Star Trek: No Subtitle

[Nate the Great]

The Vulcan we see in TOS is a resettled, second Vulcan? Covered with "ruins" that are actually recreations of structures used by the ancient Vulcans? I find that insulting. Vulcans are suppose to be logical, and any justification for rebuilding ruins eventually boils down to "sentiment." And that's not what Vulcans have EVER been about. I could buy Romulans doing that sort of thing, but not Vulcans.

This guy is introducing wonky stardate math to correct errors in the characters ages? And claiming that Kirk wasn't really made Captain in XI? He's trying so hard, but the tapestry of Trek canon can't stretch enough to cover the holes made by XI without ripping a seam elsewhere.

The refit proved unstable, so the ships had to be "defitted?" I call B.S. It would be a zillion times easier to just junk the ship and start over with a new Enterprise. Saying that they had to rebuild key structural systems for a ship of a smaller size is also absurd. Since when does "our new tech is unstable, so we have to rebuild the ship" equate to "we also have to make the ship smaller while we're at it"? That would involve replacement of just about every piece of the ship's skeleton. Nonsense!

This guy is trying, that's obvious. But the amount of Fanwank would choke a cat, and I'm dead serious.

[Sa'ar Chasm]

This guy is trying, that's obvious. But the amount of Fanwank would choke a cat, and I'm dead serious.

"We all know that Star Trek 2009 took place in an alternate reality. BUT DID IT?!

Yes. Yes, it did...
...As I said, this “interpretation” is just for fun,"

The cat's too busy playing with a ball of string (or torturing some small mammal) to care. Less serious, more revelling in insanity.

[Wowbagger]

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

The Vulcan we see in TOS is a resettled, second Vulcan? Covered with "ruins" that are actually recreations of structures used by the ancient Vulcans? I find that insulting. Vulcans are suppose to be logical, and any justification for rebuilding ruins eventually boils down to "sentiment."

Explain to me why Vulcans have art at all, then. Why does Spock love the lyre? Why is the Hall of Ancient Thought so glorious? Why the ornate robes of the Vulcan clerics? Heck, why Vulcan clerics? Why is the mountain where Kohlinar studied (freakin' Kohlinar!) literally covered in astonishingly ornate artwork?

Is all that "sentiment"? Either way, your conception of Vulcans does not seem to conform to canon. Not even your personal Nate-canon. It simply has nothing to do with Star Trek.

The refit proved unstable, so the ships had to be "defitted?" I call B.S. It would be a zillion times easier to just junk the ship and start over with a new Enterprise. Saying that they had to rebuild key structural systems for a ship of a smaller size is also absurd. Since when does "our new tech is unstable, so we have to rebuild the ship" equate to "we also have to make the ship smaller while we're at it"? That would involve replacement of just about every piece of the ship's skeleton. Nonsense!

Everything you said may well be true. But all that would also be true of (drumroll)... a refit! So I presume you're also declaring TMP and all subsequent movies featuring the original 1701 non-canon. I mean, it's undeniable that the TMP refit saw the "replacement of just about every piece of the ship's skeleton" and the "rebuild[ing of] key structural systems for a ship of a [larger] size." Just like the defit.

This guy is introducing wonky stardate math to correct errors in the characters ages? And claiming that Kirk wasn't really made Captain in XI? He's trying so hard, but the tapestry of Trek canon can't stretch enough to cover the holes made by XI without ripping a seam elsewhere.

The stardate math is definitely sketchy, but I'm not one to care about character ages very much (no more than I care about, say, characters' middle initials). But the author's work on the Kirk captaincy, claiming the last scene of the movie takes place in 2263 instead of 2258, checks out very nicely, especially in light of the travel-time-to-Vulcan sequence. If you'd watched the movie, you might recognize that, but -- since you haven't seen how the narrative flow actually works on-screen -- you can't.

Plus, I thought you liked fanwank. Last I checked, that was the basic theme of the movie you proposed.

The cat's too busy playing with a ball of string (or torturing some small mammal) to care.

Oh, yes. And that small mammal's name is Nate the Great. :P

[Nate the Great]

1. Why do Vulcans have art?

Because a person can't meditate or study lab equipment all day. Because creating art exercises the mind. Because becoming fully logical takes time, and this art could be really old. Tradition.

2. Why does Spock love the lyre?

"Love" may be a strong word. Because creating music exercises the mind. Because everybody needs to listen to music every once in awhile.

3. Why is the HOAT so glorious? Why the ornate robes? Etc.

Because ancient Vulcans were more like Romulans and actually had emotions. You can't attribute logic to anything more than (say) a thousand years old. It takes time to fully purge emotion.

Replacing key structural members to increase size and replacing key structural members to decrease size are different propositions. And at least to increase a ship's size you can simply technobabble-bolt on more bits of beam.

