In short: Dont be a gatekeeper to other people's entertainment. :P

@@ig33ku What does pluging the Sojourn have to do with gatekeeping?

I prefer realism over fantasy or hand-wavium, but at a certain point the story needs to take precedent and not how the thrusters work--to me, "internal consistency" is more important to a story than realism.

I prefer my sci-fi to have so much realism that its sci-non-fic.

To me the "realism" of a sci-fi franchise is far less of a problem, if the there's in-universe rules and reasoning established that are closely followed. If in Starship Troopers the Terran Federation aren't bombing the bug infested planets with tungsten rods launched from maneuverable drone-satellites, while keeping the majority of the fleet at a safe distance. Instead deciding to D-day the hell out of the surface of the planet, providing little to no actual close-in air support to troops on the ground, no artillery, no armored combat vehicles, instead they just try to use ww2 soviet human wave tactics against a swarm of giant insects resulting in a feast for the bugs. I really, really want to know why it is done , and why it can't be done differently. If a fictional universe stays consistent with it's own rules and they're established on some sort in-universe reasoning, I'm mostly alright with almost any level of "realism".

Consistency or verisimilitude is actually more important than realism. If realism is of prime importance, 99% of science fiction goes away, as pretty much any science fiction IP you can think of has unrealistic elements.

It's called science "fiction" for a reason.

@@autumngottlieb3071 Exactly.

Consistency is the measure between fiction and fantasy... and between good and bad fantasy after that:D While realism is just a measure between soft and hard scifi.

The idea of consistency seems to have been thrown out entirely for spectacle. It drives me crazy. If a science-fiction material has numerous 'miracle' properties, that's fine so long as they don't keep adding to the list to fix the plot of the week. Stargate was pretty consistent with Naquadah. It's a room temperature superconductor, it increases explosive yield and it can be used to generate vast amounts of energy. It's fictional but it has limitations. Star Wars has always been terrible about what the Force can and can't do and the limits. It's shown that projecting an image across the galaxy will kill a person... But pulling a 1600 metre long Star Destroyer out of orbit; you just need to sit down afterwards. Have a snack maybe. The Harry Potter films were terrible with the 'rules' of magic so we see people casting without wands and casually pulling off feats we're told in the books aren't possible (Although the books often contradicted themselves). Less said about Game of Thrones; the better.

Indeed. Pseudo science has been a part of Sci-Fi forever. It just when you make rules to allow the fantastic, you need to follow and build upon them. When you don't your creation is left feeling "unrealistic".

Yes! I'm a hardcore Trekkie but the constant head cannon some fans feel they need to do is crazy. Hard limits remove "why don't they just do X to solve Y" debates when the real answer is because its all magic and there would be no tension if they actually used transporters to solve every problem.

@@EmperorOfMan Yeah most problems could be fixed with the transporter, and yet under utilized.

@@EmperorOfMan Stargate got it right with transporters. The characters needed trackers for the technology to lock onto (first a bracelet and then an implant) and they didn't work through shields or jamming tech. They maintained this consistency throughout. Star Trek meanwhile can never seen to decide whether they're scanning for com-badges or their life signs, they encounter multiple species that can beam through shields and they tout transporters as being completely safe despite them being the focus of multiple episodes dedicated to their malfunctions. And that's not mentioning the new films and shows that throw out everything that's come before to have them do whatever they need them to do for this particular plot.

@@EmperorOfMan at some point this has to do with enjoying the series.

and balanced. I hate fantasy that just invents gimmicks or special abilities to get the heroes out of bad writing.

@@SoloRenegade or in Warhammer’s case, find an excuse to destroy the world so GW can make a carbon copy of 40K

@@Freesorin837 Exactly how many exterminatus' do you want for emperor's sake?!!

