"It's not just the whales, it's the water!"

[LMFAOschwarz]

I thought about it for a moment in the theater, and it's taken me a few decades to actually figure out, but Scotty's 400 ton beam-up of the whales and water in Star Trek IV amounts to, mass-wise, the equivalent of beaming up over 4400 people! Those newly re-crystallized crystals are really something!

I'm not really criticizing anything...I just thought it was interesting to know.

 

[Melakon]

I never drink water. Fish fk in it.
--W.C. Fields

 

[2takesfrakes]

And after this beam-up, "they" invent the issue of Spock having to "guess" the current mass of the ship to factor it into his computations, which is completely absurd. If you know what the mass of the ship is without it and how fast the ship can go without it, then travelling for a short distance at a known speed, he could've figured out how much drag there was on it, with no "guessing" required. But after the unlikely events and the flat jokes for the past hour and a half in this movie, then maybe such audience observations are more effort than they're worth ...

 

[Timo]

travelling for a short distance at a known speed, he could've figured out how much drag there was on it, with no "guessing" required

Umm, that's something Mr Scott would be expected to do. But we learned already that he cannot give exact figures, so clearly the definition of "exact" goes beyond such techniques.

I trust it's a matter of a high level of precision needed at the time-warping speeds, any tiny errors in low-speed measurements accumulating disastrously in the time-warping process. Plus, Spock needs to return to an exact future date; there was no such requirement originally, as any date before the extinction of the whales would have sufficed.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[erastus25]

I thought about it for a moment in the theater, and it's taken me a few decades to actually figure out, but Scotty's 400 ton beam-up of the whales and water in Star Trek IV amounts to, mass-wise, the equivalent of beaming up over 4400 people! Those newly re-crystallized crystals are really something!

I'm not really criticizing anything...I just thought it was interesting to know.

Perhaps the transporters have an easier time reconstructing the very simple molecular composition of water than that of mammals?

 

[Timo]

I don't think this should be a problem - after all, it was never stated or suggested in TOS or the previous movies that the transporter could not handle thousands of people at a time.

What the transporter was hard pressed to do in TOS was site-to-site, which is what happens here for the very first time. Unless the Klingons had a huge cargo transporter in the cargo bay already, and Scotty was beaming the whales directly "onto the pad".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[HIjol]

A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!

Truth to tell, I always liked my TOS with a little "reach", a suspension of disbelief.

 

[trekshark]

And after this beam-up, "they" invent the issue of Spock having to "guess" the current mass of the ship to factor it into his computations, which is completely absurd. If you know what the mass of the ship is without it and how fast the ship can go without it, then travelling for a short distance at a known speed, he could've figured out how much drag there was on it, with no "guessing" required. But after the unlikely events and the flat jokes for the past hour and a half in this movie, then maybe such audience observations are more effort than they're worth ...

for that matter, does the transporter not have some kind of log of how much mass it just moved?

 

[Ithekro]

The Klingon transporter at that.

 

[Timo]

...The Klingon transporter of the Klingon ship that Kirk had shot to pieces a few months earlier at that.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[bbailey861]

Truth to tell, I always liked my TOS with a little "reach", a suspension of disbelief.

Me, too. I like hangin' on for the ride.

 

[Candlelight]

I thought the other day that its odd they do the slingshot around the sun at such a high velocity over such a short distance - they travel at least warp 9.7 over 93 million miles...

Then again they made the centre of the galaxy in a couple of hours so...

 

[2takesfrakes]

... Movies is Magic!

 

[Timo]

The writers do end up being consistent even without necessarily making any effort, though - warp within star systems is always extremely slow in comparison with what the quoted warp factors achieve in deep space.

Insystem travel in the original "Tomorrow is Yesterday" is exactly this slow. Maximum-warp travel to a nearby asteroid is possibly even slower in "Paradise Syndrome". And for some reason, our heroes seldom if ever use warp insystem when they are in a hurry, even though they frequently use warp insystem when they are not.

I feel this is the exact "good sort of weird" that others in this thread have lauded...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[bbailey861]

... Movies is Magic!

I would 'like' this if I could.

 

[erastus25]

... Movies is Magic!

I would 'like' this if I could.

We really do need a "like" or "recommend" feature. I've seen other forums integrate it. There must be a way, right?

 

[Elder Knight]

It's been pointed out that, according to accepted physics, you can effectively reach the future by traveling at high sub-light speeds.

This would be an entirely different protocol from the backward journey in time, and the slingshot wouldn't be required. All that "Warp six, warp seven, warp eight ..." stuff was really to be understood as "Warp point six, warp point seven, warp point eight," with cruising at 0.999c. and a trip of several centuries was accomplished in minutes, while incidentally circling the Sun.

However, these calculations were largely untried.

 

[Timo]

There might be some bumps on the road if one chooses to spend three centuries circling Sol at high speed and essentially blind, and those three centuries happen to be a busy era of human spaceflight...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Elder Knight]

Bah! The odds may be merely 6.02 x 10^23 to 1 against it working, but that would be a pretty good chance by Spock's usual reckoning!

 

[LMFAOschwarz]

You know, I just noticed that in The Voyage Home, they use the same warp engine sound effect when the Klingon ship accelerates to "breakaway" speed that was used in Star Trek: The Motion Picture warp acceleration. Pretty neat!