I also just watched Interstellar during the weekend, and I think I have some answers to some of the plot holes Bltizo has raised.
The planet with 130% of the earth's gravity on surface with a smaller radius would require larger escape velocity than on earth.
I think it depends on how much smaller the radius is on the planet with 130% earth gravity.
I think the rocket booster sequence can be explained in a sensible manner that they wanted to conserve fuel for the entire mission as much as possible. So while the Ranger shuttles will be fully capable of lifting into space from Earth, fuel spent by the shuttle and thus of the mission cannot be replenished.
I think that was implied. Otherwise how did he become all familiar will all of the controls on the shuttles and the ship?
Was it implied? It seemed like one moment Cooper and Murph were meeting NASA for the first time, the next day he was trying to console Murphy that he'd come back, and then he just walked off into his truck and blasted off.
They are space reentry vehicles, have airtight pressure hull and structure and outer casing to repeatedly withstand the torture of reentry. Waterproofness is therefore a given, if it is not even waterproof how on earth can it be qualified as a mannable spacecraft.
But they even had a water flushing mechanism ;_;, as if they intended the design to be dropped into the ocean and then fly back up?
And being able to survive a wave like that and still function would be a challenge for any piece of marine engineering today, let alone a spacecraft.
I think the movie tried to paint a picture of Earth in its last days with Human material wealth in rapid decline. There was a lot of hint of Science and Engineering being neglected and underfunded by world governments, since people could barely feed themselves. That could be the reason for the "cheapness" seen various sections on the ship.
True, that could work I suppose.
The ship has artificial gravity (though centrifugal force) which is supposed to run constantly right from its first start, which minimises risk of floating particles. Under such artificial gravity, the crew should be able to eat normal food instead of relying on the toothpaste like stuff the contemporary astronauts have.
Yes, but there would still be long periods lacking artificial gravity...
Not really. They needed to find a habitable planet. And their main mission was to find the planet and populate it with gene seeds from Earth. The blackhole data was a sidetrack mission.
I mean in terms of the movie's plot.
That is to say, between their main mission and their side/accidental mission, the latter completed far more than the gene seeding. So it makes the gene seeding seem like a redundant task.
This for me was one of the major plot holes in the movie. And there isn't really a good fix. First of all the morse code idea just cannot work---see below. The blackboard idea may be more plausible if Cooper was also a theoretical physicist who studied the gravitational equations. But he isn't one, and the theorists need the raw data from the blackhole to fix some of their base hypothesises. This is most likely to be numerical data, and cannot be written down by equations. If he could, then he would have solved the gravitational equations himself.
Well, he could have simply written down the data on a blackboard, or maybe if he had a computer he could have made a txt document and typed up the data through gravity manipulation that way :/
It is also clear from the plot that the 5th dimensional beings cannot communicate with either Cooper or TARS. So they cannot have given the equation to Cooper. And if they could, then why bother with Cooper at all, can't they just contacted the professor Brand in his NASA office in the first place and given equation to him using the blackboard method?
I can appreciate the idea that the 5th dimensional beings can't directly communicate to Murph, or to Cooper and TARS.
I just can't appreciate how impractical they were. Couldn't they have created a tesseract for cooper that placed him in front of a laptop instead, where he could use gravity to create an email account and send the data off to Murph, possibly with a PS, saying "I'm in a tesseract and I've got blackhole data that is useful, be back soon, love dad"?
I mean obviously, that wouldn't be very poignant and lacks emotional punch. But the whole "bookshelf" thing just seems so contrived and artificial.
I think it was implied that they did send ships through the wormhole after Murph solved the equations. They also must have established contact with Brand on the inhabitable planet. And only after that did the migration start.
Wha? I thought at the end of the movie elderly Murph told Cooper that Brand was "still out there" implying she hadn't been found. Afterall, for Brand, only a day or so has passed since leaving the black hole's accretion disc.
I think the reason they did not send another expedition through the wormhole during all this 30 odd years after the Endurance left was somewhat also explained by the plot.
First reason is probably funding. NASA was pretty much a clandestine organisation at the time, and they probably gathered much of their approved resources for a one-shot Endurance mission. Another mission would take another several decades, if it is even approved---which makes it consistent with the 30-odd year time frame.
Secondly, Prof. Brand never really expected the Endurance mission to return. The most important part of the mission to him was the cargo of Earth gene seeds.
b-but, in the intervening years after Murph solved the gravity equation, they developed freaking O'neill cylinders! Ranger like shuttles were in every day use! Coudlnt' they have sent a shuttle or two (unmanned, even) through the wormhole to check things out?
For me the movie did a very good job on the wormhole, conveying the mathematical notion of a three-dimensional hole, which does not exists in our everyday life. This is far better than the type usually portrayed in Sci-fi, like that in Star Trek Deep Space Nine. It also managed to make the time paradox in the relativistic theory look and feel natural, which I am quite impressed with.
Yes, I thought that was quite well done as well.
The a big plot hole that I find they cannot get away with is that Cooper transmitted the entire TARS's blackhole data to Murph using MORSE CODE.
Just think about it, the contemporary particle collider experiments produce gigabytes, even terabytes of data (I have worked on some of those during my undergraduate days). MORSE CODE has a transmission speed of ONE CHARACTER/NUMBER (one ASCII character is 1 byte) per SEVERAL SECONDS. Even if the data is only 1 MB in size (a single MP3 song is about 3-5 MB, a single HR photo in compressed format is about 10MB), it would take well over 1000 hours (1456 hours if every character took 5 secs to transmit and note down) to transmit and record the data. That is 60 DAYS if Murph does it 24/7 no rest, no eating! And if the data is in a more likely region of several gigabytes or terabytes, then Murph and her offsprings would have been long died before the transmission could even reach halfway stage.
Also aren't they in hurry of leaving the place, as Murph has set fire to the corns and it is burning its way to the house? And for Cooper to remain in contact Murph and the watch has to remain inside her bedroom.
Yep, that's definitely a plot hole as well.
