posted
Yeah, I see the blue piping now. Whatever's on the side has to be something else. And, I guess it's consistent with the lack of working shuttles on the ship from the previous episode...
-Trip's got nowhere to go? What happened to spending a week on a different beach for the next two months? I think he just wanted to go to Vulcan.
-When Archer storms out of the briefing room, you can see an oversized chrome model of Enterprise through the door. I dunno - would they make something like that for a half-second appearance? It's not possibly from the Nemesis briefing room set, is it?
-Pulsed Phase Cannons (!!). I'd forgotten that they originally had to overpower the cannons on their first use to be vaguely effective. Yet, they could have easily made or effected upgrades without telling anyone. In any case, we do now have an excuse to see machine gun FX from Enterprise, continuing the cycle of pulse particle weapons going in and out of style.
quote:Originally posted by Guardian 2000: 12. A star just to the left of Polaris was the star of the "Strange New World" star system. It was evening-time, in the northern hemisphere, in late February or March of 2154. It shouldn't be too difficult to figure out which star he referred to, given the naked-eye visibility in a darkening-but-not-dark-yet evening sky.
There are two possibilities for this one.
The most likely is HR 285 (aka HD 5848), which will be almost perfectly to the very left of Polaris at just-about-dark on March 15, 2154 (which I chose as a rough estimate date).
However, I'm having a helluva time trying to get a distance for that star, and I'm afraid it might be too far. I haven't found mention of its distance in any of the "distances to stars within (a good number of) light-years" references online.
So, I'll have to get freakly on the parallax, I suppose.
The alternative is Alrai, aka Gamma Cepheus. It's about 50ly out, but is about three times as far to the left, a bit down, and so on.
Both stars are about the same type, though Alrai is much brighter in the night sky and hence more easily visible. The idea that Archer could see HR 285 at dusk would be odd.
Remarkably, the starfield they used in the shot actually does resemble the real thing, though the brightnesses aren't quite right based on the cap I've seen.
-------------------- . . . ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
posted
C/o the star catalog in Celestia, HD 5848 is 313ly from Sol, and a K2 II star.
Incidentally, from orbit around HD 5848, both Polaris and HD 6319 are an extremely bright pair of stars (about 10 degrees apart). Celestia is way cool.
posted
Of course, that could be Scotty exaggerating, the crew could have had a running joke about how fast the ship can go. But that's a stretch.
-------------------- "This is why you people think I'm so unknowable. You don't listen!" - God, "God, the Devil and Bob"
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Thanks Joshua! I wish I'd found your message sooner to remind me of Celestia, but I didn't . . . thus, I did the distances by hand. It's not tough, though . . . one over parallax (in arc-seconds) gives you parsecs.
As for the "warp 11" comment, where do you get that velocity from?
(Of course, such a question brings up all sorts of possible issues, from 'warp highways' to canon vs. non-canon.
Suffice it to say that the TMP speed is similar to that given for Enterprise in "Cease Fire" and required by numerous other examples, implying that the TMP Enterprise could've delivered Spock to Vulcan even more quickly. The speed works pretty well against a number of other examples, though of course I'd be lying if I said that speed was a consistent thing in Trek.)
-------------------- . . . ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
posted
...And I think somebody has done that calculation before, since the fan specs for the refitted ship give a top speed of warp 12 - a surprisingly reasonable figure representing a moderate increase over the TOS top speed and matching the TMP reference.
posted
YES! They fixed the dish! That was the only feature of the NX that really bugged me was that extremely squashed ellipse. I'm going to assume that they're going to retrofit that dish onto the Enterprise as well.
posted
Fixed? I thought they were just replacing it or hadn't installed it yet... Wait, it IS a squarer dish on Columbia. Though I doubt for purposes of stock footage reusal they'll upgrade the Enterprise saucer as well, even though it is seen missing.
And as for the HDTV caps - also note that both Enterprise and Columbia are in the same type of drydock. This suggests that there are at least three docks big enough to house the NX-class... I believe that there were four more NXs on the drawing boards in the first season. Hm.
posted
As I recall from looking at the Columbia, It really looks as if the dish had not been installed yet, not that it has a newly designed deflector dish.
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Registered: Feb 2000
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posted
Dat - you might be thinking of the shot of Enterprise with its dish removed. The one of Columbia definitely had a dish that extended above and below the notch in the saucer.
In related news, I have just been floored by VFX consistency. Thesepictures from the Guardian of Forever's website show the Columbia under construction in a earlier episode (I can't remember which one). You can see the newly-shaped dish being assembled here, with part of it being towed along in the foreground.
posted
Crimony,m you're right - looks like Columbia was meant to be that way from the beginning!
But it doesn't necessarily mean that the Enterprise deflector is a older or inferior design. Since I largely suspect they'll be keeping the ellipsoid deisgn (beyond stock footage, it helps tell the two ships apart if they're ever seen together), I'd figure that Columbia's deflector is meant to serve a slightly different set of purposes.
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