A story may not get everything right, but yeah, in general it should be convincing. What we may refer to as plot holes, is what real life refers to fortune, randomness or happenstance. I'm no expert writer, but a general rule to carry any scene I write is to have it balance by unsavoury acts. Example, a mercenary unit I wrote about gave the militia that reinforced them a significant advantage. That is, until the latter realise how disregarding the mercs can be when they drove over corpses to get to their fellow comrades faster. It's instances like thses spliced together with any number of different scenarios that help carry suspension of belief for the reader. This goes for any genre. Get the facts write first and ALWAYS double check. The process of just creating a paragraph may take well over an hour but its worth every second if you know that it's solid and compact, irregardless of length. I'd say, there should be little quarter given to disregarding facts of any kind in writing.

@@jameslewis2635 YES .

Done right it could be utterly terrifying though - hoojiwana from Spacedock

I actually really like how Mass Effect handled this. In short, all the sounds you hear when they are in space are computer generated for the crew to help with tactile awareness because humans are so reliant on our hearing.

I love Firefly's soundless space actions and found the sudden inclusion of sound in Serenity jarring.

@@hoojiwana in Gundam supplementary materials, there are pilots who, without permission, illegally adjust the sound settings so they can be less anxious or afraid in combat.

Workaround: Blah blah vibrations in the dark matter (if we aren't sure what it is yet, it can be anything! Remember all those stories of jungles on Venus?) interact with shields to make "sound"... which is also muffled and distorted for extra rule-of-cool. And when the shields fail you hear "the silence of death" before you actually die. Crew who escaped the killing shot / rebooted the emitters in time tell tales of how they "survived the silence".

Yes, and the writers of the Expanse use the hard Sci fi world they built to directly impact the narrative time and time again. It isn't just a story that happens to be set in a hard Sci fi world, but rather the story is inextricably linked to the setting

Why does everything need to have one correct answer? It being hard scifi is definitely one of the main reasons it's great, if not the foremost one.

@@georgedang449 obviously that depends on each individual's taste, if people are drawn to it because of how realistic/grounded it is, far be it for me to invalidate that. However, my point mainly was that if the storytelling in The Expanse wasn't great, no amount of hardness in its science would make it quite as beloved as it is.

Expanse was best thing that graced the TV screen because it was both realistic and with a good writing. It had shown those naysayers who have been parroting the same "space, realism, interesting story, chose any two" BS for the last 30+ years.

100%, the realism was icing on the cake. But not all scifi should, nor needs to, be realistic. sometimes the fun is seeing things we know couldn't otherwise exist in reality.

Out of curiosity, have you been watching Andor? - hoojiwana from Spacedock

Honestly I think we need a little less realism in that regard. It's basically "we have spaceships, but everything else is just as awful as it is today, if not worse". Why not stretch the imagination and imagine a society unrecognizable to today, with it's own set of problems? That's why I like "The Quantum Thief" series. It depicts a solar system long after the transhumanist revolution, and although life is radically different, it's still life.

Like how Expanse ignores existence of Luna or the fact that cybernetics appear to be on and off in setting at random? A guy with cybernetic eye is somehow a sneaky spy when such implants are widespread?

@@hoojiwana yes, and this is why I've said "in some cases"

YES! As a bio major, it always aggravates me when evolution and genetics are botched in these kind of shows.

Authentic is good enough for me

What's wrong? Lack the original thought to construct your own ideology?

@@DrSoapp What?

​@@DrSoapptechnically speaking, we all do.

MY big one is true to the genre/fans, a lot of stuff just looks dated after you watch the expense. IT's not just realism, if you make up silly ideas and no one else does them your product will just seem 2nd rate. @@Spider-Too-Too

And realism.

The result of a group pf people who cared about their work and cared about telling a great story instead of propagandising their audience

@@richardhockey8442 😁 Snickering in space-anti-capitalism/anti-imperialism. 😁

@@richardhockey8442 Wait, I'm curious now. Never ever looked into The Expanse. Is that what it's about? 'Space anti-imperialism' as the other person said?

