Will Trek XI repel old fans?

[Captain Robert April]

The entire concept of building a ship like the Enterprise on the ground and trying to hoist it into orbit is idiotic from the get-go. They could just as well build the Titanic in downtown Denver and drag it to the Gulf of Mexico, but just what in the hell would be the advantage of doing it like that?

And, as has been before, if this is the approach they're taking on something this basic, what the hell else have they screwed up?

The answer to that question is being answered with every new picture that's being released. After being told the sets would be consistent with the original designs, we're presented with a bridge that looks as much like the original set as a Volkswagen looks like a pimped out Hummer limousine, i.e., it doesn't even look like it's from the same universe, let alone the same time period. It's pretty sad when a KFC commercial does a better job of replicating the bridge than an actual Star Trek movie with about a hundred times the budget.

Will ST XI repel old fans? It's already repelled this one.

 

[Therin of Andor]

I'm an old fan, and I can't wait. Largely because of the characters. I lost interest in the franchise over the years, but I can't wait to see my old friends brought back, and how they will be reinterpreted.

I'm an old fan (since TAS and TMP, and then had to search out the TOS I'd missed), and I've never lost interest, although I took a while to warm to DS9, and I got angry with many aspects of ST V and VOY. And I cannot wait either!

 

[JuanBolio]

The entire concept of building a ship like the Enterprise on the ground and trying to hoist it into orbit is idiotic from the get-go.

Not when you have anti-grav, really. And there IS precedent for starship components being built on the ground. Its safer. Its easier. The less construction done in a hazardous zero-G, zero-atmosphere, high-radiation environment the better. At least, that's one way it could be looked at. I'm not saying building it in orbit is dumb... but building at least the components on the ground isn't either. It isn't the Titanic, and it isn't the same circumstances. The Titanic wasn't built in the water, either.

Who told you the sets would be consistent with the original designs? Were those the words they used? Where? When? I don't remember being told that at all.

Let me ask you this - exactly what elements of the shoestring budget original design would you have wanted them to carry over? The exterior of the Enterprise I can understand - its marvelous as is (though a few details here and there CAN improve the thing, as Vektor has proved). But the interior? Come on. I can suspend disbelief for a 60's TV show, but not for 2009 feature film. A bridge as close to that of the original as you seem to be calling for would be laughed at by all but the most hardcore purists.

 

[JacksonArcher]

The entire concept of building a ship like the Enterprise on the ground and trying to hoist it into orbit is idiotic from the get-go.

Maybe. It'd make for a great comedy sketch, though.

 

[Cheapjack]

I read Stephen Whitfield's 'The Making of Star Trek', and it said that the Enterprise components were built in San Francisco Nay dockyards and the thing was assembled in Space.

Don't they have covered spacedocks in ST? Wasn't there one in ST3?

I think they would do a lot of it in space. It's a second environment by the 23rd century.

 

[JuanBolio]

It's a second environment by the 23rd century.

Maybe in terms of travel, sure, but your average Joe Schmo construction worker isn't likely to have spacewalking and zero-G assembly on his resume. That kind of thing would probably require specialists.

One thing that occurred to me is that we've never really seen a true "drydock" in Trek. In modern terms its a repair dock in which the ship is taken out of the water for ease of repair/overhaul. Shouldn't a drydock in Trek be a facility in which a ship is taken at of the vaccum of space and put in a pressurized environment?

 

[3D Master]

Dude, spacewalking and zero-G construction isn't justa by-the-way skill you happen to pick up. Its VERY HARD, and VERY dangerous, and many time as exhausting as working on the ground with air around you. Ask any astronaut who's done repair mission spacewalks and he'll tell you the same thing.

If you want a deep labor pool of master builders, laborers and engineers to build your ship, its a good idea to build it in such a way as not to drastically limit the people available to do the job by requiring all to possess a very dangerous and difficult skill that makes every job harder, in addition to their chosen professions.

:sighs: Are you listening?

