My argument is that with imaginary (and probably impossible) tech and powers, it is necessary to suspend one’s disbelief if one is to enjoy the story.
Now that suspension needn’t be infinite. If Captain Kirk suddenly starts using tractor beams to resurrect the dead, I’ll complain loudly. But saying that FTL drives should cause the ship to maneuver more like rockets than like sailing ships is pointless. They serve only to allow the central metaphor of the story and to look cool. (And occasionally to make female crewmembers’ clothing disappear, but only in Japan.)
No, but humans do. They don’t think that way, and they don’t move the way spaceships can.
This makes sense only if you remove humans from the equation entirely and replace them with robots, which are capable of navigating and maneuvering in this fashion.
A vessel piloted by humans would at least have to have some kind of feedback to control inputs to give the crew the illusion of motion. Otherwise they’d just be along for the up-down, forward-back, pivot-right, pivot-left, ride.
My Immelmann question, BTW, was meant to be facetious. But it’s good someone actually took it seriously! 
Also BTW, reversing course by firing your thrusters in the opposite direction requires that you negate your “forward” motion before you start moving “backwards.” This is a great way to both waste energy and create enormous positive G forces.
Seems to me that an Immelmann, in which you re-vector rather than cancel out your existing forces, would indeed be a much more elegant solution.
The classics never go out of style; that’s why they’re classic!
Late to the thread and calling back to the discussion about rewiring/reprogramming gadgets to solve problems. Here’s a little story that happens to be totally true:
I was working on a high-pressure project, and I needed a Machine to do a Thing, but I didn’t have a way to tell it to do stuff. (Notice the sophisticated technobabble.) I was unfamiliar with the Machine and its internal workings, because it was made by someone with different tech from mine. So, I used my Gadget to poke at it. Now, because the Machine was fairly sophisticated, its response to getting poked was to send back data that said, “Here’s what I can do, and here’s how to ask me to do it. Now stop poking me.”
Unfortunately, it said all that in a language I didn’t know. My Gadget is pretty smart, too, though, so I put the data in it and asked it, “What does this mean?” It managed to translate a few important bits of it for me. The clock was ticking, and I didn’t have time to figure out all the details, so I fiddled with my gadget a bit and worked out how to make it send exactly the signal that would tell the Machine to do the Thing. The day was saved!
Next day, I needed the Machine to do a Different Thing. My improvised changes to my Gadget couldn’t do that, so I had to do more analysis and fiddle with the Gadget some more.
Now, what I did is perfectly understandable to us: I queried a server to see what services it offered, and I hacked together a little app for my phone that would send the request and parse the response. Then, because it was a hack rather than a full implementation, I had to add to the app to make it send other requests.
To someone from 1916, though, it might have looked a lot like someone rewiring his communicator into a controller for an alien device. (Then forgetting he had done so and having to do it again.)
In Star Trek, ships move faster than light, so relativistic issues don’t apply. The fictional method of FTL involves creating and maintaining a warp field, which, if not maintained, degrades slowly, causing you to “drift to a halt”, from Warp 6 to 5 to 4 … to 1 … to sublight.
The fictional warp field is directional, so the engines can’t generate backward-facing warp fields. Star Trek ships can’t go backwards in Warp.
We know that Star Trek ships can go up and down in normal space, and so they might (or might not) also be able to go backwards. Impulse drive is different from Warp drive.
Skald the Rhymer is absolutely correct: in fiction, the rules are made up by the writer. If he’s wise, he makes up rules that don’t grossly contradict reality. (“Oh, you’re experiencing reverse evolution and have returned to your ancestral form.” Pure garbage. “Oh, reverse the polarity on a tractor beam and you get a pressor beam.” Shrug. Maybe so. Who knows? It doesn’t contradict known science.)
Are you saying that Kirk never once ordered “All astern, warp factor _______!” :dubious: 
No, we’re talking past each other. I think I see what you mean now. You are saying to cut forward thrust so your rotation is pure rotation, then resume thrust but facing backwards. Rather than rotating while thrusting and thereby adding some sideways component that is unnecessary and unwanted. I think we agree.
By what means are you revectoring in space? Immelmanns work with aircraft because the aircraft is using the atmosphere to provide some of the forces on the vehicle. Spacecraft do not have the atmosphere to do that job.
In space, if your vehicle is moving, say, toward a small asteroid and you wish to move away from that asteroid, there is very little available to you to turn your direction of travel. Apollo 13 managed to use the Moon’s gravity to turn their trajectory, but they required timing their thrusts and pointing them in specific directions at specific times.
If your asteroid is sufficiently small, the gravity will be insufficient as it will be negligible (perhaps immeasurable to the sensitivity of your instruments). Or maybe your turn refers to the distant starfield, not any local object.
Outside of a large gravity field (i.e. not close to a planetary body), what means is there for revectoring?
Pointing thrusters is the only means to direct where you go.
Though the proposed Star Trek Warp field technology suggests that the generation of that warp field creates a directable preferred path in front of the vehicle that constrains the motion, which is what allows starships to bank like aircraft rather than behave like expected of space vehicles.
