[QUOTE=Mister Rik]
I just discovered a Web site that lets me watch every episode of TOS, and after watching the second pilot episode, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, I’ve discovered something that will probably annoy me for years: why in hell couldn’t they have found a way to get Andrea Dromm’s Yeoman Smith character into every episode that followed? :mad: My god, that has to be the most beautiful woman to appear in any episode of ST, in any of its incarnations (save perhaps Ashley Judd in a couple TNG episodes)!
I mean, Grace Lee Whitney (Yeoman Janice Rand) was certainly very nice to look at, but Andrea Dromm … damn!
[/QUOTE]
Agreed. I was channel-surfing not long ago and happened upon the Cold War comedy The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!. I was struck by (a) how hawt the female love interest was, and (b) how familiar she looked. A little IMDb.com consultation revealed it was the lovely Ms. Dromm.
[QUOTE=CalMeacham] Lithium, by the way, is element #3. The third element on the table, and the first one that’s solid at room temperature. It’s soft as butter, and reactive, although nowhere near as reactive as the heavier alkali metals:
[/QUOTE]
It’s quite widely used in batteries, and is highly-regarded in model plane circles because such batteries hold lots of charge for not much mass - for instance, one of my toys now uses a lithium battery that holds twice the milliamp-hours of the NiMH it replaces and weighs about half as much.
They do inconveniently explode if mishandled, but hey, people have been running model aircraft diesels on ether for years.
One thing that bugged me about Voyager in particular (I didn’t make it past the first disc) is the treknobabble.
I don’t mean the sprinkling of jargon that you get to explain away various problems in the other series. It seemed like in Voyager they would make up a problem ouf of whole cloth and then solve it using some imaginary particle. The conflict that drove the plot wouldn’t have the tiniest shred of a connection to reality, making the actual story nothing but a nail to hang the character development on, which would have been tolerable had the characters not been completely one-dimensional. That show just plain sucked.
[QUOTE=Illuminatiprimus]
Whoever decided to include all these mythical materials clearly flunked their basic chemistry classes, as otherwise they’d know that there are only 117 elements (and 30-odd of those are so unstable they don’t exist very long before decaying).
[/QUOTE]
You know, they’re still discovering new ones. At today’s pace I guess it’s unlikely they’ll ever get to 10,000 (and why can’t they hurry up and name some of them already?), but who knows.
With all the sub-atomic particles they have discovered (Verterons anyone?) I am not surprised that there exist in the Trekiverse elements parallel to the standard Periodic Table. What type is characteristics might an element with anti-tachyons in its nucleus have?
I give them a pass on unobtanium and handwavium isotopes.
[QUOTE=carnivorousplant]
Oxmyx or whoever says, “the guys in the other ship, yeah, they let us lots of stuff, books about how to make radios and stuff like that, but that’s The Book!”
[/QUOTE]
So essentially the other ship left behind an entire library of how to make Early 20th century items. Like the enternal combustion engine, construction techniques, and … oh helll I know they were saving money using existing sets… I liked this one so I won’t rang on it too much.
As for our stupid historian on Nazi planet, I don’t see how he could believe he could control a type of government that tried to return to feudal ideals, based on racial hatred and anti intellectualism. Like I said, he (read that as the script writers) had a grade school knowledge of the actual Nazi government which in reality was coruupt, bloated and inefficient. Some historian.
[QUOTE=BMalion]
You watch it, or we’ll do a special on you.
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Ok that may be the only saving grace on that putrid episode when they gleeful announce that his execution would be broadcast in prime time and in colour!
That is actually a nice piece of satire… the rest…Bleagh!
[QUOTE=kingpengvin]
But hey if we can get two jewish stars to dress up as SS officers I guess it was worth it. (Yeeeagghh that gives me the willies)
[/QUOTE]
[hijack] Did you know that the actors who played the lead Germans in “Hogan’s Heroes” were all Jewish? Colonel Klink, Sargeant Schultz & General Burkhalter all had to flee Europe in the 30’s, and Major Hochstetter was an American-born Jew.
Luckily, none of the actors playing prisoners were actually Nazis.
[QUOTE=kingpengvin]
So essentially the other ship left behind an entire library of how to make Early 20th century items. Like the enternal combustion engine, construction techniques,
[/QUOTE]
Since they had no prime directive, indeed apparently wished to help them advance, even with 1969 technology they could have left them microfiche and a 'fiche reader. More likely “The Earther’s Guide for Building Everything for Dummies” on a sack full of DVD’s and a dozen laptops.
