Starship construction yards in rural areas?

[The Castellan]

Still waiting for the DVD on an interesting detail, though. IIRC, the movie never established that the Enterprise was the ship being built in Riverside, Iowa. There's a time cut or three there that leave open the possibility that Kirk visited two different construction sites: one next to the bar where he picked up trouble, and another next to the shuttle stop where he picked up a flight to the Academy. In between, he did a lot of biking - perhaps from Iowa to California?

Didn't Pike say to Kirk that the shuttle pickup was at Riverside Shipyard? And when we see the shuttle leave before the screen fades to '3 Year Later' we catch NCC-1701 on the half built ship's nacelle?

I doubt Starship design utilizes either Newtonian or Einsteinian physics....more likely you'll see tortion physics and so on at work.


I'm still waiting to see the equivilent of Homer Simpson at the shipyard, and seeing the whole place go boom.

 

[The Castellan]

Security concerns are also better-its easier to lob a torpedo at an orbital shipyard, then it is to have to fly into the planet (and defeat the close-in defenses) to do the same job.

What if he's got weapons he can shoot at the ground ship yards from a safe distence?