#technobabble or science?

[captain-starskull]

Computer mice don’t have tails anymore. We shouldn’t call them mice we should call them hamsters.

[quarks-pussy]

Idec anymore, I'll say it. I like technobabble. Adore it actually! It sets the atmosphere well and I like when they try to have it make internal sense and I can see the worldbuilding. Maybe I'm just a professional tech nerd but I truly, genuinely enjoy technobabble and in fact I think most franchises could use a little more of it. Fight me

[nulfaga]

Btw where are the humanities on the enterprise. Why no historians and sociologists on the front lines. The universal translator was a devastating move for linguistic plot points (except I suppose the darmok and jalad episodes). But also: you are a warship staffed exclusively with graduates of the federation's military academy and you whine when other planetary govts don't take you at your word when you say "we're just here to explore we prommy"? Why even send a warship to presumably make first contact with potentially hundreds of new species. I can't believe i'm saying this but i need to read some econ/public admin papers talking about the nuts and bolts of the star trek universe. i'm dissatisfied

[mushroom-through-the-stargate]

bestieeeeeeeeee i would like some Info Dumping about the asteroid field scene in sga pls and thank yooooooooooooou gimme all the Fun Facts

omg ok ok ok SO im gonna go full mckay here alright so just keep that in mind just listen listen asteroid fields? not that densely packed. at all. theyre so far apart from each other theyre barely in each others gravity fields theyre just atlantis was not in peril in that way the big asteroids can't- its not physically possible for them to be that close together the gravity would cause them to collide with each other please cinema stop making densely packed asteroid fields you're making my heart sad

HOWEVER

the micro asteroids are entirely accurate everything in space is moving incredibly fast and speed equals kinetic energy and we all know e=mc² tiny amount of mass incredible amount of energy those teeny tiny asteroids WOULD be like bullets same devastating effect same or faster speeds why couldnt THAT be the entire peril those little whizzing space pebbles couldve knocked out systems it happens all the time on the iss AND to top it all off the tiny ones ARE that densely packed so they could be knocking out systems left and right they could be breaking windows cracking crystals severing wires you name it theyd break it

matter of fact, John's predictable solution of blowing up the big asteroids in their way was actually possibly making matters worse because ✨️shrapnel✨️ while yes you can shoot a bazooka at a chair and it'll get out of your way, there will be splinters in everything in a 50 foot (or more) radius thats just how explosives work

[pseud0knots]

affirmation of the day: it’s ok to reblog a post that mentions silicon-based life forms without talking about the thermodynamics of silicon oxidation & reduction in the tags. Nobody cares that Si=O bonds are vastly more stable than Si—H meaning that interconversion of different silicon species is energetically much more frustrated than say interconversion between the same types of bonds but with carbon in place of silicon. I can let people enjoy things

[aquamonstra]

How does one become a science consultant on a sci-fi series?

Like do you HAVE to be a real scientist first?

I have ZERO science on my resume but I KNOW I would be so good at this like come on man PUT ME IN COACH.

[sluttyquarantinetheory]

I think part of why I'm not as big of a fan of fantasy is that there's not a lot of technobabble. Like occasionally you get some wizard type that goes off explaining how the magic crystalized cryptocorpse enhancer uses rainbow energy to hang life and death in the inbetween of reality or some shit, but most of the time it's just like "well I drew a circle and spoke some latin"

[technicallywrite]

I am terrified delighted to share the first chapter of my first fic in 20+ years. There will be more, and yes that's a threat.

[therottenkingsreckoning]

[featureenvyproductions]

but you know what IS COMING?

The next couple chapters of Eyan Eternal!

why spend your holiday (if you live in the US) wallowing in depression with your homophobic family when you could wallow in depression with gay characters weathering a dying future??

come read more of my latest self indulgent nightmare comic tOMORROW (oh wait I guess technically it's today bc I mean Wednesday but it's like dark outside and I just woke up from an accidental 6 hour nap induced by volunteer work where I ran around cleaning up messes for like the entire time and time now has 0 meaning for me)

or possibly another day but like still this weekend but AIMING FOR TOMORROW

stay tuned pals I will be posting links and images sooooon

[hesgomorrah]

okay maybe asking for help is good sometimes. i just mentioned to a friend where i had gotten stuck on a fic i was working on and they gave me the exact answer i was looking for in a single message, saving me from hours of aimless googling

[powerfulkicks]

remembering how much i love science fiction

[spinfoamgames]

A set of new random generators are now available on The Merry Manticore, all related to science fiction settings: Technobabble, Fictional Particles, and Fictional Elements!