Every piece of a starship's infrastructure is based around supporting a crew of X people traveling at Warp Y assuming the warp core has power capacity of Z. This guy is suggesting that Z proved unstable, so that had to be shrunk, requiring X and Y to be shrunk as well. This is drastically altering the fundamental formulas that dictate the design strategy of a ship.

Before any structure can be built we must know what forces will be applied to it. We then magnify (for safety) and combine (for simplicity of design) the forces to find out what each piece of the puzzle could be subjected to. Lowering the power output of the engines and the maximum speed of the ship reduces the magnitude of the forces acting upon each structural member. Hence a slower ship with a weaker engine could handle a larger infrastructure size. If the new "defit" engine is THAT much weaker that the ship STILL has to be shrunk, shrinking the ship enough to move is just creating an engineering disaster.

[Wowbagger]

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

1. Why do Vulcans have art?
...Tradition.

If "tradition" is not un-Vulcan, then it provides an entirely sufficient justification for the reconstruction of New Vulcan with certain reflections of Old Vulcan.

I don't share your view of Vulcans, mind you; I think the fact that the kohlinar movement exists at all (to say nothing of T'Pol) proves that your treatment of Vulcans as soulless calculators misses a very important, very deep, and very personal center at the heart of Vulcan life. After all, the kohlinar people could very easily have destroyed or at least moved the art off their mountain. Certainly the same is true of its clerics.

All canonical evidence suggests that the logical Vulcan people nonetheless found some need to maintain these things as they had been handed down to them. The reconstruction of New Vulcan to resemble the Old makes perfect sense.

Replacing key structural members to increase size and replacing key structural members to decrease size are different propositions. And at least to increase a ship's size you can simply technobabble-bolt on more bits of beam.

And you can simply technobabble-bolt off more bits of beam. The beauty of technobabble: you can do whatever the hell you want with it. That was Gene's basic vision of it. That's been the basic vision of it throughout Star Trek's history. Why do you suddenly insist on resisting every attempted justification through technobabble for everything related to this movie, and this movie alone?

Unless its a matter of personal animosity to the new movie and its creators, of course.

Every piece of a starship's infrastructure is based around supporting a crew of X people traveling at Warp Y assuming the warp core has power capacity of Z. This guy is suggesting that Z proved unstable, so that had to be shrunk, requiring X and Y to be shrunk as well. This is drastically altering the fundamental formulas that dictate the design strategy of a ship.

You misunderstand the writer's argument. It has nothing to do with warp core power supply, but with the efficiency of the structural integrity field, which functions as a single member. (Each individual member would snap like a twig if not for the SIF field; the magnitude of forces they can individually withstand is so tiny on the vast scale of warp power as to be utterly insignificant. This is why you never see a nacelle sheer off at warp speed -- you only see success or near-instantaneous complete structural failure.) The SIF field efficiency is furthermore unrelated to the number of crew X and the warp core's power capacity Z. It relates only to Warp Y. And -- math majors feel free to correct me here -- if one determines in advance that the maximum warp must remain constant (and, according to the evidence, the maximum warp of the 2253 Connie, the 2258 Connie, and the 2263 Connie consistently remained at Warp 8 [TOS scale]), then the relationship between structural integrity field strength A and maximum size of the vessel B can be described by a simple linear equation.

In short, once you have less efficient SIF fields, you've got to cut off a chunk of the ship. Since the precise equations are already well known and were in fact used on the Enterprise for ten years before the refit, defitting it back to that point wouldn't alter the "fundamental design equations" one iota. In fact, the defit would be a much, much easier than the refit, because it would simply return the ship to an earlier state.

I'll note lastly that the fact that you must resort to extremely speculative technobabble-based attacks only loosely grounded in canon or warp physics as generally understood or real-life physics is fairly good evidence that you're scraping the bottom of the barrel here.

Give up, Nate. Give up and enjoy this highly enjoyable addition to the Star Trek saga. You'll thank yourself if you do.

(Otherwise I'm going to have to start calling you a sedevacantist. )

[Nate the Great]

Vulcans believe in traditions. What they don't believe in is illogical things like rebuilding ruins and pretending that they're the originals. That's simply absurd.

All Vulcans don't go through Kolinar training. It's basically extra credit that some Vulcans do to make themselves feel like they're better Vulcans. And I'll fully concede that different Vulcans have different levels of emotional control. Just look at young Tuvok.

If there are fundamental design flaws in a starship, it is more efficient to start over with a new ship. When warp drive started damaging subspace, they didn't replace the E-D's nacelle pylons with the bendable kind because that would've taken years to do this, and it would've reduced the E-D's top speed to a crawl anyway. They added a warp speed limit to current ships and fixed the problem in their future ships.

