History Mohs / PhysicsPlus

* ''Film/Dune2021'' takes a relatively realistic approach on adapting many of the books elements to screen: Laser beams are light speed and only visible when traveling through dust, ornithopters use large multi-rotor configurations to maximize stability and boundary layer ingestion, and sandworms emit sound waves to fluidize the sand before tunneling through it. It still has anti-gravity, shields, FTL and psychic powers, of course, though these are treated mostly consistently.

* Human technology in [[https://starmoth.space/]] is mostly diamond hard with the exception of the interstellar Geometry Drive, though many of the alien species discovered have their own forms of AppliedPhlebotinum. Unlike most sci-fi, FTL is not treated casually - the Sequence, the remnants of an STL interstellar empire that once ruled much of the galaxy, treat the humans like borderline [[EldritchAbomination Eldritch Abominations]] for it.

* The core universe of ''TabletopGame/{{Traveller}}'' fits in here - while there's a number of major breaks with reality such as FasterThanLightTravel and [[GravityMaster Gravity Control]], it's portrayed very consistently, and the majority of technology is generally in line with reality. Some of the alternate campaign settings are even harder, and could fall into the One Big Lie or Speculative Science categories.

* ''VideoGame/MetalGear'' blends hard and soft elements so dizzyingly that it might as well be freaking ''[[MindScrew epoxy]] [[WhatDoYouMeanItWasntMadeOnDrugs putty]].'' On the soft side, the series has things like immortal women, actual telepathic psychics, pyrokinetic men on fire, people with supernatural luck, autotropic grandpa snipers, men who can control attack bees and another who can control lightning, superhumans who can blow up a HumongousMecha in one strike, and actual ''vampires'', with much of said technology being [[MemeticMutation notoriously]] [[DoingInTheWizard done in]] in the most [[HandWave Hand Wave-y]] way possible ([[{{Nanomachines}} Nanomachines Can Do Anything]]). On the hard side, however, it's clear that what they ''do'' get right is ''[[ShownTheirWork painstakinglly]]'' [[ShownTheirWork well-researched]], with things like [[SpiderTank Spider Tanks]], [[AIIsACrapshoot Artificial Intelligences going rogue]] and [[{{Cyborg}} Cyborgs]] being portrayed in a way that'd be merely AwesomeButImpractical in the real world, while things like nuclear railguns, optic camouflages and cloning is portrayed [[ShownTheirWork so accurately]] that it becomes downright scary.

* ''VideoGame/MetalGear'' blends hard and soft elements so dizzyingly that it might as well be freaking ''[[MindScrew epoxy]] [[WhatDoYouMeanItWasntMadeOnDrugs putty]].'' On the soft side, the series has things like immortal women, actual telepathic psychics, pyrokinetic men on fire, people with supernatural luck, autotropic grandpa snipers, men who can control attack bees and another who can control lightning, superhumans who can blow up a HumongousMecha in one strike, and actual ''vampires'', with much of said technology being [[MemeticMutation notoriously]] [[DoingInTheWizard done in]] in the most [[HandWave Hand Wave-y]] way possible ([[{{Nanomachines}} Nanomachines Can Do Anything]]). On the hard side, however, it's clear that what they ''do'' get right is ''[[ShownTheirWork painstakinglly]]'' [[ShownTheirWork well-researched]], with things like [[SpiderTank Spider Tanks]], [[AIIsACrapshoot Artificial Intelligences going rogue]] and [[{{Cyborg}} Cyborgs]] being portrayed in a way that'd be merely AwesomeButImpractical in the real world, while things like nuclear railguns, optic camouflages and [[CloningBlues cloning]] is portrayed [[ShownTheirWork so accurately]] that it becomes downright scary.

* ''Anime/DirtyPair'' wasn't particularly hard in it's orginal incarnations, but the US manga adaptation turned things up a notch - space habitats were based off actual designs and extremely vulnerable to damage, nanotechnology had enormous overheating problems, gravity technology was both rare and creatively applied, and even the method of [[spoiler:stellar destruction]] was inspired by the ideas of physicist Iosif Shklovskii.

* Franchise/MarvelCinematicUniverse is somewhere between this and Mohs/WorldOfPhlebotinum. In general, everything ties back to the Infinity Stones, six artifacts which allow totally counterfactual abilities like teleportation, time travel, mind control, and infinite energy generation, but the rules governing these are pretty consistent and interact with real physical laws in credible ways.

* ''TabletopGame/GURPSTechnomancer'' is an interesting example, combining widespread use of outright magic with realistic existing and near-future tech - nuclear powered teleportation circles launch spacecraft into orbit that run on VASIMR engines with delta-V boosting homeopathic propellant, gas-dynamic lasers lased through ectoplasm produce necrotic death beams that snipe cancer cells, and dragons are engineered for radar stealth. The magic itself appears to run on some elaborate higher-dimensional physics, which are elaborated on in ''TabletopGame/{{InfiniteWorlds}}''.

