NX-01 : Should it have gotten shields in Season 1
- Thread starter DumbDumb2007
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It shouldn't have had shields and the writers should have come up with something creative to replace them that wouldn't immediately evoke "shields with a different name". Would it be harder to do this? Yes, but that is the point, Enterprise should have been something bolder.
I think the animosity seen towards Voyager and Enterprise isn't so much because of what the shows were but what they could have been. Both series really squandered the interesting opportunities afforded by fully exploiting their interesting premises for more of the old. People can dismiss a mediocre show but it's harder to ignore something that could have been great.
I think the animosity seen towards Voyager and Enterprise isn't so much because of what the shows were but what they could have been. Both series really squandered the interesting opportunities afforded by fully exploiting their interesting premises for more of the old. People can dismiss a mediocre show but it's harder to ignore something that could have been great.
Well, in a vacuum, the cooling is governed by the Stephan-Boltzman law, since the only loss of temperature is from radiation. Happily, http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/cootime.html#c1 explains the derivation of the cooling time; and even better, the related page http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/cootime.html#c2 allows one to experiment with cooling times for objects with different physical properties, compositions, temperatures, and so on.Cyclopean said:
^^Corpses can't suffocate.
I just think the effect is cool.
By the way, in your professional opinion, how quickly do you think bodies freeze in 3°K?
Making a very simplified model of the human body as a sphere of water massing 100 kilograms -- which is inaccurate for most of us, but is on the right order of magnitude -- and supposing that the body starts from a temperature of 37 Celsius (310 Kelvin), then cooling to 0 Celsius (273 Kelvin) will take something on the order of 6000 seconds, or a hundred minutes. Unpleasant, certainly, although you'll be dead from the lack of air long before.
As a complicating factor, in ``Azati Prime'' the ship was in the vicinity of a star -- and planet, as I remember -- and those will be radiating heat back to the body, so it will take longer to freeze. Note that Apollo 13, with its heating off, settled down to something around five degrees Celsius with the heat of three bodies, the sun, and -- in the distance -- Earth and Moon. (Skylab, with the Earth radiating up half its sky, was quite warmer during its distressed phase in May 1973.)
Cooling down to three degrees Kelvin -- the blackbody temperature of space -- takes something around ten billion seconds (330 years), so it's not really something to worry about too soon.
Well, if you like, although maybe the best shorthand is the view of vacuum-breathing from 2001: A Space Odyssey. But probably all the important answers are given succinctly in Dr Emmanual M Roth's 1966 paper Rapid (Explosive) Decompression Emergencies In Pressure-Suited Subjects, which is available on the web at http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19690004637_1969004637.pdf
It's a bit technical, necessarily, but starting from page 43 it reviews case histories of human beings subject to sudden decompression to various-grade vacuums, and how long they stayed usefully conscious, and how they felt after being brought back into the air.
Recommended (as of forty years ago) therapies and supply kits are outlined in the later pages of the report, and as Arthur C Clarke's pointed out in essays about this subject, a person who knows it is reasonbly likely he will have to take a breath of vacuum, and who can spend a bit of time preparing for it, will probably have more useful consciousness time even if there's not much to do about the physical consequences of the decompression.
Not only should the NX-01 never have had shields (which it didn't, thankfully), but it also should never have had a transporter, phase cannons or 'photonic' torpedoes. The plasma cannons and spatial torpedoes of early Season 1 were far, far better at creating a low-tech feel to the show.
By Season 2, the producers seemed to have lost confidence in their premise (as they did with Voyager), and wanted to just churn out the same kind of feel that brought in audiences for TNG. Look at the way they just thew in photonic torpedoes for no reason whatsoever, save for the fact that they were, essentially, the same things we'd been watching for 20 years prior.
Also, as someone said above, the producers clearly just re-named 'deflector shields' in the pilot episode to 'polarized hull plating'. They acted as the exact same thing! Surely, such armour is a physical entity that can be damaged and blown off, unlike shields which are a barrier of energy (and can therefore be re-charged)?
Meh. It was still an alright show. Gave off more of a TOS vibe than DS9 and VOY did.
By Season 2, the producers seemed to have lost confidence in their premise (as they did with Voyager), and wanted to just churn out the same kind of feel that brought in audiences for TNG. Look at the way they just thew in photonic torpedoes for no reason whatsoever, save for the fact that they were, essentially, the same things we'd been watching for 20 years prior.
Also, as someone said above, the producers clearly just re-named 'deflector shields' in the pilot episode to 'polarized hull plating'. They acted as the exact same thing! Surely, such armour is a physical entity that can be damaged and blown off, unlike shields which are a barrier of energy (and can therefore be re-charged)?
Meh. It was still an alright show. Gave off more of a TOS vibe than DS9 and VOY did.
Well, it sort of makes sense that the first Earth starship to have exciting adventures would be one equipped with breakthrough technologies. The ones that sailed out without transporters and phase cannon would probably have one "exciting adventure" apiece, something like "Fight or Flight" without the happy end.
For Kirk, space adventures were supposed to be dull routine, something his granddad had already been bored with. For Archer, there had to exist a rationale as to why he was the first to do everything. A ship that was ready for the job would be a workable rationale.
Agreed, of course, about all the other aspects of making NX-01 work like NCC-1701-E.
Timo Saloniemi
For Kirk, space adventures were supposed to be dull routine, something his granddad had already been bored with. For Archer, there had to exist a rationale as to why he was the first to do everything. A ship that was ready for the job would be a workable rationale.
Agreed, of course, about all the other aspects of making NX-01 work like NCC-1701-E.
Timo Saloniemi
I think that it might have worked better had they focused on the "We're the first out here!" thing, rather than the "We're the first to meet the Klingons/Romulans/Axanar/*insert TOS/TNG race here*!" or "We're the first with transporters/phase cannons/photonic torpedoes etc!". If they really must introduce some of those, they should have had an episode or an arc about it. Though I didn't like it thematically, I was satisfied with the way the phase cannons were introduced.
Anyway, when I first started watching ENT, I was hoping for them to do things slower. Show that their ship really was crawling through space. I expected the first season to be set around the Earth colonies as they made their way out. We'd see lots of other human and Starfleet ships, bases, and generally set up the universe at this point (find out what Earth is really like, pre-Federation, and its relationship with other races). Then, we'd move out beyond the farthest colony at the end of the first year, moving on into uncharted territories. Starfleet would now only be in contact via communication channels - there are no other ships to back them up if they get in trouble.
Somewhat disappointingly, all we got were scripts left over from VOY
Anyway, when I first started watching ENT, I was hoping for them to do things slower. Show that their ship really was crawling through space. I expected the first season to be set around the Earth colonies as they made their way out. We'd see lots of other human and Starfleet ships, bases, and generally set up the universe at this point (find out what Earth is really like, pre-Federation, and its relationship with other races). Then, we'd move out beyond the farthest colony at the end of the first year, moving on into uncharted territories. Starfleet would now only be in contact via communication channels - there are no other ships to back them up if they get in trouble.
Somewhat disappointingly, all we got were scripts left over from VOY
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