Throughout the Star Trek universe, when in battle or trying to protect the ship, persons not on the ship must wait till the threat has left for the ship to safely turn off its shields so transport could be completed. Why, since the computers in the future are much better than ours, can't the computer momentarily turn off the shields for a fraction of a second to complete a transport, then restore the shields? With processors as fast as they are now, that seems like it wouldn't take much effort on the computer or operator of the computer to be able to accomplish. Answer I'm going to my source for this, one I've cited here before, the Star Trek: The Next Generation Writers' Technical Manual, Fourth Season Edition. This was sent to me directly, in a pitch package by the ST:TNG Script Supervisor Lolita Fatjo. This is one of the Writers' Guides. In other words, it tells the writers what they can and cannot do on screen. First, see another answer where I posted ano...

Falling Skies tells the story of the aftermath of a global invasion by extraterrestrials. Is the date of the invasion ever stated, or could it be inferred from other clues? Answer Based on the information from the pilot, the time frame appears to be right around six months prior to the start of the series. We learn that this is how long Tom has been with the Second Mass at the start of the first episode. He joined the army pretty soon after the invasion, when his wife was killed and Ben was kidnapped. However, even knowing the time frame doesn't give us an exact date, because we don't have a clear timeline of what "day" it is, or even how much time has elapsed since the first episode. That kind of record keeping has been mostly eliminated in the show. It appears to be spring/summer in every episode we've seen (if they are going from Boston to NC in the winter it would definitely be cold, possibly even snowing, and the trees should all be dead). The also haven...

I don't know when I read this, probably a long time since I can't remember most of the plot scenes. Plot details I can remember: There's an engineer who, I think, wants to create an elevator. I don't know if it's an invention or whatsoever but it's a powerful one. I can't remember where the elevator will go but I'm confident it'll be a planet - that's why it is powerful. There's a part where he plans to construct it in a mountain. I think that's where tries to build it but a monk tries to sabotage it. The antagonist is a monk. Note : Sorry if I only gave little information. That's all I can remember from that story. Maybe some of you already read it and forgot it too, you can edit this question to add more information. I googled all info I can remember but it doesn't match the same book I'm trying to find. Answer That is most likely Arthur C. Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise . The engineer is Dr Vannevar Morgan, who wa...

Yesterday I watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 , and I was wondering how exactly the Death Eaters took the Ministry? In the movies we never saw that. Later I checked on Wikipedia's book article and it just said that they kill the Minister. Was it a Coup d'état or a conspiracy? Why didn't any of the authorities help the Ministry? Answer Many wizards working in the ministry were put under the Imperius curse like for example Pius Thicknesse, the Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement etc. , so that facilitated getting to the Minister of Magic, Rufus Scrimgeour. Scrimgeour was captured tortured by Voldemort for information on Harry's whereabouts, but when he refused to talk, he was killed. The Imperiused Thicknesse then was appointed as a (puppet) minister. Will add quotes later, when I have the books handy.

Do Superman's abilities, including super-speed, affect his thought processes? Is he smarter than most or does he think faster than humans because of any combination of his super powers? Answer In the DC Animated feature film All-Star Superman (2011), Superman is shown with genius level intelligence as he was developing a cure to his own illness as well as creating a 24-hour-Power serum to give to Lois as a parting gift. IIRC, he also mentions trying to cure various cancers/illnesses that plague humankind as well. This intelligence was probably from the intense exposure to the yellow sun that was the cause of his illness in the first place so, technically, it is an effect of his super powers.

At the end of the third book of the Hunger Games, President Coin proposed a certain plan. Katniss agreed to it, though the reason behind agreeing seems out of character. Why did she agree? The plan is that there would be a final Hunger Games occurring, with the participants being children of the people of the capitol. Katniss say "I vote yes... for Prim". After enduring two Hunger Games herself, it seems strange that she would agree to a Hunger Games using children from the capitol.

Within Disney canon, what was the Emperor's plan in terms of maintaining his hold on the galaxy? In Legends, we had stories in which there were clones ready to accept his essence upon the death of his body. Has anything similar been brought into the new canon? Answer Yes, he intended to live forever and maintain his rule by "harnessing the full powers of the dark side". According to the canon novel Tarkin , Palpatine planned to rule for "ten thousand years" by mastering the dark side and discovering its "final secrets": But it was here that they would one day work together the way Sidious and Plagueis had to coax from the dark side its final secrets. In the intervening years he had actually come to appreciate Plagueis for the planner and prophet he had been. Such perilous machinations required two Sith, one to serve as bait for the dark side, the other to be the vessel. Success would grant them the power to harness the full powers of the dark side, a...

