Kelly St. Clair <xxxxxx@efn.org> wrote:

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.

Keen insight here (including the Roddenberry tag).

You had me at "no more consideration than 'what do I need to make this story work'" but, unfortunately, lost me at "engineers." Frederik Pohl--who Wikipedia says dropped out of Brooklyn Technical High at 17 and served as an air corps enlisted weatherman--had an interesting editorial about this sort of thing in ~Galaxy~ way back in 1968:

https://archive.org/stream/Galaxy_v27n05_1968-12_modified

I love the last bit about "a good science-fiction story" being "able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam."

In my experience,* engineers have not generally been the folks who are particularly adept at "predicting the traffic jam." I once sat at a CAD workstation--locked away in a classified facility--listening to a handful of my colleagues spend the better part of a Monday morning arguing about the purpose of the curtains hanging on the walls of a cinema, eventually concluding they were useless because they didn't seem to have any functional role. It never occurred to any of them that the curtains might have aesthetic value. . . .

Cheers,

David

* Includes a graduate degree in engineering and having designed structural components for stealth aircraft, hand tools for space-walking astronauts and tools for human-machine interface design for aircraft flight decks. I recognize the experience of others may vary; perhaps I've been an outlier in my experience.
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