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Dec 2022

I know there are a lot of comics and stories on tapas so I was wondering how do people involve science into there creations?

Do you try and make you science as accurate to real life, or do you do the opposite and make the most outrageous syfy technologies, or maybe something in between?
I wanna here all about your story science's!
Feel free to send like to your comics and stories, maybe check out mine!

For my comic Ragtime I try to go for the Startrek thought process of explaining science. Compare your crazy science thing to something the average person could understand. I try to go one step further. Compare your science to something even a kid could understand!

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When I try to be "scientific", I'll try to make my science have some in world sense.
Like, even if the concept doesn't make sense with real-life science, it should still make the readers go, "Huh. Understandable. Now that's interesting. :o" (Of course, I still stay grounded with logic. xD)

I'm an engineering major, and I love throwing stuff I learn in to my story with varying degrees of accuracy. For example we learned about the Wronskian in one of my classes, and essentially it will equal zero if the two functions it tests are linearly dependent, so I stole the name and made a monster called the Wronskian that is rendered powerless when around people who are dependent on one another. It hasn't made it out of the script yet, but it will eventually

In my case, it's something inbetween. I try to be as accurate as I can with how physics works in microgravity, what different planets/moons are like, or anything else that has been studied in real life.

Then there's stuff that's sort of half-based on science and half-based on what I think would look the coolest. The electricity on my main characters' ship is generated by a contraption made of magnets, glowing gel, ferro fluids, and a mechanical generator. Would it work in real life? Probably not! Does it look cool? I think so!

And then there's things that I'm never going to explain, like how spaceships in my setting can generate gravity on their own. There's a switch that turns it on and off. That's all I and the readers need to know.

So long as both the real science and fake science make sense in-universe, I hope my readers won't mind too much.

In my comics universe, a part of the cosmic side involves the four main academic disciplines of STEM. The lore behind that is really about a war torn advanced civilization with real world applications to said academic principles.

Coming from a science background, my knowledge of these subjects is pretty solid so I'm confident that I can tell stories that also serve to educate people about STEM and how the world works in that respect. The only part that may not be realistic about it is the magical element to it. After all, these science based stories involve a superhuman species from planets in an entirely different galaxy.

I research science, medicine and technology from the Middle Ages for my project.

I doubt anyone would pull me up on anything if it was incorrect, but it’s fun to learn about anyway. :blush:

I've actually studied mechanics and software, so I know how things work as far as robotics go a little at least. I also researched to see if it would make sense even a little. I admit that most of it is left to the imagination though.



I always try to get descriptions accurate and explanations as close as possible to the truth, but my novel's a fantasy one, so that's something that affects the accuracy of the info. I do try to put a bit of science into my novel once in a while though.

Unless you are doing a hard science comic story, I would steer clear of actual science to your stories. The more detail you go into, the more chance the audience can find holes in your plot. Keep it loose. Make up words like star trek does. Star wars used to do it even better. Tie fighters fly. Why? because they do. Blasters shoot. why? because they do. If you make a modern story, no one expects you to describe how an internal combustion engine works, the main character just gets into a car and drives away. Your story, unless actually about the technology like the invention of warp drive, doesn't need that kind of detail. People read stories for characters, not things.

i do try make it more or less as plausable as i can , soemtimes i wonder and think about how it could work in reality, like i have thought of why mechs, and so on

I would research a bit about the basics and get them right but imo if everything is sticking too much to the real science in the real world than the room for creativity would be a bit limited.

I borrowed some science concepts like radioactivity and mutation. The earth in my story was poisoned with lethal amount of radioactivity after 3000 something years, but irl probably after three millennium the earth would be inhabitable again. People were mutated into feather-growing species because of the radioactivity, but in fact, real-life mutation is more cruel and brutal than that. I don't delve into the details but instead make it as some kind of basic setting for the onset of my story.

Yeah I get over the top with it. That Stick Figure Isekai has it too by proxy, but the idea in my story is that I'm sorta paying homage to old funk where the singers make it as outrageous as possible. Bootsy Collins is a big inspiration.

Old comic books are another inspiration, but I try to be like "Okay, but what if Funkadelic made those comics? What then?".


I do make sure that magic and science are not alike despite me getting outrageous with both. Never liked the trope where characters go "Oh magic is just science we don't understand" (I'm looking at you MCU). I always liked the Saint Seiya quote "Man uses the term "laws of nature" as a generalization of the phenomenon he doesn't understand". I guess as a result, I do offer explanations for the outrageous science stuff (no matter how wild) while when magic does something equally goofy I'm like "Pft... I dunno".

in one of my long-running fantasy series, Lawful/Lawless, I add in some politics, some science and some history, and some culture. I even made up an entire language just to add some extra layers to the world. Adding history and politics must be something that makes sense within the world, but adding science is kinda tricky. Since I'm writing a fantasy novel, the science doesn't HAVE to be accurate and legit, but on the other hand, since a lot of fellow nerds are reading my stuff, I need to give them SOMETHING to not make them laugh at me and say stuff like "this guy doesn't even know basic physics" or something along those lines.
Call me bratty, but in my opinion, a good author should be smarter than the majority of their readers, or at least, know how to fake it. If you're writing a sci-fi story, then it has to have some sort of connection to real science in some way, even a small reference is enough to make the reader go "oh this guy actually knows some stuff and researched the subject"
This smart-ass attitude is even more important when writing a thriller or a tightly written story where the lil details are important and most of the established info comes into play. What I did in Lawful/Lawless was to have Mages and Humans kill each other off in the past generations and make both sides create their own falsified story to debate something interesting and add more layers and reveals. As for science, it's not real-life science, but it is similar, Mages study the History Of Magic which kinda combines the theory of evolution and the Big Bang and the law of conservation of energy with the concept of magic. I use math and trigonometry for magic circles, but I don't get too deep into it because it'll get boring, so I gotta balance things out. Explaining everything in detail is not necessary, just make a little reference. That's an easy way to appeal to people who are into that sort of storytelling.

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closed Jan 25, '23

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