I don't like it. The trailer's very well put together and the FX are top-notch, but the welding, etc, tells me this is more fantasy than sci-fi, and the ship's design IMHO is ugly. They're trying to get a new viewership into something they feel is outdated. Instead of updating the spirit of the original, they're going for its outer shell. That is look-wise - don't know the anything about the story.
Actually they are: The way we make ships is pretty much the same method, some of the materials have changed but the basic construction (done on dry land) is the same. Bolts are put in place paint is laid on the keel is laid out on ribs. Really making a sea ship hasn't radically changed from a hundred years ago - now they just add engines... Sharr
Jackson_Roykir, I would expect that in 240 years there would be so many advances made that welding two pieces of metel together would no longer be the most effective way to produce a larger piece of metal. As the example I gave, given sufficient energy a transporter could produce pieces of metal (or anything that in its memory) of any size. Given the energy needed to warp space enough for starships to travel at warp eight, it would seem warp engines could easily provide all necessary energy. Furthermore, a single defect free (since the transporter would construct every part of the metal down to the atomic structure) would be stronger and more structurally sound that two pieces of metal welded together. 240 years ago ocean going vessels were made of wood. Today no ocean going vessel (other than pleasurecrafts) are made from wood and few, if any, of the techniques used 240 years ago are in use today. Thus, I would expect that in 240 years few, if any, of our ship building techniques would be in use.
With the exception of a proposal to use Saturn 5's to take a long slow trip to Mars that got killed about 36 years ago, pretty much all designs for interplanetary craft developed here and in the UK for the last several decades reflect the notion of constructing the craft in orbit. The space station is not an interplanetary vehicle. You build a vessel that can go the distance -- from one planet to another -- and have another as a lander, that goes the last lil bit, and back up to the long hauler. I'm not pulling this out of my ass, it has been in damned near every book on space travel I've ever read, be it published by NASA or Scholastic Book Services or Time-Life. If we hadn't been in such a damned hurry on the moon race, it is much more likely we'd've built a station in orbit long ago, and then sent crews moonward from there with an orbit-to-orbit craft; that way you don't have to haul everything all the way out of the gravity well at once, and your main vessel isn't getting worn down with exposure to elements, cuz it is living in vaccuum. More advanced stuff would come about if you did the moondozing stuff, then fired it back to earth orbit for next to nothing and did assembly using that raw material.
It's true that methods aren't completely discarded. But how many methods and materials used to build castles in the middle ages are used to build modern sky scrapers? Not many. The same would be true for building space craft. Espcially if one extrapolates from other things about space craft in today's world and the space craft of TOS era. For instance the means of propulsion is completely different. Why then would one expect the means of construction not also to be completely different?
I wouldn't bother fastening two pieces of metal together at all. I'd just create the metal in a single piece in the desired shape and size. This could be done via transporter as I mentioned previous which beams the piece into existence en mass free of any defects. Or it could be done using nanotech where nanomachines build the metal piece by stacking up the atoms in the proper places. Or it could be grown somehow in an extrapolation of how computer chips are grown today. Whatever the case, the likelyhood of a civilization with warp technology and transporter technology and phaser technology having to weld together many, many, many, many pieces of metal to make the hull of a starship is infinitesimal.
"All work and no play make Dennis a dull boy." I think this is more about YOUR bias. I've mentioned on any number of occasions that excellent spacecraft stuff can be originated in CG, and make a point of citing SOLARIS as a prime example (as opposed to just dropping in a line -- sometimes unsubstantiated -- of your POV and popping back out again, which is more your modus operandi ... how many times in the last day have you posted variations on 'saw it last night/saw it this morning & it looked awesome'? For another poster, that might be considered trolling.) But you usually ignore any putting it in perspective aspect of my posts and focus only on my objections to CG that fails to convey to me that level of sophistication, beauty and realism. And there isn't any reason for me to advocate motion control for the sake of agenda; when I point out good motion control spaceship stuff in EVENT HORIZON, it pains me to think of it, because I hated the movie so much, and wish the visuals had gone into something worthwhile instead. I'd rather have a good movie AND credible visuals. Based on the still image of the ship in this post topic, it looks slick. But it doesn't have any life to it at all. As I indicated in an earlier post, it may look a little better or different in motion. But to expect it look grossly different would be a strange conclusion, given that you'd need deeper blacks and shiny specular whites to give it any additional credibility, and what I see hear is basically a more elaborate version of the wingwalk in the TMP de, which amounts to 'nice try.'
