Why isn't hard sci fi more popular?

Why isn't hard sci fi more popular?

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because normies have bad taste
see: team fortress 2

Because it takes actual effort, you can't just justify everything in your universe as "DUDE IT'S JUST SCIFI TECH LMAO". Also braindead normalfags don't even know what gravity is, so to them hard scifi has no importance as they wouldn't be able to understand the work that went into it anyway.

wot film

The Expanse

okay user, what is gravity?

Where are the radiators?

Man I want to get my hands on those spaceship models

Co0nsequence of spacetime curvature (there's a lot more to say but I'm not bored right now). Point wasn't really that anyway, even though 99.999% of normalfags would respond a force, the point is most normalfags don't think. When they see a large ship floating into a hangar, they think "oh cool brah" instead of thinking about how and why it's floating. They also won't think about the insane forces exerted on the people inside a ship when they start doing anime-tier dogfighting in space with hairpin turns at tens of thousands of meters per second. Point that out to a normalfag and the response will be "DUDE JUST TURN YOUR BRAIN OFF LMAO".

That's why hard scifi isn't worth it for most, it's a tonne of effort for almost no profit.

To make this more videogames, pic related is by far the most realistic space combat game I know of right now. It's really good too, hope you know your orbital mechanics.

Right here, actually.

The Expanse is such a fucking godly show

>tfw you'll never be a Martian

it's too hard

If it were hard scifi that dude would be kicked off the mission for endangering the ship.

>TFW no 2+ meter tall Mars gf ;_;

he's the pilot of a small crew and I believe in that episode he's drunk and bored passing the time while everyone else is down on a moon base doing cool stuff

Is the show close to being concluded? I only watch shows when they're finished with a proper finale.

>Because it takes actual effort, you can't just justify everything in your universe as "DUDE IT'S JUST SCIFI TECH LMAO"

Except every 'hard' sci-fi setting has a faster-than-light drive which has no basis in real physics.

Because hard sci-fi is a meme

The whole "lower gravity=being taller" shit always annoyed me. you don't get taller, your back just "uncompresses" by like an inch or two. Also, that shit is terrible for your back an will give you back pain if you're not working out a bunch to compensate.

You could theoretically go from point a to b faster than light traveling through a normal vacuum could without breaking any laws of physics.
Just ask Alcubierre.

>supposedly hard scifi setting
>lasers are the long range weapon of choice in space

How to spot Brainlet "Science" Fiction 101.

Well technically you can travel faster than light. Depends how fast the light is travelling.

>You could theoretically go from point a to b faster than light

No you can't. Nothing can go faster than light. Light tries, it's just not able.

Those are railguns as far as I know.

Lasers make plenty of sense in space

1) No atmosphere = no diffraction and scattering. Beam stays perfectly intact and perfectly collimated until it reaches the target.

2) Starships need a lot of electricity, lasers need a lot of electricity. It's the same synergy that makes lasers a good weapon for nuclear powered sea vessels.

You can't really be bitter to them; most people don't really understand and care about those subjects.

Also forgot to mention, it depends who's observing the spaceship and the light.

Modern sci-fi tends to be obnoxious nu-male shit, ain't nobody got time for that.

Also 3) at long distances you want your projectile going as fast as possible so the enemy can't dodge it as easily. Even the most insane railgun will only be shooting things at less than 1% the speed of light

You can technically speaking end up at your destination faster than light moving through a normal part of space could.

You seem quite bitter.

>hard science fiction
>there must be no fictitious elements
spotted the dullard

>it depends who's observing the spaceship and the light.
It doesn't, this is what 'relativity' covers.

>Beam stays perfectly intact and perfectly collimated
WRONG.
No laser ever made has a perfectly cylindrical beam. There are always minuscule imperfections due to the limits of manufacturing techniques, meaning that the laser will slightly "bloom" and, at greater distances, the light will be too spread out to do damage.

>Nothing can go faster than light
>hop on car
>turn on headlights
>beam light now move at lightspeed+car speed
checkmate atheists

>Nothing can go faster than light.

In a vacuum.

>HUR DUR PEOPLE SO DUMB I SO SMART
>LOL I KNO IT NOT REALISTIC

People like you are the most insufferable faggots.

This, the point of hard Sci-Fi is not that there's no fiction, rather that the world has set rules and the story and tech follows those rules as if they were real. If you've previously shown that something works in a certain way you stick to it or are forced to find a reasonable explanation that still adheres to the worlds rules to allow the change.

Yeah, but why did he want to shoot the handrail?

