Nemesis crash at end

[GodThingFormerly]

okay, great ... but that doesn't help matters from my end. Is his post sarcasm, or some form of english I'm not clear on?

I believe he is simply noting that the mechanical link formed by the intertwined wreckage was evidently not strong enough to render the two multi-million ton spacecraft a single unit when the Scimitar fired its reverse thrusters.

TGT

 

[trevanian]

okay, great ... but that doesn't help matters from my end. Is his post sarcasm, or some form of english I'm not clear on?

I believe he is simply noting that the mechanical link formed by the intertwined wreckage was evidently not strong enough to render the two multi-million ton spacecraft a single unit when the Scimitar fired its reverse thrusters.

TGT

Looked like a goddamn hard dock to me, given those nasty furrows (some part of my head thinks the ships should have vaporized on impact or just bounced apart rather than gouging in.) But I'm not masochist enough to put the dvd in again to look, so I'll let it go on default.

 

[Gepard]

1) Impulse drive is supposed to have insanely powerful acceleration and relativistic top speeds - ramming another starship should result in the instant vaporization of both vessels.

I think we can safely say that, since the ramming did not do those things, then impulse does not have the properties you describe.

 

[trevanian]

1) Impulse drive is supposed to have insanely powerful acceleration and relativistic top speeds - ramming another starship should result in the instant vaporization of both vessels.

I think we can safely say that, since the ramming did not do those things, then impulse does not have the properties you describe.

Naw, it just falls under 'premise altered/undermined by lousy storytelling.' You set things up, then violate the setup because you're a lazy creator going for some space equivalent to THE ENEMY BELOW's climax.

Stuart Baird may know how to 'cut' through traffic (given a sufficiently high-priced intersection), but he sure as hell can't direct traffic.

And Logan ... geez, less said the better. Luckiest writer in Hollywood, considering everybody who rewrites him gets HIM better credits.

 

[JuanBolio]

1) Impulse drive is supposed to have insanely powerful acceleration and relativistic top speeds - ramming another starship should result in the instant vaporization of both vessels.

I think we can safely say that, since the ramming did not do those things, then impulse does not have the properties you describe.

Impulse speeds are routinely measured in large fractions of the speed of light. If you need evidence of acceleration, look no further than TMP when the Enterprise bolts away from Earth.

As for the Scimitar and the Enterprise-E being held together by the twisted wreckage - I might be able to buy that it wasn't enough to hold them together for long, but with the deep gashes the Scimitar made as it pulled away, the Enterprise shouldn't have remained rooted firmly in place, either.

 

[GodThingFormerly]

^ Perhaps the E-E's flight computer was automatically firing the RCS thrusters necessary to retain the ship's last programmed attitude and position during the Scimitar's "disentanglement maneuver" or something.

TGT

 

[FalTorPan]

The scene sucked... as did the film as a whole.

 

[Nebusj]

Looked like a goddamn hard dock to me, given those nasty furrows (some part of my head thinks the ships should have vaporized on impact or just bounced apart rather than gouging in.) But I'm not masochist enough to put the dvd in again to look, so I'll let it go on default.

Let me put it this way: take two pieces of aluminum foil. Fold them so that each has a pair of edges that vaguely look like the starship edges. Crash them together however you like.

Hold the pair up by the edges of one of these crumpled pieces. Do you want to suggest that it's not possible to pull your held piece away fast enough that the other isn't left behind?

 

[trevanian]

Looked like a goddamn hard dock to me, given those nasty furrows (some part of my head thinks the ships should have vaporized on impact or just bounced apart rather than gouging in.) But I'm not masochist enough to put the dvd in again to look, so I'll let it go on default.

Let me put it this way: take two pieces of aluminum foil. Fold them so that each has a pair of edges that vaguely look like the starship edges. Crash them together however you like.

Hold the pair up by the edges of one of these crumpled pieces. Do you want to suggest that it's not possible to pull your held piece away fast enough that the other isn't left behind?

