On 6/25/2012 1:14 AM, Invisible wrote:
> Then we usually have things like cloaking (rather difficult in a cold,
> dark vacuum), tractor beams (how would that work?), teleporters (um...)
> and so forth.
>
Not really. You are not trying to cloak the stuff that isn't there, just 
the stuff that is, which includes light, EM, and possibly your own 
signals. Interestingly, one of the recent Star Wars books did it right, 
in that cloaks, as we can do them, don't just leave the thing inside 
invisible, they render everything inside unable to see out, so there was 
a whole fleet, sitting and waiting, for a scout to finally slip in at 
their coordinates and say, "Ok, time to move", in the mean time, they 
all sat in the, literal, complete dark, looking at a black wall, with no 
idea what was going on outside.

As for tractor beams. The problem is, as mentioned, distance. Gravity 
can't be adjusted, yet, magnetism can, but has a short range, and 
doesn't work on non-metals, so you have some issues making it work. The 
biggest one is compensating for masses. Two ships of equal size would be 
pulled "towards" each other, unless one of them was intentionally 
thrusting away, to compensate. Surprisingly, a lot of Sci-Fi shows, and 
books, get this right. Others, just ignore it. None of them, in general, 
actually violate the rule, they just fail to explain that the "pulling" 
ship is either way larger, so relatively unaffected by mass, already 
traveling in the same direction, so only accelerating a bit in that same 
direction, or, most likely, reducing its speed/thrusting the opposite 
direction, to compensate.

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On 6/25/2012 4:05 AM, Invisible wrote:
> (OTOH, I don't agree with all the comments. E.g., the kid playing
> Manikin Skylark was at least as wooden as the internationally renowned
> actors he co-stared with. I don't see what the big deal about
> midichlorians is; considering all the fatal failings of the film, this
> is the /least/ of my worries. And so on.)

lol The way I figure it is, Midichlorians are sort of like mitochondria. 
No higher life is possible without them, but in the Star Wars universe, 
where spooky action at a distance is apparently very common, these small 
life forms developed a kind of nebulous "hive mind", of sorts, as well. 
Unlike mitochondria, the number that exist in the body vary from person 
to person. The more you have, in principle, the stronger you "hear" this 
hive mind, and, in turn, the more you can nudge it into doing things for 
you.

Some species, interestingly enough, may have very high counts, but 
instead of developing Jedi like abilities, they developed "defenses". 
One book described using the Jedi Mind Trick on one of the races, like 
the blue flying one on Episode I, as like reaching out and finding 
nothing was there. Later books include a species that developed this 
defense, as prey animals (non-sentient), on a world with a lot of 
predators, some of them force sensitive, to an extent that they 
literally "short circuit" force abilities nearby. You try to force leap 
past a tree with one of them in it, and you end up in the swamp, instead 
of on the next patch of dry land, since the "push" you are giving 
yourself literally fails, the moment you come into their sphere of 
influence.

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On 6/25/2012 4:28 AM, Warp wrote:
>> I literally can't find the image I'm looking for, but near the end of
>> Star Wars Episode I, when the "driod control ship" blows up from the
>> inside, the pieces all dramatically sink downwards... despite the planet
>> clearly being BEHIND the ship, not BELOW it.
>
> Perhaps the gravity generator malfunctioned?
>

If it was generating artificial gravity, then only the structural 
integrity of the ship would keep every part of it from being "thrown" in 
the direction of that artificial gravity. So, it wouldn't even need to 
malfunction, just keep working, long enough for the structure to fail, 
and all the parts to "sink" towards where "down" was.

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Patrick Elliott <kag### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> Not really. You are not trying to cloak the stuff that isn't there, just 
> the stuff that is, which includes light, EM, and possibly your own 
> signals. Interestingly, one of the recent Star Wars books did it right, 
> in that cloaks, as we can do them, don't just leave the thing inside 
> invisible, they render everything inside unable to see out, so there was 
> a whole fleet, sitting and waiting, for a scout to finally slip in at 
> their coordinates and say, "Ok, time to move", in the mean time, they 
> all sat in the, literal, complete dark, looking at a black wall, with no 
> idea what was going on outside.

That reminds me of the fridge logic about the Invisible Man story (and all
of its incarnations, such as the movie Hollow Man).

How is the invisible man able to see anything?

We see because our eyes focus light onto our retinas. Now, the invisible
man's eyes neither focus light, nor do their retinas catch any of it. The
light just goes through without modification.

Even if the retinas did catch light (which they don't because they would
by definition become visible if they did), it would still not help him see
anything because his eyes are not focusing the light properly (if they did,
they would also become visible as a distortion, like floating lenses; no
matter how transparent the lenses are, you can still see them due to how
they distort the background.)

Even if invisibility of a human were physically possible, it would make the
person completely blind.

(The only pseudoplausible way out of this conundrum is if the invisibility
were only on the visible light spectrum, but his eyes could still catch eg.
infrared ok. However, that would require a physical modification of the
retinas to be able to see infrared light, which would be a problem all in
itself. Also, I think it would probably also break some law of physics if
his body were to let visible light through unhindered but react to infrared
light normally. This is probably something physically impossible.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On 27/06/2012 10:11 AM, Warp wrote:

> How is the invisible man able to see anything?

> Even if the retinas did catch light (which they don't because they would
> by definition become visible if they did), it would still not help him see
> anything because his eyes are not focusing the light properly (if they did,
> they would also become visible as a distortion.

