Technobabble please

[SheikhJahbooty]

We've all seen sci-fi movies, shows or read sci-fi books or RPGs where some aspect of the setting seemed patently impossible or so terribly impractical that no right thinking person would do such a thing. In fact it's all but impossible to do a sci-fi setting without such contrivances. There's a rule, probably on the Atomic Rockets website that if a spacecraft is equipped with an engine that does not force the protagonists to waste a good chunk of their lives in transit, such an engine could easily double as a terrible engine of destruction. So non-boring space opera almost needs ridiculous things.

When we write our sci-fi stories, and settings for RPGs it might do us a lot of good to be aware of it.

This thread isn't for weirdness or goofs. It's just for those times when you were reading or watching sci-fi and you wished you could reach in and ask the characters for a bit more explanation.

To get us started. In the middle of season 1 of Farscape, Moya gets pregnant. It is never explained if leviathans normally mate and immediately get pregnant, or if they mate and then can control when and if they get pregnant (like cockroaches - female cockroaches only need mate once and they can get pregnant repeatedly whenever they want). It was just stated that Moya was pregnant, and that it was sacred and beautiful such that any further explanation on how frequently it happens or what other leviathans and leviathan crews do during the process would be somehow insulting to Moya. (But this show had a weird relationship to reproduction. Wasn't it weird how Peacekeeper Wars had so much screen time devoted to the pregnancies of various characters and so little to actual warfare?)

So what were the times this happened to you? - the weird warp drives that you wished the character would just say how fast it goes, or the bizarre life form that nobody ever explains what it eats, or why such and such army can make clones and program them with whatever experiences they want but they never clone kamakazis when a collision seems to inflict vastly more damage than any of their other attacks.

[Kinslayer]

Off the top of my head a couple of other Farscape references spring to mind.

One is an alien who 'twins' people to harvest their brain juice. He shoots them with something that wraps them in a big Prisoner-style ball, and then there are two of that character. It is mentioned that the process isn't perfect, so multiple twinnings degenerate the subjects into a subhuman (subsebacian?) state. I'm fine with all of that. What leaves me scratching my head is where the extra mass comes from, and why/how each twin is fully clothed.

The other Farscape bit of techno-confusion was actually lampshaded in the series. Another strange weapon is involved, and I think both are mounted on the forearms of their respective firers. This one shrinks its victims to a few inches tall. In this case, the question is, where does all of the extra mass go? How do their bodies continue to function when shrunk?

Forcefields in general have always bugged me. They are most frequently referred to as a draining system. That is, each shot by the enemy's guns draws power from the ship. Yet when the effects of a hit are shown--even with the shields holding--panels on the bridge explode, smoke billows out, and sparks fly. This implies that shields work by absorbing power, but are temporarily pushed beyond their ability to absorb and sink it.

[SheikhJahbooty]

Oh yeah. It also twinned their clothes. "Why? Can it twin anything? Why don't ships just come with that thingie so we wouldn't have those annoying episodes when we didn't have food? (More annoying for them than for me since those episodes had the redeaming feature of Virgina Hey stripping for the Tavlek dude.) Does this mean there are no clothing factories or textile shops in Farscape world?"

This also reminds me of The Fly. In the fly the guy goes into a teleporter and a fly comes out that's part human and a human comes out that's part fly. Then they remade it with Jeff Goldblum such that the two life forms were just combined. And I thought, "Isn't his skin crawling with bacteria and other microscopic life forms, dust mites and whatnot? Maybe there's some sort of mass threshold that the fly exceeded so they were combined. Couldn't he have set the mass threshold higher? How much candida does the average person carry around inside himself? Was he also genetically combined with yeast? Oh, I wonder what else was in his digestive track. Did he have to fast to use the teleporter to empty his GI track of potential foreign DNA? You know... he needs e-coli bacteria and candida and what not for his digestive system to work, so he probably programmed their DNA into his teleporter to keep track of them and teleport them back inside him..."

People have stopped writing it lately but I also go into technobabble withdrawal when a clone magically remembers something that happened to the donor that the DNA originally came from.

[Kinslayer]

That's not nearly as amazing as the psychokinetic encoding of personal experiences in that lovely little dual strand of polymers backed by sugars and phosphates that can occur at any distance. That is, clone memories are way funnier if it's something that happened to the original after the genetic sample was taken.

Here's another item: giant space monsters, what do they eat? From the giant serpentine beast in Star Wars to (back to Farscape) the budong, a giant monster whose corpses are mined for crystals, and whose teeth are larger than a leviathan. Not only are these things ridiculously huge, they live in space, and are predators. If you can kill and eat organisms the size of the Great Barrier Reef in two bites, what sort of critter can even get your notice to become food?

[kumakami]

Ok I know it was more Sci-fantasy........ But I always wanted more detail as to ALL the workings of the FTL in "Event Horizon"

I can except it take one through a Hell like Dimension (sp?) but what goes in to all this? how does it cut the Time/space travel?

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

Look for the Novella "" by the Strugatsky Brothers. Not for its technobable - but rather the conspicuous total absence of it. There are things like "Empties", infinite batteries, gravitational anomalies, and the deadly witch's jelly - but none of its explained, the zone just remains an odd world. Very interesting story, and the basis for the game "Stalker: Shadows of Chernobyl".

