The new movie: Second screening, first reactions [SPOILERS]
Phillip Thorne
Thursday, which was the second showing (of six) at my local theater.
Apparently there was a crowd for 19:00, but my screening had only 30
people in a 300-seat theater.
Music: The Goldsmith TOS theme doesn't appear until the end credits
(which is better than "Rebuild of Evangelion 1.0," which completely
ignored "Cruel Angel's Thesis").
Cinematography: Too much cinema verit� shaky-cam, and far too many sun
dogs and lens flares. In space, and inside, because ...
Production design: ... Way overdesigned. Too many pointy surfaces on
the bridges, too many accent lights, too much motion and overlapping
in the GUIs. Romulans apparently have no OSHA, and no fear of
heights; the interior of the _Narada_ made no sense for any kind of
vessel, let alone a mining ship.
Oh, and they filmed the _Enterprise's_ engineering spaces in a
brewery. And the bridge has a front window.
The transporter: The operators are seated (bad ergonomics) behind a
protective (it's labeled) glass wall (as with ST:TMP), and the edge of
the stage lights up red during operation. The stage isn't flat --
each pad has a domed lens which makes standing difficult, and there's
a bigger one in the center which would make bulk transport impossible.
They have trouble locking onto targets moving quickly, or at least
erratically -- since *of course* *moving* can't be an obstacle if you
do it from orbit. But maybe they can't -- Scotty gives a limit of
"about a hundred miles" (forget 40,000 km), and the cadets are taken
to spacedock in shuttles. But then again, they beam to Vulcan's
surface during rescue ops.
The _Narada_ (Nero's ship): Nero says he was a simple miner, and a
skyhook excavation-beam makes sense for a mining ship (I can imagine
Romulans strip-mining planets, even when asteroids are more sensible).
But the exterior and interior shapes make no sense -- where are the
holds? Refineries? I can imagine modifications during 25 years of
waiting in the past, but he made his unplanned time-jump just after
the destruction of Romulus, so why does he already have missiles to
attack the _Kelvin_? (Well, maybe Romulans are crazy enough to arm
civilian ships.)
Aliens: Funny guy on the _Kelvin_, stretched-face guy in the Iowa bar,
Uhura's Orion roommate (she's smart! as with "Miss Mary Mack" from
Peter David's _Imzadi_ and in ENT), Scotty's short pal on Delta Vega.
Ships: Starfleet doesn't appear to have any two ships of the same
shape. There's the _Kelvin_, and 25 years later, the _Enterprise_ and
six other ships in the taskforce sent to Vulcan, with various
combinations of saucer hulls, nacelles, hulls the same size as
nacelles, and rollbars.
Personal histories: Spock is older than Kirk -- he's already a
Commander and an instructor at Starfleet when Kirk enlists. Uhura is
probably the same age, and enlists at the same time. McCoy is much
older and already a doctor, but enlists at the same time as the
others, because of a messy divorce (no name is given for his wife, no
daughter is mentioned). Sulu is not in Science; he's apparently a
junior officer, and the only replacement helmsman when the primary
gets sick. Chekov is a 17-year-old wunderkind. Scotty's age is
indeterminate: he's in Starfleet, but stranded in an outpost on Delta
Vega for unspecified reasons. Kirk takes the Kobayashi Maru exam for
the third time.
Names: Sulu introduces himself as Hikaru. Uhura guards her first name
until Spock uses it, thereby canonizing "Nyota" (pronounced "nyo-ta,"
as in Japanese or Spanish, not "nigh-oh-ta").
That makes no organizational sense: Why was Scotty able to take over
_Enterprise's_ engineering? It was a new ship -- he shouldn't be
familiar with it. Why did Starfleet immediately make Kirk's
battlefield promotion permanent? He might have the book learning, but
a ship captain needs to have experience in people management.
Why were all the cadets in Iowa before going to the Academy? Okay, if
the _Enterprise_ is being built there -- if that's a shipyard, it was
designed for only one ship -- it may be a sensible gathering place.
Perhaps it's more of a population hub than you'd think? Especially
with those giant arcology towers in the background.
Why did Spock exile Kirk to Delta Vega? That is, why did he
*interrupt their rushed trip* to do so? They appeared to have been at
warp for several minutes -- wouldn't he need to drop out? But they
couldn't have been, because the planet seems to be within visible
distance of Vulcan.
Vulcan is apparently only minutes away from Earth at warp.
Spock estimates that only 10,000 Vulcans remain after the destruction
of the planet. Um, colony worlds? Merchant fleet?
--
** Phillip Thorne ** peth...@comcast.net **************
* RPI CompSci 1998 *
** underbase.livejournal.com ***************************
Jack Bohn
Whether to attach to your thread or start my own...
>Production design: ... Way overdesigned. Too many pointy surfaces on
>the bridges, too many accent lights, too much motion and overlapping
>in the GUIs. Romulans apparently have no OSHA, and no fear of
>heights; the interior of the _Narada_ made no sense for any kind of
>vessel, let alone a mining ship.
>
>Oh, and they filmed the _Enterprise's_ engineering spaces in a
>brewery. And the bridge has a front window.
Unless someone can point out clear signage that it's part of
propulsion (see your "Production design" above) I'm going to
believe Scotty was swimming in part of the environmental
conditioning equipment.
>The transporter: The operators are seated (bad ergonomics)
Eh? Too crowded, can't reach the necessary controls, or were
they just bad chairs?
>The stage isn't flat --
>each pad has a domed lens which makes standing difficult,
It sounded like Kirk and Sulu crunched one in their landing, but
I didn't notice any broken later.
>They have trouble locking onto targets moving quickly, or at least
>erratically -- since *of course* *moving* can't be an obstacle if you
>do it from orbit. But maybe they can't -- Scotty gives a limit of
>"about a hundred miles" (forget 40,000 km), and the cadets are taken
>to spacedock in shuttles. But then again, they beam to Vulcan's
>surface during rescue ops.
I'm sure the FX aren't right for the ships to be only 100 miles
above the surface, but the guys do skydive from the shuttle to
the end of the drill, about 5,000 meters, IIRC, and the power of
the superheated whatever that's drilling has got to fall off with
distance, so Nero should want to keep it close to the surface.
>The _Narada_ (Nero's ship): Nero says he was a simple miner, and a
>skyhook excavation-beam makes sense for a mining ship (I can imagine
>Romulans strip-mining planets, even when asteroids are more sensible).
>But the exterior and interior shapes make no sense -- where are the
>holds? Refineries? I can imagine modifications during 25 years of
>waiting in the past, but he made his unplanned time-jump just after
>the destruction of Romulus, so why does he already have missiles to
>attack the _Kelvin_? (Well, maybe Romulans are crazy enough to arm
>civilian ships.)
Stripmine planets, torpedo asteroids? Again, unless told
otherwise, I'm going to imagine that whole spiky open shape is
the hold, metal ore rocks being put in between them and welded
together into an aggregate that can't fall out and just needs to
be chipped apart at the destination.
Brilliant stroke making Nero a miner/truckdriver, 'cuz he ain't
the sharpest needle in the haystack. His motivation didn't make
a lot of sense, nor his plan, nor execution...
>Ships: Starfleet doesn't appear to have any two ships of the same
>shape. There's the _Kelvin_, and 25 years later, the _Enterprise_ and
>six other ships in the taskforce sent to Vulcan, with various
>combinations of saucer hulls, nacelles, hulls the same size as
>nacelles, and rollbars.
Nor do they seem to have a lot of them. It sounded like most of
the rest of the fleet was handling one other crisis.
>Personal histories: Spock is older than Kirk -- he's already a
>Commander and an instructor at Starfleet when Kirk enlists. Uhura is
>probably the same age, and enlists at the same time.
As she already had a uniform and course of study in Iowa, and was
a lieutenant when "I'll do it in three" Kirk was about to
graduate, she may be a year (or two) ahead of him.
