Looks are what I meant, of course. Besides, I’m fairly certain the minature used in the first three movies is entirely different from that used in the series, so it IS a different pretend ship.
Ah, I thought it was nocturnal transmissions, but that’s just what us fanboys do.
And at a Meta level, J.J. must be doing SOMETHING right as there’s quite a bit of buzz here.
I’d be willing to bet that the “cop” is the time travelling Spock.
As for the robotic tools, given that humans seem to be using primitive techniques like manual stick welding to build the Enterprise, I’m gonna go with they don’t.
I can’t believe I found something on point, but here is a link from someone in the industry:
The Star Trek universe is terrible at robots in general. I’m sure a small factory fabricator is more along the lines of what they’d be able to accomplish.
A.) We’re talking about something 200 (or so) years in the future, so whatever the faults of robotic technology we have now (and 90% or better of the welding on modern cars is done by robots), they shouldn’t exist in the future. We’ve currently got robots which roll down pipelines and weld them (had 'em since the 70s if Diamonds are Forever is to be believed). Given the critical nature of starship design, I can’t imagine that you’d want something as stupid as a human welding the thing up.
B.) They’re using stick welding, which is not exactly a precision technique. There are a huge number of variables which come into play. Why not use phasers or EM welding? Those would offer much better controllability than stick, by many metric assloads.
C.) Allowing home fab units (which are now starting to appear), means that computer ability has progressed to the point where you don’t need human beings doing the work on almost everything. Reason being, you’ve reached the point where you can load a CAD drawing into a robot and have it spit out whatever you want. Presently we have the ability (on a small scale) to build up three dimensional objects in metal, using a variety of techinques (solid freeform fabrication, fused deposition modeling, selective laser sintering, 3D printing, electron beam melting, and laser engineered net shaping, and others), so we’re left wondering why there’s humans welding the Enterpoop. with sticks.
No you’re left wondering it. First off, I know about modern fabrication technology, I was ***telling ***you about it. It’s logical that you can build a car with 23rd century home brew technology, I’m certain that it wouldn’t be cost effective to build a starship with it.
What you seem to be missing is that factory welding or home fabrication is done in controlled circumstances. You don’t wheel a welding robot out to a body shop to do it’s work, you set it up on an assembly line that is tightly controlled to the millimeter. The whole point is that assembling something larger in size and complexity than a skyscraper isn’t adding brackets to a car’s frame, a modern style robot can’t do it.
You’d need an extra fancy robot, like a Soong class android or at the least one of the robots from “I, Mudd”. The federation doesn’t have the technology to build intelligent robots. So no, it isn’t a stretch to assume that they have people building the ship. As for why they aren’t phaser welding it? I dunno, maybe stick welding works better, maybe it’s cheaper, maybe it’s what the 10,000 contractors they hired to assemble the Enterprise in drydock know how to use, maybe the hull is so phaser resistant that stick welding is the best option. Who the heck knows, but because it doesn’t jibe with your preconceived notions doesn’t mean it isn’t sensible.
Unions.
(Don’t overthink it man, the writers are there to write, not know about flux welding…it’s dramatic)
I’m halfway through the movie Helvetica the guy says (paraphrased) “It’s true, no typesetter can go see a historical recreation, they spend all their time thinking ‘The fonts are all wrong!’”
You do know that you’re all a bunch of geeks, right?
Except that you’re forgetting that the home fab stuff all got its start in industrial applications, and it started out building small things, they’re now working on larger and larger uses for it.
As is modern spacecraft assembly. You don’t want random crap left behind in a nearly inaccessable place drifting into a critical component when you’re a long way from the nearest service bay.
Depends upon how you define “robot.” They make portable welding units which require the operator to simply wheel the unit into position, place the electrodes in the right spot, dial in the appropriate settings, and stand back while the machine welds the parts. Given how expensive labor is, and how much it costs to build large things (aircraft carriers start out around a billion or so), there’s a lot of effort in cutting the humans out of the process. Hyundai is a leader in this area, since they run the largest shipyards in the world.
