Theory regarding the super-fast trip from Qo'noS to Earth

Simple answer is that there's little logic to this film when it comes to traveling between the two planets. It takes a few mins to reach Kronos, yet it takes a few seconds to go back. Even stranger, they were knocked out of warp right when they reached the moon, as if they would have kept going if it weren't for the Vengeance firing at them. Crazy huh? It's simply an aspect that the film doesn't really care about because the film wants to have the climax take place in San Fransisco dammit and it wants it now!

 

Becuase TNG was based on actual scientific principles, while STV was just a badly written piece of crap?

Plus the fact that if the Ent-D could do it, so could Voyager. Which would have meant that they would have been stuck in the Delta Quadrant for all of an hour.

 

Half right, at best. TNG's warp drive wasn't based on actual scientific principles to any greater degree than the warp drive was in any other incarnation of Star Trek.

 

No show that had an episode where the transporter turns them into children and they learn the meaning of fun, or where the crew de-evolve into everything from fish girls to man spiders gets to be called "based on actual scientific principles"

 

Be that as it may, I find it more believable that a ship has to take 70 years at a certain warp speed to get from one side of the galaxy to another, rather than a ship getting to the center of the galaxy in a matter of minutes using the same fictional warp scale.

 

According to actual scientific principles, crossing the galaxy in 70 years is like taking a magic carpet ride, using an actual carpet!

 

I prefer how warp speeds have been done by TNG not because it's more "scientifically accurate" but rather that it emphasizes how vast space is. They state that only 18% had been explored and that really tells you how far they have come since Kirk's era. Maybe that's a retcon, but so is STV suddenly having the E-A make it to the center of the galaxy after TNG established that it would have never happened unless there were certain circumstances to create that scenario.

I simply prefer Trek to try being consistent about its universe functions, not too strict but at the same time not too blatant on how nothing makes sense therefore why should I believe in it. nuTrek isn't even trying to be consistent with itself, not even if you narrow it down to just STID. That's how the Bad Robot folks do their thing, I don't care for it, but as we can see in this thread and forum there are fans who couldn't care less and just wanna enjoy the spectacle. All the power to them.

 

TNG threw TOS continuity under the bus, so it's not like TNG wasn't already doing its own thing.

 

Each new production team has always thrown the previous under the bus, starting with Rodenberry himself and TMP (the novelization of which suggests that the original series was an over-dramatization of Kirk's five year mission).

 

BWAAHAHAHAHAHHA!!!!

STV was a piece of crap, but I'm not convinced it was badly written. Quite the contrary, I think it was extraordinarily well written and had a lot of potential as a story.

It was just badly DIRECTED.

Yeah, because VOYAGER is famous for being well-written and internally consistent.

I don't. Mainly because in the REAL WORLD, a starship traveling under warp power wouldn't be limited to a finite speed (measured relative to WHAT, exactly?) and would spend half of its journey accelerating at a constant rate -- 4,000 gs or something -- and then turn around and decelerate for the other half of the trip.

Your travel time would actually be a function of AVERAGE speed, which in turn would be a function of distance and your maximum sustainable acceleration curve. It also probably wouldn't be as simple as "point the ship at Earth and hit the gas" since you would also have to account for gravitational influence of everything else in the galaxy, including the galactic core. Since you don't necessarily know where all of those gravitational sources are (seeing how you are in uncharted space and all) you're going to have to make an assload of midcourse corrections along the way, which means that your actual travel time will be virtually impossible to calculate ahead of time.

If you're going to split hairs on what is "believable" then we're stuck with the fact that warp drive has NEVER been presented in a halfway realistic manner and it is only the smug pretenses of the TNG era that led us to think otherwise.

 

'The Centre of the Galaxy' was the name of the bar in that system It's actually the third system on the left past Laurentia.

 

THIS.

Also, I presume that the Enterprise was travelling at warp 9.95 and that this was an urgent mission that required the higher warp speed.

The movie would have worked better if the Excelsior class had been the ship used for the Enterprise instead of the Constitution class; maybe a residual bit of transwarp tech could have been used as a way to get to the 'center of the galaxy'.

Or maybe the movie was shit after all?

 

Yeah, but both of those events are dumb.

Personally, I think that, instead of Khan going to Qo'noS, he should have traveled to a Klingon border world of little strategic interest. This solves so many problems.

- No instantaneous warping between the Klingon and Federation home worlds.
- No explanation needed for why the Klingons have pitiful defenses on their homebase and no defenses in orbit.
- No super fast starships.

 

I'd be very curious to hear more about this.

 

A lot of Trek's problems could be resolved with minor tweakes like this but the bottom line is that space is vast and if we don't want our characters to spend weeks in pursuit of a travelling vessel, all fights have to take place at impulse in one location. Trek writers don't really like that.

 

Here's the relevant section from the preface to Gene Roddenberry's novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (supposedly the words of Admiral Kirk, writing in the first person)


Unfortunately, Starfleet's enthusiasm affected even those who chronicled our adventures, and we were painted somewhat larger than life, especially myself.

Eventually, I found that I had been fictionalized into some sort of "modern Ulysses" and it has been painful to see my command decisions of those years so widely applauded, whereas the plain facts are that ninety-four of our crew met violent deaths during those years - and many of them would still be alive if I had acted either more quickly or more wisely. Nor have I been as foolishly courageous as depicted. I have never happily invited injury; I have disliked in the extreme every duty circumstance which has required me to risk my life. But there appears to be something in the nature of depicters of popular events which leads them into the habit of exaggeration. As a result, I have become determined that if I ever again found myself involved in an affair attracting public attention, I would insist that some way be found to tell the story more accurately.
(P. 7-8)

 

I agree that ships moving at the speed of plot is a perfectly acceptable use of dramatic license, but the complete lack of Klingon defenses around their home planet was a major issue that took me out of the movie. A Klingon border planet with no strategic interest would have fixed both of these problems.

 

The novelization (and apparently the script) suggest that Enterprise dropped out of warp behind one of Qo'nos' moons and was hiding there from those very same defenses. It's subtly implied that even the Enterprise crew is surprised at how lax those defenses really are; OTOH, if that's really Praxis breaking up in orbit, it's probably understandable.

If Enterprise is equipped with transwarp drive -- and it very much appears to be -- it could just be a matter of the ship being too fast for Klingon sensors to track it.

 

Speaking "in universe" it doesn't require an "explanation". Clearly the ships in Abrams' Trek move at the same speed as they do in all other forms of Trek--speed of plot. Moreover, even IF (and only for the sake of discussion--I refuse to acknowledge a "need" to do so) the ships in current Trek are far faster than in any previous iteration, it still does NOT require an "explanation". If every other piece of tech that differs between TOS and the Abrams' Trek films can be "explained" by the divergent timeline (and that is certainly how we are supposed to read those differences), then faster travel time is just part and parcel of the whole. No need to re-write the story, spend 10 mins. of valuable screen time giving us a "talking heads" expository screen pointing out the different types of propulsion systems (yawn) between TOS and current Trek... It takes however long it takes for the ships to get where they are going. One is certainly free to complain that things are "faster" for all sorts of reasons (story pacing, aesthetic choice of making galaxy seem smaller and less wondrous, etc.). But storytelling devices never require "explanation". They are simply part of the story.

 

Their planet appeared to be mid-apocalypse when Kirk and friends arrived. They were evacuating and probably had more important things to worry about than a neutral trade ship entering their airspace.