Why I like Enterprise so much

Discussion in 'Star Trek: Enterprise' started by Rennick, Oct 31, 2013.

  1. BruntFCA

    BruntFCA Commander Red Shirt

    Joined:
    Mar 15, 2011
    Location:
    A Mile High
    No its not, this is her natural hair...
    [​IMG]
     
  2. Bad Thoughts

    Bad Thoughts Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Jun 19, 2013
    Location:
    Bad Thoughts
    ^Looks like hair extensions to me.
     
  3. BruntFCA

    BruntFCA Commander Red Shirt

    Joined:
    Mar 15, 2011
    Location:
    A Mile High
    About T'Pols make up

     
  4. R. Star

    R. Star Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Jun 15, 2012
    Location:
    Shangri-La
    I'm sure breast implants serve a logical purpose.
     
  5. 2takesfrakes

    2takesfrakes Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Oct 13, 2013
    Location:
    California, USA
    All that breast implants have in their favour is size ... And what of Trip & T'Pol's son from another Time Line? I would have scoffed at the mention of T'Pol having breastfed her infant son, in that episode. Poor kid, barely surviving off of silicates for however long, until his first taste of Table Fare! And fake boobs do not seem very much fun to play with, considering that they're not real and would not feel real. They certainly don't behave as real breasts should, particularly when she is laying down! So, Long-Made-Short, the answer is a resounding "yes" to the question of whether, or not, there is something wrong with enhancements!
     
  6. teacake

    teacake Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Jan 20, 2007
    Location:
    inside teacake
    Clearly T'Pol the Vulcan does not have implants, she just has large breasts.
     
  7. TheSubCommander

    TheSubCommander Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

    Joined:
    May 5, 2013

    I think of all the things Enterprise got right, and in a realistic way, is the design and feel of the ship. First, I just love the exterior design of the ship: I felt they did a great job balancing the classic saucer\nacelle design. It both looks like a believable ship from the future with incredible detail, while still looking less advanced than the TOS NCC-1701.

    The interior sets from the bridge, to the engine room, to the quarters were all great. Futuristic, yet still had a contemporary feel, that could have come straight out of an actual modern submarine or aircraft carrier.

    In fact speaking of aircraft carriers, I have been on the USS Midway, a museum aircraft carrier from WWII, in San Diego. That ship is 296 meters long, compared to the NX-01 at 225meters, and the NCC1701 at 289 meters. That ship is unbelievably massive (but by today's standards, is puny as Aircraft Carriers go). Granted, you have to take in account that the layout is completely different, but the Midway was designed to house up to 5000 crew members, but for most of the crew things are TIGHT. For most of the crew, you literally had a small cubbyhole of a bed shared with sailors on other shifts, stacked 2 or 3 high like bunk beds (you used it while the others were on duty), and each room had several rows of these. No one had any personal space. Also, going through the engine room of the Midway, the NX-01's engine room seems all the more realistic for a ship of its size.

    The NX-01 Enterprise has come closest to showing such cramped space like that, than any other Star Trek incarnation, thus making the feel of the ship all the more realistic. In space, personal space is a luxury: where the Enterprise-D or Voyager feels like a Carnival Cruise ship, the NX-01 feels like a utilitarian cross between a naval ship and a NASA capsule.
     
    Last edited: Nov 16, 2013
  8. 2takesfrakes

    2takesfrakes Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Oct 13, 2013
    Location:
    California, USA
    I do not find the Enterprise NX-01 exterior to be at all realistic, either in design or execution. It looks like CG and is totally unconvincing, besides. I despise the transporter chamber's rear wall. It looks like some tie-dye mural, it's incredibly bad. Also, the beams in the back of the bridge, showing the power pulsing are truly hateful. Otherwise, the bridge, crew quarters and other rooms are OK. I really do not care for Herman Zimmerman's interior design sense, here. I do like the closeness, the tightness of a lot of the areas, as everyone has said: it does lend itself to an air of realism. But I was never wowed by the Enterprise, because I feel that it was so self-conscious, for one thing. Enterprise-D was also, to an extent, but it wisely resisted the urge to look like an ILM vehicle and just looked very classy and elegant. It had the presence, onscreen, that Enterprise NX-01 completely lacks.
     
  9. TheSubCommander

    TheSubCommander Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

    Joined:
    May 5, 2013
    I completely disagree with you about the NX-01. So there.
     