Because it's boring honestly af honestly, even this webm is sending me to nap country. also this guy is right, nobody gives a fuck about space shit and how it works -- only literal autists are interested in that shit.

the book is fucking better

>There are always minuscule imperfections due to the limits of manufacturing techniques

No, due to current-day mass production techniques. A space laser would be made in a bunnysuit lab like for working with silicon.

You also would not necessarily use glass lenses

Lasers still suffer from massive diffraction in anything but deep space due to the insane distances involved, not to mention the insane lens array length required to keep precision at those distances. That coupled with terrible efficiency against armour (that's just something lasers can't escape) means lasers would actually be pretty terrible at dealing damage. As said, these minuscule imperfections would become massive due to the insane distances involved in space. At that point, the only feasible solution is getting closer, at which point missiles and projectiles lose their travel time disadvantage. They would, however, be great at targeting small exposed components (radiators, engines, guns) and disabling them.

The point of hard sci-fi is that that the fiction are the events, which are achieved by our IRL tech level.

I also throught that he was gonna shoot it, but seeing the numbers on the side of the gun I now think that he was just measuring the distance with the targeting laser.

For it to be 'hard science fiction', none of the science can be fictional. Only the fiction can be fictional. Like the setting.

The problem with sci-fi is that sci-fi nerds are quick to No True Scotsman any kind of sci-fi which isn't to their hyper autistic specifications. It would be like fantasy fans saying a series is no longer "true fantasy" if the characters use any kind of technology above medieval levels.

No, if you are born on Mars you will grow taller as the gravity doesn't pull down on you so much. An earthling would 'uncoompress'

Wow, a good post on Sup Forums

so, Breaking Bad is now hard science fiction?
is The Big Bang Theory also Hard Science Fiction then?

You don't even necessarily need an atomically perfect collimator that makes a perfectly parallel beam, you just need the laser to hit the target. You can have computerized lenses to focus the target without worrying about beam parallelization.

Yes and so is most porn movies.

the "hardness" is only how well they stick to the rules, whatever those rules are.

>Facebook filename
>Mobile screenshot

>by our IRL tech level

That sounds very not sci-fi. That sounds almost as far away from sci-fi as fantasy is. Unless by our tech level you mean your understanding of physics.

Where did you get that idea? What part of my post gave it to you?

I always thought that lasers would be great anti-missile systems. Obviously you'd have to be outside the explosive radius of the missile but it's physically impossible for it to "outrun" a laser.

this looks so fucking stupid.

>none of the science can be fictional - so modern tech setting

>source: your ass

Post some actual proof before you spout that bullshit.

youtube.com/watch?v=xvs_f5MwT04
haha time to shill the best lispy autist on the internet

...

>not just eyeballing it

way to make the stunt magnitudes less impressive.

This is stupid. The camera shake and everything else.

Because nobody cares, really.

>facebook gwoop
>feowetical

Really interested but fuck watchin a half an hour video of a guy with a fucking lisp.

The problem is, you're still losing a lot of power and laser ablation is already terrible against armour, and that's not counting that spaceships could simply fart out smoke or liquid to create a cloud around them that would absolutely wreck a laser. Lasers could literally take hours to days to wear down the armour plate of a large-ish spaceship, and that's not considering countermeasures (aforementioned smoke), anti-laser armour (there's a lot of stuff way better than steel at that), the fact that lasers couldn't fire long bursts due to overheating in space (no air cooling at all), and that the damage would be very localized to a tiny point (so if you aren't always hitting the same spot, you start over). Missiles and projectiles, however, can fuck up anything they hit even without passing the armour plate due to massive internal spalling and structural stress. Of course all this is with at least semi-realistic power limitations, if you go full science magic with star-destroying lasers shit changes.

Yes and no, a laser would be great for targeting fast movers for obvious reasons, but you hit the issue above when targeting a missile from the front. The front cap of a missile would be very easy to heavily armour (remember, no gravity so missiles can weigh more), making it very hard to a laser to take out. However, disregarding that (e.g. retards didn't armour their missiles or you for some reason can target the engines), lasers would be great for point defence.

Because hard scifi is an oxymoron. There is no hard fantasy for a reason.

Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of science involved in making a hard sci-fi setting. Go figure, right? And if you try and make such a setting, and slip up and get some of the science wrong, there are thousands of fanboys perfectly willing to sperg out into the wee hours of the night about how shit your show is.

Basically, you damn near need a doctorate in physics and NASA approval to make a hard scifi setting. It just isn't worth the hassle. And while you can go on about how dumb the normies are, not everyone really has the time or inclination to study physics just so they can appreciate this one show on TV.

books 5 and 6 make me hope for an OPA genocide.

The eternal belter is behind everything.

