but that's because they're all tools of convenient/lazy writing first and foremost. The transporter was outright a way of getting around the fact that the original series didn't have the shuttle models ready in time! It's not even that they're vaguely defined
To be fair, that sounds a lot less like "lazy writing" and more like "writing around practical limitations." I really have no issue with a series doing that at all, because there's no helping it. The only real problem is that even after they got past those limitations they felt obliged to
keep it.
Those are the same thing. Technobabble is just a nickname for the nonsense words that people say when they're using pseudoscience as a plot device. Pseudoscience and technobabble are just taking what's effectively magic and dressing it up in a "scientific" cosplay.
Not really. Like, in the literal sense of what those terms are supposed to mean, you're right, but in this context "technobabble" is being used to mean "dressing up magic as science." But that's a very distinct thing from the fact that every science fiction
ever uses concepts or technologies that do not yet or even cannot possibly exist; hence the "fiction" in the genre's name.
Generally, most modern science fiction and fantasy stories that invoke either science or magic that don't exist take care to present it in a way that is
internally consistent, i.e. it lays out some basic rules of what can and cannot be done and it usually only breaks them if there's some kind of explanation for it and it's dramatically appropriate (because narrative should
always trump mechanics, IMO, as the latter only exists to service the former by allowing you to invest yourself in what's happening because you understand what's going on). If Superman's powers work because of sunlight, then that means depriving him of sunlight will
eventually weaken him. It makes no sense that sunlight should give Superman the strength it does, but that's
fine as long as the fact that he is solar-powered is treated consistently.
Fictional magic and fictional science are just fine as a focus of a setting
if there's a coherent framework for the audience to understand; otherwise, magic or science should be treated in much the way magic
used to be treated all the time in fiction, i.e. as something powerful but dangerous and not to be relied upon overmuch because it couldn't be understood by most people and often backfired on them in some way. Magic was always used as either a way to overcome an obstacle for the hero but not solve the plot (unless you count divine intervention as magic, because
deus ex machina was a very cherished part of theater and the like for the longest time) or as an obstacle in itself, but Merlin was never the hero because, among other things, magic had no framework in those stories to explain what he could and could not do so Merlin could do whatever he wanted, which is a bad thing in a hero. But I digress.
The way Dio and Jonathan's power-ups work don't make scientific sense, but they are
internally consistent. There is a
coherency to them that gives you some idea of what you can and can't expect. Dio's vampirism is always couched in terms of working on physical mechanics; thus, he does not magically turn into a bat or wolf, he is not mindlessly compelled to count sesame seeds or rice grains spilled on the floor (yes that's actual vampire lore), and he isn't arbitrarily harmed just by seeing a very common geometric shape (i.e. a cross). His powers are all described as deriving from complete control over his own body and biology, and thus he only has powers that can be explained as being a part of that in some manner; yes, none of his powers should work in the manner described as working, but you can still grasp that his ice powers are
based on the real phenomenon of evaporative cooling and properties of thermodynamics, and thus are, in fact, a result of his total control over his body and not "magic ice powers that I developed because vampire so fuck you."
