Space Flight.

I walked in on my roommate watching “Don’t Look Up” right during the space shuttle launch scene. Literally every single thing was wrong. The trajectory the shuttle took off the launch pad. It flying RIGHT SIDE UP as it did the gravity turn like a fucking airplane. The fact 50 other rockets were in formation with it despite that being stupidly dangerous, them all having different TWR ratios, there not being nearly enough launchpads anywhere in the world to do that, etc. Just everything.

We have existing video footage of shuttle launches. It’s not some crazy mystery. This isn’t Gravity where they add a window that doesn’t exist on the ISS for dramatic tension. It’s not Star Wars where the X-Wings behave more like airplanes than spacecraft for visual appeal. This was deliberate negligence.

A very common one is spacecraft seem to always launch in a direct line away from the planet. They just go straight up. That’s the least efficient way to get into space. But I usually let it slide because explaining orbital mechanics and Hoffman transfers isn’t necessary for good story telling.

In Criminal Minds, there’s a super hacker that can basically infiltrate any system at will and do impossible things (like simultaneously scanning every street cam to find a specific license plate). Government supercomputers with elite security are no match for her.

Okay, I get it. This is a work of fiction and she’s basically a mechanism to speed up the plot.

In one episode they find some kid’s password protected laptop. The super hacker goes “oh no, I can’t hack that. It’s running Anti-Hack OS! We need the password”. The password ends up being plain text password that a brute force dictionary attack could break in seconds.

I’ve never facepalmed so hard.