The space station in "The Ultimate Computer", reamstered

[LMFAOschwarz]

As I understand it real nebulae are not very colourful (if at all) to the naked eye. From what I understand all those pictures of beautifully coloured nebulae are actually composites of the same nebula taken at different wavelengths and with colours assigned to them to produce those gorgeous images. To the naked eye a nebula would look pretty much like a black dust cloud.

So TOS showing mostly black space was by chance more realistic than the later shows with vivdly colourful nebulae.

Or, one can leave the aperture on the camera open for long periods of time, provided the camera is mounted, moving and aligned with earth's rotation (a pain in the butt!). More time, more photons can expose themselves to the film. Even so, different films can show different colors in the picture.

That was my technique before I mostly gave it up. That was around the time I really, really began to dislike winter: hanging around outside in the warmer months monitoring the equipment could be fun, but in the winter (when ironically the night sky has more interesting sights here) was just too much of a deep freeze for me!

Still, there was one cool time when I just had that famous feeling of being watched. I shone my little flashlight around in the pitch-black dark, only to reveal ten or so glowing eyes around me. Turns out some deer had gathered to see what I was up to!

Still, I always wondered what a nebula could possibly look like from, say ten light-years away, as opposed to 1,500 or so. There must be more to see than our feeble attempts reveal to us...

 

[MGagen]

And why is it less reasonable than using maneuvering thrusters? In that case, you'd have to keep firing thrusters over and over to cancel out the gravitational attraction between ship and station. In the orbital case, you'd only need to fire thrusters briefly to establish the orbit, and then you could stay in orbit indefinitely without needing further thrust. It's more efficient and wastes less fuel, so what in the world makes it unreasonable?

It is unreasonable on many points. First, the ship would not be merely orbiting the station, they are both too close in mass for that. The ship and the station would be orbiting each other in a sort of cosmic dosee-doe. This is a much more difficult thing to be effected by a single ship applying a little thrust. Its very presence affects the station. It's not as easy as a tiny object going into orbit around a much more massive one.

But a station like K-7 doesn't usually have only one ship calling at a time. How do you calculate these orbits when there are two, three or four ships acting on the station at once. Suddenly we have an enormously complex and variable dance. And they all have to have non-intersecting orbits. Suddenly, much of the station's habitat would have to be occupied by traffic controllers, constantly monitoring the swarm of bees buzzing around them, pulling them and each other off course each time they got closer to each other.

No, what you propose is preposterous. There is no reason for it. Any number of ships can float in the general vicinity of the station. Each ship responsible for keeping its own relative position with minor and infrequent corrections.

I never take special-effects shots literally, since there are so many obvious impossibilities and absurdities in them.

I would generally agree with this. But I don't throw the baby out with the bath water. In the case of this particular instance, there is a conflict between the various scenes. Something has to give. I just opt for the smallest change necessary to answer the conflict with something that makes good sense. Merely add a drifting star background to the exterior shot, and you end up with something like my animation: which answers all improbabilities.

On another note, I also have a theory about what we may be seeing when we have evenly lit starships in deep space and colorful nebulae. The overexposed view ports are the clue: Exterior deep space footage is "filmed" by some extremely light sensitive equipment. The ships look bright and evenly lit because they are lit by the stars all around them. They look bright because of the light amplification of the camera. The viewports look bright and overexposed because they are overexposed. The same light amplification gives the nebulae the colors of time exposure astrophotographs.

As you can tell, I have spent far too much time thinking about this.

 

[Christopher]

It is unreasonable on many points. First, the ship would not be merely orbiting the station, they are both too close in mass for that. The ship and the station would be orbiting each other in a sort of cosmic dosee-doe. This is a much more difficult thing to be effected by a single ship applying a little thrust. Its very presence affects the station. It's not as easy as a tiny object going into orbit around a much more massive one.

Why not? Countless natural objects orbit each other that way without needing any kind of thrust at all -- Pluto and Charon, for instance, or the binary asteroid 90 Antiope. Once established, it's a stable relationship.

But a station like K-7 doesn't usually have only one ship calling at a time. How do you calculate these orbits when there are two, three or four ships acting on the station at once. Suddenly we have an enormously complex and variable dance. And they all have to have non-intersecting orbits. Suddenly, much of the station's habitat would have to be occupied by traffic controllers, constantly monitoring the swarm of bees buzzing around them, pulling them and each other off course each time they got closer to each other.

