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Yeah, there's absolutely nothing about The Core that makes any damn sense. It's not even really that enjoyable as a turn your brain off and enjoy it kind of movie.

Oh, yeah. The Core breaks my willing SoD about physics wide open.

Captain Picard's Hair wrote:One of the less obvious examples comes from Independence Day; the mother ship wouldn't need to expend any effort to eradicate the human infestation from Earth since the output from her engines which would have been needed to slow such a massive ship would have by itself devastated the Earth's surface!

Some things, particularly the well-known issue of sound in space, is just a necessary 'error' for the sake of movie drama; try to imagine Star Wars without the space "sounds" and it simply doesn't work.

The sheer mass of the mother ship would cause tidal waves and earthquakes.

Anyway that and what you said never bothered me. What bothered me is a 1996 era Mac laptop computer able to link up and send a virus to a spacefaring alien race. I mean sure you could probably give their computer a virus after studying their computer system (or what passes off as one) for several years and maybe come up with one. But definitely not on a 1996 Mac computer. My watch probably has more power than that.

I'm no computer expert, but I'm pretty sure the computing power of the carrier computer has no impact at all on the potential of the virus it holds. That's like saying a 1,000 lb bomb in the back of a pick up truck isn't dangerous because the truck isn't a proper delivery device.

Lighthawk wrote:I'm no computer expert, but I'm pretty sure the computing power of the carrier computer has no impact at all on the potential of the virus it holds. That's like saying a 1,000 lb bomb in the back of a pick up truck isn't dangerous because the truck isn't a proper delivery device.

Still, it is unrealistic to imagine they'd be able to know how to disable a completely unknown computer system with which they had limited contact at the snap of a finger. Given that these are aliens, they may quite well have designed their computers in very different ways than we have ours.

Captain Picard's Hair wrote:

Lighthawk wrote:I'm no computer expert, but I'm pretty sure the computing power of the carrier computer has no impact at all on the potential of the virus it holds. That's like saying a 1,000 lb bomb in the back of a pick up truck isn't dangerous because the truck isn't a proper delivery device.

Still, it is unrealistic to imagine they'd be able to know how to disable a completely unknown computer system with which they had limited contact at the snap of a finger. Given that these are aliens, they may quite well have designed their computers in very different ways than we have ours.

I agree. Also how they managed to send the virus too. I guess you could say the laptop was connected through the fighter then to the mothership. But I doubt this.

I mostly agree on that part, but not for the reason you listed. They had that alien fighter for what, 50+ years? That's a good long time to be poking around in their stuff, long enough to possibly figure out the computers. What is less believable is what's his face learning this literally alien computer system well enough in a few days to figure out how to code a virus, especially a virus that would specifically target the shield control program and which would propagate itself through the entire alien network unchecked. Hell, if he could manage that, why not just make a virus that completely shut down their computers entirely?

McAvoy wrote:

Captain Picard's Hair wrote:

Lighthawk wrote:I'm no computer expert, but I'm pretty sure the computing power of the carrier computer has no impact at all on the potential of the virus it holds. That's like saying a 1,000 lb bomb in the back of a pick up truck isn't dangerous because the truck isn't a proper delivery device.

Still, it is unrealistic to imagine they'd be able to know how to disable a completely unknown computer system with which they had limited contact at the snap of a finger. Given that these are aliens, they may quite well have designed their computers in very different ways than we have ours.

I agree. Also how they managed to send the virus too. I guess you could say the laptop was connected through the fighter then to the mothership. But I doubt this.

Dude, they just sent the aliens an e-mail about being a Nigerian millionaire needing help to transfer funds to the U.S.

I still found it hard to believe that a specie of intergalactic invaders never heard of antivirus softwares.

But then again, War of the World proves us that these invaders never learned about proactive immunitary innoculation.