Let me tell you again in a nice summation.

a. It's only tough now because we're limited in our technology and space suits, and much better lighter ones are already on the way.

b. It's not dangerous in comparison to other things. I don't know why you keep your mind shut on this. A car will kill you faster, more often and is more likely to do so, then floating in space. Yet we're all driving them, and even doing stunts with them. Going diving is far more dangerous than floating around in space, not only will water kill you equally quick, it's filled with jagged edges, predator species, and dangerous defensive animals, yet we go diving for fun. And there are many other things on this planet that are far, far, far more dangerous than floating in a space suit. It really only seems dangerous because you're afraid of the alien concept of nothing out there beyond your suit.

c. Have you ever WATCHED Star Trek? Ever heard of a little concept called orbital sky diving? People FOR FUN jump out of a space ship in a space suit at the very edge of a planet's gravity well and plummeth down the atmosphere! FOR FUN! Massive amounts of people will be living in space, on space ships, on space stations. They'll go to uinhabited planets with lower gravity and thus far more magnificent snow, and go ski in space suits. Hell, there's a moon in our solar system with exactly that characteristic, and there are already skiing space-enthusiasts imagining to go do it today. No doubt, by then, kids will jump out of an airlock of a space station with a space suit on, to go play! You limit yourself in the number of master builders and their skills, not the people who can space walk. Just about everyone and their grandmothers will be able to do it. And when they go train to be engineers and the rare person that can't yet, it'll autamotically be part of their education.

Then why are you trying to make it look like they're built in big chunks and moved to space?

Because that's how it looks to me, and makes the most sense TO ME.

Maybe you should go watch it again. The warp nacelles are exactly where they should be, if the ship was in tact. Are you going to tell me now, when they construct this in part, they'll go, "Ah, hell, let's make it more difficult on us, and build the parts in the exact same places as if we're building it intact!?" It makes no sense.

Also, it making sense to YOU, is the problem. When you watch that trailer you shouldn't be thinking about trying to morph the visuals to match your sense, you should simply look what's there. Because just because it makes more sense, is obviously not why the ones who made the trailer had the Enterprise being built upon the Earth.

You want to be closed-minded, wildly optimistic about the ease of working in space, and utterly shut out any possible advantages of working on the ground? Fine. You're the one who's limited, not me. I see either one as a possibility, with each having distinct advantages.

I'm not closed-minded, you are, Abrams and co. are if the trailer is the way the movie is made and it isn't just metaphor. You're too closed-minded to look beyond present-day realities distorted by your fear of the unknown to consider any other option than that space walking is horribly dangerous now, and unimaginably difficult now, and will remain to be so for the next 300 years without there apparently being any technologically breakthroughs that make it easier. (Never mind that lighter and easier suits are already being designed, never mind that that would make the whole concept of Star Trek useless.) You then also close your mind to what we already know of Star Trek, as well as all the things we're imagining and working toward doing today.

Me, I take all those things into my mind and allow it to bring forth a (still modifiable) picture, while you remain fixed on just "it's dangerous, it's difficult, can't think of it as anything else." That makes ME open-minded, and you and the idiots in Abrams production who has starships being built planet-side closed-minded.

The entire concept of building a ship like the Enterprise on the ground and trying to hoist it into orbit is idiotic from the get-go.

Not when you have anti-grav, really. And there IS precedent for starship components being built on the ground. Its safer. Its easier.

:sighs: It's not safer, and it's NOT easier.

The less construction done in a hazardous zero-G, zero-atmosphere,

Which makes it LESS hazardous when you're dealing with massive objects like a parts of a starship.

high-radiation environment the better.

Radiation in space is barely a problem today, why would it be insurmountable and dangerous 300 years hence? It makes no sense.

At least, that's one way it could be looked at. I'm not saying building it in orbit is dumb... but building at least the components on the ground isn't either. It isn't the Titanic, and it isn't the same circumstances. The Titanic wasn't built in the water, either.

When by components you mean a screw or a computer console, you MAY BE right, and I highly stress MAY BE for some parts. (This of course, goes out the window the moment you have replicators and you can just have a replicator on a small tether or thrust assembly right next to you.) The big compartments like a saucer, a nacelle: nope. However, a tiny case can be made for that.

But again, the trailer didn't show us parts being built, hauled up, and assembled there, it showed the entire ship being constructed on the ground.