@@charlie7mason Well, there is an empire that forms later, which I garner is indeed the bad guy. So. Give or take.

Like,Star Trek would be a whole lot less enjoyable if they pulled a nonsensical technobabble solution out once and never did it again. But since that happens all the time, it’s not that big of a deal in spite of being wildly unrealistic.

No, it's not! lol

The laws of physics and whatever other universal constants do not have to be the same as in our universe, as long as they are consistant within the IP's universe

@@kaylinhendrich4673 Star Trek is sitcom. Kinda like Futurama. When it takes itself too serious, like the Picard series, people get turned off.

agreed

Like Godzilla’s spikes glowing as he charges up a blast of atomic breath.

That depends on whether the setting is technologically sophisticated enough to turn waste heat into something useful, instead of just throwing it away. Ships in Gundam channel that heat into particle beam weapons. Ships in Battletech partially repurpose waste heat into thrust. Ships in The Culture flat out turns waste heat energy into any kind of power used in any kind of system onboard.

Or the radiators are fragile and limit ship maneuverability when extended. So a ship extending radiators cannot tactically maneuver, and is trying to dump heat before it cooks the crew. If a ship has extended radiators when in enemy weapons and continues to fire, the enemy can easily shoot off the radiators and that ship is now in much more trouble. So on-screen you might see the cooling spikes of the engine starting to glow and you know that ship will do something impressive. But you also know that the ship doing this only has a short time period before the crew cooks. Source = board game "Attack Vector: Tactical"

Even WAY back in Doc Smith's Skylark novels, shields were often said to be radiating in ever-higher frequencies before they finally blew out, as the ships frantically dumped waste heat into them.

@@georgedang449 Being able to channel waste heat into some practical purpose quickly and with 100% efficiency doesn't sound too feasible. Under optimal conditions, you might be able to pump the excess energy into a laser emitter, or thruster reaction mass, or some other useful gadget, but you don't plan exclusively for optimal conditions. A ship designed for combat especially will be producing a lot of excess heat, and can't afford any delay in getting rid of it. This kind of heat repurposing equipment would presumably also take up more volume and mass, which is at a premium on a warship. At best I can imagine such methods supplementing, but not replacing simpler ways of dumping waste heat in a more "realistic" setting.

The Expanse shows the vastness of space with the tech they have so that stellar journeys take weeks or months. You get an Age of Sail vibe to it, especially with the depiction of space food and drink. I particularly liked the use of plants as air filters. You always get the vibe that resources are finite; food, water, power etc. Firefly was good for this too. You never get that feel in Star Trek with its replicators, which is why the premise of Voyager never worked despite their attempts to claim resources were rationed... One of the issues with Stargate is that later on, they were able to travel between the Milky Way and the Pegasus Dwarf galaxy in just eighteen days. True, they're using a hyperdrive from a species tens of thousands of years technologically more advanced but it robbed the show of its own premise that the Stargates allowing this kind of easy travel was miraculous. It was easier for them to travel between galaxies in a ship than to power up the gates for inter-galactic travel. They go from using the gates and being awed by ships that can travel ten times or a hundred times the speed of light to ships that with the right power source can travel between galaxies in a matter of hours... It all felt too easy.

@Skylark Guns were invented before the Age of Sail. A few hundred years earlier in fact.

Wasn't there an episode about sling-shotting through gravity wells that portrayed space as very much not being vast and empty?

@@insu_na Alex was using the moons of Jupiter. Jupiter has eighty moons, possibly more and in space terms, they're all close together. As Alex says 'That's a lot of moons.'

@Cancer McAids The UN being absolute shit at running the planet seems pretty realistic to me.

@Cancer McAids Why? While I don’t think that in our timeline there will be a war with mars I think that the story made sense. Because It makes sense that Mars is more unified than earth just because they always had to work with each other in order to survive. The same goes for the belt and the different colonies. The way the see earth and mars, the way mars sees earth etc. I also like the fact that they really combined the environmental, scientific facts with the development of the culture.