Element Zero for Mass Effect allowing ships to "hide from the universe" and go ftl is an interesting note. The Normandy's stealth system based on heat sinks (still probably wouldn't be enough) is a nice nod to real life considerations - though the infinite ammo and nano-tech weapon mods are still suspect.

I'm actually a little annoyed with Mass Effect FtL since its very similar to and idea I had around 2001 for "Hyper Foil Gates" that are a center point of my game XenoExodous. HFGs supposedly shift most of a ship to another dimension, just skirting our own, the same way a hydrofoil boat leaves most of the water for higher speeds. What they may or may not really do, who built them, and the psychological effects they have on some people are amongst the big secrets of the setting. More importantly, they have the effect of moderating system access, which dampens the ability to have all-out wars between faction - thus limiting fighting to sabotage and infiltration - things on the scale of potential player characters.

Gundam's Minovisky Particles are actually an interesting example of fairly well thought out "unobtanium" material. Amongst other things, they allow refrigerator sized fusion generators, the creation of beam sabers/rifles, and a hover system for some ships planetary take-off. However the true importance is that they jam long range radar and communications - thus making combat a close range and personal affair, rather than the future of war being all button-presses and beyond visual range interception.

Conservation of momentum means that the humanoid mobile suit robots are more efficient in space than fighter like craft as they can just shift limbs around to turn without thrusters.

[Kinslayer]

There was a television show back when a certain SyFylitic network had a non-silly name, The Invisible Man. The technobabble revolved around injections of an antidote, or 'counteragent', that turned him visible again. I understand the use of the limiting factor from a plot perspective, but he otherwise seemed to have an unlimited supply of the 'quicksilver' that made him invisible. He could pour it from his body over pretty much any object (thus avoiding the nudity issue). But they never explained about the biomass problem, how much or how quickly his body could generate quicksilver through this artificial organ, how it was completely under his mental control, or why he wasn't just put in a factory somewhere constantly turning military vehicles invisible. After all, a tank or helicopter doesn't have to worry about going insane from a lack of counteragent.

[SheikhJahbooty]

Those are really good questions about the invisible dude.

And I too always wondered what that thingie in Star Wars ate when it wasn't trying to bite Millenium Falcons flying from it's mouth.

As far as Gundam goes, good try. It's always hard to justify giant robots. I think they have to stand on how cool they make a setting because when I heard the Gundam technobabble about rotational momentum I thought, "Then they should have even more limbs. Maybe they would become too unwieldy to pilot. But the computer could handle limb position and the pilot just determine where he wants the ship to go..."

Nanotech is one of those words that people sometimes think stands on it's own for technobabble. It's even worse when people theorize smaller tech, like picotech or femtotech. If something is nanotech, explain to me how moving atoms around allows the device to function. A nanotech gun that never needs reloading? Fine, are the bullets made out of frozen nitrogen atoms, because I don't see the gun coming into contact with a whole lot of other types of atoms?

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

I think it was Plato, or possibly Aristotle, who originally analyzed the invisible ring. Specifically as a thought experiment about how would a man behave if he had an object that absolved him of the consequences from his actions. Without societies mores, would they continue to be good, or would they would they do as they please, as no one can pin the crimes on them and besmirch their honor/fight back effectively.

A lot of settings postulate equipment that should be similarly problematic. One example I like from star trek, is there is nothing really stopping someone from using the transporter to lock onto the atomic signature of Uranium with a transporter and essentially vacuuming up pure U-235. Collect some hydrogen (Tritium, or certain types of Lithium that breed it) and you can make a nigh unlimited number of hydrogen bombs, and since there is no known upper limit to the size of an H-bomb - who needs a Genesis Device or Planet Eater?

Aliens and humans share food or eat each other far too often. A chocolate-macadamia nut cookie is a treat for a human, but potentially lethal to a dog (Both the nuts and the chocolate can damage the liver or kidneys). This sort of bio-chemical incompatibility should show up a lot more often.

Also Shape Shifters. I remember reading a discussion about them once which brought up some very interesting points. First of all - what kind of world would encourage that kind of biology? How dangerous does the prey have to be that disguising yourself as a different species is a necessary hunting tactic.

Secondly, consider the kind of energy requirements needed for the mass restructuring/ efficiency of the energy-mass conversion rates. These things would probably be radioactive, need to eat nuclear fuel, and would explode like a tac-nuke if you shot them.

[SheikhJahbooty]

That was amazing. I laughed so hard stuff came out of my eyes nose and mouth. That should go on my wall for me to see and remember for any alien species or fantasy race I make up. "What kind of world would encourage that kind of biology?"

There was nothing about Odo's homeworld that seemed to require his people to separate from the pool they were in, or to ever change their coloration, density, or rigidity. So why can they do it? In their natural environment, how does it benefit them in any way? And we never see any other animals on his planet, so we can't really see if anything else can do that trick. The plants sure seemed normal.

Such a shame that nobody asked the writers these questions. It might have really fleshed out Odo's people, and maybe the Dominion - Federation war might have made sense. I remember that the war was ridiculous, and made absolutely no sense, so I stopped watching the show.

Only too late do we realize the importance of the right technobabble in shows like Deep Space 9 or The Invisible Man.

Off topic: Now that you've explained the Invisible Man thingie, I kind of want to run or play in a game like Zero that really goes into that question.