I am not the user who linked the vid, but
you will get used to it

besides a half hour vid is pretty short for him.
But what I like about his vids, is that he is not just rambling, he compiles a proper script with logically following talking points and stuff.

Because hard sci-fi is really, really, really hard to do. You don't have a perfect model of the universe in your head, so errors in your sci-fi are unavoidable. People complain even about really basic shit like The Martian and how it was totally impossible because of some small errors in the scenario, and that shit was basically contemporary. Extend it 100, 200, 300 years or more into the future and your "hard" sci-fi is going to be so full of holes it's basically science-fantasy anyway. Not that you can't respect a guy for at least trying.

But most people also don't really care that much, like lord autismo right here points out .

It also has tons of huge downsides, in how it invalidates almost all the common sci-fi tropes. You can throw pretty much all the 'fun' shit out the window. No FTL; (probably?) no wormholes; no force fields; no fancy space battles with pewpewlasers; no psychic powers; no lightsabers; no retarded asscrap humanoid aliens that are and act like just humans in crappy face makeup; etc. People don't want that shit. They want explosions and lasers and klingons.

In essence, it's just not worth it.

It doesn't exist by that name, but there is a difference between high fantasy and low fantasy that parallels soft scifi and hard scifi

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_fantasy

>being THAT guy

>Lasers could literally take hours to days to wear down the armour plate of a large-ish spaceship

This is nonsense, you haven't done the math.

>He has to let the carrier itself come into range.

Dude, launch drones after intercepting them, use the extra Delta-v to intercept and pulverise it. Why do you hate gold medals?

>no giant glowing energy beam
whats the fucking point

when the fuck is season 2 coming out on netflix

Imagine a world where the tone of ME1 persisted with ME2 and ME3, and all the games that aped ME matched that tone as well

Because hard sci-fi tends to be complex, and complicated things take a lot of effort to make and aren't easily digestible i.e. there's no mass appeal

Don't tell me you haven't seen it yet just because it's not on Netflix

This guy's job is kinda rad.

that's also the world where Hillary Clinton got elected, the Cubs lost, WW3 happened and the cetaceans inherited the Earth

Chemical and gas-based are indeed suffering from diffraction, but they are not the only solution. There are things like X-ray lasers, which are could be litteraly "weapon of doom" for space combat, because they will be capable of initiating nuclear fission in any material they hit. So damage they inflicted goes not from trying to cut small hole through enemy armour but by detonating nuke at point blank range.

Problem? While they are theoreticaly possible, but we dont have a technology to build one, because that will require some crazy superconducting material that we cant produce.

Yet. We dont have a technology to build a simple CO2 laser like 70 years ago...

Sounds better than Mass Effect Andromeda.

With the use of a focusing lens, the beam waist can be calibrated to the distance of the target, ensuring that the imperfect collimation is focused to a point on the target.

Stop browsing here right now and go read: childrenofadeadearth.wordpress.com/2016/07/02/the-photon-lance/

Dunno why people bother posting lengthy explanation when this guy has done it for them already and they obviously know of it.

>spaceships could simply fart out smoke or liquid to create a cloud around them that would absolutely wreck a laser
That stuff weighs though.
And every gram counts when you are ins pace.
Go on projectrho, someone did the calculations and turns out you might as well use normal armor since the effectiveness is the exact same

I always thought that the difference between normal Sci-fi and hard Sci-fi was that normal both just handwaves most the science as space-magic and usually has different coloured/textured humans as aliens where as hard tries its best to at least make up an explanation and has aliens that actually look like other species and not just people who had modelling clay and a bucket of paint dumped on them

That's very thin compared to armor.

What if someone made a spaceship coated with mirrors? Try hitting that with lasers, nerds

I just finished s1 but cant find torrents for s2

combat lasers don't fire in visible spectrum

And the tool he's using is very small compared to a weapons-grade laser on a large frigate, destroyer, carrier, etc.

>thin plates
>has to be done point blank
What happens if he takes five steps back?

1337x.to/torrent/2177061/The-EXPANSE-Complete-Season-2-S02-2017-720p-AMZN-WebRip-x264/

0.1% of laser energy gets through reflective coating, a very small area of coating is vaporized, now 100% of laser energy is being dumped into the mirror's substrate, mirror warps, heat and vaporized material destroys rest of coating

And at distances billions of times shorter, not to mention you will notice the cable, suggesting the power supply is far from portable. It doesn't scale like you seem to think.

Well, that laser is deliberately very unfocused so he doesn't slice a wall in half if he mishandles it
So it wouldn't cut if he did that. But certainly it could if you build it that way

Hardness is not a quality that elevates a work. It's trivial unless the work in question is a literal textbook used to teach people physics or engineering. That's different from the goals of narrative fiction.