I’m pretty sure there was a handwave line about how, in addition to “Gangs of the Twenties”, the Iotians received books on “building radios and stuff”, which could conceivably be an entire library’s worth of engineering and technical information. The Gangs book was probably the most interesting to non-nerds.
A vaguely similar conceptual problem in an otherwise highly entertaining episode happened in “Darmok”. Sure, maybe there’s a species out there that communicates only in metaphor, but how do they build spaceships that are equally or even more advanced than the Federation? Engineering on that scale requires extreme precision. It’s hard to say “hand me the 5/8ths crescent wrench” when you can only express it as “The small moon of Dellenda turns by season.”
[QUOTE=Bryan Ekers]
I’m pretty sure there was a handwave line about how, in addition to “Gangs of the Twenties”, the Iotians received books on “building radios and stuff”,
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[QUOTE=Bryan Ekers]
…A vaguely similar conceptual problem in an otherwise highly entertaining episode happened in “Darmok”. Sure, maybe there’s a species out there that communicates only in metaphor, but how do they build spaceships that are equally or even more advanced than the Federation? Engineering on that scale requires extreme precision. It’s hard to say “hand me the 5/8ths crescent wrench” when you can only express it as “The small moon of Dellenda turns by season.”
[/QUOTE]
I meant to mention that. You’re right. That was a great episode, but IRL you’re going to progress just so far technologically if you only communicate in metaphor. Better it had been a planetbound society.
Acquire spaceship, “Ming from Flash Gordon; Kick Ass and Steal.”
Perhaps their communication skills are somewhat better when they haven’t been smoking.
[QUOTE=Elendil’s Heir]
I meant to mention that. You’re right. That was a great episode, but IRL you’re going to progress just so far technologically if you only communicate in metaphor. Better it had been a planetbound society.
[/QUOTE]
It was an interesting concept for a show (and a damned good episode), but you can’t even get to Metaphor unless you can communicate smaller concepts. Individual words still have meaning and it must therefore still be possible to communicate using individual words.
[QUOTE=Bryan Ekers]
Engineering on that scale requires extreme precision. It’s hard to say “hand me the 5/8ths crescent wrench” when you can only express it as “The small moon of Dellenda turns by season.”
[/QUOTE]
Everyone knows that the small moon of Dellenda is exactly 5/8 the width of the large moon in crescent phase.
Anyway, if I recall the episode aright, the rest of the Enterprise crew eventually traced some of the alien language’s allusions to the mythologies of other planetary cultures.* So clearly they had contact with other species previously. Maybe they acquired their technology in exchange for their exceptional storytelling skills or prostitutes or something.
Actually I’m even more unclear on how one would tell a story solely by citing example of other stories. It seems like it would be the literary equivalent of those endless-corridor mirror gimmicks. I guess Robert Jordan proved it was possible. I frankly don’t see his literary output being worth an entire warp drive though. Still, we know that tastes vary enormously in the Star Trek universe. Maybe the Borg would be huge fans, who knows.
Come to think of it, Enterprise was pretty much an exercise in telling stories purely by reference to other stories.
[QUOTE=Just Some Guy]
I was browsing another forum and I was reminded of that terrible episode of The Next Generation where the Enterprise is confronted by craft armed with good old ordinary lasers and our trusty space heroes just laugh it off. That’s driven me nuts for years since lasers are likely to be the most effective weapon against the Enterprise!
A laser is just a coherent beam of light. The shields are invisible. Ergo a laser weapon would pass right through their shields to burn a hole in the hull, kill anyone behind it, and potentially do some real damage. And as a bonus it would be invisible when fired in a vacuum so they might not even realize who’s shooting at them.
It was a stupid line thrown out to tell the viewer how much more advanced the technology in Star Trek is to our ordinary present day tech (cause that faster than light travel and gravity control weren’t enough) but it really says that the writer had no clue what a laser was beyond the SF concept. You can fanwank in explanations but its hard to get past the fact that light easily reaches them.
I know it’s a silly thing but it’s bothered me forever and it feels good to let it out. Anyone else with a scifi annoyance that’s gotten under your skin for years you want to let out?
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Coming late to this thread, but it always bugs me that invisible dudes can see. Nuh uh, the light would pass straight through the retina, not be absorbed.
[QUOTE=Tom Tildrum]
I once read a different sci-fi author who explained away his unobtainium as having been discovered as part of an unanticipated stable “island” of artificial elements WAY up the periodic table around atomic weight 900 or so.
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