except for Jim, who it turns out is a postgraduate student getting his Phd in geophysics, and actually goes to the trouble to work out how such a planet would be feasible. On the subject of Darths and Droids and this trope, the players decry Naboo as being unrealistic for structural reasons.Another: The Square-Cube Law notwithstanding, the buildings are so slender in comparison to height, that the slightest breeze would probably cause them to buckle.Its central chamber is so large that unless the air inside was kept extremely dry, clouds would condense in the upper tiers. One notable offender is the Senate Building.
It's even mentioned in one novel that Coruscant somehow still has ice caps, and the characters go skiing. There's also the issue of how a city-spanning planet could possibly void all the heat that it generates, not to mention the gaseous exhaust of trillions of vehicles, building systems, and industrial facilities.There is a lot of debate of how possible/impossible the city-planet of Coruscant is, and not least the concept of miles-high buildings and the infrastructure required to maintain them and the population they contain.Star Wars started as a self-aware Space Opera, no matter how much fans wanted to take it too seriously later.Just the stabilizing and moving systems alone would be a nightmare. A bipedal machine is, with anything resembling modern technology (or in the near-future sans Handwavium), a horribly complex, inefficient, and dangerous way to design a war machine. Mecha in general often touch this trope.Full Metal Panic! actually used this in an interesting way: One Humongous Mecha fell apart once the Applied Phlebotinum allowing it to ignore its own weight failed.Eventually, it does get built, but it's a barely-functional one just for show so that the Big Bad can steal credit from the hero for saving the world from it. 20th Century Boys features an engineer who gets kidnapped to build one and rants at his kidnappers about just how undoable it really is.(Even he applies Artistic Licence though.) Shirow Masamune, is in fact, an engineer.Is there anything with Humongous Mecha that doesn't fit into this?.See also: Artists Are Not Architects, Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale, Square-Cube Law. Related to No OSHA Compliance, as process safety is a pretty big issue for most engineers in Real Life. If the work is set in modern times, you're supposed to ignore it, but if it is in a sci-fi or fantasy setting, it's a toss-up whether it will be ignored completely, explained as being made of Unobtainium or Applied Phlebotinum of some nature, or only working because A Wizard Did It or a Higher-Tech Species show us how.Ī very frequent cause of Awesome but Impractical. Even machines that have been properly "designed" and thought through will make no sense whatsoever if there is clearly another, much more efficient way to do what they do. And then there's failure to think outside the box – that is, failure to consider that there might be other, perhaps less spectacular ways to get the job done.Fuel consumption? Maintenance needs? Heat dissipation? They're the last things most writers worry about. Even those writers that pay some attention to functionality often can't be bothered to think things through.This is often the case with spaceships in softer Science Fiction. Many writers will not even think about functionality when designing a machine they're more concerned with the "look" and "feel" their machines convey rather than whether they actually make sense given the function they're supposed to perform.When you let a writer of fiction dream up a machine, odds are good that you'll end up with something that is horribly inefficient, unsafe, or just plain impossible. It's a challenging job, involving analytical thinking and mathemathics as well as creativity – and last but not least, common sense. In Real Life, an engineer's job is to design machines or structures that perform a certain task, and perform it efficiently, reliably and safely.