It's a second environment by the 23rd century.

Maybe in terms of travel, sure, but your average Joe Schmo construction worker isn't likely to have spacewalking and zero-G assembly on his resume. That kind of thing would probably require specialists.

The "average Joe Schmo construction worker" is a highly trained engineer, who if he goes to work on starships will have space work in his training. More likely than not, the guy was playing in space suits out in vaccuum when he was a kid. His parents might very well have taken him on a ski vacation to one of the planets in the solar system.

One thing that occurred to me is that we've never really seen a true "drydock" in Trek. In modern terms its a repair dock in which the ship is taken out of the water for ease of repair/overhaul. Shouldn't a drydock in Trek be a facility in which a ship is taken at of the vaccum of space and put in a pressurized environment?

No, such thing does not exist, there's not point. Which exactly should show you that there's no point in building a ship on the ground. Ships are built in space, repaired in space, and put out to pasture in space.

 

[JuanBolio]

1) The nacelles may not be in their exact position - they seem closer to the saucer, unless they're much thicker than they were originally.

2) People involved with the film have suggested that final assembly does take place in space, not on the ground. I'm not making anything up. I'm conceding that doing so has certain advantages.

3) How do you explain the shots from TNG of large sections of a Galaxy-class starship laid out, seemingly under construction, on a planetary surface?

4) No matter how advanced space suits and rescue technology get, working in space is always going to be more dangerous than on the ground, in the air. Objects still have MASS and can still crush and kill. There is no sound. Human beings are not adapted to that environment. Oxygen and radiation are going to pose limitations on time spent working. Even if asteroids ARE mined for raw materials, refineries and component assembly facilities are likely to still be planetside. Take your pick. It is NOT a mental, fear-based irrational reaction. Walking and working in space is always going to be dangerous as hell, and if you truly think its ever going to be as easy as or easier than working on the ground, barring some leap in human evolution toward adapting to space, then you need to have some sense drilled into you by an astronaut who knows better.

Now if we were talking about assembling ships in a true space drydock with pressure and shielding, that might be a different story. As it stands, you haven't presented one good reason why the ship's modular components can't be built on the ground and anti-grav'd into orbit for final assembly and calibration.

 

[Cheapjack]

It's a second environment by the 23rd century.

Maybe in terms of travel, sure, but your average Joe Schmo construction worker isn't likely to have spacewalking and zero-G assembly on his resume. That kind of thing would probably require specialists.

One thing that occurred to me is that we've never really seen a true "drydock" in Trek. In modern terms its a repair dock in which the ship is taken out of the water for ease of repair/overhaul. Shouldn't a drydock in Trek be a facility in which a ship is taken at of the vaccum of space and put in a pressurized environment?

I think the spacedock in ST3 was like that. In any case, they have forcefields that can be penetrated by big objects, like the shuttle hangar bay one and the one in Best of Both Worlds.

I don't think that there is such a thing as an 'average, joe schmoe', in the 23rd Century! At least, not compared to us!

 

[JuanBolio]

I think the spacedock in ST3 was like that.

It might've been, but other than being enclosed there was nothing really to suggest that. No open areas, cars, or airlocks. In any case it was referred to as a "spacedock", which would be the opposite of a drydock. The "drydocks" we have seen are always open to space with people floating around in suits... no evidence of forcefields or atmospheres.

 

[Cheapjack]

I think that space will be less fearsome by the 23rd Century.

You can break your neck stepping of the pavement in the 20th, or be run over, but that doesn't mean people don't go outdoors. Someone from the 13th century would be terrified by our world.

 

[3D Master]

1) The nacelles may not be in their exact position - they seem closer to the saucer, unless they're much thicker than they were originally.

They ARE much thicker than they were originally. Indeed, there is a bulge at the end, where the original had none. In such, it looks quite a bit like Gabe Koerner's reimagined Enterprise:

2) People involved with the film have suggested that final assembly does take place in space, not on the ground. I'm not making anything up. I'm conceding that doing so has certain advantages.

No doubt after the lot of us pointed out how ridiculous it is, and they went do at least SOME research, and went: ooh.

