Spoilers Beyond: the technical points (spoilers, and nothing but)

So this is going to be pure spoilers all the way. Please don't read on if you don't want the full treatment.

1) Starship meets mountain, starship wins by a landslide. Finally we get to see what has always implicitly been the only possible case!

2) The only valid reason for a (shielded or polarized) starship suffering damage from an impact: said impact being with another starship or comparable structure. Ramming is a plausible mode of fighting in Trek.

3) Cargo transporters become people transporters by press of a button. Fine with me - they became that by act of bureaucracy in "Broken Bow". I doubt Emory Erickson ever invented much: the tech is probably alien, ancient, and fully capable of everything it ever will be even back in that day in history when the Vulcans first acquired it.

4) Yorktown defenses and the rest of the tech made fairly good sense despite looking cool. While Kirk's posse says their ship wasn't designed for this type of fighting, Yorktown shows some guns that were. Defense trumps offense in Trek, as it should. And with defenses like that, it's not a big shame that we don't get classic shield action - the swarm fighters would have had their hands full trying to reach any of the shields.

5) Centralized air conditioning with loads of failsafes is good. Why is the final failsafe a series of levers located so inconveniently? There's this massive venting system in place, clearly intended to see use - did Scotty break too many things in the actual control system while trying to bring down the failsafes, forcing Kirk to resort to the levers?

6) I missed the line explaining why the heroes had to drop the Franklin off the cliff before starting the engines. What part of the engine system needed the fall, and for what reason?

7) But thruster action here is good, and to scale. Why exactly shouldn't ships of this era be good at atmospheric takeoff? They can fly through mountains just as well as any, and indeed should, or else they couldn't be starships. So it's not a matter of the hull failing, or the engines being too weak. Does this tie in to #6?

8) A "nebula" is a superdense asteroid cloud now? Well, why not - it's not as if there's any pressing reason to think that this should be a natural phenomenon. Most Trek nebulae probably are flotsam from ancient space battles anyway. It still looks a bit silly that it's rock all the way, from the front door of Yorktown to the very vicinity of the planet. But referring back to #1, why is this a problem? The hero ship flies through rock well enough even after losing primary and auxiliary power - no need for "cutting edge navigational systems" when she and any of her lesser sisters could simply make a beeline through the "nebula" and count the barely felt bumps for future reference.

What else?

Timo Saloniemi

 

It's like dropping a manual tranny into gear with the engine off by rolling down a steep hill in neutral

 

There was an asteroid field outside the nebula...It looked cool. I'd suggest maybe this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frost_line_(astrophysics)

 

But why make bigger ships? What good is size?

The mushroomy city-in-space introduced in ST3:TSfS was already about this size, only with less of this domed airspace around it. And those stations were always found close to Earth-like planets... When building in empty space, one might wish to go that one step further for a greater degree of independence.

Timo Saloniemi

 

The concept of a 16km wide starbase that's designed as a huge habitat seems two-fold. Make as wide a variety of species comfortable for long periods of time in an environment totally unsupportable to life on the boundaries of the frontier and bring it all with you!

 

We saw that turbolift cars are airtight and spaceworthy. I'm not sure where, but I feel like I've seen it suggested before that the cabs were, while not fully-fledged escape pods, capable of use as ersatz lifeboats or temporary shelters in case of disaster.

Speaking of escape pods, my take is that the Kelvin Pod isn't the standard lifeboat in the Kelvin Timeline (though we didn't see any multi-person TNG-style escape pods, to be fair), but are a specific response to the Kelvin disaster— single-person vehicles that can be boarded and launched in seconds, placed in critical areas where it may be vital that the crew remain until the last possible moment. George Kirk didn't have enough time to get to the shuttlebay and launch after he set his ship to ram the enemy, but he could've made it to a pod attached to the bridge and ejected, so he would've at least had a chance of surviving long enough to be picked up by one of the shuttles.

