Never mind the Star Trek computer, Star Trek engineers are stupid | Hacker News Reader

Never mind the Star Trek computer, Star Trek engineers are stupid

stardestroyer.net

I love how he first dismisses real life reactors that publicly failed before he finds an example of how real engineers work. Was TMI not designed by real professional engineers?

But it gets worse. He uses the safety of a large, stationary object as his example of how well engineers design systems. Why not hold up something that moves as his example instead? Like a helicopter? Oops, helicopters have a nasty tendency towards fatal failure modes. You can have redundant engines, but if you lose a helicopter blade, not much can be done other than provide you with an ejection mechanism.

But what about airplanes? Much better than helicopters. They can lose power and be landed safely. Heck, as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232 documents, one plane was mostly successfully landed with no hydraulics, no control of its flight surfaces, and just 2 operational thruster engines.

But add an interesting constraint, such as desire to make it hard to spot on radar, and the next thing you know you get something like the B-2 stealth bomber. Unstable on all 3 axes, and will fall out of the sky like a rock the second the automatic computer corrections stop going. Do you think that the air force spends $737 million per airplane on something that wasn't designed by engineers? Yet they built something that will literally fall out of the sky if there is a problem with the computer!

While I agree that Star Trek has lots of plot holes that you can drive large trucks through, I don't think that their lack of engineering mindset deserves to be near the top of the list. The warp engines are unstable? Well they need to burn a lot of energy, which means you need an intense energy source. They use matter/antimatter. Doesn't take much going wrong for that to blow, and anything less energy dense won't cut it. Not really a plot hole.

They use force fields everywhere? Well it takes energy, serious energy, to get actual matter up to warp speed. By using force fields preferentially and for structural integrity they save incredibly on weight, and therefore efficiency. Those engineers are to be commended for figuring out how to strip out even more matter, and not criticized for failing to use poorly suited low tech solutions.

A lot of his "problems" just aren't.

Eh, to go blatantly ad hominem, it's StarDestroyer.net. It's a site devoted to arguing that the technology and militaries of one not-remotely-hard SF setting are "better" than the technology and militaries of another not-remotely-hard SF setting.

When I've looked before, there were straight-faced essays on there about the wonders of Imperial stormtrooper armor (augmented reality HUDs, sensors, etc.) that would have ended the Star Wars series about two minutes after the Millenium Falcon got tractor-beamed into the Death Star. There were deadpan articles about the military skills and discipline of those stormtroopers that don't at all fit with their getting slaughtered by Ewoks or a formation of them running in panic from a single charging man in their own base.

The wacky justifications for all the "canon" they contradict with their claims make it clear - this stuff is not meant to be taken any more seriously than the puddi puddi meme. It's meant to amuse people and troll Trek fans.

ETA: I mean, really, do we want to look at the engineering practices in Star Wars? Huge walking tanks you can trip or take out with one grenade, near-absence of railings, etc... It doesn't bear worrying about. :)

Perfect counterexample: Battlestar Galactica (the newer one).

Bullets and nukes for weapons, CDC deep within the hull of the ship, damage control stations throughout the ship, sound-powered emergency telephones that do not require a power source (similar to the ones still in use in the Navy), pressure bulkheads, non-networked computers, emergency jump coordinates coordinated between ships BEFORE emergencies, etc.

To be fair the Galactica is supposed to be a warship, while IIRC the Enterprise is basically a science vessel with a couple self defense capabilities.

This excuse gets a lot less tenable about halfway through DS9, when the Federation is in the middle of a gigantic, potentially genocidal war against a far more powerful opponent. Especially when the Jem'Hadar ships have the exact same flaws (and for that matter, the Klingon ships always did).

The real reason is after Gene Roddenberry left in Season 2 of TNG the writers didn't stay entirely true to his original vision. When DS9 came about they had zero obligation to that vision so they went in a different direction. The writers could have done a better job putting it into context on-screen.

