TV writers
Apr. 17th, 2019 03:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kengrCatching up on TV programs. An episode of NCIs had a whole of stupid errors.
It had them on a nuclear sub. Somebody had sent false orders to the sub. This was supposedly done by somebody adding a device to the connections to the subs antennas. That made it ignore actual Navy signals and only accept ones from somebody else.
Ok, theoretically possible. The problem is that they had the bad guy sending orders to the sub while it was submerged.
They got the fact that that requires ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) signals. There are several problems with that. The transmitters require antennas hundreds of miles long. The Navy's transmitter uses a good chunk of Michigan.
Second problem. The low frequency means that the transmission rate is measured in characters per *minute*. So the messages sent are *short* code groups. Which absolutely blows the plot.
A *critical* bit of the plot involves a last minute message to the sub and they make a big deal about "proper formatting" of the message, Alas, in the real world, the message would be two to 3 code groups (one to Id which sub it was for and the other one or two groups would be something to look up in the code book on the sub)
So there wouldn't be any "formatting". And it wouldn't be "last minute". It'd take several minutes to send maybe as much as 10 minutes.
Also, the bad guy wouldn't have been able to send the *detailed* orders the sub got while it was submerged. One of the code groups is *known* to be "surface to receive detailed orders".
and of course, the bad guy couldn't have sent ELF signals anyway.
It had them on a nuclear sub. Somebody had sent false orders to the sub. This was supposedly done by somebody adding a device to the connections to the subs antennas. That made it ignore actual Navy signals and only accept ones from somebody else.
Ok, theoretically possible. The problem is that they had the bad guy sending orders to the sub while it was submerged.
They got the fact that that requires ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) signals. There are several problems with that. The transmitters require antennas hundreds of miles long. The Navy's transmitter uses a good chunk of Michigan.
Second problem. The low frequency means that the transmission rate is measured in characters per *minute*. So the messages sent are *short* code groups. Which absolutely blows the plot.
A *critical* bit of the plot involves a last minute message to the sub and they make a big deal about "proper formatting" of the message, Alas, in the real world, the message would be two to 3 code groups (one to Id which sub it was for and the other one or two groups would be something to look up in the code book on the sub)
So there wouldn't be any "formatting". And it wouldn't be "last minute". It'd take several minutes to send maybe as much as 10 minutes.
Also, the bad guy wouldn't have been able to send the *detailed* orders the sub got while it was submerged. One of the code groups is *known* to be "surface to receive detailed orders".
and of course, the bad guy couldn't have sent ELF signals anyway.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-17 11:52 am (UTC)The Navy doesn't do it, preferring a dedicated antenna array, because it tends to mess with anything using those power lines, but I presume a bad guy might not care if someone's tv went wonky.
but yeah, the rest of that episode was garbage.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-17 12:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-17 12:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-17 01:40 pm (UTC)Chlorine gas was one of the first modern chemical weapons used in war. It's heavier than air and tends to settle in low areas, including trenches. More recently, Syria used makeshift bombs which were little more than pressurized containers of chlorine with a small charge to rupture the container and spread the gas.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-17 01:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-17 01:50 pm (UTC)They also had chlorine being *destroyed* in a program to get rid of chemical weapons. And the gas in the attempted attack came from gas that hadn't been destroyed.
But chlorine *cannot* be destroyed. It's also an important industrial chemical that is available all over the place in multi-ton lots.