How about space battles that seem to take place on a 2D plane? "Admiral, we have enemy ships in sector 47!" "It's a trap!" OK, so Death Star in front, Star Destroyers behind... what about all the other directions you could escape in a 360 degree sphere?
Isn't this how Spock helped beat Khan? He noticed Khan had more 2D tendencies, perhaps being from the 20th century, I think.
OT but similarly in writing police fiction I often skip the tedious writing out of the caution by the protag telling his minion "say the words to this asshole" Also in my day job i found myself telling a group the other day "its critical that its 10 seconds max from splashy splashy to blowy blowy thumpy thumpy, zappy zappy" (that is ten seconds to get a drowning victim out of the water and into a place where you can do CPR and deploy a defibrillator... but they'll remember my way a lot more readily)
Apologies if someone has already complained about this, but I'm tired of seeing smooth lines and shades of grey or muted colors in the future. I most recently noticed this in the trailer of the new Dune movie. It's like set and costume designers in these scifi movies think the aesthetic ideal of the future will be to make everything look like an iPhone or something.
Someone did complain about that already, you, a few pages back I believe. But I am wholly with you, so complaining about it again is entirely appropriate and okay in my book. What we need is a new renaissance.
Yeah I should have known I was repeating myself. I’m pretty monotonous like that. But with more pointy edges and bright colors.
I think it's hot, but you won't have to wait long for everything flips the other way. It's a reflection of the aesthetic of our time. It would be very hard to break from that.
You know what I don't like? Shiny stuff. Curves. Smooth lines. Walls that are a sterile white. That iPad look. A total lack of straight lines. Glowing see-through screens all the time, with holographic interfaces. Give me the rusted out hulk look, with the whine of hydraulics and servos. Give me banged up guns that aren't piddy little phasers, but giant blaster cannons built for warfare, not for the security teams of science exploration ships. Give me rusted gun metal grey, bulky and angular, built not for sleekness and high performance but for ease of repair and reliability.
Earth gravity, on every planet, on the deck of every space ship, with no one bothering to explain it.
Single biosphere planets for different societies to live on. Desert planet. Ocean planet. Forest planet. City planet.
This makes me wonder what the human range of tolerance for gravity is. Like, what percent +/- would the average person not really notice? Be able to go about their daily business without serious inconvenience? Where does the danger zone start (for healthy adult humans)? Ima call NASA, brb. ETA Niven's Known Space makes much of microevolutions between residents of low- and high-gravity worlds.
We could group that with cultural generalisations of the inhabitants, as a form of Planet of Hats trope. Definitely annoying when gimmicks become too predominant in how we understand a planet. Although to be fair the less we see of the planet, the harder it is to show nuance and variation so I can understand how some end up coming across as gimmick. Not that is justifies the way things like Star Wars lean into it so much. But it does mean we should have some patience.
How about the entire premise of empires, etc. on galaxy-wide scales. The ability to control, defend, or even care about the multitudes of stars and planets on those scales.
I mean it's possible with sufficient delegation. No one person or small group of elites can ever control much without some delegation, and the bigger the territory the more delegation would be involved. Like in, to begrudgingly use this as a positive example, the Empire in Star Wars. They clearly a complex system of regional governors, extensive military and intelligence agencies and varies allies and proxies. So you get at least some sense of how they managing to govern many planets. It's not done the most well, and the premise is kind of ambitious, but you can get the idea of how it works. Ironically, by this principle, the key to holding wider overall power is to sacrifice more specific power. The more territory the chief authorities want, the less they can individually exercise their own will. Which would inevitably mean they become sort of accountable in s0 far as their power structure is complex enough to necessitate more cooperation and a degree of independence at the local level. The mid to lower-upper levels would become sort of stakeholders that the top executives need to keep satisfied for the infrastructure to hold together. It's not necessarily the most likely premise but it is do-able. Although therein it would feel less like a tyrannical empire ruled by any kind of dictator and more like a diverse confederation of allied local powers. I have a multi-planetary empire of sorts that also operates across parallel dimensions and as well as being a semi-satirical and fantastical kind of story, it is important that they are a semi-democratic alliance with a large senate body of local powers (many of them pre-existing local leaders) and the central bureaucratic infrastructure that runs things only involves itself in issues of a certain level. The politics and logistics of that are also relevant to the story.
Yeah, I'm with you on that one. All those 18th-19th century empires on Earth that had to business by boat went tits up as soon as the locals stopped cooperating. Nevermind starships and interstellar distances. It's one thing if you create new societies on new planets where no civilization existed before, but that's not really an empire. That's a further expanion of a preexisting society in a vacuum nobody cares about. But to take over a planet a zillion miles away that has been chugging along for centuries? Fuck you, we're going to do our own thing, send a ship if you want, and we'll see you in a year or three.
@Homer Potvin It gets particularly bad when the heroes have to go through enemy space. They'll end up out in the middle of space, not even a solar system around, and there the enemy are with their spaceships in formation like battleships on an ocean, and the heroes are stopped trying to figure out how to get past them. Like there aren't, for practical purposes, endless reaches of empty space in every direction. For once I'd like to see something like: Captain: We've located the Thing We Need To Win. It's on the far side of the quadrant. Plot a course. Lt: But that will take us through G'rool space! Cpt: On the display. This is the G'rool fleet. What's this big area here, all around them? Lt: That's just empty space, Captain. Cpt: Plot a course that takes us 100 light years in this direction. We'll just go around them. And then the heroes arrive at the destination and the G'rool fleet are still sitting in formation trillions of miles away, like assholes.
To be vaguely fair, while sometimes it is too much to justify, you could argue the reason it occurs is because the other ships will fire upon them or chase them down. So in closer quarters, when they don't have the option of going 100 light years away, it potentially makes sense.
In terms of what we dislike seeing, I am a little sick of the "android civil rights parable" plot being used. It's an obvious problems that intelligent artificial beings could be exploited, as so many natural-born people have. But it's been done as a major theme, often one of the THE main themes, in so many things. At a certain point we don't need another Blade Runner, write something else please.
Any kind of apparent inconsistency. The USS Enterprise is the most advanced ship in the galaxy, presumably with computer-automated everything, but it takes two guys on the bridge pushing buttons and fiddling with touch screens to sail her.
A lot of times they're not in close quarters, though. The heroes know where the bad guys are because they have long range sensors, but they still act like to get from point A to C they have to go through B, where the enemy is sitting. It's all scripted like ships on an ocean instead of like spaceships in space.
If you have faster ships you can avoid enemy ships. Sometimes, you don't. Or, an enemy fleet might be in orbit over your destination planet. Or, destruction of an enemy fleet might be the mission.
Of course. None of those fact scenarios are relevant to what I'm talking about. I didn't say there couldn't be valid situations in which you have to deal with an enemy fleet. However, when the confrontation is forced because space is being treated as two-dimensional, it's ridiculous.