Totally agree. Halo is awesome.

The early books especially are a lot better with realism than I've ever really seen them given credit for. As far as the Nylund novels go, ten thousand kilometers is a close-ranged engagement. There's an actual flip-and-burn sequence at one point.

But in regards to your point: Yeah. Most of the Covenant ships look so beautiful to me that I don't mind how inefficient they are compared to grey bricks.

Mans speaking straight facts

Except for the size of MAC cannons.

That's one of the great things about Brandon Sanderson's fantasy series.

Sadly, that rarely happens.

yes

I love the Lost Fleet books. I actually read the entire series multiple times. They are a ton of fun. And I just looked it up and there's 2 new books since I last read any of them! Goody! :) In the same vein if you haven't yet, try the Expeditionary Force books. Also loved John's pillars of reality books. Which ironically delivers on the science fantasy I was hoping I would get from David Webbers Safehold series. Personally I feel Safehold got kind of boring after a few books, but definitely give it a try if you like idea of a science fantasy story based around the age of sail.

David Weber's other better known Honorverse series is also really cool:) For anyone who doesn't know, it's essentially real physics plus the ability to manipulate gravity in lots of cool well thought out ways. It also is really cool in that the books cover a period of rapid technological advancement, and so all the space battles keep changing:)

The Lost Fleet is so underappreciated that I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've seen anyone else mention it in Spacedock's comment section

I've read the Lost Fleet series multiple times too. wish it could get made into a TV series, written/made by people who appreciate the series and scifi in general.

@@SoloRenegade So, not Disney, Amazon, Netflix, or Hollywood, right? 😁 =^x^=

That's why I love The Expanse. The showing of what the future could be is my favourite sci-fi concept, and is what gives me inspiration to make stories.

@@ketchupchips0250 The expanse isn't that realistic compared to literary SF but it's frankly more realistic than Trek or Wars or any other series that was ever on the air or on streaming services, so it gets a lot of praise on that front

came here for this comment. I love hard sci-fi, I love science fantasy. as long as the setting is internally consistent, I can lose myself in it and fall in love with it. as soon as it stops playing by its own rules, I am pulled out of it

Yes 40k has magic and demons and gods, yet a majority of the human tech that is ubiquitous in the setting is based off of real concepts, promethium, which is a petroleum replacement, is a real mineral, it's spent nuclear fuel that's been powdered and is an extremely unstable compound, and thus, combustible. Or Melta-weapons, based off of German tech from WWII designed to be hand-held anti-tank weapons that could do more then a panzerfaust by basically being a multi-use HEAT round.

I dunno, 40k has more than its fair share of lore contradictions. Most sci-fi franchises of a certain size do, for that matter.

@@justinthompson6364 Unavoidable when there are many different writers (hard to avoid with even one writer).

@@justinthompson6364 i have this headcanon that if there's any inconsistencies in the lore of 40k it's because of the centuries old administratus and stories getting lost and distorted over time. Or it is an embellishment by holy terra to make themselves sound more grand

I often find the use of softer sci-fi necessary to keep the plot going. For one of my own settings, I decided that all my ships would rely on a reactionless and inertialess drive. Obviously this is not realistic, but by making them reactionless, I can avoid doing calculations for delta-v. And my making it inertialess, I can sidestep issues with inerta dampening and time dilation. And I justify it in setting, by making part of the FTL drive. (Just down shifted to sub light speeds.)

@@erikschaal4124 that's not a terrible idea for that setting. Isaac Arthur had an episode, which briefly touched on that very idea. And there is actually a concept around low-gear-FTL called the Bias Drive that you might find useful.

the thing about so called "realistic" sci fi its still fiction and the "realistic" aspects are still based on a bunch of theories and concepts. what is more Important is that it should make sense within the scifi stting itself.

