11 Things About Star Trek That Make You Go WTF?

[Holodoc]

It was Spock who not only saved Earth from the orbital drill, but also critically damaged Nero's ship.

With an assist from Sulu, who at the time was actually in command of the Enterprise, in the form of that anti-torpedo fire. So, really, the Enterprise should be Spock's ship, with Sulu as first officer. I guess Kirk can drive, though only if he's learned his lesson from his younger days.

(BTW, chalking things up to "destiny" is a supremely unsatisfying explanation for any story development. Especially in a story, like this one, that's supposedly all about freeing things up to chart a new path into an unknown future.)

Agreed. It's interesting how this is supposed to be a big, bold new universe, where anything can happen, and yet we have to rely on something as hammer-to-the-head blatant as 'destiny' to explain why Kirk finds oldSpock, or ends up in command of the Enterprise.

Not to mention, time travel stories generally revolve around the crew fighting 'destiny', don't they?

 

[Irishman]

I think the list is both apropos and hilarious!

That really makes no sense. The Kelvin was part of the original timeline, built before Neo's arrival changed anything.

What part of my post don't you get? The Kelvin - part of the original timeline or not - would have to have been bigger than the TOS Enterprise to hold 800 ppl +. We know that 800 or so survived, not that the ship had a complement of 800. The complement could have been 850, or 900, or 950. Or more.

Further, when you compare the scales of the new shuttle that is assigned to the Enterprise, they're big enough to carry a dozen or more ppl plus crew, plus gear stowage...

I think that this safely lets us know that Ryan Church has designed a new Enterprise that is a good 50% to 100% larger vessel than the original.

What I don't get is your willingness to accept that in the original timeline, thirty-odd years before TOS and over a decade before the Enterprise was built as part of the state-of-the-art Constitution class, Starfleet supposdly had ships with at least four times the crew capacity of Pike's original Enterprise and twice that of Kirk's upgraded version. IOW, that the Kelvin "would have to be bigger" is the problem, not the solution. That the "new" Enterprise in the altered timeline may be bigger than the original (we can speculate, but don't really know) isn't at all relevant to this.

All they had to do was change Pike's dialogue from "800" to "200" and the whole glitch would've been avoided.

Spock's explanation indicated he was caught off guard by the destruction of Romulus, so we may assume that - since Spock isn't an idiot - this thing didn't behave like a normal supernova. As I've postulated in other threads, maybe it got tangled up in one of those warp pollution anomolies and it accelerated the blastwave, or maybe some jackasses figured they could stop it using subspace warheads and only made it worse. There are many pseudo-science explanations that would fit within the world of Trek. We got the Cliff's Notes, that doesn't mean there isn't an explanation.

Even the expanded backstory in the Countdown comic doesn't really make any sense of this. Sure, it's possible to come up with a suitably SFnal explanation for the threat to Romulus, but obviously the writers just didn't bother—prefering to give the audience a scientifically illiterate "Cliff's Notes" version (as you astutely put it) rather than a fully realized story we could actually buy into.

I think it's pretty clear that Ryan Church designed these ships to be the size he and/or JJ wanted them to be. No smaller, no larger. Personally, the larger Enterprise makes more sense to me.

 

[Irishman]

Omega, the Kelvin and the Enterprise in this film are substantially larger than their TOS counterparts. By a large margin. Crew sizes will double or triple.

When they showed the shot where the camera crossed in front of the B/C deck on the Enterprise, it didn't look substantially bigger. You could see the bridge inside via the niffty window/viewscreen. Didn't appear to be 50 to 100% larger than the old E.

I'd love to see you take scaled drawings of the Galileo compared to scaled drawings of the new Shuttle, and make it fit in the TOS Enterprise as originally scaled AND the new Enterprise as currently shown.

Can you accept the challenge?

 

[lawman]

I think it's pretty clear that Ryan Church designed these ships to be the size he and/or JJ wanted them to be. No smaller, no larger. Personally, the larger Enterprise makes more sense to me.