As usual, here's a handful of samples:

Close the hydrogen waveguide

Tinstrium

Psi Axinoior

Orient the fermion joiner

Xennethorium

Theta Anti-nerptatron

Invert the graviton intermixer

Verbonide

Weak Charadron

Oh, and some other update news: items that you mark as favorites should now be saved to your browser so they won't be reset from one visit to the next any more!

[robotsprinkles]

trying to figure out the mechanics of energon for Encyclopedia Cybertronia and the (still unnamed) tf fanfic

(I'm going to need to do so much editing. this reads like ass)

I was originally going to make energon some sort of stored plasma medium (and I still might) but the "plasma as power/energy source" thing felt too. I don't know. standard? easy? "plasma as the generic sci-fi go-to for [insert worldbuilding/technology requirement here]". but then again antimatter's pretty well used in sci fi as well so.

also I wanted to have a thing with the different weapon types being clearly differentiated (plasma primarily melts/burns and producing emps, only doing significant kinetic/explosive damage when fired fast enough, laser weaponry being the highest precision type with basically no kinetic impact and also being. y'know. lightspeed travel time. energon weaponry having the highest explosive damage (excluding nukes), etc)

[transmutationisms]

people on here talk about therapy like the characters on star trek talk about science. so comforting to know there's no such thing as a problem that cannot be solved by magical technobabble immanentising the psychological eschaton

[dduane]

Sorry if you’ve answered this before, but any tips on improving your technobabble?

I originally came at this problem from two different directions. The first one took considerably more time to enable.

(a) Be familiar (or get familiar) with the languages in which most scientific terms are coined: Latin and Greek.

I took Latin in high school, already knowing that I was a science person and that Latin was considered "the language of science". (And medicine, which also turned out to be handy for me later.) I also started studying Greek in college—and, sigh, I'm still studying it.

Once you're starting to get familiar with the languages, practice coining terms as you need them. While it's considered a failure of style in scientific naming to mix Latin and Greek in the same term, I've found it better to be guided by euphony than a slavish obedience to the rules.

Because sometimes a word or term just sounds right. "Temporospatial claudication", for example, was coined by running a Latin physics term head-on into a medical one. "Claudication" was (and still is in some countries) a term for a constriction in a blood vessel. Its origin in the Latin claudo- and clausum roots is responsible for the Emperor Claudius's name, which would once have implied somebody who limps secondary to such a circulatory problem. I simply bent the term's most basic meaning off into a different direction.

...So you see how that goes. Bang the roots together and see what successfully sticks.

The second approach is a little easier. But only a little.

(b) Base your coined terminology on the conventions and rhythms of real technobabble: by which I mean actual, technical scientific language.

The best way to pick this up in sufficient depth is by reading technical papers in your field of interest—lots of them—so you can see how the pros communicate to/with one another. Every field has its own jargon lying around just begging to be stolen... assuming you observe very carefully how it's correctly used. Otherwise you risk outing yourself as nothing but an interested but insufficiently-committed bystander. You must also be super careful not to screw with the interior grammar of such techspeak... as inevitably it'll have one.

For example: when I was tooling up for writing The Wounded Sky, I spent easily three months reading papers in/on hyperdimensional physics. (Not that I wouldn't have done this anyway. It's a fascinating subject, and before I went into nursing I'd been a physics major, so I had a fair amount of the necessary background to understand what I was reading.) Even in the 80s there were a lot of such papers around, and in those distant pre-Internet days I was helped a whole lot by living just across the road from the impressive science library at Cal State Northridge.

During that period I could be found in the periodicals racks once or twice every week, digging through the monthly journals on the hunt for material that would be germane to the plot I was boiling. I found ten times more goodies than I ever could reasonably have used. The toughest part was winnowing it all down to what I actually needed to scatter here and there for atmosphere's sake, or to plant in specific spots to grease the plot's wheels. (My favorite remains the [legit!] paper with the delightful title, "Taub-NUT Space as a Counterexample to Almost Anything.")

Anyway, I must have got something about that whole business right, since one Princeton physics professor whose work I'd cited at the end of the novel asked me if he could use it in teaching his classes. :)

But there's a third element involved; more an attitude that you apply to what you've produced while employing the first one or two approaches.

You have to treat your coined terms as if they're absolutely real... something that any person educated in the science you're working with would know. The voice and tone in which you write using them has to reflect this absolute confidence and commitment to their reality. Because if you don't—at least while you're writing—absolutely believe in them enough to speak confidently about them, no one else will believe in them either.

But then that's a solid general principle anyway. If you don't do something you've created the courtesy of taking it seriously enough to believe in it (or its reality inside the larger reality you're creating), it won't long survive contact with exterior realities like the inside of your reader's mind.

HTH!

ETA: here's that citation page from the end of Wounded Sky. I believe it remains the only Star Trek novel with a cites list at the end. :)