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Spoilers ST Discovery - Starships and Technology Season Three SPOILER Discussion

We have companies today that make cars that look - externally - like classic 60s vehicles but have modern engines/steering/electronics. If you CAN, why would you not?

STO plays with this a lot, with Starfleet of 2409 making ships to honour the design of Connies, Constellations, etc. The latest one is a 25th Century Miranda (Reliant-Class).

Yeah, but Trek isn't without precedent of using 100 year old designs in the 24th century.
Miranda and Excelsior classes (and Constellation - seldom as it was) were still in use.
The USS Lakota (Excelsior class) was upgraded before the start of the Dominion war with modern technology and it ended up rivaling one of the most powerful ships in Starfleet (USS Defiant) without even having ablative hull armor... and speed-wise, O'Brien suggested the Lakota could may have been much faster than the Defiant (Warp speed wise).

Past the initial 100 years, I doubt any new ships would be made because modern designs are generally BETTER.
I sincerely doubt that Starfleet was making new Excelsior or Miranda class ships in late 24th century.

My thinking is that a new class of ships is produced for about 10... maybe 20 years before newest designs take precedence (construction-wise)... at least when it comes to the Federation.
Other major powers like the Klingons may have other ideas and could be producing older ships for much longer.

Any SURVIVING starfleet ship designs will likely continued to be upgraded with modern hardware (and probably revamp their hulls in the process by harvesting the existing one and use this matter to convert it into energy and just materialize new hull in place - same with any other innards of the ships).

In the 24th century and beyond it would be relatively easy to do this with industrial grade replicators... and with programmable matter (later on) it makes things similarly easy.

Its possible certain designs are just phased out entirely after a certain amount of time (after about 200 years)... after all, even Earth was surprised that a ship with metallurgy from 23rd-25th century would still be in use... so its possible that Programmable matter just makes ANY modern technology work with a very old design.
 
There are a couple "outs" - for starters, when they got to Earth earlier this season the locals scanned Discovery and reported that their ship was indicative of 23rd-35th century makeup / metallurgy / whatever (nevermind that historical records SHOULD have popped up instantly that it was a Crossfield-class ship from the 2350s). In any case, it suggests that ships of that era were generally supplanted by ships with more advanced / different metallurgical makeup. Perhaps this means that ships after the 25th century are made of sterner stuff, such that there may well be 400+ year old starships in active service? Could that be when holographic matter comes into widespread use?

Mark
 
Brief tech comments on today's offering:

- Having 32nd century forcefields look exactly like 2250s is doing the opposite of growing on me.
- Saru is no longer wary of "executing" his Black Alerts while inside the HQ cloak bubble. I wonder if any ship sitting right below the Discovery would really be crushed by the spore jump maneuver?
- Speaking of wonders, are Culber's medical ones this week are 23rd or 32nd century stock? Also, it seems McCoy could do more with less. That is, less intrusively or obtrusively.
- Having Osyyra's ship be considered a "heavy cruiser" is another 23rd vs 32nd century thing. The impression we get is that such ships outgun Saru's by some margin, even though the size differential isn't significant.
- Osyyra had weird ideas of bombardment. Initially, she seems to be commanding for the forests to be torched, but we never see a fire, beyond the specific fireballs of the impacts. But then Burnham for some reason assumes the Orions are targeting the defensive system. Is she in error?
-Perhaps this is because one station in that system was hit? But there seem to be thousands if not tens of thousands of the torpedoes raining down, so that half a dozen can hit mere dozens of meters from our heroes; a couple hitting defense system nodes by sheer coincidence appears inevitable. Granted, the heroes are obviously close to what counts as the local capital, so the density of impacts there might be a lot higher than average. And the VFX does show Osyyra's ship putting out volumes of the things.
- Speaking of the VFX, there are three shots (I think) where the ship is clearly shown to be only a couple of miles high, visible from the surface in detail, yet interspersed with ones showing her on medium orbit hundreds of miles up. Trek so far has done pretty well to steer clear of this sort of nonsense. But the dialogue did specify that Osyyra was going down in order to pursue her agenda; it's actually the orbital VFX that is at odds with the plot in this case!
- The torpedoes obviously have low-yield warheads, somewhere around the ST5:TFF level. It would make sense for Osyyra to fire such if she wants to keep on milking this place further. And for her to concentrate her fire on the capital area for demonstrative-punitive reasons. In a nod to another TOS movie or two, her wussy projectiles don't appear to hurt Booker's ship much, either - perhaps she can't easily switch yields?
- We get a good close-up of the hero ship when the amplifier beam is fired up. Yeah, the deflector is gone for good, replaced by a flat plate and surrounded by Tokyo Drift lights. The inner surfaces of the rings have bands of light that may or may not replace/obscure the original portholes. The phaser pairs on the inner ring are at their usual places, only glowing white rather than red, but the outer ring has now gained phaser banks, too (again outboard of the spinners). And it's not so much as if the lower box of the secondary hull would be totally gone - rather, the wings have been thickened, but with two trenches per side to still allow for lateral portholes. The blended shapes might preserve volume in addition to view.
- Still no sign of torpedo tubes, and now there no longer are candidate features at the nacelle tips.

