4 ms·
"specialized craft able to withstand the gravity field" I've been noticing an uptick in this in the past few years, where a "gravity field" is treated as just
by jerf 3y ago
"specialized craft able to withstand the gravity field"
I've been noticing an uptick in this in the past few years, where a "gravity field" is treated as just another scifi technobabble word that the authors don't understand at all. Which is weird, because gravity is a plain English word, not particularly hoity-toity or "fancy", so it is really becoming another touchstone to me of bad writing.
"Oh no! We're experiencing high amounts of gravitometric interference!"
You mean you're currently pinned to the floor because you now weigh thousands of pounds and you're struggling to draw breath, if not simply turned to jelly by all the forces?
"No, I mean our screens are flickering on and off and there's some flashy sparks shooting out of the walls! We're totally fine, though. It's just our mission at stake!"
My dear sir, are you sure you don't perhaps have electromagnetic interference there? Can I interest you in perhaps some technobabble word with no real world referent, like "high degree of subspace inelasticity" or "the ansible field is experiencing a random stellar burst" or "the baryons are inebriated again"?
"Oh no! It's definitely a gravity field! Says so right here in the script."
Well, then, scrape your fellow adventure's jellified remains off of the floor and carry on, I guess.
- vundercind 3y agoI just assume they've discovered some things we don't know yet. I mean, they usually have gravity-creating and gravity-neutralizing devices, so they must have learned some stuff about it that we don't know. Maybe we haven't even figured out how to "see" the sort of field they're talking about. How would it, perhaps, interact with equipment that may include gravity-manipulating components for all sorts of purposes? > electromagnetic interference "Electromagnetic? LOL. You mean you're being struck by lightning? Or some little bits of rock are doing kinda funny things? Because that's what electricity and magnetism are, and only those things, and they're separate."
- noman-land 3y agoMy friend, if you've studied the literature you'd know that gravimetric interference affects the structural integrity of the ship's hull by warping spacetime and thereby applying sheering forces that can only be sufficiently mitigated by activating external shielding. If you encounter a Class Y phenomenon without being fully prepared, it could definitely cause enough lateral sheering force to damage equipment and even cause coupling relays to come out of alignment and emit sparks.
- salad-tycoon 3y agoIf you haven’t read it, you may enjoy Red Shirts a book about the lives of extras from sci fi shows. https://www.amazon.com/Redshirts-John-Scalzi-audiobook/dp/B0088U1CCO/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=14KZ96AI1ITED&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.-VjYMQZv6Iey5P5PiXN3AXcJ-qLWzP-OCOhsFOxpS3fB0mN1b9ruGzlwu2YgteIioxdFQylYfaUeVG--FI1M5nGbm7K4Tzu3lC2EvVEZbDFWh4REoKlTCn1LICQnYUGkZfh5zO6TUmPnSGZ_M0zdCEL7JlJM-j6eq5MyJF9WINU.O0Pg47inmecC7tb-Zi-66op1lSj9b6USCJE_Qp-DXAE&dib_tag=se&keywords=red+shirt+book+scalzi&qid=1710070029&sprefix=red+shirt+book%2Caps%2C219&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Redshirts-John-Scalzi-audiobook/dp/B0...
- noman-land 3y agoThe audio book is narrated by Wil Wheaton!
- noman-land 3y agoThanks for the recommendation. I will check it out.
- klyrs 3y agoWait until they discover quantum gravity!
- Stratoscope 3y agoA transformative hermeneutic approach would transgress the boundaries!
- smcin 3y agoSailing on the SS Sokal...
- idiotsecant 3y agoWhat you're describing is someone who is unable to prevent change in the gravity 'field'. It seems ridiculous because we are unable to do so, but imagine a hypothetical case where we had not figured out how electric fields propagate or are attenuated and then imagine a equally hypothetical jerf scoffing at the wildly implausible idea of not being saturated by radio waves in an energetic field.
- cheela 3y agoFor a realistic scifi usage of gravity as dramatic plot device, see Starquake by Robert L. Forward[0] https://mdpub.github.io/cheela https://mdpub.github.io/cheela
- jerf 3y agoThat's one of the better "username checks out" that I've seen. That is certainly an author who knew what was what with gravity fields.
- 082349872349872 3y agoA few days ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39583437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39583437 ) I ran across technobabble from ~2'400 years ago. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0168%3Abook%3D8%3Asection%3D546b http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... et.seq. > Now for divine begettings there is a period comprehended by a perfect number, and for mortal by the first in which augmentations dominating and dominated when they have attained to three distances and four limits of the assimilating and the dissimilating, the waxing and the waning, render all things conversable and commensurable with one another, whereof a basal four-thirds wedded to the pempad yields two harmonies at the third augmentation, the one the product of equal factors taken one hundred times, the other of equal length one way but oblong,—one dimension of a hundred numbers determined by the rational diameters of the pempad lacking one in each case, or of the irrational lacking two; the other dimension of a hundred cubes of the triad. And this entire geometrical number is determinative of this thing, of better and inferior births. It's generated a lot of commentary over the years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_number but Plato's Socrates even explicitly lampshaded the technobabble a few paras beforehand: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0168%3Abook%3D8%3Asection%3D545e http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... > ...say that these goddesses playing with us and teasing us as if we were children address us in lofty, mock-serious tragic style? So I doubt it had ever been intended to denote: merely to connote.