Star trek is the shit
Star wars isn't... (though the KotoR games are very cool)
Lies. Star Trek is just Communist Feelgoodies In SPAAAAAAACE!
I can't stand treknobabble. Sure, I'll suspend my disbelief for FTL travel. But when you start to try to use real scientific terminology to
explain your scifi, and you use terms that have nothing to do with what you're talking about, the bubble pops. And how freaking many
Deus ex Machina plot devices of the week can you
have?! And why on Earth would you
ever bring civilian families on a vessel like the Enterprise?! A vessel whose primary mission is one of diplomacy and exploration (not to mention a heavily-armed flagship) is expecting to run into some trouble here and there. Bringing kids and civvies is flat-out irresponsible. And then the one-dimensional "aliens!" Klingons are all apparently idiotic SPACE VIKINGS who
have directed energy weapons, but infinitely
prefer to charge headlong into melee with one of the most poorly-designed weapons ever conceived! Apparently, their palce in Valhalla - er, the afterlife - is guaranteed by following the most idiotic combat tactics proposed by the loudest and stupidest suicidal maniac in your barely-organized unit.
And don't even get me
started with the Borg! They can "adapt" to directed energy weapons, but have demonstrably
not been able to adapt to physical damage, yet nobody thinks to use a freaking replicator to manufacture semiautomatic weapons. Hell, Picard managed to down several in First Contact by using a Tommy Gun on a Holodeck, and then promptly engages in an EVA operation with only a few phasers whose usefulness they
know will degrade after only a few shots, and Worf's
combat knife (itself a stupid implement whose design purpose, judging by the bizarre blade shape, was specifically engineered to become stuck in an opponent's ribs and be worthless)! And antimatter?! What a stupid power source - you need an active containment system to prevent it from annihilating with its container, meaning loss of power for even a moment results in KABLOOIE!
Bah!
I often enjoy watching Trek, but I find myself in unfortunate position of needing to just not
think at all about what I'm seeing and hearing to prevent my suspension of disbelief from completely evaporating.
Star Wars has reached a similar place. In teh original trilogy, very little technobabble was used - Han misued the term "parsec" to mean a unit of time as opposed to its actual meaning, which refers to distance (though subsequent novels and apologists have suggested that he was actually referring to literally shortening the run by making his route approach more closely to a black hole cluster, thus making a reference to distance more appropriate), and the concept of "ray shielding" (which presumably stops directed energy weapons but oddly does not affect visible light) struck me as somewhat absurd, but at least nobody tried to explain the destruction of the Death Star as reversing the quantum polarity of the gravitons in the unobtanium power core to cause a neutrino cascade effect, releasing destructive photons that will overload the plasma relay matrix and give Darth Vader a really bad headache.
Scifi series shouldn't try to explain how their supertech works. Better to just say "I have a faster-than-light travel mechanism."
/rant