Okay, so much for brief. In general, the space duel was fun to watch, and would have been even more fun if executed as commanded, down in the upper atmosphere. The bombardment was agonizing, though, with purely dramatic pacing of near-misses. I guess it can be excused in treknology terms: Osyyra really was firing blind, carpet-bombing when she didn't want to really destroy, and with good odds of near-missing everything important. It's just that it happens so many times in a row to our heroes, defying expected statistics.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Having 32nd century forcefields look exactly like 2250s is doing the opposite of growing on me.
It's lazy VFX work IMO.

- Saru is no longer wary of "executing" his Black Alerts while inside the HQ cloak bubble. I wonder if any ship sitting right below the Discovery would really be crushed by the spore jump maneuver?
I wouldn't want to be the one to find out.

- Speaking of wonders, are Culber's medical ones this week are 23rd or 32nd century stock? Also, it seems McCoy could do more with less. That is, less intrusively or obtrusively.
No clue, other than the Holographic UI, the scanning suit seemed kinda low tech even compared to the 24th century stuff.

- Having Osyyra's ship be considered a "heavy cruiser" is another 23rd vs 32nd century thing. The impression we get is that such ships outgun Saru's by some margin, even though the size differential isn't significant.
You saw the number of large Energy Gun Turrets mounted on her ship, in a straight up exchange, there is a good chance that Discovery might lose.

- Osyyra had weird ideas of bombardment. Initially, she seems to be commanding for the forests to be torched, but we never see a fire, beyond the specific fireballs of the impacts. But then Burnham for some reason assumes the Orions are targeting the defensive system. Is she in error?
Osyyra was stating she's going to burn down his forest one Hecapte at a time, it was just systematic deforrestation and Book's Brother's Planetary Shields did a admirable job of defending his planet, but some energy damage still passed through the shielding from Osyrra's Energy Bolts from her ship.

-Perhaps this is because one station in that system was hit? But there seem to be thousands if not tens of thousands of the torpedoes raining down, so that half a dozen can hit mere dozens of meters from our heroes; a couple hitting defense system nodes by sheer coincidence appears inevitable. Granted, the heroes are obviously close to what counts as the local capital, so the density of impacts there might be a lot higher than average. And the VFX does show Osyyra's ship putting out volumes of the things.
Those weren't torpedoes raining down, those were energy bolts from Osyrra's ship blasting onto the planetary shields to threaten Book's Brother with Orbital Deforestation until she gets what she wants. Some of the energy from the bolts impact against the shields penetrated onto the surface, ergo the small explosions behind Michael.

- Speaking of the VFX, there are three shots (I think) where the ship is clearly shown to be only a couple of miles high, visible from the surface in detail, yet interspersed with ones showing her on medium orbit hundreds of miles up. Trek so far has done pretty well to steer clear of this sort of nonsense. But the dialogue did specify that Osyyra was going down in order to pursue her agenda; it's actually the orbital VFX that is at odds with the plot in this case!
Their VFX house doesn't know how to get perspective correct for a ship that's supposed to be ____ km above the ground.

