Explaining away hiding a giant space ship in the water....
- Thread starter ED-209
- Start date
- Status
Evading an enemy ship. There are no nebulas nearby to hide in, and gas giants just won’t do (either ship is too big to hide between the rings, or there are concerned about hiding inside a gas giant).
The ship also does not have a cloaking device/invisibility shield/holographic shield etc. installed. and the cloak might still be detected anyways.
The ship could also have been evading a hostile cosmozoan, like a planet killer or Crystalline Entity. And rather than destroy the creature outright, it was preferable to hide on an M-class world with a primitive alien civilization and let the creature go on about its day.
The ship also does not have a cloaking device/invisibility shield/holographic shield etc. installed. and the cloak might still be detected anyways.
The ship could also have been evading a hostile cosmozoan, like a planet killer or Crystalline Entity. And rather than destroy the creature outright, it was preferable to hide on an M-class world with a primitive alien civilization and let the creature go on about its day.
I think the reason's clear enough from the movie itself. We were shown or told that the magnetic interference from the volcano disrupted comms and transporters, and that the vast clouds of ash prevented a shuttle from functioning in flight for very long. So it follows that the ship had to be as close to the volcano as it could get so the shuttle wouldn't have to fly very far and so they could stay in touch with the shuttle crew. Hovering in the atmosphere created too much risk of being seen, and the ash clouds and the static buildup and lightning within them would've been bad for the Enterprise as well, so they hid underwater.
I used to think it was implausible that a starship built for space could viably handle being on a planet surface, but then I realized that Trek starships routinely endure thousands of gravities of acceleration in space maneuvers, so the structural stress of being under one gravity or so on a Class-M planet's surface would be relatively easy to endure. And the buoyancy of water would reduce the stress even further, though that advantage might be cancelled by the higher pressure.
I've always wondered how they did it. You couldn't just drop in directly from above, as the ship would be easily noticed, and if you moved too quickly you'd cause flooding on the mainland (although those cliffs were quite high). The other option is they'd have to submerge the ship farther away, then travel as a submarine closer to shore.
Which would make sense since they probably needed seismological data from the site anyway and being closer to the ground could provide that.
#genesvision
It was a treaty with the Romulans, though what the Federation got in return who knows?
Came in at night with the lights off?
I'm imagining an aircraft-like landing trajectory, long and shallow, and submerging slowly. Since it's got super-futurey antigravity fields and stuff, it can come down relatively gently. (Realistically, an antigravity field pushing down would probably displace the water as much as a physical mass would, but fiction tends to ignore such things -- see any episode where phasers fired from orbit reach the ground rather than being absorbed and scattered by dozens of miles of atmosphere.)
The volcanic ash cloud meant they had to be under it to communicate with their teams.
See also, Star Trek: Insurrection where a village sized ship was hidden underwater and Picard season 2, where a Vulcan survey ship was hidden underwater in the 2000's.
See also, Star Trek: Insurrection where a village sized ship was hidden underwater and Picard season 2, where a Vulcan survey ship was hidden underwater in the 2000's.
The specific purpose of going underwater?
And if it wasn't village-sized, how would the holodeck illusion work if the villagers wanted to be at different ends of the village?
Same way it always works, as Zero explained in Prodigy's holodeck episode. Same way they could fit Victorian London in the Enterprise's holodeck or a baseball field in one of Quark's holosuites. "Treadmill" forcefields on the floor and optical projections to make people think they're farther apart from each other than they are.
But magic technology can't be used to put a ship underwater?
The why is to circumvent the volcanic cloud, while allowing an escape from the natives without revealing the Enterprise.
Why did it have to hide underwater especially if it had a cloaking device?
- Status