Many very small sea creatures are nearly completely invisible because 
they are transparent and they match seawater's salinity. Often the only 
really visible part is... the eyes.

> (The only pseudoplausible way out of this conundrum is if the invisibility
> were only on the visible light spectrum, but his eyes could still catch eg.
> infrared ok. However, that would require a physical modification of the
> retinas to be able to see infrared light, which would be a problem all in
> itself.

Well, if we postulate not an invisible "man", but an invisibility suit, 
there's no particular problem with the suit having infrared goggles.

> Also, I think it would probably also break some law of physics if
> his body were to let visible light through unhindered but react to infrared
> light normally. This is probably something physically impossible.)

I don't know. People have built things like antenna arrays with have a 
negative index of refraction at radio wavelengths, but (obviously) 
behave perfectly normally at visible wavelengths. Whether you could make 
something that does not affect radiation /at all/ over one specific band 
is another matter, I'll admit...

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On 6/25/2012 1:14, Invisible wrote:
> tractor beams (how would that work?),

If you can stand on the flat deck in outer space, chances are you can work 
out a tractor beam.
-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Oh no! We're out of code juice!"
   "Don't panic. There's beans and filters
    in the cabinet."

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On 6/25/2012 3:07, Warp wrote:
>> - Why do they fall downwards in screen space if there's a major failure?
>
> Care to give an example?

Any starship enterprise when it loses power and spirals out of orbit.

>> Then we usually have things like cloaking (rather difficult in a cold,
>> dark vacuum)
>
> What do you mean?

How do you get rid of your heat?

> (Besides, vacuum is not cold. It has no temperature because there's nothing
> to have any temperature.)

Not true. If you're at thermal equilibrium, then you're at the same heat as 
the surroundings. If you're orbiting mercury, your thermal equilibrium will 
be much higher than if you're orbiting pluto.

FWIW, I used to think vacuum has no temperature also. :-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Oh no! We're out of code juice!"
   "Don't panic. There's beans and filters
    in the cabinet."

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> In outer space, which is perfectly jet black apart from a few tiny
> points of light, it's going to be a tad difficult to not emit a single
> stray photon of thermal radiation. A space ship is presumably quite hot.
> Certainly a damn site hotter than what little dark matter is floating
> around out there. I'm also unsure whether you can shield the /outside/
> world from radio-frequency signals emanating from /inside/ a structure.
> (These ships have computers, right?)

In _Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country_, the Enterprise tracks a Klingon
ship by its exhaust.

Question is, why can't they do that in /every/ episode that has Klingons or
Romulans?  (Answer: because it would kill off a neat plot device.)
________________________

There are some suspensions of disbelief that are pretty standard for SF movies
with interstellar settings:
  - FTL travel and instantaneous communication across astronomical distances.
  - No G forces.  (_Star Trek: TNG_ addresses this with inertial dampeners.)
  - Nearly all intelligent life forms are humanoid.
  - Artificial gravity.

  - The stars of all habitable planets radiate at 5800 K.  Except Krypton.
  - In interstellar space, there is enough lighting to see the ship's hull.
  - In _Star Trek_, the universal translator.  In other movies, aliens that
    speak English on first contact.

_Star Trek_ has a couple of irritants: planets are backlit with a large finish {
ambient }, and gaseous nebulae are dense enough to hide in.

In _Star Wars IV: A New Hope_, the _Millenium Falcon_ is said to go 0.5 past
light speed.  Not fast enough!

_ST:TNG_ episode "Who Watches the Watchers?" has an inhabited planet orbiting
the star Mintaka.  No can do!  Mintaka is a class O star IRL; in the unlikely
event that a planet can even form around such a star, such stars do not live
long enough for intelligent life to evolve.  (It was still an excellent
episode.)

_ST:TNG_ episode "The Next Phase" has so many scientific plot holes it whacks
you upside the head with a frozen fish.  Could not suspend disbelief.

_ST:TNG_ and _ST: Voyager_ have episodes where individuals evolve or devolve.
Evolution doesn't work that way.

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On 7/1/2012 9:15 PM, Cousin Ricky wrote:
> In _Star Wars IV: A New Hope_, the _Millenium Falcon_ is said to go 0.5 past
> light speed.  Not fast enough!
>
This "assumes" you are talking about the literal speed of light, or a 
colloquialism. Lets say that a "light speed drive", to qualify, would 
cut down a trip of 10 light years to say 10 days. The same trip at .05 
past "light speed" would then be recognized, base on this metric, to the 
average traveler, as only taking 5 days instead. What the *actual* speed 
was, on this basis, isn't relevant, since its no a scientific measure 
being used, but a "common usage, meaning, X amount faster than the 
slower ship that can travel at 'light speeds'".

Yeah, I know. In reality its just one of many things that wasn't either 
bothered with, or which was "intentionally" left Buck Rogersish, so that 
it fit in with the sort of campy space travel of that era's TV shows, 
which tended to get everything wrong, including their predictions of 
what the future would even remotely look like. lol

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> In _Star Wars IV: A New Hope_, the _Millenium Falcon_ is said to go 0.5 past
> light speed.  Not fast enough!
>

That's also the ship that made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs. 
Which simply  means Han (or Lando!) took a short cut since parsecs are 
units of distances, not time.

> _ST:TNG_ and _ST: Voyager_ have episodes where individuals evolve or devolve.
> Evolution doesn't work that way.
>

Bah!  Evolution, mutation... It's all the same to a Hollywood script writer.

(Or Kentucky museum curator, but that's another topic)

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