However, the current ships in the warp speed limit era were not all called back to base for a complete top-to-bottom redesign. The Enterprise refit between TOS and TMP is because every piece of technology had been rendered obsolete, and let's face it, Kirk pushed the ship too hard and Scotty broke every design standard achieving his miracles.

Making a ship, ANY ship, smaller is simply ridiculous! Trash it and move on to the Enterprise A twenty years early!

[Wowbagger]

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

Vulcans believe in traditions. What they don't believe in is illogical things like rebuilding ruins and pretending that they're the originals. That's simply absurd.

TRADITION: (\trə-ˈdi-shən\) (n.) Any irrational activity which Nate thinks is perfectly sensible despite being irrational. (CONTRAST: "absurd" - irrational activity which Nate thinks is just downright silly.)

All Vulcans don't go through Kolinar training. It's basically extra credit that some Vulcans do to make themselves feel like they're better Vulcans. And I'll fully concede that different Vulcans have different levels of emotional control. Just look at young Tuvok.

It does not make them feel like they're better Vulcans. It perfects Vulcans as disciples of one particular school of Surak-based philosophy -- an extreme form, which rejects all emotion-based impulses. This is opposed to the rest of Vulcan society, which -- note this well -- does not go to that extreme and does admit emotional and semi-emotional relics of various kinds.

Even if I conceded that historical tradition is illogical -- I do not -- Vulcan society might well still follow it. Because it is not and never has been portrayed as entirely logical, even in pretense.

When warp drive started damaging subspace, they didn't replace the E-D's nacelle pylons with the bendable kind because that would've taken years to do this, and it would've reduced the E-D's top speed to a crawl anyway.

Wrong on all counts. (1) The bendiness was not the reason Voyager's warp drive was environmentally friendly. That's non-canon speculation from an unpublished version of the Tech Manual. (More likely a change in the dilithium crystal chamber.) (2) Therefore, we don't know that they didn't upgrade the E-D. (3) Even if they didn't, that's because the D exploded less than a year later. (4) If they had upgraded it, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever, anywhere, except for your own contorted anti-XI logic, to lead anyone to believe that it would have lowered their max speed one jot.

If there are fundamental design flaws in a starship, it is more efficient to start over with a new ship.

The Enterprise refit between TOS and TMP is because every piece of technology had been rendered obsolete

These statements are contradictory. Fortunately, since the second statement supports me and the other does not, and only the second statement references canon, you've pretty much proved my point.

Making a ship, ANY ship, smaller is simply ridiculous! Trash it and move on to the Enterprise A twenty years early!

Making a ship, ANY ship, bigger is simply ridiculous! Trash it and move on to the Enterprise A ten years early!

Gotta run to class. Cheers!

[Nate the Great]

"Fundamental design flaws" =/= "obsolete technology"

The first is "the ship will explode if we keep using this tech." The second is "this ship is old and rickety, will slowly fall apart, and will be increasingly resource-intensive to repair."

The article implies that although the neo-E had flashy new tech in it, it (surprise, surprise) still had bugs in it that rendered the whole thing a deathtrap. A refit was necessary.

The pre-STTMP refit (if you want to follow non-canon like I do, from Constitution class to Enterprise class) was not to make the ship safe. The tech might have been obsolete, but it still WORKED. The refit was to update the specs, not make the ship safer.

[Nate the Great]

If the bending pylons wasn't to get around the Warp 5 limit, tell me why Voyager had them and no other ship we've ever seen did.

PNQ: Did we even see "variable" pylons? Either they were down or up, right? Did we ever see in-between? And was the ship ever at warp with the pylons down?

[Sa'ar Chasm]

If the bending pylons wasn't to get around the Warp 5 limit, tell me why Voyager had them and no other ship we've ever seen did.

Because it looked cool but was too graphics-intensive for a ship that wasn't mentioned in the title of the show, plus the writers were hoping that whole Warp 5 speed limit thing could be quietly swept under the rug and forgotten.

[Nate the Great]

It looked cool? I always thought it looked ugly. Besides, speed limits aside I'm pretty sure it was supposed to be able to change according to the specific warp factor the ship was traveling at, but I only saw "up" and "down", never anything in between.

[Wowbagger]

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

It looked cool? I always thought it looked ugly.

Agreed. TPTB disagreed. But TPTB were often wrong, sadly.

Besides, speed limits aside I'm pretty sure it was supposed to be able to change according to the specific warp factor the ship was traveling at...

Nope. You pretty much just made that up. As far as I can tell, you got it from a theory posted on EAS.

Oh, Nate. How much you want to be Justice Scalia, and yet at every turn you show yourself to be a Stevens. (I guess that analogy makes Abrams into Kennedy, though, and I can't stand that fence-sitting wuss [no offense to Kennedy fans out there!], so maybe we should forget about this whole paragraph.)

