-Name dropping: Dr. Phlox mentions the Nausicaans!Plus, the guest race in this epsiode are the Anxanar, and as a result of Hoshi they eventually get off on a good footing with them. The Axanar are androgynous and live around 400 years, by he way.

-Away missions (no offical term for it yet) are a really big deal. Lots of preparations go into it, and they tend to bring a lot of equipment over to accomplish their mission.

-And they use the shuttles to go there and back. Some sort of docking adapter is on the top on the ship, which rotates as necessary to attach to hatches and stuff. In this episode, they attach to the "top" of the ship to get in, and flip upside down. The shuttle has visible maneivering jets, too.

-Speaking of which, we see *why* the shuttlebay has two decks - you biard the shuttles throught the top, via a drop-down stair that extends to it! Pretty neat. Docking takes a bit of doing, and is a fragile process.

-The "plasma rifles" *are* apparently redresses of the Jem'Haddar rifles, themselves redresses of previous guest weapons. Oh well. The phase pistols have a top/front section that opens up like a revolver, and has a glowey power cell or something inside that can pop out.

-We see the armory this episode, which is probably one of two in the forward section. It features two loading cradles forward, with two tubes into which torpedoes are loaded. The four ports on the underside of the hull are the torpedo tubes. Aft, the torpedo is launched from the suspended pod(!). Whaddya know...

-The torpedoes themselves are long, metallic, pointed and with a pinched section in the middle. They're pretty slow when fired, and the episode is partly about getting them to target and explode properly. Even when they DO work, they still don't seem very powerful.

-This is part of what I am liking about this show - they seem to be clearly outmatched by other races thus far, and have to get out of situations by their wits instead of technobabble crap. Voyager, the E-D, and the E-nil tended to be on equal or greater footing with their antagonists tech -wise, or could use their tech to get out of situations. On the Pre-E, everything is experimental and realtively low-tech.

-The bad guys who were killing the Axanar are unknown, but come in a ship that looks like a Neitzchean fighter from "Andromeda". They have tractor beam technology but use boarding tubes a la later Vidiian episodes. They were killing the Axanar and extracting some compound for their own use. Finding the Pre-E, they start doing the same thing when another Axanar ship shows up to save them, after Hoshi learns their language.

-Speaking of which, this is mostly a Hoshi episode, focussing on her getting used to space travel and exploration. The clip we've seen of her screaming is actually a significant plot point: the first time aboard the ship, Hoshi freaks out when she sees the dead crew, and is really ashamed later about screaming "like a 12 year-old". She eventually gets through her crisis with the help of an obtuse metaphor involving a slug. Overall, not badly done.

Bah, that's enough. You guys fill in the rest tonight.

Mark
 

Actually i cant think of any good reason why there shouldnt be mention of Nausicaans on Enterprise. I think Enterprise needs to be a vehicle for established races (i.e. our first contacts with them) from the older series, not new races that will mysteriously disappear before the later series begin
 

Mark
 

Or is it just called continuity when Ron Moore does it and pointless name-dropping when Braga does it?
 

[ October 03, 2001: Message edited by: CaptainMike ]

As for name drops being useless. Well, let's take my favourites, the Breen. The entire culture was built-up in a series of little name drops here and there over six years.

You're right about there being essentially a criticial mass of already-established names, and "Tarkalean" being a throwaway line that is truly throwaway. But why complain about an episode that uses two already-established names and recycles them? How exactly is a Nausicaan reference any different than an Andorian one?
 

And the Breen thing was awesome, because they kept threading it through. Although they did lose track of the original reference, which was that the Breen used disruptors ('Hero Worship' & 'Generations', but by the time we saw a Breen they had left phaser burns ('Indiscretion'). but i had fun figuring that out too

[ October 03, 2001: Message edited by: CaptainMike ]

At least Phlox' reference to the Nausicaans is a real observation about something on his part. If he had said something like "This food tastes remarkably like a Nausicaan spaghetti I once had...", then I would worry.
 