- The torpedoes obviously have low-yield warheads, somewhere around the ST5:TFF level. It would make sense for Osyyra to fire such if she wants to keep on milking this place further. And for her to concentrate her fire on the capital area for demonstrative-punitive reasons. In a nod to another TOS movie or two, her wussy projectiles don't appear to hurt Booker's ship much, either - perhaps she can't easily switch yields?
Again, not torpedoes raining down, but Energy Bolts from her Ships main turreted guns.
Booker's ship was piloted by Detmer who was doing Death Star like close to the hull strafing runs so that the turrets wouldn't be able to track her ship whizzing by at high relative speeds.
Osyrra's Ship had HUGE Turreted guns that must have High Mass and High Energy output, ergo not good at tracking nimble targets.

- We get a good close-up of the hero ship when the amplifier beam is fired up. Yeah, the deflector is gone for good, replaced by a flat plate and surrounded by Tokyo Drift lights. The inner surfaces of the rings have bands of light that may or may not replace/obscure the original portholes. The phaser pairs on the inner ring are at their usual places, only glowing white rather than red, but the outer ring has now gained phaser banks, too (again outboard of the spinners). And it's not so much as if the lower box of the secondary hull would be totally gone - rather, the wings have been thickened, but with two trenches per side to still allow for lateral portholes. The blended shapes might preserve volume in addition to view.
The main Elongated Hexagonal shaped Deflector looks like a clone of modern AESA style Radar Emitters hidden behind protective cover with RGB lighting on the edges. The Planetary Dome sensor on the Ventral side is finally used as a beam emitter. The StarDrive section seems to copy modern B-2 Stealth Bomber like design where it's a Blended Wing Body shape.

- Still no sign of torpedo tubes, and now there no longer are candidate features at the nacelle tips.
Yeah, that still bothers me.

Okay, so much for brief. In general, the space duel was fun to watch, and would have been even more fun if executed as commanded, down in the upper atmosphere. The bombardment was agonizing, though, with purely dramatic pacing of near-misses. I guess it can be excused in treknology terms: Osyyra really was firing blind, carpet-bombing when she didn't want to really destroy, and with good odds of near-missing everything important. It's just that it happens so many times in a row to our heroes, defying expected statistics.
There was some HORRIBLE camera placement where the camera was pointed towards the inside of Book's ship instead of focusing on the Space Battle. That's some horrible Directing by whomever is in charge of the CGI Camera placement.

Osyrra was just threatening to "DeForest" the planet, she wasn't targeting any specific person and she never made that specific threat. Her threat was to remove a Hecapte of Forrest for every time she gets delayed what she wants, which is for Book's brother to hand Book over so she can use Book as leverage to get Ryn back. So Michael & Book weren't being targeted specifically in any way shape or form. The explosions were incidental and lucky that none of them were hit directly by any of the Energy blasts that got past the Planetary Shields.

NOTE: Just rewatched the scene and Gen Rhys says Osyraa is using a Grid targeting pattern to systematically burn down his forest, or at least attempt to. So yeah, Osyraa is not targeting anybody specifically, but going for a giant Square/Rectangular grid of destruction.
 
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No clue, other than the Holographic UI, the scanning suit seemed kinda low tech even compared to the 24th century stuff.

Indeed. But Culber talks about "advancement" both as regards the scan and the quick-acting sedation, so presumably both come courtesy of Admiral Vance.

Osyyra was stating she's going to burn down his forest one Hecapte at a time, it was just systematic deforrestation and Book's Brother's Planetary Shields did a admirable job of defending his planet, but some energy damage still passed through the shielding from Osyrra's Energy Bolts from her ship.

Yup, seems so: the intent was to burn the forest but she wasn't there yet.

Which is tactically silly, because carpet-bombing would be great for burning the forests but is the one way granted to prolong the agony of taking down the shield. But if she can't see where the shield nodes are, she can't concentrate her fire against those. And perhaps concentrating fire against a specific shield segment won't hurt more than spreading it out?

