Continuing on. I realize my observations are later than they used to be. My un-married, no-kids, significantly more overweight me would be laughing at me from his reviews of 199x-2005 and laughing as he pounded his posts out within an hour of first watch.
Still doing them though. Onwards!
- Voq is found making "art" in a holo chamber of some sort, linking the various starship hullks still floating around the binary star (I suppose said binary doesn't exert THAT much excess force on stuff just outside the belt, or else everyone would be worried about being dragged in as the Shenzhou almost was). Anyway, what'st he purpose of the chamber? Everything is so ornately designed it's tough to figure out specific areas or stations.
- Regardless of rank, everyone in the mess hall last week ate off of gary gray plastic trays and gray or transparent green plates. Captain Lorca gets the fine porcelain dinnerware, naturally emblazoned with his ship's name; however, he still eats his salad with his hands and no silverware apparent. RHIP! Notably, there seems to be a hypospray right next to his plate. Drugs for his eyes, or thousand island dressing?
- Corvan II is home to the Corvan Gilvo species, which resembled branches and sock puppets. Two rare specimens would be transported by the Enterprise-D when they were almost killed by, ironically, someone ELSE figuring out a "new way to fly". Still, they were common enough to be seen as a one-off Ferengi pet a couple years later. Poor gilvos, never catch a break.
- As Admiral Cornwell relays the distress call, her hologram gestures to Lorca's monitor and then watches the message with him. More food for thought as to whether Cornwell actually has a monitor on her side, can see Lorca's from where she is (and not just him eating salad off an invisible plate), or if the computer is being nice enough to pretend she's in fact gesturing to his monitor instead of hers. She probably has an aide just offscreen, or someone to cue the Discovery's monitor to play the message.
- It's already been discussed, but yes, I'd think the source of 40% of the Federation's dilithium would warrant more protection. We don't know how big the "patrol ship" force was (or if it was also separate from the ships Cornwell said were blockading the place), so for all we know we missed an intense battle that wiped out a sizeable Federation AND Klingon force, including any friendly forces nearby, leaving a few pesky BoPs to slowly siege the Corvan population and win a strategic victory.
- So, after wondering what Engineering actually WAS last week, we pretty much confirm that the set IS the primary Engineering, and "test bay alpha" must refer to the place where the bear goes.
- Ah! Just before the spinning starts, Lorca specifically queries Commander Airiam by saying "Drive?". Dedicated "Drive station" on the bridge, confirmed!
- Let's dive into the statement "excess energy cavitation", which is that Commander Airiam initiates - and which is meant to be linked to the spinning saucers. In seagoing vessels, cavitiation is the phenomenon by which bubbles are created from a spinning propeller. Strictly-speaking, those bubbles are actually steam caused by water boiling as a result of low pressure areas created by the spinning propeller (the water boils because pressure is low, not because the propeller heats it up). Applying that to the spore drive, I'd surmise that some sort of subspace manipulation is being accomplished by doodads within the spinning saucers, creating "low pressure" areas within subspace resulting in the either creating the means by which the ship enters spore space (sic) or to facilitate the energy transfer by which the ship makes the jump. Either way, no spinning, no spore drive. Thoughts?
- Sticking with real-world physics though, I'm happy that there ARE two discs spinning in opposite directions, so as to MAYBE minimize the torque effect created by the rotation relative to the main mass of the ship. We don't know how much volume are actually in the spinning sections (my guess is not much, and that they're bascially the skin of the saucers), but at least someone is thinking about spinning masses in zero gravity and the effects produced thereof for non-spinning sections. Looking at YOU, Babylon 5.
- Saru orders Landry to reroute impulse power to phasers, and the latter replies that they's now "double hot", suggesting a significant, or even doubly powered array (and possibly no way to maneuver at significant sublight speeds right away after sporing to the destination..). No word on torpedoes, though? No way to make THEM double-hot?
- Discovery's errant first jump literally "drops" them into a star's corona (the effects suggest they actually arrive by moving into position by a Z-axis drop). Good thing they were oriented top side away from the star, otherwise people would be confused </sarcasm>
- SCIENCE! An O-type star is usually 15-90 times more massive, 30,000-1,000,000 more luminous, and 5-10 times hotter than our sun. It didn't look THAT big here, but maybe it's just really dense. :P In any case, nerds like us find ample justification that Discovery is in trouble by how much more EVERYTHING this star is compared to our own. Heck, they're pretty rare to begin with (about one in five to twenty million stars in the Milky Way is O-type).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-type_main-sequence_star
- Discovery has had several alert klaxons for different ship and statuses. Here, we at last here one derived from the TOS Enterprise, and not a straight up re-use of one from the TNG era. The black alert sound was new too. Maybe the show runners wanted a unique sound profile for the main ship, and for the Shenzhou and other vessels, they just gave a USB drive filled with sounds they had franchise rights to, and told the effects guys to have fun...
Mark
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