They couldn't exactly rewrite the fictional rules of a universe where bridge consoles explode whenever the ship gets hit and so forth. I don't know how Gene's presence or absence makes much difference; a lot of the dumb engineering ideas (like the exploding consoles) originated in work beyond his control. The first exploding bridge console in Star Trek history was in the Kobayashi Maru sequence in Wrath of Khan, a film that Gene had virtually no creative control over.

Still, even in the original series it's intended that the Enterprise is a capable warship; the original show bible compares it to an imperial warship of the colonial era, and on multiple occasions (the Romulan incursion in "Balance of Terror"; the near-war with the Klingons in "Errand of Mercy") the Enterprise is deployed directly to the front line of potential combat. (The Enterprise-D would fulfill similar roles in episodes like "Best of Both Worlds", "Chain of Command", or even the first season episode "The Neutral Zone".)

Ah, I was not aware of that. Haven't seen DS9.

It's the best series in my estimation (after season 3).

That's just another flaw of the series. They can never really decide if Star Fleet is a science or military organization. So you wind up with wierd things like science vessels on the front lines or shooting wars.

In fact, when the robotic protagonists, the Cylons, infect the Battlestars with viruses, Galactica stays live because the commander did NOT want his ship computerized. Each system lives on its own, and only meatspace in the CDC can control other systems.

This isn't a spoiler as it is discussed in the miniseries and S01ep01. Am watching it now, and on S03ep15, so please, no spoilers.

Does "stick in there; it gets better" count as a spoiler? You're pretty much slogging through the low end of the show right now, when the network desperately wanted one-off episodes and the writers had run out of good one-off episode ideas.

Without system failures and alien possessions, life on the Enterprise would be pretty damn mundane.

I've always thought they should use more drones to do things. I mean, why do they have to drag that huge monstrosity of a ship all over the nebula to chart it?

And those shuttles. How dangerous are those? You just know when they hop on one of those things, a crash is imminent.

And for god's sake, if Scotty can keep himself alive in a transporter buffer for 80 years, why can't they keep backups of the aweigh team!

Sorry, just never got over the loss of Tasha Yar. :-(

Away team, "aweigh" is a term used to indicate that a ship is in transit (as in "anchors aweigh") :)

Standing correctedly by the anchor.

I've seen some valiant attempts at procrastination, but boy--this really takes the cake. Cross-examining engineering dialogue diagnosing fictional technology? Really?

A lot of it's wrong too.

Instead of minimizing excess reactivity, they seem to be doing everything in their power to increase it. Evidence of the high excess reactivity of a warp core can be found every time one of 'em blows up. For example, in "Generations", they knew the reactor was going to blow five minutes before it actually did, and they couldn't do anything but evacuate. In "Disaster", we saw a similar scenario; the reactor was counting down to doomsday throughout the entire second half of the episode. The only way they could stop these catastrophes was to eject the entire warp core or restore the containment field. You would think that they could simply shut off the flow of antimatter into the chamber (or at the very least, redirect it out into space), but it appears that even if they do so, the warp core contains enough unreacted fuel at any time to destroy the entire ship. It's a textbook example of extreme excess reactivity.

This is completely ignorant. Given that there's no such thing as an antimatter reactor, we have no idea how one works. Applying design principles from some trivial mechanical system to a fictional science fiction super-reactor just doesn't make sense.

Exactly what I was going to say. Maybe the warp cores are dangerous because it's simply not possible for them to build one that's completely safe. It's actually reminiscent of the accidents that we've had with nuclear power in the last century - creating a reactor that won't ever go critical is something that's only been possible recently.

Though I do have to admit the holodeck failed far, far too often.

The holodeck is one of the most-abused plot elements in Star Trek. Basically every time budget was short or the production crew felt like using other costumes, they'd just use the holodeck as magical plot element. With grave plot inconsistencies as a consequence.

Hey, at least they stopped the TOS practice of using the "it's the Roman/Nazi/postapocalyptic Cold War/Amerindian/Ancient Greek planet!" principle to use other costumes.

Can you imagine if you used the gas pedal of your car as a moderator instead of to feed just enough fuel mix into the engine?

Take your foot of the gas today and the car stops.

Take your foot of the gas in Star Trek and the car explodes.

I think this is what he was getting at: The design seems to have instability as a feature.

