Starship Size Argument™ thread

But Star Trek fans, in fact any sci-fi or space opera fans have always justified dumb or inadequate scenes in their shows. It's part of the fun of being a fan.

 

I think these scaling issues we're arguing about may be the result of a similar war between the production team and ILM.

One of them clearly wants the ship to be bigger, and the other clearly wants it to be smaller.

Kinda ironic eh?

 

I find the endless turboshaft in TFF much more eyerolling, along with Scotty bonking his head.

The Enterprise falling out of orbit when they were out of power TOS (if it was in a stable orbit initially, it wouldn't need power to stay there).

Janeway and Paris turning into lizards.

Just few. Trek has never been high art, or scientifically accurate.

 

That scene was pretty cool when they are running through the corridors.


-Chris

 

I'm just interested if you hold the rest of Star Trek to the same standard of science that you are holding the Abrams films too?

 

There's nothing in any of those scenes which indicates which direction they were falling, whether "towards Earth" or "towards the bow." The direction of the falls changes so much from moment to moment that it's literally impossible to tell what the ship's relative motion is at any given time, especially with its own gravity constantly malfunctioning.

 

Because some Trek fans have become completely anal and forget what the show was about to begin with.

"Roddenberry wanted an open format that allowed for a vast array of stories, all with human conflict at their center. He would tell his writers not to get overwhelmed with the enormity and foreignness of it, and spelled it out in the Star Trek Writer's Guide this way "Joe Friday doesn't stop to explain how his gun works when he pulls it from the holster" The gadgets should not take center stage; the stories instead revolving around the characters" - (These Are the Voyages Season One, page 23)


What a complete difference than TNG where it was all about the tech the tech to tech the tech, and having no conflict between the characters.



-Chris

 

I have to admit you're right. Roddenberry changed the focus of Star Trek by the time of TNG. That's why I still feel that although TNG-onwards is still Star Trek, the shows are all remarkably different in style and focus compared to TOS.

 

No, just ANY thread. You've had ample opportunity to do so.

The thing is, if you actually went through all of Star Trek and started nitpicking all the bad science that's gotten a pass over the years... by the time you were finished, you'd probably stop liking Star Trek.

We forgive the sins of Star Trek Into Darkness because it's a fantastic movie and the scene itself is very fun to watch; it's worthy of a of fridge-logic appeal in the court of believability. We don't extend the same leniency to, say, Star Trek Nemesis, because that movie sucked and its many errors just add fuel to the fire.

Sad to say, it's like a high school lunchroom. When you're popular and well liked, people overlook your flaws. When you're unpopular and annoying, people magnify your flaws as a way of putting you down.

And that, IMO, is what made TOS so iconic in the first place. The technology was cool, the ship was even cooler, but it has to be remembered that even the WRITERS didn't really understand how all of that shit worked and for the most part never bothered to delve into it. It's enough that a phaser does what it has been established to do more or less consistently; HOW it does this is hardly important.

This is something I think Abrams has gotten very very right in the last two films. Character-driven space adventure where the technology is just a means to an end and even the space battles turn out to be just a pretext for the next insane stunt that Kirk has to do in order to save the day. Cool scenes and cool tech are one thing, but none of it matters if the characters in the center of it all are weak or uninteresting, and STXI has some of the strongest characterization we've seen since TOS itself.

 

It has nothing to do with the fucking Abrams films. It has to do with people trying to rationally explain something idiotic.

 

Again: Sci-Fi fans. This is just SOP for sci-fi and fantasy fans. Star Trek isn't any different, and the scene isn't any worse or better than any of the other silly and absurd stuff we've had to accept out of Trek.

The grandfather of it all: Transporters. If you can accept Transporter (and Replicator) tech and the in show explanation for the tech, then you can accept all the other Magic-Science that comes along with the trappings of Trek.

 

You still haven't answered the question: do you hold the rest of Trek to the same standard?

 

No, you're all missing the point. There's a difference between speculative science (e.g. transporters, warp drive, replicators, etc...) and BAD SCIENCE (falling down inside a ship accelerating toward the Earth). The best of the best - Asimov, Niven, and so on - could make the former believable, and stayed well away from the latter.

In fact, when fans called Niven on his big blunder (the instability of the Ringworld), he responded with several other novels to address it.

 

Okay, so basically: Anything absurd in TOS good; anything absurd in the new movies evil. Got it.

I mean after all, Transwarp Lizards, time travel, torpedoes to blow up stars, Alien Human hybrids. Yeppers, that all makes perfect sense.

