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What is up with all the flamethrowers?

erotavlas

Lieutenant Junior Grade
Red Shirt
I didn't know that as technology advances, ships get more and more fragile. On top of that they somehow use energy conduits on the bridge that spew hazardous flammable material on every impact of the shields. I'm not sure if previous seasons the set design was similar but I think this season it was way over done with the flames coming out of the walls of the bridge, very unnatural looking. This kind of ruins the whole experience for me.
 
Yeah, I hate the flame effects. They don't "ruin the whole experience" for me, but they are distracting. There's no attempt to hide how artificial and theatrical they are -- they're just gratuitous puffs of flame coming out of fixed points on the walls at regular intervals.

And people thought lens flares were bad...
 
I think they have underestimated how many of those puffs would end up on screen... I think that while shooting, the director must have thought you'd only see them sporadically when the final cut is done, but it winds up looking a bit silly now, like something out of the Armageddon attraction at Walt Disney Studios. Is it really such a big deal? Not for me. I've enjoyed these first two episodes tremendously nonetheless!
 
I think they have underestimated how many of those puffs would end up on screen... I think that while shooting, the director must have thought you'd only see them sporadically when the final cut is done, but it winds up looking a bit silly now, like something out of the Armageddon attraction at Walt Disney Studios.

Then again, the makers of this show have proven in the past that they prefer spectacle over credibility -- see how they represent turbolift shafts as some gigantic industrial thrill ride existing in a pocket dimension bigger than the whole damn ship.

I mean, it's not like they would've had to wait for the final cut to see how it looked. With digital video, they could have instant playback of any shot, and I'm sure the practice of watching rough cuts/dailies as they go is still around. If it had been a mistake, they would've noticed it in time to go back and reshoot. But they've done it two weeks in a row now.

Increasingly, I take solace in Gene Roddenberry's point of view that Star Trek is not a literal documentary of the events it depicts, but a dramatic recreation after (or before) the fact, with its imperfections and inconsistencies being attributable to budgetary and technological limitations, artistic license, or adaptational error.


Is it really such a big deal? Not for me. I've enjoyed these first two episodes tremendously nonetheless!

So have I, but it's still an annoying distraction in the middle of something I enjoy, like ants at a picnic. It doesn't ruin the experience, but the experience would be better without it.
 
something something eps conduits blah blah technobabble high temperature plasma

On the bridge? Over and over again as soon as the action starts? That's insanely bad safety design. Surely 32nd-century technology should be able to avoid such dangerous eruptions, considering that they never seemed to be a problem in previous centuries.

Maybe it's just some kind of stylized holographic evolution of red alert lights, influenced by some non-human member culture of future Starfleet. Keeps the crew on their toes.
 
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Ep 2 even took away any kind of "new bridge exhaust feature" excuse, as the flame-pots go off on Book's ship too. It'd be fine if they kept it to a minimum, but as with most stylistic choices they just can't help but set it at 11.

And while we're at it, how come the gravity going off made everyone shoot into the air and then stop suddenly at a certain distance from the floor?
 
Ep 2 even took away any kind of "new bridge exhaust feature" excuse, as the flame-pots go off on Book's ship too.

There were also some in the corridors in episode 1.


And while we're at it, how come the gravity going off made everyone shoot into the air and then stop suddenly at a certain distance from the floor?

It wasn't the gravity going off so much as external gravity fluctuations hitting the ship, so presumably the crew were caught between two competing pulls. Though it's hard to explain why 1) the gravity fluctuations pulled "upward" when the nose of the ship was facing the phenomenon from which they emanated and 2) why the AG and inertial damper fields didn't cancel external accelerations like they normally do.

Although ultimately it's the same reason they've hardly ever used seatbelts in 55 years of Trek -- spectacle over logic.
 
And while we're at it, how come the gravity going off made everyone shoot into the air and then stop suddenly at a certain distance from the floor?
When the Klingon ship lost its gravity generators in STVI, it wasn't a sudden jump upwards like that, but they also just kind of drifted up to the mid-level of the rooms and corridors they were in and stopped.
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Maybe there's gentle counter-gravity plating in the ceilings as a backup safety measure in case the grav-plating fails spectacularly and launches you up toward the ceiling?
 
When the Klingon ship lost its gravity generators in STVI, it wasn't a sudden jump upwards like that, but they also just kind of drifted up to the mid-level of the rooms and corridors they were in and stopped.

Yeah... far too many filmmakers assume that microgravity works like floating in water. They mistake weightlessness for buoyancy rather than just a lack of downward pull.

And in this day and age, there's really no excuse for it, since there are surely countless hours of space station video available online to use as a reference for how people and things actually do move in microgravity.
 
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