Star Trek: The Art of the Film

[JoeP]

or at least a fruitcake.

 

[Dukhat]

Y'see, Dayton, that is what makes the difference between a professional who takes the work seriously and a hack who doesn't care and doesn't think the audience either cares or is smart enough to notice.

Your smarminess to Dayton Ward aside, your above point as regards this movie is completely baseless.

1. You picked one insignificant thing (which you paraphrased from an art book, while the actual movie itself made no mention of it) in which to bitch about, knowing full well that the 250 million dollars worth of ticket holders couldn't give a rat's ass about it, wanting only to see an enjoyable movie that had nothing like this incoherent technobabble that made previous Trek so stilted.

2. You're arguing that TPTB of this film got the tech wrong about a FICTIONAL PIECE OF ENGINEERING. (Bussard collectors are a theory, since to my knowledge, no one has ever built one to be able to prove its scientific validity. But just the fact that they're actually using Bussard collectors on Trek as opposed to, say, a "Q-38 Explosive Space Modulator" shows that they indeed have a good grasp of scientific engineering principles, whether they know all the intricacies of it or not.)

3. Everyone and his brother knows how you feel about this movie and that you have a pathological aversion to accepting anyone else's opinions other than your own, so it's impossible for you to have a balanced and unbiased opinion about it. Therefore any time you make your baseless and unfounded arguments, no one can possibly take you seriously.


However, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, oh self-appointed know-it-all of all things Star Trek. Do tell us exactly how this FICTIONAL PIECE OF ENGINEERING is supposed to work, and why the producers of Star Trek '09 are morons for thinking otherwise?

 

[Sci]

Who of you the tie-in authors doesn't know Trek down to the tiniest bit of trivia, even the technobabble stuff?

Me.

I don't keep all that crap in my head. I can hold my own so far as TOS and most of TNG is concerned, but not so with all the ridiculous mumbo-jumbo from the latter series. When the need to have such information arises, I consult the proper references to refresh my memory. Unless there's a specific need, I don't spend time obsessing over such things.

Emphasis mine.

Y'see, Dayton, that is what makes the difference between a professional who takes the work seriously and a hack who doesn't care and doesn't think the audience either cares or is smart enough to notice.

Wait. I'm confused.

You saw a section in The Art of the Film that said that at first, someone who worked on the film thought the Bussard collectors did one thing and not another before looking it up. And now you're seeing an author saying, sometimes he doesn't know all the details of technobabble so he looks it up.

And this means that one is a bad artist and the other is a good one?

 

[JoeP]

Emphasis mine.

Y'see, Dayton, that is what makes the difference between a professional who takes the work seriously and a hack who doesn't care and doesn't think the audience either cares or is smart enough to notice.

Expect a fruit basket at Star Fest.

Or the third option is that the audience is smart enough to notice and be smart enough to not care.

Besides, it was never mentioned in the film, so nothing was contradicted by the "hacks". You can unclench now.

 

[Christopher]

However, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, oh self-appointed know-it-all of all things Star Trek. Do tell us exactly how this FICTIONAL PIECE OF ENGINEERING is supposed to work, and why the producers of Star Trek '09 are morons for thinking otherwise?

Far be it from me to disagree that Captain Robert April's complaint is ludicrous, but this is one aspect of it where he's kinda sorta not entirely wrong. A Bussard collector is not a fictional piece of engineering, but a very real concept developed by Dr. Robert Bussard. Rick Sternbach worked with Dr. Bussard on certain projects, and so when he became part of TNG's staff, he decided to incorporate the Bussard collector concept into Trek in order to make it a little more realistic. What the Bussard collectors do, as spelled out in the TNG Tech Manual, is to collect interstellar hydrogen (or more specifically deuterium) as a backup fuel source. Some of this deuterium, so the TM claims, can be put through a "spin-reversal system" (an imaginary technology, but based in real physics) to convert it to antimatter.

So if there was a reference in The Art of the Film to the Bussard collectors drawing in antimatter from space, that's wrong, but close enough to right to show that whoever said it wasn't completely unfamiliar with what Trek had established in the past. As I said, the passage in the book could've been a misstatement or misquote, and we don't even know who said it. And it's still completely irrelevant to the quality of the film.

 

[Dukhat]

So if there was a reference in The Art of the Film to the Bussard collectors drawing in antimatter from space, that's wrong, but close enough to right to show that whoever said it wasn't completely unfamiliar with what Trek had established in the past. As I said, the passage in the book could've been a misstatement or misquote, and we don't even know who said it. And it's still completely irrelevant to the quality of the film.

Well, that is what I kinda stated when I said this:

But just the fact that they're actually using Bussard collectors on Trek as opposed to, say, a "Q-38 Explosive Space Modulator" shows that they indeed have a good grasp of scientific engineering principles, whether they know all the intricacies of it or not.

But I'm not gonna split hairs.

BTW Christopher, love your novels.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Emphasis mine.

Y'see, Dayton, that is what makes the difference between a professional who takes the work seriously and a hack who doesn't care and doesn't think the audience either cares or is smart enough to notice.

Expect a fruit basket at Star Fest.

Or the third option is that the audience is smart enough to notice and be smart enough to not care.

Bingo!