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Appereantly, Commodore Paris WAS a nod to Tom Paris...

Realistically, I think such a massive structure falling from space to a planet surface would either break up in the atmosphere or essentially vaporize on impact in a huge explosion, or at the very least collapse under its own weight. Although I guess the case could be made that their frames employ some hyper-advanced engineering techniques to withstand accelerations of thousands of gs, as they would need to do routinely in order to travel and maneuver at high fractions of lightspeed or travel via space warp. Or that their inertial dampers and structural integrity fields remain powered throughout the descent and afterward.
 
IIRC, there is a scene in one of the novels where Admiral Paris - Tom's father - has pictures of several prominent Parises (Parii?) overlooking his desk. I wonder if the Commodore is one of those. We never hear her first name in STB, do we?
 
Mr. Laser Beam said:
IIRC, there is a scene in one of the novels where Admiral Paris - Tom's father - has pictures of several prominent Parises (Parii?) overlooking his desk. I wonder if the Commodore is one of those. We never hear her first name in STB, do we?
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I believe it's Chrisjen. ;)
 
Cyke101 said:
It could always drop out of the sky like a rock, though I'd love it if the saucer floated for a few seconds, just long enough to pop out a sign that says "Help!" before falling with long whistle.
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Followed by a long distance aerial shot of a landscape ending in a puff of dust erupting from the surface.
 
Mr. Laser Beam said:
IIRC, there is a scene in one of the novels where Admiral Paris - Tom's father - has pictures of several prominent Parises (Parii?) overlooking his desk. I wonder if the Commodore is one of those. We never hear her first name in STB, do we?
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The novels themselves have featured members of the Paris family in various eras. There's a Caroline Paris in the 22nd century serving on one of the ships in the Rise of the Federation series. There was also a Michael Paris serving on the Stargazer in that novel series, who even was specified to be Tom's uncle.
 
The Wormhole said:
The novels themselves have featured members of the Paris family in various eras. There's a Caroline Paris in the 22nd century serving on one of the ships in the Rise of the Federation series. There was also a Michael Paris serving on the Stargazer in that novel series, who even was specified to be Tom's uncle.
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There's also an IMF agent named Paris in the mid-20th Century....but maybe I'm getting my shows confused

;)
 
Shit, that's right. Michael is also Tom's newborn son in the Voyager re-launch novels, which is probably why I had the name on my mind.
 
Nerys Myk said:
There's also an IMF agent named Paris in the mid-20th Century....but maybe I'm getting my shows confused

;)
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I don't know. That Paris looked strangely Vulcan . . .

Hey, maybe Tom Paris on VOYAGER was a homage to Nimoy's character on MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE? :)
 
Greg Cox said:
Hey, maybe Tom Paris on VOYAGER was a homage to Nimoy's character on MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE? :)
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**in a shuttle which has just crossed into neutral space, "Tom Paris" peels off his facial disguise and smiles**

**at the same moment, villainous despot of the week suddenly realizes he's been played and has lost everything**

[cue theme music in quintuple meter]
 
Bry_Sinclair said:
It would've been better if Shohreh Aghdashloo had been Commodore Bashir.
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That was my thought as well.

Christopher said:
Aghdashloo is Iranian and Alexander Siddig is Sudanese-British
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So what? I'm pretty sure that Julian Bashir and his parants were not Sudanese-British, and who knows where Commodore Paris was from. From the looks of things, it would have made a lot more sense if the Commodore was an ancestor of the Bashir family.

Nerys Myk said:
Why? Is Bashir Iranian?
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Is Commodore Paris Iranian?

stardream said:
I've brought up my own family before in this discussion. I'm part Native American and apparently look Latino. Husband is of Nordic descent with the accompanying blond hair and blue eyes. One child looks like me, two look like him. The younger two have a really fun time defending the fact that they in truth, part Native American. Our son got the positive end of it, he doesn't sunburn. Daughter is lactose intolerant and complains that she got the short end of the stick. ;)
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Cute story ... :techman:
 
Christopher said:
Realistically, I think such a massive structure falling from space to a planet surface would either break up in the atmosphere or essentially vaporize on impact in a huge explosion, or at the very least collapse under its own weight. Although I guess the case could be made that their frames employ some hyper-advanced engineering techniques to withstand accelerations of thousands of gs, as they would need to do routinely in order to travel and maneuver at high fractions of lightspeed or travel via space warp. Or that their inertial dampers and structural integrity fields remain powered throughout the descent and afterward.
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You forget that these ships are build within an atmosphere on the surface of a planet. They are supposed to withstand gravity and atmospheric pressure.
 
rRico said:
You forget that these ships are build within an atmosphere on the surface of a planet. They are supposed to withstand gravity and atmospheric pressure.
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It's not as simple as that. A structure designed to withstand gravity is generally designed to withstand it at a certain angle. It's built so as to channel the forces in a specific direction, downward through its structural members. If you tilt the structure so that its main support members are no longer vertical, then the forces pull in a direction the structure wasn't designed to handle, and it causes the structure to collapse. You can see this if you've ever seen a tall building get demolished, or seen footage of the 9/11 World Trade Center collapse. When skyscrapers tilt sideways, they don't keep toppling over to the side like rigid boxes the way they do in movies; as soon as they get just a few degrees off of vertical, they pancake straight downward, because the upright structural supports that hold up their weight are no longer perfectly vertical and the sideways shear forces cause them to break. They just aren't designed to withstand gravity pulling at the wrong angle. (For a simpler example, kick one leg of a chair a few degrees inward and then try sitting on it. Supports generally only work if they're at the correct angle.)

So if you take a Constitution-class saucer that was designed to withstand planetary gravity while the saucer was parallel to the surface, and you then stick it into the ground on its rim, then the forces will be perpendicular to what it was designed to handle, and so it would collapse right away. And that's not even considering the titanic g-forces of the impact itself if it falls clear from space.

So being designed for planetary gravity doesn't even begin to explain it. Especially since the front-back forces that a starship would experience when accelerating to high sublight velocities would be thousands of times greater than planetary gravity. Planetary gravitational forces would be inconsequential compared to what the ship would have to be designed to withstand in everyday operations in space. Heck, that's the only reason it makes any sense that the ship was built on the surface at all.
 
Keep in mind that she could be related to the Voyager characters but that doesn't have to be by blood as she could have been a distant Aunt or cousin through marriage or she could have been adopted by an ancestor of Tom's.
 
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