Construction of wooden ocean going vessels in the 1700's is much different that construction of modern ocean going vessels. The basic materials used (wood v. metal) mean vastly different methods are used. The similarities between the two methods owe more to the overall design commonalities than anything else. Point in case: welding; it's used today, but it wasn't 240 years ago.
Dude, if you think that the basics of material science is somehow going to be totally rewritten... not just ADDED TO, but all the existing known facts thrown out... you're living in Sci-fi land rather than reality. All basic materials fall into one of three general categories. Polymers (long strings of organic molecules)... aka "Plastics." Ceramics (ionic/crystaline materials, including all glass materials, all electronic medium, etc). And metallics (materials that have low electron affinities, and thus create a "sea" of loose electrons in the material matrix... providing malleability, strength, conductivity, and opacity at the same time). There are also "composites" which are simply non-homogenous mixtures of the various subcomponents. An example would be structural concrete, which is a composite of steel bars (called "rebar") for tensile strength, combined with a mixed ceramic structure called "concrete" for compressive strength. Now, it's fair to assume that in three centuries, some new breakthroughs in material science may occur, and we may ADD to this in some fashion. But as far as materials that exist in nature, EVERYTHING useful for mechanical construction falls into one of those three categories. (Wood, for example, is a porous composite which consists primarily of a polymer known as cellulose. Human bone consists of organic materials made with a high concentration of natural polymers, along with calcium-based natural ceramic structures.) Now, you can either say that they'll totally abandon the use of naturally-available materials in the future (HIGHLY UNLIKELY) or they'll add to it in some fashion (which is reasonable... but says nothing about abandoning metallics as primary construction materials) or that, for the most part, these people live and work in the same universe, with the same basic laws of nature, which we live in. In which case, it's entirely unreasonable to assume that metallics would be abandoned. It's also entirely inconsistent with what we've seen in ALL the variations of Star Trek which have ever been shown. The show, whether you like it or not, assumes metallic construction techniques make up the majority of the load-bearing structures we've seen. Call it "modern biases towards current techniques and materials" if you really want to... it's well-established in Trek that this is what's done. Now, if you're talking about metal... there are really four ways to join metals together. You can use fasteners (rivets, clamps, bolts, etc). You can solder (ie, use a dissimilar metal to joint two metal objects). You can weld (cause two metal objects made of the same basic material to "merge" into what is, effectively, a single metallic mass). Or you can bond (ie, use an adhesive). Can you think of any others? Now, soldering is an EASY process, but it's not good for load-bearing applications (it gets used in electrical work, or in plumbing work quite frequently, because it requires relatively low temperatures and makes for a fairly quick and easy joint). Bonding is OK... it's very effective for isolating one material from another, and some bonding agents are very effective with metallics. But I've never seen a bonded joint that's stronger than a true contiguous metal region would be. Fastening is what we do most often. Aircraft aren't welded together, they're rivetted for the most part. And this is a very effective method... also quite easy to fix, if you happen to "pop" a rivet or two. Threaded fasteners are less reliable but are easier to reuse and make for easier maintenance. Clamps and other approaches are also used, but less frequently. SO... welding. Welding, in theory, gives an interface between two metallic parts which is indistinguishable from the basic material on either side of the weld. You're not gluing two plates together... you're turning two plates into one plate. It's very tough to do that in real life, because of certain recrystalization effects you get around the high-temp weld joints. Yet, you CAN make a weld joint that is totally indistinguisable from the surrounding metal. For small parts, for instance, you can put it through a series of heat-treatments which cause all metallic crystaline structures to regrow, essentialy becoming totally uniform. This is done, for instance, on jet aircraft turbine blades (though the ideal is to make a blade from a single piece... and ideally from a single uninterrupted metallic crystal!) SO... welding is VERY unlikely to go away, as I see it, and I expect metals to remain the standard building material for the foreseeable future. However, I do expect to see vast improvements in HOW we do welding, as well as further refinement in the metallurgical sciences... to optimize