The planet Chekov, Terrell and their merry men were searching for in ST2 was not supposed to be lifeless. It was supposed to be a lifeless Class M planet! That is, they expected to find free oxygen down there, just like they did on Khan's hellhole. Now, the combination of free oxygen and lack of life (all the way down to whatever lichen they thought they saw in their sensors) must be one of the rarest things in the universe...
...Save, of course, for all those Class M planets that originally sported life, but later met with some sort of a disaster.
Burrowing into the ear sounds like a good way to start: the critter is protected from the elements, which on its planet are on the harsh side (even before the disaster, as stated at the end of "Space Seed"), and can then take its time munching through the inner structure of its victim.
The ST6 shockwave would make sense in more ways than one if we said "Subspace!". This would e.g. explain why it propagated out in a single plane - apparently so completely and precisely that the Klingon homeworld, supposedly in the same star system, didn't get hurt at all. Ordinary space doesn't have "layers" or "limiters" that would force blast waves into such shapes. Subspace may well have those. Heck, the
Excelsior appeared to move on the same plane, in the same orientation, probably because that's the best way to ride the local subspace. (She may have been on a different "layer", though; no doubt the wavefront spread out at distance, perhaps becoming a wall of parallel wavefrontlets lightyears high even when each wavefrontlet was only a couple of hundred meters high.)
The FTL subspace wave would probably bleed energy into realspace as it went along - and that energy wouldn't travel FTL any more. One of those ripples could have been what hit Sulu's ship.
Sounds good in theory, but that doesn't explain how they could create a whole planet out of a hydrogen emission nebula, even one that's about a million times denser than a real nebula would be. The nebula couldn't possibly be at a habitable distance from the Regula star, and it's absurd that a device programmed merely to reformat an existing planet's surface could spontaneously manufacture an entire star system from space gas.
But nothing in the movie necessitates the Genesis planet being born out of nebula gases. It could be the transformation of the Regula I asteroid that we're seeing instead - after all, that's what the Genesis device was programmed to do, and the Marcuses stated that there was no room for program modifications after that.
And the nebula
was within impulse range of the star, no two ways about that. Doesn't mean it would have stayed there for long, of course. We could be speaking of a timescale of mere centuries, or decades even, for a cloud that either was born in the inner star system and was thinning out, or was moving towards the star to soon be consumed.
DS9 had a clock, and that Quark's Bar closed after a certain hour, or that Quark did his nefarious dealings usually in the middle of the night.
Quark had made good business while the station was hanging on Bajoran orbit, where it had every excuse to follow the Bajoran diurnal rhythm. Why change that which works?
It's not as if the station was really a particularly busy place at any point. Sure, there were rush hours when dialogue would refer to ships arriving and departing. But most of the time, nothing of that sort was shown or told.
A ship like the Enterprise would need at least three shift changes. All the senior staff on the bridge working at the same time is not practical.
And we see exactly this happening. And of course, all the senior staff
would be on the bridge whenever something interesting happened, or was supposed to start happening soon.
There would be no explosions or sound in the vaccum of space.
And no warp drive, and no Klingons, and little or no adventure...
Well, space is not hot or cold.
Sure it is. It's a gas, albeit a thin one, and the temperature of a gas is well defined. In the thinner parts, it's 2.7 K, which certainly qualifies as cold. Close to Earth, where there still is a lot of gas to go by, you can get thousands of K in places.
And if you move a physical thermometer to a spatial location, the Sun heats it to about 400 K if you are at the same distance from the Sun as Earth is; that's what the temperature of space would be there, too, if we were talking about equilibria. But we aren't, so the density of gas complicates the issue.
For example, when the Enterprise is nose to nose with a Romulan warbird, or in a battle when all the ships are more or less on the same level.
Well, they have to pick one orientation, out of the infinite number of possibilities. Why not pick the one that makes sense? It's only polite to face the opponent the same side up.
One race of people who speak one language.
The only time we can be sure we're seeing this is VOY "Basics", where our heroes have lost their Universal Translators, and one "race" or tribe of people indeed speaks one language - and consists of less than a hundred people. Makes perfect sense.
Other cultures may well have a spectrum of languages, but the UT would render the issue completely moot. Picard probably speaks French all the time, Bashir speaks Farsi, Keiko speaks Japanese, and so forth. It just gets translated to the lingua franca of Starfleet, just like it should. Klingons may well have the same sort of diversity, nullified by their UT.
Although it's equally possible that a single lingua franca will eventually kill all other languages on a planet or within a star empire. Certainly this should have happened on Bajor, which has more history than the other known humanlike cultures combined, all of it consisting of sitting together on the homeworld.
Why didn't they just used shotguns to kill the Borg (since it showed it worked)
Because you can't modulate a shotgun. Any weapon is only good for killing two or at most three Borg; after that, you have to modulate. Phasers can do that. Tommy-guns cannot.
I read somewhere about what is theoretically possible scientifically from Star Trek, and in reality a lot of things were thought to be possible. The one thing I remember that would be entirely impossible is the transporter.
It's just guesswork, though. All "predictive" science tends to be. Trek already hinges on the idea that there have been "breakthroughs", discovery of subspace, discovery of phased space, whatever. Those would completely nullify today's laws of physics, certainly including such trivialities as the Pauli rule or the Heisenberg principle.
Trek is full of implausibilities; less so of impossibilities. Today's world is already pretty implausible, but demonstrably not impossible.
Timo Saloniemi
