Inception

I watched the DVD of Inception that I got for Christmas.
There's not much rewatch value in it. Most of it is endless pointless fight scene either way, and Cobb's issues with Mal just don't resonate with me enough to want to see him chew them over again. Cobb's issues with reality on the other hand are a little too close to crazy home, and I could quite live without.
It remains creepy that the exact same thing, kill yourself to wake up, turned up in Doctor Who too.
When I die in dreams all that happens is I kind of float around for a bit until I get bored and recorporealise.
Or I just switch point of view to a different character.
And it's still bizarre how absolutely ordinary these 'dream' spaces are. Not a lightsaber to be seen. Do people really dream so close to reality?
Even when I dream real places like college or wherever I can go through the walls and end up somewhere completely different.
Also, when I dream, if I realise I'm asleep, usually I get killed by a horde of zombies or similar.
... I don't know, my subconscious probably doesn't like me very much.

So, anyway, all that, that's the value in Inception. Everyone dreams, the idea of shared dreams hits all these shiny possibilities, either to use as presented or to tweak to be closer to right.

Plus characters like Eames and Arthur had just enough detail to be engaging without having enough to get in the way of making up whatever the hell we like. Fanfic bait.

And together they've got that Ocean's 11 heist crew thing going on with added gravity-optional fight scenes. Layers of awesome in the potential there.

I'm just not thinking the actual movie was especially awesome. Not twice, anyways.

Bandwidth between planets

I find myself needing to know the probable media distrubition infrastruction of an interplanetary civilisation based in a system roughly like our own. Like, if humans go live around Jupiter, will they get movies from Earth, and if so how?

I vaguely understand about light speed lag, so I know any request will take a long time to do a round trip, and internet will not work the way we expect it to on Earth right now once you stretch the unavoidable light speed lag between planets. You wait because you have to wait. It could take you hours to get a 404 not found.

But what about television? Right now we can get satellite TV from all over the world, or downloads from all over the world, lots of channels, lots of choice. If we go to other planets will it be the same only slower? Or is there a limit to how much we could send that far?

If people travel between planets to buy the film rights for other planetary markets are we talking a physics limit, which humans can't route around, or just a wider version of region coding?

... my space traders want to go into the movie business. Data weighs less than metal. But does it need to weigh anything at all?

Space law on rescue and salvage

I've been trying to figure out a big disaster that could land my spaceship owning merchant protagonists in the situation they're in at the start of the story. It is, naturally, turning into a whole other story. And I discover I need to understand about what happens to a spaceship when it is wrecked and then invent some law about finances if you rescue a ship or salvage a dead ship. Also, is it a dead ship if it arrives in two halves and the people are in one half and the valuable engines in the other? Everyone that owns it is still there, physics says all the parts keep going, they might be sitting right next to each other, they're just not technically all one ship any more on account of the middle part went crunch or boom or something.

I also need to figure out what happens to the course and speed in the crunch or boom or something.

I just wanted to write about families in space having an argument! Now I need to know physics! And vaguely understand economics, which may well be beyond me. And, now, law.

And add to the pot that the law in the nearest space station is derived from Islam and has particular Words to say about not nicking stuff from orphans, and most of the survivors are now orphans. There's a whole legal story there about jurisdiction and salvage claims and stuff.

And all the property in question belonged to their mothers and is now in the control of their uncles, with no fathers on record or vaguely in the picture in the kids lives. There's places that will crunch into laws set up with other assumptions.

... I know what happens in the other story. It's a nice simple action plot. It probably fits in a movie.
But the more I worldbuild to figure out the setting and how everyone got to that point the more story necessarily exists in the background or around the edges...