Nitpicking the science in Star Trek

Cafe Society
41

Chronos wrote:

<nitpick>

The maximum safe cruising speed of the NCC-1701 Enterprise on ST:TOS was warp 6. This translates to 216c using the ST:TOS warp speed scale.

The maximum safe cruising speed of the Galaxy-class NCC-1701-D Enterprise on ST:TNG is listed as warp 9.2 on page 57 of the ST:TNG Technical Manual. Since the “official” ST:TNG warp speed scale only gives exact figures up to warp 9.0 (which corresponds to 1516c), we can’t tell exactly how fast warp 9.2 is, but we can guesstimate that it’s probably around 2000 or 3000 times c.

</nitpick>

42

Carnivorousplant…

You bet they do. According to Mr. Wong of Stardestroyer.net…

That sort of thing just scares me.

Chronos…

Well, it’s a “nitpick” in that Trekkies think their shit is so great… we just enjoy pointing out to them how lousy it really is. :smiley:

Tracer…

  1. ST shields surround the ship in a big “bubble” several dozen meters above the hull. As far as I can tell by the dynamics of the shield bubble, the actual “shield” does not make “contact” with the ship itself, aside from the power generation from the shield generators.

  2. There’s a good twenty or thirty meters of vacuum 'tween the shield perimeter and the ship. No chance for a shockwave.

Conclusion? ST shields are “porous”, and allow a bleed-through of energy to help conserve shield generator resources. No, not a nitpick of energy shields in general, just in the notion that ST ships are strong in any way, shape, or form.

43

Well, since Voyager can travel faster than the speed of light, escaping from the Event Horizon of a black hole would be trivial. Well, you could escape easily. What would cause a problem would be the time dilation effects. If you are that close to the black hole your personal rate of time is going to be much slower than what happens outside. So you escape from the Black Hole no problem, but you find that a couple thousand/million years have passed while you were inside.

Oh, and the other trouble would be tidal forces. If you got close enough to the black hole to be inside the event horizon I would imagine that the atomic forces holding your ship together would be waaaaay weaker than the gravitational force of the black hole.

44

SPOOFE wrote:

Yeah, but –

If they’re anything like electric or magnetic fields (and I’m not saying they are electric or magnetic fields), I’m only saying if they are anything like electric or magnetic fields), then any stresses on the shields will cause stresses on the shield generators. Sorta like how putting an electrical “load” (resistance) across an electric generator makes it harder to turn.

45

[quoteIf they’re anything like electric or magnetic fields (and I’m not saying they are electric or magnetic fields), I’m only saying if they are anything like electric or magnetic fields), then any stresses on the shields will cause stresses on the shield generators.[/quote]

Well, they’re “warpings of subspace” (or something like that) that deflect energy (kinetic or otherwise) away from the ship. In any case, the stress on the shield generators makes sense (there’s that bleed-through I mentioned), but I see no reason why it should cause damage in unrelated/unaffected parts of the ship. I mean, if there’s damage on Deck 15, why do consols in the friggin’ bridge (Deck 1) blow up?

46

There is an original series episode in which Kirk and Spock are sent back to when the planet they are on was in an ice age. Spock starts getting emotional and explains that during the same time period Vulcans were more primitive and had not rid themselves of their emotions. I won’t bore you with an analysis of the erroneous assumptions inherent in that explanation.

It just occurred to me that the writers may have been perfectly aware that Spock’s explanation was nonsense. Spock may simply have been rationalizing being attracted to the alien woman who had been exiled to that time period.

I was going to mention the universal translator, but it’s getting late. Besides the language and culture related errors in Star Trek deserve a thread of their own.

47

Ugh…

I’m surprised that no one has mentioned Geordi’s famous line, “Wow- that planet has a surface temperature of 400 degress below zero centigrade!”

