Trope: Space Opera - using manually aimed guns/lasers/etc. at targets traveling at fractional relative light speed.
Authors want to get the feel of naval battles in space and have the people doing actiony fightin’ stuff during battle scenes, but neither wet navy battleship strategies or air force dog fight tactics apply at .5 c.
You can divide up Space Opera by how they handle the logistics of space battles. In one of the Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan series books, the computers AI’s do all the shooting once the big multi-ship battle starts, because (duh) human reactions just aren’t fast enough. The tension is in watching the battle and waiting the outcome of the battle AI’s to play out. So, lazy tropes are not necessary for there to be action and tension in the battle. Nor do books need to be “military sci fi” to do this, as the Vorkosigan series books are Space Opera, not the harder military sci fi of David Weber’s Honor Harrington, etc.
Trope: Faster than light, sensors that are real time, no matter how far away the object they are monitoring is, even though the book’s universe doesn’t have FTL communications.
This one isn’t so much stupidly wrong - I’ll grant an author genre conventions - but stupidly lazy when the author is inconsistent about how his or her universe physics/technology works. If they have magic FTL sensors fine, but they need to be consistent with whether they have FTL coms and such.
Actually that brings up a semi-related trope or at least a common setting: Cheyenne Mountain. From War Games to Star Gate, it’s amazing what’s supposed to be there. My last actual duty station in the USAF was the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, specifically in the data processing center. Yeah, no star gates, no time tunnels, sorry. Now admittedly, maybe they just didn’t let enlisted shlubs like myself into those areas, but considering the facility does let civilians in to tour the place on a regular basis, I’m not sure how much they could really hide there. (Side note: the tour is pretty cool, even if even while stationed there I considered the whole thing a pointless cold-war relic.)
There actually is a command center vaguely similar to the one pictured, but not nearly that well appointed. The computer equipment I recall was actually a bit behind the contemporary technology of the time and I suspect it remains such 25 years later. Rows of people staring at standard sized, albeit TEMPEST “hardened” screens? Sure. Huge video displays dominating the room with amazing graphics capabilities? Yeah, not so much. (Big screens, yes, but nothing fancier than you get in most business conference rooms.)
Still, at least no one was keeping a hacker out of the system by having two people rapidly type on a single keyboard at the same time.
Also at that speed your projectiles might as well be sand sized to pea sized instead of full blown missiles scatter a cloud of that in front of their ship game over. Saves a lot of space too.
Yup. It’s why so many Space Opera series have ships with magic shield technology to prevent that.
Another issue that most, but not all, space opera tries to avoid talking about is the fact that it’s kind of trivial to destroy entire planets when you have fractional light speed ships that can just head on the right trajectory and let go of a rock. All the space ships and defense guns really don’t have a chance unless they add magic technology to detect and destroy such projectiles, some how, at a large fraction of the speed of light.
Medical “advice” that is flat-out wrong. A key example: the overdose scene from Pulp Fiction. Treating a heroin overdose with an intracardiac injection of adrenaline sounds like a particularly nasty way to kill someone, especially when we have something like naloxone (Narcan) that really works.
Hollywood user interfaces tend to have no relevance to real computer usage, for that matter. Of course, a typical real-world data display doesn’t look as dramatic as the flashy graphics on your typical CSI episode, while such flashy displays would be ridiculous in real-world applications.
This raises the question of the “original cliche”. The one that came 1st before it was cliche. The one I remember as spectacular is in Altman’s 1973 Long Goodbye, which I saw with my dad when I was 11. Dad though R ratings were bullshit.
[Marty Augustine to girlfriend Joanne] Look at that face. Is that a face for a magazine cover? The profile. You’re beautiful, and I love you. I sleep with a lot of women; I make love to you. The single most important person in my life, next to my family. Is that right, Pepe? Huh? [smashes a coke bottle on her face] Get her out of here! [to Marlowe] Now, that’s someone I love! And you I don’t even like! You got an assignment, cheapie: find my money!
Yeah. It’s just too bad they didn’t make any sequels.
Then again, that’s probably for the better. With such a phenomenal performance by Weaving, I’d have been tempted to bring him back for the sequels. And that would have been a horrible idea.
Anyone else get the distinct feeling that his performance in The Matrix was almost entirely achieved by allowing the ghost of Carl Sagan to possess him?
We’d know for sure if he ever said “billions and billions” in the movie.