Make the tech within your stories consistent, and that will help a lot. For example if you have an engine that lets you go from planet to planet but it takes a month or two, don't have a second ship catch up easily. Or if it does, then the second ship has a new engine, with all sorts of fun problems you can talk about. You could make it where the troops have to use a variety of weapons based on the environment, and a change in the environment makes the current weapons much less effective. For example you might have a platoon using laser weapons on a vacuum planet, and recharge from their nuclear-powered Dropship. Then something happens to their Dropship and the troops only have as much ammo as they had charged up. This will radically change their tactical operations since they no longer have free reloads. Or an enemy fires a silica grenade filling the air with refractive prisms. Now the laser weapons are much less effective, but the rebels with their AK-207s have no problem. Or the reverse where the troops attack during a heat wave inhibiting the enemy laser weapons, and their assault rifles are good. The problem is that the assault rifles have to carry physical ammo powered by chemical explosions imposing an ammo limit, while laser weapons might be linked to giant batteries and have unlimited ammo. You likely have all sorts of experience with military equipment, and can translate that to a military sci-fi story. One idea might be small nuclear reactors whose purpose is to extract oxygen and nitrogen from the air and make ammonia fuel for the rest of the armored force. How happy would the Quartermasters be with a tank force that is truly independent from fuel needs? You might have a book that tells you that 1 Milk Cow vehicle can support 40 tanks on the road, 20 tanks cross-country, or 10 tanks on the attack, so your readers know that in combat the fuel supplies will be used up faster. An enemy hitting the fuel tanker (not the nuclear vehicle) means you can't save up fuel for a deep strike. Plus infantry using the ammonia fuel to clean their gear, resulting in lower fuel supplies before an inspection.

I wouldn't worry too much. All future set sci-fi is speculation. If you set a story hundreds of years in the future using only what we know is currently possible that would be in itself unrealistic, as our understanding of physics, material science etc. is always changing. (writing about a material with the properties of graphene would've been considered soft sci-fi not so long ago) Another example. Star trek used plenty of unexplainium in warp tech, making it soft. Since then we have Alcubierre's equations, moving its position on the soft to hard scale, though not all the way as its still only theoretical. I agree that consistency is important as it helps the reader understand the universe you've built but more important is developing your story and characters. Good luck!

@@elliothawthorn9681 Oh I'm not too worried about how the discourse affects my works, I've made what I thought was a good story and wasn't chased away with a stick by others my worry more just comes from, if I had started with this grating fear that I have to make it "Realistic" otherwise its not good sci-fi I don't think I ever would have stepped out to try my hand at writing and I just worry for how many people fit that mould and feel like that.

Good point. As the video said, too many people are presenting their personal preference as absolute. It must be hard for a writer to block that out and not second guess himself. I suppose the old saying 'if you try and please everyone, you'll end up pleasing no-one' applies.

I would recommend reading the Imperial Radch trilogy for a good contrast. It never goes into artificial gravity, barely touch on the FTL technology, weapons are vaguely described as "guns". The AIs, the politics, the Radch culture and the general intrigue are however described in depth. How large is a Justice class ship, how many weapons does it carry? Irrelevant. It is an enormous troop transport with a millennia old AI core, that is what we need to know. It is a soft sci-fi, but it has more realism than most fiction I have read. The characters, the culture, the AIs, the ships are really well written. Hell, it has better aliens than the Expanse's Gatebuilders.

I dont think you do... everybody agreeing gets pretty boring pretty quick... also there are some really f'd up things that can happen if you go too far with the live and let live

Really the only realism issue i have with gundam is the use of humanoid warcraft. lol

The irony is in a zero G environment a vehicle/capsule with 4 robot arms would make a lot of sense. Think 4 Canada arms. It's just the way gundam does it is absurd. @@molochi

Indeed. I loved the Starfuries. How they used RCS, inertia, etc. They didn't fly like airplanes like most spacecraft in Sci-Fi.

yeah, it was great . i still have plastic model of SA-43 on the shelf. one of my fav space fighter crafts (next to stargate F-302/puddle jumper, colonial viper (of all variations) and nearly all citadel races spacecrafts from mass effect saga) .

