I think it’s hilarious that in HHGTTG they are using a improbability drive.
@richText I think Adams wrote that because many Sci-Fi spaceship are using very improbable propulsion methods.
@odd An inconsistency, it seemed to me, in the Star Wars movies: none of them make any sense unless you assume that all the spacecraft have access (somehow!) to limitless amounts of energy. Then in one of the later, newer movies, they make a big plot point of a craft running out of fuel. What is this "fuel"? one asks.
@JMaxB I’ve forgotten about that, but those who make the movies are only people too, I guess. They think no-one is going to remember, or at least mentally ask these questions. There is so much that is to wonder: How can a spaceship designed to go at incredible speeds sometimes just hover slowly over a landscape, with no visible propulsion, and then we have WARP-drive, and worm-hole travellers… It’s all a mess.
@odd One of his brief incarnations was a bowl of petunias that (because of the infinite improbability drive) just popped into existence several miles above the surface of a planet — gravity took it from there.