No, what you propose is preposterous. There is no reason for it. Any number of ships can float in the general vicinity of the station. Each ship responsible for keeping its own relative position with minor and infrequent corrections.

The very fact that you use the word "float" shows the fundamental conceptual flaw in your argument. To float is to hover as if weightless. But as I've been saying, gravity isn't optional. The ships and the station cannot simply "float" at a constant separation forever. They have mass, they are in an essentially frictionless vacuum, and therefore they will attract one another gravitationally, no matter what. That's fundamental to the physics of the situation. The only thing different between your proposal and mine is in how the ships' operators choose to cope with that gravitational influence. If the ships are keeping station by thrusters as in your scenario, they'll still have to calculate thrust to cancel out their mutual gravity (assuming they stay on station for several days, long enough for it to affect their trajectories by more than a few millimeters either way). So it's still going to be "enormously complex and variable" if they do it your way.

But you know what? There are indeed ways that three or more bodies can orbit together in a stable or semi-stable fashion. Surely you're familiar with Lagrangian points. Once you have the Enterprise in orbit of K-7, you could put the Klingon ship at the L-4 or L-5 point. Or maybe L-3, which is diametrically opposite, albeit only semi-stable. Of course, since the ships are close to each other in mass, the standard Lagrangian-point physics wouldn't quite apply, since they assume the two main bodies are far more massive than the others. But the basic principle is sound. And there are plenty of other stable three-body orbital configurations.

Of course, I'm not saying they have to rely on orbit in every instance. Obviously it's not the only possibility, since they do have thrusters. I'm just saying it could work in certain specific cases. If there are a lot of ships flitting around, then it might be difficult to maintain a stable orbit -- although over the course of a few days, it wouldn't make much difference, since again we're talking about an orbital period on the order of one month. But in a two-body problem like the specific one we've been talking about, there's no reason it wouldn't work.

I would generally agree with this. But I don't throw the baby out with the bath water. In the case of this particular instance, there is a conflict between the various scenes. Something has to give.

Nothing "has to" give. This is storytelling, the use of created images and words to convey the illusion of an event. All we have to do is not take the illusions too literally. If two images contradict each other, we can choose one or the other, or we can treat them both as imperfect representations. I try to look past the surface images and imagine the underlying idea that they're approximating.

 

[plynch]

My kid and I are watching ENT together and Reed and Mayweather are walking around on an icy asteroid, or maybe a comet, like its nothin. Wouldn't they have next to no gravity on such a thing? Like Philae bouncing off its target recently?

 

[Metryq]

My kid and I are watching ENT together and Reed and Mayweather are walking around on an icy asteroid, or maybe a comet, like its nothin. Wouldn't they have next to no gravity on such a thing? Like Philae bouncing off its target recently?

Philae certainly wasn't sliding on any ice.

 

[Christopher]

My kid and I are watching ENT together and Reed and Mayweather are walking around on an icy asteroid, or maybe a comet, like its nothin. Wouldn't they have next to no gravity on such a thing? Like Philae bouncing off its target recently?

Yeah, but it's hard to fake that on a soundstage. It used to be that movies and shows set on the moon or in space or something would use wirework to simulate low or zero gravity, but for some reason, they rarely bother anymore and either ignore the gravity issue altogether or come up with some lame excuse. Like Doctor Who: "Kill the Moon" making the Moon's anomalously high gravity into a plot point, which was clever in principle although the actual explanation was inane. And there was that recent Syfy failed-pilot miniseries High Moon, which claimed that everyone wore special weighted outfits in order to make themselves heavier -- which wouldn't actually work, because the rate at which objects fall is independent of their weight, so if you made something six times heavier on the Moon, it still wouldn't fall any faster.

You'd think that these days, with digital wire removal being routine, it's be easier to do low-gravity stunts/effects convincingly than it was in the '60s or '70s. Yet for whatever reason, TV producers today are less willing to make the effort. Maybe it's because back then, images of astronauts walking on the Moon were more recent and familiar, so it was what audiences expected to see. These days, it's just not as much in the public consciousness.

