..What's this "tiny solar system" thing, BTW? Is it a reference to that ringed planet that, judging by the reflection of the ship on the ice of the rings, is about 50 kilometers in diameter?
I don't see a pressing reason
not to believe in ringed planets 50 kilometers across, even when those are physically utterly impossible. Indeed, I'm convinced Paris buzzed that one exactly because it was so darn cute, claiming to Janeway that this was out of scientific interest, while the Captain sort of yawned and asked if the planet also had tiny people farming tiny coffee plants, and if not, whether the detour really was worth the hassle.
No individual opening credits event stands out as unlikely to have happened for real in any of the Trek shows. Or a closing credits event, for that matter: even if a few of the TOS stills are from outside the aired episodes, none show an excess of stage timber or mic booms or anything, and while the pans in the Abrams movies are colorful and bizarre, they actually take pains to depict real, plausible and downright mundane events, such as doomsday machines and giant green hands floating in space... In this, they are no different from the opening montage of ENT where similarly humdrum snippets of spaceflight history are given an artistic flair.
Timo Saloniemi
