To spin off a more general discussion from another thread:

 Because apparently someone doesn't like crossing the streams when people get geeky,  But mostly because it seems like a fairly decent lounge topic covering a wider scope, and holds a good chance of kicking out some ideas and conversations which also impact game development that don't really need to drown out talks on a specific movie. So, why not have a more general topic on the issue?

A writer's failure to stay consistent within their own ruleset that they have developed for their world has always been one of the fastest ways for my enjoyment as a reader/viewer of it to be diminished. As a sometimes game developer and writer myself, dealing with the issue of "power creep vs power leap" and maintaining engagement has been a problem. If you have "Super powerful awesome technology", just how does it remain balanced and interesting, and not break everything within your setting.

I figure people on a site like this can probably come up with a lot of examples of both good and bad ways these issues have been handled in various settings.

I feel that the issue of consistency and of power jumps kind of go hand in hand in many ways, but they are also closely tied to what I, as a writer, think of as 'considering all of my options'. 

As an example, a point brought up in the other thread from Star Trek was their rules base around shields and transporters. I don't have every episode of all series memorized, but it did seem to me that they were fairly consistent on transporters not working safely, if at all, through the ships shields. They mostly remained consistent on that point, and the few counter points I can think of all had clearly defined 'gotchas' to them that made them fairly specific to a given situation when they made exception to that rule. But teleporters are the kind of technology which raises very serious questions about power and possibilities. "If I can teleport something from one point to nearly anywhere, then why not just teleport a warhead next to their reactor and be done with it?" is 'kind of an important question to answer' if you want your audience to see the world you're creating as something deeper than the paper it was written on.

In that case the writers went with a fairly straightforward "Well, you can't..." by simply declaring that "Everyone has shields, and you can't transport through them" (Which is then given the caveat of 'except when we want to, because, reasons...' I guess.)

So with a given power or technology, or even just a situation characters find themselves in, I strongly feel that we, as creators, must sit down and "Think through all our options". An example that was only kind of ever address in Star Trek with regards to its teleportation technology is "Why does anyone carry a phaser/disrupter?" Why not a tricorder like scanner with a "pocket teleporter" that can move a few millilitres of material from point to point within a few hundred meters. - That is, rather than jumping out from behind a rock to shoot at someone with your fancy space gun, why not continue to cower behind your nice safe rock, and teleport a few grams of brain matter out of the guy shooting at you? (As I was writing this I remembered a Deep Space Nine episodes where they had a "Bullet teleporting sniper rifle" which didn't really get beyond prototyping stage. But even that has its own issues and questions.)

The Dune series takes an interesting, but also flawed approach, to countering the question of "What is stopping them from just using this tech and steam rolling everything" with their lasgun technology by adding in "Personal Shield" technology to the mix. However a very large flaw in this was how he explained why it stopped lasguns from being the end all and be all of combat, and went a little overboard by establishing that they're often "A very bad idea" because they have the tendency of causing random nuclear bomb like explosions and either end, or both. 

- Two questions then quickly come up when we step back and consider our options with Dune lasguns and shields:

1. If armies frequently employed both shields and lasguns in the field, then how exactly were random accidental nuclear explosions not a common thing from someone taking a shot with a lasgun at the same time someone panics and flips on their shield? Personally I'm kind of left with the thought of "Well maybe we shouldn't give these nuclear explosion prone rifles to our troops, and we'll give them something else to shoot with instead", but maybe that's just me.

2. If personal shields that fit comfortably on a belt are common, and people commonly move about with small lasguns, and firing a lasgun at an active shield almost always causes a nuclear like explosion to go off... Then why aren't people rigging a timer up with a lasgun pointed at a personal shield, and catching the next shuttle off the planet?

Which makes me think of Dune as an excellent example of an over correction in power abuse. From a writing standpoint it could very easily have been that lasguns were perfect against unshielded targets, but then utterly ineffective against anything with a shield. A devastating machine gun against poorly equipped targets, but little more than a marshmallow pop gun against anyone who flicked a shield on. By going so far as to say "We'll have our heroes use knives and swords and looking cool because they risk Nuclear Explosions! if they didn't", it brings up its own set of other problems to deal with rather than just going "Well, they do that, because the other cool weapons get nullified in these instances". 

