So, Star Trek?
So, Star Trek?
I'm game!
Space Speed?
It will be a fire. "The Orbiting Inferno"
Have they done an episode where fire is threatening the ship? I remember the cargo bay fire with Laforge and Beverly from TNG, "Disaster", I think. But never a full-on fire emergency that threatens the entire ship.
The SFX crew are readying the ceiling rocks and flame throwers.
I don't see how a fire could possibly threaten the entire ship, when you have metal bulkheads separating levels and you can just turn off oxygen and create a firebreak.
Computers go down.
Flammable plant life spreads throughout the ship and catches fire when it damages the wiring.
Botanist Sulu saves the day!
"Controls unresponsive, Captain!!!!!"
Check please.
I mean, I understand this in theory, but in a sensibly-designed ship, everything should have a manual backup. There should be ways to depressurize a deck without computer controls and the like.
Just an aside, but I really hate how Star Trek treats "life support down" as "we're all going to die in 60 seconds." That's not how spaceships work. You can survive on the oxygen in a sealed room for days. The real danger is C02 buildup, but scrubbers are a cheap technology. The other danger is waste heat being built up without being dumped into space, as it's hard to dissipate heat into vacuum, though this is an hours to days problem, not a minutes problem.
It's a TV show built around drama. Sensibly designed ships tend to squash that.
Same way a starship can be easily overtaken, orbits decay quickly, and manual backups fail. It is sadly the drama first attitude with Star Trek.
Voyager had a manual override fail to trap Tuvok and his trainees. Hell, Lwaxana nearly launched a torpedo by pressing a button!
Yup. Realism went out the door a long time ago. Space travel is rather dull and by the numbers procedure to s certain degree.
I dunno man. The Expanse (which was showrun by Naren Shankar, who cut his teeth as TNG's science consultant) was extremely rigorous when it came to the depictions of space other than a few conceits for the worldbuilding (the Epstein drive, "mag boots," the protomolecule, etc.). It still had plenty of drama.
I mean, they showed:
- An accurate depiction of how fires look in zero gravity.
- The Coriolis effect changing how fluids flowed on a spinning habitat.
- That depressurization is something that needs to be fixed in minutes/hours, not a black hole that causes guts to spew out into space.
- That space isn't actually that cold, and bodies don't freeze.
- That space is soundless.
- That there's no absolute up/down, and that ships can come up on one another at any angle, rather than treating them like fighter planes or battleships.
- That space combat involves two ships so far away they can barely see one another.
- That as acceleration increases, the number of Gs the crew sustains goes up, and that it can get to fatal levels.
To be clear, I'm not saying that Trek would need to go that far. Things like artificial gravity and inertial dampeners are built into the setting now, and I think that's fine. But you don't need to continue with dumb tropes like "space freezes you instantly" which have genuinely lead to people being misinformed about reality.
This ain’t that show.
I haven't gotten past the first episode. Nothing grips.
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