So I've watched pretty much all the Star Treks and from what I've seen, Star Trek officers don't wear any protective gear! Why don't they wear any kind of armor like the Klingons? Is it because the weapons are so powerful that it doesn't matter if you wear armor or not? Ex: You're shooting antimatter so it doesn't matter if you have matter type armor? But then again, the Borg. They have personal shields, but everyone else doesn't for some reason. Why can't Geordi or Data figure out how to create portable force fields by putting down things similar to those power poles placed in a triangular formation when they need to teleport into an "interfering" atmosphere? Answer Given that the primary purpose of Star Fleet is peaceful exploration and all that good stuff, I'd be willing to bet that the primary reason they don't wear any sort of armor is that it goes against that particular mission statement (e.g., "Hey dude... if you'...

At the middle of season 5 of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic , Hasbro has released a partly censored S5 cast poster. The poster shows most of the cast of the season, with many characters hidden by a blue overlay. You can see this image here (please comment if you know a higher resolution version) and some description about it here . It seems that all characters that don't appear in the first 13 episodes are covered by blue overlays, but some additional characters are covered as well. Nevertheless, we have identified some potential spoilers (that I won't list here) from even the outlines of the covered characters. Here is a cropped and partly obscured part of that image, showing two yellow mares: Who are these two yellow mares? With some help, I have identified all ponies visible (not covered by the overlay) on the image other than these two. Below is a modified version of the poster . Identifications will refer to those labels, though they should be understandable without....

Horcruxes are rare (and then seven come along at once...) and only a few people know about them. But when was the last Horcrux before Voldemort's? 50 years before him? Centuries? Millennia? Answer I'm going to limit this question to "among the known users of Horcrux's". In which case the answer is: 2600 to 2800 years ago. But... I'd say it's sufficient to say more than 2000 years ago . The most recent Horcrux-er other than Voldemort is Herpo the Foul 1 . Depending on how loosely you want to take the description of Herpo the Foul who was said to be a wizard in "Ancient Greece", which is traditionally described to be 600 to 800 BC. There are no other known creators of Horcrux's. While there is only negative evidence to support this (that Herpo was the 2nd most recent user), the HP Wiki notices the same thing. So, while there's no canon, the negative evidence is generally accepted as proof. 1. 2007 interview

Inspired by What was Saruman the White's purpose? The Istari are Maiar in corporeal form - it seems evident that some aspect of the Istari continues after the death of their corporeal (and can even reform as flesh in the case of Gandalf). Is there any canon or notes from Tolkien to indicate that Saruman returned to the ranks of the Maiar as a non-corporeal? Answer TL;DR: Yes, he continued to exist as an ethereal Maiar after he was murdered, but he was without any power and he was doomed to wander but never to return to Middle-Earth Well, he didn't actually die (since he was a Maiar, like you said), but his spirit separated from his body much like Sauron's after the Downfall of Númenor. As an incorporeal spirit, he should have been called to the Halls of Mandos, but the tale implies that he was barred from returning. Tolkien indicated that his spirit was left naked, powerless and wandering, never to return to Middle-earth: Tolkien says: "Whereas Curunir was cast down...

Lady Romana is quoted as saying a TARDIS weights 5x10^6 kilograms, but I've also read that she was mistaken in this or that she was referring to the inside. The Doctor's TARDIS has been moved a number of times and has landed on soft ground and not sunk in at all. This indicates the full weight of the interior is not felt from the exterior. But in The Parting of the Ways , Rose, Jackie, and Mickey use a large truck with chains to free up part of the interior of the TARDIS, and when they pull with the truck, the TARDIS doesn't just get pulled along on the ground, so, at least when the door is open, there's some connection between the weight inside and the outside shell. I've searched for this and Romana's answer is the only one I find, but if that were true and it weight that much on the outside, people could not pick it up and move it. How much does the Doctor's TARDIS weight from the outside? Answer I've never seen a in-universe explanation (Possibly b...

