I think people writing fanfiction for the project hail mary fandom (and probably other hard sci-fi media) are in a worse-off position than people writing for less rule-dependent media because real-world science is such an integral part of it. I mean, you can always suspend your disbelief regardless of the context but its muuuch easier to do so if your characters live in a land full of dragons or if both the writer and the readers are very familiar with the subject matter and the reader can see that something ‘wrong’ was intentional and not an oversight. For example, i was reading a bloodymary fic where grace and rocky find simons submarine floating in space because rocky heard him. Trough space. (No hate to the author, the fic is very good.)
Maybe this is happening because some people only watched the film and some of the background show-dont-tell scientific stuff went over their heads (which certanly happened to me) and then they dont realise something already has an explanation so they make it up themseleves. Thats not always bad, certanly, but if youre presenting your story as being set in the real world with real world physics then you have to either a) stick to what you know or b) research, and some people dont do that.
If youre writing for media set in the modern-world earth, you have to know things like how people work and how certain social stuff works. Most people will have no problem with those because theyre living in that exact world and dont have to research what going to a coffee shop or library looks like, while they would have trouble describing long-distance space travel off the top of their heads. Im not an astrophysicist or anything like that but i find myself clicking off fics which feature very obvious (at least to me) inaccuracies in throwaway moments. If youre using a fun but impossible thing to move the plot forward and have fun then have at it, but im saying that not doing that intentionally while expanding upon a world which is very much constrained by the laws of physics will take me, and maybe other readers, out of the moment. For instance, while a star trek story about an abundance of conveniently earth-like atmosferes on distant planets and near-instant conversations across light-years (not to even mention warp-drives) is standard, a plot containing anything even remotely similair to that in the phm universe would be very jarring because of the constraints of the original.
All to say, its hard being a pedantic scifi fanfiction reader… Thanks for reading my ramblings. Also: write what you like, im not the boss of you!!! Do it for yourself even if others dislike it!! Have fun!!