The problem, to me, is that it’s fine and well to have an SF series that uses plot devices. But it’s really problematic when you have unnecessary errors like the cold planet mentioned above. In particular, you have to remember that SF fans typically will catch these errors, and are oftentimes sticklers for accuracy (both scientifically and in terms of logic and continuity, for that matter.) When Braga et al. do that kind of thing, it strikes me that they must have a Gore-like disdain for their viewers. Who are you going to vote for? Bush? What are you going to watch? Cleopatra 2000?

It’s especially problematic because SF writers have proven that good science isn’t a handicap. Think of all the drama in the Heechee novels centering around Broadhead’s girlfriend being trapped inside a black hole. Yes, Pohl used plot devices, but he was very careful to specify when he did so, instead of throwing around a slop-bucket of bad science like latter-day Trek can do. And, last but not least, all of this becomes most frightening of all when we’re reminded of what we should have realized already: most people learn science from SF TV, and in particular they learn it from Star Trek, because Star Trek is the most willing to take technical terms which people might have picked up from the news and then grossly misuse them.

-Ben

48

I learned all I know about science from Star Trek.
I learned all I know about psychology from “The Bob Newhart show”.
I learned all I know about the WW2 from “Hogan’s Heroes”.
I learned all I know about the American Revolution from “Jack of All Trades”.
I learned all I know about ancient Greece from “Xena, Warrior Princess”.
I learned all I know about police work from “Columbo”.
I learned all I know about small towns from “Picket Fences”.
I learned all I know about New York from “Friends”.

The people who claim that Star Trek teaches science are disingenuous. People who believe the science in Star Trek are idiots. But I do think Star Trek can fairly take credit for inspiring a lot of children to learn about science, if only so that they can nit-pick the mistakes they see.

The fact that the producers promote it as science fiction doesn’t make it so. It’s fantasy. If you want true science fiction, print has always been the best source.

I love TOS and TNG, and I will watch Enterprise, but I can see them for what they are. When you don’t expect science fiction, and when you accept that the writers change the rules to fit the story rather than the other way around (which is pretty much the definition of fantasy), it’s easier to appreciate. I look at most episodes as self-contained stories (this doesn’t always work for DS9, though).

Yes, the science is ridiculous. Yes, the continuity is screwy. But there are some good stories being told here, and because of that, I can forgive the other, um, inconsistencies.

49

For those who are interested “The Nitpicker’s Guide for Trekkers” series of books by Phil Farrand covers many of the science problems covered in the above posts.

I would like to make some comments in Star Treks defense, many concepts they use are dead on and were a great improvement form the usual TV Sci-fi.

Trek knows the difference between a galaxy and solar system. How many times did the Galactica enter a “new galaxy”?

Since stars are so far away you need to travel FTL to cover such distances in a reasonable period of time. In order to travel FTL, rocket thrust no matter how much will not do the job, thus “warp drive.”

Great power requirements are needed so they use matter/antimatter annihilation as a power source. You can’t get more bang for the buck.

Two propulsion methods, warp drive for FTL, impulse engines for sub-light speed. The impulse drive is a fusion reactor powered rocket engine with deuterium as the propellant mass. A fusion rocket is not science fiction but a very real possibility. The velocities and accelerations Trek uses however are fiction but even here they are aware that such accelerations would be deadly to the crew, thus inertial dampers.

Trek knows interstellar space is full of dust particles and at high velocities would cause damage to the ship thus navigational deflectors.

At one time or another Trek has dealt with and discussed the following science concepts: antimatter, Quantum mechanics, nuclear fusion, stellar evolution, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. When was the last time “The Many Worlds” interpretation of QM was discussed on Friends?

“SF like Star Trek is not only good fun but it also serves a serious purpose, that of expanding the human imagination. We may not yet be able to boldly go where no man (or woman) has gone before, but at least we can do it in the mind. We can explore how the human spirit might respond to future developments in science and we can speculate on what those developments might be.”

Stephen Hawking (from the Foreword: Physics of ST by Lawrence Krauss)

50

The biggest problem that I’ve had with ST, is the Transporters.