3) How do you explain the shots from TNG of large sections of a Galaxy-class starship laid out, seemingly under construction, on a planetary surface?

Shots from TNG? They were actually on screen, and not some promotional shot? Because I can't remember a single one in TNG at all. In fact, I'm pretty certain that the holo-program of Brahms had the Galaxy's warp nacelles through a window in space.

4) No matter how advanced space suits and rescue technology get, working in space is always going to be more dangerous than on the ground, in the air.

Again, NO! There are environments on the Earth so hostile, it'll kill a person in protective clothing faster than if you were put naked in space. Space isn't very hostile, the only real problem is the lack of air. You don't die instantly in space. That's a ridiculous, distorted by fear of the unknown concept of space. You are far more likely to be run over by a car than die in space while wearing a space suit. Yet you happily cross streets, and drive in those cars. But cars, and streets aren't unknown to you, so you don't worry (indeed we probably worry far too little) about their dangers. While space is largely unknown, and as a result most of us have these ridiculous distorted views about space.

You could spend minutes in space NAKED and still not be dead, and still be saveable, especially with 23rd century technology and transporters. It would be indeed be one of the most horrifying, painful and slow torturous deaths you can imagine, but it isn't a fast one, and you can easily be rescued from it. A little puncture in a space suit, will be no problem at all.

Objects still have MASS and can still crush and kill.

But there's no gravity, friend! That means they don't MOVE! They just hang there if something happens. Only if something would actually push them would they start to move, and since the ship is in construction, this can't be any of the full engines, it won't be going very fast, especially not compared to the 9.81 m/s^2 that gravity will accelerate any object no matter how big or small, barring any air friction. This means it's acceleration will only be very small, it's speed very low, plenty of time for you to move. If it bumps into you, it'll just move you, it won't crush you, because there's nothing to crush you against, unless you happen to be floating right in front of a pylon of the space dock. And you would have minutes, and minutes, and minutes to get out of the way.

Why can't you see this?

There is no sound.

There's plenty of sound, they're called communicators. They allow people to warn you, and since anything moving will be only very slowly there's no problem.

Human beings are not adapted to that environment. Oxygen and radiation are going to pose limitations on time spent working.

That's why we have technology to solve our problems for us. Suits that reflect or absorb harmful rediation, and there'd be enough oxygen to last you hours, long enough to get your union-negotiated break time, you would also have on the planet.

Even if asteroids ARE mined for raw materials, refineries and component assembly facilities are likely to still be planetside.

Very small, very tiny components, MAYBE. And that's a big MAYBE. Because you're going to building in space, and you can have artificial gravity and air in a station, you might as well put the refineries and assembly facilities in one place. And the moment you have replicators, they most certainly won't be on the Earth anymore.

Take your pick. It is NOT a mental, fear-based irrational reaction. Walking and working in space is always going to be dangerous as hell, and if you truly think its ever going to be as easy as or easier than working on the ground, barring some leap in human evolution toward adapting to space, then you need to have some sense drilled into you by an astronaut who knows better.

:sighs: It IS a fear-based irrational reaction, because you're blowing it out of proportion. It's dangerous, but you're more likely to be run over by a car while crossing a street than get hurt while floating in space in a space suit (and that's TODAY's space suit). And if any astronaut thinks the technology will never get better than we're using practically right now, he's an idiot ignorant moron both blind and deaf. Becaus any astronaut especially a carreer one, would have to be aware of the much better space suits that are being designed right now, partially in preparation for missions to mars.

Now if we were talking about assembling ships in a true space drydock with pressure and shielding, that might be a different story.

You wouldn't want that! Pressure maybe, but not gravity. Gravity is detrimental to anything big you're building. Gravity is what makes building big things so dangerous. So if you can do it without gravity, you can do it much safer and easier.

As it stands, you haven't presented one good reason why the ship's modular components can't be built on the ground and anti-grav'd into orbit for final assembly and calibration.

I never said it can't be. You can do a lot of things if you want to. Doesn't mean it's smart, and that you're not uselessly endangering lives. And thus that's very unrealistic when it's shown to be done that way.

