Question about the new 'V' motherships

[Christopher]

^The point is, though, if you're going to design sets that are that bland and empty, wouldn't it be cheaper to actually build them?

 

[Reverend]

I have no idea. Maybe, maybe not. Though I'm reasonably confident it'd be a nightmare keeping physical sets so spotlessly clean. Plus of course some of those rooms are very big and that'd eat up a lot of stage space.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

The insides of the Visitor ships are all 'virtual'? Kind of like The Starlost?

 

[Christopher]

I have no idea. Maybe, maybe not. Though I'm reasonably confident it'd be a nightmare keeping physical sets so spotlessly clean.

Starfleet sets always looked spotless in the Trek shows. And most of the mothership "sets" are far simpler. Not to mention so drab that who's going to bother paying attention to their cleanliness? If anything, a little imperfection would make them less boring and less fakey.

Plus of course some of those rooms are very big and that'd eat up a lot of stage space.

Then you simply build smaller swing (temporary) sets in the open space, the way the 24th-century Trek shows often did with their cargo bay and hangar sets. Or you build it out of wild panels that can be easily struck and reassembled as needed. TV series and movies have been doing these things with far more elaborate sets for many decades. It's no great burden.

 

[Silvercrest]

Of course that's true, since V predated ID4 by 13 years. Then again, the moment I first saw the original V back in 1983, I could tell right off that it was imitating Arthur C. Clarke's 1953 novel Childhood's End:

There had been no warning when the great ships came pouring out of the unknown depths of space. Countless times this day had been described in fiction, but no one had really believed that it would ever come. Now it had dawned at last; the gleaming, silent shapes hanging over every land were the symbol of a science man could not hope to match for centuries. For six days they had floated motionless above his cities, giving no hint that they knew of his existence. But none was needed; not by chance alone could those mighty ships have come to rest so precisely over New York, London, Paris, Moscow, Rome, Cape Town, Tokyo, Canberra. . . .

I'm a lifelong fan of Kenneth Johnson's work, but one thing he's not is original.

But in the passage you quote there, even Clarke admits the idea is not terribly original. "Countless times this day had been described in fiction". If Johnson is unoriginal than so is Clarke.

And let's not forget... Childhood's End is an adaptation of "Guardian Angel."

 

[Shatnertage]

The thing that gets me about the V motherships is that they're just hanging over someone's apartment. Isn't that kind of rude?

"Hey, I'm going to show up at your planet and park myself over your building! Bye-bye sunlight!"

"Aw c'mon, move already! All my plants are dead!"

Wouldn't it make more sense to park them over the ocean? And be more polite to those in the cities below? Unless it's just a psychological ploy to underline just how throughly the Vs arrival changes everything.

Or, as others in this thread have suggested, because it just looks cool.

 

[Christopher]

^Not to mention that the FAA would probably have objections.

For that matter, that big ship hovering over the city, no doubt giving off plenty of waste heat as well as serving as an atmospheric obstruction, would have a significant effect on the weather.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Sports stadiums would love it, though. Really cuts down on the rainouts when you've got a mothership hovering over your building.

 

[Shatnertage]

Isn't the bottom of the ship white tiles, though? It would make fielding outfield fly balls pretty interesting.

 

[diankra]

^No, any sensible engineer would design the ship to orbit the planet and send down reasonable-sized landing craft. Contrary to what Star Trek and other shows tend to claim, orbit requires no power at all.

It requires a bit of power, occasionally, to make up for the tiny bit of atmospheric drag. But I take your point.

However, it's a different point. If you were to do a properly realistic version of V, the ships wouldn't hover above cities, there would be a squadron of ships in 'normal' orbit so that one was overhead at any time. And maybe other ships in geosync.

But that's not what either vintage of Visitors want, so they have the ships hovering over major cities (and that might even be a more sensible way of doing it than setting up the halo orbits that comms sats need to cover areas further from the equator, like Moscow).

To return to my original point: the anti-grav power needed to hover above a city on a 1G planet is a lot less than's needed to accelerate the same ship out of orbit and up to anything resembling relativistic velocities.

 

[Peter the Younger]

According to this site, they are:

a) between 1-3 kilometers across;
b) far too big to make any sense.

I'd love to see Number 2 represented some day. "We have a device on board that (magically) equalizes the air pressure around the spacecraft. If we turn it off, the resulting weather patterns will make Katrina look like a light drizzle."