In Age of Ultron, after Wanda Maximoff sends Hulk into a rampage, Tony Stark has to call in Veronica to Pacify Hulk because Natasha is not available to pacify him. Veronica sprays Hulk with a lot of liquid in the middle of the physical fight. The liquid weakens Hulk so that only a little more fighting is required before Hulk reverts into Bruce Banner. What is the fluid that Veronica sprays on Hulk? Answer While the Hulk's exterior is quite robust and able to resist quite a bit of damage, early depictions of the Hulk showed him to be susceptible to gases, tranquilizers and being deprived of oxygen. For a time it was one of the only ways to subdue the Hulk long enough for the plot of stories to develop. The chemical agent depicted is never described in the cinematic release. Perhaps in the extended blue-ray it will get an official name. Eventually writers were no longer able to use any form of chemical against him and they even showed certain drugs like nerve agents which should ki...

As a lifelong Beatles fanatic, I am well aware of their plans to make a Lord of the Rings movie. When they hit the big time, that signed a contract for 3 feature films. The first two were A Hard Day's Night and Help! , after which they got bored with movies and focused on making revolutionary rock and roll. However, they were still contractually obligated to make a third film. Around 1966-67, they finally started thinking about what this film should be. John Lennon suggested The Lord of the Rings , which he and the other Beatles were fans of. Everyone loved this idea, and they decided which characters each of them should play: John = Gollum Paul = Frodo Ringo = Samwise George = Gandalf They wanted Stanley Kubrick to direct the movie, but he refused, apparently because the scope of the project intimidated him. Unfortunately (who knows whether the movie would be any good, but just think of how awesome the soundtrack would be!), the idea was eventually scrapped. Why? Has the reason...

I read long ago, I think it was in Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy , that Yoda was able to hide his presence from Vader and the Emperor because of that Dark Side cave on Dagobah . I found this reference : He made his dwelling near the Cave of Evil, which further negated his light side presence Dagobah entry on Wookieepedia That always bugged me since. How was Obi-Wan Kenobi able to hide his light side presence on Tatooine without using any subterfuge of this kind? Or did he? Answer I can't recall ever seeing a reference to a strong dark side presence on Tatooine. In fact, I doubt there was one, as it would have been a poor environment to raise 'A New Hope' in. I think it boils down to this: Obi-Wan is NOWHERE NEAR as powerful as Yoda. Yoda's power is such that he could be sensed from a considerable distance. Obi-Wan didn't ever have anywhere near that level of power. Secondly, Vader was unlikely to ever come back to Tatooine. It held deep personal pain, and Dart...

I've read in several places that Mathematica was used in some of the analysis of the language used in Arrival . Do the logograms carry any actual meaning as a language, and if they do, are there any tools that can be used for analyzing or generating them? Answer The analysing part: Christopher Wolfram, who was in charge of analysing the alien language, did a stream 1 explaining the code he used. [embedded content] Update : I have contacted the guys at Wolfram Foundations, and they responded. The code for the stream, along with 38 logograms with their meanings, can be found at GitHub , licensed with CC-BY-NC 4.0. I guess I have to retract my previous statement about Wolframs, though they could have made all this more accessible. 1 : It's supposed to be available at the link, but it didn't start to play for me. One workaround for this is to create an account, and start a free PRO trial. That way you will be able to download the stream (1.4 Gigabytes). The creating part: T...

One of whom destroys the Earth, perhaps accidentally, while fighting another... the plot also involves a human colony ship or planet that loses contact with the Earth; I think a small boy is also involved with the plot, although it's been 20-30 years since I read this story. Any help would be appreciated! It's driving my brother and me a bit batty. Here's the batty brother's take: the main being has created others who are now at war, exploding stars. To escape, the main being accelerates the star of the human colony as a decoy. However, most of the story centers on some guy who winds up living forever, as they keep sticking him in cryogenic sleep and reawakening him. If memory serves me right, they abandon the colony planet for a while and move to asteroids as the star is weakening because it is using it's energy to accelerate. When it decelerates, it is the only star left in the universe. The one "being" was almost reduced to living off the energy of a bl...

Throughout all the elder scrolls games I've played, The daedric princes seem to have A LOT of power - In oblivion, sheogorath could summon burning wolves from the sky, Clavicus vile could grant wishes in small ways, Hermaeus Mora appeared and killed someone personally in skyrim, the list goes on. I understand that they have the dragonfires in oblivion to stop them, but from what I could gather its specifically to hold back Mehrunes Dagon. so why can't the other princes break through into tamriel and take over?