The TRIGA design is over 50 years old, with about 65 reactors built. It was designed to be inherently safe, and "safe even in the hands of a young graduate student."

So we've known how to do this for some time, at least in the realm of research reactors.

Why not? We software types scoff at VB-GUIs-to-track-IPs, after all.

  "How are you supposed to create drama and tension if the 
  technology never fails? My answer is that ... you need look
  no further than ... numerous Japanese animé series to see
  the proof."

It's probably unfair, but this part of the conclusion just jumped out at me as a hilariously stereotypical "Internet Argument". It's almost like a godwin for Sci-Fi.

I enjoyed the completely unnecessary diacritical mark over the 'e' in anime. "Pretentious? Moi??"

Actually, sometimes I wish we used accent marks more. You have no idea how hard English is to pronounce until you try to teach the "rules" to someone else.

I mean, one could claim that "ghoti" is pronounced the same as "fish."

I mean, one could claim that "ghoti" is pronounced the same as "fish."

And taking this full-circle, according to Wikipedia, in the Klingon language ghoti means fish.

If ever I am tempted to wonder why learning Klingon is a popular activity, I will remember this example.

It's just one linguistic in-joke after another.

I mean, one could claim that "ghoti" is pronounced the same as "fish."

Yeah, if you ignore all the heuristics about where letters are placed in a word. "gh" is only an "f" sound at the end of a word and "ti" is only a "sh" sound in the middle of a word.

What was that? I couldn't hear you over the coughing. Once I've sloughed off this layer of mucus, it should quieten down.

laughter

edit: although a trivial modification to the rule you suggested would fix this counterexample; gh is only an 'f' sound at the end of a word-stem.

I've never really understood why it matters. I appreciate accuracy in a movie or show based on something very closely tied to technology (for example, in a movie titled "Hackers" I'd expect at least a little accuracy on the subject), but Star Trek is obviously not a technical show. It's about the people.

Accuracy never really bothered me. They're just hollywood-types. It can be fun to see technology through their myopic eyes. Its the inconsistency that gets me. The transporters have wildly different operating modes and capabilities depending on the week, problems that nearly destroy the ship in some episodes are solved by three keypresses, rerouting this to that (often by their 15 year old boy-mascot) in others.

Dammit Jim, pick some damn rules and stick to them. Constraints make good drama. I doesn't count if the plot can be resolved at any time by some idiot in a Jefferies tube.

I used to hold up Star Wars as an example of good consistency. Then Ep. 1 came out. My wife asked me (5 minutes into the damn movie) why the Jedi bothered to swing their light sabers at the robots if they could just wave their hands at all of them and knock them over in groups. Gah. I sensed a great disturbance, as if a thousand sharks surfaced and were suddenly jumped...

TV series have a lot of trouble with consistency unless they have a tight team of in-house writers who are all on the same page. Freelancers with incomplete background information or people who disagree on various points cause inconsistencies. And sometimes they just happen under the best of circumstances.

In non-geek genres, most people don't much notice inconsistencies, whether they're pedantic things like "someone goes the wrong way to get to his bedroom" or bigger things like, "When did this character become afraid of dogs? He had a Great Dane back in first season!"

ETA: Try trawling the TV Tropes wiki for eight zillion examples of how TV writers of contemporary sitcoms and dramas can't even be consistent with the real world the stories are set in. :)

Accuracy matters when you're smart enough (or pedantic enough) that technical details break your suspension of disbelief (assuming it is not intended to be campy).

I cannot second this enough. Suspension of disbelief isn't some accidental aspect of fiction, it is essential to enjoying it. When even a casual viewing (as opposed to rigorous pseudo-scientific analysis) can't maintain suspension of disblief, then you have a problem if your target audience is geeks.

Suspension of disbelief is an active choice- an agreement even, not a state of mind created and maintained by the movie producer. With the exception of glaring violations (like the time I watched some character penetrate a firewall (a wall of fire) by cutting through it with a sword), any geek who elects not to ignore the strange idiosyncrasies is simply missing out by his own volition.

