On Technobabble and Its Proper Dramatic Uses

It's more used when they want to get out of a situation demonstrating creative original thought on behalf of the heroes or course starships etc not being real they have a few choices use some old classic strategy bought forward into the modern age or insert technobabble.

I read that trek writers used to just write, "insert techno speak here that achieves X" and another crew wrote in what happens there.

To add texture and atmosphere=fine
To repeatedly resolve plots points=problematic

Doctor Who does it all the time though.

At some point a writer may want to write that hero solved a technical problem due to his knowledge of the problem, this becomes a problem in Sci-Fi as such problem is not real. I guess though unless you want to get Alex Reynolds in to write every episode of Doctor Who you have to have the meaningless techno babble.

Alistair Reynolds rather.

I think what prompted this thought was listening to one of the Doctor Who audios, and realizing how overly convoluted they described some of the tech. Concepts that we've commonly understood for a coupla decades needed to have overly explicative names for either better understanding, or, i suspect, to make them sound more (unnessarily) techy.

And it's this extra unnecessary bit that I find jarring and pulls me out of the story, as much as a hilariously bad American accent.

Oh this is kinda neat:

"Reverse the polarity"

The catchphrase most associated with the Third Doctor's era is probably "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow". The phrase was Pertwee's way of dealing with the technobabble that he was required to speak as the Doctor. He wanted something all purpose and easy to remember instead of myriad made-up dialogue, and Terrance Dicks provided him with the phrase.

Many fans of the show believe that this is a scientific impossibility. In actuality, it is possible for neutrons to flow and, since neutrons have a magnetic moment[1], it is possible in theory (although difficult in practice) to have a stream of neutrons polarised along or against their direction of motion. Given this, such a polarity could presumably be reversed. However, the phrase is still meaningless in the contexts in which the series uses it.

Pertwee did not use the phrase as often as popular belief has it. The Third Doctor only said the full phrase "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" once on screen during his tenure — in The Sea Devils — and also in the 1983 20th Anniversary special The Five Doctors. Pertwee did use the phrase again in 1989 when he acted in the stage play Doctor Who - The Ultimate Adventure. (When Colin Baker took over the lead role in the play he amended the line to "Reverse the linetry of the proton flow.") In the radio play The Paradise of Death the Brigadier asks "Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow?" and the Doctor proceeds to explain that the phrase is meaningless.

On four other occasions on screen, the Third Doctor simply "reversed the polarity" of other things. He tells Ruth to reverse the temporal polarity of the TOMTIT device in The Time Monster; reverses the polarity of his sonic screwdriver in Frontier in Space; reverses the polarity of some dismantled circuitry in Planet of the Daleks; and tells Osgood to reverse the polarity of the diathermic energy exchanger in The Dæmons.

The full phrase was used in several Target novelisations. It was subsequently used by the Fourth Doctor (in City of Death) and the Fifth Doctor (in Castrovalva and Mawdryn Undead). Together with The Five Doctors this resulted in the phrase being used as a nostalgic reference three times as often as it was originally said. In the Tenth Doctor episode "The Lazarus Experiment" the Doctor, while hiding in Lazarus' machine, comments that it had taken him too long to reverse the polarity due to being out of practice.

The phrase has entered geek culture, although this has been more through its use as technobabble. It appeared before Doctor Who in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "That Which Survives" and later in the Stargate SG-1 episode "Learning Curve" and South Park episode "Cancelled". The phrase appears in various The Real Ghostbusters episodes, such as Egon's Ghost. The phrase has also featured in the dialogue of the musical We Will Rock You, amongst other references to popular culture.