Those weren't torpedoes raining down, those were energy bolts from Osyrra's ship blasting onto the planetary shields

But Book specifically identifies them as photon torpedoes. And if we want to argue that he'd really have no way of telling (where would he have experienced the acoustic effect of photons vs. these shields before), despite his dealings with the Emerald Chain weaponry, Burnham later confirms that the Nautilus was hit by eight photon torpedoes in the fight. All of Osyyra's fire seemed to be of the same sort - ergo, the turret guns fired photon torpedoes.

Their VFX house doesn't know how to get perspective correct for a ship that's supposed to be ____ km above the ground.

We never hear of a specific altitude - but we do hear she "dropped into the atmosphere". So the orbital VFX is the one in error, showing just a few ship's lengths of descent at best.

Osyrra's Ship had HUGE Turreted guns that must have High Mass and High Energy output, ergo not good at tracking nimble targets.

Which is weird in itself. Why not make them good at tracking? Only move those parts that absolutely must, and then put some serious power into that movement. I mean, the power needed to turn the turret of a 20th century battleship is a good fraction of her propulsive output, but with a starship, it just plain can't be.

It won't be a rate-of-fire issue, either, not with the witnessed rates. Detmer's dodging must be better than we can imagine if only eight of those blasts connected.

The Planetary Dome sensor on the Ventral side is finally used as a beam emitter.

Which is again weird, because they're doing the same thing as on Kaminar in "Sound of Thunder", and they didn't need a visible beam there. (I guess the Ba'ul beams were used instead. But it's sound amplification and distribution in both cases. Why does that need to travel on a beam of visible light?)

...For a further technical note, the techniques of Adira on the cello and Stamets on the grand piano fall quite short of convincing. Data did much better with his violin (does Spiner play?).

They seem to have fiddled with the corridor that opens to the shuttlebay, widening it to allow for the final scene with Book, Burnham and all those pieces of luggage. Sounds a bit silly, changing the set for that one shot. Frakes should know better!

Timo Saloniemi
 
On Discovery's weapons systems... I wouldn't be surprised if Programmable matter simply creates torpedo tubes and weapons ports (such as say phaser strips) when combat is due to occur.

As for Viridian firepower... meh, rapid firing of energy bolts or torpedoes is not something I'm impressed with. Federation ships also have this capability with phaser strips, but VFX guys (or the writers/directors) just plain ignore it most of the time to give 'some' advantage to the bad guys and create an impression that they are powerful.

To be fair, we also don't know how much more powerful Discovery got. Despite their description of the Viridian, no one on the bridge seemed to have mentioned that Disco would be at a disadvantage in a firefight.
 
Indeed. But Culber talks about "advancement" both as regards the scan and the quick-acting sedation, so presumably both come courtesy of Admiral Vance.
Then it must the information processing speeds of the scan that is "Advanced, near real time processing on a atomic level must have vast amounts of data".


Which is tactically silly, because carpet-bombing would be great for burning the forests but is the one way granted to prolong the agony of taking down the shield. But if she can't see where the shield nodes are, she can't concentrate her fire against those. And perhaps concentrating fire against a specific shield segment won't hurt more than spreading it out?
She was just trying to raise the pressure on Book's brother, she rather get what she wants then burn down his forrest, ergo the slow "Deforestation". Plus she doesn't know where the Shield Nodes are hidden, it could be buried under ground for all we know and projected out barely above the tree tops like we saw in the VFX sequence. I highly doubt Book's Brother would tell her any information on their planetary defense grid. You can't concentrate fire if you don't know where one end of the shield node ends and the other takes over, if it's "Seemless", then it might as well appear as one giant chunk to the assaulter.