A scene meant to look cool and convey a sense of danger and death?! Trek ruined forever.

 

We're not saying that it isn't bad science (that is, if it actually happened as you said), we're just coming up with ways to justify the supposed bad science as a fan would usually do. You said there was a problem with justifying what you deem to be bad science, but we said justifying bad science and inconsistencies has and always will be a fan thing.

Star Trek has always had examples of inconsistencies and poorly thought out science. Doesn't mean part of the fun isn't to come up with solutions for them. Sometimes Trek itself addresses inconsistencies (such as the Klingon foreheads), sometimes they don't, but I don't see what's wrong with trying to fill in errors in Trek. If fans succeed in explaining problems, it makes the shows more enjoyable, if they don't, at least it was a fun, enjoyable attempt. What's wrong with that?

 

For all the debate about the nuEnterprise's size, let's not forget the conceptual Giantprise from the Phase II era. And that was when Gene was in the show.

I'll even say (get the pitchforks ready) going strictly on the shuttledeck and torpedo launcher sets alone give the impress that the refit 1701's official size is too small.

Don't you get it, it's only fund and justified when we're doing it for the TOS / TNG era.

 

This scene deserves little defence.

The main reason it annoys me is because it was trivial to fix it. It would have been enough if that line said "Artificial gravity is failing. Gravity generators are going crazy" There, a tiny addition, and there's no longer a problem with it. The implication that they were somehow pulled by Earth's gravity took me out my suspension of disbelief and I couldn't enjoy the scene as much as I would have otherwise. I have watched astronauts on YouTube, and they don't fall towards the Earth (well, literally they do, but you know what I mean).

If the artificial gravity was buckling, the scene would be equally fun, enjoyable, whilst being realistic and not leaving me wondering "What? Why there are falling?" It is also a decent way to acknowledge the existence of artificial gravity, to familiarize the audience with it without the use of boring lengthy technobabble that ruined a lot of the old Trek (and was also quite often incorrect). It's just sloppy not to write it that way. I am sure they could have found a couple of thousand dollars in their 190 million dollar budget to weed out simple inaccuracies like this.

Contrast this with the weird black hole physics shown in STXI (another thing that I enjoy to complain about cause it makes little sense). They don't really bother me that much, because if you had realistic physics there, you'd totally ruin a few exciting scenes, not to mention the entire premise of the film. And the weird physics are easily explained if you imply that red matter breaks the conservation of energy, creating new mass for the black hole. Since it is from the future, the crew is unfamiliar with how it works, so it is also natural that there is no explanation in the dialogue, blah blah blah.

OTOH, this here has little excuse for being the way it is, and it is somewhat of a major hiccup. But whatever, I still explain it away with crewmen speaking off the cuff instead of the real reason. It is nowhere near as bad as the lack of acknowledgement of the thousands of dead in San Francisco, but it is certainly worse than than any inconsistencies in the starship proportions, size, or compartment placement (i.e. this entire thread and the aft nacelle one).

 

This is a symptom of my only real problem with the movie: Everything from the point forward of where Khan hijacks the Vengeance and beams Kirk, Scotty, and Carol back to the Enterprise, felt rushed. They were trying to wrap up the story completely and were hauling ass to do it. We effectively shifted from one movie to another with that moment,and we weren't given enough time to really do it justice. So there were a lot of things that felt very first draftish and in need of a good polish.

The scene in and of itself is on par with Trek of the past. But the dialogue could have used some work. It was very much a spectacle scene.

 

So the annoyance seems to be fixated on an absence of technobabble filling the blanks? We have clearly been brainwashed by 15 years of TNG era Trek

 

What did I miss? Did anyone suggest Spock should have said how the primary power couplings failed after the ship rerouted power from the main phaser banks to life support, which caused power fluctuations in the warp core antimatter injectors, knocking off the internal inertial dampeners offline, leading to spurious shields remodulations and a plasma leak that caused the gravity plating to reverse polarity because of an overload in the secondary power conduits?

"Artificial gravity going crazy" is very weak by Star Trek's technobabble standards. It's almost like saying "sharks with frikin lasers attached to their heads" contains too much obscure technical terminology.

Quite the contrary, the scene already had a contrived explanation which was technobabble. It might have been better off without it, but if you insist on keeping it in, there's no harm in making sure it at least makes sense, is there?

In fact, same scene without the aforementioned line:
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAXosKR9ubw[/yt]
Much better, ain't it?