What's with the visual distance?

[sHuRuLuNi]

Sorry if this has been answered somewhere, I tried searching the forums, and even tried for days on google, but can't seem to find anything about this.

It has to do with the visual distance in the ST Universe. Right now I am watching "The Swarm" from ST:Voyager.

There is a scene when Voyager is being chased by a swarm of small ships - then Paris says something like "the ships are 100.000 km away and closing" - in this moment we see a shot from outside and one can see the small ships behing Voyager not more than 200m (METERS!) away!
This goes on as "they are now at 7000km ..." etc. And of course I have noticed this in other ST Series as well - it absolutely irritates me!

Is it that the writers were just throwing numbers arbitrarily and making ridiculously high to sound "cool" or whats this all about?

I know it would not look cool if the small ships were REALLY 100.000km away - because the shot from outside would then only show Voyager and the small ships would be nowhere to be seen - but in that case why use such ridiculous numbers? Why not just say "the small ships are 200m away" or maybe "1km away"?

I just don't get it - but it pissed me off every time I watch Star Trek.


Look at the pic - this is when the ships are still "100.000km away", lol:

 

[Timo]

If this were a warp chase, then a distance that looks like 100 meters might well be 10 lightyears. There could (and should) be all sorts of weird distortion there.

But the Swarm appeared to chase our heroes at sublight - no warp streaks in the above picture! In which case the visual is simply dead wrong and no excuses.

However, it's not wrong the way you suspect. Dialogue establishes that the chase is in fact taking place at warp, and that Torres is struggling to remove a source of warp drag with explicit orders not to shut down the warp drive. So the picture above should be showing us warp streaks, and the distance between the ships seen (as projected onto realspace) could well be hundreds of thousands of kilometers...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Tiberius]

The camera was a long way from the ships, so it had to zoom in. This has the effect of compressing the distance, making it look like the pursuing ships are much closer to Voyager than they actually are...

 

[jgalley]

The camera was a long way from the ships, so it had to zoom in. This has the effect of compressing the distance, making it look like the pursuing ships are much closer to Voyager than they actually are...

no..this kind of distance error is shown throughout ALL Trek iterations.

they say they're like 10km away from something but be right up to it..no more then a couple football fields away.

it has nothing to do with the camera lol

 

[cblmc1296]

Consider the insanely high velocities at which ships in the Trek universe are supposed to be able to travel. Even at impulse power the various Trek ships make speeds that put our best current day space vehicles to shame. So, in order to maintain some level of believability, the distances at which bridge officers call out verbal updates are usually given in the hundreds or thousands of kilometers to allow sufficient time for the captain to make decisions before the enemies are upon them.

Visual effects shots show the ships in what would apparently be much closer proximity because it is, after all, a TV show and it makes it more exciting for the viewer to look at than if the enemy ship was a speck of light, barely distinguishable from the starfield in the background.

 

[Deimos Anomaly]

Worse is episodes like The Way of the Warrior when the Klingon fleet closes to within a mile or two of DS9 before opening fire.

Exactly the same thing happens in a Call to Arms, it's worse in that the fleet gets within a few diameters of DS9 at which point Dukat or someone else on his bridge (I forget exactly) says something like "we're in weapons range now" and then they open fire.

It's nice to know the effective range of the main battery on 24th century starships is about a tenth the range of a WWII sea battleship. The distance those ships were to DS9 when they opened fire would have been considered "point blank" by the crew of the Iowa, Bismarck etc.

 

[MrJ]

The camera was a long way from the ships, so it had to zoom in. This has the effect of compressing the distance, making it look like the pursuing ships are much closer to Voyager than they actually are...

We saw this kind of effect all the time in the new Battlestar Galactica. They would show a ship in the foreground and another in the background and the camera would zoom out to show the ships in actual relationship to each other, or they would do it the other way around.

Worse is episodes like The Way of the Warrior when the Klingon fleet closes to within a mile or two of DS9 before opening fire.

Exactly the same thing happens in a Call to Arms, it's worse in that the fleet gets within a few diameters of DS9 at which point Dukat or someone else on his bridge (I forget exactly) says something like "we're in weapons range now" and then they open fire.

It's nice to know the effective range of the main battery on 24th century starships is about a tenth the range of a WWII sea battleship. The distance those ships were to DS9 when they opened fire would have been considered "point blank" by the crew of the Iowa, Bismarck etc.