 

Starbases can be Huge if they orbit a planet or in a star system with lots of resources and nowhere to go. Ships need to be smaller as wsrp fields cost lots of energy. Maybe the base was more advanced.
Cargo transporters need lower resolution to beam around nonliving objects. I assumed a talented enough engineer could increase the resolution for biomatter.
With Starfleet Tech elecronics often fails before manual overrides. Last ditch action being manual is a good idea.
Starships usually do not have antigravity tech, so liftoff would bebvia thrusters and then impulse engines. That old NX-01 like ship was patched up so I could see time need to start impulse engines.
A natural nebula is only gas and dust. After stellar and planetary formation, asteroid belts would exist inside a star system, unless lots of star systems ejected lots of small bodies somehow creating thatcseem field.
Worn out with the passive post.

 

I wasn't able to notice much differences myself but was the Enterprise-A at the end substantially different from the Enterprise at the start?

 

Not that I could tell but the resolution was not that high. More likely the interior sets will change for the next movie.

 

Here are the major differences I spotted:

- Less curved hull design; there are actual corners around where the neck meets engineering. The shape may have had a hint of Gabe Koener's version of the ship around that section.

- The warp nacelle pylons stick straight out, at 90° to each other, more like the original's (so the ship no longer looks like it's shrugging with those bunched-up engines, my biggest complaint about the Kelvinverse version)

- The warp nacelles are noticeably smaller. I thought they were a bit too thin, they looked more like drinking straws or pencils to me than engines.

- Rearranged hull markings. Most noticeably, the registry was added to the bottom of the saucer (yay!) curving along the front a la the TMP version (yay!) but was set a bit further out, looking like one of those old toys or blueprint sets where they put the numbers into the wrong ring of hull paneling and everything seemed too big and spread out (boo!). The name was also set behind the registry there, which will never stop looking weird to me no matter how often people try to do it (I'm thinking of the Challenger and various fan-designs).

It'd definitely more than the subtle differences in color and window arrangement between the Primeverse -refit and -A.

 

Good eye. I might have spotted some of this without the 3D glasses on.

 

I was a bit confused about the Franklin. Impulse engines are fission engines so fuel AND powered tech has to be in place to get them running. After 50 years, emergency batteries must be dead so starting the impulse engines would be impossible. Similarly, antimatter containment pods require power to prevent them from going boom. I guess we're supposed to assume that Jaylah has been refurbishing the ship from more recent wreckages and that she had already scavenged what she needed - emergency batteries to power impulse reactor and magnetic containment fields. Her problem was not knowing how to hack into the ship's critical systems to take it to the next level perhaps?

It was fun to see the thrusters working. I was a bit confused in STiD why they wanted to engage the warp engines in the atmosphere. I would have thought that using thrusters or impulse engines to ditch into the ocean would have been a far more sensible option, and generally easier to fix (why were all the thrusters offline at once, for example?), notwithstanding that I would have hoped that Earth cities would have had better (or at least some) methods of defence, whether that be guns, shields, or tractor beams. At least Yorktown could take care of itself.

 

My understanding was that it wasn't the engine system, per se. It was that since the ship wasn't designed to fly in an atmosphere (unlike the Kelvin timeline's Constitution-class), they needed a high velocity before they were able to generate enough lift to be able to take off.

I was slightly confused by the Enterprise's saucer section being unable to use the impulse engines until they separated from the spine. We saw in Star Trek (2009) that the impulse engines can work fine without the warp core. Is there some sort of hard lock in place where they can only run off an auxiliary reactor in the engineering section until it separates, and only then will it fall back to an auxiliary reactor in the saucer? Seems dumb, but then again, we have the no-phasers-at-warp interlock in TMP as precedence for dumb Starfleet design decisions.

 

I think you're correct. It seemed to me that the Kelvin pods were slightly smaller and a different shape than the lifeboats we saw being ejected earlier from the engineering hull.

I got the sense it was the major damage that caused something to not function properly rather than a design issue.

 

Impulse should run off for fusion generators. I am surprised that antimatter containment was maintained for ~100 years. How long is the life span of the native population?