 

[RAMA]

The entire concept of building a ship like the Enterprise on the ground and trying to hoist it into orbit is idiotic from the get-go. They could just as well build the Titanic in downtown Denver and drag it to the Gulf of Mexico, but just what in the hell would be the advantage of doing it like that?

And, as has been before, if this is the approach they're taking on something this basic, what the hell else have they screwed up?

The answer to that question is being answered with every new picture that's being released. After being told the sets would be consistent with the original designs, we're presented with a bridge that looks as much like the original set as a Volkswagen looks like a pimped out Hummer limousine, i.e., it doesn't even look like it's from the same universe, let alone the same time period. It's pretty sad when a KFC commercial does a better job of replicating the bridge than an actual Star Trek movie with about a hundred times the budget.

Will ST XI repel old fans? It's already repelled this one.

Its called modular construction and its economical and time saving for large structures. Bringing it into orbit and assembling it makes a lot of sense. As mentiond on other threads, the E-D was constructed this way.

RAMA

 

[unimatrix7]

Will ST XI repel old fans? It's already repelled this one.

Repelled? I don't think you're repelled, Cap'n. If you were, you wouldn't spend so much time in here dribbling nonsense.

 

[JuanBolio]

They ARE much thicker than they were originally. Indeed, there is a bulge at the end, where the original had none. In such, it looks quite a bit like Gabe Koerner's reimagined Enterprise

I've seen it, but even his aren't that thick. I've seen renderings of the ship with nacelles as thick as the ones portrayed in the teaser, and they look awful. I really doubt the design team would've settled on them. I'm guessing they zoomed in on them so we'd get a good look at the spinning ramscoop blades for the trailer. You can use the excuse that the nacelles were detached at the time and forward of their final positions, if you like. I do. If the final version of the ship proves me wrong, I'll eat my words, but til then that's my story.

Shots from TNG? They were actually on screen, and not some promotional shot?

There's a thread in this very forum titled "The E-D was built on the ground..." or something along those lines. Its an image from a monitor on the E-D showing a shipyard seen from orbit. Better yet, fuck it - I'll post it myself:

I'm surprised you haven't seen it, passionate about the subject as you appear to be.

Again, NO! There are environments on the Earth so hostile, it'll kill a person in protective clothing faster than if you were put naked in space.

An active lava tube, maybe. A shipyard ain't one of 'em.

Space isn't very hostile, the only real problem is the lack of air. You don't die instantly in space.

Instantly? No. But pretty damn fast. You'll be in great pain within seconds. Unconscious within 20 or so. Dead in under a minute from nitrogen bubbles forming all through your body. Not to mention the fact that if you're in sunlight you're going to get horribly burned.

You are far more likely to be run over by a car than die in space while wearing a space suit.

Only statistically, since there are many drivers and very few spacewalkers.

You could spend minutes in space NAKED and still not be dead

Again unlikely, especially if you're in the sun. Being in shadow isn't much fun either.

But there's no gravity, friend! That means they don't MOVE!

There doesn't need to be any gravity, and the objects don't have to be moving fast, but they MIGHT BE if something goes wrong, which happens often enough. Have you considered how hard something with the mass of a warp nacelle or a hull section would hit someone at only a few miles per hour? Mass x acceleration. Hard enough to break bones, break suits, and send you spinning off into any dangerous direction you care to name. Get out of the way, can you? What if you run out of maneuvering propellant? Safety line, say you? Hundreds of workers with hundreds of lines, alone with moving workpods and sections of ship? That'll get fouled pretty fast. Trasporters? They need several seconds or more to react once they've ben alerted to the problem. By then you could be blinded, crushed, or hammered quite dead.

Why can't you see this?

I dunno. Cloaking device?

There's plenty of sound, they're called communicators. They allow people to warn you, and since anything moving will be only very slowly there's no problem.

IF anyone else notices you're in peril and isn't concentrating on their own job. Without sound one of your primary means to detect incoming danger is gone. You're going by eyesight and radio alone.

Very small, very tiny components, MAYBE. And that's a big MAYBE

No, very BIG components as well. Much of human industry and infrastructure is already ground-based, it'd be economic and logistical HELL to move all that into orbit. Some of it, sure, but not all.