  10. Bad Thoughts

    Bad Thoughts Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Jun 19, 2013
    Location:
    Bad Thoughts
    With the ship design (and even with the character outlines) Berman and Braga really did restore the feeling that space exploration is dangerous. As intriguing as NX-01 was, I wouldn't want to be on it or near it. And every time Archer said, "polarize the hull plating," I thought, "fuck no! raise the shields! raise the shields!" Consequently, Enterprise's comparatively modest explorations still appeared risky.


    Not only did the ship and characters support the notion that space exploration would be dangerous, but also that it was an exercise in making things up as you go. However, that did not mean freedom so much as missteps and consequences. I hate that Dear Doctor and Cogenitor pre-figured the prime directive so clearly, but it made sense that their faith in their altruism (as much as their faith in their technology) would be tested. And by the end of the series, the future would come down to a battle between competing visions of humanity, one that was human-centric, one that was humanitarian.

    The bigger problem was not whether Enterprise, as a series, successfully represented the texture and atmosphere of early deep space exploration (which I argue it does), but whether we find it charming. Some of that came down to execution. Archer had a chip on his shoulder, but Bakula couldn't dial in closer than Archer being outraged. On the other hand, Bakula represented the discontents of exploration quite well. However, I am starting to think that the timing of Enterprise was really poor. It seems strange that, as has become often commented on in the last year, that there has been a resurgence of interest in Enterprise. Obviously, the HD and Netflix releases of the series has helped. Nonetheless, there is a current Star Trek franchise that fans can fixate on. I am starting to think that the mid-2000s wasn't as interested in exploring the past as the 2010s are. Enterprise was obviously set in the future, but it was always conceptualized as a history of previous ST series. With the temporal Cold War, the 22nd century was not in control of its own destiny: it was a function of actions taking place up to and including the 31st century. Quite possibly, audiences weren't as interested in exploring their own history to see where their actions might lead. The mentality of the era didn't really support reflection as much as action. If the Xindi arc was comment on the War on Terror, there was much more second-guessing in the former than in the latter.
     
  11. cylkoth

    cylkoth Commodore Commodore

    Joined:
    Jan 16, 2003
    The only nit I'll pick in regards to the interior set design, is the color palette. It was simply too dark for me. I know the real world reasons for it-selecting a color scheme that the previous series sets hadn't used in order to differentiate the ship and era from the others, but if this were 'real life', I wouldn't want to cram a crew onboard a ship for years on end, out in space, far from home, in an environment with such dark colors everywhere. Brightly painted walls, combined with environmental lighting, at least in the corridors, crew quarters, and common areas would be mandatory. Visits to Sick bay were a welcome relief in many an episode. It's brightly lit and the walls weren't so dark. Really, the best regular area shown on the ship.

    I think I'd go nuts if I were ever stuck on Terak Nor...no wonder the Cardassians were so cranky. :lol: One of the things the Bajorans should have done is give the place a face lift, to match their own sensibilities. No oppressively dark rooms and corridors. Turn the entire project into a reality show...Flip This Space Station. :rommie:
     
  12. R. Star

    R. Star Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Jun 15, 2012
    Location:
    Shangri-La
    So there's an evolutionary advantage artificially stiff breasts? :p
     
  13. WarpCore

    WarpCore Lieutenant Red Shirt

    Joined:
    Dec 19, 2011
    Your math is... well, frankly, not math but random numbers hastily thrown into a calculator. Your calculation is 1 dimensional rather than accounting for a ship's width and multiple decks.

    NX-01 has a beam of 135m (445.5ft) corresponding to the diameter of the saucer section and has crew quarters on 4 of its 5 decks (B through E). If that entire space were made up of your "small room" scenario which is actually close to the set design used, it would provide 7692 rooms (3.14 pi * 222.75 ft radius * 222.75 * 4 decks / 81 sq ft and some rounding). That's without windows, without sickbay, without engine space, etc. Just square 9'x9' rooms without even corridors to access them.

    However, if Starfleet had some regulation that all crew quarters must have a window and much larger rooms of 20ft x anything were used, NX-01 could have supported 280 very large quarters (3.14 * 445.5 * 4 / 20). Assuming the quarters were 20 x 15, this would leave 82% of the ship's internal space for other purposes, even after accounting for the MASSIVE 6 ft wide corridors.

