Well, reverse my polarities! It's the Thursday DE!

[needsmoreresearch]

Lots of canons have something that probably counts as technobabble, though it might be magicobabble or culturebabble instead: flavor text made up to suggest that there is totally a solid canon-world basis for this Thingamajig or Phenomenon that is currently important to the plot--but which doesn't really require a solid explanation. Like reversing the polarities. Or crossing the streams. From Wikipedia: "a fiction writer might use it to cover plot holes or to invoke suspension of disbelief of story elements that defy current understandings of science and technology."

Do you have a favorite from your canon? Have you made some up for Milliways or fanfic that you're proud of? Do you have a rule of thumb for making up technobabble for your RP?

Is there something in your canon that doesn't quite meet the usual definitions of technobabble, but which you feel kinda fits anyway? Job titles and such?

Comments

[myriadbeautiful]

There isn't much, except when it comes to Fairy Fixit :D

One such line — " Oh, some orks came along and stuffed this ork into the fairy ring system. I thought they were going to destroy the whole thing but I managed to compensate the RLS to DOIs, so he should be okay."

Though maybe I should look to the penguin related quests for more technobabble. It takes a massive suspension of disbelief to accept that penguins are a legitimate threat and in pursuit of world domination. Hell, most recently they crashed a TARDIS like thing into the Kharidian desert and now there are penguins AND SNOW in the middle of the desert.

Naturally, Amascut is unhappy about it. There is SNOW in the desert, AND ITS STICKING.

[never_promised]

...compensate the RLS to DOIs, I like it. I like it.

(djehuty is making sad ibis faces at snow in the desert though)

[camwyn]

'Microfusion'.

This is the entirety of the explanation for how Fallout's retrofuture tech can get a power armor suit or a plasma rifle to work. The most advanced pre-War power armor has 'a back-mounted TX28 microfusion pack'. Laser rifles, plasma rifles, and a few other weapons use 'microfusion cells' the size of a can of Campbell's soup, and all anyone says about them is that the cells are essentially small fusion reactors. No indication of how they're supposed to work or how they're made.

I'd say second place goes to the fission batteries in the cars and the mini-nuke ammo for the Fat Man, except that I know for a fact the smallest nuclear fission device the United States was willing to admit existed in the 1990s/2000s weighed around 14 pounds, which is to say a controlled fission reaction can be made to take place in something that weighs about as much as the average human head. So that could theoretically be persuaded into existence without too much technobabble. But fusion? That's another story.

[ceitfianna]

Two of mine have all the technobabble.

Charles with Marvel Science and I have no idea how Cerebro works, I know how they say it works but that doesn't actually make sense. I've read enough about genetics with him to go, and now we go into Science! mode.

Sameth and the Charter, his canon goes into great detail with how the Charter is used by the Abhorsens, very little on how he does. That's why I've gotten good at him describing what the spells and doing and all that sort of stuff along with times of and he talks about the Charter. His official title is Wallmaker and in canon, he created this amazing prosthetic hand. My favorite way to refer to what he does is that he's a Charter Engineer.

My favorite tech term from Ivan's world which is the only really sci-fi of mine is five space math. That's used to explain the wormholes and space travel in the world, I love the phrase and also that Ivan's not an engineer. He knows the basics.

[garde723]

In Izana's canon Heigus particles are the magic..well not McGuffin but they allow for charged particle beam weapons, propulsion, and other energy needs. The author also really loves the idea of a gravity beam emitter, using it as an ultimate weapon in both "Knights of Sidonia" and "Blame".

[have_no_mercy]

With Tess it's mostly "Kryptonite did it!" or some other Kryptonian MacGuffin. Anything she said about the moon base was me talking out of my ass. Write did a better job.

[never_promised]

The question was obviously prompted by my new need to deal with Asgardian nonsense. MCU doesn't really give us enough examples to work with, but I kind of want to make a technobabble generator for them, so I can rattle off all sorts of magical-sounding doohickeys along the lines of "it's a soulforge."

"It's a thoughtplane."
"Get the lifeglass."
"We'll try a forceway."

Anyone got any good ones?

[ceitfianna]

That kind of makes me think of the some of the Old Kingdom terms which are in some ways really obvious but in context sound creepier or more powerful like Gore Crow, Book of the Dead, Wallmaker, Free Magic.

[sunbaked_baker]

ramble warning activate

Thinking of the unclear but important-sounding terminology reminded me of all the mild confusion I still feel rereading Sabriel, where Terciel tells Sabriel that Mogget is "the Wallmakers' Relic, their last creation, or their child, no one knows for sure." The Old Kingdom wiki suggests the relic is specifically the ring/collar/binding rather than Mogget himself, though that isn't clear and it still sounds as though Terciel is referring to the Great Charters (the Bright Shiners who put all of their power into the Charter) as "the Wallmakers."

By the Lirael/Abhorsen timeline, it looks like Nix has a clearer picture of where Mogget fits into things (as Yrael), and what the Wallmakers actually were: not the Great Charters themselves, but another bloodline with the power of the Great Charters in them, like the Clayr, Abhorsens, and the royal line.

[ceitfianna]

I didn't realize that, I haven't done a reread in a while, but that's fascinating. It would make sense that the ring was a Wallmaker creation and yes, going through the books, Nix clearly gets his ideas together. I might do one as Goldenhand made me happy with the canon direction and wanting to maybe do some OOMs.

[sunbaked_baker]

I so enjoyed Goldenhand. Ferin was great and I love the idea of Yrael's connection to the northern tribe.

[ceitfianna]

Yes, it was so wonderful to see Yrael enjoying himself and appreciated like that. Ferin makes me happy as she's an amazing character and her chemistry with Sameth worked so well.

[jedi_interrupted]

midichlorians

I know Star Wars is filled with more examples but that's the one that stands out the most for me. It is not my favorite and I head canon that it is merely one of the theories to Force sensitivity.

[cottoncandypink]

Enis' magic spell in the first episode. It involves things like smacking Mark with a metal chair, and shoving bees up his nose.

Surprisingly, the spell doesn't work.

[genarti]

For Thor, uh, obviously there's Asgardian technomagical babble! I can get by a lot with the fact that Thor's not a nerd or an expert, and with "the term Thor uses in the Allspeak is somewhat more precise than what it translates to," but every so often I do have to juggle some nouns in my head and come up with soul-embers or a spark-net or something.

For Enjolras and Cosette, they're from a historical canon; their lives may be fictionalized, but the era is quite real. So it's not so much technobabble as societal detail babble. For Cosette, that's actually pretty minor, but for Enjolras, I spend a lot of time hastily googling political events and philosophies and people to toss into a thread, in what's basically the same function as technobabble: the meaning is important to the character, but it's mostly the feel of having those specific mentions that matters to the reader (and writer).

Kazul gets some magic babble -- not too often, because it's not really her conversational focus, but she does toss off offhand mentions every now and again.

Doctor Dinosaur is all about the technobabble. He's from an ACTION SCIENCE canon, which is basically all about reversing the polarities, crossing the streams, and bouncing the graviton particle beam off the anti-gravity crystals. My key rule of thumb for Doctor Dinosaur is that it shouldn't make a lick of sense.