* ''TabletopGame/{{GURPSTechnomancer}}'' is an interesting example, combining widespread use of outright magic with realistic existing and near-future tech - nuclear powered teleportation circles launch spacecraft into orbit that run on VASIMR engines with delta-V boosting homeopathic propellant, gas-dynamic lasers lased through ectoplasm produce necrotic death beams that snipe cancer cells, and dragons are engineered for radar stealth. The magic itself appears to run on some elaborate higher-dimensional physics, which are elaborated on in ''TabletopGame/{{InfiniteWorlds}}''.

* ''TabletopGame/{{Battletech}}'' is a curious case. {{Necessary Weasel}}s such as FasterThanLightTravel and HumongousMecha aside, it averts many common scifi tropes such as ArtificialGravity, InertialDampening, ignorance of heat management and unrealistically high accelerations, but is "softened" by many [[SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale Scale Failures]].

* ''Manga/BattleAngelAlita'' averts many of the usual [[NecessaryWeasel Necessary Weasels]] and usually tries to provide in depth scientific explanations for technology, although explanations occasionally depend on invented or pseudoscientific principles, which combined with the implausible performance of many of its cyborgs results in it falling in here.

* ''VideoGame/FTLFasterThanLight'' has FTL (jumps only between set beacons, much more like a PortalNetwork), artificial gravity, DeflectorShields and [[TeleportersAndTransporters teleporters]]. They have their own internally consistent set of rules that are sometimes exploited (teleporters work through shields, so there are weapons that teleport explosives to the enemy ship) and the other weapons are fairly realistic.

* ''Webcomic/SchlockMercenary'' is almost entirely plausible scientifically, although little of the theory appears in the work. Its placement is primarily due to limiting its AppliedPhlebotinum to gravity manipulation (but not generation — ships are built around spheres of neutronium as sources of gravity to manipulate), taking it for granted that the process is as well developed as electronics, and playing the result to its natural conclusions; ubiquitous {{flight}}, DeflectorShields, [[OurWormholesAreDifferent traversable wormholes]] (one example which {{justifie|dTrope}}s a TimeTravel storyline), and [[TeleportersAndTransporters quantum teleportation]].

** As a curiosity, when ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'' came out, it was intended to be Mohs/SpeculativeScience, almost Futurology. The concept of {{antimatter}} has been around since 1898, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuterium deuterium]] is a totally real thing, DeflectorShields and {{Protophotoneutron Torpedo}}es make perfect sense (though the latter, [[NonIndicativeName unintuitively]], uses antimatter in its warhead), a number of Starfleet technologies have become {{defictionalized}} (self-opening doors, tablet computers, voice-operated computers) with more on the way, and "warp drive" was chosen because NASA saw it -- and, indeed, still sees it today -- as one of the most likely ways to achieve FasterThanLightTravel. However, the series started sliding into {{Technobabble}} almost immediately, particularly given its budget -- there was no way to show the much more realistic approach of "shuttles landing on alien planets" every week, for instance, so the [[{{Teleportation}} transporters]] were invented, immediately opening a massive can of worms as Heisenberg's [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle uncertainty principle]] had been known since the 1920s.[[note]]This was {{handwave}}d in the ''TNG'' era with the existence of "Heisenberg Compensators." When asked how they worked, the showrunners replied, "[[MathematiciansAnswer Very well, thank you.]]"[[/note]] Dilithium, trilithium, protomatter and more followed in its wake, inevitably costing the franchise its relatively-hard-science rating.

** As a curiosity, when ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'' came out, it was intended to be Mohs/SpeculativeScience, almost Futurology. The concept of {{antimatter}} has been around since 1898, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuterium deuterium]] is a totally real thing, DeflectorShields and Protophotoneutron Torpedoes make perfect sense (though the latter, [[NonIndicativeName unintuitively]], uses antimatter in its warhead), a number of Starfleet technologies have become {{defictionalized}} (self-opening doors, tablet computers, voice-operated computers) with more on the way, and "warp drive" was chosen because NASA saw it -- and, indeed, still sees it today -- as one of the most likely ways to achieve FasterThanLightTravel. However, as the series started running out of ideas, it slid into the {{Technobabble}} it's famous for today ("dilithium crystals" being only the first step), inevitably losing its relatively-hard-science rating.

* ''Anime/DirtyPair'' usually falls in here - [[SpaceFriction Space Friction]] is averted, and the series generally tries to stay relatively accurate when it doesn't get in the way of [[RuleOfCool Rule Of Cool]] or [[RuleOfFunny Rule Of Funny]].