(Hmm... "You'll be an officer in four years, you could have your
own ship in eight." "I'll do it in three!" Here I thought Jim
was only responding to the first part of the sentence.)
>McCoy is much
>older and already a doctor, but enlists at the same time as the
>others, because of a messy divorce (no name is given for his wife, no
>daughter is mentioned). Sulu is not in Science; he's apparently a
>junior officer, and the only replacement helmsman when the primary
>gets sick. Chekov is a 17-year-old wunderkind. Scotty's age is
>indeterminate: he's in Starfleet, but stranded in an outpost on Delta
>Vega for unspecified reasons. Kirk takes the Kobayashi Maru exam for
>the third time.
>That makes no organizational sense: Why was Scotty able to take over
>_Enterprise's_ engineering? It was a new ship -- he shouldn't be
>familiar with it. Why did Starfleet immediately make Kirk's
>battlefield promotion permanent? He might have the book learning, but
>a ship captain needs to have experience in people management.
This is the final proof that Starfleet is not the military. Kirk
did not get promoted to O-6, two braids with a partial running in
between, 'cuz the kids in the club (one of whom is Admiral Komak
from the nameplates) get to pick who's on their team.
>Why were all the cadets in Iowa before going to the Academy?
Cadets on a field trip, not recruits shipping in. kirk was
(maybe) the only recruit.
>Spock estimates that only 10,000 Vulcans remain after the destruction
>of the planet. Um, colony worlds? Merchant fleet?
I guess not.
Timeline changes:
*Early revelation that Romulans are of Vulcan stock. Was this
during the _Kelvin_ Incident? Did Nero or anyone identify
themselves as Romulans?
*Kirk's late entry in Starfleet. Blame it on his step-father.
(And what happened to George Samuel Kirk?)
*Doctor Gillian. One of the shuttles was named Gillian. Could
this mean Kirk did/will not abscond with a certain cetacean
expert, who made more of a name for herself in the 20th Century?
This could provide a time-travel amplification effect for some
other stranger changes, to wit-
*Late launch of the Enterprise (and its weird design). How can
we attribute this to the death of Kirk's father and the captain
of the Kelvin? Is it somehow due to the 800(!) who survived?
(Should the Farragut have been destroyed by the time of Kirk's
new graduation date? It's the ship Uhura did not want to be
assigned to. Rather embarrassing to our hero to attribute its
survival to him not being aboard.)
*Worse sensors. Sensors, like other characters, tend to only
tell you what the plot needs you to know, but generally we'd been
able to detect *some* things while on approach. The Enterprise
doesn't know what's going on at Vulcan until they come out of
warp in the middle of their destroyed fleet.
--
-Jack
Space Cowboy
news:b257051ubcm3ppc1v...@4ax.com:
Bitch,bitch,bitch
This old fart liked it and accepts the changes....though it does open
a can of worms.eg.Will old Ambassador Spock spill the beans to
Starfleet Security about threats still out there? Like go back to the
20th or 19th to seed Humpbacks in the 23rd,even as a secret project?
Whale probe going to Earth after not hearing anything for 200 years,
all of a sudden picks up Humback calls, turns around for home, crisis
averted before any Terran civilian knows.
> they can't -- Scotty gives a limit of "about a hundred miles"
> (forget 40,000 km), and the cadets are taken to spacedock in
> shuttles. But then again, they beam to Vulcan's surface during
> rescue ops.
>
Listen to the convo....he also says he can do it planet to planet
within the same system ergo..not carved in stone.
>
> Vulcan is apparently only minutes away from Earth at warp.
Good!
>
> Spock estimates that only 10,000 Vulcans remain after the
> destruction of the planet. Um, colony worlds? Merchant fleet?
Hhhhmmmmm...OK, and for astronomy most Hollywood filmmakers frellup
........even Whedon is far from perfect in that sense and i got
flamed elsewhere for pointing that out.
As the story goes, the timeline got frelled in Archer's day anyhow,
eventhough pastyface from the 31st said it was fixed, what would he
know..he's a Berman character!
--
Origin: "Battle Beyond The Stars"[1980,George Peppard,actor.Roger
Corman,producer,low budget but fun to watch]
Must See: "The Magnificent Seven" & "The Seven Samurai"
Starfleet in both Prime(TOS) & J.J.Abrams`verses & Browncoat in
another `verse!
Phillip Thorne
>Phillip Thorne wrote on 7 May 2009:
>>The transporter: The operators are seated (bad ergonomics)
>
>Eh? Too crowded, can't reach the necessary controls, or were
>they just bad chairs?
We didn't actually see enough of the chairs to know if they provided
proper lumbar support, but it's more a matter of sightlines. From a
seated position the operators won't be able to see the raised
platform. And being seated causes
Also it's less photogenic: you can't shoot a scene in which the
operator(s) and traveler(s) are nose-to-nose if one party is seated.
>>The stage isn't flat --
>>each pad has a domed lens which makes standing difficult,
>
>It sounded like Kirk and Sulu crunched one in their landing, but
>I didn't notice any broken later.
Maybe they're flexible, and they squished it into its other
conformation.
>>They have trouble locking onto targets moving quickly, or at least
>>erratically -- since *of course* *moving* can't be an obstacle if you
>>do it from orbit. But maybe they can't -- Scotty gives a limit of
>>"about a hundred miles" (forget 40,000 km), and the cadets are taken
>>to spacedock in shuttles. But then again, they beam to Vulcan's
>>surface during rescue ops.
>[Arguments for/against _Enterprise's_ altitude at that point]
This is one of those "We need to reduce the capability so it can be
visibly improved later" things. ("Later" meaning in this movie, and
in subsequent movies.) But (a) they seem to have less capability than
ENT (which is part of canon, annoying as it is), and (b) "a hundred
miles" is a ridiculously short distance.
And targeting seemed to be entirely manual. Why? (For DRAMA!)
Also, despite their fancy GUIs, they didn't seem to have the
capability to reroute transporter control to the bridge, TNG-style.
Chekov had to run to the transporter room.
Later, when Spock-Prime provides Scotty with his own "transwarp
transporter" formula, which he'd apparently mused about c.2270... (a)
TNG did not seem to have that capability, so did Montgomery Scott,
commander of SCE, finally work it out c.2390?, and (b) will it now be
a standard feature on Starfleet ships?
Phillip Thorne
>Phillip Thorne wrote on 7 May 2009:
>I'm sure the FX aren't right for the ships to be only 100 miles
>above the surface, but the guys do skydive from the shuttle to
>the end of the drill, about 5,000 meters, IIRC, and the power of
>the superheated whatever that's drilling has got to fall off with
>distance, so Nero should want to keep it close to the surface.
Maybe the skyhook-part wasn't original equipment, and it's something
Nero's crew cobbled together during their 25-year wait for Spock and
his supply of Red Matter?
Operationally, strip-mining a *planet* seems like too big a job for
one ship -- it can carve the planet, but it needs to carry the ore up
the gravity well. A collection of specialized vehicles are necessary
(look at any Earth-mine today.) Maybe the beam was designed for
carving asteroids that are large enough for internal heating and
stratification to have occurred (all the tasty heavy metals have sunk
to the center), but small enough to extract those bits.
I wonder how deep a hole he dug? You can't dig too deep, or the walls
of the shaft will just squeeze shut. I'm not a petroleum engineer,
but it might happen too fast to even drop the Red Matter weapon.
Why wouldn't the Red Matter create an adequate black hole if dropped
onto the surface?
>>The _Narada_ (Nero's ship): Nero says he was a simple miner, and a
>>skyhook excavation-beam makes sense for a mining ship (I can imagine
>>Romulans strip-mining planets, even when asteroids are more sensible).
>>But the exterior and interior shapes make no sense -- where are the
>>holds? Refineries? [...]
Admittedly, I'm mostly concerned about the interior design, which
seems to follow "First Contact's" school of "make it pointy,
industrial, steamy and creepy."