So you’re saying that robotic technology somehow gets frozen in the early 21st Century. :dubious:
Nope. First of all, the whole parameters of construction are going to be far different in a world where a machine can spit out an I-beam of the exact length, shape, and material strength you need. There’s no worries about getting something too long, too short, or having the wrong characteristics. Heck, you’ll be able to spit things out with variable characteristics along the length, so that when you weld it to another section, you don’t have to worry about the material around the weld being stronger or weaker. They can even be spit directly out of the machine with machine readable bar codes on them, so a robot can scan the bar code, know what the part is, where it goes, and what’s to be done with it. Things like this are already starting to appear, so logically, they’ll have even greater ability in the future.
You don’t need highly intelligent robots if you can ensure that 99.99999999% of everything is made exactly to spec. Japan has entire factories where the only jobs the humans perform are final inspection and robot repair. Scaling it up to operations the size of starship construction will come in a lot less than 200 years. No doubt the first steps will be in prefab home construction (where Japan is a leader), then to larger buildings and finally to things like ship construction (if not necessarily in that order).
Yes, it is. Moore’s law is still in effect, and we’re now starting to get elements of quantum computing worked out. Remember how badly they gauged compter tech in TOS? We’ve got computer voices which sound way better than the original Enterprise had, and they don’t even make that mechanical clicking sound as they speak.
Stick welding involves a whole host of issues, including things like supply chains, material analysis, X-ray inspection (got to check those welds for voids). Why would you go to all that trouble when you can simply train a human to point the thing at a spot, punch a button and let it weld? Why worry about ordering welding rods (or waiting for a fabrication machine to spit out an order) when you can dock a phaser in the charge station? Even if you go with the phaser resistant hull idea, EM welding is still a better choice, hands down. The level of control is, again, metric assloads higher, and you have fewer quality control issues. Heck, even friction welding would probably be better.
There’s also the health and safety issues associated with having humans doing the welding. Not only are humans at risk of injury, but they also tend to inhale huge amounts of nasty crap when they do welding. Does the Federation not have its own version of OSHA?
That I’d almost buy, if the Trekverse had shown the adversion to technology that the Star Wars universe has.
Yes, and the premise of putting oil drillers in space in Armageddon was supposed to be “dramatic,” but it turned out to be stupid. (Abrams was involved with that cinematic abortion, BTW.)
Trek is even worse. If there’s a scene of Kirk opening his safe and he doesn’t punch in the “right” combination, people are going to be screaming at the top of their lungs.
[Kirk]Really? I hadn’t noticed. [/Kirk]
It’s not like the canon in the original series was rigidly adhered to.
There is no consistency throughout the entire run from beginning to end.
No kidding. I think it’s funny that fans are so worried about canon when the writers didn’t give two shits.
Well, they can’t GIVE two shits if they’re not WORTH two shits. 
Give 'em credit, though, they made a TON of bank on the same formulaic layout:
Interesting oddity, 6 minutes in, cut to break, Oddity becomes malicious, cut to commercial break, (20 minutes in), First attempt fails, making things terminal (cut to break at the 37 minute mark), Terminal collapse of the Entire Universe(!) cut to commercial break (52 minutes after the hour)
Deus Ex Machina solution by inverting the an-ionic chrono-protonic waveplex (usually by Data, Geordi, or Wesley) Show ends with no negative impact to ship or crew.
Repeat weekly through the entire run of TNG…DS9 panicks when JMS hands them their lunch…then forget all they’ve learned and return to the formula for the entire runs of Voyager and Enterprise. (and Nemesis, but multiply by 2.5 to deal with movie timeframes)
You just leave me and my parakeets out of this. Hear me ?? ( Shakes fist at [b[Skald the Rhymer**. 
I saw the trailer. I was deeply into Trek in the early 1970’s when it was kicking butt in syndication. Deep in. I went to conventions. I collected items.
This thing looks entirely like Trek. It feels right. I’m psyched.
Cartooniverse
I should think that’s why the fans are worried about it.