Even just failing to consider the situation and tools available has made for some nasty missteps in movies. A big example is in the early act of The Force Awakens (Which seems old enough to openly talk about, unlike The Last Jedi which many of us haven't seen yet) where they are escaping the ship in their stolen TIE fighter - They make a big deal about "having to take out the cannons before we escape" in one scene, then fly by a bunch while blowing up one before making their escape. Which looks epic and cool on screen, but then has the glaring hole that I found jarred me out of the moment as I was watching. "Well, why didn't they fire at them with the rest of the cannon thingies? Or launch a bunch more of those TIE fighters still sitting in the hangar to intercept them..."

Even if we assume they were caught by surprise and it took longer than usual to scramble fighters to go after them, then why didn't the capital ship just watch where on the planet they crashed, and then spot them by sending swarms of flybys around the area before either of them could get to 'civilization'? 

A very simple change that could have been just as epic on screen, and waved away the problem of the very logical options would have been to say "Well, we have a group of heroes in a TIE fighter that is already inside the ship and past all the core defences... Blow something up inside, have a scene with the bridge crew cursing over how badly damaged and crippled they are, and how poorly damage control is handling things..." The heroes get to fly off safely, for a time, and buy themselves some breathing room, but no so much as to remove the threat entirely. - Damage control gets things squared away 'some time later', and the baddies start to game of catchup in a logical manner in a sensible time frame.

From a more game related point, I think that many "Point and click" puzzle adventure games end up with at least one awkwardly done puzzle chain that leaves the player looking at things and saying "Well, why don't I just pick up that rock shown in the background art right there, and smash this window, and bypass a bunch of these puzzles?", but plenty of other games can still suffer from the issue of "Well if the technology allows X, why not use it to do Y and get around things/kill the baddies more easily?"

- But as a total side note, I've often thought about making a Monkey Island like game where every puzzle has two options: Solve the 'real' puzzle and jump through the normal hoops, or just smash things with a rock/use your pocket knife to 'solve' the problem. With suitable in game commentary over your choice.

There are almost always inconsistencies in any story because it is simply the writer imagining how futuristic technologies might work.  They don't have to actually make them work, so they don't discover the problems with their ideas.  Star Trek is a great example because so many people think it is "scientifically accurate" when, in reality, it is just as inconsistent as any other sci-fi story.  The vast majority of people don't notice even the simple things that are wrong, and only those who attempt to actually make it work (usually in a game) will ever notice the more obscure issues.  In most cases, inconsistencies don't matter because almost nobody will notice them.  Most people don't understand those issues well enough to notice them.  Someone like JJ Abrams really takes this stance to heart and really doesn't care if it makes sense to people who understand, only that it makes sense to the vast majority who don't.

As for Star Trek transporters, there are many examples of Star Trek saying that if you know the frequency that shields are operating on you can match that frequency to void the effect of the shields and pass through them.  This is how Lursa and Betor destroy the Enterprise in Generations, for example.  Transporters would be a paradigm changing technology on many levels that Star Trek just ignores because they want to be able to beam things around, but they don't want all the problems associated with the technology... so they simply ignore all of the problems with it.  And 99% of people, even hard core Star Trek fans, don't notice.

Another example from Star Trek are that, based on what is seen on screen, the cloaking device doesn't actually work.  There are a million ways to track a cloaked ship and it never takes more than half an episode to discover an entirely new way of doing that.  But almost nobody notices that, everyone still things of it as "invisibility".

In my own universe I have been as careful as possible for everything to make sense.  For example my "transpoters", "quantum teleporters", require a direct line-of-sight and can't teleport through a piece of rice paper.  This doesn't resolve all of the issues, but the fact that it points out and resolves so many issues with ST transporters that most have never considered before... it will seem "more realistic" to everyone.  Even though there are still a lot of problems, almost nobody will notice... they still haven't noticed all the problems with ST's transporters.  But I know, no matter how many inconsistencies from previous sci-fi I have resolved, it will still be filled with them in the end.  The other really hard core "technobabble" people like me will instantly start pointing out things I missed, or never considered.

So all you can do is make it as consistent as you are able to work out, knowing that in the end the hard core people are still going to be able to pick it apart in the end.  Because this stuff is all imaginary.

3 hours ago, Luckless said:

Then why aren't people rigging a timer up with a lasgun pointed at a personal shield, and catching the next shuttle off the planet?

