Adam Savage gets up close & personal with the ST:TOS USS Enterprise Filming Model

Tested - The Original Star Trek USS Enterprise Filming Model!


Enjoy!

 

Cool video, except I did get kind of worried when they were leaning over the model and getting right up close. Imagine if one of them had lost their balance and fallen on it!

I love it that a woman who's actually been to outer space for real still geeks out at getting to see this fantasy spaceship up close.

 

Maybe because Star Trek is way cooler than actually visiting space, right? =)

 

Are they redoing the lighting again? Wow. Impressive.

 

Uhm... Trek was initially based upon real life science. And we are getting closer on developing real life Warp drive too (now that the energy requirements have been overcome).
In that sense, TOS Enterprise wasn't/isn't really a fantasy... its more like one potential extrapolation of how spaceflight could look like if we had access to such technology... but contrasted to real life, even with Warp drive, I think Humanity would have opted to mainly send out automated warp capable probes to nearby star systems and do remote surveys etc. before even considering sending humans there for potential colonization - I'm not sure how 'realistic' the concept of exploring actual space in a starship is because the environment onboard might be too confining/limiting for most humans.

 

Yes, I know. It was discovering Star Trek as a 5-year-old that got me interested in learning about science, space, and science fiction and led to me eventually getting a BS in physics and pursuing a career as a hard science fiction author, including spending most of the past two decades writing Star Trek novels. My comment was made in sympathy for the astronaut's reaction, not lack of understanding. Hence "I love it."

 

As for being confined... well, TOS era was limited to 5 year missions. Given the lack of family onboard during this era, it might also be reasonable to extrapolate that like with modern Navy crews, there would be psychological testing to see how they could handle long, confined periods like that.

 

Did they say that is why they are cracking it open again so soon?

 

We don't actually know that. Just because the narration said the Enterprise was on a 5-year mission, that doesn't mean it was the only mission length that existed, or that it was even a regular thing. A single instance doesn't prove a pattern. It wasn't until Kelvin and Discovery that we got confirmation that 5-year missions were a recurring practice; before then, for all we knew, Kirk's 5-year mission was the only one there had ever been. There was no evidence either way. If anything, Kirk citing "my five years out there" in TMP and Icheb referring to "Kirk's historic five-year mission" in Voyager: "Q2," calling attention to the duration like that, imply that it was the exception, not the rule.

The 5-year mission was a general patrol, survey, and colony-support tour, just roving the frontier and doing whatever came up. It stands to reason that more specialized missions would be shorter, just as long as it took to complete a specific assignment. Also, smaller ship classes would probably have shorter maximum tour durations because they wouldn't have such abundant resources. (The Constitution-class ships were supposed to be the biggest, most powerful ships in the fleet, though the modern shows have ignored that and given us multiple bigger classes in the pre-TOS era.)

And of course, if TOS had been more successful and gone to six or seven seasons, they would've probably done what was normal for shows in that era and just ignored the whole "5-year mission" business, having the show take place in a perpetual present (like Run for Your Life, a 3-season series about a guy with 18 months to live, or M*A*S*H, an 11-season series about a 3-year war).

 

How close?

 

Maybe a thousand years instead of a hundred thousand...

 

I doubt that.
Given we're (finally) starting to use AI and adaptive algorithms in R&D, its more likely this will happen in the next several decades... or at least within a century... unless of course we don't do anything about climate change which could end up causing our own extinction first.

 

According to.....?

 

To what are you referring to?
The fact we're starting to use AI in R&D, that science and technology are evolving exponentially, or the fact that we're in the midst of climate change?

 

Warp drive.
Remember?

 

I think I heard them mention something about lighting in the engineering hull...something to the effect of one of their technicians showing how good it would look lit up properly? It was a little hard to follow.

One thing I think I heard for sure was they were replacing the motors in the end caps. I think.

 

Here's an article on a recent warp field discovery by DARPA scientists


-Will

 

To create the effect on the small scale in the lab? Perhaps. To actually create a viable, crewed faster-than-light starship? Probably not. Sending matter or information faster than light may forever be impossible, and the warp bubble effect might only be practical as an inertialess sublight drive -- which would still be extremely useful and could allow reaching other stars within a human lifetime, but wouldn't allow visiting a new one every week.

 

^^this

More -- Going into space - real space, outer space, deep space - is sorta like going to a single's bar after closing at 3am, complete to the tune of The Smiths' hit song "How Soon is Now". Very few people are there and those who are happen to be scattered around in areas you can't really get to, and chances of being recognized and interested are few and not likely the sort you'd want. Won't even see Buck Rogers disco dancing there...

On the other hand, Star Trek believes that all sorts of exotic aliens will hit on you (metaphorically and/or literally) because they're all over the place (think of the same singles bar but it's now at 10:17PM when its capacity is beyond maximum occupancy and after everyone's drunk'n'druggied out of their skulls and ready to get at least one form of something requiring hospital treatment or at the very least some medicines for some result), but while the statistics and law of probability are one thing, perfect timing of a species that evolved to figure out how to traverse space more quickly than fruit flies in an apple orchard is another.

 

very cool video. Still my favorite of all the Enterprises.

would love to go see this in person someday.