I read the first 10 or so words and knew exactly what show you were about to mention... AND I 100% AGREE!!! I loved this show when it was on and was disappointed it only got 1 season. Makes it a quick rewatch though... I need to find it on DVD.

A true unfinished gem. Put it right next to Earth 2.

Hm, the "realism" was very muted, though.

SPAAB most underrated show ever. FYI BSG just ripped it off continuously, including the strong female hot shot pilot. Even the part of defending a bad presidential candidate.

I always prefer to use the term "grounded" rather than "realistic" when refering to mechs since Big combat legged plataforms doesn't exist but saying "grounded" is like saying "this doesn't exist but we will tweak things to make it look like it could work at some degree" , besides that way you get off the annoying twats that say "no mech is "realistic" , killing two birds with one stone

What the heck are you on about, have you just watched solely just the 3 UC OVAs? We have G-Gundam which is quite literally a Super Robot Brawl Anime and Wing Gundam with all the Gundams easily mowing down hordes of Leos, and it was finally Unicorn Gundam that made you decide that Gundam is a Super Hero Franchise? Even if its just exclusively UC Gundam, we had Kamille channeling the power of the dead to kill Scirocco and Amuro using his Newtype Powers to push Axis from Earth.

@@dooggo-1402 I was only including UC, there is a big difference between Kamilles final desperate attack or axis flash requiring two armies and the sacrifice of two incredibly power newtypes and the straight up god powers that Unicorn exhibits, it sends the MS reactors back in time for gods sake. Yes G Gundam is a Super Robot show it was made to cash in on Dragonball Zs popularity, Wing is not because the Gundams are still treated as war machines all be it very tough ones, I dont really consider Unicorn to be an actual super robot show either (note the use of the phrase "might as well have") as for the most part the unicorns are treated as high performance Mobile Suits. My big problem it was the culmination of Newtypes changing from people with the ability to instantly understand each other with some psychic abilities that can pull of incredible feats when pushed to the absolute limit but with tragic consequences to outright magical beings that again send things back in time or in Narrative become Mobile Suit piloting ghosts and whatever BS that terrible villain I can never remember the name of is doing at the end of that awful movie. I believe I have explained what the hell I was on about and I apologise for how overly simplistic and vague my initial comment was.

Whining about his childhood really dragged the story down.