 

[Albertese]

^^^Gravity boots?

--Alex

 

[Metryq]

SPACE: 1999 always used the "overcranked" effect to create Moon gravity, but only outside the base. It was established right from the pilot that some kind of gravity control was in use.

Creating low gravity effects, or even freefall for short scenes shouldn't be too much trouble for today's production crews. Also, since a dozen episodes (in the US, half-a-dozen in the UK) constitutes a full season these days, there shouldn't be any excuse not to do it right.

 

[MGagen]

Christopher:

You're arguing with a straw man. I am not saying an orbit is impossible. I'm saying it is impractical, and a lot more bother to achieve than merely keeping relative station with an occasional thruster blast. Counteracting negligible attraction in a microgravity situation is a lot easier than trying to establish a stable microgravity orbit.

And you don't need to teach your grandmother to suck eggs. I've been an amateur astronomy buff since the '70s. I know all about binary asteroids. Of course they orbit each other without the benefit of thrust to establish it. But what you left unstated is the fact is that only the ones that didn't happen to collide end up that way. It's a very tricky thing to establish. Most of them either collide, or go on their way into space with a slight course change.

My objections stand. YMMV. I am done discussing it.

M.

 

[Christopher]

Christopher:

You're arguing with a straw man. I am not saying an orbit is impossible. I'm saying it is impractical, and a lot more bother to achieve than merely keeping relative station with an occasional thruster blast. Counteracting negligible attraction in a microgravity situation is a lot easier than trying to establish a stable microgravity orbit.

I don't see why you think that. Yes, obviously it would require precise calculations to achieve the correct orbital trajectory, but the same goes for entering orbit of a planet. Or setting a course from a planet in one star system to a planet in another. The degree of precision necessary for starship navigation and maneuvering would be extremely high as a matter of course. Heck, it took incredibly complex calculations to figure out how to send the Dawn probe to orbit two different asteroids, but now it's less than ten days from entering Ceres orbit. If we can do that with an ion-propelled probe under remote control by modern computers, why would it be prohibitive for a 23rd-century starship with inertial dampers and duotronic computers? It seems to me like a trivial problem in vector calculations compared to the proportional precision required to aim at station K-7 from dozens of light years away and end up close enough to rendezvous with it at all.

 

[Albertese]

Yeah, in space, orbits are THE way to hold position. The navigational systems on a starship should be able to calculate such orbits in a very casual and trivial fashion. Even if dozens of objects are also orbiting said position. This would be advantageous in case you need to power down for repairs, or in case something goes off-line due to an accident. Rather have your ship in a natural parking position than to waste fuel needlessly holding an unnatural attitude.

Also, with an orbital period of a month or so, you are moving so slowly that you may as well be stationary.

A powered orbit would seem silly.

On the other hand, seeing how the Enterprise orbits planets, it may be that powered orbits are standard procedure most of the time. So, maybe... Star Trek has done sillier sciency things before.

--Alex

 

[Metryq]

Triboelectric parking orbit
They just rub the station with a tribble:

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHrBhgwq__Q[/yt]​

 

[GNDN18]

Triboelectric parking orbit
They just rub the station with a tribble….

"Mister Chekov, this flight is supposed to provide both experience and knowledge."

Well done!

 

[Marsden]

I don't know if this adds to the conversation, but in non-canon resources, (I know that means ignore the rest of the post for a lot of people) Federation space stations have a gravitational device (positional stabilizer) that holds them stationary, they are not just floating loose or in orbit of a star, although there are some that orbit a planet.

So a deep space base like K-7 or even those asteroids in Balance of Terror are fixed to their positions in the galaxy, not just going in all directions. That was a complaint I've seen/read many times about that episode BTW, that a line of asteroids would never stay put because of gravitaional forces and the rotation of the galaxy.

So, if this is accepted, then the gravity well of the station is not equal or near equal of the ship's gravity but almost like a small planet, making orbits not something they could do but necessary.

This is also one of the reasons a ship can't just come and grab a base and take it away with a tractor beam.
Capturing a base really wouldn't be so difficult to capture if you could just drag it to your own territory.

