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Artistic License – Engineering
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In Real Life, an engineer's job is to design processes, machines or structures that perform a certain task, and perform it efficiently, reliably and safely. It's a challenging job, involving analytical thinking and mathemathics, as well as creativity — and last but not least, common sense. Not so in fiction. When you let a writer of fiction dream up a machine, odds are good that you'll end up with something that is horribly inefficient, unsafe, or just plain physically impossible. The reasons for this vary: Many writers will not even think about functionality when designing a machine. They're more concerned with the "look" and "feel" their machines convey rather than whether they actually make sense given the function they're supposed to perform. This is often the case with spaceships in softer Science Fiction. Even those writers that pay some attention to functionality often can't be bothered to think things through. Fuel consumption? Maintenance needs? Heat dissipation? They're the last things most writers worry about. And then there's failure to think outside the box — that is, failure to consider that there might be other, perhaps less spectacular ways to get the job done. Even machines that have been properly designed and thought out will make no sense whatsoever if there is clearly another, much more efficient way to do what they do. If the work is set in modern times, you're supposed to ignore it, but if it is in a sci-fi or fantasy setting, it's a toss-up whether it will be ignored completely, explained as being made of Unobtainium or Applied Phlebotinum of some nature, or only working because A Wizard Did It or a Higher-Tech Species shows us how. A very frequent cause of Awesome, but Impractical. Cool, but Inefficient is a subtrope. Related to No OSHA Compliance, as process safety is a pretty big issue for most engineers in Real Life. See also: Artists Are Not Architects, Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale, Square-Cube Law. Subtropes: Accidental Astronaut: In Real Life, spacecraft are designed with so many safety and security checks that the chances of someone accidentally launching themselves into space are zero. Alcohol Is Gasoline: Some internal combustion engines can burn alcohol, but others can't. Mecha: Real-life military hardware trends towards the Boring, but Practical because of a need for ruggedness and self-sufficiency. Mecha are anything but: humanoid locomotion is a lot more complex, inefficient, and hard on machinery than it seems. Humongous Mecha: The same problem as normal-sized mecha with the addition of problems with the Square-Cube Law. Murder by Cremation: This was perhaps more plausible in the past, but modern crematoriums are designed with plenty of failsafes to prevent potential murder victims from being shoved into one and set alight. No OSHA Compliance: Rules about workplace and public safety are ignored for the sake of story / Rule of Cool. Outlandish Device Setting Rube Goldberg Device: Because plenty of people think that more complicated contraptions are cooler and better; in reality, engineers prefer simplicity and efficiency. Star Scraper: While we have extremely tall buildings now, they're not by these standards, which tend to abuse the Square-Cube Law. |
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DBTropes | |
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The Main Characters Do Everything | |
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On a more philosophical level, the franchise generally doesn't seem at all clear on the vast differences between engineers, spacegoing engineers, scientists, and so on. Presumably an artifact of having The Main Characters Do Everything... on the other hand, this might explain a lot about Starfleet. | |
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Awesome, but Impractical | |
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A subversion with the Odin, which is noted to be laughably Awesome, but Impractical. So Swann comes up with the Thor, a smaller-scale, mass-producible version... but by no Means a Mini-Mecha, the thing needs to be airlifted by a Drop Ship that can hold two tanks. | |
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Lethal Chef | |
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They decided that it would be a great idea if instead of metal wiring, most of the ship's utterly vital systems are connected with gel packs, which are basically biological goo. Not only does it open up engineering weaknesses that no good old copper wire would face (such as one instance where it was poisoned by Neelix's cooking) but also cannot be replicated or grown. Yes, they chose the one system that couldn't be made on the fly with their replicators. They also have have other engineering slip ups like have no emergency lights and manual door overrides that don't work if it doesn't have power. | |
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Rule of Cool | |
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The chicken walkers (AT-STs) are just walking targets. The Hoth walkers (AT-ATs) make a bit more sense, if we take into account that repulsor coils big enough to make something as big as an AT-AT float would be such an energy drain that the power plant wouldn't be feasible for mass production. The only reason two AT-ATs got taken out at all was more Luke's Rule of Cool then anything else. note Then again, Expanded Universe information implies that the only reason the AT-ATs were a threat in the first place was because weather conditions on Hoth prevented the Rebels from using anything other than modified civilian airspeeders, which lacked the firepower necessary to dispatch the walkers. | |
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In-Universe | |
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This occurs In-Universe and is Lampshaded in Star Trek Judgment Rites, when Kirk and his team are placed into a World War 1 era German town created by the omnipotent Trelane (who has no clue about engineering, architecture, or urban design). Spock starts spotting all sorts of errors and oddities all over the place, and makes damn sure to point them all out. Even the layout of the town itself gets a comment from him. | |
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City Planet | |
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There's also the issue of how a planet-spanning city could possibly void all the heat that it generates, and the gaseous exhaust of trillions of vehicles, building systems, and industrial facilities. | |
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Castlevania (Franchise) | |
| Artistic License – Engineering / int_5cc0d020 | comment |
Most iterations of Castlevania have a tower that is not anchored to the ground, essentially floating in place with only a narrow bridge connecting it to the rest of the castle— It's usually where your final confrontation with Dracula takes place. This feature is so iconic that even a a simple rendering of the castle◊ has it. Hand Waved in that the castle is described as "a creature of chaos" and thus normally full of strange and impossible architecture. | |