Perhaps the other two tubes are fired from a second armoury room that has yet to be fully outfitted?
 

a guy can hope....
 

and mesa likes!
its quite a change to see how earth ships don't simply rule the galaxy becuase they're the good guys...

i got a whole babylon 5 feel toward enterpirse's weapon capabilities, by that i mean earth force ships in B5 were pretty bad and were almost always outgunned by aliens.

I hope they will improve her weapons slightly,
its brings great luaghter to see the enterprise fire off a barrage of pulse fire and miss every shot!

Then she fire her precious missiles and you can hear the tension, then the aliens just brush them aside with their shields and weapons!!! LOL
"oh my god, ha!" they're screwed and its fun to see.

Now back to more serious note, what more can we conclude about the enterprise's "shields" or primitive version/armor hybrid.

The first alien fire that impacted on the front of the bridge seemed to have resulted in a more shield like effect than some field enforced armor[ as previously hinted from dialogue]
The second fire went clean through, i'm surprised the enterprise is not in a much worse state since the alien ship pounded her several rounds while the shuttle ever so slowly got back into the hanger.

One last comment, i have to say that the explosions were a little "fake" and the alien harvestor ship too, something about her outer hull lighting was very fake,
the design is good though, very menacing looking even when sitting still.

[ October 03, 2001: Message edited by: TheF0rce ]

ugh
 

On the whole though, I like this new show. They haven't yet fucked over continuity of events, even though tech-wise it doesn't look older than TOS. Liked the reference to the Axanar.

-MMoM
 

We also didn't see any lifeboats, are we to assume that if the ship was critically hit everyone was screwed?

We didn't see thrusters, either, so are we to assume it could only perform tight maneuvers using its main impulse engine?
 

By the way, it seems likely 1701 couldnt rear fire, what does that have to do with NX-01? Just because the Constitution's design didnt lend itself to the addition of a rear firing tube, whos to say that its predecessor wouldnt be able to? Theyve been making cars with power windows for decades, but they still make cars without power windows too? Why? Cost, feasibility, design preference.. etc.. the point being that even though one ship had them, doesnt mean theyd be added to every ship after them.

Ships of the Star Fleet depicted an upgrade of the Constitution-class refits, the USS America that was identical to the E-A except with the back of the torpedo tube module containing a rear tube. It'd be interesting to see the studio model in that area, most blueprints of the E-no suffix refit label it as the torpedo waste vent, but if the E-A model had an area that lookedl ike it could launch a torp, then maybe it could have.

And if somebody said starships didnt have rear firing tubes before the 24th century, then f*ck that because its obviously wrong. The NX-01 had them.

[ October 05, 2001: Message edited by: CaptainMike ]

The blue thing could be very, very important to the ship - after all, the Constitution-refits, Sydneys and some Excelsiors had one, and Constellations, Mirandas and some Excelsiors actually had two. It could also be completely superfluous, since the TOS ship and the TNG vessels had none. But whatever it is, it's reasonably large and reasonably radiant. Perhaps it's a good idea to keep it away from the inhabited parts of the hull...

Putting the aft torp launcher there seems like a jolly bad idea to me, though. Especially if the pod already houses big and dangerous equipment, and torp preparation and launching requires manual labor. A properly designed ship (from the TV show standpoint, even if not necessarily from the engineering one) ought to have weapon emplacements that look like weapon emplacements and are all installed using a common logic, like a seagoing warship's gun turrets or torpedo tube clusters or VLS cassettes. You don't mount one gun in a turret on the forecastle and then have another one swing from cables between the masts. If the main hull is good enough for forward torps, it ought to be good enough for the aft ones as well.

Timo Saloniemi
 

quote:

---

The only thing I don't like about the rear-firing torpedo launcher on the new Enterprise is that the torpedo was launched from that pod. Damn it, I so wanted that pod to be the engineering section!

---

Well, actually, someone in the episode said that a 3 meter difference on a target could mean you'd hit the warp core instead of the weapons. He could be refering to the Enterprise here, meaning the pods holds both the rear torpedo launcher and the warp core.
 

As for the rear torp launcher... If it were in the main hull, wouldn't you have to shoot around the pod? That doesn't seem very efficient.