I meant to say “…square kilometers in area”
It is impossible to get measurements of the sails from video footage of the ship, unless it flies up to a giant ruler. Maybe the body of the ship was a significant fraction of properly-sized solar sails.
Okay, that’s true, and I admit it’s been a while since I saw that one, but I seem to recall that you could see the ship and the sails and the lines connecting them. We know the approximate size of the ship, so you can get a pretty good idea of the size (quite small) of the sails by the angle of the lines. They were way too small.
The body of the ship was a significant fraction of the size of the ship. This is exactly my point. The amount of thrust you get from photon pressure is quite small, which is why you need sails which are magnitudes larger in diameter than the ship they are pulling.
I believe that the density of asteroid belts, the ratio of solar sail area to mass of the ship and the number oh M-class planets are coverned by poetic license.
Realistic asteroid belts would be darn boring. 
Accurate spelling is also “coverned” by poetic license.
Coverned: Controlled or covered and or governed by.
Of course they are. So is warp drive, time travel, having every alien species in the galaxy look like humans with putty on thier faces, and all the rest of it.
I thought the point of this thread was to have a little fun poking holes in such things. 'Scuse me if I misunderstood.
I mean it. What the hell is an isogram? And how is it different from a regular gram, multiplied by any power of 10?
I hope Andre Bormanis got paid a lot for thumbing thru all those scripts.
And I beg your pardon if it were I.
A line on a chart that is a constant value.
Or an “isoton”. Apparently, an “isoton” is a measure of explosive power that is equal to “2.5 megatons”.
WTF?
Couldn’t they have just multiplied whatever number they had by 2.5 and just said “megatons”?
My pet theory is that transporters don’t actually transport anyone. They disintigrate (ie-kill) the person being sent, send the information and energy to a new location, then reintigrate it, making an exact copy of the person. Thus, McCoy is right to fear the transporter; they actually kill and clone everyone who uses them.
Nitpicking the science in Star Trek makes little more sense than nit-picking the science in Lord of the Rings. Star Trek is a fantasy that substitutes science for magic and aliens for elves and gnomes. It isn’t, not by a long shot, science fiction. I love TOS and TNG, and liked DS9 and Voyager, but I don’t treat them like true science fiction.
Mike Wong (of http://www.stardestroyer.net fame… or infame) agrees with this. I think it’s just a point of semantics, with the thinking that if there’s no dead matter left over afterwards, then nothing really died.
Except The Lord of the Rings doesn’t brag about “teaching” people about science.
In Voyager, Paris and later Janeway break the transwarp barrier and then start turning into some weird critters.
The doctor analyses them and says something like “they are changing in a pattern consistent with human evolution”. There is a pattern to evolution?
GAH!!! Yes! One of the worst things I’ve seen was that two part episode on Voyager with the Dinosaurs that escaped from Earth. I’m not even going to ask HOW they built a spaceship and left no trace of their technology behind.
But I really want to know why Janeway went into the Holodeck and said to the computer “ok, that dinosaur we had on our planet a couple million years ago? Tell me what he’d look like today.”
No! No! No! Evolution is based off random genetic mutation and the biological needs of the creature based on the enviornment that creature is living in. You can’t just ask to see what a creature will look like in a million years putting no other variables whatsoever into the equation. But if that’s possible to do, gosh I’d love to see what we’ll look like in ten million years.
Tapswiller, good post. I want to disagree with you about the astroid belt. Well, not disagree, exactly, but is there any reason that asteroid belts couldn’t be a bunch of rocks that densly packed? Granted, they’d all crash into each other and create space dust, but assume a continuous influx of rocks from somewhere. Basically, must we accept OUR astroid belt as the only model? Also, welcome to the boards.
You remember that ST;TNG episode when Picard, Ro, Guinan, etc. all turned into children due to a transporter mishap?
The doctor uses a lot of technobabble to explain the transformation.
Even die-hard trekkers admit this is an absurd episode using meaningless science.
I think my personal favorite piece of Star Trek idiocy is when the Voyager uses torpedoes to blast through a Black Hole’s Event Horizon. <slaps writer’s around>
Well, an “asteroid belt” in the usual sense of the term implies a phenomenon created by (supposedly) a planet in a system that didn’t have enough mass to form… which is why there’s so little “total” mass in our asteroid field (it’s also presumed that the gravitational dichotomy 'tween the Sun and Jupiter kept it from forming). However, in Star Trek (or Star Wars, for that matter), an incredibly dense asteroid field could have been formed by the destruction of a planet in recent (read: in the past fifty thousand years or so) times, which would result in a crapload of matter condensed in a relatively small space.
Although they never explain this in the show… you’d think they’d be absolutely astounded to see so many ateroids so close together, but they just act as if it’s an every-day thing.
And Trek does?
A lot of the things folks are complaining about here aren’t really science errors, although I suppose they might be considered technology errors. There’s no law of physics that says that spaceships from warring fleets can’t agree on a standard plane of engagement and a single “up” perpendicular to that plane. Likewise, if a person wanted to build a ship with plasma conduits going to every console, he could. It’d be incredibly stupid, but it’s not impossible.
The biggest (or at least, most common) science errors are with speeds. Granted that Starfleet has some sort of technology that effectively allows travel faster than light. Even with the speeds quoted for typical cruising, though, it’d still take much longer than depicted on the show to get from place to place. On the original series, the maximum safe speed for the Enterprise was somewhere in the vicinity of Warp 9, which according to the tech manuals, would translate to 729 times c. At that rate, it’d still take two days to get from here to Alpha Centauri, and that’s about the typical distance between “adjacent” stars. Throw in the fact that probably the vast majority of stars aren’t interesting (read: populated) enough for the ship to visit, and we’re looking at at least a week or so to get from Point A to Point B. Yet, on the show, it’s usually only a matter of hours, or a couple of days at the worst, to get wherever it is they want to go.
SPOOFE wrote:
A modern battleship has over a foot of armor plating. If I hit it with a small explosive shell from my own ship’s guns, the armor will not be breached. However, the explosions will send shock waves through the ship, as though you hit it with a great big sledge hammer. Stuff inside can get shaken up – and damaged – pretty badly. Particularly if you’re raising geraniums in your quarters.
(And, yes, since the explosive is in physical contact with the ship, the shock waves would propagate through the ship’s structure even if the ship were in a vacuum.)