Even TOS wasn't consistent with TOS.
Maximum speed of the NuEnterprise
- Thread starter EJA
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Even TOS wasn't consistent with TOS.
Yeah, they moan on and on about being so far from home in Voyager, yet the crew in TOS go to the centre of the Milky Way on a regular basis! lol
And to the edge of the Galaxy just as quickly.
Seems like warp speeds slowed down considerably after TOS, IMO...
I've come to accept this, but wouldn't it be nice if the producers/writers took time to make things at least seem to make sense in terms of travel times? Just because it's fiction, it's space, and it's essentially magical doesn't mean it shouldn't have some sort of rules.
It would require writers and producers to have calculators when writing scripts. Ain't gonna happen, IMO, especially when a story needs our heroes to get from Planet X to Planet E in time to save the day...
Fudge factors will always win.
Fudge factors will always win.
You wouldn't need a calculator, just maybe a spreadsheet or even just a crude map with a grid.
Plus, although not in space, I'd imagine any show that said a flight time or driving time from one city to another was wildly different than what you'd expect, you'd get flak. A writer should just know how these things work, and he'd have to know by a producer of the franchise setting ground rules. Anything else would be lazy.
I've watched shows where people fly from New York to Carribean and back in what looks to be less than an hour. There are movies were a character can exit a building in NYC and walk to another NYC location in minutes even though IRL it might take a an hour. Time is only a factor when it has to be. The writers are not going to sacrifice drama for the sake of "accuracy". They need their characters to be at point A to perform task B.
Which is what I consider poor writing. A well constructed story is a one that makes sense, in every way possible. If your story takes place in New York, then the fuck accept the obstacles caused by its geography and work around them, and don't just ignore them.
Speed of plot is the lamest excuse I've ever heard. It's the excuse of writers that don't care.
The bad guy gives the hero a deadline: "Go from central park to wall street in 5 minutes." And then the writer goes "wait, that's impossible, but my story needs the hero to get there in time time. Aww, I'll just ignore that." Why doesn't he simply extend the deadline so things match up?
And unfortunately, this movie is filled with various incarnations of "speed of plot", "vision of plot", "distance of plot", "abilities of plot", "physics of plot", "weapons strength of plot", "geography of plot" that I get the impression the writers were VERY lazy.
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Yes, they don't care and they're lazy. We get it.
Took you long enough.
It's the Copy and Paste comment a couple of posters are using at the moment.
It's not so much lazy as in not accepting something that would be a creative limitation. It would be worse than trying to adhere to a mountain of really thick continuity.
Say that the writers and producers do adhere to a speed limit--that would pretty much confine our heroes only to anyplace fairly close to them, maybe within a single star system. There would be no rushing to another sector of space or another star system where something important is going down because such voyages could take months--or years--even at high warp. It would be infeasible for them to go there, especially if it was a situation where time was of the essence, because it's too far away. The NX-01 would not be going to Qo'noS in "Broken Bow," the original Enterprise would not be battling the Reliant in TWOK, and the Enterprise-D would not be there to stop the Borg in "Best of Both Worlds" and so on.
For every creative limitation, there is an equally creative workaround.
Nah, you'd just make the limits higher. Earth to Vulcan in a day. Earth to Romulus in a few days, Earth to Qo'noS in a week or more, Earth to Cardassia in a couple weeks. If those are too slow, then cut them in half or a quarter and stick to it.
You'd only have to worry about rushing if you just didn't put the ships in the right place. The situation in this movie could have been solved a little bit easier with just the right staging.
The NX-01 and Qo'noS was just a bad idea all around. They were taking the first ship with decent warp capability and saying it could reach the Klingon homeworld in four days. So 200 years later, does that mean a ship could make it there in four hours? With Enterprise, they needed to accept the limitations of technology and tell stories that suited it. Instead, it was just TNG with different costumes.
As for the other two examples, I don't see the problem.
Absolutely. Either make the speed of the ships faster for some reason or place them where they need to be as part of the plot. So in Trek 2009, have the Enterprise on a cadet cruise close to Vulcan (similar to TWoK - although we have to assume that several months passed in that movie too). Blimey that would cover the stupidity of getting to Vulcan so quickly AND the stupidity of destroying the other Federation ships so quickly. What would we have lost? A lame joke about leaving the parking brake on - and they could still have used that when they left Earth for the cruise.
Describing this as limits on 'creativity' is odd. If they didn't want to have to think their way around the history of the universe, why re-use existing characters, an existing universe, existing alien species etc. It IS suggesting that they were lazy to suggest that they couldn't possibly be 'creative' if they'd stuck to the laws of Trek physics. Surely thinking of ways to fit in with Trek requires creativity? People here have thought of warp corridors, damage to the Narada from Vulcan's orbital defences justifying its slow progress to Earth and desire to avoid Earth's defences, the passage of a little more time so Kirk isn't so green etc.
And fans are quick to call writers lazy whenever they do that.
I can almost guarantee that any new speed limit short of infinite velocity would be broken almost immediately if the story demands it.
