Speaking of the sky of Vulcan, isn't it supposed to be red? I swear it was blue in the new movie. That's my only nit-pick, but it's not important.
It seems Vulcan's sky is seasonal. Or at least the planet takes on a different hue in different episodes of TOS, TNG or ENT, much like Mars does in the real world. Sometimes it is salmon red, sometimes brownish, sometimes yellowish. No doubt the color of the sky is correspondingly affected, as on Mars; the likeliest cause for the color changes would be dust in the atmosphere (the second bet being changing small-scale vegetation on the surface of the sand, perhaps).
..there's more than one planet named Delta Vega.
Possibly. But for hundreds upon hundreds of hours of televised Star Trek, the writers have managed to avoid having two planets named identically by the same culture. Sure, there may be two planets named Krios (or sounding like that), but that name doesn't necessarily come from a human culture. Delta Vega is an obvious human name, and if humans in the Trek universe can't keep their records straight...
...Why, then they would appear almost like real humans! But the point is that Trek so far has nicely managed to remain simplistic rather than realistic, because that's better for drama and continuity and such stuff. Why did the makers of the current movie fail where literally thousands before them had succeeded just fine?
Sheer incompetence doesn't sound like a sufficient reason, because it's unlikely that all of those thousands were more competent than the team of STXI. Not caring is a fairly hollow-sounding reason, too, because those hard-working, ill-paid thousands probably cared even less. Yet the previous Trek writers had somewhat fanatical continuity experts to correct their mistakes; or, when dramatic reasons dictated the contradiction of some pseudofact, then these fanatical experts would soon invent a "patch" that explained everything to satisfaction in a subsequent episode or movie.
STXI seems to be very different from all previous Trek in not caring, and not allowing anybody in the team to care, either. Also, there's no concurrent TV show that could attempt to "patch" the holes being made, at least not yet. Until we get a sequel, we can't tell if the current team even cares about internal continuity between Chris Pine -starred Trek movies - but the odds do seem surprisingly bad at the moment.
Of course, perhaps the sequel will bow to the fanatical part of the audience again and "patch" some things that raised dissent in STXI...?
Timo Saloniemi