Not really clear on your point here. Church designed the ships to look like he wanted, sure. But neither ship appears on screen in a context where it's possible to gauge its size accurately, and so far as I know none of the associated marketing has included ship specs. And Church didn't write the line establishing the Kelvin's crew complement, so it can't be pinned on him. A larger Enterprise is at least plausible in story terms, but an 800-plus-person Kelvin simply makes no sense.

 

[Irishman]

I think it's pretty clear that Ryan Church designed these ships to be the size he and/or JJ wanted them to be. No smaller, no larger. Personally, the larger Enterprise makes more sense to me.

Not really clear on your point here. Church designed the ships to look like he wanted, sure. But neither ship appears on screen in a context where it's possible to gauge its size accurately, and so far as I know none of the associated marketing has included ship specs. And Church didn't write the line establishing the Kelvin's crew complement, so it can't be pinned on him. A larger Enterprise is at least plausible in story terms, but an 800-plus-person Kelvin simply makes no sense.

It makes no sense to you, sir.

It makes fine sense to me. It reads like you're assuming that, as time goes on, capital ships will always get larger in a predictable fashion. So, you're expecting the Enterprise to be larger than the Kelvin. Is that right?

It sounds like you are having a hard time wrapping your mind around a Kelvin that could be larger than the later Enterprise. Yes?

 

[Noname Given]

If Nero wanted to destroy the Federation, he could have easily done it during his 25-year hiatus. With a ship that much more powerful and technologically advanced than its rivals, he could have ripped through any Starfleet vessels sent against him (like we saw in orbit of Vulcan) just like Mirror Archer did when he got his hands on the Defiant.

But Nero was nuts. The FIRST thing he wanted to do was find Ambassador Spock - from that first scene with the U.S.S. Kelvin; he attacked BEFORE he even knew what happened because he saw a Federation ship (Probably expected to die too as he thought he was still in the 24th century). It wasn' until he interrogated the Kelvin's captain that he began to get a clue that:

a) He was now in the past.
b) Amabassador Spock wasn't in the area.

But he had two things he wanted to do:

1) Find Ambassador Spock.
2) Make Ambassador Spock suffer as he had by making Spock witness the destruction of his homeworld.

I don't think it was until AFTER Vulcan was destryed that Nero got the idea - 'Hey, I'm here; I can destroy the Federation and make Romulus REALLY safe...

 

[Holodoc]

Quick WTF moment:
When Kirk sees the Enterprise before joining the Academy, it appears to be nearly complete. Three years later, Pike says it's brand new. Given the amount of work that's already been done, I think we have to assume they're halfway in, at least. So, it takes five or six years to build a single space ship?

 

[lawman]

It makes fine sense to me. It reads like you're assuming that, as time goes on, capital ships will always get larger in a predictable fashion. So, you're expecting the Enterprise to be larger than the Kelvin. Is that right?

It sounds like you are having a hard time wrapping your mind around a Kelvin that could be larger than the later Enterprise. Yes?

Yes. That assumption has generally been borne out in known Trek history. I suppose one could cobble up a plausible explanation why a ship in 2233 would have twice the crew capacity of the cutting-edge fleet flagship 30 years later, counter-intuitive as it may be, but the writers (once again) didn't bother to do so; they merely tossed the information out there sans context. As such, it eminently qualifies as a "WTF" moment, as the thread is discussing.

 

[Irishman]

It makes fine sense to me. It reads like you're assuming that, as time goes on, capital ships will always get larger in a predictable fashion. So, you're expecting the Enterprise to be larger than the Kelvin. Is that right?

It sounds like you are having a hard time wrapping your mind around a Kelvin that could be larger than the later Enterprise. Yes?

Yes. That assumption has generally been borne out in known Trek history. I suppose one could cobble up a plausible explanation why a ship in 2233 would have twice the crew capacity of the cutting-edge fleet flagship 30 years later, counter-intuitive as it may be, but the writers (once again) didn't bother to do so; they merely tossed the information out there sans context. As such, it eminently qualifies as a "WTF" moment, as the thread is discussing.

For you.

I don't care, though.