 

The neck is also a bit thicker and topped by a "cobra head" like on the E-D; no such thing was in evidence when the original ship separated.

But they just fired those underbelly thrusters to achieve lift... Or perhaps to aim the nose. Why not do that on the mountaintop, and then engage the impulse engines?

Ships built in orbit have never had much problem flying in atmospheres - NX-01 and the original NCC-1701 did that with pronounced ease. OTOH, their engines have always been fantastically overpowered for mere atmospheric flight, and attaining escape velocity or hovering indefinitely have both been simple enough feats.

There was some technobabble about how the impulse engines were still thinking they should be drawing power from the (already lost) main powerplant rather than the auxiliary systems of the saucer, a fault situation that could best be remedied by radical means, by severing the stump of the "secondary hull" (i.e. the remaining neck).

Indeed - fission has not been mentioned in connection with impulse engines (although "atomic matter piles" were mentioned in "Court Martial", in relation to nothing specific). Tanks holding fusionables might be good for a millennium of storage, dependin'.

This might be sort of self-sustaining - there's enough fuel in them to propel a starship across a galaxy, so spending 90% of it on something as petty as maintaining a containment field would probably allow for centuries of storage, after which 10% would remain available for warp.

The actual natives - no longer relevant (they all went extinct). I guess the big question is, were those natives the actual Ancients who built the superweapon, or merely folks pushed aside by the Ancients for their mining project?
The warriors under Krall's control - unknown (they were a slave species that might have been engineered either for longevity or then for ease of breeding, providing an endless supply of them for millennia in either case). Possibly the warriors/slaves live forever using a variant of the process that kept Krall alive, but I never got the impression the slaves would have been engaging in any kidnapping on their own, so it can't be the exact same process.
The assorted captives - varies by species (I don't think we ever learn how long Jaylah survived, or how young she was when escaping, or any specifics like that).

Timo Saloniemi

 

Did they? I only remember seeing the thrusters used on the Enterprise's saucer, not the Franklin. Aboard the latter, I thought they just used the impulse engines to nudge themselves off the cliff, without any initial lift.

They also weren't trying to reach orbit from a dead stop on the ground - they had substantial initial velocity from their orbital insertions.

Sure, as long as you still had the warp core up and running. You're not going to get power from the antimatter pod alone. I'm not sure that's something you could rely on across the centuries - would the dilithium even last that long? We know it has to be occasionally replaced or regenerated.

 

I think what ended up happening was the engineering was in a race to keep the ship functioning under impossible circumstances, and each trick they used ended up working against them once something else went wrong. The warp engines were severed, so they redirected all of the M/AMR's output to the impulse drive to get more speed, but to do that, they had to override the connections to the fusion reactors, which was a problem when the neck was severed and there was no more power from the warp core, and the most straightforward way of undoing what they'd done to the impulse feeds was to force a "proper" saucer separation and let the ship's various failsafes and automatic systems reconnect the fusion reactors.

 

The Franklin ignites the underbelly thrusters just before she disappears behind the treeline, then shoots out on the impulse engines, no longer having the belly flames on.

Umm, not exactly. NX-01 was doing lazy circles above New York rooftops, at what might be considered propeller plane speeds aka standstill. NCC-1701 was flying on automation slowly enough for an F-104 to keep up with her. Return to orbit afterwards nevertheless was a triviality not worth commenting on.

Why not? Tiny photon torpedoes supposedly eat into their warheads to achieve warp propulsion (although this is just backstage doubletalk) - the machinery need not be as complicated (efficient?) as the actual warp core.

Yet the antimatter pods are something built without even the theoretical possibility of failure, as our heroes in "Contagion" muse...

Self-sustaining containment fields that only shut down after the last anti-atom is used up sound doable in Trek terms. The fields themselves are probably gravitic in nature (it's netural anti-deuterium they are supposedly storing, not something that could be controlled by simple electromagnetic fields), and we know that gravity in Trek never fails, not even after millennia. Perhaps artificial gravity is something you turn on by applying power, and then can only turn off by applying further power?

Timo Saloniemi