I read a book once where an agent of a futuristic multi-planet government was sent on a mission, and in doing so, used a machine to impress copies of his mind on other people to send them. I remember no names, of people or locations, but I can describe what I do remember. The place the copies of this man were sent was a planetary system that was used as a prison. The planets were used as a prison because of a unique type of bacteria or virus that lived there. Whenever that bacteria would go too far from the planet, it'd die, and take any organism that it was inside with it. There were 4 planets in the system, and copies of this man were sent to each one. Each planet granted the copy one "power", unique to the planet, through the bacterium. In one world the bacteria would break down everything man-made remarkably quick, but some people could control them enough to stop, and even create things for you. Another gave people the ability to swap minds during sleep, waaking up i...

In Season 3 of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Aang and company are hunted by a strange guy with a third eye, after Zuko sends him to kill the Avatar. He never says anything, is accompanied by a seriously beat up looking vulture, and can shoot what I can only describe as nuclear energy blasts from his third eye. He doesn't look like he's using any bending I've seen, and I'm not even sure he's human, from his metal appendages. Who and or what is this guy? Answer His true name is never mentioned, though Zuko knows it. He is referred to as Combustion Man. He uses a specialised form of motionless fire bending allowing him to create guided explosions. It is believed that a lack of control over this power initially caused the damage to his limbs, necessitating his metal prosthetics. Like the story of Zuko's mother, Combustion's Origins are considered to by the development team to be too interesting to rush in to a single episode. They've hinted at elaborating on...

The Mortal Engines series by Philip Reeve is set in a long-distant post-apocalyptic future known as the Traction Era, in which cities have become massive mobile structures that move around hunting each other, following the theory of Municipal Darwinism (except in the lands controlled by the Anti-Traction League). Can we work out when the Traction Era is relative to the present day? Clues given in the books include a reference to 35th-century ceramics being studied by Historians in the first chapter of the first book, and a given year of the Traction Era (roughly 1000, if memory serves) being specified in the last chapter of the last book. But is there enough to work out the time period from now, through the Sixty Minute War and the advent of Quirke, to the time in which the books are set? Answer At least several millenia The series is clearly set at least several centuries after the modern period, since the Stalkers were destroyed (and presumably created) "hundreds of years ago...

There are a ton of Harry Potter video games out right now, movie games, LEGO games, and others. Which games, if any, have had input by J.K. Rowling, and/or had nods of approval? Answer Guest443 already covered "Book of Spells" , so I'm not going to discuss it here. It appears as though Rowling had quite a bit of creative input on the movie tie-in games. In an interview with The Courier Mail , reported by a fansite (the original article has been taken down), Derek Proud, a producer on the Chamber of Secrets game, had this to say: "Indeed much of the stuff that we have put in the game which is outside the bounds of the fiction had to be put to [Rowling] so that she could approve it and make sure she was happy with the way we were shaping the Harry Potter universe. "Rowling seemed to be very happy that we were growing her fictional world and so she gave us a whole lot of extra fictional material which she hadn't used in the books to date. "For example ...

And in Deathly Hallows , why didn't the Killing Curse rebound when Voldemort tried killing Harry with the Elder Wand when Harry was undefended?

Why was this cyborg sent back and who sent it? The Terminator Wiki makes the claim that Connor might have sent it. If Skynet sent it why did they care about John Henry?

According to the MU-TH-UR 6000 Wikia entry, we have the following: The MU-TH-UR 6000, known simply as "MOTHER" was a 182 model 2.1 terabyte AI Mainframe that served as the computer mainframe for the Nostromo, Mother auto-piloted the ship while the crew were in hypersleep and monitored their activities. Mother communicated with the crew through the intercom system or a special interface room only accessible to officer at the top of the chain of command. http://alienanthology.wikia.com/wiki/MU-TH-UR_6000 Compare this to its entry for synthetics: The Synthetic's mind is an integrated Carbon 60 processor with a processing speed of 10^15 floating point operations per second. Memory capacity includes 1 terabyte of fast cache buffer RAM and 1.2 Petabyte of non-volatile memory. The system is constructed around a very powerful heuristic logic driver, making decisions based upon imported sensory data, information drawn from experience and the android's vast inbuilt databases. I...