You wouldn't want that! Pressure maybe, but not gravity. Gravity is detrimental to anything big you're building. Gravity is what makes building big things so dangerous. So if you can do it without gravity, you can do it much safer and easier.

I didn't mention gravity, though there is an advantage in humans having the ability to use their natural means of locomotion - running or walking - to get the hell out of the way if they need to.

There are problems with building on the ground in a gravity field, yes. But no more and possibly less so than with building everything from scratch in a vacuum. My idea takes the middle road, actually - half and half.

 

[Pavonis]

IIRC, somewhere Rick Sternbach once claimed that that image was of a training facility, not necessarily a ship under construction.

[nerd mode] There's no scale bar on that image, so there's nothing to suggest that it's a full-scale Galaxy under construction; it could be 1/2 or hell, even 1/10, scale for all we know.[/nerd mode]

 

[3D Master]

They ARE much thicker than they were originally. Indeed, there is a bulge at the end, where the original had none. In such, it looks quite a bit like Gabe Koerner's reimagined Enterprise

I've seen it, but even his aren't that thick. I've seen renderings of the ship with nacelles as thick as the ones portrayed in the teaser, and they look awful. I really doubt the design team would've settled on them. I'm guessing they zoomed in on them so we'd get a good look at the spinning ramscoop blades for the trailer. You can use the excuse that the nacelles were detached at the time and forward of their final positions, if you like. I do. If the final version of the ship proves me wrong, I'll eat my words, but til then that's my story.

So, it's safer on the ground, but we're going to make it extra perilous by moving the nacelles closer to the saucer? That makes no bloody sense.

Shots from TNG? They were actually on screen, and not some promotional shot?

There's a thread in this very forum titled "The E-D was built on the ground..." or something along those lines. Its an image from a monitor on the E-D showing a shipyard seen from orbit. Better yet, fuck it - I'll post it myself:

I'm surprised you haven't seen it, passionate about the subject as you appear to be.

Again, that's nice. I saw the picture, but that doesn't mean it means anything if it wasn't on screen on tv. Also, that picture doesn't make any sense if it's a Galaxy-class under construction. If you build modularly, you're not going to build the parts in the same construction hall. You'll have a factory specialized for nacelles, a factory specialized in saucers, and a factory specialized in ever piece. And you then only bring them together later.

That, is about the most inefficient way of "modularly" building things as you can get. Hell, it's practically NOT modularly building things.

An active lava tube, maybe. A shipyard ain't one of 'em.

Which of course, doesn't matter.

Instantly? No. But pretty damn fast. You'll be in great pain within seconds. Unconscious within 20 or so. Dead in under a minute from nitrogen bubbles forming all through your body. Not to mention the fact that if you're in sunlight you're going to get horribly burned.

Or in other words: seas, and seas, and seas, and seas of time to save someone. ESPECIALLY if you have transporters like they do in the 23rd century. And that's when they're NAKED. A small rupture in a space suit would be no problem at all.

Only statistically, since there are many drivers and very few spacewalkers.

Nope. It doesn't matter how many space walkers you've got, matters nothing, you're still more likely to die from car accident than something fatal happening to you in space in a space suit.

Again unlikely, especially if you're in the sun. Being in shadow isn't much fun either.

Not unlikely, cold hard fact.

There doesn't need to be any gravity, and the objects don't have to be moving fast, but they MIGHT BE if something goes wrong, which happens often enough. Have you considered how hard something with the mass of a warp nacelle or a hull section would hit someone at only a few miles per hour? Mass x acceleration. Hard enough to break bones, break suits, and send you spinning off into any dangerous direction you care to name. Get out of the way, can you? What if you run out of maneuvering propellant? Safety line, say you? Hundreds of workers with hundreds of lines, alone with moving workpods and sections of ship? That'll get fouled pretty fast. Trasporters? They need several seconds or more to react once they've ben alerted to the problem. By then you could be blinded, crushed, or hammered quite dead.

The only way things get to move that fast relative to you, is if main engines came online. And let me tell ya, on the ground, a whole lot worse. In space, whatever the engine is attached to will just get going. On the ground it'll crash and go up with a boom that makes the Tzar bomb look like a firecracker instead.