The problem with both of those ideas is that it inevitably will place our heroes in a position where it becomes more feasible to use another vessel to go in and save the day because the heroes will be too far away to be of any good.
And any kind of limit is still, well--a limit--and one that will get in the way of dramatic storytelling.
To be fair, though, how warp drive has been depicted in all of the Trek shows have been fairly consistent--ships can cross vast sectors of space in a very short period of time. The only "real" problem is that they have never adhered to the non-canon warp scales or maps of the Star Trek Universe. Even the Voyager broke its speed limit every once in a while when the story demanded it to.
If adhering to either the so-called TOS or TNG warp scales, the ships would be too far away and it would take them months to make those voyages. It would be far more prudent for them to contact another much closer "Mary Sue" ship to go play the hero.
At Warp 6 on the TOS scale, a ship would only average 0.6 light-years per day. At the same speed on the TNG scale, it would be 1.1 light-years per day. Sure, higher warp speeds are possible, but it has been generally shown in every incarnation of Trek that they're not good for the engines and could even damage them for prolonged voyages.
Of course, the writers could go ahead and make warp speeds significantly faster--but that's actually what they kind of do...
Or the Enterprise-E in First Contact, for that matter.
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How about you give me an example and I'll try and give you a creative workaround. I don't think there's any situation that couldn't be worked out.
Writing is filled with all sorts of limits. Characters need to behave accordingly. Things need to behave how the writers establish them or possibly even how science establishes them. Stories need to have continuity to a significant degree. Apart from that, most series have some sort of writers bible that shouldn't be deviated from. These things aren't hindrances, it's just the sandbox they're allowed to play in. If they couldn't play within those guidelines, then they shouldn't write for it. I'm not saying Star Trek ever had such a guideline, but that there would be absolutely no harm in having one.
I wouldn't say never. There are several attempts to use those scales, but they are then negated by someone who just doesn't care. For instance, going back to Enterprise, they define the time it takes to get to Neptune and back at warp five. Oddly enough, it fits the TOS scale for warp drive almost exactly. The problem then comes when you actually give those figures out and then say that a trip to Qo'noS can be made in four days. Someone is going to do the math, and figure out that the writers screwed up.
I never said that they had to follow the math of what was in the technical manual. All they had to do is lay out a spreadsheet of how long it takes to get from A to B, B to C, and A to C, and then consistently follow that instead of "the speed of plot".
"If the story demands it." What does that even mean? A sequence of good scenes connected without any sense is not a good story.
I said it before somewhere. A 17th century sailing ship movie that has a lot of drama in the beginning because the trip from England to Cape Town takes WEEKS. But then in Cape Town one of the crew members shows signs of a mysterious illness and is going to die in two days. His only hope is a hospital in London. Since this character needs to save his father's life later in the movie, the story obviously demands that he survives. So the sailing ship simply goes at the speed of plot and makes it just in time.
Would you say that's a good story? Every scene in that story is perfect oscar material, dialogue and all, and the tension and pace has you at the edge of your seat every time, but the connections between the scenes are stupid, contrived and make no sense. Something like that is awful, in my opinion. When speed of plot is used, or when a character who is usually intelligent makes a totally stupid decision, or when suddenly a very odd coincidence happens, just so that the writer is able to connect cool scene A with cool scene B, stuff like that is very lazy and lame, and not creative.
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Borg ship came out of a transwarp conduit and has entered Sector 001. The Battle for Earth has begun, and Starfleet is losing ships left and right every minute. The Borg are now within reach of the Sol System. Unfortunately, the Enterprise is way over at the Neutral Zone at this time. How will our heroes save the day?
That's your scenario.
See, that's the thing--warp drive does behave how as the writers have established it. Writers have always fudged warp speeds and travel times in Trek. Every Trek series and movie has done it since day one.
As a result, Trek has maintained a consistency with keeping warp speeds vague and undefined. If anything, what's in error are the offscreen materials that says "warp x equals this" or "the Klingon Empire is x light-years away."
For the most part, Trek has maintained a general continuity. Looking at the whole of it--some 600+ episodes and nearly a dozen films, the continuity violations are actually few and far between. It's just that Trek fans tend to pick these things out and debate them over and over again.
Actually, the only series that tried to adhere to any known warp scale was VOY, and even then they found a way around it. I don't think it is case of someone not caring, but someone knowing that the story comes first.
I think that someone is going to be in a really small minority of viewers. Even among Trek fans, there are very few of us watching the telly with calculators in hand to see if they got the non-canon warp factors right...
It doesn't matter what the spreadsheet is or what the math is. It will still get in the way of dramatic necessity because the speed of plot will always be faster or slower depending on the story. It's the "drawback" of any kind of series whose primary goal is entertainment rather than being 100% scientifically accurate.
I thought it was kind of self-explanatory myself.
It depends on what you consider "without any sense". For most of us, it makes perfect sense for our heroes to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible. Anything else is just quibbling or nitpicking over things most audiences couldn't care less about.
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