Two things I really find interesting about Halo are it's vehicle design, both military and civilian, and world design, specifically urban areas like New Mombasa, and New Phoenix, AZ. I like The Expanse as well because of its attention to detail, and scientific accuracy. And the ships in The Expanse have a clear lineage of tech to our spacecraft, though are far more advanced, and actually are comparable to Halo in terms of propulsion, weaponry, and use of armor rather than shields. You could imagine spacecraft in The Expanse as a technological bridge between what our first space warships would be like, and Halo's ships. As far as spacecraft design goes, I prefer The Expanse, though I love the frigates from Halo. Tech in Halo has varying levels of advancement depending on the environment, space travel, colonization and AI are the most advanced areas of technological advancement. Other areas have hardly advanced compared to todays tech, land vehicles still use wheels, and have engines that run on various fuels. The warthog is a decent example of this, or many of the civilian vehicles you see in mainly Halo 2, Halo 3: ODST on Earth. Some colonies like New Alexandria on Reach were built to minimize vehicular traffic as much as possible, and rely on maglev trains, pedestrian areas, etc. New Mombasa on Earth clearly has plenty of roads due to its roughly 650 years of development, built around both personal cars, and public transit, as well as being designed as a shipping hub due to having the first space elevator on Earth, and as a result of that space elevator the city grew exponentially, and has quite a number of tall buildings that dwarf the tallest buildings on Earth today. Most if not all the cities in Halo are also ran by what are considered "dumb AI". Dumb AI despite their name surpass human intelligence in regards to what role they were designed for. As for aircraft and spacecraft, The Pelican for example might not fly in the real world using todays tech, but factoring in the advancement of aerospace tech 500 years into the future, and the miniaturization of fusion drives small enough to fit on aircraft, then it's really easy to imagine the pelican it flying in atmosphere using fusion thrusters. (though I think it has conventional jet engines that use fusion plasma to drive turbines, or use hydrogen as fuel when in atmosphere, with vectoring thrust capabilities) Spacecraft design in Halo is great as well, depending on whether a ship or spacecraft is military or civilian also influences it's aesthetics. Military ships are generally more angular and blocky to give off a utilitarian design. Civilian ships tend to be more rounded, as they are designed more for atmospheric flight and interplanetary, or interstellar travel, but some of which look like spacefaring airliners. I imagine airliners for intercontinental transport in both The Expanse, and Halo would be similar to the Lapcat A2 and capable of Hypersonic speeds, which actually is what we should aim for instead of just supersonic transport. Cargo ships vary greatly depending on the environment, and both Halo and the Expanse shipping relies heavily on containerization as we do today, but their containers are designed to be sealed for space travel. Bulk freight ships likely exist as well, especially for mining colonies. I am not so sure about the Expanse, but I would imagine it would be similar to an extent. Halo uses trucks, maglev trains, as well as ocean or laker ships for transport of goods on Earth, and the space elevators are the primary hubs of transporting goods to and from geostationary orbit, and the planets and star systems beyond Earth.

But it can beat Warhammer 40K? XD

It took a second for me to read "LASER Point Defense Weapons" instead of "Personal Defense Weapons". The thought of someone justifying the existence of LASER Personal Defense Weapons makes me afraid

@@Ranade_Empor Laser Personal Defense: Burn a hole in your assailant AND your retinas!

@@DecidedlyNinja "See that thug over there?" 'Yes, sir.' "I don't want to, anymore." 'Understood, si- AAAAAAAAAAAAMYEYES!'

​@RommDan news flash: having a sci fi that can't survive a cross over war with 40k doesn't make your sci fi bad

I love Mass Effect, and am definitely interested in The Expanse. Not sure when I'll get around to it but looking forward to it for sure.

Look, it's a good idea, but a lot of the ideas I hear on KZfaq sound like they're smarter than they really are

That way it can be the new rule of cool.

Look up " leopards frequently spotted on high mountains in western " on yT. Elusive....

Well it's less tv shows and more other media. There's videogames like ΔV: Rings of Saturn and Children of a Dead Earth, and in terms of literature theres decades of content to draw upon. - hoojiwana from Spacedock

Away on Netflix. It's near future depicting a crew going on the first trip to Mars and I thought it was pretty good.

Murdoch Mysteries-- anachronistic tech is involved in 1800s mysteries. Explanations of logic and math are common. Hard Scifi need not be in space....pewpew

@@viscifi517 Agreed! it starts in the 1890s and carries on. right when we were just starting to learn all sorts of things. I love it when they invent modern stuff to solve a case like its new. (a primitive version of photoshop to 'prove' a guy was at a place because they had a picture)

Not a TV show but the books written by Kim Stanley Robinson are excellent examples of hard sci-fi (the Mars Trilogy is one of my favourite book series). If you've played the Terraforming Mars board game, it takes a lot of its inspiration from the Mars Trilogy.

What kind of game? Video or tabletop/pen and paper? I've been hunting for a scifi tabletop/pen and paper game for years

Specially true when it comes to things that only exist at small scale , like no matter how grounded you may make a mech you Will always have that one mf that is like "there is no such thing as a realistic mech" and i'm pretty sure that Will be the case even if we do make some Big combat mech irl

It's especially frustrating because you wouldn't be able to get away with such a thing in a contemporary show. You can't have a car chase start in New York and end a few minutes later in Paris, for example.