It's not that hard to believe honestly. We can only speculate the barest details about the alien's society, but their lack of anti-virus protection would seem to be an indicator that computer viruses are something that has never been an issue for them before. With as little as we do know about them, it's easy enough to imagine a bunch of possible mindsets for such an alien race that would preclude them trying to sabotage each others computers. They're telepathic after all, maybe it'd be impossible for such a thing to be done without everyone knowing it? Or the fact that their entire race is dependent on the proper functioning of their ship and it's systems, and so only a select few ever get access to the knowledge of computer programming. As for facing threat of virus from races they're conquering, given their methodology shown in the film, it seems pretty damn unlikely any other race has tried it or even had the opportunity to try it.

Lighthawk wrote:I mostly agree on that part, but not for the reason you listed. They had that alien fighter for what, 50+ years? That's a good long time to be poking around in their stuff, long enough to possibly figure out the computers. What is less believable is what's his face learning this literally alien computer system well enough in a few days to figure out how to code a virus, especially a virus that would specifically target the shield control program and which would propagate itself through the entire alien network unchecked. Hell, if he could manage that, why not just make a virus that completely shut down their computers entirely?

No, sorry, that can't work. They did have the ship for the last 50+ years but they could never get it to work. The power systems weren't compatible with anything we tried. The system only came on when the aliens arrived a few days before. So they had 1 perhaps 2 days to work out how to interface to the computer and write the virus. It would them them longer than that to work out the basics of the interface let alone the operating system.

Ah...I'd forgotten that bit. Been more than a while since I last saw it. In that case then, total agreement, there was nowhere near enough time to figure anything out.

IanKennedy wrote:

Lighthawk wrote:I mostly agree on that part, but not for the reason you listed. They had that alien fighter for what, 50+ years? That's a good long time to be poking around in their stuff, long enough to possibly figure out the computers. What is less believable is what's his face learning this literally alien computer system well enough in a few days to figure out how to code a virus, especially a virus that would specifically target the shield control program and which would propagate itself through the entire alien network unchecked. Hell, if he could manage that, why not just make a virus that completely shut down their computers entirely?

No, sorry, that can't work. They did have the ship for the last 50+ years but they could never get it to work. The power systems weren't compatible with anything we tried. The system only came on when the aliens arrived a few days before. So they had 1 perhaps 2 days to work out how to interface to the computer and write the virus. It would them them longer than that to work out the basics of the interface let alone the operating system.

Another thing too is the mothership is a quarter the size of the Moon. Don't remember it is mass or size. Anyway, like I said before the mothership coming into orbit of the ship would cause tidal waves and earthquakes. But so would the complete destruction of the mothership.

Also the initial attack on the city busters, what did they expect to do with a bunch of fighters attacking a 15 mile wide object? Same goes with the second attack. It was only the sucidal attack by a hungover drunk that destroyed it. Also that hungover drunk should have never been able to fly the F/A-18. Different platform over the F-4 fighte among other things. There are also other military related things such as the hungover drunk accidently nearly launching a missile on the ground. There is a mechanism that prevents that.

At the very least, attacking those things with AMRAAMs and Sidewinders was absurd. Fly over it and drop heavy bombs on the top of the things, at least! That still wouldn't be enough, but it would be closer than those little missiles.

I'm always amazed that alien weaponry is so awful. They have a fleet of ships, each 15 miles across, with a giant city killing weapon. One Ohio class submarine is about 500 FEET in length and can rain down multiple nuclear warheads on at least two dozen cities simultaneously, with the added advantage that it doesn't have to be sitting right on top of said cities to do it.

Well, that's kind of a necessity for there to be a movie at all. Not that it excuses just how bad a lot of it is, but it'd be a short and depressing movie that depicted an alien invasion in which a half dozen missiles fired from the approaching aliens went into orbit and dropped a few hundred independent gigaton nukes on the world, and a week later the mothership arrived to begin harvesting the smoking ruin of the world for it's mineral wealth.