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Science fiction is based on the premise that future technologies are plausibly extrapolated from current ones, and moreover, this extrapolation process logically extends to the trajectory of progress as well. So while technology doesn't absolutely have to advance at the same rate, it feels wonky (on a deep intuitive level) when it doesn't. I'm not sure what you mean that the speeds of communication and travel are illusions. There is a very tangible relationship between them in terms of speed, cost, and convenience in our everyday lives, as well as in the critical components of commerce and military planning. It should feel equally tangible in an RPG setting, particularly given how common both communication and travel are in RPG adventures.

Trying and failing is only part of the Hero's Journey if it results in crucial character (or plot) development. The side trip to Canto Bight, for instance, did neither. Poe's actions may lead to some character development, but we haven't seen it yet. All we saw were the tragic consequences of his failures. Some of this has to do with the fact that this movie is a middle chapter, with plot and character development strands that won't get tied up and resolved until the next movie (if ever). But a lot of it, I feel, is simply the result of questionable writing and some questionable creative choices as a whole for this new trilogy.

In order to get what I'm saying, you have to take away the terminology that describes the physics of things (e.g., FTL) and think more abstractly. Instead, use the terms "communication" and "travel" and don't get hung up on the mechanisms involved. It is the speed relationship that is important to what I'm trying to say, not the particular velocities involved. For most of our species' history, detailed communication (i.e., anything more sophisticated than basic signal passing) was as slow as physical travel. This was true whether the mechanism of travel was feet, horses, boats, or trains. It wasn't until the telegraph (and then radio) came along that this changed. Suddenly you had a technology that allowed detailed communication to occur far faster than travel. This remains true today even though the technologies of both have evolved (aircraft, space shuttles, satellite-based mobile data networks). The average RPGer will expect this basic relationship to remain true into the future, no matter what the exact technologies/mechanisms are for either communication or travel. Regardless of whether or not you agree with this expectation, I believe it will still be there, and for GMs who don't want to have to fight upstream against some very basic player expectations, I feel this is something worth thinking about. After all, a sci-fi game doesn't have to let the limits of "FTL" hold things back; this is rubber science after all. Call it Nullspace travel and Nullspace communications, and define both as nearly instantaneous regardless of distance. Or, go with Jump travel (takes a lot of time) and Nullspace communications (takes almost no time). Either of those arrangements will avoid a campaign setting that feels like our past rather than our future. But if you allow communication to regress to being as slow as travel (i.e., communication tied down to the speed of, say, Jump travel), then your campaign setting will feel anachronistic. Bear in mind that I'm not saying such anachronisms are inherently bad, only that they are likely to be quite noticeable and may induce the feeling that the supposedly far future setting isn't so futuristic after all. In my experience, it is extremely rare that someone's observations and thoughts on something are recognized/shared by absolutely no one else. But even if not, so what? I'm simply offering a point of view. The struggle, as I've experienced it so far, is not that nobody agrees with it, but rather that hardly anyone actually understands it. It may be because I'm explaining it poorly, but I think a lot of it is because it is just easier to argue with a (mischaracterized/misunderstood) point that I'm not actually making. One explanation that a setting might go with is that sending information via FTL is possible due to the mass being virtually non-existent, whereas sending large objects (people, ships, cargo, etc.) is not possible due to the need for infinite energy. Of course, as you say, with rubber science, anything is possible, and rather than deal with conventional physics and its limitations, you can just invent a new (magical) technology that overcomes all those limitations.

I think there are several in the Downloads section.

Let me try to clarify through a bit of abstraction: 19th Century Life: Physical travel between two distant points in the campaign setting can take weeks or months, and communications takes the same amount of time as physical travel. 21st Century Life: Communication is nearly instantaneous regardless of distance between two points in the campaign setting, whereas travel takes significantly longer. 46th Century Life: Physical travel between two distant points in the campaign setting can take weeks or months, and communications takes the same amount of time as physical travel. You can see how that "far future" setting resembles the 19th century setting. The pace of common activities like communication and travel has regressed compared to today, and that is what will shape the anachronistic feel of the game. It doesn't matter whether the travel technology is horses or FTL drives, if travel takes weeks then it feels less advanced than today. The scale of travel has to keep up with the scope and size of the setting or else it starts to feel old-fashioned rather than futuristic. Similarly, communications can't be as slow as physical travel without feeling anachronistic, regardless of the actual technologies involved. Yes, FTL travel is technically more advanced compared to today's transportation technologies, but it won't feel that way if it doesn't somehow allow you to go from one end of the galaxy to the other in less than a day.

Thanks to the retcon, we don't know that she was unwilling to get involved. She may have been unable to. Or she did get involved, but in a way that somehow did not make it into the history books or on film (yay magic!). I mean, yes, they definitely have some 'splainin' to do now, but presumably they are aware of this and are working on it. Or, they're just hoping nobody will really care.