Maybe they waited until they were close because their energy weapons might lose energy the further they travel, after all we have only ever seen ships fire phaser and disrupters at targets that are close. And maybe they didn't want to give DS9 a chance to shoot down the incoming torpedoes.


Also it looks cooler to have them close than shooting at each other from beyond visual range.

 

[Finn]

Time dilitation. That's why ships looks closer than they do. The viewer sees into the future.

 

[Tiberius]

The camera was a long way from the ships, so it had to zoom in. This has the effect of compressing the distance, making it look like the pursuing ships are much closer to Voyager than they actually are...

no..this kind of distance error is shown throughout ALL Trek iterations.

they say they're like 10km away from something but be right up to it..no more then a couple football fields away.

it has nothing to do with the camera lol

The fact that it happens a lot doesn't mean I am wrong!!! Long lenses do distort distance like this!!!

 

[G2309]

Worse is episodes like The Way of the Warrior when the Klingon fleet closes to within a mile or two of DS9 before opening fire.

Exactly the same thing happens in a Call to Arms, it's worse in that the fleet gets within a few diameters of DS9 at which point Dukat or someone else on his bridge (I forget exactly) says something like "we're in weapons range now" and then they open fire.

It's nice to know the effective range of the main battery on 24th century starships is about a tenth the range of a WWII sea battleship. The distance those ships were to DS9 when they opened fire would have been considered "point blank" by the crew of the Iowa, Bismarck etc.

Its just one of the things we have to accept for good visuals. Ironically the special effects restriction of TOS which couldn't show battles with ships in the same shot got it the most right.

 

[Iamnotspock]

The camera was a long way from the ships, so it had to zoom in. This has the effect of compressing the distance, making it look like the pursuing ships are much closer to Voyager than they actually are...

There should be a sign at the bottom of the viewscreen; "Objects may appear closer at warp than they actually are."

 

[NSTrekfan]

If you want it to be accurate and not cinimatic then you shouldn't be able to see the phaser beams wither.

 

[plynch]

If you want it to be accurate and not cinimatic then you shouldn't be able to see the phaser beams wither.

They have pills for that now.

 

[G2309]

If you want it to be accurate and not cinimatic then you shouldn't be able to see the phaser beams wither.

They have pills for that now.

Lets face it the perspectives are off on most shots. In films based on true stories like apollo 13 do this for better visual effect.

 

[jgalley]

The camera was a long way from the ships, so it had to zoom in. This has the effect of compressing the distance, making it look like the pursuing ships are much closer to Voyager than they actually are...

no..this kind of distance error is shown throughout ALL Trek iterations.

they say they're like 10km away from something but be right up to it..no more then a couple football fields away.

it has nothing to do with the camera lol

The fact that it happens a lot doesn't mean I am wrong!!! Long lenses do distort distance like this!!!

....except you are wrong.

as others have stated...it's T.V. if the ships were as far apart as they're said to be..then if the camera panned out we'd only see small dots on screen..not very dramatic or exciting at all.

that's why they appear to be so close during these shots.

and if you WERE right, which you're not, then considering most of the time in these shots the ships are within a ship-or-two from each other...are you telling me, for example, the Enterprise-D is like 10km long?

whatever...it's an error...but it's an intentional one..because two bleeps on the tv screen firing little glowing pencil lines at each other isn't exciting.

 

[T'Girl]

no..this kind of distance error is shown throughout ALL Trek iterations.

Wrong, this began with the FX shown during TNG, during TOS distant ship were shown to be at a ... distance.. Unless they were actually quite close, like the Tholians or the Botany Bay.

 

[Deks]

Indeed.
If I'm not mistaken, the only Trek show to get the distances VFX (probably) right was in fact TOS.

TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT all suffered from 'ships are withing spitting distance to one another when compared to on-screen dialog distance numbers' syndrome.

The VFX department wanted to make things appear 'cool'.
Reality of the situation is that 24th century SF ships are able to fire at 300 000 km maximum distance before their phasers lose their effect.
In essence, if Phasers are photon based or even FTL based, their appearance to the target should be instant... instead, we see them taking their sweet time to reach a target and actually manage to miss (though this happened mostly when the tactical officer was manually firing at ships).

Torpedoes... FTL capable, yet at sublight they take their sweet time to reach a target and we can see them.
We should only be able to see the pulse on the photon torpedo tube from when it fires the torpedo (which in turn should be able to reach any target instantly if it's in phaser range alone... we won't talk about millions of km's away or self-guidance capabilities).

In short, plenty of things were dumbed down and made to look 'cool' as opposed at how they were originally envisioned.