The control console/pillars were a bit like those in "Balance of
Terror." Tossing around holographic images (how do they know where to
stop? computer looks for the first person in the direction of the
gesture?) is without Trek precedent AFAIK.
Why the flooded decks? That can't possibly be a design feature. Too
busy with revenge to close a leak?
>Stripmine planets, torpedo asteroids? Again, unless told
>otherwise, I'm going to imagine that whole spiky open shape is
>the hold, metal ore rocks being put in between them and welded
>together into an aggregate that can't fall out and just needs to
>be chipped apart at the destination.
Aha. Yes, that would make more sense than pressurized internal holds.
Trek usually forgets there's an "outside" to each ship, but maybe we
can thank the new team for not falling into that conceptual trap.
And all the fringed bits are to provide extra tie-downs?
I dislike the complete lack of warp nacelles (all the ships acted more
like "Star Wars" hyperdrive vessels), but Trek's been doing
non-nacelled ships since TNG year 1, so that boat's sailed.
>Brilliant stroke making Nero a miner/truckdriver, 'cuz he ain't
>the sharpest needle in the haystack. His motivation didn't make
>a lot of sense, nor his plan, nor execution...
Somebody on his crew was smart enough to figure how far Spock's
arrival would be diverted. Which strains credulity, cause (a) they
shouldn't have been equipped to take readings, (b) falling into an
unexpected black hole, would they *remember* to do so, and (c) how'd
they have the know-how to interpret them?
Maybe his crew had some physicist-prisoners sent to the work camps.
Phillip Thorne
>*Early revelation that Romulans are of Vulcan stock.
The initial comm officer admits he may be unable to distinguish
Romulan and Vulcan. That's why Uhura takes his place.
Which raises a question: in TOS, when the Romulan War accords were
negotiated by subspace radio, were they done in text or by voice? And
in whose language?
>Was this during the _Kelvin_ Incident?
>Did Nero or anyone identify themselves as Romulans?
Not IIRC. But Uhura intercepted the transmission about a "Romulan"
ship destroying 47 Klingon ships (how would the Klingons recognize
such a bizarre future design as Romulan?), and Kirk connects that with
the "space lightning storm" of the _Kelvin_ incident.
Or maybe it's one of those milieu-assumptions that the screenwriters
forgot to write around when considering the newbie-audience. Or just
a logic hole.
OTOH, it's completely plot-unimportant that Nero's Romulan. All his
blather to Pike and Kirk about protecting the future-Romulans by
destroying the present-Federation is just talk, since they have no
clue about Spock-Prime's unification efforts and the whole d�tente.
Well, not completely -- there was the Earth-Romulan war a century
earlier. But the idea that the future-UFP could *stop a supernova*!
>*Kirk's late entry in Starfleet. Blame it on his step-father.
>(And what happened to George Samuel Kirk?)
Pre-incursion:
James, father of Winona
Tiberius Kirk, father of George
George Kirk and Winona, parents of George Samuel and James Tiberius
George S. Kirk and Aurelan, parents of Peter
>*Doctor Gillian. One of the shuttles was named Gillian.
The good marine biologist's name was Gillian *Taylor*. Shuttles are
named after surnames.
>Could this mean Kirk did/will not abscond with a certain cetacean
>expert, who made more of a name for herself in the 20th Century?
>This could provide a time-travel amplification effect [...]
Ahaaa. So the first-order changes are those from the _Narada's_
arrival in 2238, including the _Kelvin_ deaths. The second-order
changes arise from time-travel excursions not taken by the revised
_Enterprise_ crew.
Since they (Crew-1) never traveled further back than Earth's 1960s, I
think we can assume the great whales still went extinct.
Cdr.Spock (Quinto) notes that, if the _Narada_ is from the future, it
could've changed history, so Nero can't predict *anything*. (This is
also self-serving re: sequel movies.) But he has no reason to believe
it's other than a fluke, or that the _Enterprise_ crew will ever go on
t-excursions, so he has no reason to speculate on second-order
effects.
(Comprehensive Vulcan education probably includes a course on
theoretical temporal physics.)
>*Late launch of the Enterprise (and its weird design). How can
>we attribute this to the death of Kirk's father and the captain
>of the Kelvin? Is it somehow due to the 800(!) who survived?
They escaped with limited tactical scans of the _Narada_, and
Starfleet altered its design priorities?
>(Should the Farragut have been destroyed by the time of Kirk's
>new graduation date? It's the ship Uhura did not want to be
>assigned to. Rather embarrassing to our hero to attribute its
>survival to him not being aboard.)
We don't know that it *did* survive. The other six ships of the
taskforce were solidly trounced by the _Narada_. (There goes Uhura's
Orion roommate, who practically went "squeee!" upon her assignment.)
Or rather, it may've survived the cloud-vampire (possibly by not
encountering it), but it didn't survive to decommissioning age.
>*Worse sensors. Sensors, like other characters, tend to only
>tell you what the plot needs you to know, but generally we'd been
>able to detect *some* things while on approach. The Enterprise
>doesn't know what's going on at Vulcan until they come out of
>warp in the middle of their destroyed fleet.
Yes, travel at warp seems to mean a sensor/comms blackout. And nobody
seemed overly concerned about the lack of comm from Vulcan. And why
would the distress call specify "natural disaster" when there's a
frakkin' obvious HOVERING SHIP WITH MONSTER CUTTING BEAM that's the
cause?
The _Narada_ might be able to easily destroy 47 Klingon ships (c.2270)
in direct combat, but it couldn't chase down every ship in the
vicinity of Vulcan. Some of them should've seen what was happening,
retreated, and called for help.
And Vulcans are too logical to discard all their assets (system
patrol?) against an unknown threat in a single wave.
Also:
Time travel is probably the most overused plot-device in Trek (after
FTL, humanoid aliens and the universal translator). But we're aware
of the 29cen Starfleet and starship _Relativity_, and the 31cen
temporal cold war. Is this movie another front in that war? Are
there time-agents hiding in the corners, trying to minimize Nero's
disruptions and ensure the Federation and its most talented members
survive in some form?
Phillip Thorne
>>the bridges, too many accent lights, too much motion and overlapping
>>
>>Oh, and they filmed the _Enterprise's_ engineering spaces in a
>>brewery.
In fact, Uhura's station seemed to be one of several crammed between
two rows of steel tanks. (It's the background image in the "gallery"
section of <startrekmovie.com>.)
>And the bridge has a front window.
As did the _Kelvin_; they had to activate filters because the
_Narada's_ exit-anomaly was near a star.
A front window on a starship is silly -- what is there to *look at*?
Everything you need to see is better sythesized from omnidirectional
sensors.
>Unless someone can point out clear signage that it's part of
>propulsion (see your "Production design" above) I'm going to
>believe Scotty was swimming in part of the environmental
>conditioning equipment.
I expect so. Or potable water reprocessing. Lucky he didn't beam
into a tank of sewage, or of refrigeration fluid.
The sets seem to include:
Kelvin
* Bridge
* Shuttlebay (industrial re-dress)
Enterprise
* Bridge
* Turbolift
* Sickbay
* Transporter room
* Corridor 1
* Corridor 2
* Shuttlebay (industrial re-dress)
* Environmental engineering (industrial re-dress)
* Main engineering (industrial re-dress)
Building an Engineering set seems to be a recurring battle for Trek
production crews. IIRC, Roddenberry ensured one for TNG by writing it
into the script of the pilot.
There's a 360� panorama at <startrekmovie.com> (turn down your volume
before visiting). It shows three doors to the bridge: s.f., p.a.
(corridor), and s.a. (turbo). So at least they're not trapped by
turbo and ladderway access.
>I'm sure the FX aren't right for the ships to be only 100 miles
>above the surface, but the guys do skydive from the shuttle to
>the end of the drill, about 5,000 meters, IIRC, and the power of
>the superheated whatever that's drilling has got to fall off with
>distance, so Nero should want to keep it close to the surface.
No, I think they "space-dived" from a much greater altitude, and only
started *counting* when they were 5,000 meters above the platform.