Indeed, for that alone you'd make sure you never build the damn things on the ground.

IF anyone else notices you're in peril and isn't concentrating on their own job. Without sound one of your primary means to detect incoming danger is gone. You're going by eyesight and radio alone.

Which doesn't matter. The size of the things that will get moving and might hit you, you'll notice, even without sound.

Very small, very tiny components, MAYBE. And that's a big MAYBE

No, very BIG components as well. Much of human industry and infrastructure is already ground-based, it'd be economic and logistical HELL to move all that into orbit. Some of it, sure, but not all.

Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Seriously, how difficult is the concept of the 23rd century to you, hmm? There are starbases and spacestations everywhere. Huge parts of human industry and infrastructure will be SPACE based.

In fact, you're constantly talking about ant-grav that allows for what you want to do, that should tell you, you're now contradicting yourself. If there was no anti-grav putting industry and infrastructure into space would be an even greater hell, and yet, the plans to do exact that now are there, and we'll probably start soon. So why would you not do it with when you have anti-grave. In other words; to get to a time of anti-grav you must ALREADY have moved your industry and infrastructure to orbit, because the fuel cost without anti-grav is far too great to keep things on the ground.

So you should now know your argument is ridiculous, it's ridiculous for our time, and even more so for the Star Trek's time.

You wouldn't want that! Pressure maybe, but not gravity. Gravity is detrimental to anything big you're building. Gravity is what makes building big things so dangerous. So if you can do it without gravity, you can do it much safer and easier.

I didn't mention gravity, though there is an advantage in humans having the ability to use their natural means of locomotion - running or walking - to get the hell out of the way if they need to.

They only need to get the hell out of the way, if there's gravity. Without gravity there'll be nothing that ever accelerates fast enough to require the hell, normal getting out of the way will be more than adequate to the job.

There are problems with building on the ground in a gravity field, yes. But no more and possibly less so than with building everything from scratch in a vacuum. My idea takes the middle road, actually - half and half.

Except that it doesn't; hell, there are components today that are already on the Earth made in a practical vaccuum, space would be easier.

 

[Dyabolikal]

So you should now know your argument is ridiculous, it's ridiculous for our time, and even more so for the Star Trek's time.

Naw, not really. Everything you're saying makes good sense, but the burden of proof is a bit higher than that. That being that there is absolutely, positively no way any of us can predict the best way to build ridiculously large spacecraft 250 years from now.

Thus, it's pretty hard for anyone to argue that they are right, and anyone who says something to the contrary is completely wrong on this issue.

The best we can hope for is a civil discussion of the pros and cons of each method of construction.

 

[Cheapjack]

So you should now know your argument is ridiculous, it's ridiculous for our time, and even more so for the Star Trek's time.

Naw, not really. Everything you're saying makes good sense, but the burden of proof is a bit higher than that. That being that there is absolutely, positively no way any of us can predict the best way to build ridiculously large spacecraft 250 years from now.

Thus, it's pretty hard for anyone to argue that they are right, and anyone who says something to the contrary is completely wrong on this issue.

The best we can hope for is a civil discussion of the pros and cons of each method of construction.

Good science fiction is fiction that is well thought out and extrapolated from what we know today. We can't tell WHAT advances will occur, but we know in what ways the science we know today will apply tomorrow. We can guess what things we will bew able to do in 300 years, judging by the way research is going today. We can guess that we will have fusion in another 100 years, for example , cos we're working on it now. We can create antimatter now, so we can imagine a propulsion drive based on this 300 years hence.

BAD SF is just space adventure with rockets and stars and space suits and guns and 20th Century characters and no thought.

 

[Tyberius]

There simply are no advantages AT ALL for building a ship on the ground, so why would you?

Yes there is. And it is the most important aspect of any enterprise - labor.

Building the component parts on Earth would allow an easier access to labor. Families could live next to the plant and still be on Earth. A comparison of the costs of maintaining a labor force near their home with the costs of maintaining a labor force away from their home gives great favor to maintaining that labor force near their home.

Component parts of the spacecraft will be built on earth for as long as is economically feasible.