the metallic behavior of whatever you're working with. I don't expect that a 23rd-century starship would be assembled using 20th-century resistance-welding hardware (which is what I THINK you're objecting to, isn't it?). But I still expect it to be made from metals and to have those metals be welded. If the ship was constructed in the fashion we're seeing here, you'd basically have to send the entire starship through an annealing furnace to prevent stress-fractures throughout the hull. Well, you're arguing TECHNIQUE there, not materials science. Basically, in TOS, you still cut people and still seal those cuts. But you use an organic adhesive ("anabolic protoplasm") as the "glue" rather than, as we sometimes do today, using cyanoacrylate glue (our most common contemporary surgical adhesives are based upon cyanoacrylates). In the times of TOS, or even TNG, they still have to cut people open to get inside. They just have a somewhat "nicer" way of sealing the wound, that's all. Why do you think that TOS is "unbelievably advanced?" That's a really odd thing to say. Other than the fact that they've found a few new technologies (FTL travel, controllable antimatter anihillation as a power source, matter teleportation, etc), which we could discover NEXT YEAR as far as any of us know... hell, we could have it now! The culture and, overall, the science of TOS isn't "unbelievably advanced" at all. Nor, for that matter, was TNG's... although TNG did definitely set the "unbelievably smug about ourselves" quotient quite high. Part of what I liked about DS9 was that it basically played off of that smugness and, well... MOCKED it, or at least demonstrated how misplaced it had been. It's only about 250 years ahead of where we are now, after all. We've learned a few things in the past 250 years, but none of the basics we knew back then have really gone away, have they? The major advances since then have been flight, computers, genetics, and the atom. But, contemporary smugness aside, people today aren't really any different than we were 250 years ago. Well, Andrew Probert told me (and also has repeated this other places) that he's always assumed that HIS Enterprise (the 1701(r) from TMP) was skinned with a ceramic/polymer composite, and that it was essentially deposited in-place. Well, we have ceramic/polymer composites today... we make some auto bodies and even aircraft structures out of them (in common usage, think of "fiberglass bodies" on cars). This works... but a metal body on a car is far more likely to keep you alive in a crash, so despite the fact that glass-reinforced polymer composites are less expensive (if mass-produced) and much lighter for the same "design limit" strenghts, they haven't been used to replace metal body panels yet, and I don't expect that they ever fully will. A metal body panel absorbs energy through deformation... a fiberglass panel absorbs slightly more energy during initial deflection... but it then fractures, resulting in NO PROTECTION WHATSOEVER. Metal bodies are just safer. The same wreck in two similar cars, one with a fiberglass body and one with a metal body, both designed to carry the same operational loads, will result in an orders of magnitude higher likelihood of survival for the guy in the metal-body car. Like it or not... a metal's ability (due to it's "sea of electrons" nature) to deform and stretch elastically makes it FAR more suitable for high-stress applications. SO, with all respect to Andrew, I disagree with his take. I don't like seeing modern-era welding hardware in use on a future starship any more than you do... which leads me to conclude that this entire scene is really intended to be figurative in nature rather than part of the film's plot. But I really don't think he "missed the boat." I'm in that same mode, definitely. I'm rather disappointed to see that this bit (obviously done far ahead of the "real" SFX work, I'm convinced) indicates an INTENT to use a design much different than what we're used to. But since SFX work normally isn't done 'til post-production... there's still a chance that what we're seeing isn't really what we'll see, too. And even if it IS, it doesn't mean that the film won't be a good film. Just ... "not as good as it ought to be."
You use microscopic machines to form molecular bonds turning the two pieces of metal into a single piece. This is why there are no joints or specular variations on the TOS Enterprise - the entire hull is manufactured to microscopically precise tolerances by nanonic devices programmed to do so. It's created that in a few large pieces in "vats" of the raw material (perhaps not the finaly alloy, but in fact the basic elements of it are themselves assembled into the final material by the microbots) - whether on Earth or in orbit is irrelevant - and then fused into a single unbroken shell by more nanomachines in orbital space.
But... the Enterprise is being heated up and cooled down when it enters and leaves a solar system, so the material that the hull is made out of would expand and contract and wear down over time, right?
