This is a general question, I swear. There are factual answers to this. That’s the whole point of this thread, actually.
What are the scientific mistakes that Star Trek has made?
I’m not talking about “well, they couldn’t ever create a transporter because…” and “Everyone knows it’s impossible to go past the speed of light!”
Things like, in Star Trek Generations, the missle that travels to the sun does so in approximately 10 seconds. Light travels from the Sun to the Earth in approximately 8 minutes so that sun have been so close to the planet it would have fried the place or it’s a big time miscalculation.
Further, in that movie, the Sun collapses to change the path of the Nexus. But that missle never actually changed the mass of the sun, so there wouldn’t have been a change in gravitational pull, thus no change in the Nexus’s path
twice the Enterprise(original series) had to travel forward/backward in time by slingshotting around the sun. I believe it was ST5(the one with the whales) where they had to travel back to the 20th century to get some whales to save the planet.
Now, even though the whole idea seems ridiculous, I can admit that it’s possible that, somehow, they did that. They went back in time when whales were around.
What I thought was bogus was when the travel BACK through time, to the future again. They end up in EXACTLY the same place, at the EXACT right time. That’s just not right, says I. That’s a 1 in a billion X billion X billion X billion, at the very least, and they somehow did it? I don’t think so.
The fact that Enterprise can assume a “stationary orbit” above any point of a planet, even above the poles. A stationary orbit is by definition above the equator. I’m sure the Enterprise can keep its engines on and hover above any point of the planet, but if you need engines to maintain position it’s not an orbit.
How about the fact that 99% of the planets they encounter have breatheable atmospheres and comfortable temperatures? We know that even in our solar system, there’s only one out of 9 planets like that. Even more ridiculous are the comets and asteroids that have pockets of breatheable air.
The “gas clouds” and “nebulae” they encounter are far denser than anything we know about.
The use of “dampening fields.” I fail to see why a sprinkler system is useful on a spacecraft.
There are ridiculous inconsistencies in their use of technology, but I guess those are plot holes, not “scientific mistakes.”
The reason that they are usually visiting POPULATED planets is because the show needs a plot. There wouldn’t be much excitement if the Enterprise was always visiting Jupiter-like planets, right?
“Hey Jim, look at that damned big red swirl!”</Bones>
“That…is…extremely large…Doctor McCoy.”</Kirk>
“I’m sending a probe down now captain. I find the exploration of this marvin-milktoast planet illogical, however.”</Spock>
Ah, a chance to post the OTHER incident that made me turn off Voyager for good.
The crew spends tons of time and research on new drive that goes really fast. After it’s built, and the night before the test, Paris is simulating the drive in the Holodeck and discovers a problem controlling the ship after about 8 seconds of flight.
Problem 1:
Why didn’t they simulate it BEFORE they went to all the trouble of building it, like every engineer since 1980 has done with anything more complicated than a 2-bit adder?
If I remember the plot correctly, they try it anyway and crash in to a planet. Chakote and Paris survive, and somehow send a message back in time telling Voyager that they will crash into a planet if they use the new drive.
So Original Paris decides that the best course of action is for him to lead the way in the Delta Flyer, but it still ended in near-disaster and they dismantled the drive.
Problem 2:
Why didn’t they just use the magic engine in 8 second bursts?
I swear, if Kirk was the captain of that ship, they’d have been home in a year and a half, tops.
(That was actually the plot that I hoped the last episode would have, Voyager enters the Nexus, where Kirk tells Janeway what a dumbass she’s been and explains to her, very slowly, in very deliberate language, that they can leave the Nexus when/whereever they want, so they should leave the Nexus and show up at Starfleet Headquarters and appologize for losing their nice ship.)
-Sometimes, as a plot twist, they’ve been able to “resurrect” a person after that person has died, but “restoring” them from the transporter pattern buffer. So why aren’t they immortal?
-The ship gets hit by a weapon blast. The operations officer says, “Shields down to 80%. Damage on decks blah blah.” DAMAGE?!? Their friggin’ shields are UP!! If they can generate a force field that can protect the interior of a ship in the event of a hull breach, why can’t they generate a shield that keeps the weapon fire out?!?
Sigh.
-Plasma conduits. Apparently, the whole friggin’ ship is wired with miles upon miles of tubes that carry streams of plasma, and these provide power. But how much fucking power does a damn keyboard need?!? Because of these plasma conduits, every single square foot of the ship is capable of erupting a plume of plasma, potentially killing anyone nearby, if the ship is inflicted with a mediocre amount of damage! Don’t these people realize that you can transmit electricity over relatively non-combustive copper?!?
-Ship design: Huge wastes of space EVERYWHERE. Massive, opulent quarters for every member of the crew. Twenty-foot-high ceilings (why the hell do they need twenty-foot-high ceilings?!?) Miles upon miles of corridors that do nothing by take up space.
