Shittiest piece of garbage tech in science fiction

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Sci-Fi Wi-Fi > Shittiest piece of garbage tech in science fiction

Hodgepodge: Jan 29, 2006; Can't post for 252 days!

Butternubs posted:

Starfleet surge protectors.

I guess a post scarcity society still contracts out to the lowest bidder.

Like jesus christ load a bunch of consoles into a torpedo casing and fire them at the enemy.

doing that is probably banned by a treaty with the romulans after an exchange of console torpedoes left three light years of the neutral zone barren of life or something

# ¿ May 27, 2020 09:53

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# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 01:47

Hodgepodge: Jan 29, 2006; Can't post for 252 days!

GD_American posted:

Is "light infantry" a tech? Because Starship Troopers. Just a bunch of easily punctured flesh dudes grabastically charging giant scything deathbugs and dying in droves. Sure would be neat if, oh, say, they were to create a powered suit of armor for these soldiers, maybe they should hire a sci-fi author or something

charging might not be the core strength of light infantry but im pretty sure st was not exactly depicting competent utilization of the lives of recruits

they are useful against some space bugs they just need something but what was it...

...aaah that's the stuff

# ¿ May 31, 2020 16:33

Hodgepodge: Jan 29, 2006; Can't post for 252 days!

40k hive worlds will very explicitly starve if cut off from agricultural worlds; it's one of the things that caused the pre-imperial human civil8iation to collapse.

and the lower levels being bottomless helps is the basis of one if the most popular spinoffs. The lower levels also have lost technology, mutants, gangs, etc, etc, and are one of the more interesting places in 40k.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2020 05:50

Hodgepodge: Jan 29, 2006; Can't post for 252 days!

frogge posted:

Subspace communications.

I can suspend disbelief at FTL travel, but for some reason what's essentially a facetime call that has a good connection and also not have any delay or feedback with a caller light years away irks me.

I know WH40K gets around that with psychics. But I just expect interstellar communications basically devolving into text messages or telegrams at best.

Astrotelepathy in 40k is supposed to be like the shittiest form of communication imaginable, it just gets ignored for convenience.

Like a distress signal is received as a bad dream a random amount of time from when it was sent in a random place and relayed multiple times as the relay astropath's interpretation of the dream.

Whole astropathic choirs going insane from suddenly receiving distress signals from thousand year old wars is a thing.

It's even worse on a ship where you might lose your entire communication system to the physic echoes of some atrocity that happened a million years before humanity was born.

Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Jun 22, 2020

# ¿ Jun 22, 2020 16:47

Hodgepodge: Jan 29, 2006; Can't post for 252 days!

Admiralty Flag posted:

I'm the Mass Effect Citadel, the product of an incredibly old and technologically advanced race

They knew how to build Mass Relays, but faster-than-walking-pace elevators eluded them

socializing in elevators was important to their culture

they never imagined other peoples being forced by chance to adopt this practice

Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Jul 6, 2020

# ¿ Jul 6, 2020 01:04

Hodgepodge: Jan 29, 2006; Can't post for 252 days!

SlothfulCobra posted:

"Honor" is kind of an arbitrary thing, because if you actually had rules against slaughtering the helpless that you stuck to, you could never form an empire in the first place. The only honorable way to fight is to attack enemies that are stronger than you, and then spare all orphans.

Klingons cloak because at some point a script planned for the Romulans swapped in Klingons instead, and ever since, the Romulans never really could distinguish themselves because every attempt to define them got traded off to another species.

debt: the first 10k years had a good explanation of honour: it's surplus dignity extracted from your victims

# ¿ Jul 11, 2020 09:24

Hodgepodge: Jan 29, 2006; Can't post for 252 days!

Ghost Leviathan posted:

I forget if it's come up before, and I feel like it probably has, but hell with it, I feel like among all of Warhammer 40k's absurd technology both in-universe and out, Ordinatus (warning: chan speak, if relatively mild) absolutely fit the bill.

Might have come up that humanity in Warhammer 40,000 have had a pretty bad case of Butlerian Jihad (if not as bad as Dune itself, or even Battletech, overall, but significant) to the point where the technology-cult of the Adeptus Mechanicus considers innovation and blue-sky research in itself to be incredibly dangerous at best. This means, poo poo has to be ridiculously dire for them to actually do it, and the Ordinatus are a result of what precepts and organisations they have to actually accommodate it. What you end up with is basically a mad science superweapon mounted on absurdly large tank treads of an arbitrarily massive size, typically built around an extremely specific scenario that needs to be solved. This can range from a massive sonic cannon to a Death Star Jr superlaser to a massive drill tank, and is sometimes not even operable after its first use, which probably doesn't make the AdMech too sad because they're incredibly reluctant to use them for any reason other than something ridiculously similar to the scenario they were originally built for.

Perhaps fittingly among 40k's deliberately ridiculous treatment of technology, Ordinatus stand out, as they're oddly standardised for one-off mad science superweapons, yet a design that makes sense as 'break glass only in case of mad science emergency' button, being as said, basically a massive fuckoff superweapon mounted on ridiculously oversized treads made only for massive fuckoff superweapons. The ones who have playable stats even make sense for this; they tend to be glass cannons et large, mainly relying on very rare energy shields usually reserved for particularly large and rare Titans (the giant mecha which are often literally cathedrals) That said, their stats do in turn seem to be 'anything I'm pointed at is all kinds of hosed'.

And of course, a couple of these, mostly the city-sized sonic cannons, have been looted by the Orks. It aint the Imperium til it's been used against them because of their hubris!

The big titans aren't even cathedrals anymore, they're considered gods (or avatars the machine god) in their own right. This is also not inaccurate as the main job of the several humans that need to be wired into one for it to function to basically communicate with and direct their AIs, which are modeled after predatory beasts to provide the necessary instinct without defying the jihad as it were.

Its a pity that space marines dominate 40k so much,because unlike Star Wars with jedi stuff, I personally think 40k has a lot of other interesting stuff going on thats way cooler than yet another space marine chapter.

# ¿ Dec 25, 2020 05:44

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# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 01:47

Hodgepodge: Jan 29, 2006; Can't post for 252 days!

Forgall posted:

How about alien civilisation from Amnesia games, whose entire society runs on ~~adrenochrome~~ vitae, which they extract by torturing kidnapped humans 24/7 on industrial scale?

That one civilization from the Torchwood special which surgically grafts kids to their bodies to get high and will never know how lucky they were to be in the spinoff.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2021 01:59

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