But Book specifically identifies them as photon torpedoes. And if we want to argue that he'd really have no way of telling (where would he have experienced the acoustic effect of photons vs. these shields before), despite his dealings with the Emerald Chain weaponry, Burnham later confirms that the Nautilus was hit by eight photon torpedoes in the fight. All of Osyyra's fire seemed to be of the same sort - ergo, the turret guns fired photon torpedoes.
I'll have to disagree with you on that. Those looked like energy bolts and the Torpedo could've fired off-screen in the battle. And a LARGE chunk of the battle was either zoomed out from planetside or obscured by the cockpit of the Nautilus. For the Torpedos to track and hit the Nautilus while it's doing it's "Death Star-style strafing attacks", the Torpedoes must be able to manuever and track the Nautilus. Ergo, the straight moving energy bolt looking projectiles from the turrets must be normal old energy bolts. The torpedos were just never shown in the VFX.


We never hear of a specific altitude - but we do hear she "dropped into the atmosphere". So the orbital VFX is the one in error, showing just a few ship's lengths of descent at best.
It could be or we don't get a good sense as to what their altitude is.


Which is weird in itself. Why not make them good at tracking? Only move those parts that absolutely must, and then put some serious power into that movement. I mean, the power needed to turn the turret of a 20th century battleship is a good fraction of her propulsive output, but with a starship, it just plain can't be.
The larger the turrets, the harder it is to turn them, even with electric motors. I highly doubt her ship had CIWS style anti-projectile and anti-fighter capabilities. Probably a oversight on her or her designer since she probably never had to contest against a competent space pilot in a star fighter level of manueverability vessel.


It won't be a rate-of-fire issue, either, not with the witnessed rates. Detmer's dodging must be better than we can imagine if only eight of those blasts connected.
Don't forget that the computer was helping for some of the battle, we don't know when the Torpedoes hit, so it could be either Detmer or the computer's fault that the torpedoes hit or just unavoidable due to circumstance.


Which is again weird, because they're doing the same thing as on Kaminar in "Sound of Thunder", and they didn't need a visible beam there. (I guess the Ba'ul beams were used instead. But it's sound amplification and distribution in both cases. Why does that need to travel on a beam of visible light?)
VFX beam for the uninformed audience.


...For a further technical note, the techniques of Adira on the cello and Stamets on the grand piano fall quite short of convincing. Data did much better with his violin (does Spiner play?).
::Shrugs:: No clue.

They seem to have fiddled with the corridor that opens to the shuttlebay, widening it to allow for the final scene with Book, Burnham and all those pieces of luggage. Sounds a bit silly, changing the set for that one shot. Frakes should know better!
Or they permanently widened the corridor during the refit?
 
Then it must the information processing speeds of the scan that is "Advanced, near real time processing on a atomic level must have vast amounts of data".

That would be the fun way to interpret the sperm suit: it's ancient, pre-McCoy tech, but the 32nd century allows it to perform much more significant scans.

The quick sedation thing appears to be a novelty to both the 2250s medics, though. We first see such things in action in the TOS era, so it's not exactly supertech, but it's still better than what Culber previously could achieve without blasting his patients with a phaser on stun...

I'll have to disagree with you on that. Those looked like energy bolts and the Torpedo could've fired off-screen in the battle. And a LARGE chunk of the battle was either zoomed out from planetside or obscured by the cockpit of the Nautilus. For the Torpedos to track and hit the Nautilus while it's doing it's "Death Star-style strafing attacks", the Torpedoes must be able to manuever and track the Nautilus. Ergo, the straight moving energy bolt looking projectiles from the turrets must be normal old energy bolts. The torpedos were just never shown in the VFX.

Here I must point out that the VFX for torpedoes basically invariably shows "energy bolts" that travel in straight lines. What Osyyra fires is no different from what our TNG heroes fire when they spit out photon torpedoes in, say, ST:FC or ST:NEM.

Torpedoes do maneuver in all eras, from ENT to DSC S1-2 to TOS (dialogue only) to TNG to PIC. But the most typical maneuver for a torpedo is a beeline...

It could be or we don't get a good sense as to what their altitude is.

The altitude in the shots from Book's POV is sorta fine: the ship is a few klicks up, hovering above the capital and trying to punch a fairly local hole in the defenses.

