On 6/20/2020 1:51 AM, Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at yahoo.com (via tml list) wrote: > On Saturday, June 20, 2020, 12:53:32 AM MST, Kelly St. Clair > <xxxxxx@efn.org> wrote: > > > On 6/20/2020 12:45 AM, Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at yahoo.com (via > tml list) wrote: > > > Or just fall back. "Tragically, when applied to other purposes, the > > destruction of the space vessel inevitably occurred. Scientists have > > been studying the phenomenon for many centuries but have made no > > progress in understanding or correcting the problem". > > So, we're back to "magic". > > -- > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > What was it Arthur C Clarke used to say about the relationship 'tween > 'science' & 'magic'? Here's the thing, though: Sure, to most people the Jump drive is a black box, it's effing magic. But to the people who work with them, who design and build and run and maintain them, they are machines, technology, with known properties and technical details and performance. They may not fully understand /why/ it works, but they do know /how/ it works. They may not go around /explaining/ this to anyone in earshot (see Roddenberry's axiom), but the practical operation of a Jump drive is no more a mystery to them than internal combustion engines are to us. And where this becomes a problem is that, IMO, most game designers (or science fiction writers, etc) do not have the time or interest or imagination or technical background to fully work out the details of their magic box's operation, and its implications and effects upon society, its connections to other technologies in use, or other potential applications. That's left to us clever monkeys, I mean fans, and we tend to be pretty damn good at finding things that the creators missed. And by that I mean "holes big enough to fly a battleship through." Every time a creator invents or describes a thing, in a couple of lines of dialogue in a script or text in a novel or rulebook, often with no more consideration than "what do I need to make this story work", it's like setting a place for the Law of Unintended Consequences and ringing the dinner bell. There are pitfalls in both being too vague /and/ too specific. In my experience, the writers who handle fictional technology best (including all the connections I mentioned above) tend to be, perhaps not surprisingly, engineers as well. -- --------------- Kelly St. Clair xxxxxx@efn.org