:rolleyes:
Custom fabricating parts is most likely not going to to be cheaper than using a large scale industrial process. Auto fabricating I beams isn’t going to cost less than using a bunch of huge rollers to squeeze one into shape.
I think you’ll find that modern spacecraft aren’t assembled by robots.
No, there probably is a great deal of it done robotically, but the Star Trek universe doesn’t have human intelligence level robots. It isn’t a stretch to assume that the fine work of applying the outer hull plating would be done by human hands.
When you need 200,000 radial bulkhead connector beams you aren’t going to one-off them in a fabricator. You’re going to use fast and cheap industrial processes to create them. For specific elements that need custom fabrication I’m sure it’ll be used, but the shipwright would be an idiot if he decided to go with a more expensive route. Logically much of the process will be automated, as much as they can get away with. Also, without true AI, humans are going to be involved at some stage.
A shipyard isn’t a factory. Something larger and more complex than the Nimitz isn’t a car.
In your opinion. There is zero reason why you might not be wrong. After all, they had a nuclear war they had to dig themselves out of, so maybe they aren’t as advanced as all that. Never mind that it’s not a given that that sort of technology will be around by then. And in a scifi where people actually aim cannon and pilot ships, you must assume that either AI isn’t sufficiently advanced or they don’t use it for some reason.
That’s just silly. Moore’s law isn’t a law, it’s an observation of how things have gone. It has utterly zero predictive power.
That’s a pretty good reason to reboot the series.
Maybe those stick welders are much more useful than the ones you’ve used? Maybe they incorporate X-ray sensors?
Oh, are you an expert at welding tritanium?
You’re assuming that the stick welders are the kind you’re used to, perhaps they use sci-fi materials?
Of course, that’s why the stick welders of the 23rd century don’t give off noxious gasses.
Seconded. I think the trailer looks awesome, and I couldn’t be more excited.
Assuming that’s true (which seems unlikely), the ability to have greater control over the quality of material would certainly pay for itself.
Not yet, but nearly every other aspect of it is.
Yes, because humans are soo good at getting things accurate to within .0000001 of a mm.
One fabricator, no. Lots of fabricators, yes. And as fab@home is proving, when you have one fabricator, you can quickly have many more of them.
“Fast and cheap” is rapidly changing its meaning. At one time, it was cheaper to have humans do everything, now its to the point where humans are becoming the most expensive part of the process, and employers are working to phase them out where ever they can.
One of the benefits touted about fabricators is that they pretty much do away with costs. No human labor involved, just energy and raw materials. Given that the Federation can afford to power a fleet of starships, hoversleds, etc., power seems to be relatively inexpensive. Material costs are difficult to estimate, but when you’ve got nearly zero waste in recycling processes, and a whole solar system of materials at your beck and call, the costs probably aren’t going to be too exorbitant.
Final inspection and initial design.
Hyudai’s shipyards (the largest and fastest in the world) most certaily are. They can build an entire container ship in about 1/2 the time of anyone else.
The amount of computing processing power that’s needed to design something as large and as complex as a warp power startship dictates that they do. Modern fighter aircraft could not even exist were it not for the power of modern computers, let alone fly. The Enterprise is several orders of magnitude more complex than a jet fighter, you’re going to have to have massively powerful computers to even begin thinking about such an undertaking, let alone doing it.
In the TNG tech manual, its stated that humans are in control of firing weapons simply for philosophical/moral reasons and not technological reasons.
It was coined in the late 60s and has proved correct ever since. Additionally, we now have the ability to do cluster computing, so we get the benefits of more powerful chips without actually having to build them.
Not really. A good story holds up no matter how dated the technology in it is. Were it otherwise, we wouldn’t still be reading folks like HG Wells and Jules Verne.
Why go to that trouble, when you can just ditch it in favor of something which doesn’t need those things?
You’re right, sonic welders would work so much better! (Or was that Doctor Who that used those?) 
Then why not sci-fi welders?
Funny that they can do that, but can’t figure out how to keep control panels from exploding all the time.