Which itself seemed to be several klicks above the surface.
Is space-diving a common operation, such that they had a shuttle with
bomb-bay doors, and sufficient crew with training in it? And why did
they issue explosives to only one of the three?
The Abrams-E can direct all six saucer-mounted phaser banks (p/s/f
d/v) to the forward arc and fire them at once. And they're red pulses
instead of blue beams.
>*Late launch of the Enterprise (and its weird design). How can
>we attribute this to the death of Kirk's father and the captain
>of the Kelvin? Is it somehow due to the 800(!) who survived?
They escaped with limited tactical scans of the _Narada_, and
Starfleet amended its design priorities?
For all the angst over the external redesign of the E, we didn't get
to *see* much of it. The bad angles? The curved nacelle pylons that
flexed? The Bussard collectors (blue/red)? The flexible deflector
dish? (We see it do something when Kirk takes 'er out at the movie's
end.)
The shuttlebay definitely seemed squished into a melon shape instead
of the TOS hemisphere.
When Pike's shuttle exited, you could see the big diagonal struts.
They make structural sense, I suppose (no monocoque fuselage for us!),
but competely destroy the vast open feel of the shuttlebay interior.
Phillip Thorne
>>shape. There's the _Kelvin_, and 25 years later, the _Enterprise_ and
>>six other ships in the taskforce sent to Vulcan, with various
>>combinations of saucer hulls, nacelles, hulls the same size as
>>nacelles, and rollbars.
One of them looked like a Miranda-class, but with nacelles instead of
megaphasers on the rollbar. (Remember how excited we were in ST2 to
get the _Reliant_? Before that, the only onscreen Starfleet vessels
were shuttles and copies of the E. And some ugly boxes from TAS.)
Checking <startrekmovie.com> -- Nope, no official photos of them.
>Nor do they seem to have a lot of them. It sounded like most of
>the rest of the fleet was handling one other crisis.
Well, "we're the only seven ships in the sector" (not what they said)
is a change from "we're the only ship, singular." But why did they
need to use the cadets -- not enough regular crew? Were they all ill,
or had an aggressive shipbuilding program gotten ahead of staffing?
Vulcan no longer has their own national navy, as seen in ENT? I
*liked* those ships!
The other crisis (in the Laurentian? Lorentzian? Nebula) was not
described. Perhaps in the ADF novelization.
>As [Uhura] already had a uniform and course of study in Iowa, and was
>a lieutenant when "I'll do it in three" Kirk was about to
>graduate, she may be a year (or two) ahead of him.
Well, *that's* gotta be embarrassing for everybody. James T. Kirk,
the late-blooming Doogie Howser of the spaceways.
>(Hmm... "You'll be an officer in four years, you could have your
>own ship in eight." "I'll do it in three!" Here I thought Jim
>was only responding to the first part of the sentence.)
Unless his ego is even bigger than we thought, *he* probably thought
so too.
>>Kirk takes the Kobayashi Maru exam for the third time.
We see how he cheats, and it's boring (his new parameters simply has
drop the Klingon shields for no reason). Something like a series of
system failures and bad decisions by the Klingons would've been more
fun, but would've taken more screen time. Or a passing space storm.
Starfleet probably hadn't encountered any mysterious omnipotent beings
yet.
The Klingon "warbirds" appear to be perfectly ordinary D-7s or
K't'ingas (not timeline-changed!), but we only see them from the
front.
("Warbirds"! Completely unnecessary. The newbie-audience would be
happy with "warships," and A/K/O have just offended the diehards.)
>>Why were all the cadets in Iowa before going to the Academy?
>
>Cadets on a field trip, not recruits shipping in. kirk was
>(maybe) the only recruit.
Aha. That makes sense. "Okay, everybody, here's the new flagship
under construction. In three years, maybe you'll get a billet. Iowa
won the special contract and single-berth shipyard facilities were
moved in from San Francisco."
I *suppose* Starfleet might issue uniforms to cadets beforehand if
they have "pre-admission", as opposed to walk-in enlistees. It'd be
nice if the uniforms had school-year markings so we could verify
visually. (Do present-day military academies do that?)
>>McCoy is much older and already a doctor, but enlists at the same
>>time as the others, because of a messy divorce [...]
What is this, the French foreign legion? Or does Starfleet have an
open door for those who already have useful job skills?
Pike challenges Kirk to join Starfleet. He does so the next day (or
at least flies to SanFran). Does the Academy have rolling admission,
or did he just luck out on the timing?
And how picky/not is Starfleet? "Enlist" not "apply." As opposed to
the depiction by the Reeves-Stevens in e.g. _Prime Directive_, where
(by 2280) there are 12,000 applicants per spot, all of them with "la
reve d'etoile" (the dream of stars).
Jack Bohn
>Why wouldn't the Red Matter create an adequate black hole if dropped
>onto the surface?
Well, to come at it from a different direction, maybe it wouldn't
*stay* on the surface. Pulling in all that matter has got to
create some disturbance...
>>>The _Narada_
>>>But the exterior and interior shapes make no sense -- where are the
>>>holds? Refineries? [...]
>
>Admittedly, I'm mostly concerned about the interior design, which
>seems to follow "First Contact's" school of "make it pointy,
>industrial, steamy and creepy."
If it is the ore processing area... (why are the crew spending so
much time in it?) See particularly the Giant Wheel of Pointy
Things that Kirk leaps past at one point, a digger/scooper?
>The control console/pillars were a bit like those in "Balance of
>Terror." Tossing around holographic images (how do they know where to
>stop? computer looks for the first person in the direction of the
>gesture?) is without Trek precedent AFAIK.
?!? I must have been distracted by production design or
shakycam, I don't remember this.
>Why the flooded decks? That can't possibly be a design feature. Too
>busy with revenge to close a leak?
Nero misread the script and thought he was Nemo for a while?
>>Brilliant stroke making Nero a miner/truckdriver, 'cuz he ain't
>>the sharpest needle in the haystack.
>
>Somebody on his crew was smart enough to figure how far Spock's
>arrival would be diverted. Which strains credulity, cause (a) they
>shouldn't have been equipped to take readings, (b) falling into an
>unexpected black hole, would they *remember* to do so, and (c) how'd
>they have the know-how to interpret them?
>
>Maybe his crew had some physicist-prisoners sent to the work camps.
If all Romulan ships have singularity drives, perhaps we can say
that black hole knowledge is widespread among their starship
crews. That would also help with them knowing how to work with
the red matter.
--
-Jack
Jack Bohn
>>Phillip Thorne wrote on 7 May 2009:
>>>Ships: Starfleet doesn't appear to have any two ships of the same
>>>shape. There's the _Kelvin_, and 25 years later, the _Enterprise_ and
>>>six other ships in the taskforce sent to Vulcan, with various
>>>combinations of saucer hulls, nacelles, hulls the same size as
>>>nacelles, and rollbars.
>
>One of them looked like a Miranda-class, but with nacelles instead of
>megaphasers on the rollbar. (Remember how excited we were in ST2 to
>get the _Reliant_? Before that, the only onscreen Starfleet vessels
>were shuttles and copies of the E. And some ugly boxes from TAS.)
>
>Checking <startrekmovie.com> -- Nope, no official photos of them.
Four or five months until the next Ships of the Line calendar! :(
>>>Kirk takes the Kobayashi Maru exam for the third time.
>
>The Klingon "warbirds" appear to be perfectly ordinary D-7s or
>K't'ingas (not timeline-changed!), but we only see them from the
>front.
They weren't the ones designed but not used for ENT?
I often imagine ways in which what I'm watching could be better
than it is, but I usually see what I'm watching, as well!
--
-Jack
Joseph Nebus
>I caught "Star Trek" (no bloody XI, 11, Zero, or Prime) at 19:30 on
>Thursday, which was the second showing (of six) at my local theater.
>Apparently there was a crowd for 19:00, but my screening had only 30
>people in a 300-seat theater.
