That’s because communications take place on the subspace channel which is capable of sending communications at infinite speed. When out of subspace range you have to send at plain ol’ light speed.
It might only be that human/vulcan crossbreeds have green blood. Not sure about that though. Have the Klingons always had purple blood like in The Undiscovered Country?
There’s a kick-ass scene in ST6 when the cloaked Klingon ship fires a torpedo at the Enterprise, then the camera rotates to reveal the torpedo headed straight “up” to the Enterprise’s underside. IOW the bad guys were pointing “up” in relation to the good guys.
I would think the real-world explanation for this is that it just looks better on TV/film if everyone’s pointing in the right direction. If ships are oriented differently along the XYZ axes it would look chaotic. If you’ve ever played the computer game “Homeworld” you’d know what I mean.
Here’s an apparent contradiction I just noticed in ST2, which is airing now on TNN (they’ve put an incredibly annoying black title bar along the bottom of the screen BTW; logo “bugs” are bad enough but this is just ridiculous).
After the Kobayashi Maru (sp) training scenario, Saavik asks Kirk for advice. He says, “Prayer, Lieutenant. Klingons do not take prisoners.”
Klingons don’t take prisoners? What was that planet Kirk and McCoy were on in ST6, an enormous bed-and-breakfast?
quote:"One thing that used to bug me, from the beginning of next generation and on into the spin offs, the upside down V insignia is used for com badges, uniforms through out the fleet, Starfleet command and probably federation issue condoms. But in the original series "
IIRC, this was answered in the ST role playing game. Shortly after TOS, Starfleet honored the Enterprise’s exploits by adopting the Enterprise’s insignia to represent all of starfleet. Hey, if the US army can change from “Be all you can be” to “Army of one”, then Starfleet can certainly change their logo.
Well, that was more of a Kirkian quip than an anthropological (xenological?) monograph on Klingon customs. It’s pretty clearly established in various episodes and so forth that Klingons find the whole idea of being a prisoner to be highly dishonorable. Death before surrender and all that. Their attitude seems rather reminiscent of WWII-era Japanese. So, they do take prisoners–at least sometimes–but since prisoners are clearly cowards without honor who didn’t even have the guts to die fighting like warriors, Klingons tend to treat them rather poorly. If they don’t just slaughter people who have surrendered outright (or kill them as they’re trying to surrender), they ship them off to some Siberia-like planet with sadistic guards and lousy weather and shape-shifting aliens who happen to assume the form of fashion models, and force them to slave away in the salt–I mean Kessel spice–I mean dilithium–mines or build a railroad to Burma or something.
Contradictions concerning exactly what the Prime Directive does and does not prohibit are legion. One episode of ST:TNG that always bugged me was “Symbiosis” from Season One. When the Enterprise renders aid to a distressed vessel, they discover a situation in which the Brekkians are keeping the neighboring Ornarans addicted to a drug, which the Brekkians supply to them, under the guise of peddling them the “cure” to a “plague”. Picard makes a big to-do about how just telling the Ornarans that they’re being had would violate the Prime Directive. Not beaming landing parties down on Brekka to eradicate all the coca plants or whatever the hell, or instituting a Federation blockade, or beaming a massive interstellar “Just Say No” public service ad campaign on all Ornaran frequencies. Just sharing a little information that the ship’s doctor has stumbled across. I think Picard comes up with some frightfully clever way out of his “dilemma”, but why was it a dilemma in the first place? It’s made quite clear that the Ornarans have space travel; they’re not so backwards that any and all contact is prohibited. (And if that were so, then the mere act of rescuing their distressed space travellers would have violated the Prime Directive.) If just telling these people the doctor’s findings violates the P.D., then so does every act of peaceful commerce or diplomacy or cultural exchange the Federation has ever committed in its history.
