Model shots - strange flight paths around planets.

[DizzyMan]

Daowulf said:Worse than the curving orbits, though, is the VOY opening sequence where the ship's reflection can be seen in the planet rings -- not the issue of whether the ring material could reflect the ship, which has been pointed out many times, but the more significant issue of the fact that the rings must be hundreds of miles below the ship, making any reflection way too small to see.

That shot of Voyager flying over the planet's ring doesn't bother me too much.

Voyager clearly is flying only a few metres above the ring, and clearly is flying very near to the inner edge of the ring, but the ring extends off to the right of the frame. For all we know, it could extend hundreds of miles to the right.

We have no way of really knowing how far away the part of the ring is that extends into the distance and curves round the planet, but if this is a normal-sized planet then that far portion of ring would have to be thousands of miles away, meaning that it would have to be hundreds of miles in width.

Let's suppose the far portion of ring is 10,000 miles away, and the ring is 1,000 miles in width. That would mean Voager is flying right along the inside rim of the massive ring. There is no way to 'disprove' that this is happening. The only thing you could say might be that the curve on the 'horizon' wouldn't appear so great. But it's a minor detail.

As for Voyager being 'reflected' by the rocks, that does seem dubious to me. You need a fairly smooth surface to get a reflection, but when the camera flies through the ring, it seems to have quite an uneven consistency, with many large displaced rocks, as opposed to a mass of tiny particles in uniform. Therefore, I wouldn't expect any kind of good reflection, more of a general glow that extends down somewhat (like a light reflecting over water, only hazier).

 

[Timo]

Actually, the big problem is the fact that the scene continues past the shot where the ship and only part of the ring are seen. Namely, this view allows us to count how many "sub-rings" the ship is wide and vice versa, and further to approximate the number of sub-rings in the ring system. We get a total width of only about a few dozen (20-50) ship-widths for the entire ring system, which isn't very nice for our purposes.

The whole idea of those sub-rings is contrary to known physics in the first place. Analogous structures in the rings of Saturn are hundreds or thousands of kilometers wide, not mere meters like shown here. Yet certainly the effect, largely greated by gravitic interaction at Saturn, could be reproduced in different scales, perhaps by electromagnetic forces.

We could say that the sub-rings are of realistic size, in which case the ring system and the planet become realistic in size as well but the reflection becomes aphysical (in size, that is, never mind how it is created). Or we could say that the reflection is realistic, in which case the sub-rings, the total ring width and the size of the planet all become aphysical.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[DizzyMan]

Timo,

Hey, you're right. Looking at that frame, it is clear that the planet/moon must be ludicrously small.

The only way I can rationalise the scene in my head now is to imagine that Voyager is shining a huge searchlight into the distance, and it's reflecting off the distant debris, which is hundreds of miles away.

If they'd only not done that stupid reflection, the scene could have been great. Actually, it would have been even better if they'd had Voyager fly off into the distance towards the ring, so you could see how far away the ring actually was supposed to be.

I often wish Trek would show more of ships flying into the distance when there's a planet in the background. It would help us to appreciate how large the planet was. It would be nice to have some shots where the camera is flying alongside the ship as it approaches the planet (with the planet getting slowly bigger) — then the camera falls behind and we see the ship vanish into the distance.

Oh, another thing that bothers me is when we do see a ship flying towards something distant, the angle is usually wrong and it looks as though it's flying at a tangent to the destination. This is no doubt because the special effects guys think of the distant planet and ship as being approximately the same size, and imagine that a small ship will reach something millions of miles away in a few seconds when it's only travelling slowly.

 

[Michael]

I never really thought about that. But you're right -- there is no real scientific explanation for how the orbiting is portrayed. But I think it is just made to look dramatic/cool. After all this is a TV series, not a space documentary.

 

[Ronald Held]

Yes orbiting scenes are mostly for the dramatic.
one might say ring Physics was known less well when the Voyager opening credits were CGed, but a technical advisor could have explained what was unphysical with not too much difficulty