I was at an 8 pm screening in a digital-equipped theater, so
that the show started off (in the trailers) with some attempts to get
the blue pixels showing again. Otherwise the trailers started up in
bright red and green, for a ... different ... effect.
I'd say the theater was about half-full, but since I was near
the front (I like sitting up beside Crow and Tom) I mostly noticed the
few rows ahead of me were clear.
>Music: The Goldsmith TOS theme doesn't appear until the end credits
>(which is better than "Rebuild of Evangelion 1.0," which completely
>ignored "Cruel Angel's Thesis").
The Courage theme, surely. It's used over and over and plays
so well it makes it really striking none of the other movies used it
besides the opening-narration intro, though. It also serves as further
proof that, rather like the basic uniform scheme, the original product
works even on the big screen if you just show it and aren't embarrassed
about wearing primary colors.
(Yeah, they wrinkled up the shirts so that they're made of, I
don't know, thousands of little arrowhead insignias. It's still the
same basic design.)
>Production design: ... Way overdesigned. Too many pointy surfaces on
>the bridges, too many accent lights, too much motion and overlapping
>in the GUIs. Romulans apparently have no OSHA, and no fear of
>heights; the interior of the _Narada_ made no sense for any kind of
>vessel, let alone a mining ship.
I suppose it retroactively starts making sense of the bits in
Nemesis where there's open mile-long pits everywhere and the Death Ray
Of Death runs right through the bridge, though. At least it starts to
make it consistent.
>The transporter: The operators are seated (bad ergonomics) behind a
>protective (it's labeled) glass wall (as with ST:TMP), and the edge of
>the stage lights up red during operation. The stage isn't flat --
>each pad has a domed lens which makes standing difficult, and there's
>a bigger one in the center which would make bulk transport impossible.
The domes are hard to parse. They do seem to have gotten to
thinking of neat curvy surfaces (they had nice, wide corridors with
curved edges in the 2.9 seconds seen in corridors), but why people
have to stand on them is weird. Maybe the center bulge for bulk
transports is meant to make it easier to tip cargo over and start moving
it, but that sorts of thing's harder to explain when you've got gravity
control.
>Aliens: Funny guy on the _Kelvin_, stretched-face guy in the Iowa bar,
>Uhura's Orion roommate (she's smart! as with "Miss Mary Mack" from
>Peter David's _Imzadi_ and in ENT), Scotty's short pal on Delta Vega.
Come to think of it, have ever encountered non-smart Orion
women? Yeah, 'The Cage' describes them as animal-women slaves, but
Batgirl and whats-her-name from that animated series episode were not
at all like that, and the trio in _Enterprise_ were pulling a scam so
concealed that only people watching other channels didn't see it from
the teaser onwards.
>Personal histories: Spock is older than Kirk -- he's already a
>Commander and an instructor at Starfleet when Kirk enlists. Uhura is
>probably the same age, and enlists at the same time.
Same age as Spock? I'd buy that. Kirk, though? In the New Order
he's 25 and therefore enlisted at 22, when Uhura's already been in the
Academy, presumably a year if it's four-year terms and they graduate
together.
> Chekov is a 17-year-old wunderkind.
Chekov, having graduated on the Wesley Crusher plan, worked well
by my tastes (I always liked Chekov and he's played well), but he's
actually *older* in the New Order. He used to be about twelve years
younger than Kirk; now he's only eight. Maybe he even has siblings.
> Scotty's age is
>indeterminate: he's in Starfleet, but stranded in an outpost on Delta
>Vega for unspecified reasons.
It's not all that unspecified. He tried out his transporter on
'Admiral Archer's beloved beagle'. This is unquestionably meant to be an
_Enterprise_ reference, although it can't be Porthos who was vaporized.
I could buy Archer being alive a century after _Enterprise_ Year Four,
assuming he does thrive on being captured and beat up by the Villainous
Xenophobic Species Of The Week, which he seems to do, but not Porthos.
I forget how much of the biography whipped up for Archer for
'In A Mirror, Darkly' was actually spoken on-screen; was it made clear
that he went on to be President of the Whole Entire Federation? That
would seem to suggest most folks would refer to him as 'President Archer'
even after leaving office. Protocol may evolve, certainly, although I'm
not sure they were thinking through that far.
>That makes no organizational sense: Why was Scotty able to take over
>_Enterprise's_ engineering? It was a new ship -- he shouldn't be
>familiar with it. Why did Starfleet immediately make Kirk's
>battlefield promotion permanent? He might have the book learning, but
>a ship captain needs to have experience in people management.
I'm still vague on why Pike was taken off the ship and made an
Admiral, unless his case of Not Ceti Eel Worm was serious enough that
people decided he needed to be bumped several grades and put somewhere
he couldn't do any harm.
The ship of cadets and brevet promotions of the wunderkinds to
flagship status gives me really, really strong Marrissa Picard vibes that
are not entirely welcome, although I admit 25-year-old Kirk is more
credible all over.
I don't like the running theme here of how Natural Talent and
Inherent Genius is better than Long Experience and Training: with the
exception of Pike all the characters we're supposed to be sympathetic
to are shown just somehow naturally knowing what to do rather than
reasoning and thinking and proving their skills by challenging them.
It's exhilarating seeing someone do better than anyone thought they
could, but I also don't believe you can really *do* that without hard
work, and that's all hidden between scenes.
>Why did Spock exile Kirk to Delta Vega? That is, why did he
>*interrupt their rushed trip* to do so? They appeared to have been at
>warp for several minutes -- wouldn't he need to drop out? But they
>couldn't have been, because the planet seems to be within visible
>distance of Vulcan.
On the other hand, Nero wanted Spock dropped off somewhere near
Vulcan so he could see it, which suggests putting him somewhere in the
same system, which ... suggests they wouldn't have gone that far away
from Vulcan despite being at warp ... uh ... and stopping a second to
pitch him overboard would ... er ... look at that big distracting thing!
>Vulcan is apparently only minutes away from Earth at warp.
Everything's only minutes away, now, even Delta Vega that was
somehow on the end of the galaxy in the Original Order. Really makes
Scott look like he was running up his per diem back in _The Motion
Picture_ by promising to have Spock back at Vulcan in four days.
>Spock estimates that only 10,000 Vulcans remain after the destruction
>of the planet. Um, colony worlds? Merchant fleet?
I had understood him to be talking about 10,000 survivors of the
destruction of Vulcan, which given the mere minutes people had to flee
seems credible enough. A merchant fleet wouldn't probably change that
order of magnitude. Colony worlds, it's harder to say, but I have the
impression that in the Trek world a colony tops out at a million people,
which is as many as I remember ever encountering in the Original Series.
--
Joseph Nebus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joseph Nebus
>Phillip Thorne wrote:
>Whether to attach to your thread or start my own...
>>Oh, and they filmed the _Enterprise's_ engineering spaces in a
>>brewery. And the bridge has a front window.
>Unless someone can point out clear signage that it's part of
>propulsion (see your "Production design" above) I'm going to
>believe Scotty was swimming in part of the environmental
>conditioning equipment.
There was something about coolant on one of the labels, and
signs about turbines in the Giant Cuisinart Scott was heading for. It
does seem to have been part of the power plant of something from three
or four centuries before its specified time.
>Brilliant stroke making Nero a miner/truckdriver, 'cuz he ain't
>the sharpest needle in the haystack. His motivation didn't make
>a lot of sense, nor his plan, nor execution...
It forgives some of the glitches, although there's bigger ones
where you'd think a quarter-century of time to think might have altered
things.
>>Ships: Starfleet doesn't appear to have any two ships of the same
>>shape. There's the _Kelvin_, and 25 years later, the _Enterprise_ and
>>six other ships in the taskforce sent to Vulcan, with various
>>combinations of saucer hulls, nacelles, hulls the same size as
>>nacelles, and rollbars.
>Nor do they seem to have a lot of them. It sounded like most of
>the rest of the fleet was handling one other crisis.