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Star Wars (Franchise) | |
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Star Wars: There is a lot of debate of how possible/impossible the city-planet of Coruscant is, and not least the concept of miles-high buildings and the infrastructure required to maintain them and the population they contain. One notable offender is the Senate Building. Its central chamber is so large that unless the air inside was kept extremely dry, clouds would condense in the upper tiers. note This actually happens in some NASA buildings! There's also the issue of how a planet-spanning city could possibly void all the heat that it generates, and the gaseous exhaust of trillions of vehicles, building systems, and industrial facilities. Another: The Square-Cube Law notwithstanding, the buildings are so slender in comparison to height, that the slightest breeze would probably cause them to buckle. The chicken walkers (AT-STs) are just walking targets. The Hoth walkers (AT-ATs) make a bit more sense, if we take into account that repulsor coils big enough to make something as big as an AT-AT float would be such an energy drain that the power plant wouldn't be feasible for mass production. The only reason two AT-ATs got taken out at all was more Luke's Rule of Cool then anything else. note Then again, Expanded Universe information implies that the only reason the AT-ATs were a threat in the first place was because weather conditions on Hoth prevented the Rebels from using anything other than modified civilian airspeeders, which lacked the firepower necessary to dispatch the walkers. The prequels and The Clone Wars series make this worse, since the earlier designs were much more effective. The Clone equivalent to an AT-AT could walk straight up cliffs, had a lower center of gravity distributed further apart on more limbs, and had weapons that didn't all face forward just for one example... and vulnerable to the above-mentioned mines that the AT-AT have long legs against. For the record, the disadvantages of low height actually came up in the first Clone Wars cartoon, where Durge and his lancer droids were able to trash the AT-TE walkers with their lances. Maybe this is excessive —Suspension of Disbelief exists for some reason— but if as according to EU sources the reactor of Imperial Star Destroyers generate the same energy as a small star, unless they had very good heat dissipation technologies (not just the exhaust vents the Death Star had) there'd be enough waste heatnote Something impossible to avoid because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. to vaporize them. The Death Star's hypermatter reactor, far more powerful, has those same problems, but even worse. |
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Killer Robot | |
| Artistic License – Engineering / int_986dad9a | comment |
The animatronics are far above real-life animatronics, being more like full-fledged Killer Robots as opposed to computer-controlled puppets. Most animatronics are completely unable to walk around due to their wires, power supply etc. typically being below a stage and attached through the legs (which, incidentally, are not often built with functioning joints), and even if they could, they would break apart as animatronics are often designed to break if enough pressure is applied so as to prevent injury. If the Bite of '87 really happened, an animatronic's jaw would be the only serious casualty. Game Theory ran the numbers on this at one point and concluded while you could build a Bite-capable animatronic with standard pneumatic drives on the market today, doing so would be an example of such hideous over-engineering anyone would assume you had deliberately built a killing machine. (In short, the drives required are 1000 times more powerful than those typically used by a Chuck E. Cheese animatronic.) | |
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RealLife | |
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If anything else, the WH40K fighting vehicles resemble the World War One tanks, which themselves were ungainly and primitive contraptions of an era when nobody really knew what a tank ought to be. Eventually all other designs were surpassed by Renault FT-17 because it simply was the most practical, and they even today follow the same format: one revolving turret with one gun. In Real Life, the WH40K tanks would be large, poorly maneuverable targets with awful shot traps and perpendicular surfaces. | |
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Square-Cube Law | |
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Another: The Square-Cube Law notwithstanding, the buildings are so slender in comparison to height, that the slightest breeze would probably cause them to buckle. | |
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SuspensionOfDisbelief | |
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Maybe this is excessive —Suspension of Disbelief exists for some reason— but if as according to EU sources the reactor of Imperial Star Destroyers generate the same energy as a small star, unless they had very good heat dissipation technologies (not just the exhaust vents the Death Star had) there'd be enough waste heatnote Something impossible to avoid because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. to vaporize them. The Death Star's hypermatter reactor, far more powerful, has those same problems, but even worse. | |
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Mecha Show | |
| Artistic License – Engineering / int_e11e98dc | comment |
Omnipresent in Mecha Shows. A bipedal machine with anything resembling modern technology would be horribly complex and inefficient, and that's before the challenges of making a Humongous Mecha, THEN the exponentially increased complexity of Transforming or Combining Mecha while still having them work well. It's quicker to list the series that avert this. Shirow Masamune, is in fact, an engineer. (Even he applies Artistic Licence though.) Shoji Kawamori as well, and an aerospace engineer at that. Tsutomu Nihei is an architect/civil engineer by training, and it shows. 20th Century Boys features an engineer who gets kidnapped to build one and rants at his kidnappers about just how undoable it really is. Eventually, it does get built, but it's a barely-functional one just for show so that the Big Bad can steal credit from the hero for saving the world from it. Full Metal Panic! actually uses this in an interesting way: One Humongous Mecha falls apart once the Applied Phlebotinum allowing it to ignore its own weight fails. |
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We Will Use Manual Labor in the Future | |
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Digging into the lore of Battlefleet Gothic produces quite a few more of these. Among other things a "torpedo" is an eighty-metre long self-steering engine that overloads its reactor core when it gets close enough to something, which sounds reasonable enough... until you realize it gets transported from the magazine to the tubes by armies of serfs with pulleys and a trolley. | |
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Artistic License – Engineering |
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