Cause and Effect

Discussion in 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' started by Newton, Aug 9, 2012.

  1. Photoman15

    Photoman15 Commodore Commodore

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    Any depressurization could move the Enterprise. It weighs NOTHING in space.
     
  2. Timo

    Timo Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Physics doesn't work that way. It's just as difficult to push the Enterprise in space as it would be to push the Queen Mary 2 in an ocean, despite both indeed "weighing nothing". Weight is irrelevant; mass is everything.

    Timo Saloniemi
     
  3. Photoman15

    Photoman15 Commodore Commodore

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    But the force would push against the inside walls and create a "thrust" that "could" move the ship.
     
  4. Timo

    Timo Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Right. And? It would still have to push a mass from immobility into motion, which takes F=ma amount of force. If force F is small, it can only give a tiny little acceleration a to the constant mass m.

    That regardless of whether the ship is floating in space or in water. (Although there'd be a tad less friction in space, admittedly.)

    Timo Saloniemi
     
  5. Trekker4747

    Trekker4747 Boldly going... Premium Member

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    It still has mass, mass that must be moved. In order to move a greater amount of mass is needed, or something that expel a greater amount of mass or force. And a room full of air just isn't, I believe, going to have enough mass or force to move the ship. The Enterprise is still a 5 million ton hunk of mass and it's going to take that much mass (or a small amount of mass with a large amount of acceleration) to move it.

    It might "weigh nothing" in space but that doesn't mean that Data could have gotten out of the ship and simply pushed it out of the way, he'd still need to push it with enough force to overcome the Enterprise's mass.

    So I pulled out the blueprints and took measurements of the Enterprise main shuttle bay.

    I ignored the elliptical shape of the room and well as the approach area made by the door vestibule. So I simply measured the widest points of the length and width of the room. Again ignoring that the inside of the room has outcroppings and structural obstructions.

    At the wides point the shuttlebay on it's lowest deck (where the door is, not counting the "hangar" below the shuttlebay) is 17cm by 11cm which in the scale of the blueprints is 425 feet by 275 feet. The shuttlebay is two decks high, while the upper area is likely slightly smaller we'll ignore that.

    I'm going to assume a standard "deck height" of 10 feet (the ship's height by it's number of decks mostly supports this) so that'd given everything I've fudged each level of the shuttlebay is 425ft x 275ft x 10ft. Or 1.17 million cubic feet. Times two for 2.34 million cubic feet of space inside the main shuttlebay. And, again, that's likely on the high-end given the number fudging I've done.

    So 2.34 million cubic feet of space times 75 pounds of air per cubic foot gets us to 175 million pounds of air, or 87,750 tons of air. So we would need about 57 shuttlebays worth of air in that space to have enough force to just to overcome the mass of the ship and maybe nudge it out of the way.

    (Incidentally, the episode suggests the air in the shuttlebay was enough to move the bulk of the ship out of the way but not enough to toss some shuttlecraft out the door. But we can probably assume the shuttlecraft had magnetic or tractor "tiedowns" in place to prevent this.)
     
  6. blueziggy

    blueziggy Lieutenant Red Shirt

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    the explosion of the enterprise d creates an anti-time distortion which travels back in time to pick up the bozeman. bringing the bozeman forward to collide with the the enterprise causing said distortion. a paradox.

    if this didnt stop there would have been an anti-time anomaly at earth when the first protein is formed.

    so by not destroying the ship in cause and effect and by destroying the ship in all good things the human race survives.



    and now my head hurts....
     
  7. Enterprise is Great

    Enterprise is Great Vice Admiral Admiral

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    That's correct. I just saw that last week so it's still fresh in my mind.
     
  8. Tiberius

    Tiberius Commodore Commodore

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    Because each ship needs the other in order to complete the loop. So neither ship could go through the ,loop more than the other.

    For the Enterprise, but not the Bozeman. The Bozeman spent most of the loop in the past, and only came to the 24th C at the end.

    Why would that make a difference?

    I gotta agree with you there. Turning back would have been the first thing I would have done.
     
  9. Tiberius

    Tiberius Commodore Commodore

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    Actually, if the rush of air was really so strong, it should have torn Bev and Geordi's arms off in Disaster.

    Beats me why they didn't just try BOTH ideas in C&E...
     
  10. Timo

    Timo Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    "More" in this case referring to the number of the cycles, not their length. In those seventeen days, the E-D needs to have X cycles with the length of 17/X days each, but the Bozeman only needs to have X cycles of unknown length - because for most of the time the E-D is undergoing a cycle, the Bozeman is leisurely cruising in the 23rd century and not repeating anything. The Bozeman only participates in the cycle after arriving in the 24th century! Before that arrival, there is just an empty volume of space that is doing the cycle in lieu of the Bozeman, so to say.

