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[Thule]

C (299,792 km/s)

[sdmike1]

wow, just wow!

[PerturbedPug]

That was really good. Will there be a feature length one?

[Gothars]

I don't get the plot, like, at all. They want to colonize a world with half a hijacked warship? Why do they separate their engine block? Am I missing something or does this make not even remotely sense?

[Gothars]

Ok, I tracked down a statement from a crewmember:

Our trailer shows a weapon test () which was meant to show that the entire ship is essentially one huge cannon. By removing the engine block and shooting out the back they can go super fast. As for slowing down, all they have to do is shoot out the front again, or use the smaller engines to turn themselves around and accelerate in the other direction (the reason to do this is they are using the shield in the back as a pusher plate, whereas in the front there would be nothing to absorb the impacts).
As for angry crew members, that would be something we would love to explore in a longer version. But alas it is a short and we tried to pack a lot in there!
Really happy to see people discussing it!

Which just confirms that those guys don't have a clue about physics and did not care much to make this believable, which is a really bad thing for scifi.

[sdmike1]

Still, compared to a lot of "scifi" that we get these days, this is pure gold!

[Gothars]

Yeah, I'm probably just used to good hard-scifi by consuming it much more through books and audio books than movies.

Still, I just don't get how these people can go through so much effort to get reasonable good actors, sets, effects, cinematography and all the other production stuff and then just settle for a plot, which ought to be the cheapest thing to get perfect, with glaring holes in it.

[BillyRueben]

So basically the Star Trek: Voyager story in reverse?

[Aleskander]

Ok, I tracked down a statement from a crewmember:

Our trailer shows a weapon test () which was meant to show that the entire ship is essentially one huge cannon. By removing the engine block and shooting out the back they can go super fast. As for slowing down, all they have to do is shoot out the front again, or use the smaller engines to turn themselves around and accelerate in the other direction (the reason to do this is they are using the shield in the back as a pusher plate, whereas in the front there would be nothing to absorb the impacts).
As for angry crew members, that would be something we would love to explore in a longer version. But alas it is a short and we tried to pack a lot in there!
Really happy to see people discussing it!

Which just confirms that those guys don't have a clue about physics and did not care much to make this believable, which is a really bad thing for scifi.

Tel me what's wrong about this, I didn't see the video but from what you quoted I don't see anything wrong science wise.

[Gothars]

Why do you care if you didn't see the video? oO

There is lots of nonsense, but to pick one: a pusher plate is a device for propulsion where you have (nuclear) explosions behind a reinforced plate and then the shock wave hits the plate and pushes it (and the attached spaceship) forward. In the movie they had a hole in the plate (which was not really a plate, but just a broader part of the spaceship) and fired a beam through it. The plate does not even have an effect.

And if they somehow did need that plate for propulsion, why can they just "shoot out the front" again to decelerate?

And if they can generate thrust with the frontal beam, why did they not just turn the ship around to fire instead of separating their goddamn engines?

And so on and so on....

[K-64]

Thing is, sci-fi doesn't need to be 100% absolutely realistic. The latter half of the genre's name defines such. Science fiction.

[Gothars]

Not realistic, but it has to make sense. This film aimed to be science fiction, after all. One could probably make up lots of "reasons" and technobabble why everything in that movie has to be as it is and explain away all the gaps, but that's so much less elegant than just making sense from the start.

Science fiction is the extrapolation of known scientific principles into the future. Those can be primarily of technological nature, then you get hard scifi. Or they can focus on social or psychological sciences, resulting in soft scifi.
If you toss science out completely you end up with future themed fantasy.

Which is fun in itself (star wars etc) but very different.
Sadly most people understand everything with starships in it as science fiction, even if it's the equivalent of Harry Potter in space.

[K-64]

So because they take some liberties from "established" physics to make a form of locomotion for a ship that also looks nice means that you are entirely justified in panning the work? That severely limits the amount of sci-fi you can enjoy then. Namely to none at all, that I can think of

[Axiege]

There are pretty much 3 kinds of sci-fi Gothars. What you want is hard sci-fi, in which great lengths are gone to in order to make everything seem physically possible given our current understanding of the universe. Fantasy sci-fi is the complete opposite, where the technologies presented are too far advanced for our current understanding, and even attempting to fudge together some explanation wouldn't add to the story anyway. Soft sc-fi is kind of in the middle, where the basics of a technology's operation will be given, but the intricacies and hows and whys won't be because they don't really matter.

(Source: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness )

You can however definitely fault a piece for going fantasy sci-fi and then throwing in some fudged vaguely techy-sounding explanation for things that don't need them, 'cause that'll turn off people whose preferences lie all over the spectrum.

[Gothars]

So because they take some liberties from "established" physics to make a form of locomotion for a ship that also looks nice means that you are entirely justified in panning the work? That severely limits the amount of sci-fi you can enjoy then. Namely to none at all, that I can think of

What does panning mean in this context?


You misunderstand me. I like many works of fiction that are clearly not scientific at all and don't try to be. But they have to have an internal logic and keep to the rules that they set for themselves. A laser-sword has to stay a sword and not become and wand.

In (real) science fiction the internal logic is almost identical to real world logic, allowing for some deviations like artificial gravity or FTL to enable telling the story.

This movie tries to be accurate* at some points (like the lateral g-force working in the compartment with deactivated artificial gravity when the ship first starts accelerating) but completely disregards logic at other points. The inconsistency ruins it for me.

You can however definitely fault a piece for going fantasy sci-fi and then throwing in some fudged vaguely techy-sounding explanation for things that don't need them, 'cause that'll turn off people whose preferences lie all over the spectrum.

It's the other way round here though, the movie is clearly aiming for hard sci-fi ...and failing.

*

C isn’t a mainstream sci-fi movie, it is a tribute to scientific ideals and a departure from the sci-fi status quo.

A compelling sci-fi action/drama about one woman's vision for the next logical step in human development: the leap from interplanetary to interstellar colonization.

C proposes a space-age manifest destiny in the shadow of extinction. In an era where science and technology are too often vilified, we believe that science-fiction should inspire us to surpass our limits and use the tools available to us to create a better future for our descendants.