Hmm… “Shaka, when the walls fell” involves understanding the straighforward objective sentence “The walls fell.” “The river Temarc in winter” requires understanding “river” and “winter” as nouns in their own right, and that this river is called the Temarc. Yes, our own languages do have a lot of language that is referential (Draconian measures. Pyrrhic victory. Quixotic effort. Dogged pursuit. Kamikaze tactics) but these are nonessential and can be effectively rendered with plain language (Strict measures. Victory at too high a cost. Doomed though idealistic effort. Persistent pursuit. Suicide attack). So yes, if the UT can crack those parts of the language, then there should be a root grammar/syntax/vocabulary to which you can recur.
OTOH if you’ve NEVER heard the words “stop and listen!” assembled as a sentence to require that you shut up and listen, but ever only “the river Temarc in winter!” it may take you a while ( " ‘stappan lyssen’? what does ‘stappan lyssen’ mean?" ) until you realize what’s the actual sentence being said.
I’ve always been of the school of thought that says the “communicate via metaphor” thing was that race’s “diplomatic language”, and for whatever reason (strict caste system, strong cultural taboos, etc.) a diplomat speaking the “street” language in a diplomatic situation was one of those things that “just isn’t done”. The protocol is so deeply ingrained that it simply never crossed Dathon’s mind to summon his Ship’s Janitor to the bridge and say, “Here, see if you can talk to them.”
Truthfully, I think arguing about how one would communicate only in metaphor is missing the point. I think the whole point was simply to get across to the viewers that these aliens communicate in a way that the UT can’t translate, and make the point in a way that doesn’t require the writer to be a master linguist himself.
If you’re referencing the first Romuans episode Balance of Power, the Romulan’s weapon wasn’t a torpedo, but a plasma (pure energy, as Spock would say) weapon.
I personally have always liked how all these alien cultures so freely give up their leaders.
The good ship Enterprise arrives at a world where “no one has gone before.” Picard or Kirk (or Janeway on the Voyager) orders that the planet be hailed. So, there is some interplanetary protocol for “hailing” a planet. Even non-Federation worlds subscribe to this protocol. Cool. The alien who responds to this hail is, almost invariably, the supreme leader of the world. They never get a “space traffic controller”, a secretary, a phone operator, a receptionist, some military flunky, or even an exo-biologist interested in alien species. Nope. They get the guy at the top on the horn straight away.
Then, Mr. Bigshot claims to speak on behalf of all the people on his world. No world ever seems to have countries, tribes, races, factions, or whatever, unless such divisions lead to an important conflict that drives the plot. After identifying himself as the bigshot of the whole world, he then spills the beans on whatever crisis or conflict is driving current events on his world.
I just know that if I were king of the world, I would at least have someone to work the phones.
No, cloaked ships can’t have their shields up, hence why they’re vulnerable whilst cloaked. Also one of the major features of the 6th film was the fact that the Klingons had developed a bird of prey that could fire whilst remaining cloaked so it wasn’t like it couldn’t be done, but once the Enterprise worked out how to get around that (effectively heat-seeking photon torpedos) it quickly became obvious it wasn’t the unstoppable weapon originally envisaged, given that a cloaked ship can’t have its shields up and so wouldn’t be able to handle many hits.
This was sort of addressed by one TNG episode where they were dealing with a planet that wanted to join the Federation that had two factions on it. They made the point that virtually all planets that reached interstellar tech levels also achieved world government, and as the prime directive forbids contact with worlds below that level of development it’s not surprising that they only deal with unified species.
/fanwank
You are right that it’s a little unrealistic that you can get a hotline to the supreme ruler of a planet on the first try, though.
I’m probably missing something, but I don’t get all the different faster-than-light speeds - Warp 1,2,3, etc. Travelling at the speed of light gets you there instantaneously, at least from the traveller’s point of view. How much quicker can you be than getting there at the same moment you leave?
The transporter is also very short-range compared to Trek’s usual weaponry. Novels aren’t canon, but I years ago one said that transporters could only pick up things within a 45,000km radius.
What always bugged me was the whole Ceti Alpha V becomes VI thing. The fanwank explanations just seem silly to me. I still think VI was either a typo or someone forgot how roman numerals work.
The reason it is called a Warp drive is that rather than going faster than light in the normal Universe, it is instead Warping Space and effectively taking a short cut through a 4th physical dimension. This was roughly explained somewhere along the way by either Roddenberry himself or in one of the episodes or movies.
Ah, but you see: that’s the point of introducing FTL technomagic like Warp Drive (Trek), Hyperspace (SW), Jump points (B5), Psychic Navigators (Dune) etc. in space operas – to circumvent relativistic effects so that interstellar adventures can take place within the same lifetimes/timeframes for the people who are on the planets and those on the various ships. Go from Earth to Vulcan on business and back in time for your child’s graduation, not her retirement party. Hear that Colony N3WG is being attacked by aliens and get there in time to fight them, not after they have been assimilated for 400 years. Don’t take the chance that in the time it takes to get from Caladan to Arrakis the Empire will have fallen and the whole thing will be moot. . .
Yes, and of course it was a single, irreplaceable prototype and the bad guys didn’t keep any plans and no one’s ever been able to make one like it since, even after 80-some years, despite the immense military advantage it would give you. :rolleyes:
Another one. To travel through time, all you need to do is to go really really fast towards a star, then pull away at the last moment. Why the bad guys aren’t pulling this little manuever and traveling into the past to rob the Aztecs, the wealthiest emperor of Andor or the first grand nagus of Ferenginar is beyond me. For that matter, the Borg could try it over and over again until they assimilated humanity at some time in the unprotected past.
Well, if they had unleashed their “Time Travel Pod” a ways away instead of, you know, in Earth orbit in front of a couple zillion Federation observers, they could have just coasted in. And saved themselves a cube.
It’s not that the technology could never have been developed again but, like I said in my original post, that the premise of a cloaked bird of prey didn’t work very well with the heat/gas seeking photon torpedos in play. So they didn’t bother.