Not to be too picky (or deliberately obtuse ... HONEST!), but I don't think you can get interpenetration with these pieces of foil no matter how you fold them or smash them. We're talking superstructure gouging its way through decking, objects of various tensile strengths, some that may contract or expand depending on the heat of impact or the cold of space or the you-fill-in-the-blank properties of the colored space they are in.

After the collision, I didn't even think of it as enterprise and scimitar, it was more like BRUNDLEFLY or ScimiPrise, a whole new form. The idea you could achieve an extraction so simply just hasn't ever registered for me.

 

[ST-One]

Looked like a goddamn hard dock to me, given those nasty furrows (some part of my head thinks the ships should have vaporized on impact or just bounced apart rather than gouging in.) But I'm not masochist enough to put the dvd in again to look, so I'll let it go on default.

Let me put it this way: take two pieces of aluminum foil. Fold them so that each has a pair of edges that vaguely look like the starship edges. Crash them together however you like.

Hold the pair up by the edges of one of these crumpled pieces. Do you want to suggest that it's not possible to pull your held piece away fast enough that the other isn't left behind?

Not to be too picky (or deliberately obtuse ... HONEST!), but I don't think you can get interpenetration with these pieces of foil no matter how you fold them or smash them. We're talking superstructure gouging its way through decking, objects of various tensile strengths, some that may contract or expand depending on the heat of impact or the cold of space or the you-fill-in-the-blank properties of the colored space they are in.

After the collision, I didn't even think of it as enterprise and scimitar, it was more like BRUNDLEFLY or ScimiPrise, a whole new form. The idea you could achieve an extraction so simply just hasn't ever registered for me.

Agreed.

 

[ancient]

The scene is fine in terms of physics. Starships are very massive, and a bunch of broken support beams will not hold them together. Also, the Schimitar clearly fires some sort of big rocket engine to pull them apart, and prehaps the exhaust from those was buffeting the Enterprise also, more than enough to cancel out any small momentum the detangling would've generated.

I don't think that smashing the ships together would create a lot of tangled things, just a lot of smooshed things. Think: car accident.

The scene is fine, it just happens to be in a really stupid movie.

 

[Brutal Strudel]

I don't think that smashing the ships together would create a lot of tangled things, just a lot of smooshed things. Think: car accident.

The scene is fine, it just happens to be in a really stupid movie.

Cars have locked together on collision, though: it's fairly common. The Sopranos even incorporated it into a scene.

 

[ancient]

It can happen, but doesn't HAVE to happen. When the tow truck hauls them away they generally tend not to have trouble getting them apart.

Look at how they collide, and how they look afterwards. This is the equivalent of a fender-bender. Only the very front section, a pretty tiny peice of the saucer is even damaged. It wasn't a collision where the entire Enterprise was a heap of twisted metal. The nose just got blown off.

Now if the Enterprise's nacelles were wrapped around the shimitar and the entire saucer was imbedded in the schimitar's nose, I could see how they might be stuck together. Then again, the ENT-E would not be getting fixed at the end, it would be in a scap pile.

 

[Brutal Strudel]

That is true.

 

[Timo]

I think people with basic knowledge of physics may be thrown off by the impression that the Scimitar pulls away at a walking pace while the E-E remains completely immobile. They know that absent friction forces and such, the inertia of the E-E would have to be infinite if the enemy ship were to pull away while leaving the hero ship in place.

However, that's just an impression. Nothing in the scene would serve as a frame of reference against which we could determine that the E-E is standing still. The scene is more consistent with the idea that the two merged ships initially start moving in unison, after which the Scimitar pulls herself out of the mess, then stops pulling - but the two ships and the shrapnel cloud of course keep on moving at a high speed relative to the original state of (no) motion. It's just that in space, it's impossible to tell that they are moving at said high speed.

