The STAR TREK Movies, As Ranked By STAR TREK Con-Goers

i was going through this thread and i gotta tell you, I'm not a trekker not by a long shot, i only saw one trek show from the beginning to the end and that was Enterprise and I enjoyed. I thought both Star Trek (2009) and Into Darkness were good movies and i don't feel like rating them.

 

What about it? If I wanted to go by real science I'd say its a form of exotic matter, the type postulated to create wormholes.

 

Cmon guys what are we doing here?

Lets all agree Star Trek is great.

Star Trek is not ridiculous, its not 'hard' science fiction but nothing ever is (except 2001:A Space Odyssey)

 

In most of those instances, not the best of times.

 

Man, this is another one of those where you just got to take the Butch Cassidy approach and say to yourself, I got vision and the rest of the world need bifocals.

You could probably cite Occam's Razor, or trot out some existing real-world basis for zero-gee fab & assembly (as I have here repeatedly, and in some good company at times), and the response is STILL going to be some variation on, 'in the future they will have starships that can feed the poor, so they can do ANYthing.'

 

Yeah but.. but.. but.. Gene Roddenberry's Vision and, well, and, philosophies and morals and.... Gene Roddenberry's Vision.

 

A couple pages back I posted the following in response to that:

time travel via close flyby of gravity well has been a 'hard sf' staple going back to Van Vogt's FAR CENTAURUS, so yeah, I can buy off on the slingshot thing for a TREK movie just fine.

supplemental: FAR CENTAURUS is a pretty damn fine story, dealing with a sleeper ship and time marching on while they sleep, and I highly recommend it. Found it in the semi-juvenile (they call it that, but I wouldn't) Silverberg anthology DEEP SPACE, which also has Chad Oliver's BLOOD'S A ROVER, a novella that I still find as moving as John Vernon's decision at the end of QUESTOR TAPES, and some other good tales.

 

"Technology" in Trek has always worked in whatever way the plot needed it to. By definition, it constantly breaks its own rules. Sometimes it takes X hours to go Y distance at Warp Z. Other times it takes 2X hours to go Y distance at Warp Z. This is a minor example, but the formula is reduced, increased, or changed as needed. Sometimes black holes do this, other times they do that; sometimes artificial gravity works one way, other times it works another; so on and so forth.

There is nothing at all scientific about Star Trek story telling.

And as I said, the "internal logic" is always breaking for everything. I dare you to find one piece of techno-gizmo or scientific presumption that remains constant throughout all 800 (or whatever) hours of Star Trek. I would bet if you randomly picked three episodes and a device or scientific premise shared by all three, you'd find some kind of variance from one episode to the next.

Dumbledore is to his wand as Data is to his tricorder.

 

No the answer will be they have mastered artificial gravity and tractor beams. ( as shown on the show and in the films). So they build on the ground where the construction crew is safer and less encumbered. Then use anti grav and tractor beams to lift it into space.

Still easier to swallow than the nexus, Genesis and dilithium.

 

And old, harry fat guys making love to beautiful young women has been a staple of porn for centuries. That doesn't make it plausible.

Man has accomplished much greater feats with mules, pulleys, and some elbow-grease.

 

If you don't think some of the rich old 'harry' fat guys get plenty of hot action, then you don't know what makes the world go round. Hint: it's not love, and in the US it is mostly green.

If you don't find Van Vogt's stories plausible, that's your concern. I can't get into Tolkien, but I know lots of people love his stuff, and I ASSUME he knows something about what works in fantasy -- much as Van Vogt knew something about what worked in science fiction.

 

This is simply dishonest...

I explained why I feel that building a large spacecraft on the ground isn't a deal-breaker in the ST universe and you simply ignore it, instead preferring hyperbole to actual debate.

 

Once more, with the last erg of feeling. It is safer to build in space than on Earth, unless you've got everybody with their own personal antigrav rig. It is probably faster too, because you're working in microgravity and only have to worry about inertia mass and not the one gee going DOWN. Plus zero-gee fab offers all sorts of possibilities.