Yes, and you’d use thrusters to re-vector your motion, unless your warp field could be reconfigured somehow. The result would be the banking maneuvers we see the *Enterprise *perform.
One of my pet peeves has been things like phasers and light sabers. I had a laser pointer, I took it outside at night and pointed it at stuff. There was a red dot over there. No “beam”, just the dot. Why would anyone with three-eights of a brain design phasers to produce a visible, glowing line? I mean, if you want to use it for combat, you telegraph your exact position right away. The beam should be invisible, like a laser is, but even in smoke and fog. You shoot a gun, the bullet is effectively invisible in flight.
And the lightsaber. What the hell? If I was designing a fencing weapon of that sort, it might create a shimmer, like a heat wave, but glowing? That is just stupid. You want to make it difficult for the other guy to see.
In Star Wars and many other movies/shows you also see the blasts moving. Even when you can see lasers, you can’t see the beam move because that happens at the speed of light. So I always assume these weapons send out some kind of soliton-like plasma bolt. Not that that’s realistic of course. 
A real laser weapon would never be handheld because it needs an enormous amount of energy and probably also cooling. Also, although it would be quite dangerous, cutting through unprotected flesh and blinding people left right and center, it wouldn’t be all that effective because you can simply reflect the beam using a thin reflective layer.
I do like how in Stargate “the Tua’ri’s primitive projectile weapons” are effective against the replicators while energy weapons aren’t.
And please stop with the apostrophes…
I don’t think you spelled “Crazy Ivan” correctly 
One approach I heard rumored as effective would be an charged-particle (proton ion) beam coincident with a laser. Charged particles get distracted by stuff, but the laser, which would not have to be the weapon’s power, so it would not have to be all that strong, could be tuned to corral the protons. A particle beam could not be defeated with a mirror. Would still have some power source and heat dissipation issues, though.
Regarding starships like the “Enterprise”-why do you need guys sitting at control panels-why doesn’t the ship’s computer control everything, via interface with the captain’s brain? Like the “engine” room, where Scotty presides over those guys in jumpsuits-what is this, the “Titanic”.
Because the story is about people (counting Data as a person), not machines. It’s not “realistic.” Realism is boring. The majority of the Enterprise’s adventures wouldn’t take place if the characters had realistic approaches to what they were doing.
This is the same computer that runs the holodeck. It’s tremendously powerful and knowledgeable…and it has the judgment of a small child on laughing gas. Do you really want that AI controlling the ship without lots of supervision? The implicit function of every post is not “do thing X”; it’s “keep the ship from killing us while it does thing X”. Knowing how to do thing X themselves, if necessary, helps them spot screwups and even to take over when the computer is offline (either due to damage or because it tried to kill everyone again).
HOW do you use thrusters to re-vector your motion?
Let’s not confuse talking about warp fields and rockets. I have no idea how a warp field works, because it works according to however the author says it works.
But a rocket is a different thing.
OK, you’re sitting there in space. You’re moving along at quite a clip. Except now instead of going over that way, you want to go over this way. So you use attitude jets to re-orient your main rocket and start firing.
Except in space, all that happens is that you start changing your vector by whatever amount your main rocket can accelerate. Your original vector doesn’t disappear simply because your ship is pointing in a different direction. You can’t just re-direct your vector. If you’re going at 100 meters/second towards Mars you can turn your ship any way you like, and fire your rockets any way you like, but the only way to stop going towards Mars is by firing your main rocket, which can only add to your vector, not change it. Of course, you can add to your vector in a negative amount.
This might help you. You’re on skates. You go forward. You want to change direction you dig in your skates and suddenly you’re going in another direction but you’ve preserved your speed. Now imagine that you’re on the ice but you don’t have skates, just a rocket. You’re headed toward the wall and are going to crash. Can you change direction and do a U-turn using your rocket? No you cannot. The only thing you can do is point your rocket at the wall and turn it on until you slow down and eventually stop relative to the wall.
Note that if you’re near a massive object it might seem like you can do tricks like this, but that’s only because the massive object is constantly accelerating you towards it, so you’re falling toward the planet, or sun, or black hole, or whatever. So all the forces balance, you’re just able to use the acceleration of the object’s gravity rather than your rocket.
Not really. Invariably, you’ll have some speed sideways relative to the direction of the planet (or other body). This means that you’re accelerated towards the planet, but you miss it and fly past. At that point the acceleration towards the planet no longer adds to your speed but subtracts from it. So the net speed difference from passing by the planet is zero, just like rolling down a hill and up the next one will first accelerate you and then slow you down.
(Things get more complex if you also consider the movement of the planet, if you catch up from behind you’ll get a “gravity assist” and gain some speed.)
However, passing by a body with non-negligible gravity will change your direction so this is the only way to change course in a vacuum without using power. (Well, the only reasonable way, I guess you could use a solar sail or pass by some insanely strong magnet.)
Correct. You have to subtract your current vector from the desired vector, and then accelerate along that difference-vector. (And even that won’t exactly work, since, as you move, your desired vector will likely be changing.) But, anyway, yeah: you have to work at cancelling what you’re already doing as well as establishing what you want to do. Otherwise, as you say, you’ll end up with the sum of the two, and not merely the desired result.