In several instances, they do. Someone (Duncan Idaho?) uses the effect to blow up the Harkonnen soldiers pursuing them in the original Dune. And Bashar Teg seeds them all around one of the Matre-controlled planets as a form of blockade in a later book (probably Chapter House).

Just now, swiftcoder said:

In several instances, they do. Someone (Duncan Idaho?) uses the effect to blow up the Harkonnen soldiers pursuing them in the original Dune. And Bashar Teg seeds them all around one of the Matre-controlled planets as a form of blockade in a later book (probably Chapter House).

True, but I had meant as more of an active attack and purposed built weapon. The only instances I remember were more makeshift affairs, a 'no other option' last ditch kind of thing, or an accident. Imagine what Afghanistan or Iraq, or Ireland/UK a few decades back would have been like all it took to make 'a nuke' was the equivalent of little more than an M16 and a tactical vest...

All fictional universes I've read about so far have issues. I guess the reason is that most (if not all) of them starts as a standalone story that later develops to a universe. Dune, with its melange that for some reason no one can artificially make (I know that it one of the books, maybe Dune Chapterhouse, they do make it). All of the story is based on this fact.

The Lord of the Rings universe has its issues, though more obvious on the story level than on the universe level (though the stories depend so much on individuals, that many happenings can be explained with their random personal choices). The biggest issue for me with this universe is that it's just too fairy talish, and in my opinion the main reason was fitting the Hobbit inside it.

Or take the Marvel ""Universe"". Where the biggest power in the entire universe is... Jeff Goldblum?? The power inconsistencies in Ragnarök is so striking (grinding undead soldiers with M16 rifles. WTF?) that the whole universe lost its last sparks of seriousness. It really fell to the level of Spaceballs for me, and I remember how amazed I was with Thor 1.

Okay, I don't remember more examples.

The other problem for me in fictional universes besides inconsistency is that most of them has fairy tale elements that bridge elements or even hold the whole thing together. For example psychic powers that all work the same for every species, even if they are totally different in nature, pace/interests or whatever (Uplift universe, Known Space universe, Star Wars "Universe"). In some universes, it may have it's place (in ConSentiency universe, though I only read one novel from it, it can be explained by the almost omnipotent powers of one race).
Memory spanning through generations via cell memory (?) in Dune series with other shit like predicting future and perceiving things faster than light.

Sorry, I didn't link the universes I referred to one-by-one, here's a list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_universes_in_literature

All speculative fiction is based on circumventing/violating/exceeding existing science/technology.

There are degrees to it.... from outright magic in LOTR/Star Wars to soft sci-fi with FTL to super hard sci-fi that obeys relativism, etc, but still has "technology sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic"

And generally, a good writer establishes the rules for their universe and should generally stick to them.

But fundamentally, no-one cares. Or to be more specific, the rules of a given fictional world are irrelevant compared to character and plot.

As pointed out above, Star Trek violated its own rules all the time, but the general public didn't care. Why? Because the stories were good and the characters were likeable.

In fact, a lot of the episodes are about finding a way to violate the rules for the purposes of plot. "We can't detect cloaked ships!" or at least, not in this episode. In another one, "hey, let's set up a torpedo to find exhaust gases". And again, if the story is good, no-one really cares.

It only matters in two scenarios: 

1: the rule-breaking is so wildly inconsistent with the universe that it feels like a total cop out (imagine if, at the end of the Wire, one of the cops was revealed to be a wizard)

2: the story breaks down and characters act out of character. The end of the BSG reboot felt like this. 

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Another example from Star Trek are that, based on what is seen on screen, the cloaking device doesn't actually work.  There are a million ways to track a cloaked ship and it never takes more than half an episode to discover an entirely new way of doing that.  But almost nobody notices that, everyone still things of it as "invisibility".

Using a cloaking device that hides you from the majority of other ships is still wise, not every opponent will have a genius on-board able to cook up a way to by-pass it.

In any case, this has historical precedent. Camouflage has always been a technological game of cat and mouse, with new techniques working for some time until an opponent comes up with a way to compensate. The fact that they do not re-use the same way to track them may indicate that cloaking technology has kept moving on in response to such discoveries in the past.