Another episode of TNG that always bugged me was “The Neutral Zone”, also from Season One. Among other sub-plots, the Big E picks up a derelict spacecraft with three cryogenically-preserved Earth humans from the 20th Century. (I think it was the 20th, not the 21st, and that’s what the episode synopsis says, although I don’t recall ever hearing anything about anybody launching spaceships full of cryogenically-preserved terminal cases–maybe that’s what NASA has really been doing under the guise of the whole “Moon landings” and “International Space Station” stories. Then again, I don’t recall hearing much about the Eugenics Wars either–I guess CNN didn’t cover them or something. But enough of that–that’s not even my main objection to this episode.) Anyway, Data brings back the survivors, basically over the Captain’s objections, and they get revived. Picard’s attitude towards the former corpsicles is extremely snotty–he can’t believe they didn’t just die back in their time, the way God clearly intended for them to. Apparently, 24th century people have all achieved Buddha-nature or something, and the prospect of dying young (all three of the revivees were fairly young–at least a couple of them were no more than middle aged, maybe even young middle aged) no longer upsets anybody, although I seem to recall everyone being fairly bummed when Tasha Yar bought the farm. (Gee, should I have put a spoiler alert there? In case somebody reading this thread never saw the early episodes of ST:TNG and is now catching them all in re-runs.) Anyway, even if Picard doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the humanitarian aspects of the whole situation, what about the scientific aspects of it? Here’s an opportunity to interview three real-live people about life on Picard’s homeworld 300 years ago–like finding three people who could give us eyewitness accounts of the Salem Witch Trials or the Glorious Revolution against James II in England. What happened to Picard the explorer and man of science, “boldly going where no one has gone before” to seek out new knowledge? Where’s Picard the amateur archaelogy buff? All he does is act like a bloody prig.
friedo wrote:
If that were the case, it wouldn’t merely take “weeks” for your message to get to Star Fleet. It would take years. (E.g. say subspace comm has a range of 3 light-years. You’re 4 light-years away from the nearest communications relay station. If you beamed light-speed signal to this station, it would, by definition, take 4 years to get there.)
Believe it or not, this isn’t entirely untrue in real life. Take a look at a representation of our galaxy sometime. Everything rotates more or less in one horizontal plane, all in the same direction. While many stars are noticeably above or below this plane, they’re still oriented the same way.
All the planets in our home system are aligned with the same sense of up, and orbit in the same direction. Pluto’s orbital plane is at an angle to all the others, but it’s believed that Pluto was a runaway planetoid that was captured by Sol’s gravity.
Astronomers used to have terms like “galactic North” and right ascension to describe the position of stars, and now use a coordinate system. Still, AFAIK most stars behave the same way rotation-wise, and the planets we’ve observed orbiting some of them are also in the same orientation.
So yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as “up” in space.
In The Undiscovered Country, S[pock informs Scotty that Klingons have no tear ducts, so they can’t cry.
But Worf tells his son, Alexander, a story about the famous
Klingon Messia, Kahless the Unforgettable, and how he once
cried and his tears filled an ocean…or something.
BTW…
The TOS warp scale> Warp factor= c^3, no upper limit
TNG warp scale> Warp factor= c^3*c^1/3, up to warp 9,
than rising asymptotically to infinity at warp 10
All Good Things warp scale>?
My take…after warp 10, the warp factor = c^4*c^1/4…
thus, warp factors after 10 to be a Transwarp Domain.
Warp 10 is not achieved but instead bypassed…a ship jumps
from warp 9 to warp 11, the ship uses the same power but is now going 17.5 times faster.
Just figure out how to do the jump to…ah…shift into
second gear.
Cap’n Crude wrote:
Yes, but:[ul][li]The ecliptic plane – the plane that all the planets except Pluto orbit the Sun in – is not aligned with the plane of the galaxy. And, furthermore:[/li][li]The “plane” of the Earth’s rotation is tilted 23.5 degrees from the ecliptic.[/ul][/li]Other planets in other star systems are going to have the same problems.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by MEBuckner *
**
The Ornarans have space travel (and just barely that), but not FTL travel, which is the standard for providing ongoing support. Until a culture develops FTL travel, it’s supposed to be hands off.
The ship that the Ornarans were flying is the last of its kind. The Brekkians sole industry was producing the drug, and the Ornarans made consumer goods and pretty much everything else for the Brekkians. Neither was producing space ships, and when some vital part was damaged, the only source of a replacement part was the Enterprise, which could easily replicate it. Picard decides that the Prime Directive would actually prohibit repairing the ship. Without the ability to transport the drug, the Ornarans would run out and learn that they were addicts and didn’t really have any plague, and conquer the addiction. Having a thriving industry, the Ornarans could easily recover, while the Brekkians, who could produce nothing, would probably have their entire society collapse, unless they were to develop a new industry and negotiate a fair trade agreement.