There's plenty of movies full of huge technical flaws I could point out an enumerate in an instant during only the first run through. They jump out at me, I see they are there, but I ignore them. This is what Suspension of Disbelief is. The only time it breaks, at least for me, is when the flaw is so bad as to be comical, and so comical as to make me loose my composure.

Look at the conclusion of the piece. He agrees: it should be about the stories. His beef is with the writers lazily resorting to retarded engineering time after time.

Perhaps this stems from the fact that few writers also have an engineering background, and as such don't look at the plots they assemble the same way we might?

They're also under alot of time pressure to produce scripts so the filming, and retake after retake, can get done. IANAE but I imagine for a weekly show that's not easy. Having tried to both a regular blog and a book, it's harder than it seems.

If they toned down the technobabble, Star Trek would be nearly watchable.

>Worst of all, this flying disaster-in-waiting is supposedly the product of the finest engineers the Federation has to offer.

I've thought about this one before. Imagine how bad the other ships must have it. They must be failing all the time (not just when the cameras are on). For Starfleet to operate it all, they must need a fleet of repair ships, spacedocks with warp drive, which come along and rebuild the USS Irreparable every time the captain forgets not to drag the boot disk to the Trash.

I'm sorry to all you who disagree. The guy is right. While his nitty gritty details are wrong, lets look at a few pieces of empirical evidence.

An aircraft carrier with destroyed pumps, engines, everything, as long as the structure is more or less ok, will stay afloat. Wait... An aircraft carrier can withstand a nuclear missile, and then keep sailing (the people are going to be dead through). This was proved in the 50s (old tech baby) when the government tested nuking a retired navy fleet of carriers and destroyers to see if they will sink. They didn't understand radiation, but the ships still sailed home. 5% of the fleet was destroyed.

Lets look at the stealth bomber example as noted by btilly. While its true if the computer dies, the plane falls like a rock. However the pilot can still eject. The ejection mechanism is not linked to the computer except for maybe the automatic mode.

I think the two "worstly" engineered vehicles are airliners and helicopters. Small planes can land without power due to the aerodynamics and weight, as long as hydrolics work. Airliners are not able to glide so well, nor are they light.

Airliners though do still demonstrate the redundant designs, each critical system has a backup which is a completely different in both their physical location and approach to solving the problem. If one fails the other can take over because a completely different set of conditions will cause the other to fail.

I think Battlestar Galactica did a good job showing REAL engineering. Those ships took a lot of pounding before they got destroyed. The only time the battlestars were just easily obliterated (like the enterprise was in every other episode) is when they were hooked up with a new computer system that connected every part of the ship to itself (and the computer was compromised) this was in the very first episode. Galactica survived BECAUSE it had all of it's systems disconnected and redundant, so when some shut down, people took over operations of that one back in manual mode. Hell part of the plot was that galactica was being sabotaged. In startrek sabotage was "opse the ship is going to explode now" while in galactica they just had some damage, or had their fuel blow up, or something (can't remember 100% of the details) but point being that you can't just blow the damn ship up. Maybe a civilian ship, not the warship. The only stupid thing in galactica was the cylon battleships had that central column which was succeptable to being blown up and destroying the ship, and that resurrection ship which if destroyed would fuck up resurrection for an entire cluster. I would have expected redundant resurrection ships/hubs.

In any case, the most unbelievable part of this whole ordeal is that you have a very large ship, full of civilians, armed to the teeth, the damn flagship of the fleet. That is all. Since when does the united states (or any country EVER) pack their destroyers or stealth bombers with civilians? Preach all you want about "exploration", in a real scenario you would have a mostly unarmed science vessel armed to the teeth with sensor gear, and a warship next to it for protection. Hell maybe the science vessel docks in the warship most of the time. The second an enemy approaches, the science vessel is already in high warp with every bit of stealth engaged getting the hell away from there until the warship signals them that it's safe to return.

Hell maybe the science vessel docks in the warship most of the time. The second an enemy approaches, the science vessel is already in high warp with every bit of stealth engaged getting the hell away from there until the warship signals them that it's safe to return.

The Star Trek: TNG term for this was "saucer separation". Not that it wasn't woefully underused.

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