In our universe,there is no Earth mass body at 100 AU circular orbit. certainly not with oceans of water.
100 AU from Earth
- Thread starter FredH
- Start date
On the other hand, a starbase commander with too much free time in her hands could decide that the worthless minuscule planetoid next to her facility ought to look more like home - and would make it so with the continent-carving phasers available to her. In a couple of hours, the familiar shapes would be there, and methane could be shipped in to imitate (shallow) oceans...
Timo Saloniemi
Timo Saloniemi
In the future, Pluto got tired of being called a dwarf by the other planets, so he moved out and bulked up.
The water is sweat from all the heavy lifting he did to build muscle mass.
Mystery solved.
It was a joke. You navigate inside of star systems in EVE using an AU as measurement. nevermind.
Visual fx of the planet aside, the egregious errors still are the 100 AU reference and the 1 light year reference. Both are elementary details any Star Trek writer should know
100 AU is the edge of our star system. 1 ly is very close.
Basic physics makes it most practical to put a space station in orbit of a larger mass. Having some planet(oid) makes sense.
100 AU is the edge of our star system. 1 ly is very close.
Basic physics makes it most practical to put a space station in orbit of a larger mass. Having some planet(oid) makes sense.
Oh, sorry! My mistake.
Let me quote what is said about year 2018:
Marla says: "About the year 2018", not "the year 2018". And she says "2018" not AD 2018" or "2018 AD". Marla doesn't specify the calendar or year count used, so we don't know which calendar or year count she used. I doubt that the calendar or year count is specified in more than a half dozen cases in Star Trek, so we only know which calendar or year count is used in those half dozen cases.
In "Where No Man Has Gone Before":
Mitchell's words seem to be an explicit statement that the date of "Where No Man Has Gone Before" is between 2096 and 2196 in the calendar he is using. So when the Star Trek Chronology: The History of the Future stated that "Where No Man Has Gone Before" is in 2265, 69 to 169 years after its date given by Mitchell, that was the same thing as admitting that Mitchell used a different calendar.
So there is no more reason to assume that the year 2018 is AD 2018 any more than there is to assume that any other year given in a Star Trek production is a year AD.
To me it seems that the earlier detail should take precedence over the later, assuming that the later detail is due to carelessness or forgetfulness.
As for Kirk's initials, there is no contradiction. One was the official form of Kirk's name at one time, and the other was the official form of Kirk's name given at several later times. People have the right to completely change their names, let alone change which of several middle names to base the middle initial on. No doubt Kirk didn't want to see "James R. Kirk" and be reminded of the tombstone again.
As for the crystals, people prefer to refer to substances by names shorter than their often extremely complex full chemical formulas. Hawkesite sounds a lot better than polybathroomflourine, for example. So I believe that "dilithium" was a component of an extremely complex chemical formula, and Starfleet members used to call it "lithium" until Starfleet command ordered them to use "dilithium" instead, to avoid confusion with the element lithium and conform to the usage of other Federation institutions.
Christopher said:
Some people might assume that warp drive is faster and slower in different regions of space. Thus they might assume that that there is slow space between Earth and Vega and between Earth and Rigel. Thus they might have to zig zag through various regions of fast space until they came to Vega, the first Earth colony with advanced medial care. Going on to Earth from Vega might take as long as getting from Rigel to Vega. That is one possible explanation for the annoying problem in "The Cage".
Last edited:
That is an utterly bizarre assumption. The way writing or any creative endeavor works is, you start with a rough idea, and you refine and improve it as you go. The first version of an idea is almost invariably the worst. Rewriting and revising is what makes a story good in the first place. Laypeople don't understand that because you only see the finished product, so you have this quaintly absurd idea that a creation springs complete from the creator's head like Athena from the brow of Zeus -- which dismisses all the really hard work that writers and other creators have to do in order to perfect it to the point that it's worth showing to people.
And of course, usually, hopefully, we get better ideas as we go along, as we learn more and refine our craft. Surely in your own life, you've had experience with learning from your mistakes -- being embarrassed by the things you did when you were less experienced, less practiced, less mature, and being glad for the chance to improve on your past performance. That's what it's like for writers. We're always trying to improve our work. Imagine how terribly oppressive it would be for us if we were required to always, always stick with our first drafts, forbidden to improve them when we got a better idea. That's just no way to work.
Besides, by your logic, we should be watching the adventures of the Earth starship Yorktown under Captain Robert April, Number One, and half-Martian first lieutenant Spock. Of course we don't stick with the first version of an idea. We never have. We never should. Fiction is a human creation, and thus it is imperfect. As with any human undertaking, it is our ability to address and correct its imperfections that allows us to gradually improve it over time.
There is a hypothetical ninth planet in our Solar system, somewhere between 100 AU and 700 AU away. It is presumed a Super-Earth type planet with a mass 10 time of Earth and a diameter 2-4 time of Earth. So they might have right placing the planet there. The only problem is that this planet is presumed with a low reflective surface and the Discovery planet is high reflective, too high for a planet out there. So yeah, I wish they would get their science fact right. It would be an interesting idea presenting planet nine in DSC but they got it wrong this time around.
It's a viewscreen image. They can increase the light sensitivity. I mean, really, we've been seeing brightly lit starships in deep space for over 50 years now in Trek. Obviously we've never been seeing literal naked-eye images, so why start assuming that now?
You can't take visual effects literally. They're symbolic representations. Very few space shows or films have ever portrayed space in a way that's remotely close to how it would actually, realistically look; it's usually stylized for the audience's benefit. Things are too bright or too close together or too slow-moving, beams and energy effects that should be invisible are represented by bright lights, explosions in vacuum look like flames roiling in atmosphere, etc. It's all utterly fanciful. Even a hard-SF show like The Expanse takes some liberties for the sake of visibility. And Discovery's effects go in the opposite direction; they're as fanciful and garishly absurd as any Trek effects have ever been, and their designers have so little interest in realism that they can't even spend 30 seconds to look up what color an O-type star is.
Yeah even Ron D Moore shelved his idea for BSG to be "harder" sc-fi by having silent space battles as it just wasn't good TV. (Though he did manage a compromise because of them using "real" ordnance and therefore legitimate "shooting sounds" from inside the shooter's ship...)
Firefly did silent space scenes, and it worked quite well, contrary to popular assumptions. I felt the lack of sound gave the action more of an impact, not less. After all, when we see news footage of real events captured by security cameras or drone cameras or whatever, it's frequently silent. So seeing silent footage has a realistic feel, while footage with clearly audible, intricately engineered sound effects feels more artificial, even aside from the "sound in space" issue.
I mean, if anyone doubts the power of silence, just show them that certain scene in The Last Jedi.
I mean, if anyone doubts the power of silence, just show them that certain scene in The Last Jedi.
Ah yes point taken, thanks. Never saw Firefly but The Last Jedi scene did work.
The spacewalk between Kurnow and Max in 2010 is one of my favorite silent space scenes too. The panicked breathing into the microphone and the dialogue does all the sound one needs. If there were any space sounds in the scene I don't recall them and they certainly weren't necessary.
And now we have four hours of:
on youtube. i think audiences are growing up whether they like it or not.
Planet 9,if it exists,is too cold for liquid water on the surface.
Actually, they did try soundless space scenes, but test audiences for the miniseries complained it was distracting switching back and forth from noisy interior scenes and quiet exteriors. So the concept was abandoned because of that.