My problem with this episode was the idea that the two cultures were so specialized that they had fogotten the basics of spaceship construction that enabled the trade to come to be in the first place. Two cultures that so closely depend on each other would not have relied on centuries old technology, they’d have developed more and more efficient transportation methods over time. The Ornarans ships would have gotten better and better.
It also bothered me a bit that the story was basically lifted from the Asimov book “The Currents of Space”. In that book, the commodity is cloth, but the basic set up is the same. Still, IMO, this is one of the better early shows of TNG.
RE: Ship orientation…
I don’t find it contradictory at all to see vessels approach each other with the same respective “up”. After all, it’s not very hard (in the ST universe, anyway) to rotate until both ships are situated the same way, is it? Additionally, in the case of the Voyager episode with the giant space critters, it’s not very hard to rotate oneself upside-down in relation to the critters themselves.
Remember… in space, everything is relative. Star Trek seems to forget this all the time. “Captain, the ship is travelling at 15,000 kph.” 15,000 kph relative to what? The ship? A nearby star? A nearby planet? The center of the galaxy? Because it’s certainly not relative to the camera point-of-view, because in the very next scene we see the ship, and it doesn’t appear to be travelling more than a few dozen kph.
Is there or is there not money in the 24th century? In “The Trouble With Tribbles” a tribble costs a few “credits.” But in ST4 at the pizza place Kirk tells Gillian that they have no money in the future.
My two peeves:
In DS9, first episode, the wormhole aliens made it clear that they would not allow the wormhole to be used for conquest. Except, of course, for anybody who tried it. The Federation went through, the Dominion came back, then the Klingon/Romulan alliance went through… bah.
In STII, Saavik accuses Kirk of never having faced the Kobayashi Maru challenge. Umm, hello? He took the test three times. The first time, straight like everybody else. Second time, he took the test to see if he could beat it knowing the answers. Third time, he cheated. But that first time was exactly the same for him as for Saavik and every other command-rank cadet. Except for Spock… ???
I think there is no money used in the Federation, but planets outside the Federation use it and persons of…questionable character…like Cyrano Jones use it in their nefarious, under handed, sneaky black market dealings.
An explanation for that: the slingshot method of time travel is top secret info which is not given out to anyone. If every Starfleet captain knew how to do this, they’d be constantly using it to redo untoward events that happened to their ships.
Hmmm… in another ep, Spock pushes Kirk out of the way of a spore spewing plant, and Kirk asks him if he knew how much StarFleet has invested in him, and Spock gives a figure. So they did have money. Things like “Scotty, you’ve earned your pay for the week” (“Doomsday?”) could be figures of speech.
Doesn’t Picard, in a film, tell Alfre Woodard they don’t use money when she makes a comment on how much the E must cost?
What about Jordi’s (Jeordi? Geordi? Georgie? Honey?) blindness? All the medical advancements and they can’t take care of this? Didn’t they establish in one episode that Picard (Pecard? Pacard? Godard? Pecan?) has a mechanical heart? Yet blindness goes unabated…
Ethilrist wrote:
It is quite obvious that Saavik was speaking metaphorically. Kirk had taken the Kobayashi Maru test, by going through the scenario in the simulator, but he had never faced what it really, really meant to be in a no-win situation. That was what Kobayashi Maru was supposed to be all about. Instead, Kirk just threw a tantrum and cheated until he got his way and “won.”
Torgo wrote:
Hell, they can’t even cure baldness in the 24th century. 
He had that cool infared visor, then later got artificial eyes with zoom ability.
This is not an inconsistency, thereby placing it off-topic; however, it is an enormous annoyance, thereby earning a rant, thereby earning its place here at the SDMB.
The phrase of some kind.
What?
Oh, you know. Like this:
**Captain, it’s a spacial anomaly of some kind."
“I think it must be a starship of some kind.”
“I’ve scanned the device; it’'s a forcefield of some kind.”**
If I’ve heard this phrase used on a Trek TV show once, I’ve heard it at least 17,462 times, with Voyager being far and away the worst offender.
“Of some kind”??? As opposed to what – of no kind?
We doctors have a name for this: it’s called unconscionably lazy, substandard, and just plain bad writing. Which pretty much explains why Voyager was always the worst offender: the only explanation for the quality of Voyager’s writing is that the creative staff consisted of 17 monkeys and a dart board.