Fact-Checking Inside Star Trek: The Real Story
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And I'm sure a capable designer could find a way to make it interesting. I'll trust professionals' imagination over armchair quarterbacks' presumption any day of the week.
A show that was set in the ocean depths, which naturally make it hard to see things. It should be obvious that that's an invalid comparison to the vacuum of space.
Stars illuminate things. If you're in a remote place with clear air, the stars shine more, and you see more of them. Plus we can assume we're seeing what we'd see after a minute for our eyes to get used to a lower light level. Ships in interstellar space could be seen well enough, just not totally illuminated as in TOS.
You can see them, but they're far too dim to provide much illumination for any objects close to you. You certainly can't read by starlight, say.
It depends. The problem with most media images of ships in space is that they ignore the differential light level between the ship's own window/running lights or engine emissions and the background stars. Generally, if your camera aperture were opened wide enough to pick up the stars, then the ship's own lights would be so bright that they'd totally wash out the image; and if you adjusted the exposure level for the ship's lights, then the background stars would be invisibly dim.
That's not how it works. If you're between stars light years apart there won't be sufficient light to illuminate a ship. You then have to resort to creative licence.
And whether it's the depths of the ocean or the depths of interstellar space you're faced with the same problem if you intend to depict exact realism: you don't see a damned thing.
Well, you're wrong for two reasons. One, as you keep failing to acknowledge, a ship can emit light of its own, whether engine lights, window lights, or running lights. Two, the sensitivity of a camera can be adjusted. It's possible for a sensitive enough camera to make out clear detail on something that would be invisibly dark to the naked human eye. Most of the astronomical photos we see of bright, colorful nebulae and galaxies and the like are actually long-exposure photos, the result of gradually accumulating very dim light over an extended period. To the naked eye, these things would be far dimmer. So it's not unrealistic for the hull of a ship in deep space to be visible with the right camera exposure, any more than it's unrealistic for the surface of Pluto to be clearly visible in New Horizons's photos, even though the sunlight at Pluto is about 1100 times dimmer than it is at Earth. As I said, though, the unrealistic part is that the ship's window/running/engine lights don't wash out the image at those exposures.
So we are back to creative licence rather than exact realism.
Maybe you don't think it's dull to see see some windows and a few bits of reflected hull, but I think it would be boring as hell. So I'll take the creative licence approach.
In that one aspect, yes, but there's always a balance to be drawn between realism and artistic license. It's just a question of whether you prefer a bias in one direction or the other. You've made your preferences extremely clear, but fortunately they aren't binding on the rest of us.
While playing around with 3D modeling I've played with no light source, but the model's lights and windows. You don't see much at all. You can get something more interesting if you allow for some external off-camera lighting to give your object some shape.
For dramatic purposes and to allow for viewer expectations you simply have to apply creative licence along with some variety.
We are using Trek here as an example. Contemporary productions have a lot more lattitude than what was possible for TOS given the ship had to be discernible on small CRT televisions and often, if not usually, in b&w. But I was reminded of this issue while watching episodes of Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea recently where the Seaview is always clearly visible even when running in the depths of the ocean and near the sea floor when realistically you shouldn't be able to see anything except whatever lights or windows were illuminated. Again, this had to be done given what they had to work with back in the day, but today you could give a nod to greater realism while not resorting to the Seaquest approach where you saw next to nothing. Again creative licence must be invoked.
For dramatic purposes and to allow for viewer expectations you simply have to apply creative licence along with some variety.
We are using Trek here as an example. Contemporary productions have a lot more lattitude than what was possible for TOS given the ship had to be discernible on small CRT televisions and often, if not usually, in b&w. But I was reminded of this issue while watching episodes of Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea recently where the Seaview is always clearly visible even when running in the depths of the ocean and near the sea floor when realistically you shouldn't be able to see anything except whatever lights or windows were illuminated. Again, this had to be done given what they had to work with back in the day, but today you could give a nod to greater realism while not resorting to the Seaquest approach where you saw next to nothing. Again creative licence must be invoked.
Seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey when it opened, it was a bit odd to get total silence as a massive spaceship moved across the screen. You'd think that the soundtrack was faulty, until realizing that no, this is correct!
I recall some director or special effects guy (sorry, can't recall who) commenting on the first Star Wars long ago. He said that when you see a space ship explode and hear the sound, you shouldn't make he assumption that your eyes (the camera) and your ears (the microphone) are in the same place. Maybe the sight comes from a hundred yards out in space, but the sound could be from the engine room of the doomed ship.
talk about expanding one's head! I guess that explanation could work. In any event, it doesn't bother me too much any more.
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Except all you'd hear in that case is a quick burst of static and then silence, because the microphone was destroyed!
