjointed performance.
I doubt anyone envisioned 4K resolution back in the 60s. The horrible beard probably wasn't that big a deal on a 60's era tube television.
The beard wasn't as bad, no. Watching this in the 29th century with as much as 480p resolution was more forgiving to many things in regards to makeup and effects.
Did you mean the 20th century or have I missed a joke?
Thanks, it's a typo - I'll go fix it. If it had been a joke I probably would have gone for 29th and a half century
BridgeConsoleMasher wrote: ↑Mon Dec 24, 2018 3:34 am
Not sure if you're overshooting this a bit.
He was just saying that as far as science fiction constructs, it's particularly not hard sci-fi if you take generic things and render them some conduit to satisfy the speculative fiction. Like, warp drive in Trek works off of established relativity theories, but hyperspace travel doesn't really.
I may be reading stuff into Chuck's claim but I am pretty clear that he is not saying stuff like the spore drive is in any sense scientifically accurate.
This is a tangent, but as I have found the terms like subspace and hyperspace elaborated (in terms of say in the writings of Larry Niven or other big name science fiction writers), they actual seem to mean the same sort of thing. Literally sub and hyper space should be opposites, since sub=below and hyper=above. Different writers use one term or the other to mean spaces where the speed of light is far higher than in our normal space. So if you jump to hyperspace, you go to a place where the speed of light is much faster travel at near that speed and then return to normal space having traveled a vast distance. Conversely my sense is that you send a subspace message you send it through a space where the speed of light is again far faster than in our space, so your message traveling at the speed of light in that space is now traveling vastly faster than light in our space and so can quickly be picked up by someone with a subspace receiver at the other end (also apparently warp has something to do with subspace in Star Trek technobabble).
So Star Trek does not use hyperspace for travel, but does use subspace for communication (and travel?). So I am not sure one is more or less scientifically accurate then the other. It will depend on who Roddenberry et al. was listening to while making up the show bible that day...
Yours Truly,
Allan Olley
"It is with philosophy as with religion : men marvel at the absurdity of other people's tenets, while exactly parallel absurdities remain in their own." John Stuart Mill
AllanO wrote: ↑Tue Dec 25, 2018 3:45 am
I may be reading stuff into Chuck's claim but I am pretty clear that he is not saying stuff like the spore drive is in any sense scientifically accurate.
Yes we agree on this, I just thought his point was very concise about hard sci-fi actually meeting the speculated fiction halfway with established theories and specific equipment to suit the speculated achievement. Using just any generic thing is just pretty lazy. This is what you were getting at in your post, just seemed really elaborated.
AllanO wrote: ↑Tue Dec 25, 2018 3:45 am
This is a tangent, but as I have found the terms like subspace and hyperspace elaborated (in terms of say in the writings of Larry Niven or other big name science fiction writers), they actual seem to mean the same sort of thing. Literally sub and hyper space should be opposites, since sub=below and hyper=above. Different writers use one term or the other to mean spaces where the speed of light is far higher than in our normal space. So if you jump to hyperspace, you go to a place where the speed of light is much faster travel at near that speed and then return to normal space having traveled a vast distance. Conversely my sense is that you send a subspace message you send it through a space where the speed of light is again far faster than in our space, so your message traveling at the speed of light in that space is now traveling vastly faster than light in our space and so can quickly be picked up by someone with a subspace receiver at the other end (also apparently warp has something to do with subspace in Star Trek technobabble).
So Star Trek does not use hyperspace for travel, but does use subspace for communication (and travel?). So I am not sure one is more or less scientifically accurate then the other. It will depend on who Roddenberry et al. was listening to while making up the show bible that day...
Apparently warp drive extends the area around the ship into subspace while the pocket of real space that the ship is in carries to the ship at faster than light.
The spore drive is magic. This parallel universe thing is like something out of a comic book. Which do you think is worse? The spore drive is bad storytelling. The matter/antimatter universe structure in the Star Trek multiverse is good storytelling. I think that kind of cosmic world-building more than outweighs the idiot ball some characters hold and the conflict ball it creates. I wish they'd returned to it in TNG.
"A culture's teachings - and more importantly, the nature of its people - achieve definition in conflict. They find themselves, or find themselves lacking."
— Kreia, Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords
"A culture's teachings - and more importantly, the nature of its people - achieve definition in conflict. They find themselves, or find themselves lacking."
— Kreia, Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords
I can see why some people have more of a problem with The Alternative Factor's two-particles-destroy-the-cosmos stupidity than STD's mycellium-network-destroys-the-cosmos stupidity. We know that real antiparticles don't do that, and we don't know how real cosmos-wide mycellium networks work. Like the difference between getting behind the wheel of a '92 Mustang and pulling back on the steering wheel to fly vs. flying around in a boat that can fly because it's a Sith sea-skimmer
Darth Wedgius wrote: ↑Tue Dec 25, 2018 9:14 pm
I can see why some people have more of a problem with The Alternative Factor's two-particles-destroy-the-cosmos stupidity than STD's mycellium-network-destroys-the-cosmos stupidity. We know that real antiparticles don't do that, and we don't know how real cosmos-wide mycellium networks work. Like the difference between getting behind the wheel of a '92 Mustang and pulling back on the steering wheel to fly vs. flying around in a boat that can fly because it's a Sith sea-skimmer
No, I think the real reason why people have more of a problem with The Alternative Factor is that it is a one-off villain-of-the-week episode. At least the mycelium network is a big, multi-episode plot, and it is something that is central to the show. The idea that someone at the rear-end of nowhere can destroy the universe sort of makes everything pointless.
I think that The Alternative Factor would have been a much better episode if the effects of Lazarus's plot were a lot more localized, e.g. he threatened to destroy the Enterprise.
"You say I'm a dreamer/we're two of a kind/looking for some perfect world/we know we'll never find" - Thompson Twins
Or the planet really was Insane Lazarus' homeworld, and its population really was wiped out, accidentally, by Sane Lazarus' experiment, and Insane Lazarus is trying to kill Sane Lazarus' people in the otherverse as revenge.
