Hahah dthind Im glad you made my friday right there.

Some very interesting points here.

Honestly they were movies so I can offer little in the way of counter points besides that well...it's a movie. I believe the borg had the advantage of being a collective hive mind and being part machine so although the phaser may kill the first borg, all the rest of them analyzed the data and adjusted their personal cyborg shield.

In Star Wars, I dunno if I was a rebel then I would see the contractors helping to build a world destroyer for the evil empire as part of the problem...so blowing them up makes some sense. Those poor Ewoks may have been smashed all up yes, but you have to consider that a ton of that crap would likely burn up in the atmosphere and plus Ewoks suck.

On the topic of the droids being stolen. All I can think about is GTA 5: starwars style.

Wow...you have too much time. Perhaps I do too for answering.

However, let me explain a few things:

Star Trek

1. Gravity can be generated by a ship rotating while traveling. This will produce "artificial" gravity within a vehicle. However, you'd have to think that 500 years from now they'd be able to generate artificial gravity in some way. Or, to cut-and-paste from another website (http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9606/Bormanis-9606.html): If it is someday shown that gravity is simply one manifestation of a single general force"”it may then be possible to manipulate gravitational forces through the application of electromagnetic forces, which we know how to generate and control precisely. This could give us the capability to control the geometry of space with electromagnetic forces. In the Star Trek universe, we assume that the unification of the forces of nature has been achieved, and the verterium cortenide warp coils are the medium through which electromagnetic forces are used to alter the geometry of space.

Another way is an inertial damping fields...you can look at up on Wiki. But again, it's possible.

2. The ship design is actually somewhat probable. The warp engines would create a field that could be harmful to humans and other electrical equipment. Therefore, they would have to be separated from the rest of the ship. Since air flow isn't a factor and shields have been created, an extended living quarters/control area far away from the engine area could provide a safer and more productive design. As for the elevators, who says that elevators in the future can't travel at an angle? Or they could even use something like this: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5816368.html.

3. Given that Borg are cybernetic, their strength lies in their ability to change and adapt to other "machines". Their collective intelligence allows them to work on the problem as a group and adapt personal shield frequencies like no other species. As for cloaks, many in the Trek universe have them. The Federation is prevented from having them via peace treaties, much like anti-nuclear proliferation treaties today.

Star Wars

1. So the rebels are working on the greater good...your point is? The term is called Collateral Damage, and it's a fact of war. It's estimated that over half a million Iraqi civilians have died as a result of our invasion of Iraq, something you hear little about. So in a universal conflict, why would a few thousand contractors matter?

2. I'm sure the Storm Trooper outfits do offer some protection from explosions and such. However, they're not going to stop a direct hit. And given that the troopers are CLONES, the suits also make it easier to identify the leadership structure since everyone looks alike. So they look a bit stupid - pretty much so does every other special effect from the 70s.

3. Who's to say that those are air intakes? They could be another type of power source - hydrogen, solar, fusion, etc. There's little doubt that the speeder is a bit noisy, which is why it's a lower-class vehicle in the Star Wars universe. Even very poor people today have vehicles...so does Auntie Beru and Uncle Owen.

4. Droids pretty rarely get stolen in Star Wars. The only "real" time droids get stolen is by the Jawa, who are out in the middle of a harsh, lawless land. There's a black market for cars, I-Pods and laptops today...again, why is it shocking the occasional droid gets heisted?

Outrageous equipment and crazy ship designs don't bother me at all. Magic doesn't bother me, either. What bothers me is when someone fails to establish the rules, fictional as they be, to which the said trinkets comply. Or they establish/imply the rules, and then violate them whenever it becomes convenient.

The moment that happens, I lose a lot of interest because I realize I am dealing with something that took no effort to make, and where further speculation about the character's predicament is fruitless, because as they're trapped in an ever-compressing garbage compactor, at the last moment they will concentrate really hard and realize that they had a superpower that allows them to disable garbage compactors.

Outside of hard science fiction, I don't mind if the science doesn't make sense in science fiction. All those fake technologies and tools, the time travel, alien species and all the other stuff we associate with the genre are just metaphors or part of story mechanics for me.

I can suspend belief a good deal with sci-fi, but one thing that bothered me was when the death star used its super laser to destroy Alderaan. I found this http://www.theforce.net/swtc/ds/ when I looked it up. Basically they say that to destroy a planet so quickly, they have to use some technology with an energy density greater than matter-antimatter.

This is why no one likes nerds.

One of my favorite movies is Galaxy Quest

So am I to take it that some of you are saying that there is an explanation and 1) I'm too stupid to get it, 2) It doesnt fit in the studios 87 minute Director Hated cut, 3) Isnt relevant to the story or 4) That the images I am seeing are not in fact part of some distant civilization's plan to better acclimate us to their way of life so the beam us their "Historical Documents" prior to the invasion

Is that it ?

