There was plenty flying and maneuvering in the second episode during the Klingon battle scenes. But, no, we haven't seen discovery actually fly.
Will we actually see Discovery Fly?
- Thread starter tomalak301
- Start date
This is something I dislike about the show too.
Hate to bring Orville comparisons in, but they really understand how much starship porn is important to Star Trek.
Instead of using the modern power of the latest CGI to show us Newtonian motion and RCS manoeuvring in great detail, or the ship as a tiny backdrop against a huge gas giant (ala Alien or Stargate Universe), it moves almost like a toy from a kid's show.
Hate to bring Orville comparisons in, but they really understand how much starship porn is important to Star Trek.
Instead of using the modern power of the latest CGI to show us Newtonian motion and RCS manoeuvring in great detail, or the ship as a tiny backdrop against a huge gas giant (ala Alien or Stargate Universe), it moves almost like a toy from a kid's show.
She moves around nicely in this battle scene
This Klingon cloaking devices seem to not hide their power signatures very well, but perhaps scatter the signal so it is difficult to pinpoint this early into the conflict. I would guess Starfleet will figure out how to track or target these power signature before the war ends, leading to when the Romulans show off their cloaking devices. The Romulans don't appear to have the massive power signature (thus not the type of think Spock would look for) but because of the power signature not washing out the sensors as much, Enterprise picks up the ship's motion on sensors...perhaps eddies in interstellar dust giving away the approximate position of the Romulan ship. Enough for Enterprise to roughly shadow the vessel and give them a general area to fire weapon.
Spock has even less trouble tracking the Romulans than Owosekun has tracking the Klingons here... Indeed, Spock never even suggests there might be any trouble associated. But the level of tracking the "blip on the motion sensors" doesn't allow for accurate fire control there, either. OTOH, Spock specifically says the Romulans must be using lots of power to generate their cloak.
Klingon 2250s and Romulan 2260s cloaks appear more or less identical in behavior and description, then. It's probably mostly a matter of the users being new to the hardware and still having to trial-and-error the appropriate tactics: Klingons in 2256 keep their shields and weapons and engines "hot" during cloaking, degrading their invisibility effect, but will later learn to be more stealthy - and Romulans will become downright paranoid about this and have fancy "silent running" procedures in place, up to and including an automated shield-dropping system which will later cost the Duras sisters their life. Teaches the traitors never to buy Romulan!
Timo Saloniemi
Klingon 2250s and Romulan 2260s cloaks appear more or less identical in behavior and description, then. It's probably mostly a matter of the users being new to the hardware and still having to trial-and-error the appropriate tactics: Klingons in 2256 keep their shields and weapons and engines "hot" during cloaking, degrading their invisibility effect, but will later learn to be more stealthy - and Romulans will become downright paranoid about this and have fancy "silent running" procedures in place, up to and including an automated shield-dropping system which will later cost the Duras sisters their life. Teaches the traitors never to buy Romulan!
Timo Saloniemi
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The cloaks have always been about an overcoming-then-improvement process.
Except in "Balance of Terror", which nonsensically claims that invisibility is theoretical as a thing.
Which is a bad idea in many ways, none of them a matter of "writing continuity". Our TOS heroes run into invisible things all the time. Heck, invisible adversaries popped up right next to them in "Charlie X" already, before this adventure in terms of airdate, production date and stardate alike. And it would be incredible for this set of heroes to be the first to experience something that commonplace - or to be ignorant of others experiencing it.
Sensibly, ENT preempts this nonsense by showing humans meeting invisibility when it's credible - during their first-ever true deep space sortie. After this, in-universe (and thus long before this, in production terms), the phrases "There's more to it than meets the eye" and "Our eyes may be deceiving us" are accepted as truisms by every set of Trek heroes. Which should be a no-brainer to anybody familiar with television. Although admittedly television did die in the 2020s...
