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Spoilers marsh8472's Consolidated Continuity Thread

Why does warp drive in Star Trek Discovery look so different?

  • Starfleet is employing advanced propulsion technology on their ships in addition to the Spore Drive

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Star Trek Discovery is showing correctly, every other series looks abnormal actually

    Votes: 1 4.8%
  • Nothing is wrong at all, everything is consistent everywhere

    Votes: 10 47.6%
  • Discovery is in a seperate timeline from TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, and ENT

    Votes: 3 14.3%
  • Star Trek Discovery's visual effect of the warp drive is incorrect

    Votes: 1 4.8%
  • Other

    Votes: 6 28.6%

  • Total voters
    21
@marsh8472 you have four separate threads about minor continuity nitpicks. You're fine to post about these, that's not an issue, but it's taking up a lot of the limited front-page space with one person's observations starting a new thread every time. To keep the visible topics varied, I've merged the four and kept your poll for the warp drive. You can post new observations in here.
 
Will there be a thread on why the transporter effect looks different too? Obviously this is the same effect, but better. This is what happens when you ask visual effects people the same question 30 years later, and give them lots more money to answer it.

Apparently, even the simple TNG streaks were expensive at the time:

The Galaxy class starship Enterprise has a lot of windows that look out into space, giving many of our sets a wonderful sense of "really" being on a starship. This requires us to do a lot of bluescreen shots to show streaking "warp stars" whenever the ship is traveling faster than light. Naturally, these visual effects are very expensive. The result is that there have been a few times when budget considerations have forced our producers to find an excuse — any excuse — to have the captain take the ship down to impulse so that we can avoid the extra expense.
-TNG Technical Manual

Actually, the DSC "at warp" effect is extremely similar to the TNG "going to warp" effect, which was more impressive but rarely seen:

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If you ask me, the VFX team has nailed it this time. This is what we should have seen all along. If you must have an in-universe explanation, then the answer is sensor calibration. Diane Duane puts it far more eloquently than I could, in "The Wounded Sky":

The problem with waiting around in space to see a starship go by is that, when a ship is in warp drive, she’s hardly there at all. The otherspace in which the warp field embeds her is just that-other; a neighboring alternate universe in which natural laws are different, and light moves many thousands of times faster than in the universe to which the six hundred eighty-three species of humanity are native. A starship in warp carries a shell of that otherspace with her, so that within it she moves at many multiples of lightspeed through the analogue universe, without really being in our universe at all, or running up against its intractably low speed of light. Within the ship, of course, sensors are calibrated to edit out the slight strangeness of the other-universal starlight, that all the humanities find so unsettling. Outside the ship, all there is to be seen of her passing is a tremor of starlight as space itself is shaken, wrinkles, and slowly smooths out again. At the heart of the shimmer, there might be the faintest, palest ghost of light, not even an image. An impression, a hint, maybe an illusion.
 
@marsh8472 you have four separate threads about minor continuity nitpicks. You're fine to post about these, that's not an issue, but it's taking up a lot of the limited front-page space with one person's observations starting a new thread every time. To keep the visible topics varied, I've merged the four and kept your poll for the warp drive. You can post new observations in here.

GUeOv2X.jpg


ehh no. I prefer to hone in on the issues and resolve each, not jumble up everything together. That's not very organized.
 
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