They were, although I can't remember the crisis exactly. It
seemed to have something to do with Klingons, but it was described so
quickly that there wasn't much chance of my catching it. (Perhaps we
need to check on the special edition that won't be plagued by that
whole ``Fun, Watchable'' problem.)
>Timeline changes:
>*Early revelation that Romulans are of Vulcan stock. Was this
>during the _Kelvin_ Incident? Did Nero or anyone identify
>themselves as Romulans?
I don't think they did, but it may be something that leaked out
from ship markings or something instead.
>*Kirk's late entry in Starfleet. Blame it on his step-father.
>(And what happened to George Samuel Kirk?)
Good question. If he was a younger brother, he's gone; if he
was an older brother he was either not on the Kelvin, was evacuated
separately from his mother, or was one of the people killed.
>*Late launch of the Enterprise (and its weird design). How can
>we attribute this to the death of Kirk's father and the captain
>of the Kelvin? Is it somehow due to the 800(!) who survived?
Well, presumably in the original timeline everyone on the ship
would have survived since there wasn't any crisis, so it can't be
obviously due to their survival that things changed. There'd be those
on the ship who were killed, as a start; there's also whatever ways
Star Fleet might have reacted to the new and rather big peril that the
Kelvin's destruction showed; and it may be that Nero went and killed
more people while waiting for Spock to show up. Even if he didn't
particularly want anyone killed I suspect he wouldn't be friendly to
ships that happened to run across his either.
>(Should the Farragut have been destroyed by the time of Kirk's
>new graduation date? It's the ship Uhura did not want to be
>assigned to. Rather embarrassing to our hero to attribute its
>survival to him not being aboard.)
Uhm ... hm. Yeah, Farragut attacked by the Cloud Monster 11
years before the second season, when Kirk was 34, therefore it was
about when Kirk was 23, so ... either it escaped destruction or it had
been replaced.
>*Worse sensors. Sensors, like other characters, tend to only
>tell you what the plot needs you to know, but generally we'd been
>able to detect *some* things while on approach. The Enterprise
>doesn't know what's going on at Vulcan until they come out of
>warp in the middle of their destroyed fleet.
Hmmm. Dr Daystrom came up with duotronics something like twenty
years before the second season, so about five years after the Kelvin ...
an early fan thought was that the time barrier mentioned in The Cage had
to do with being able to process sensor data while at high warp so that
the ship could get real-time updates on what was around it. Perhaps some
ripple effect has kept duotronics from showing its promise, too?
There are some improvements to sensors, though: when the Kelvin's
captain is marched off to his redshirting, the bridge has its updates on
his health and knows the minute he gets hacked apart.
Other small details: when building up to warp speed, we see the
monitor reporting speeds of warp 0.3, 0.5, 0.7, et cetera, much as was
done in The Motion Picture and some Original Series episode I forget now.
--
Joseph Nebus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joseph Nebus
>On Sat, 09 May 2009, Jack Bohn <jack...@bright.net> wrote:
>>Nor do they seem to have a lot of them. It sounded like most of
>>the rest of the fleet was handling one other crisis.
>Well, "we're the only seven ships in the sector" (not what they said)
>is a change from "we're the only ship, singular." But why did they
>need to use the cadets -- not enough regular crew? Were they all ill,
>or had an aggressive shipbuilding program gotten ahead of staffing?
It is nice that they had a fleet for once, even if the fleet
wasn't good for anything. At least it was an attempt.
I suppose if they were pert near graduation day there'd be a
number of ships ready for new crew. It does seem that Star Fleet
likes to have crews trained as cohorts meant to stay together for
good long stretches --- note that in The Wrath of Khan, they're at a
simulator for the Enterprise Class, and *try* explaining the Next
Generation gang hanging around each other for fifteen years in any
sort of system that's not trying to keep them together.
>The other crisis (in the Laurentian? Lorentzian? Nebula) was not
>described. Perhaps in the ADF novelization.
I'd thought Laurentian, but it might be Lorentzian. Lorentz
is just about popular enough to be grabbed onto as ``See? Real science
flavored irrelevant details!'' type filler.
>>>Kirk takes the Kobayashi Maru exam for the third time.
>We see how he cheats, and it's boring (his new parameters simply has
>drop the Klingon shields for no reason). Something like a series of
>system failures and bad decisions by the Klingons would've been more
>fun, but would've taken more screen time. Or a passing space storm.
>Starfleet probably hadn't encountered any mysterious omnipotent beings
>yet.
The version in the book by (Ecklar ?) did it better, and would
probably have run about the same screen time. I suppose it feels like
a different cheat if Kirk simply activated an unauthorized subroutine
rather than tucked in a major roleplaying-character-motivation, but it
might have got an even better audience reaction too.
Given how lousy space was with nigh-omnipotent meddling beings
in the Original Series, that era Trek has got to have met up with some
super-Mary-Worths.
>>>McCoy is much older and already a doctor, but enlists at the same
>>>time as the others, because of a messy divorce [...]
>What is this, the French foreign legion? Or does Starfleet have an
>open door for those who already have useful job skills?
I'd imagine they'd always be welcoming to people with particular
specialized skills. There's probably a steady need for new ship's
surgeons what with the ones on guest ships always being killed off by
this week's mysterious space virus that lets out your secret inner
personality.
>Pike challenges Kirk to join Starfleet. He does so the next day (or
>at least flies to SanFran). Does the Academy have rolling admission,
>or did he just luck out on the timing?
Maybe he lucked out. Though Pike did seem to have Kirk in mind
as someone to push for application to start with; perhaps he figured on
calling on Kirk and shoving him towards the next application date in any
case.
--
Joseph Nebus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Phillip Thorne
On Sun, 10 May 2009, Space Cowboy
<space...@nospam.HephaestusStation.com> wrote:
>Bitch,bitch,bitch
We accept the assertion by Abrams & Co. that certain aspects of the
movie must be changed to have wide commercial appeal and therefore
franchise survival. However, we reserve the right to disagree about
the direction and magnitude of the changes. :)
It's not bitching. It's hypothetically-constructive criticism.
We're on a tech group. Tech is nothing if not specific.
>[...] Will old Ambassador Spock spill the beans to
>Starfleet Security about threats still out there? Like go back to the
>20th or 19th to seed Humpbacks in the 23rd,even as a secret project?
>Whale probe going to Earth after not hearing anything for 200 years,
>all of a sudden picks up Humback calls, turns around for home, crisis
>averted before any Terran civilian knows.
Well, the usual problem is *convincing* the authorities that you're
from the future, and that you have their best interests at heart.
Spock-Prime is no longer a stickler for rules and regs, and "City on
the Edge"-type concerns about fixing the timeline no longer apply. He
might do things himself; though he must know he could encounter
opposition.
>> they can't -- Scotty gives a limit of "about a hundred miles"
>> (forget 40,000 km), and the cadets are taken to spacedock in
>> shuttles. But then again, they beam to Vulcan's surface during
>> rescue ops.
>>
>Listen to the convo....he also says he can do it planet to planet
>within the same system ergo..not carved in stone.
Scotty's talking about his unproven "transwarp transporter" theory,
whether between planets or to a starship rapidly warping away. The
standard technique is, by what he said, limited to a very short
distance.
>> Vulcan is apparently only minutes away from Earth at warp.
>
>Good!
Why, exactly? Because it makes weeks- and months-long trips to
distant points like the edge of the galaxy feasible?
I'll have to watch the movie again, but I think they may've been
limited to warp 3 or 4 (which is ridiculously low even by ENT
standards, let alone TOS).
Phillip Thorne
>>Why wouldn't the Red Matter create an adequate black hole if dropped
>>onto the surface?
On Mon, 11 May 2009, Jack Bohn <jack...@bright.net> wrote:
>Well, to come at it from a different direction, maybe it wouldn't
>*stay* on the surface.
Aha. And ejecting it into orbit wouldn't advance Nero's aims.