That article, while spot on in its analysis, is missing the meta forest for the diagetic trees. The leadership displayed in these movies is so poor because the writers don't know anything whatsoever about proper military conduct, effective echelon command and control, effective campaign strategy, or realistic operations and logistical management. The only storytelling imperative they seem to follow is "keep it bone stupid for the audience who will never know the difference."

I don't believe that is really the case. For one thing, Patty Jenkins (and others) have provided numerous reasons for the WWI setting, and not once was BvS continuity mentioned as a guiding element. Moreover, the notion that Diana withdrew from the world after WWI was retconned entirely, and so that would not have been a guiding element either.

Star Wars was so good because the screenplay had been perfected over the course of many years, with input from esteemed peers (like Coppola). The prequel screenplays were garbage because they were typically pumped out over the course of a couple of weeks, while pre-production crews sat around twiddling their thumbs, and nobody was willing to stand up and tell Lucas his first (and only) drafts needed significant work.

There's a lot from the prequels (and the animated series) that I'd like stricken from canon too, but that ain't gonna happen either.

It was a good way to visually represent the contrast between the bright, vivid optimism of the Amazons with the cold, harsh, dreary reality of WWI. The use of the cold palette when in Europe was not a Snyder-ism, it was integral to the visual narrative, and quite effective if you ask me.

I'm not assuming anything of the sort. I am saying that the average RPGer will be confused if your far future feels less advanced than today. Today is merely the baseline. How is this so hard to grasp? Yes, I am aware of this. I am merely pointing out why the "type of adventuring" that Traveller was designed around feels so anachronistic, and not very futuristic in many ways. I agree. However, I don't feel that computers (and "other devices") 2500 years from now will even remotely resemble current technology. Traveller assumes that they will resemble computer systems of the 1970s.

When you say "doing the same things," are you talking about what we ask computers to do for us? Or are you talking about how we design and build computer systems? In terms of the latter, we do far more with far less energy and far less space consumed than ever before. If you extrapolate this another couple thousand years, we should easily imagine a massive "network" of super-nodes, each the size of a pea, scattered about the galaxy, communicating with each other in a massive network over nearly instantaneous data "channels". Like a brain expanded to the size of a galaxy. A starship might carry one such pea-sized super-node to do any and all calculations that are necessary for ordinary operations, but when something truly demanding is required, it gets other super-nodes involved, like a massive version of cloud computing (galaxy computing?). It doesn't make sense to me to imagine 46th century starships with old 1970s-style "big iron" devices taking up entire rooms, doing Von Neumann-like computing tasks.

What I should have said was: communication that is not only faster than physical travel, but effectively instantaneous (i.e., with an unnoticeably short delay) is merely where you start because that's where we are in the relatively primitive 21st century; to make a setting feel like the far future you have to push forward even further and, for instance, make physical travel as fast (i.e., nearly instantaneous) as communications. Traveller does not meet this criterion because neither element is nearly instantaneous. However, as mrinku points out, this can be "solved" by removing any significant delay in travel time over vast distances. I just don't think 4500AD feels (to me) like 4500AD otherwise. Instead, it feels like the 19th century merely transplanted into space.

Civilian train travel across Europe was spotty and unreliable at best in 1917. Most of Europe was not adequately covered, especially through the Balkans. The war made things even worse (the Orient Express suspended services during the entire war). They would have had to stow away on dozens of small trains, most of them commandeered by various foreign militaries, to even have a chance of reaching the Channel coast of France. Aircraft were simply not an option. The trials and tribulations of two travelers trying to get to London by crossing Europe would be a harrowing movie in itself, and it would take them quite some time. As for Wonder Woman's powers, her bracers (which were made from Zeus' shield as I recall) had pretty amazing abilities in BvS as well. What we saw in Wonder Woman seems consistent with that at least. Their ability to absorb and redirect Ares' lightning attack is not an unreasonable ability to imagine built into them either.

That's why I said that you start with present day and then extrapolate forward, using the historical trajectory of science and technology to guide you as best it can. But you don't look backwards--or plant a flag in the ground of the present and assume no significant forward progress at all--unless you are trying to inject anachronisms on purpose. Communication that is faster than physical travel is merely where you start; to make a setting feel like the far future you have to push forward even further and, for instance, make physical travel as fast, or nearly as fast, as communications (e.g., transporters). That's what it means to project science and technology forward into the future (as part of worldbuilding). Star Trek has an interesting track record at predicting our technological future. In part because those responsible for building that future were heavily inspired/influenced by Star Trek, but also because many of the writers of TOS were lauded sci-fi novelists who had a knack for imagining plausible future technologies based on what they knew of their present circumstances.

It is by definition anachronistic to assume that the far future will be the same as the present, especially when it comes to science and technology.