    Well, "Disaster" featured a rush of air that was unnaturally strong, so it's a good thing it wasn't portrayed as strong enough to tear their arms off. But "Cause and Effect" could plausibly feature a rush of air that our heroes manipulate into even greater strength, with the tricks they are known to possess (it even says "VARIABLE GRAVITY" on the wall of the shuttlebay!).

    Timo Saloniemi
     
  11. Tiberius

    Tiberius Commodore Commodore

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    How do you know?
     
  12. Timo

    Timo Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    The cycle is known to affect only the E-D. The cycle does not affect the UFP timebase beacons, or Earth, or Vulcan. The default assumption is that the cycle does not affect things unless otherwise indicated. And the Bozeman in the 23rd century would be well removed from the known region of influence, arguably even better than Earth or Vulcan.

    Timo Saloniemi
     
  13. Tiberius

    Tiberius Commodore Commodore

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    And there's your problem. You are making an assumption.

    Since the thing involves a funnel through time, we have no way of knowing what will be affected.
     
  14. Agent Richard07

    Agent Richard07 Admiral Admiral

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    I thought of that too. I was going to suggest that maybe each iteration of the Bozeman's loop wasn't long enough for anyone to figure out anything, but that explanation doesn't add up either thanks to a lot of the discussion here.
     
  15. Timo

    Timo Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Not my problem. Assuming this explains why it was up to Picard's team to devise a way out of the loop. Assuming the opposite, again without much basis, creates an unnecessary problem with the plot.

    Timo Saloniemi
     
  16. Tiberius

    Tiberius Commodore Commodore

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    First of all, we have no way to know that Bateson's crew wasn't also developing a way.

    Secondly, since we saw the Bozeman on each trip through the loop and since each loop was slightly different, it happened several times for the Bozeman too. Since the Bozeman appeared once and once only for each time the Enterprise went through the loop, it makes sense that the Bozeman went through the same number of loops as the Enterprise.
     
  17. Dick_Valentine

    Dick_Valentine Commander Red Shirt

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    Perhaps the best teaser in all of Trek...

    When I was a kid my dad would put on TNG and I'd half heatedly watch while playing along with my toys or doing something else.

    After the Ent-D exploded and the credits rolled we both sat there looking at each other with a kind of "WTF?" look on our faces....
    We almost expected the next 40 mins to be silent pictures of the crew in Black and White with their birth and death dates at the bottom!

    The rest of the ep surprisingly did live up to such an amazing teaser (though a bit of a shame the actual explosion effect does look like a firework inside a tonka toy model of the Ent-D instead of the tumultuous explosion you'd expect a ship of that size...I wonder if this'll change in the remastered like a few of the explosions have been doing in Series 1? :confused: )

    Though the resolution being 3? Because Riker has 3 pips?
    But....Data has 3 pips too?
    Yeah, one of them is blacked out but it's there!
    Crazy to ensure the survival of 2 starships on an easily confusable bit of information!

    This ep was so sucessful you can tell the writing staff sat down each year to try and "sequel" it with the Romulan Freeze-time episode and the Multi-Ent-D episode too.

    Never quite pulled it off though, this was the best of all the time travel eps, imo.
     
  18. Dick_Valentine

    Dick_Valentine Commander Red Shirt

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    Sorry to double-post but my browser didn't recognise the last page until after I replied.

    With reference to the above discussion it's obvious there's a time-portal element to the time-loop.

    My hypothesis is that the Bozeman, without the Ent-D being present, would've found itself 90 years ahead anyway, whereas it was the collision with the Enterprise and all that anti-matter exploding in proximity to the time portal that caused the time loop.

    So ensuring the loop didn't happen didn't completely close the time portal, or if it did, it was too late for the Bozeman who still would've been trapped out of time whatever happened, it was just the difference between living in the 24th century or exploding in it.
     
  19. T'Girl

    T'Girl Vice Admiral Admiral

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    The Enterprise Cee went back through it's time portal, if there was no destruction of the Boseman, would it have been able of returning to it's own time?

    And (time loop to the side) was the Boseman destroyed following the collision with the Enterprise? By the time the Enterprise exploded, the two ships would have been widely separated, and the Boseman didn't seem as badly damaged by the collision.

    :)
     
  20. Sexy Human

    Sexy Human Lieutenant

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    Great episodes. Because its a great cast.

    Can you imagine the crew of enterprise pulling this off? No. It would be boring as shit.

    I can picture it now.

    Tucker: "Keep your shirt on Luietenant".