>Pulling in all that matter has got to create some disturbance...
And come to think of it, the planet did not collapse symmetrically --
it flowed (at high supersonic speeds!) to a point on one hemisphere.
That implies the epicenter was quite close to the surface.
Leaving aside the whole fact that black holes don't act like this. (Or
cause survivable macroscopic timewarps, or *partially* disable a
starship.) Obviously they used the term "black hole" because it was
easily comprehensible to the audience. But would "it's a spacetime
anomaly, something like a black hole" be so hard to write?
>>Admittedly, I'm mostly concerned about the interior design, which
>>seems to follow "First Contact's" school of "make it pointy,
>>industrial, steamy and creepy."
Apparently (according to TrekMovie), the prequel "Countdown" comic
explains that Nero enhanced his ship with Borg tech at some point.
(Before or after his trip?) That would explain much of the
grunge-pointy aesthetic. And possibly the flooding, if the crew
wasn't in complete control.
(See also: the Alastair Reynolds novel _Revelation Space_, in which a
nanotech "melding plague" afflicts the captain, who is stuck in a
cryocoffin, but eventually it leaks out and transforms the ship into a
gothic chamber of horrors.)
>>The control console/pillars were a bit like those in "Balance of
>>Terror." [...]
>
>?!? I must have been distracted by production design or
>shakycam, I don't remember this.
Remember in BoT, the controls were three panels wrapped 'round a
pillar? Same thing here, but with tech-grungier pillars.
>
>>Why the flooded decks? That can't possibly be a design feature. Too
>>busy with revenge to close a leak?
>
>Nero misread the script and thought he was Nemo for a while?
>
>>>Brilliant stroke making Nero a miner/truckdriver, 'cuz he ain't
>>>the sharpest needle in the haystack.
Noted by one poster replying (out of the usual run of illegible,
illogical and vociferous dross) to the TrekMovie review of the movie
novelization: Nero is a parallel to Kirk. Both lost somebody, both
became delinquents, but one of them toughed it out and made something
of himself.
The Kirk/Spock parallel is more obvious, because it was in the TV ads.
>>Somebody on his crew was smart enough to figure how far Spock's
>>arrival would be diverted. Which strains credulity, [...]
I need to create a list of exactly how many Convenient Coincidences
are in this movie. Granted it's space opera, where Heroic Coincidence
is the primary law of physics.
>>Maybe his crew had some physicist-prisoners sent to the work camps.
>
>If all Romulan ships have singularity drives, perhaps we can say
>that black hole knowledge is widespread among their starship
>crews.
Aha. Or at least, they've got the engineering manuals to extrapolate
from.
>That would also help with them knowing how to work with
>the red matter.
Maybe not -- if I recall TrekMovie's review of the "Countdown" prequel
comic, it was something New and Amazing created on Vulcan in the late
24cen.
Space Cowboy
>
> We're on a tech group. Tech is nothing if not specific.
>
>>[...] Will old Ambassador Spock spill the beans to
>>Starfleet Security about threats still out there? Like go back to
>>the 20th or 19th to seed Humpbacks in the 23rd,even as a secret
>>project? Whale probe going to Earth after not hearing anything for
>>200 years, all of a sudden picks up Humback calls, turns around
>>for home, crisis averted before any Terran civilian knows.
>
> Well, the usual problem is *convincing* the authorities that
> you're from the future, and that you have their best interests at
> heart. Spock-Prime is no longer a stickler for rules and regs, and
DNA
> "City on the Edge"-type concerns about fixing the timeline no
> longer apply. He might do things himself; though he must know he
> could encounter opposition.
Avoid the destruction of Romulus in this new time line, the Nero of
this new TL will have no motivation other than being a miner, the
R'hiann live and time could snap back to Prime. BTTF all over again.
>
>>> they can't -- Scotty gives a limit of "about a hundred miles"
>>> (forget 40,000 km), and the cadets are taken to spacedock in
>>> shuttles. But then again, they beam to Vulcan's surface during
>>> rescue ops.
>>>
>>Listen to the convo....he also says he can do it planet to planet
>>within the same system ergo..not carved in stone.
>
> Scotty's talking about his unproven "transwarp transporter"
No,no,no, it was before that, he mentions it BEFORE the bit about
Archer's beagle!
> theory, whether between planets or to a starship rapidly warping
That part came when they were inside the outpost shuttle.
> away. The standard technique is, by what he said, limited to a
> very short distance. {when he moved from one chair to the other}
ATM....still not carved in stone
>
>>> Vulcan is apparently only minutes away from Earth at warp.
>>
>>Good!
>
> Why, exactly? Because it makes weeks- and months-long trips to
> distant points like the edge of the galaxy feasible?
>
Yes and for debating over at alt.startrek.vs.starwars,also I'm trying
to forget the Berman years, in particular "Voyager" with Captain
Lameway. I've got nothing against female captains, I was all for
Rachel Garret but she got that hunk of metal in her head and that was
it for her. Years[as I said ages ago]before in "Captian Scarlett" I
accepted GA placing women in combat roles re:Angel Interceptor pilots
because women of the same height as men usually,if their fit, weigh
less...meaning less fuel consumption and the Angels were 'fly-by-
wire' no cables no cockpit hydrolics therefore require a lighter
touch.
Now if the two divergence points meet in the future it may just snap
like a rubber band aka reset switch or not, WTF I don't care I like
it...lets stop giving ourselves headaches and enjoy or (c&p from
elsewhere):
As that other Doctor with the Blue Box might say, 'That universe
still exists but is now locked in a loop of its' own, and no math or
amount of energy will allow entrance. This new universe is the one
you must now live in for better or worse'.
--
Origin: "Battle Beyond The Stars"[1980,George Peppard,actor.Roger
Corman,producer,low budget but fun to watch]
Must See: "The Magnificent Seven" & "The Seven Samurai"
Starfleet in both Prime(TOS) & Abrams`verses & Browncoat in another
`verse!
Joseph Nebus
>On Sat, 09 May 2009, Jack Bohn <jack...@bright.net> wrote:
>>Timeline changes:
>>*Early revelation that Romulans are of Vulcan stock.
>The initial comm officer admits he may be unable to distinguish
>Romulan and Vulcan. That's why Uhura takes his place.
>Which raises a question: in TOS, when the Romulan War accords were
>negotiated by subspace radio, were they done in text or by voice? And
>in whose language?
I had the impression that it was done by text, but that wasn't
based on anything in 'Balance of Terror', and I think I might have got
the notion from Franz Joseph. If I had to defend it I'd go to a
look-and-feel argument: negotiations by Morse Code feel more primitive
than negotiations by voice, and if they wanted communications a century
behind ship-to-ship visual communication, text has that feeling.
Hm. 'Balance ... ' gives us that the intercepted Romulan message
is sent to cryptography, suggesting that their language could be
understood if the clear-text were known. But later on Spock speaks of
*if* the Romulans are offshoots of Vulcans. If the Romulan language were
known, the similarities to Vulcan would either make a compelling case or
else would indicate there are so many languages like Vulcan that there's
no interesting conclusions to draw from it.
Perhaps the Romulans learned English (or Vulcan, or another
Federation-translatable language) so that the concluding dialogue between
Romulan Sarek and Kirk could be done.
Nice little stab at the world being large, though: it's mentioned
there are three dialects of Romulan. That still seems low, but it's much
better than the average for Trek, which is for the species to have about
four words and that's all.
>>Was this during the _Kelvin_ Incident?
>>Did Nero or anyone identify themselves as Romulans?
>Not IIRC. But Uhura intercepted the transmission about a "Romulan"
>ship destroying 47 Klingon ships (how would the Klingons recognize
>such a bizarre future design as Romulan?), and Kirk connects that with
>the "space lightning storm" of the _Kelvin_ incident.
>Or maybe it's one of those milieu-assumptions that the screenwriters
>forgot to write around when considering the newbie-audience. Or just
>a logic hole.
