The Star Trek Into Darkness teaser trailer is here!

Professor Farnsworth: Good Lord! That's over 5000 atmospheres of pressure!
Fry: How many atmospheres can the ship withstand?
Professor Farnsworth: Well, it was built for space travel, so anywhere between zero and one.

 

That's about the 5th time that shit has been posted here and it's not any more relevant now than it was the first time. The Planet Express ship is part of a comedy cartoon, it's not meant to be remotely realistic and changes it's properties every week.

And since it's been seen taking severe structural damage from things as simple as a baseball bat, me thinks the Professor penny pinched on materials (assuming he was even telling the truth about building it himself in the pilot).

 

Well, he was already in his pyjamas.

 

So are most of Starfleet

 

Starfleet engineers had to design this ship for both space travel and underwater travel, two completely different environments, even if the likelyhood for a mission having to take place under water is like... almost zero? Poor engineers. What else did they have to think of? Maybe the Enterprise can indeed transform into mega maid.

 

Clearly they consulted the Xindi Aquatics. There. Problem solved.

 

It makes one wonder if the Xindi are already members of the Federation in the new, altered timeline. I don't think the Xindi joined in the Prime reality until much later than the Kirk era but who knows...Daniels was extremely vague about when the Federation and the Xindi teamed up.

It might be cool to see a Xindi-Reptillian as an Enterprise crew member at some point as a wink to the audience. "See, kids? They weren't all villainous bastards!"

 

Or, they could finally do something like what they had planned for TNG and have an area in the saucer devoted to aquatics.

Only not Earth ones, but sentient crew members, you could do two shout outs in one there. Have not only the race from Titan, but a Xindi aquatic swim past. The audience would just see cool aliens, we'd get the injoke, lots of fun, like 5 seconds of screentime.

Of course, it won't happen but it would be fun.

 

Nah, it wouldn't. But it's a neat little idea in any case.

I wouldn't mind hearing the Xindi attack on Earth in 2153 referenced at least once during the course of the Abrams films as a nod to one of the most traumatic events of the warp era. You know, Kirk and McCoy are drinking and enjoying some social time together and one starts reminiscing about their old professor or classmates at the Academy. "Boy, Dr. [insert name here] was such a pain in the ass about Starfleet history. It was bad enough Professor Gill never shut up about the Xindi probe attack...."

That kind of thing. Again, who knows if it'll ever happen but Enterprise is now the only series that exists in both the Prime and Abrams timelines so the history is shared by both.

 

"Genesis device" - a missile that magically creates an oasis of flora and fauna literately out of ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, in a matter of minutes... No one flinches.

A starship designed to operate in vacuum and traverse huge distances by bending the very fabric of space gets submerged under water... "Blasphemy! Jihad! Behead the infidel!"

Trekkies <3

 

Actually, there is strong precedent in Canon.

Voyager had no issues with Fluidic Space.

And the Enterprise in The Immunity Syndrome was essentially swimming inside a giant amoeba, certainly a liquid environment roughly analogous to water.

The functioning within a 1G environment is slightly more problematic, until you realize that a starship is travelling at warp velocities, and has survived close proximity to far more intense gravitationally induced stresses, to the point of surviving time travel.

 

I pointed that out myself a few days ago. The thing is, if Voyager, or the Defiant, or any of the prime universe ships had been submerged in one of the old movies or shows, no one would have said anything. The main issue isn't with the actual submerging, it's with the "reboot". Always has been.

 

Actually, we don't know that for sure. Everyone assumes that the timelines diverged with Nero's incursion from the future but there could have been multiple divergences before then. For example, one of my own self-amusing pet theories is that what were seeing in the NuTrek universe is actually our timeline in which the Eugenics Wars never happened, at least not in the 1990s, and there was no Third World War as such, either because a temporal incursion prevented them from happening or because they were caused by a temporal incursion in the first place. It could explain why so many things are different in the NuTrek timeline and why technology is more advanced, because they never had to recover from that massive devastation.

 

Well, true. It was taking on water and sinking, but it did stay afloat far longer than should've made sense. Then again, we can't have our heroes drown.

 

Great. Now I'm going to have crushing migraines all night pondering that.

Thanks. Thanks a lot.

It's not a theory I buy in the slightest, but it is creative.

 

Can't really use Fluidic Space as an example, because we really have no idea of the pressure and viscosity of that particular fluid.

But it probably still wouldn't have any trouble, at least not if it moved slowly. Any ship that can survive the streses of a) skirting the event horizon of a black hole and b) getting blasted out of said black hole by a massive antimatter explosion probably isn't going to have any issues with water pressure... so long as it doesn't dive very far.

Does anyone know if NASA uses (or rather, used) submersion tests in order to determine the structural integrity of things like shuttles and Apollo capsules?

 

My work here is done.

 

Not sure as to how/why technology would be more advanced in the Alternate Reality, but I defer to writer/producer intent regarding the Alternate Reality splitting of Stardate 2233.04.

 

Considering there's a pretty big size difference between the two... Which is my problem, the Enterprise is huge, even the TOS Kirk Enterprise/Movie Enterprise. IIRC schematic put the Abrams Enterprise as bigger than the -D. Which is, scientifically speaking, 'Utterly Mother Fucking Huge!"

Nor is it the most aerodynamic shape, but the Enterprise should barely be able to not fall apart under its own weight in an atmosphere, let alone be underwater.

 

That's the way I look at the new timeline. Before the singularity that the Narada emerges from begins forming we're in the Prime timeline (Spock's birth in the deleted scenes of Trek '09 also happens in the original timeline on stardate 2230.06)....the moment the singularity begins to appear we're in the Abrams timeline. Everything diverges from that moment.

That means that the uniforms seen on the Kelvin crew are what the Prime timeline uniforms also looked like until at least 2233 and George Kirk was an officer aboard the ship in both timelines.