Additionally, in what I was reading, those bases have much larger phasers, because of the stable firing platform because of the positional stabilizers. I realize that was never shown, K-7 may not have been armed at all for what we saw but it's seems silly to think it would be completely defenseless out there.

 

[Christopher]

^The problem is, there's no way to define "stationary" in space except in relation to some other object like a planet or a star. Everything in space is moving. The idea of making things "stand still" in space is not only impossible to define objectively, but functionally useless given that everything else around them is moving in some sort of orbital path. There's simply no such thing as a "fixed position in the galaxy," since the galaxy is a fluid thing, with every piece of it in constant motion. Even if there were such a thing as a fixed point in space, it would be useless to "anchor" a space station there, since the rotation of the galaxy's stars would just leave it behind.

Naturally, the star that Romulus orbits is itself orbiting the center of the galaxy, as is Sol and essentially every other star in the galaxy. If you want the monitoring asteroids (which would, of course, have to be distributed across a planar or curved surface rather than a "line," since space is 3-dimensional) to maintain a steady relation to Romulus, you just put the asteroids in a galactic orbit whose velocity, eccentricity, and inclination approximate those of Romulus's sun. And of course you'd have to adjust their positions over time as Romulus's relationship with the stars of the Federation changed -- although it would take centuries for the relative star positions to change by any significant degree on a cosmic scale.

 

[MGagen]

Having established the lack of any need for the Enterprise to orbit K-7, let's look at what the script has to say about it. Here are some interesting excerpts from the final shooting script as published in Gerrold's Tribbles book:

=======

CUT TO:
12 TRANSITION SHOT—SPACE STATION
Enterprise hanging motionless nearby.

=======

26 INT. ENTERPRISE—BRIDGE
as Kirk enters the bridge, followed by Spock.

KIRK
(to Chekov)
What’s that Klingon ship doing now?

CHEKOV
Nothing, Captain. He’s just sitting there…a hundred kilometers off K-7.

UHURA
I have Commander Lurry.

KIRK
Put him on visual, Lieutenant.

Kirk steps to his chair.

KIRK
Commander Lurry, there is a Klingon war ship hanging one hundred kilometers off your station…

=======

27A EXT. SPACE—SHOT OF SPACE STATION

KIRK
Captain’s log, Star date 4524.2. A Klingon warship is hovering only a hundred kilometers off deep space station K-7, while its captain waits in the station commander’s office. Their intentions are unknown.

=======

DISSOLVE TO:
29 ENTERPRISE—HANGING MOTIONLESS IN SPACE

=======

I'm not seeing a lot of "orbiting" here.

It appears that the set decorators read the script a lot more carefully than either the folks at Anderson's facility or the CBS Remasterers.

Of course, the Anderson folks may have been implying a moving camera and just didn't have an element of drifting stars ready in time to composite...

Too bad CBS Digital didn't stick to the script.

 

[Christopher]

^Again, nothing is ever "motionless" in space, except relative to something else. It's a meaningless concept. The closest thing to "sitting there" would be maintaining a constant trajectory that isn't under thrust. And orbit is, as I've been saying, a good way to do that. I'm not talking about the ignorance of Earth-based TV writers, I'm talking about how things would realistically occur for actual ships and stations in space.

Anyway, as you seem to keep forgetting, we're talking about an orbital period of just over one month, and an orbital velocity of less than five millimeters per second. At that speed, it would take about fourteen hours for a Klingon D7 cruiser to travel its own length. That's comfortably close to "just sitting there." I don't know why you insist on assuming there's a huge difference between orbiting and station-keeping, when it's really a very tiny, almost subliminal difference that would take days to become noticeable.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Of course, the Anderson folks may have been implying a moving camera and just didn't have an element of drifting stars ready in time to composite...

Since TOS Trek never did anything like that in any other episode, I find that extremely doubtful. I would have to see evidence that such a shot was specifically ordered to believe it had ever been contemplated.

Also, as I mentioned upthread, Gerrold included a footnote indicating that the station was shown as rotating, which you have elided from your excerpt for scene 12 (footnote 4, page 177, 1st paperback edition). In other words, Gerrold acknowledged that the VFX did not match what was scripted, and he did not indicate that there were any additional VFX that were not ready in time. On the contrary, he seemed to be of the opinion that a mistake was made there.