As for the definition of "local", when Book and Burnham went under the scattershield, they were already a couple of minutes' walk away from the capital and the Boss House (unless there was vehicular traffic of personal transporting involved offscreen). Dialogue is ambiguous on whether they walked under the umbrella from beyond its edge, or whether the umbrella was opened above them after the beam-down, but logically the latter would be more appealing, as Book would want to beam down close to their destination, and said destination would be unlikely to be near the edge of the shield. OTOH, perhaps it's not easy to turn the shield on and off?

Incidentally, the map of the pseudo-Iceland shows them beaming in halfway through shoreline and island centerpoint, a location Booker considers "deep inland". Make of the scale what you will, then.

https://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/epics/DSC-S3/S3E8/DSC-S3E8-179.jpg

The altitude in the fight between the two ships is revealed in a shot where the curvature of the planet is visible behind them. That's half a thousand klicks at least, and not consistent with being inside the atmosphere of the planet (technically, there'd be air up there, too, but it would not be significantly different from the amount of air at the initial altitude of the Discovery).

https://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/epics/DSC-S3/S3E8/DSC-S3E8-340.jpg
https://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/epics/DSC-S3/S3E8/DSC-S3E8-348.jpg


At best, we can argue that Osyyra went up and down like a Discovery turbolift in an attempt to shake off the Nautilus...

The larger the turrets, the harder it is to turn them, even with electric motors.

But the point is that even "maximally hard" is a breeze for a starship. There's absolutely no in-universe reason why a turret the size of the Discovery could not complete fifty rotations per second from a standstill start - after all, we see the Discovery do that very trick in most episodes!

I highly doubt her ship had CIWS style anti-projectile and anti-fighter capabilities. Probably a oversight on her or her designer since she probably never had to contest against a competent space pilot in a star fighter level of manueverability vessel.

There could also be a capacity gap at the specific niche of Book's ride: an opponent that is nimbler than big ships but better shielded than small ones. And the designers of the cruiser might take a look at that capacity gap, and decide there's no point in trying to close it, because all opponent ships in that niche will be far too weakly armed to do any damage even when they can engage in a prolonged dogfight. But Detmer having good advice on where to shoot would alter that.

Don't forget that the computer was helping for some of the battle, we don't know when the Torpedoes hit, so it could be either Detmer or the computer's fault that the torpedoes hit or just unavoidable due to circumstance.

Indeed. But with the volumes of fire involved, even fairly random hits would quickly reach the count of eight!

We are hard pressed to count the hits ourselves. The shields of the Nautilus flare up often enough, but perhaps not all impacts count as hits when the shields do their job?

VFX beam for the uninformed audience.

The situations at Kaminar and Kwejian were admittedly slightly different. In both, though, the point seemed to be to project sound waves at a large number of individuals even when a point source was generating them. At Kaminar, this was apparently achieved by co-opting the loudspeakers of the Ba'ul pylons at every village, via Ba'ul comms. At Kwejian, there would be no loudspeakers available, so the obvious alternative would be a tractor beam that shakes the air over a wide area.

So the two things distasteful about the beam we got would be

1) it doesn't look, walk or quack like a tractor beam (for any era, least of all the DSC ones for which we have seen the VFX and many emitter locations both in the 23rd and the 32nd century), and
2) it really doesn't appear to cover a particularly large area of the planet.

But we can handwave both. Perhaps tractor beams were recently (that is, post-"Die Trying") upgraded to look like this? Perhaps using them for atmosphere shaking makes them look like this? And perhaps the pseudo-Iceland actually is a really tiny island, and most of the planet is uninhabited or free of the locusts but also unsuited for agriculture?

We could also argue that the heroes created a divine loudspeaker right above the capital and let the sound propagate across the planet - but I'd trust such an arrangement would have pulverized the capital while still making the locusts at the shores strain to hear what is being recited at them.

Or they permanently widened the corridor during the refit?

We'll see. I'm still rather fond of the idea that ships of this ilk were originally shuttlecarriers, and everything from the forward bulkhead of the current shuttlebay is a modification where the original hangars have given way to mushroomrooms, labs and the like. Modifying the modifications would then be not just doable but perhaps also desirable: after all, most of the original experiments would now be gone forever, or optimized and minimized.

