Worst science goofs

[Christopher]

Silvercrest wrote:

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Actually it makes a great deal of sense considering all the other time he's done it.

That would only be true if that were all you had to consider. The point is that in this case we have hard evidence from before the fact that supports what he said very shortly after the fact, in the comic book adaptation. And, as I said, we do know that he later changed his story to something else, the navicomputer explanation I quoted above -- so it's that something else that we should be skeptical of, surely.

And last I looked, wasn't this a Star Trek forum?

[ATimson]

Christopher wrote:

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And last I looked, wasn't this a Star Trek forum?

Star Trek literature, to boot. Oh well.

[Silvercrest]

Hey, Mr. Laser Beam gets the credit for bringing it up; I'm just an accessory to the crime. And I did bring up Final Frontier.

[FFunctionalData]

Therin of Andor wrote:

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In the DC Comics "Grond vs Ajir" two-parter by Diane Duane, Kirk needed to get the Enterprise to safety, so he ordered Sulu to perform a 360 degree turn to escape an alien vessel!

[King Daniel Into Darkness]

I have yet to read it myself, but I'm sure I've read someone complain about the Genesis Wave's inconsistant FTL/STL speed.

It's been ages since I read it, but wasn't the premise of Spock Must Die! that the transporter duplicate of Spock was an exact mirror image of the original, and that was what made him evil?

[bullethead]

King Daniel wrote:

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It's been ages since I read it, but wasn't the premise of Spock Must Die! that the transporter duplicate of Spock was an exact mirror image of the original, and that was what made him evil?

No, it turned out the weird barrier over Organia was the reason why the other Spock was evil.

[Christopher]

^But he was a mirror image because he reflected off that barrier around Organia.

[Timo]

...In defense of Diane Carey, the Final Frontier chase scene where George Kirk doesn't have to yell "Freeze!" to stop his prey cold is not quite as counterphysical as some have suggested.

The fugitive doesn't enter a room in vacuum - he enters a room full of air, at "minus two-hundred-something" by the inexpert opinion of sidekick Drake (but probably a bit hotter than that, or the air would have turned liquid). So there's a lot of heat conduction available for cooling down our victim. Moreover, the freezing does not take place in seconds - there are several minutes available for it. Finally, the victim doesn't totally shatter from hitting a wall at running pace - "shards" and "chunks" of him spray the heroes when they unthinkingly turn gravity on and drop him from near the ceiling of a "garage-sized" cargo bay all the way to the floor of that bay, but the corpse still supposedly remains more or less intact and a chore for our heroes to drag away.

What's being described there is actually semi-plausible... In scifi terms at least.

Timo Saloniemi

[Silvercrest]

Ah. Well, that's why I asked if I was remembering it correctly. Thanks!

[theblitz]

The whole of the new Star Trek is based on super-bad science.

1. A supernova would not destroy a distant star system
2. It would take ages for even the minimum effects to arrive.
3. The fact that the star is VERY old (as stated in the pre-flim comic) actually means that it is LESS likely to go nova.

[Timo]

OTOH, ignoring the comic, we learn neither that the supernova would happen in a distant star nor that said star would be particularly old. For all we know, it was the homestar of Romulus that blew.

Although the movie does make it sound as if the explosion came as a nasty surprise to everybody except Spock, in which case it would in fact be better if the star were of a type that was unlikely to go supernova.

For fairly bad science in that movie, we get the scene where Nero has devastated a formation of starships, and the sky is full of wreckage. Yet the wreckage is at a virtual standstill vs. Nero's starship - and Nero's starship is at a standstill vs. the nearby surface of planet Vulcan. Unless all the action is taking place at geosynchronous height, the wreckage should be in the process of falling more or less straight down towards the planet... And it would take some pretty extreme assumptions about the nature of planet Vulcan to argue that the very low height we observe is geosynchronous (or hephaistosynchronous, or whatever terminology nitpickers might want to extrapolate from today's naming practices).

Sure, our heroes arrive fairly soon after the fight, so the debris might have only recently begun its fall. But why were the ships destroyed so much higher up than the position Nero's ship that they'd be at this level some minutes after the action? And why don't we see any appreciable downward motion? Gravity at the observed height should still be about three-quarters of surface normal, so the acceleration down shouldn't be invisibly gradual...

Timo Saloniemi

[Christopher]

theblitz wrote:

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The whole of the new Star Trek is based on super-bad science.

Which is no worse than the inanity of the Genesis Device in TWOK and TSFS, the portrayal of the center of the galaxy in TFF, the explosion of Praxis in TUC (which was also able to instantaneously affect a starship sectors away), the trilithium supernovae in GEN (ditto), the fountain-of-youth ring radiation in INS, and the particle-of-the-week doomsday weapon in NEM. Not to mention the sheer fantasy of the godlike psychic powers of Gary Mitchell, Charlie Evans, Trelane, the Organians, etc. in TOS, or the way starships in the series fell out of orbit if their power failed, or the whole idea of humanoid aliens who can interbreed with humans, or, or, or.

[MacLeod]

Well we have to expect a certain amount of bad science in a Sci-Fi TV show.

But here is another one, in TNG's "The Royale" they came up with a temapture below absolute zero.

[Keturah]

The last time I watched Generations, I laughed as Dr. Sorin sent that rocket up towards the sun from the planet surface, and it appear to be going, say 85mph. But fewer than 5 seconds later, it reached the sun! Wowsers. Am I remembering that correctly?

[Timo]

Sure. But what's so odd about that? Star Trek spacecraft are really fast when in space, but tend to move very slowly within atmospheres; this probe need not be an exception at all. Earlier in the same movie, another probe had been launched towards another sun, this time from a space station, and had apparently completed the journey in seconds as well. Warp technology should allow for that.

...Even if for some reason even very high warp factors appear to amount to a crawling speed in the proximity of stars. Say, our heroes go warp eight or even warp ten in their Klingon BoP in ST4, yet it takes the ship several seconds to arch around the Sun nevertheless. But that's not a major problem as such, because probes can be assumed to be faster than ships. In many cases, they indeed appear to be.

The science goof there is what happens after the probe reaches the sun. The sun dies - and Soran and Picard immediately see it happen! Light from the star (or darkness from the star) does not travel at warp speed - it only travels at the speed of light. So it should take five to ten minutes for the death scene to reach Veridian III, not a split second.

(Of course, we can argue that there was a cut in the action there. Two old geezers had just fought each other, and one had triumphed and killed a star. What would there be for the two to do except catch their breaths and wait for the death scene to become visible? Picard would gain nothing by climbing the cliff to give Soran one more punch in the jaw; Soran would gain nothing by coming down. Perhaps the two shouted insults at each other in hoarse, huffing voices for five minutes, and the director mercifully spared us from that.)

Timo Saloniemi