In Star Trek, every time a Romulan ship appears it is treated as if this is the first time a cloaking device has ever been encountered.  The idea that they are constantly improving works for some cases, but it doesn't really logically cover it in all cases.  Some of these encounters happen too close together for that to have happened.  The best way of explaining the cloaking device, that covers all of the bases that need to be covered, is that it is usually possible to detect a cloaked ship and know that it is in the area.  You may even be able to track it for brief periods.  It is an extreme electronic warfare effect.  This makes it not useless while explaining all of the times that they detect cloaked ships.  But even this doesn't cover everything, like detecting it's exhaust with a torpedo guidance system.  If you can do that, then the cloak just doesn't work at all... the ship's sensors are far more powerful than a torpedo guidance system and would see cloaked ships as if they were not cloaked if that was the case.

But it is actually a story device and doesn't need to make perfect sense because almost nobody will notice such detailed and minor flaws in made up technologies like this.  For example I was the Romulan representative on the SFB Staff, which makes me one of the world's leading experts in the cloaking device ("I am a nearly limitless well of useless information"), so I notice.  But there are very few people who take this stuff seriously enough to notice flaws in sci-fi technology and very few (if any) people who write such stories know enough about these types of subjects to get it right.

It's similar to stories about the military.  Ask anyone who has actually been in the military about how bad books and movies about the military are.  The authors of stories very often have almost no knowledge of what they are writing about, which is where a lot of this winds up coming from.  But the audience doesn't know, either.  Only a small number of people are even aware of inconsistencies like these, and those that are have learned to accept that stories and movies about a given subject are usually wrong in most of the details.

Star Trek is... special. In order for a lot of the problem solving to make sense, you tend to have to treat the Federation as a bunch of idiot-savants tooling around the universe in ships that they barely understand how to operate. Their ability to perform research and development in real-time is something that not even the more advanced in-universe races can match.

I thought of a couple of good examples of how most people don't understand how things are supposed to be working, and so they don't even recognize the inconsistencies that are there.

In the final episode of TNG Riker says that the top speed of his refitted Enterprise is Warp 13.  This is a contradiction of the "physics" of how Gene Roddenberry said that his warp drive worked.  When you see a star in the sky you aren't seeing it where it actually is.  Space is curved, and the light from that star is being bent by gravity between you and the star.  Star Trek's warp drive pulls a ship out of normal space, and takes a "more direct path" to the destination through "subspace" at nearly the speed of light.  The ship never actually moves at the speed of light, it "takes a shortcut" through "subspace".  Warp 10 is a perfectly straight line through subspace between the origin and destination points, so obviously nothing in the Star Trek universe could ever possibly exceed warp 10.  Most people don't know this, so they don't even notice that Riker's "warp 13" comment was wrong.  Those who do know this develop what trekkies call "head cannon", which means your own personal interpretation of it regardless of what the writers have said or done.  But "head cannon" only goes so far, there needs to be enough consistency to begin with for people to get to the point of caring enough to do that.

Babylon 5 is actually the most "realistic" and consistent of the established "mass market" sci-fi universes.  One example of this is the way ships are said to travel faster than light, which most people have only a vague notion of from what was seen and heard on the show.  On Babylon 5 the ships are actually pretty slow in normal space, they can only travel FTL using either natural or artificial wormholes that allow them to enter hyperspace.  Hyperspace is a natural "contracted space" where the distances between points is far, far less than it is in normal space.  But sensors and scanners don't work in hyperspace and the ships are "deaf, dumb, and blind" while traveling in hyperspace.  "Beacons" have been established just inside of the jump gates "artificial wormholes" and these beacons are the only thing that ships can "see" in hyperspace.  They travel only between the established beacons just inside of the jump gates.  Ships that can open their own wormholes know where to do this by triangulating (using the beacons) the correct location to leave hyperspace to arrive where they want to be in normal space.

Very few people know these kinds of details, so very few people are capable of even recognizing inconsistencies that are right in front of them.  This is also a big reason why only the original creator can get things right in their own universe, because only they understand their own universe.

JJ Abrams provides a good example of an inconsistency that was "just plain stupid", and that everyone can easily recognize.  The kind of inconsistancy that must be avoid for people to not simply dismiss you as an "idiot" as most old school Star Trek fans have done with JJ.  In JJ's first ST movie he has ships coming out of a black hole.  Obviously, nothing can ever come out of a black hole.  That's what makes it a black hole!  This kind of "stupid" level of inconsistency is what drives people away from a story.