To me this is the Best Damn Weapon Ever CreatedTM. You want to kill an enemy ship, beam its antimatter containment controls into space, or beam a photon torpedo onto their bridge or…

Now they keep saying that you can’t beam through shields, but it is done whenever the plot deems necessary via a myriad of loopholes that usually center on frequency. And that Transport requires too much power, yet the ship can maintain life support, cook dinner, hold velocity due to the warp bubble, project shields, communicate with distant ships and planets, AND fire massively powered beam weapons simultaneously

Also, you have captains that are responsible for ships that must represent an incomprehensible financial and political investment for the federation, yet they wait until after the ship has entered a dangerous situation (and blown a few plasma-powered control stations) to raise the shields…

51

If you really want to nitpick the transporter/shields thing, you don’t even need a loophole to use them as a weapon. The reason the show (usually) gives that you can’t transport through shields is that the signal gets degraded all to heck: If a boarding party tried to transport directly onto a shielded enemy ship, you’d end up wit a few piles of goo. Note that it’s not the energy/matter itself that’s the problem, just the signal. Fine. Transport several kilograms of gooey antimatter over onto the enemy ship.

But wait! That’d be a waste of perfectly good antimatter. We’re told many times that the transporter converts an object into energy on one end, and back into matter on the other. Why not just forgoe the transfer and reconversion? “Beam” a few kilograms of your enemy’s hull, and leave the energy in place. For that matter, you could power your own ship that way, too: No need for antimatter at all.

52

Good points Chronos, I hadn’t thought of beaming sans reconversion. Gooey antimatter,eh? Is that similar to slush hydrogen :)?

Also, if you have advanced holo-emitters that can exist outside of a holodeck.(As does the Dr. on Voyager) that can interact normally with the physical world, why waste all the energy to lug a living crew across interstellar space.
You could have a ‘virtual’ holocrew, that would require a much smaller and more spartan spacecraft.

[sub] but what’s the fun in that?[/sub]

53

Okay. Score one for accuracy. Minus a million points for the temperature goof cited by Ben above. (Actually, I think the line was “minus some degrees Kelvin,” which is wrong in a more subtle yet stupid way.)

The point is that many of these scientific errors could have easily been avoided by allowing a science consultant to proofread the scripts. Indeed, they already paid somebody to do this. I don’t know why they bothered – either Andre Bormanis missed the reference to “iso” used as a prefix for a unit of measure, or nobody listened to him when he told them how to fix it.

In other words, they may have taken science education on television a step forward, but they took two steps back at the same time. And how is an audience member supposed to tell the difference between the genuine education and the horseshit? By forgetting Star Trek and educating themselves, I guess.

54

…And they got it wrong, each time.

55

I’ve never heard of this. My understanding is that shields block the transporter beams, or deflect them back into space.

56

That is also my understanding.

57

Re: Andre Bormanis

I’ve always figured he spent a lot of time hanging out at the same bar as Rush Limbaugh’s fact checker.

There’s a classic Trek episode, “Spock’s Brain”, in which the Enterprise encounters an “advanced” alien spaceship (which of course steals the title brain but SPOILER they get it back). Anyway, the alien spaceship has an “ion drive”, and Scotty spends half the episode raving about how super-duper-advanced “ion power” is and how he wishes his ship had an ion drive and so forth and so on. WTF? Heck, NASA has already begun experimenting with ion propulsion. Whatever the Enterprise’s “impulse drive” is, it’s got to be at least as good as an “ion drive” (in fact, I suspect that the “impulse drive” is an “ion drive”). The Enterprise’s warp drive would of course make an “ion drive” look like an oxcart. It’s like the engineer of a nuclear-propelled sub saying “Big husky galley slaves pulling on oars! Aye, they could teach us a thing or two, couldn’t they?”

58

What about the science/technology they use to get Seven of Nine into that little thing she wears where you can consistently see her panty-line? I want to know about that.

And how she always ends up naked when the ratings are slumping. :smiley:

59

There is no evidence of a correlation 'tween the two. If one really did cause the other, Voyager would have a full-fledged X-rated show by the end of season five.

60

And it would have been a lot better for it.