Genesis is just alchemy, in place of terraforming. It is silly as all get out. I don't know from crystals, but the nexus is the most arbitrary of plot devices, right up (or is it 'down'?) there with the 'science' of TSFS.

 

You don't WASTE energy. That is why you wouldn't be running a goddamn holodeck while 70,000 light years from home. Just cuz you HAVE a certain tech doesn't mean you always use it, or that it is wise to use it all the time (look at modern movies, they use CG like it is going out of style, but we got better results 15 years ago when there was a mix of techniques.)

You don't expend all this energy to build the deadliest thing imagineable on the ground of your homeworld either.

Now I'm guilty of everything I told the other guy was fruitless to get mixed up in. We are so talking past one another that I might as well be speaking Eurish and you Esperanto. There's no debate as you call it when there aren't parameters common to both parties, and in this instance, I don't see any.

 

Really, with all the hard radiation, the fact that a suit develops a leak, the fact that you have to be VERY careful as to the movements you make - and tire easily if you're not careful (that hasn't and won't change, man is man); it's easier/safer to build in space as opposed to the ground just using anti and artificial grav tech that they seem to have perfected?

 

What he said.

 

Space is not "safer" to work in. . . there is cosmic weather, radiation, micro-meteors, that whole "no oxygen" thing, wearing uncomfortable, and mobility limiting, suits in order to work, etc.. . . plus, if the workers slightly misaligned say a bulkhead in microgravity, only to discover it when the artificial gravity is turned on, it would wipe out months of work in an instant: that won't happen when the ship is built in the gravity that it is going to work under; plus humans are fairly comfortable with gravity, considering that we evolved with it and all, it makes sense that we would actually work better in our native environment. . .as BillJ has said, the Federation has tractor beams and antigravity. . . there would be no problem getting a ship built on Earth into space. . .


~FS

EDIT: I see someone said it more eloquently than I did. . .

 

Vulcanian.

 

Way to ignore the point completely. Bill offered sun surfing time travel as an example of Star Trek's incredulity. Your response was to suggest that, since it's been associated with the form for a while, that it automatically passes the sniff test.

I used an absurd analogy to point out how ridiculous that is. I could have just as easily used laptop supercomputers in crime procedurals, or the way people's lifestyle in most film and television exists beyond their means. Or, if I really wanted to skew the conversation, I could've brought up prophetic sons of gods born to virgin or unwed mothers.

Just because something is presented consistently in such a way over time doesn't it make it truthful, accurate, or believable.

But thanks for the contemptuous, albeit cynical, non sequitur.

And Ted Kaczynski knew what worked in dementedly Quixotic manifestos. What's your point? What works and what's believable are two completely separate things.

Your "safer" argument has already been proven inaccurate.

"Faster" is irrelevant. It does not mean "better," just cheaper. And monetary considerations don't apply. There was also no evidence that deadlines to meet political or civil considerations applied since it was implied the Enterprise was a special case. And there was no evidence that all Starfleet ships were built planet side.

Since it was a special case, I might point out that all of your arguments apply to assembly lines and auto manufacturing. Yet there are legitimate reasons people choose to build cars by hand.

Besides, your basing most of your arguments on theory since there's only one large man-made structure in space. And it was only assembled in space. And a space station is quite a different animal than a space ship. You have no idea what the intricacies and nuances of building a starship are. For all anyone knows, there are plenty of practical reasons for building one on Earth.

We're all just guessing, and, despite the smug condescension, your guesses aren't any better than others'.

 

Still reading reaction to this story from across the interwebs, it seems virtually NO ONE believes this to even be accurate or, at least, accurately representative of the fan base. Kind of a universal "WTF?" The only people who believe this are Devin Faraci and the sheep at IGN/The Guardian.

http://www.edrants.com/why-devin-faraci-is-unfit-to-practice-journalism/