Back to the Future

Why use a DeLorean, why not like a toyota truck instead. All you need to do is get to 88 mph. The DeLorean would have low suspension, likely wouldnt handle the roads well from any time prior to 1980 and you cant fit more than two people without a problem. Get a Toyota Truck, put all the gear in the back and perhaps a couple of gallons of extra gas for gawds sake. I dont accept the DeLorean as a valid option it was probably a first year model and you know how first year models are with time travel.

Alien 3

I love the first Alien movie after that, They went south quickly. One question, the strange wire thingy coming out of Wynona Ryders arm was that Firewire, USB 1.0 or a micro serial connection ? Everything else in the movie made perfect sense...

He also needed the stainless steel frame of the Delorean for the flux capacitor to work properly, if I recall correctly. It's been a while.

As people have pointed out, there are actual explainations for all the of the above in the canonical materials for all these series. I was starting to type them out when my geek-o-meter pegged into the red so I quit. I do want to say Aunt Beru is not keeping a bard in the wardrobe - there's a garage entrance on the other side of the droid maintenance facility. The whole place is laid out in the Tatooine sourcebook for the Star Wars RPG.

What I find funny is going on about landspeeders and not mentioning the Force flu.

Others have said it, but I'll repeat: those really aren't science fiction, they're futuristic fantasy. The rules, such as they are, don't relate to physics as we know it, and frequently contradict themselves. There's really no difference between Star Wars and Lord of the Rings; they're both magic. When Wesley can change the deflector dish, at will, into something that nobody has ever seen before but which solves the present problem exactly, that's just spellcasting in disguise.

It's nearly impossible to find real SF on TV. Babylon 5 was fairly close. Galactica seemed pretty close before I gave up on it. Firefly was probably the hardest of all the SF shows that have been on TV.

Nearly all the rest are just spellcasting in space.

What, nobody's quoted Clark's Third Law yet?

It's simple, all sci-fi high tech equipment is powered by plotonium and most are built from various forms of the infinitely versatile substance unobtainium. The actual scientific theories being employed can all be easily explained by what my Physics professors used to call "hand waving," which involves rapidly covering the nearest display space with an incomprehensible gibberish of equations, graphs, and/or data, waving your hand toward them, and saying "as you can clearly see here..."

My favorite corollary is "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Therefore any sufficiently advanced technology is also indistinguishable from a convenient plot device."

And Star Wars wasn't so much written as it was congealed, so that explains all your Star Wars questions.

It's probably been said before in this thread, but a major point about Star Trek was that it went to great lengths to not have to explain that stuff, and instead focus on the story. If you're focusing on trying to figure out the gravity, you're either ignoring the story on purpose or the story is so bad it doesn't matter (which is not the case in most episodes past TOS).

Some of the best science fiction is done as character studies, and in that aspect spending pages or minutes describing mundane technical details only gets in the way. To paraphrase a Star Trek writer and the new BSG showrunner, Ronald D. Moore, having to explain technical details were an indication of story failure.

Toyota's are made out of plastic. One of the unique things about the DeLorean was it's stainless steel construction. I'm sure Doc Brown mentions this at some point EDIT: Ahh, momgamer beat me to it.

I just have to chime in that I agree with what everyone here's saying about it not being realistic because it isn't real or relevent. That said I'm surprised you didn't mention aliens in science fiction. Unless a series is going the Asimov route (Firefly did this, bless their soul) and sticking with only Humans the idea that aliens all look just like humans with some makeup on is absurd. That's probably my biggest gripe, though it certainly hasn't stopped me from enjoying those sci-fi shows with humanoid aliens (i.e. all of them).

Well, whether we like it or not, TV shows have budgets -- simulating null-G is fantastically expensive. When a movie can spend a hundred million for two hours of video, they can do it right. (and even then, they mostly don't.) TV shows are rather more limited.

Postulating a gravity generator isn't entirely ridiculous, and it lets them put their limited budgets where it's important, instead of trying to (poorly) simulate an environment that probably wouldn't contribute all that much to the story.

In general, most good SF makes a few handwavy assumptions; the fewer it makes, the 'harder' it is. Faster-than-light drives are pretty much required for stories about societies that cover more than one star system, and gravity generators are needed to keep the costs of production down. Those two devices will essentially always be present in space-based TV SF.

One thought that comes to mind; it's likely that gravity generators are going to require huge amounts of power generation capability, and then more gigantic amounts to transit between systems; the energy required to jump to even a nearby star would probably be enough to run the state of California for a year or so. Tech is an outgrowth of power generation, and vice versa. If there are cheap semi-portable devices that can spit out that kind of juice, allowing the constantly-broke Firefly crew to travel between systems, you just wouldn't see 'frontier' towns at all. Even the most desolate of frontier worlds would easily be able to build to a 20th-century level of comfort very quickly.