    In other words, there was absolutely no reason a crew of ~80 people should have been cramped in a space that large. And it would be a very bad design to set that up as the norm on a long term ship of exploration.

    As for other ships...

    NCC-1701-D had a beam of 464 m or 1521 ft over 16 decks. It isn't perfectly circular, but close enough for this. With the small useless 9x9 rooms, it could hold 358,912 of them, not a few hundred. According to http://www.ussenterprise.co.uk/enterprise/entd/entddeck.htm normal crew quarters made partial use of 9 decks. Assuming mandatory windows, 20 ft rooms, and removing conference rooms and Ten Forward, the Ent-D could have held 2,142 decent quarters on those 9 decks.

    CRUSHER: Jean-Luc, if I might ask, how many people are there on board?
    PICARD: One thousand and fourteen, including your guest, Doctor Quaice.
    LAFORGE: Is there something wrong with that count, Doctor?
    CRUSHER: No. That's the exact number there should be.


    The NX-74205 Defiant according to wikipedia is 170x134m with 5 decks. It's not a perfect rectangle, and I think I saw these dimensions somewhere, so I'll go with 120m/394ft by 100m/328ft. That's enough space for 7,977 9x9's, and it was supposedly built with only a few dozen double bunk coffins? That's ridiculous, even for a warship, unless that doubled up design is for potential tactical reasons other than space. That's less than 1% ship space for quarters. Sick bay is almost non-existent, the mess hall isn't overly impressive, and engineering isn't very big either going by the sets. IIRC, the only other spaces ever seen are a transporter room and hallways. So 75-90% of the ship is dedicated to torpedo storage, power conduits, and armor thickness?

    Voyager's asymmetric shape makes it kind of a pain, but suffice it to say 344m x 130m x 63m should provide tons of room for 200 people even though the 344m includes the nacelles.

    Basically everything on NX-01 was decided for TV reasons. The bedroom sets were built tiny to give the impression the ship was cramped even though they shouldn't have been, but hallways were made nearly as large as rooms to provide walking and talking scenes and to get camera angles. At least even the captain's quarters were tiny to portray a modicum of equality, but the doubling up of quarters for a "servant class" of crewmen (eg, Daniels) raises some questions of decency and ethics.

    TUCKER: I know you don't think this chair is important, but you're wrong. What's the most critical component on this ship? The main computer? The warp reactor? Uh-uh, it's the crew.

    I guess no one told the shipyard or the set designers.
     
  14. Melakon

    Melakon Admiral In Memoriam

    Joined:
    Nov 22, 2012
    Location:
    Melakon's grave
    Well... this conclusion is primarily an archaic, male chauvinistic perspective circa the late 20th/early 21st century. It doesn't take into account whether a woman has the surgery done for medical or esthetic reasons, or if it's performed because it gives her more confidence in herself or because she thinks it makes her look better. With actresses especially, it can be a deciding factor on whether they get a role.

    It's basically no different than men taking steroids to improve their physique, or Viagra or other specialized methods to either enhance "performance" or other areas of endowment.

    By 22nd or 24th century standards, the procedure may become sophisticated enough that there wouldn't be any noticeable physical or tactile difference.
     
  15. teacake

    teacake Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Jan 20, 2007
    Location:
    inside teacake
    Flotation devices?

    Because of Vulcan being a water world and all..
     
  16. Gov Kodos

    Gov Kodos Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Mar 23, 2004
    Location:
    Gov Kodos on Mohammed's Radio, WZVN Boston
    They're used for pointing out and motivating prospective challengers during Pon Farr.
     
  17. teacake

    teacake Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Jan 20, 2007
    Location:
    inside teacake
    Now I'm picturing T'Pol swiveling at Trip right before she gets married :lol:

    Thank god they didn't go that route.
     
  18. Gov Kodos

    Gov Kodos Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Mar 23, 2004
    Location:
    Gov Kodos on Mohammed's Radio, WZVN Boston
    Well how else are they going to lift and separate the boobs at the ceremony?
     
  19. 2takesfrakes

    2takesfrakes Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Oct 13, 2013
    Location:
    California, USA
    Sir...............................................
     
  20. teacake

    teacake Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Jan 20, 2007
    Location:
    inside teacake
    Melakon is correct. No different, and the choice of a person to body mod whatever they like.