Certainly the moving of walls is allowable, and especially in the case of a ship that has interior volume to spare, as per the turbolift funhouse scenes.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Hmm. Anything interesting techwise this week? At all?

The butt end of a large auxiliary craft, I guess. And technicalities regarding trans-timeline travel. But otherwise...

Out-universe, I wanna know how they placed SMG and Yeoh in the middle of that snowy hill without footprints, from them, the makeup folks, or the coffee cup carriers. Did they need to blow new snow around them after each take? Get it all on one take (at that distance, there'd be no lines to blow, say)? CGI-fake the lack of prints?

Timo Saloniemi
 
And in olden-times, they just had people with brooms and rakes get rid of all the footprints and tracks that weren't supposed to be there right before they started filming.
 
...It's just that in this case, the two heroes were in there ankles deep, in snow that obviously had a hard and brittle crust, making the restoring-camouflaging job real difficult.

Come to think of it, this could be a tech question as well. When you beam down to a snowy area, which of these happens?

1) You materialize on top of the snow and sink, leaving foot-sized holes in the snow.
2) You materialize on top of the solid ground, and the ACB pushes just enough of the snow away to let your feet in (meaning there's actually a hole the size of your leg in the snow, not a hole the size of your foot!).
3) You materialize on top of the solid ground, and the ACB wipes clean the area around you.

We can now strike #3 from that list at least... And the holes would obviously be foot-sized in reality. So is it #1, or is it something like #2½, with the ACB clearing more than your-body-plus-two-centimeters, but less than your-body-plus-fifty-two-centimeters?

Timo Saloniemi
 
...It's just that in this case, the two heroes were in there ankles deep, in snow that obviously had a hard and brittle crust, making the restoring-camouflaging job real difficult.

Come to think of it, this could be a tech question as well. When you beam down to a snowy area, which of these happens?

1) You materialize on top of the snow and sink, leaving foot-sized holes in the snow.
2) You materialize on top of the solid ground, and the ACB pushes just enough of the snow away to let your feet in (meaning there's actually a hole the size of your leg in the snow, not a hole the size of your foot!).
3) You materialize on top of the solid ground, and the ACB wipes clean the area around you.

We can now strike #3 from that list at least... And the holes would obviously be foot-sized in reality. So is it #1, or is it something like #2½, with the ACB clearing more than your-body-plus-two-centimeters, but less than your-body-plus-fifty-two-centimeters?

Timo Saloniemi
I think the ACB just adds a millimeter around the outside of your body/clothes/objects and calls it a day.
 
This is arguably the second time DSC references a planet with a letter of the alphabet as the identifier, IAU style.

But the first time, Eridani D, wasn't quite explicit; used the uppercase spelling in closed captioning; and might be a fictional planet in any case, at least in terms of writer intent (would they have been aware 82 G. Eridani d?). Might have been a proper name in the Dytallix B sense. Might not have been the name of a planet at all, despite the reference being about "the seven moons of Eridani D" - perhaps the star system has hundrum planets which between them have seven fascinating moons?

This time Kepler-174d is rather unambiguously a planet, and a real one at that. But also a contradiction: several of the characters have visited it, so it should no longer be called by its placeholder name (with the d standing for the fact that it was the third rock spotted around the star which herself gets the a), but its actual name (with a Roman numeral to denote its true orbit around its star)...

That is, unless both the Emperor and her protege visited the system in ISS Reliant and never bothered to count the orbits.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Also noting, that Kepler-174 is along the "roads" to Deneb (and Farpoint), apparently. Being in the originally-targeted region of the sky that Kepler's researchers wanted to look at, right?

One of the ExoPlanetKyoto maps:

Kepler-174_d_STZ3.png
 
The thing that stuck most in my craw was this whole notion of being from a different time AND a separate dimension would eventually kill you. Poor early-late TNG alternate Yor is this universe’s first case, which suggests they still believe Spock died saving the galaxy and wasn’t transported to the divergent JJ-verse as a result - given that they’re implying that same event brought Yor to this universe AND projected him forward. Either way, they’re sorta implying that prime Spock’s ultimate fate was a result of his displacement as well. Thoughts?

Mark
 
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