Disney & Pixar present- "LIGHTYEAR!"

[Sabrblade]

And that's another thing. Sox was capable of solving the formula problem.

Sure, it took him, what, 65 years(?) to do it. But if he, a little therapy cat bot, was capable of doing it at all, then surely Star Command could have set aside some kind of stronger AI technology to calculate the formula faster than it took little ol' Sox to do it, right?

Sox proves that they had the technology that could do the very thing that they needed done in the movie. Just have it be done by a better version of the same kind of tech used to make Sox so that they don't have to wait as long as it took Sox to calculate it.

I mean, Sox can't be the most sophisticated piece of AI technology that they have with them, right? Otherwise, why on this barren dead world would they be using the most powerful computer AI they have for a little therapy cat?!

And that montage of failed test fight after failed test flight honestly makes it look like Buzz and co. just kept trying the same thing over and over again without any sign of any kind of deviation, but expecting a different result each time, which as we all should know is completely insane.

 

[wonko the sane?]

You're assuming they wanted or needed to solve the problem in the first place. They might have just gotten used to the whole "kinda time travel" thing and built it into their economy.

 

[ZakuConvoy]

They ARE supposed to be scientists in a movie. I HOPE they're more motivated by problem-solving and curiosity than financial gain. Especially when they have a completely self-reliant "economy" that has no outside competition.



After thinking about it, I think you could actually MERGE the characters of the Rookie, Airman Diaz, Commander Cal, and Darby Steel the geriatric ex-con into one character and you'd actually end up with a stronger character. They'd actually have a interesting character arc. You might have to fiddle with the ages and the timeline a little, but I think it results in a more interesting character.

The new character starts out as a rookie, and is insulted when Buzz offhandedly insults then and tells them they should find a different job. So, we get a little montage of them trying out different jobs, all of which they're terrible at. They're humiliated by the vines grabbing them all the time and having to be saved constantly. They're motivated to actually work their way up the chain of command to take over administration of the colony. They get paranoid about the monsters on the planet, forcing through construction of a giant laser dome to protect them from the vines that used to drag them off so often. They eventually go too far, defunding important services to give more resources to the military to protect them from the planet, and get tried for crimes against the colony and ends up trying to work off their prison sentence. Then they're forced to team up with the very person who "ruined" their life all over again and reconcile with them. Plus, they'd get a chance to work out their problems on future-Buzz...and they'd probably LOVE that. And it'd show Buzz that people CAN change...given TIME.

It'd actually be a..."twist ally" in a Disney movie. I think I like this one theoretical character more than the 4 we actually got who all disappear at different points in the movie.

 

[Sabrblade]

You're assuming they wanted or needed to solve the problem in the first place.

Then what was the whole point of that montage? Why would they keep sending Buzz up into space in hopes to perfect the formula if they never wanted the formula perfected in the first place? That's sound like they were trying to get rid of Buzz the whole time by intentionally sending him out on missions that were always doomed to fail from the start.

If that were the case, simply putting a gun to his head would be far more more merciful and a better use of resources, and not nearly as sadistic as wearing him down emotionally with time-dilations that rob him of precious time with his friends and drive him more and more over the edge with each failure.

 

[wonko the sane?]

I didn't consider it that way. They might have actually been trying to get rid of him. It's a large scale, space faring society: they might have already HAD someone come back from the future and warn about the horror of it all.

They might have been pushing to create conditions in which they solve the problem in one of three ways: outright failure; buzz launches, ship explodes, problem solved. Buzz quits because the track record of failure gets to him, problem solved. They actually derive the right formula, problem solved. And frankly: so long as the dark future does not come to pass; who cares how that happened?

And from a time travel point of view, they couldn't just... tell buzz about it, with the risk of creating a self fulfilling prophecy. I don't know why a large scale organization would give two shits about happy endings for all involved, but here we are.

 

[Pocket]

Let's take something really simple that I don't believe was ever addressed: What was the original mission here? Where was this Turnip with all these people going? Were they just exploring alien worlds? The movie seems completely uninterested in sharing what these characters motivations were for even STARTING this journey.

This is a good point. What even were the Space Rangers? What was their purpose? Clearly it's not colonization, or Buzz would have decided Mission Accomplished before they even started experimenting with ways to get off-world. But then, you might as well ask why there are thousands of civilian passengers on board the Enterprise at any given time, other than "to artificially inflate the stakes whenever the ship is in danger".

A entire team of scientists working DECADES can't solve the fuel chemistry for hyperspace travel...but a "toy" cat can? How incompetent ARE these scientists?!

Also a valid point. If crystolic fusion is the key to interstellar travel, then the formula has already been perfected by somebody else. They clearly had a "how to survive, colonize, and exploit the resources of any planet you might happen to get stranded on" guide on board, so how is this the one thing that isn't already a part of that? It's not even a matter of the planet seeming to lack some vital raw ingredient and having to track it down; they literally don't know how to make these things.

 

[Pocket]

Why? Because even at light speed (which he never reached on the test runs), he'd only have lost a few minutes each time. And since he was shown capping at around 0.8c, his personal clock would only have been about half as fast as the planetary one. So, figure the sun is about 10 light-minutes away from the planet, 20 minute round trip for light itself, he'd fall no more than 20 minutes behind. (Gunbuster did this slightly better, but still exaggerated the effect.)

Oh yeah, I skipped over this, but it dawned on me that this is also ridiculously fudged. They make it seem like time dilation caused his trip to be longer than anticipated, not just the failure to achieve lightspeed. Which is stupid because getting closer to the speed of light makes the trip shorter, not longer. Because that's what going fast means. Relativity messes with a lot of things, but it doesn't magically make faster suddenly mean slower. But if you do the math, it's the only explanation that makes sense: Our own conventional rockets, going 10,000 mph, can make it around our own sun and back in less time than he took. And his flight plan didn't have him making the jump until he had already swung around the sun and had a straight shot home. So even without knowing how fast he was going, a plan to get there and back in four minutes means the sun couldn't possibly be more than four minutes away.

A runner-up for explanation-that-almost-makes-sense is that traveling back in time is a normal, expected result of hitting light speed, and they were expecting him to take years to reach the sun but make up for it by rewinding time almost as much. But that doesn't work either because he'd have to be going so slowly that it wouldn't feel like mere minutes to him. And also, if you look at his speedometer, he wasn't going that slowly. He topped out at, what was it, 80% lightspeed? If he was steadily accelerating to that point and then steadily decelerating all the way back to 0, that means he was averaging 40% lightspeed for the whole trip. Let's be insane and drop that by an order of magnitude. A mere four percent. A trip to our own sun and back would still take no more than a day.

So yeah, junk science, junk math, junk logic. And all aimed in the wrong direction, even. I have no problem with junk science in science fiction, but the purpose of it should be to make your setting more adventure-friendly than real life, not less. Unless you're writing one of those cautionary stories that are trying to get across that "science bad", your phlebotenum should be solving more practical problems than it creates.