And let’s not forget centralization. Any trekkie worth his salt can come in and quote the complete weapon stats of each and every ship in Starfleet. But you know what? All of those weapons can be instantly rendered ineffective with a single utterance of four magic words: “Target the weapons array.” So tell me… why is there one big button on the hull of the ship that turns all the weapons (or the engines, or the sensor equipment, or Neelix’s vibrating ass dildo, etc.) off?
-Thoron particles. What in the name of Jack Chick’s gaping asshole are Thoron particles?!?
Let’s face it, everyone… Star Trek died when they stopped showing Kirk tear his shirt off.
The original communicators. In a series set 200 years in the future, they are still using what are basically cell phones? Wouldn’t technology have been much more advanced?
What are they going to be using in Enterprise? Tin cans and a string?
B or B refered to this, but I don’t think they are cell phones. They seem to be able to communicate much further than a cell phone and it doesn’t seen to matter where in orbit the ship is, just how far away. Making excuses that ‘they deployed satellites’ is arguing from the presumption that they are cell or satellite phones.
As an aside, Bragga or Berman said that “Janeway’s laptop is bigger than mine”. Maybe Janeway’s laptop does stuff that yours doesn’t, Dude.
I don’t know if you remember, but in the original series they had a device that looked like a mango with a clear plastic rod sticking out of one end. It was a massively powerful, focussed flashlight. At one point, the away team’s communicators went offline and a redshirt wandered off to look for a clearing so he could flash a Morse Code message to the Enterprise.
He died.
Cnote: They mentioned gravity plates in decking in several episodes, particularly the DS9 episode in which Sisco built a solar-sail spaceship out of wood.
cnote no worries. I’ve been hijacked by much better than you.
I’m kinda surprised this was moved too. I had a sneaking suspicion it would, but there ARE factual answers to this question. Maybe a whole lot of them, but answers nonetheless. Eh, it’s not worth the pit rant…though I am giving the eeeeeeeevil eye in bibliophage’s direction. Damn hippie fascist.
Like, in Voyager, there was an episode, where they had to commander a spaceship/dumptruck that was spewing out radiation like a mo-fo. So Janeway gave them two options “get control of that ship’s radiation by X amount of time, or we’re turning it into the sun nearby to destroy it.”
Now, the problem here is that the longer they wait to turn it, the sharper the turn they need. If they were continually turning it while working on it, the arc would be gradual and they could decide later on what they wanted to do with the ship.
They must like to orbit with the Enterprise skimming the clouds, because any time they lose engines, their orbit is spiralling inward and they’re going to crash into the planet in two hours.
I also love how they detect neutrinos all the time with a device the size of a cracker-jack box. I don’t care how cool you are; if a neutrino doesn’t happen to interact with one of the atoms in that-there cracker-jack box, you don’t see it.
You’d be suprised how many “Ask the Expert” questions we get about what exactly an M class planet is, and what the other classes are. Answer: IRL there are nine planets. (Well, at least there were until 5 years ago. ) We don’t have to classify them by letter; name does well enough. “M class” is technobabble. And other classes? If the planet ain’t amenable to human life, Star Fleet don’t go there.
The guy in the red shirt ALWAYS dies.
If Kirk tells you to put on a red shirt and go behind the big rock, “Spock, Bones, you’re with me.” Then you must find an excuse to beam back to the ship. Discover that you are really, really sick. Say that you have to pee really badly. Mention that you left the coffee pot on in your quarters. Whatever.
Crisco didn’t build the ship of wood. He did move solar sails that would take years to work like he was Horatio Hornblower on the high seas, but he didn’t make it of WOOD.
Did he?
Those solar sail were much too small to move a spaceship. You would need sails many hundreds of square kilometers in diameter.
I only mention that one because it was just posted.
My actual favorite episode to rip to shreds was the ST:TNG episode where the Enterprise comes to the rescue of a planet in dire jeopardy because there is an interstellar garbage barge with radioactive materials on it in orbit, and everyone on the planet is going to die of radiation poisoning.
Hmmm…In the 23rd century, is space not still filled with radiation of all sorts, from far IR up through gamma rays, as well as cosmic rays, which are much more deadly than the low-grade radiation you get off nuclear waste?? And are atmospheres not capable of blocking almost all of this radiation, as they are today? And then the Enterprise crew starts to get sick from this radiation, even though they have shields which will stop focused particle-beam weapons.
Then, when they tractor on to the thing to drop it into the sun, they find it necessary to drag it the whole way, when it would be a simple matter to simply give it a push in the right direction and let gravity take it’s course.
Oh, right, they have to get it through the asteroid belt! In reality (and every movie/show I have ever seen that deals with asteroids makes this error), asteroid belts are not even remotely that dense. Yes, there are millions of asteroids, but the volume they occupy is, well, astronimical. Standing on one asteroid, you would need a good telescope to see the nearest neighboring one.
:sigh: Thanks for providing a place for me to sound off on that one.
(I’m kinda new here and I gotta get my #of posts up. It’s embarrasing being the new kid.)
) We don’t have to classify them by letter; name does well enough. “M class” is technobabble. And other classes? If the planet ain’t amenable to human life, Star Fleet don’t go there.