The anachronism is using a 1970s view of computers as the model for computers thousands of years in the future. Traveller does not take place in the 1970s (hence the anachronism). It was merely designed then. And the designer(s) clearly had no interest in (or ability to) imagine where the trajectory of computing technology (which took us from UNIVAC to the Cray-1 in only 30 years) would take us 2500+ years later. It was just easier to inject yet another anachronism into the setting than rethink the nature (and role) of computers in the far future.

Agreed. But I don't think it is the lack of a detailed depiction of their time on the sail boat that is the issue, it is the implied speed with which they made the journey. Steve needed to get Maru's journal to London immediately. There are no routes, either seaborne (by sail boat, mind you) or overland (even by train) that wouldn't take months to get you from an island somewhere in the Aegean to London. The movie just glosses over this fact by not depicting the journey at all; not because it would be boring to watch, but because it wouldn't fit within the crisis narrative set up in the first act of the film. It is sloppy writing, but I think the writers just hoped nobody would really notice (or care).

Taste in women will vary from person to person. I happen to be among those who find Gal Gadot to be absolutely stunning. *shrug* Steve's infiltration team was a post-modern take on the Howling Commandos, where cultural inclusion for the audience's sake is more important than historical authenticity. Mixing Wonder Woman in with a team like that is not much different than throwing Peggy Carter in with the HCs. Wonder Woman didn't feel like a war movie to me; it felt like a superhero origin story that happened to use a war as a backdrop. Sailing from the Med to England in such a short time was rather clunky, you're right. And no amount of handwavey dialogue ("We got lucky and hitched a ride...") helps there. Powering up during one's Phase, before your opponent's next Phase, seems well within the structure of cinematic (superhero) combat to me. Remember, this is the same genre that allows villains to monologue as long as they like without any impact on combat. I believe that the German Army gave up Veld because they were profoundly low on resources and about to lay down arms due to the Armistice anyway. The only remaining act of aggression available to the Germans at that point was the gassing of the town, which Ludendorff did, against the orders of German High Command mind you. I'm not sure what is meant by rebuilding her power set by 500 points. Compared to what? The comics? The last movie she appeared in? This is the movie where she not only became Wonder Woman (the superhero) but also embraced (and unlocked) her true nature as a demi-goddess. For me, Wonder Woman was easily my favorite movie of the year, and immeasurably better than any DCEU film that came before it.

A common tactic for shutting down discussion that someone finds absurd is to dismiss it on realism grounds. In this case, the fact that rubber science and techobabble describe things that aren't real gets used to sweep away comparative studies of the respective universes of Star Wars and Star Trek (or Marvel vs. DC, or whatever). You are absolutely correct when you say "it is just technobabble," but what is the goal of pointing that out except to try and convince people to stop playing the comparison game?

Not if the person with the blade is busy doing something else (like attacking someone in their current Phase).

I guess what I should have said was that the anachronistic view of computers reinforces the anachronistic nature of Traveller as a whole (which is exemplified by its Age of Sail aesthetic). Somehow I suspect everyone understood what I was trying to say just the same. Snarky misinterpretations are beneath you, Lucius.

The Hero System encourages all kinds of situations, some wonky some brilliant, but which ones come to dominate play is generally up to the players and their playing style. In 30+ years of experience with the Hero System, the possibility of a "Mexican standoff" had never become a noticeable problem for me or any of the players I played with, so clearly the mechanics themselves are not exclusively (or even primarily) at fault. Hacking a D&D-like AoO mechanic into the Hero System is like hacking a D&D-like Saving Throw mechanic into the Hero System. Possible, but unnecessary (and ugly).

The impracticality of quantum entanglement is somewhat irrelevant. The rubber science of space opera isn't governed by 20th/21st century technology, it is merely informed by it. We take the essential trajectory of the scientific and technological advancements that we have experienced as a species and extrapolate it, using our imaginations to fill in the gaps where real physics stops and leaves us with nowhere to go (given our current understanding of the universe). Therefore, if the jump drive can exploit an imaginary phenomenon in space-time to yield FTL travel, then the ansible can certainly exploit an imaginary phenomenon in space-time to yield near-instantaneous communication. I say "near" instantaneous because, in order to appease those whose willingness to adopt rubber science doesn't extend to perfect simultaneity, it would be no big deal to say that the ansible suffers from a ~3 nanosecond delay between sending and receiving, regardless of distance. You still have a delay in order to preserve causality, but it becomes inconsequential in practice. Traveller doesn't have to have the ansible, as I've said before. Eliminating it is a valid (if somewhat dubious) campaign setting choice made to impose a particular feel on the game, and that's fine. But attempts to justify its absence on "realism" grounds is kinda pointless. I feel there is a better, more plausible case to be made for using realism to open up exotic, far-future possibilities rather than to shut them down.