I can't speak for Arlo; However I personally think that that IS the starship that will be in the film, but the teaser itself IS a metaphor, and what we see in the teaser has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot of the film. Teasers are not part of Star Trek Canon, so what we see in them is irrelevant. Did the Voyager battle the Borg in 'First Contact'? Of couse not -- that isn't consistent with canon. Yet one of the trailers for 'First Contact' showed the Voyager firing on a Borg ship. Good thing trailers aren't canon.
So the trailer is on the digital presentations of "Cloverfield"? Can anyone else confirm this? What theater chain did you go to, by any chance? And do you know if it was a 2k projector (2048x1080) or just a 1.2k (1280x1024)? Did the titles and credits look stair-stepped or pixelated? 1.2k presentations usually have problems with text on 40 foot plus screens.
I don't know how you guys can tell what the dude's welding... Yeah he's on the surface of the ship, but he could be welding in number of things. Also, I laughed when I turned on the History channel and Modern Marvels is about welding lol.
I would also like some confirmation of this, as my local Regal theater offers a number of DLP Projection showings, and though I would see Cloverfield even if there were no Trek trailer, I'd hate to have to see it again in non-DLP to see the trailer in all its glory.* *And by see it again, I mean theater-hop to watch the trailers.
But its not the basic method remains the same, be it wood or whatever from the moment a keel is laid out to its being skinned. Sure in a metal ship you use bolts instead or nails and don't plug it with whale oil based material you use a modern equivalent but its not all that different in form or function from what was used to close the gapes in the 18th Century sailing vessel. Sharr
Regal Cinemas multi in Lakewood, WA... I believe that it is the DLP system. Same complex that I saw "The Menagerie" at when it was released. Don't know which... 1.2 or 2.
Not true. The same basic principles apply. You see structures in even the most modern skyscraper that are, in every meaningful mechanical way, "keystones"... which have been used in arch construction for THOUSANDS of years. Skyscrapers are built as compression structures. The basic principles of how much incompressible "footing" is required for how much mass carried has remained totally unchanged since the middle ages, and is still done in very much the same way... ie, it's based upon an experience base, at least as much if not moreso than upon any hard-scientific analysis. Towers were built in the middle ages. Construction today isn't nearly as far advanced from that as you may think. We've just refined the processes (considerably, mind you!) It's true that there's an FTL "field drive" system on the ship... aka "warp drive." But sublight drive is defined using a standard scientific term... "impulse"... that applies to conventional rockets every bit as much as any esoteric ion system or so forth. It accelerates a bit of mass out of a nozzle at a high velocity, and the "equal and opposite reaction" gives the ship an acceleration in the opposite direction. Fundamental science... and not something that they've tossed out in Star Trek. They've got a few new toys... things we can only dream about... but it's still in the same general universe we live in, and we can imagine our own world becoming like theirs (if we're LUCKY). This is an argument that, you may notice, all the guys who have backgrounds in science and technology are rejecting... but those who are mainly in it for the "entertainment" but don't really get into the science seem to like. Is there anyone who has a real grounding in materials science, construction technologies, physics, chemistry, etc, who thinks that we're likely to stop using the stuff we KNOW to be reality and come up with something "totally new?" The more you understand what we DO know (and thus, how little we really know about even the stuff we currently use), the more you understand that we have a loooonnnnng way to go just to get a grip on what we're supposely "expert" with today. The changes that are likely to occur are vast... but they will be REFINEMENT of our ability to manipulate and control the universe we already live in. They won't... at least not for a VERY long time... involve inventing our own altered reality.
I do not have much of a problem with the welding or the earth construction, let me explain. The earth construction and sub launch is not a problem because they have warp drive. Who I am to second guess a culture like that. If they find it more economical to build on the planet and then launch so be it. Same goes for 'welding', thet have warp drive, how can we second guess that. Maybe they have the orbit teather in star trek and they just pull the loads up via the rope. Who cares. Now as for the micro-welding, we have no idea. A custom paint shop will paint your car such that the paint forms one solid molucule of paint around the entire care. The same priniple exisits for metal. You fuse the metal on the sub atomic scale such that there really is no 'joint'. Over all I see no problems... i may be blinded by darkness and giggityness though.