[Nate the Great]

http://www.star-trek-voyager.net/ship4/voyship_all1.htm
http://www.startrekmovie.com/forums/...ead.php?t=1754

Apparently the variable geometry nacelle hypothesis isn't that strange.

[Wowbagger]

Are there people who believe it? Sure. I mean, EAS does have a wide readership, and the ecological claim is at least based on something the producers said once, off-screen, in an unpublished book. Are these two theories plausible? I'll even grant that that they are.

But, in terms of canonicity, they are roughly on a par with Sixteenth Amendment conspiracy theorism and the "collective model" of the right to bear arms. Which is to say, they're made up out of whole cloth in order to justify a set of prejudices, and no one who treats the theories as binding can seriously call himself a canon originalist.

You're a Trekkie judicial activist raging impotently against the Abrams Supreme Court.

And I am enjoying this metaphor far, far more than is healthy.

[Nate the Great]

Fine, you tell me what the purpose of the folding nacelles was. Is there an alternate hypothesis?

[Wowbagger]

Fine, you tell me what the purpose of the folding nacelles was.

I have no idea. Canon is silent on this point. I mean, asking me what the purpose of the folding nacelles was is like asking me why there are two separate stages for flux chillers or in what year Pancho opened the Happy Bottom Riding Club. There is no answer. There is only speculation.

Incidentally, my speculation is that Pancho bought the lot in 2369, right after the UFP took over, but didn't finish relocating from his old location at the Antares Shipyards until after the end of the attempted Bajoran coup in 2370. But that's pure speculation, a flagrant interpretation based on the two facts we know about Pancho's Happy Bottom Riding Club. But Abrams should feel free to override me on that, and other interpreters of canon should feel equally free to ignore my speculation and substitute their own, which might suggest that Pancho joined the Promenade near the end of the Occupation. We can do the same thing with the VOY nacelles.

Because speculation ain't got the canonical weight of the virtual paper it's written on.

[Nate the Great]

From startrek.com's article on the ship:

"Voyager's folding wing-and-nacelle warp drive system allows the starship to exceed the warp 5 "speed limit" without polluting the space continuum."

And I think we can all agree that in-universe information at startrek.com is at least beta canon.

[Nate the Great]

Returning to Trek 11, from this article...

http://www.comicmix.com/news/2009/05...e-annotations/

"Romulan military normally wear dark, checkered uniforms, sometimes involving sashes, and have haircuts similar to most Vulcans. However, Nero and his crew are traditionally miners, as he explains, and have different outfits entirely. Their shaved heads and tattoos were an effort by Abrams to distinguish them further from the Vulcans, as he did not want to confuse new fans who were unfamiliar with Trek lore and might assume that Nero was an "evil Vulcan" rather than a member of a completely different culture and society."

Oh, come on! We're not talking about Rigellians here (they're a fairly obscure Vulcanoid race mostly seen in the novels, think friendly emotional Vulcans in a strong clan system), they're Romulans! Romulans appeared in The Original Series and looked identical to Vulcans except for haircuts and uniforms, and NOBODY confused them!

Besides, "evil Vulcan" is as succinct a definition of "Romulan" as I've ever heard. How else can you describe them (except with "and they don't believe in controlling all emotion")?

[Sa'ar Chasm]

Oh, come on! We're not talking about Rigellians here (they're a fairly obscure Vulcanoid race mostly seen in the novels, think friendly emotional Vulcans in a strong clan system), they're Romulans! Romulans appeared in The Original Series and looked identical to Vulcans except for haircuts and uniforms, and NOBODY confused them!

ViewersAreMorons

...

Uhhh, pretend that's a hyperlink.

[Tate]

Time to give my two cents (three cents Canadian).

You make a lot of good points, Nate. Having seen the movie, I will readily admit that it's far from perfect. There are especially problems when the movie interacts with Prime Trek. The decisions they made in the new timeline don't bother me too much, but things that happen in the Prime timeline don't seem to match up with established canon (or logic for that matter, and Spock's the one telling what happened...)

But despite all the problems with the movie, I love it! For me, this movie is the first time the original series crew and their world seems real and relatable for me. I really enjoy the characters, I really like the Enterprise, and I just like the movie.

Now, this may be a sign of weakness on me part. Perhaps if I was a better person, I'd be satisfied with the original Trek. It may be a sign of the decadence of modern life that I don't enjoy things as much without expensive production values, neat special effects and copious lens flares.

I admire those of you who really liked the Original Series. But for me, TOS never appealed to me as much as the other Trek series (what's the plural of series anyway? seriess? series's? series? ) shows did. It was an enjoyable diversion, but never something I could really get into. This movie is.

So there are my thoughts on the matter. There are a number of problems with the movie, but I really like it anyway, and I'm looking forward to sequels.


I think that hyperlink's broken, Sa'ar. I keep clicking on it and nothing happens.