Timo Saloniemi
Which is a bad idea in many ways, none of them a matter of "writing continuity". Our TOS heroes run into invisible things all the time. Heck, invisible adversaries popped up right next to them in "Charlie X" already, before this adventure in terms of airdate, production date and stardate alike. And it would be incredible for this set of heroes to be the first to experience something that commonplace - or to be ignorant of others experiencing it.
Sensibly, ENT preempts this nonsense by showing humans meeting invisibility when it's credible - during their first-ever true deep space sortie. After this, in-universe (and thus long before this, in production terms), the phrases "There's more to it than meets the eye" and "Our eyes may be deceiving us" are accepted as truisms by every set of Trek heroes. Which should be a no-brainer to anybody familiar with television. Although admittedly television did die in the 2020s...
Timo Saloniemi
Probably Spock was talking about invisibility as a practical military technology, whereas a lot of other invisible things in Star Trek have been natural or super-advanced - I can't say I'm all that comfortable with how cloak has become common prior to Balance of Terror - maybe the Romulan version represented a step up?
EDIT - for ref:
Captain James T. Kirk: Go to full magnification.
Sulu: Screen is on full mag, sir.
Captain James T. Kirk: I don't see anything. Can't understand it.
Mr. Spock: Invisibility is theoretically possible, Captain - selective bending of light - but the power cost is enormous. They may have solved that problem.
EDIT - for ref:
Captain James T. Kirk: Go to full magnification.
Sulu: Screen is on full mag, sir.
Captain James T. Kirk: I don't see anything. Can't understand it.
Mr. Spock: Invisibility is theoretically possible, Captain - selective bending of light - but the power cost is enormous. They may have solved that problem.
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It would be relevant to observe a military technology proliferate to a specific enemy, yes. But Spock is saying nothing of the sort: he's ranting about theory where he should be aware of the practice already. "Ooh, the Taleban now have fuel-air explosives" or "ISIS seems to have adopted multicopter-type drones" are relevant observations, ""Ooh, this big kaboom created by the Taleban could be theoretically explained as a fuel-air explosion" or "ISIS appears to have invented a way to control multiple rotors for uncrewed aeronautical applications" are not.
Then again, this is Spock speaking; Kirk probably has just become tired of correcting his convoluted phrasing, only to be countered with the Eyebrow and "I believe I said so, Captain".
So let's say Spock is in fact meaning "Seems the Romulans, too, have cloaks now, Captain" when musing about the exact nature of the cloaks the Romulans have deemed fit to adopt. We're still left with the problem of the enigmatic Romulans being famous for one thing historically - their ability to create false visuals, up to and including creating the illusion of not being there. If that's the one and only thing known about the Romulans, besides the bird motif paint jobs, how come our heroes are surprised by this very fact?
This is when it moves over to the territory of writing continuity. And this is where we might wish ENT never tackled the issue the way it did. But I'd personally rather attempt a different tactic altogether in excusing Spock's nonsense in the first place.
Timo Saloniemi
Then again, this is Spock speaking; Kirk probably has just become tired of correcting his convoluted phrasing, only to be countered with the Eyebrow and "I believe I said so, Captain".
So let's say Spock is in fact meaning "Seems the Romulans, too, have cloaks now, Captain" when musing about the exact nature of the cloaks the Romulans have deemed fit to adopt. We're still left with the problem of the enigmatic Romulans being famous for one thing historically - their ability to create false visuals, up to and including creating the illusion of not being there. If that's the one and only thing known about the Romulans, besides the bird motif paint jobs, how come our heroes are surprised by this very fact?
This is when it moves over to the territory of writing continuity. And this is where we might wish ENT never tackled the issue the way it did. But I'd personally rather attempt a different tactic altogether in excusing Spock's nonsense in the first place.
Timo Saloniemi
"Invisibility is theoretically possible captain, but the power cost is enormous. They may have solved that problem." said Spock in "Balance of Terror"
Never mind that Klingons were cloaking left and right only 10 years earlier, and the Suliban, Xyrillians and Romulans 100 years before.