@@RocketToTheMoose Well, actually, you probably could. You could turn a mundane story on earth into some reality-warping sci-fi thriller/mystery where suddenly in the middle of a car chase, some random people are spatially displaced for some mysterious reason. Perhaps you could turn it into a story about simulation theory, or any number of things. It's all about the execution and consistency of its elements. Of course, I know it's a figure of speech, but honestly, you could do something interesting with just that as a plot hook.

@@TheHazelnoot I mean sure, but I meant in the sense of a contemporary non-SF show.

The Expanse's Epstein Drive never seems that fantastical because I find it does for space travel what the jet engine did for air travel. Before jets, the fastest prop aircraft could only manage 500mph (record is 574 I think). The fastest jets can do 2,000 mph. And when you consider how little time passed between the first powered flight and the development of jet aircraft, it's not that much of a stretch. I always enjoyed Stargate for being consistent with various techs. Transporters need something to lock onto so personnel are given tracking implants. They don't work through shields and jamming tech can be used to stop them. They also have a maximum range. They also make the point that craft are equipped with 'inertial dampeners' and that without them, they would be paste. Shepard even uses this at one point in Atlantis to his advantage. Star Trek was pretty consistent with this during the 80s/90s but since the Abrams films, tech does whatever the plot needs it do. And they can't seem to decide whether they use Warp drive that allows them to travel faster than light in real space, or whether it puts the ship into subspace/hyperspace.

@@DomWeasel thank you for taking the time to write that out. That was very well-put, and I really don't have anything to add to it 👍.

Most gundam stuff is stand alone. Wing, Iron blood orphans. Seed. No need to watch anything else. Just start with episode one. Even some uc stuff like Victory can be watched as a stand alone. So this was a thing before witch ever came out.

Yeah, big ships don't move like that in such fast speeds.

The english is fine the LITERAL!!! only word that was wrong was "whitch" it's which* btw

@@florntlaze810 thx for spell check

For those of you bringing up radiators and dealing with excess heat and such, hey look at that, thats a thing in battletech. Mechs, aerofighters, and spacecraft all need to mount heat sinks to deal with heat, and if they dont they can shut down, or worse. Its probably more hand-wavey than *real life*, but its more than most settings, in that regard ;)

The Martian is both an awesome movie and book.

eh~ even within the series that gets challenged every other show has some huge biblically accurate mech throne that is an order of magnitude stronger than any of the mobile suits civilian mobile suits and related tech helps make it more believeable, but honestly its more the fact that everyone uses mobile suits and they are an accepted convetional weapon in the setting that sells it same reason nobody questions replicators in star trek, its not the technobable its the framing

But it is not, look at the most successful fiction IPs, they have a lot of consistency problems

@@rommdan2716 "For me"

I second this suggestion. The Universal Century is (usually) a fairly hard science fiction setting.

Yea, I would love to see it as well. What I especially like about it is that it is actually used to properly explain just how and why things such as energy barriers work with the I-Fields in this setting when most other sci-fi settings say it is an energy barrier and leave it at that. The particle is also remarkably flexible despite being under some strict rules, eventually leading to things such as the Minovsky Drive System.

For me, mecha action.

Its the problem with most sci-fi it's not very realistic it has some realistic properties but it's not. The problem is those realistic aspects that are overplayed when the style of governments and economics the mundane technical things that are very important to making something real is always not very flushed out and rightfully so because if that's the case then it's not fictional.

absolutely

Writing, it's always the writing.

Characters and story > Narrative Consistency > Realism

Also yes, MOAR RADIATORS IN SCI-FI!

There is a term for it in TV Tropes: Minovsky Physics. Where you have some handwavium to explain some of the fantastic elements while keeping everything else as realistic as possible.

@Battlesheep that's awesome! And that makes perfect sense, especially since my protagonist in most of these stories is going to be a human superhero!