It may also have been a Klingon assumption from a similar kind
of reasoning that Kirk had in 'Balance ... ': a ship near Romulan
territory attacking those around it and with recognizable Romulan
markings. I'm not sure how many markings would actually stay the same
for centuries, but then you could sail any ship from the Royal Navy
into anytime since 1707 [*] and the flags would give a strong hint to the
pastlings what was up. But other nations would be more troublesome.
[*] Roughly. The Union Jack story is more complicated than
this. It's a British thing.
>OTOH, it's completely plot-unimportant that Nero's Romulan. All his
>blather to Pike and Kirk about protecting the future-Romulans by
>destroying the present-Federation is just talk, since they have no
>clue about Spock-Prime's unification efforts and the whole dtente.
>Well, not completely -- there was the Earth-Romulan war a century
>earlier. But the idea that the future-UFP could *stop a supernova*!
Yeah, you're right. The Romulan-ness of Nero really doesn't
figure into things, except for giving a hook by which Spock can be
lured into the storyline. Although this does suggest that Spock is
by the time of whenever Nero leaves (I'm not trying to figure out
just when that is ... uh .. let's see ... nine years from Kirk-Two
to Kirk-Prime Second Season, about 100 years from Kirk-Prime Second
Season to whenever it was Sarek appeared first on Next Generation,
another ... two? ... years till Spock went underground on Romulus,
so however far back Nero went minus that length in the future of
Next Generation Season Five) that Spock is out of secrecy and hiding
on Romulus.
>Cdr.Spock (Quinto) notes that, if the _Narada_ is from the future, it
>could've changed history, so Nero can't predict *anything*. (This is
>also self-serving re: sequel movies.)
One friend's endlessly amusing suggestion: have the next movie
be the remake of `Space Seed'.
>Also:
>Time travel is probably the most overused plot-device in Trek (after
>FTL, humanoid aliens and the universal translator). But we're aware
>of the 29cen Starfleet and starship _Relativity_, and the 31cen
>temporal cold war. Is this movie another front in that war? Are
>there time-agents hiding in the corners, trying to minimize Nero's
>disruptions and ensure the Federation and its most talented members
>survive in some form?
Some sort of Time War story is probably the best way to
rationalize how the timecops haven't undone all this damage by the end
of the movie anyway.
If the movie weren't meant as a Second History (and *is* the
author of _Killing Time_ getting a royalty for this, but I kid) then
it would have been a thematically unifying resolution to have New Kirk
secure the red matter, then jaunt off to the star which is going to go
supernova and destroy it early, thus avoiding the destruction of
Romulus and all the unhappy things in the story, resetting the timeline
to what it really should be. This would fit with the Kobayashi Maru
dropped in earlier: if you can't win, change the test. And yet,
blowing up the pre-supernova would end this timeline and everyone New
Kirk knows, a universal doom but for a greater good. There'd be a nice
tangle of emotions and motivations involved.
--
Joseph Nebus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joseph Nebus
>Phillip Thorne wrote:
>>>Why wouldn't the Red Matter create an adequate black hole if dropped
>>>onto the surface?
>On Mon, 11 May 2009, Jack Bohn <jack...@bright.net> wrote:
>>Well, to come at it from a different direction, maybe it wouldn't
>>*stay* on the surface.
>Aha. And ejecting it into orbit wouldn't advance Nero's aims.
>>Pulling in all that matter has got to create some disturbance...
>And come to think of it, the planet did not collapse symmetrically --
>it flowed (at high supersonic speeds!) to a point on one hemisphere.
>That implies the epicenter was quite close to the surface.
And, come to it, when the red matter was used to make a black
hole nowhere particular, the collapse came dreadfully near sucking up
the New Enterprise too. It may be that putting it in the center of
the planet is the surest delivery system that pretty well guarantees
survival.
>Leaving aside the whole fact that black holes don't act like this. (Or
>cause survivable macroscopic timewarps, or *partially* disable a
>starship.) Obviously they used the term "black hole" because it was
>easily comprehensible to the audience. But would "it's a spacetime
>anomaly, something like a black hole" be so hard to write?
This is true. But black holes --- er, black stars, anyway ---
were established back in 'Tomorrow Is Yesterday' to be sources of time
warps, at least. And as Trek technology goes, leaping from a black
hole to a time portal is very nearly sustainable by actual existing if
probably inapplicable theory.
It is kind of refreshing they didn't call it a gravimetric
anomaly in spacetime, isn't it? Sometimes the simplest blather is the
best.
But it would have opened up options for plausibility if they
had specified it as some particular type of black hole, which would have
the joint effects of making it seem to be making things more particular
while actually just meaning we don't have to measure it against the
effects of actual black holes. Call it a 'Penrose-Conway black hole'
and anything may be.
>>>Admittedly, I'm mostly concerned about the interior design, which
>>>seems to follow "First Contact's" school of "make it pointy,
>>>industrial, steamy and creepy."
>Apparently (according to TrekMovie), the prequel "Countdown" comic
>explains that Nero enhanced his ship with Borg tech at some point.
>(Before or after his trip?) That would explain much of the
>grunge-pointy aesthetic. And possibly the flooding, if the crew
>wasn't in complete control.
Tch. Yes, because if there's something we aren't more sick of
than time travel, it's Borg.
>Noted by one poster replying (out of the usual run of illegible,
>illogical and vociferous dross) to the TrekMovie review of the movie
>novelization: Nero is a parallel to Kirk. Both lost somebody, both
>became delinquents, but one of them toughed it out and made something
>of himself.
>The Kirk/Spock parallel is more obvious, because it was in the TV ads.
Hm. That's not a bad building point, no.
If nothing else the movie does show that there's no reason the
Next Generation movies or _Enterprise_ had to be so dull. Chop up and
reassemble the plots of them and you have a zippy, exciting movie
product.
>>>Somebody on his crew was smart enough to figure how far Spock's
>>>arrival would be diverted. Which strains credulity, [...]
>I need to create a list of exactly how many Convenient Coincidences
>are in this movie. Granted it's space opera, where Heroic Coincidence
>is the primary law of physics.
Another friend pointed out, space opera scientists and heroes
have got to be really sick of not being able to build a device, touch
a rock sample, or step in front of a telescope without unleashing some
inexplicable new kind of energy and natural effect that can reboot all
reality faster and harder than a Markovian running Windows 95 will.
--
Joseph Nebus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Christopher C. Stacy
> Another friend pointed out, space opera scientists and heroes
> have got to be really sick of not being able to build a device, touch
> a rock sample, or step in front of a telescope without unleashing some
> inexplicable new kind of energy and natural effect that can reboot all
> reality faster and harder than a Markovian running Windows 95 will.
Windows 6, I think you mean.
chrisbasken
> I'll have to watch the movie again, but I think they may've been
> limited to warp 3 or 4 (which is ridiculously low even by ENT
> standards, let alone TOS).
IIRC, they never give a warp factor. It's the cop out "maximum warp."
--
Chris
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=307367971&mt=8
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=306241303&mt=8
chrisbasken
> Vulcan is apparently only minutes away from Earth at warp.
That was my initial impression, too, but then I realized we had to have
lost some time in that trip. When they leave Vulcan and zip back to
Earth, there's mention of the Enterprise being "hours away" from a
planet right next door to Vulcan.
Or is that the equivalent of "uphill, both ways!"?
mdic...@seds.lpl.arizona.edu
>
> Vulcan is apparently only minutes away from Earth at warp.
Which is perfectly in-line with speeds established in TOS' "Obsession"
and "That Which Survives". Remember that ST:ENT twice established in
"Home" and "Daedalus" that Vulcan is a little over 16 light years from
Earth. Given that the trip there apparently takes about 10 minutes or
so, we can infer a speed of 8640,000c.
> Spock estimates that only 10,000 Vulcans remain after the destruction
> of the planet. Um, colony worlds? Merchant fleet?
Blame the damn Syrranite movement for that.
-Mike