But don't worry it's prime universe. They said so on twitter
Never mind that Klingons were cloaking left and right only 10 years earlier, and the Suliban, Xyrillians and Romulans 100 years before.
But don't worry it's prime universe. They said so on twitter
I wonder if it is generally assumed that the Suliban had temporal aid in their cloaking devices and that information was sealed because of it?
The Klingon cloaks seem to use an enormous amount of power and it shows up on sensors as a lot of power.
The Xyrillians? Maybe what they are using isn't so much a cloaking device, but a holoprojector and some sensor dampeners?
The older Romulans? Who knows. Maybe also holoprojectors like their later drone ship. Perhaps that style goes out of favor once Starfleet figures out how to spot holograms of deep space moving around in deep space.
The Klingon cloaks seem to use an enormous amount of power and it shows up on sensors as a lot of power.
The Xyrillians? Maybe what they are using isn't so much a cloaking device, but a holoprojector and some sensor dampeners?
The older Romulans? Who knows. Maybe also holoprojectors like their later drone ship. Perhaps that style goes out of favor once Starfleet figures out how to spot holograms of deep space moving around in deep space.
So many great things in this scene. Lorca pretty much kibashes all the theories about him being a mirror universe guy or being a klingon spy. He's a straight up OG Starfleet badass of a captain and he's all about trying to save his fellow officers. I also love that he wastes no time when the Gagarin goes down.
Again, "Invisibility is theoretically possible captain..." - it's not that others had done invisibility in other ways, it's that it hadn't been seen before. It was only theoretical.
Admittedly, the damage was done to "Balance of Terror" by ENT first. But since DSC is supposed to be only 10 years before - and we know from the tactical map in Lorca's ready room that the Enterprise is part of the war effort with Spock on board - it's more immediately stupid that they're claiming it's all part of the same continuity.
God, this is why the ENT cloak was, bar none, the worst continuity error in all Star Trek.
I remember watching the episode with bated breath, "the first canonical appearance of the Romulans" (!!!), and being so so disappointed. We all realised immediately the magnitude of the error, although the Suliban had made it problematic already.
It wasn't necessary to the script, seriously fucked with continuity, and could have been prevented by even a layman knowledge of TOS.
It also calls into question why the Federation didn't develop cloak, as now they had 150 years, instead of a few decades before the Treaty.
It just had horrible political and military implications across the franchise.
I remember watching the episode with bated breath, "the first canonical appearance of the Romulans" (!!!), and being so so disappointed. We all realised immediately the magnitude of the error, although the Suliban had made it problematic already.
It wasn't necessary to the script, seriously fucked with continuity, and could have been prevented by even a layman knowledge of TOS.
It also calls into question why the Federation didn't develop cloak, as now they had 150 years, instead of a few decades before the Treaty.
It just had horrible political and military implications across the franchise.
Aren't we all glad they toned down the chromatic aberration that was over-present in the previous episodes' CGI shots?
That's one way of looking at the problem, another one would be: should ENT and DSC be canon?
I prefer to think of all Trek as canon, but if I was going to divest some part of it, it certainly wouldn't be the foundational stone upon which the rest is built. TOS is still arguably one of the two best Trek series, and is for certain the most influential on general culture.
And TAS, TNG, DS9, VOY and the movies, all of which are fine with ancient invisibility and the fact that it has no "political implications" just like warp drive has none.
Trek has always found ways around the major shortcomings of Trek: we now know better than Hodgkins why humanoids are so common, say. Or better than Spock why his dad didn't want him to join Starfleet. It won't be all that difficult to write stories that make TOS characters dead wrong and thereby improve the Trek universe overall...
Timo Saloniemi
I think that is so when they get a real ship into the mix (a Constitution-class starship) and those twin blue phaser beams fire (using the basically 1960s sound effects updated to modern audio) , they will seem meaty and impressive carving a Klingon battlecruiser in half.
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