The Rockwell Scale Of SF Hardness

So. TV Tropes has the Mohs Scale Of Sci Fi Hardness. But a lot of it is taste. It's partly based around the less imaginative SF fans simply saying x is a soft feature—regardless of how much work has been put into making x believable, works that have it will automatically, without another thought, be considered softer than those that don't. FTL is a popular value for x, as are starfighters, whether they think they're airplanes or not. I thought I'd make my own scale, one that corrects for taste—rather than saying FTL makes a series soft, FTL that's explained and consistent will be harder than one that "just works", and one that's based on a real theory will be harder than both.

The problem with the Mohs scale is it caters to illiterate taboos, to trends, and to taste. For instance, Firefly is higher on the Mohs scale than Larry Niven's Known Space stories. Niven's artificial gravity is mere Unobtainium—magnetic monopoles, the basis of the Kzin gravity planer, really would screw with gravity, if they existed. Firefly's is not only never explained, it can negate rest mass.

The Mohs scale also rewards deliberate vagueness in a work, the avoidance of attempts to explain—mainly because of the abuse of technobabble by Star Trek. But this leads to SF being graded like the SAT: wrong answers lose points, but not answering doesn't. I prefer to grade SF like homework, with an attempt at an answer being more useful than a blank question. When a work doesn't try to explain how something works, when it seems like it shouldn't—for instance, people making out in close proximity to a spaceship engine, but not being fried by the radiation—it gives me the suspicion the writers didn't know about it.

Anyway, because it attempts to correct for taste and trends, my alternative scale is called the Rockwell Scale Of Sci Fi Hardness—after the Rockwell Scale of Material Hardness, which attempts to correct for mechanical imperfections like backlash, just as mine corrects for trends and taste. The Rockwell Scale is also more intended for industrial use than the "pure science" of the Mohs Scale—and science fiction is a form of entertainment, not a peer-reviewed academic discourse.

Hardness levels from softer to harder, with a hypothetical example:

1. Blatant Fantasy. Not only is current science violated without a word of acknowledgment, fairly old ideas are ignored. A work where people just walk around on the open decks of wooden spaceships, all of which have the same gravity as earth.
2. Complete Fantasy. Current science is ignored without a word of acknowledgment. A work where ships can just keep speeding up, ad infinitum; there is no light-speed limit.
3. Voting "Present". The work deliberately avoids going into its technology, avoiding any explanation, plausible or not. A work where the FTL is just called "FTL".
4. Handwave. Things happen that shouldn't work in current understandings of science, but are acknowledged as they are passed. The matter-energy converter, that works on the basis of individual particles, has a component that counteracts quantum indeterminacy.
5. Aperture Science. The things that don't mesh with current science are done consistently and systematically; though the mechanism may not be explained, its effects are logical. A field that cuts everything inside it off from entropy, and can therefore also turn a wire it's projected around into an infinitely sharp blade.
6. Squatter's Rights. The things that don't work under modern science are explained as being made possible by a current gray area in modern science. A system is explained as being based on the theory that finally united quantum mechanics and relativity.
7. Unobtainium. Nothing is used that couldn't be adequately explained by current theories—it just uses materials that may not actually exist. Artificial gravity generated by the peculiar trait of exotic matter (if there is such a thing): negative mass.
8. Mundane. Nothing is used that isn't known to exist, or at least to be producible with better tech and resources. An orbit elevator that uses carbon nanotubes to make an extremely strong cable.