In the scene between Darth Maul and the two Jedi, multiple times he's faced with fighting just one while the other isn't relevant to the fight: (a) first when Obi-Wan falls down several levels, and (b) again when Qui-Gon is defeated. My question is, how can he so precisely defend against two Jedi simultaneously but not have a clear advantage over just one of them in head-to-head combat? Answer If we take the official novelisation as gospel, the strict answer is that Maul's initial successes (in holding off the Jedi) were because of his martial prowess, his training regime and his personal hatred of the Jedi, versus an older opponent and a relatively untrained opponent. His ultimate downfall was his overconfidence. Apologies for the great big lumps of text. At the start of the fight the two Jedi seem quite evenly matched to the single Sith: But on this day, he [Qui-Gon] had met his match. The Sith Lord he battled with Obi-Wan was more than his equal in weapons training, a...

This is a short story (definitely not a novella) set in 'the future' where cities are connected by massive conveyor belts that people hop on/off and one of them breaks down or gets damaged. I think there's a scene set in a diner. I believe the story was from the 40s or 50s. It was on an audio book I had back in the mid 90s. Answer I agree with Mike Stone's answer that this is most likely "The Roads Must Roll" (1940) by Robert A. Heinlein. However, considering you listened to it as an audio book there is a chance you may have actually listened to one of the radio shows that played it, either Dimension X (1950 - 1951) (episode aired 1950) or X Minus One (1955 - 1958) (episode aired 1956). Both of which are free to listen to online publicly. In the first section of the narrative, the protagonist Larry Gaines is entertaining Mr. Blenkinsop, an Australian who is looking into Road technology on behalf of his government. Gaines's explanation of the Road mac...

Earlier today I was shown the following picture in chat, some fan art of various Wheel of Time characters: Some of them, of course, are easy to identify: Rand, Mat, Tuon, Thom Merrilin, and Elayne are all almost instantly identifiable. But I struggled with some of the others, including many of the women. Who are all these characters? For ease of reference, here's a numbered version of the image . Answer Moiraine Damodred. Moiraine's description the first time Rand sees her: The wide hood of her cloak framed her face and dark hair, hanging in soft ringlets. He had never seen a grown woman with her hair unbraided; Her clothes were just as strange. Her cloak was sky-blue velvet, with thick silver embroidery, leaves and vines and flowers, all along the edges. Her dress gleamed faintly as she moved, a darker blue than the cloak, and slashed with cream. A necklace of heavy gold links hung around her neck, while another gold chain, delicate and fastened in her hair, supported a smal...

I realize that, out-of-universe, we have come to refer to them as Force Ghosts. However I doubt Qui-Gon or Yoda would use the words "Force Ghost" to describe what happens. Is there an in-universe word or phraseology that Jedi would use to refer to what we call "Force Ghosts"?

Prompted by a recent comment in chat from the greatly esteemed ♦TimPost, we know that they have a wide variety of foodstuff in the Star Wars Galaxy, but do we have any canon in-universe confirmations that they have butter ? For reference, I'm aware that they have blue milk (that could theoretically be churned into butter) and that in the SW:III Script , Obi Wan cuts through droids as if they were made of butter Note also that the wookiepedia article on butter doesn't appear to contain any canon sources, only outdated EU novels and comics. Answer Yes, they do. In the new canon novel " Tarkin ", we find the following passage: Teller nodded. “ Burned through the pirates’ armor like a knife through butter and blew the ship apart. ” He turned to point to toggles on the control console. “ Same system here. ” This would seem to indicate that not only is butter found in the Star Wars galaxy but that it's a common enough substance that it's used as a metaphor f...

In every film of the Star Wars series someone, usually one of the main characters, says the line "I've got a bad feeling about this...". It's sort of one of the catch phrases associated with the series, along with "May the Force be with you". I believe it even shows up in quite a few of the Expanded Universe media, including almost every episode of Star Wars: the Clone Wars . Is this a reference, or homage to another work? Has George Lucas, or any other offical source ever commented on where the line comes from?

In the "Key to Time" epic, covering the whole of season sixteen of Doctor Who , the Doctor is sent on a mission to retrieve the six pieces of the Key, ostensibly by the White Guardian. However, he is not the only person looking for the pieces. The third story, "The Stones of Blood," begins with a warning voice: "Beware of the Black Guardian," which is the first mention of the Guardians since Romana's arrival in "The Ribos Operation." The Doctor then visits contemporary Earth, where the third segment has been held by the alien criminal Cessair** of Diplos, having brought it there thousands of years earlier. And Cessair knows both how to use the segment's shape-changing powers to alter her appearance, and that the Doctor is there looking for the segment. The natural conclusion is that she is an agent of the Black Guardian, who is seeking the key. In the last story, "The Armageddon Factor," the main villain, the Shadow, makes no at...