"High" being rather generously defined, of course. While the Tech Manual and such imply that the ships at impulse move about at relativistic speeds, there is almost no onscreen material to support that. Were a ship to move at a TMP-like acceleration of a thousand gees, it would still take hours to work up to relativistic speeds, and most occasions where impulse speed is of relevance only involve minutes or seconds of impulse boost.

There are surprisingly few plotlines where true impulse travel from A to B is implied: usually, impulse is just a way to pass time between action scenes. Interplanetary impulse travel is most often seen in DS9, where the supposedly 1 AU trip between DS9 and Bajor takes some two hours. That's roughly 0.1% of lightspeed, assuming instantaneous acceleration, and only a tiny bit more for top speed if we assume steady acceleration and deceleration at a thousand gees. Or if we assume steady acceleration and instantaneous deceleration, which Star Trek vessels are probably capable of achieving by using some sort of a "subspace anchor" or "inertial drag chute".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[zephramc]

I have to agree with Timo. I can't be sure, but it seemed that the Scimitar was stationary when Picard ordered the Ent-E to ram. We have no idea the velocity of Enterprise, but we could assume that when the two ships collided, the moving Enterprise pushed the stationary Scimitar backward. Let's suppose that Enterprise accelerated to 1000kph. After the collision, both ships are moving at 80kph (Enterprise forward, Scimitar backward). The Enterprise still has inertia. The Scimitar would, in theory, only needs to accelerate at a slightly greater velocity and slightly different direction to break away from Enterprise.

As Timo stated there's no frame of reference to know for certain that both ships were standing still after the collision.

 

[Timo]

...Or before the collision. The spatial anomaly was clearly big enough to contain the entire battle, even back when the E-E and the Scimitar were moving at warp. Shinzon would have no reason to try and come to a standstill with respect to the anomaly, then, not even in an attempt to prevent Picard from reaching the anomaly's border and yelling for help.

It's not as if we see shrapnel from the destruction wrought on the two Romulan ships after those ships cease to be a plot point; quite possibly, the battle moved to a considerable distance from that shrapnel, and the E-E and the Scimitar flew, drifted, rammed and shook loose at relatively high velocities wrt the two Romulan wrecks.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[arch101]

I thought I'd read somewhere (where I don't know, can't find it on Google) that an 'omega' designation for auto destruct took out a lot of the surrounding area of space with the destructing ship. If that's true, than the Big E still would have taken out the Scimitar.

DES

Yeah, but we shouldn't have needed some kind of fancy "Omega" whatever. The idea that, when the E is out of torps, low on phasers, and unable to penetrate Shinzon's shields, that Picard would crash something big enough to smash through the Scimitar's shields (namely, the E herself) and then detonate the self destruct is a very sound last-ditch ploy needing no sophisticated explanation. It's a completely logical ploy. By backing off before attempting the self-destruct, Picard would give Shinzon time to detect the impending detonation and warp away. It only makes sense if the E is blown while embedded in the Scimitar. I think this may have been the writer's intention, as I can see the scene playing out like this if edited in the proper order.

 

[Timo]

But it would also make perfect sense that Picard would want to take out Shinzon without dying himself.

If that was his goal, then it would be logical to ram the Scimitar without self-detonating. If that plan didn't work, then the self-detonation might be necessary, hopefully after Picard had arranged for a suitable time window to evacuate himself and his crew. And if that plan failed, too (because the auto-destruct was offline and thus manual self-destruct would be needed, needlessly jeopardizing lives), then it might be time for plan C.

Of course, plan C should have involved more than simply Picard beaming personally over to fight a shipful of armed foes. Picard should at least have told his officers to take the E-E to safety with maneuvering thrusters, or to suit up for a spacewalk assault (even if that would take far too much time, the gesture should still have been made) as a plan D - or really to do something, anything, apart from just sitting and waiting.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[cardinal biggles]

But... but... I thought the only characters in the movie were Picard and Data! Who are these others of which you speak?