Drop your warp core, beam your credits, liquor and all those big breasted, brow ridged women over now, or I blow your ass off, targ breath.
I don’t know what you’re smiling about there son, it’s stuff like that started the Earth-Mimbari War.
Well, the Minbari waved a knife in a friendly greeting of openness, the Earthers went and shot them. This is why we need interstellar gun control laws!
Oh Hell, you’re probably right. He’s going to take my threat as a jocular comment, and be expected to beam over to play games of chance involving sharp objects and drink too much.
Dammit.
But it makes for the one of the coolest scenes in the movie: to see the hull of the Enterprise rise up, ready to annihilate Khan’s ship is a very satisfactory moment. Poetic license, gentlemen!
What I want to know is why “yellow alert” doesn’t involve shields. One would think it would–a preventive, protective move.
Indeed.
The shields suck up so much power the wi-fi goes off all over the ship.
So here’s one that has bugged me for ages - the speed of warp in the Trek universe is completely inconsistent.
In TNG and DS9 going to warp 9 seems to indicate travelling at a high speed, and that one can go a large distance that way. In Voyager, however, a ship that has as its cruising speed warp 9.975 can only travel about 8 light years a day. Exhibit A for these speeds is in “Scorpion” when Seven of Nine tells them to rendezvous with a cube 40 light years away and Chakotay says that’s a five day journey in the wrong direction - exhibit B the fact that it would take Voyager 70 years to travel 70,000 light years, which actually gives them a speed of roughly 3 light years a day which is even worse.
For comparison, the nearest star to earth is Proxima Centauri which is 4.2 light years away. On that basis you could barely consider the Federation an interstellar power as it would take them days to get from one star to another, and the Federation is 10,000 light years across (or nearly three and a half years from one side t’other). This is completely contradicted by the info in one of the star trek wikis, for instance this entry hereon warp speed, which says that warp 6 is 392 times the speed of light (that would make a lot more sense, I have to say).
Anyone want to prove me wrong on this as it bugs the hell out of me.
“…It’s just a show, I should really just relax.”
Starships (like turbolifts) travel at the speed of plot. The various references to warp speed in different shows aren’t consistent, and can never be made so.
Yes yes, Bellasario’s Maxim, I know. 
Ha! And here I thought it only messed with the food generators…
ok, I got a D in Physics (god, I hated that class), but anyway, what I don’t understand about all this talk re “orientation” etc, is this: if you have starship that has its weapon’s bank firing thingie facing forward, you pretty much have to BE facing forward to hit something in front of you, right?
Now, Enterprise (TOS and TOS movies) have this. I think they MAY have a few weapon outlets (I cannot think of the appropriate term tonight–sue me) aft, starboard and port and (for all I know) in the rear. But my point remains: to HIT something, you need to be “facing” it (the weapon needs to be oriented towards the object you wish to destroy).
Am I nuts or is this not so? It’s all very well to say that Kirk could have fired from beneath (so to speak) Khan etc, but if the trajectory of his phaser isn’t correctly aligned, he isn’t going to um, score (I just realized that sentence sounds awfully porn-ish). So, position, relative to the other ship, does matter in space. No?
And please don’t bore me with physics. Thank you.
Another bad example - in “Tomorrow is Yesterday” (otherwise a great episode) they go into high warp to circle the sun to go back in time. It takes them an appreciable amount of time to go 9 light minutes. Then, in this high warp state. moving forward in time, they have enough time to beam John Cristopher into his fighter, after a chat.
It is not just Trek - there is a rule in all fiction that time slows when the main characters have to make a final speech. This also explains why opera singers die slowly, belting out their final arias at the top of their lungs.
of T.B.
Bolding mine.
And Anna Russell’s.
Based on the position of the main phaser emitters, it would take a rather extreme pitch change to bring the phasers to bear on the Reliant. That’s one of the reasons later systems used phasers arrays as opposed to banked emitters.
I thought Kirk’s Enterprise had phaser banks on the top and bottom sides of the saucer. I know 1701A did. So, why not just point the top side phaser straight up at the belly of Reliant? The only answer I can think of is … drama.
Photon torpedoes tend to be characterized as the “heavy” weapons on Federation starships. Phaser-only fire from below would damage the Reliant, but might not finish her off. If you think you might only have one shot, best to try and bring the torpedoes to bear so it’s your best shot.
There is more than one emitter pod.
In a lot of semi-official “tech manuals”, the artwork/plans show emitters covering a majority of directions.
In the “Star Trek: Enterprise” mirror universe two-fer, the Defiant(?) is shown as having rear facing phasers and torpedo launchers (they use them to break out of the ad-hoc Tholian dockyard).
In the most recent film, you see several “hard points” in use on the Kelvin and Enterprise.
I assume that direct fire weapons (phasers, disruptors) need line-of-sight to the target. You may need to adjust the orientation of your ship to bring more emitters to bear on the target, as well as possibly compensating for any cooldown/recharge cycles.
What the main beef is, is that guided weapons (missle, torpedos, booby trapped shuttle craft) should be available at most any orientation (as the weapon can change direction in mid-flight), but this is not shown with consistancy in film/on TV.
“Semi-official.”
On the original, refitted NCC-1701, we only saw the one phaser bank. Ever.
I totally agree about the guided weapons. If we can do it now, you’d think that they’d be able to do it then.
And this reminds me of another nit-pick:
According to canon, the Federation agreed not to pursue cloaking technology. But why-o-why did they not pursue anti-cloaking scanners??
They had to jury-rig a torpedo to hit a cloaked Klingon warbird (and the torpedo is clearly shown “seeking” out the target and changing directions in flight). A multitude of scanning and ECCM stuff should be standard equipment on a photon torpedo. Are we to assume that the torpedo is reliant on scanner info from the launching ship?
In the early days of air to air combat, radar guided missles homed in on the radar return “echo”, with the radar mounted on the launching platform. (Some models still are.) But, even today, there are missiles that are “fire and forget” self guiding, and carry their own sensors. :smack:
I don’t believe you are correct:
In “The Wrath of Khan” film itself, I recall that there are scenes of phaser emitters firing from the upper-starboard side of the saucer, and the lower-port side of the saucer. I tried to find an online image of these scenes, but my google-foo is weak.