Plus, of course, most movie/TV explosions in space look absolutely nothing like what a spaceship exploding in vacuum would actually look like. They look like a liquid-fuel conflagration taking place in atmosphere, thus generating flame that roils and billows as the expanding gases interact turbulently with the surrounding air. Special-effects artists favor that kind of explosion because it's very low-energy, meaning both that it's not very dangerous and that it happens slowly enough to be visually impressive. And so movies and TV have brainwashed into thinking that all types of explosion must look like that, even though the vast majority of them do not.
If a starship with a matter-antimatter reactor exploded, what you'd see would be a split-second burst of blinding light and then just a diffuse, swiftly expanding sphere of debris and vapor. The reaction would proceed extremely quickly and the energy of it would blow apart the remaining reactant mass just as quickly, so the whole thing would be over in less time than the duration of a single frame of film or video. There also wouldn't be any expanding "shock wave" to rock nearby ships, because that's something that happens on land or water, not in vacuum with no medium (to speak of) to propagate the shock. So basically everything about standard sci-fi ship explosions is completely wrong; the sound effect is the least of it.
Babylon 5 made a game effort in its early seasons to show space battles realistically, including realistic non-fireball explosions. But after a while, they started pandering to audience expectations and putting in fireballs. They also had sound effects, even though some fans, in the course of touting how realistic B5's space scenes were, somehow managed to convince themselves that they were silent.
Look up at the night sky. All those stars are light years away. When the air is especially clear without city lights, starlight can illuminate fairly well.
The B5 sequel Crusade had some silent space sequences, except for strange music that didn't help.
I have long figured that the TOS footage of the REAL E was "filmed" with ultra high sensitivity "film" and thus the stars are brighter than they look to your naked eye and the ship is illuminated pretty evenly from all directions by the stars all around it. It is also why all of the lit windows look so bright: They are blown out.
If the above were not so, then the windows would look more like an office building at night, with all internal details visible, but not very brightly; and the hull would be almost invisible.
The only inconsistency with this interpretation is the orbit shots, which should look more like ISS and Space Shuttle footage. There is no way lit windows would look lit in the same scene with a properly exposed day-side planet below...
YMMV,
M.
If the above were not so, then the windows would look more like an office building at night, with all internal details visible, but not very brightly; and the hull would be almost invisible.
The only inconsistency with this interpretation is the orbit shots, which should look more like ISS and Space Shuttle footage. There is no way lit windows would look lit in the same scene with a properly exposed day-side planet below...
YMMV,
M.
I'm always amused that the Enterprise can be photographed while it's zipping by at warp.
True. Realistically there would no way for a camera to track it.I'm always amused that the Enterprise can be photographed while it's zipping by at warp.
Right. There is no "camera" in-universe. When we see the ship looking well lit in interstellar space, we're getting an omniscient, "God's eye view" of things. And why shouldn't we? Stories told in the third person can have an omniscient viewpoint.
They can even do a dissolve that goes from the saucer exterior to the bridge interior. Where is that coming from? It's visual storytelling and totally legitimate.
If they were blown out, though, then their light would spread well beyond the window frames and obscure a fair portion of the image around them. You can see a limited example in the video I took of the Enterprise miniature at the NASM last month -- the LEDs were so bright to my phone camera that they flare out far more brightly than they did to my eyes. And that was in a well-lit room. If the camera were adjusted to super-sensitive night viewing, the window and engine lights would be so severely blown out that you wouldn't see the ship at all, just a blob of light.
Oh, that's the least of what bothers me about TOS orbit shots. The silliest part is that the ship visibly turns as it moves toward or away from the camera. The radius of an orbital path would be thousands or tens of thousands of kilometers. On a scale where the ship was clearly visible, the curvature would be so gradual that the ship would appear to move in a straight line -- just like the curved surface of the Earth appears flat as far as the horizon (and of course, the curve of an orbital path far above the planet's surface would be even more gradual than the curve of the surface itself). The way the ship's path curves in orbit shots implies that the planet is just this tiny little thing right next to the ship -- or else that the ship is itself thousands of kilometers long.
The other part I hate is the "sideways" orientation, like the ship is a car circling a racetrack and the planet is alongside it within the track. For a ship in orbit, "down" is toward the planet. That's the source of the gravity that holds the ship in orbit. So it would be more accurate to position the planet below the ship in the frame. Although the Space Shuttle tended to orbit "upside-down," with the Earth "above" it relative to its own orientation, so that the heat radiators inside its cargo doors would be in the shade at all times and thus be able to do their job. So there's no reason the ship can't be in any orientation relative to the planet, but there's also no reason for the default "sideways" orientation.
It's a warp camera. It sees as warp speed. And can hear in a vacuum.
This. WTF you guys?
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