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.