How many times in movies and television have you watched a ship burning in space? Too many, right? Are you aware that doesn’t happen? Space is a vacuum. A void. Practically empty. There’s no oxygen to fuel a fire.[1]

Again, I bring up Red Dwarf because it makes fun of a lot of these boners, including the ability of Moon Base Alpha and the Voyager to stay stocked up on spacecraft. In Red Dwarf, there are about three spacecraft besides the Red Dwarf main ship. Starbug 1 and 2 and another vehicle called the Starbus. They lost one of their Starbugs, and in one episode, after the Starbugs were getting banged around a lot, one of the characters quipped that the Starbugs were made of the same material those dolls that survive fatal airplane crashes were made of.

 asmehad nyrogeanithes wrote in:

Hi
I noticed that some movie makers are confusing microgravity with vacuum. I have a scene in mind, where someone floats into an airlock from outer space, closes the door behind him and the air begins to hiss into the little room. Then somehow the gravity kicks in and the floating person falls immedieately to the hard ground. Last time I’ve seen this was yesterday in the movie “Sunshine”. Or perhaps they had some technology to turn gravity on and off?

I haven’t seen the movie yet (it’s not due out in North America until the end of the year, last I heard), but it would be interesting to see if that was deliberate or not.  Let’s give the movie-makers the benefit of the doubt and that the air lock can turn off its artificial gravity in the airlocks for EVAs.

You’ve seen the episode: group of ne’er-do-wells take a sample of the hero’s DNA, put it in a machine and presto! A fully-grown copy of the hero complete with full memories, exact duplicate of the personality (except modified to be loyal to the ne’er-do-wells) and sometimes even a nifty suit of clothing to go with it. Uh-huh. Now that we really have cloning, let me explain how the Dolly team did it.

A personage calling himself “The Phantom Computer” pointed out a boner in the classic Gerry Anderson series UFO:

In the Gerry Anderson series UFO, the medical exams uncovered that the invading aliens were suffering from “hereditary sterility”. In other words, if your father was sterile, then so are you! How’s that again?

Reminds me of the old joke, “Celibacy is not hereditary”.

Some of the coolest looking FX sequences can be seeing spaceships maneuvering in space. But ever notice that these space ships move more like fighter aircraft in an atmosphere than a craft in space?

Ever seen one of those thick, pea-soup nebulas in the Star Trek movies, Star Trek: The Next Generation or Star Trek: Voyager? That’s about the only place you’ll see them unless you are at ground-zero (space-zero?) of an exploding star. Nebulae are thin, wispy things that are best seen from a great distance with a powerful telescope and photographic film.

Andreas Hartl wrote to suggest unit confusion as a blunder.

In the movie Screamers (totally B-movie quality) the hero travels to the origin of some highly sophisticated weapons system: it’s a mine where those weapons were used to defend it. The character traveling along with the hero explains that this mine was the source of the valuable mineral Bernylium. Bernylium was mined “cubic-ton by cubic-ton”. I do not recall mass having three dimensions… (This is from the german translation, I cannot guarantee that the original script contained this inaccuracy)

Or how about confusing light-years and parsecs with units of time. In the Babylon 5 episode “Messages from Earth”, Lenier said the pressure outside the hull of the White Star was reaching 200 gravities. Gravities? Since when did that become a standard for pressure?

(In retrospect, I think the writer of the episode was confused with specific gravity which still was the wrong unit for pressure.)

On Star Trek, Doctor “Bones” McCoy will administer a cure and it will take effect immediately. We see the same things on the other incarnations of Star Trek, and in other TV shows. It’s pretty dramatic to see a cure work immediately, but cures tend to take a few minutes at least, if not hours, days and months. Even if the disease or whatever is killed instantly, the damage and growths still take time to repair. Do your cuts heal in seconds? No, so neither would a blister or growth.

How many times have you tuned in an episode of Star Trek and seen someone “breeding” with another species? Too many to count. What’s worse is Star Trek says different species evolved in isolation can breed and have fertile young. If two organisms can breed and have fertile young, they are by definition members of the same species. Star Trek: The Next Generation at least tried to address this with an episode that claimed all humanoids are derived from a parent species of humanoids. I’ve seen other shows do it without thinking too much about it. The only counter examples I know of come from the Star Trek novels and Babylon 5. I read the novelization of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier before seeing the movie. The novelization mentioned that Spock, born of a Vulcan father and Human mother, was conceived with a lot of technology. The movie made no reference to this, but it wasn’t really important. This isn’t surprising since the Star Trek novels have always said interspecies breeding isn’t possible without lots of medical intervention.

Babylon 5 understood the concept of different species breeding, but in order to get two species to breed, used a magic machine (being assembled by Delenn in “Chrysalis”) to half convert Delenn into a human-Minbari hybrid.