Placeholder. Damn, my VCR went and recorded some stoopid Bachelor show instead. So until I can get the Torrent, enjoy!
Mark
Posted by MrNeutron (Member # 524) on :
Well, some tech things that bothered me...
--Clone has Trip's memories from his DNA...rrrrrright.
--Engines are out. Ship can't move. Okay. So, don't they have RCS thrusters?
--The shuttlepods tow the ship...which was kind of cool. But what made no sense was that the ship didn't even budge until the shuttles had rammed their engines past the overload point for a certain amount of time. Hello, Newtonian physics. They weren't pulling the ship out of a ditch. Some velocity, however minute, should have been imparted almost immediately.
Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :
Some more tech bits..
- During a rather awkard neural massage scene, Tucker talks about "rerouting the system taps", "compressing the antimatter stream before it reaches the injectors". That stabilizes the warp fields and allows NX-01 to do Warp 5.0 without field fluctuations. So basically, Enterprise is going to get faster.
- When they actually perform this upgrade, Tucker wants the ship go to Warp 4.9, to get the plasma hot enough to compress the AM stream. It seems to work, until one of the injectors gives up and things start blowing up.
- A polaric field the encounter caused the explosion. It's nucleonic particles flooded the reactor. Some nice exterior shots of magnetic dust clinging to the hull. The ship looks messy without lit bussard ramscoops and covered in grime.
- They use a perfectly normal 20th century welder to fix some pipelines.
- They clone Tucker with a Lysarian 'mnemetic symbiont', some sort of larvae. Somehow, these larvae have developed the ability to take the shape of whatever DNA they're given, and complete it's lifecycle in approx. 15 days. No explanation on why it has evolved these extreme abilities. And I take it we Lysarians were never mentioned before?
- The Lysarian Prime Conclave has outlawed this procedure. No word on Earth's own laws regarding clones.
- The symbiont looks like a wet ball of cottons. It IS a wet ball of cottons.
- The symbiont not only manages to become sentient, it also imitates the entire human metabolism. It's also able to learn language, a Texan accent, and Trip's memories... Phlox claims some species rely solely on genetic sequencing to pass on memories. This is the first proof humans might have that ability.
- The first use of the word tricorder!? Phlox calls his scanning device a medical tricorder.
- PORTHOS!
- Hey! Archer still has his model warpship! You know, the triangular one from "Broken Bow". Young Tucker-clone gets to play with it. And he breaks it. Someone on the production team must have had a great job making an old-fashioned model starship
- Can a 10-year old really understand he is a clone and all that this implicates in under 2 minutes?
- A new uniform? 20-something Tucker was wearing a grey overall.
- The magnetic yuckiness continues to build up on the ship, and starts to endanger internal systems.
- Malcom measures force in dynes... I guess the SI takes a nosedive after WW3
- Really bad newtonian physics in the Expanse...
- The symbiont gets weirder and weirder. I seriously don't understand WHY these creatures evolved this way.
- Woo. The clone caused an ethical mayhem. Picard would never have let it come this far. I bet any of the 24th century captains would have just let their crewman go.
- Enough rambling for now..
Posted by Starship Freak (Member # 293) on :
Anything said about the model starship? Specifically I mean, like what starship it is meant to represent?
Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
First off, I'd like to say that I didn't like this episode much when it aired seven and a half years ago as "Tuvix." I didn't like it much better this time around, either.
That being said, though, why the heck was all that crud that'd collected on the hull just automatically start falling off after they left the polaric-whatever cloud? Did all the material just suddenly lose its magnetic properties or something?
Reed reprograms the phase cannons to fire back towards the ship, so they can clear the crud off the launch bay doors and launch the shuttlepods. Okay, Mr. Smartypants, so how'd they clear the crud off the ports for the phase cannons?
I know the ship got all those upgrades and stuff in "The Expanse," but IIRC this is the first visual confirmation that the ship had its fourth phase cannon installed on the aft ventral quarter.
You know, I'm starting to think that ENT just might actually be developing a semi-coherent hull shape lineage of its own here.... getting another close look at the model ship makes me think that it's one of the early designs, shortly after the Phoenix itself. (i.e. An actual purpose-designed ship rather than a kitbashed ICBM.) From that you'd (possibly) go to the unnamed warp ship over the moon in the opening credits (anyone know if it's supposed to have a saucer or not?) or at least the Iceland-type ship (more recent, say, last twenty or thirty years). Then there's the Intrepid-type, which converts the triangular hull into a half-saucer. And finally the NX, which realizes the full saucer that was inspired by Cochrane seeing the 1701-E in profile.
Posted by Starship Freak (Member # 293) on :
The moonship does have a saucer: Lunar ship Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
Over time, I've managed to get over my complete disgust at their use of the Akira shape, however modified. I've been able to see how the shape, as you say, does follow a certain lineage, especially if you think in terms of flat-ish configurations with nacelles sticking out the sides.
I can also rationalise the plating of the ship's skin as being nicely retro. Which is where the skins of the Iceland and Intrepid start to annoy me, because in some ways they look TOO reminiscent of some 2370's ships.
Posted by TheWoozle (Member # 929) on :
The rifles are PLASMA rifles. I hadn't seen that mentioned before. Plasma rifles must be more powerful then phase pistols, since that was used to get a sample.
Was that a new graphic for the warp plasma flow?
Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
quote:Originally posted by Lee: [QB] Over time, I've managed to get over my complete disgust at their use of the Akira shape, however modified. I've been able to see how the shape, as you say, does follow a certain lineage, especially if you think in terms of flat-ish configurations with nacelles sticking out the sides.
Yeah, maybe we're just getting soft.
But the other interesting thing is that NONE of the ENT-era ships has anything like a secondary hull incorporated into the design. The closest we get are the aft struts and the tiny pod on the NX-01, and the single rear strut on the Intrepid. This supports the idea that a secondary hull was a later development in starship engineering -- and regardless of whether we insist on accepting the Daedalus or not, it's still a similar progression! Earth's starships still need to get from the single integrated shape (whether the tubular missile like the Phoenix or the lifting body shuttle-types).
I'm almost -- ALMOST -- ready to eat my words from back when the show came out about how horrible the design is... but I still think that the very concept of a saucer shape must have been "artificially" introduced by Cochrane's glimpse of the Enterprise-E.
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
It's a better design than the Connie Refit. (dodges various huurled objcts and runs for cover!) Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
Well, suppose he remembers the saucer-shape. . . Any future work he might have done into warp-field dynamics might have (consciously or unconsciously) have assumed a flat-ish shape for the ship. Hence the initial reliance on lifting bodies, then the half-saucer - almost reminiscent of a flying-wing design - followed by the first true saucer.
Which plasma rifle we talking here? Original ex-Jem'Hadar, or MACO rifle? My Torrent has another 25% to go!
Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :
T'Pol only says they used plasma rifles to obtain some samples of the magnetic stuff. The process was not actually shown.
It's probably the Starfleet-issue plasma rifle (ex-Jem'Hadar), since we probably have to presume the MACO rifles are phase rifles (since they have stun settings).
Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
I wonder if that's the original pulse-firing Starfleet plasma rifle, or the new magically-firing-red-beams-identical-to-phase-pistols Starfleet plasma rifle. . .
I've been going under the assumption that the MACO rifles are plasma rifles, although I can't recall right now where I got that idea from. It certainly wasn't a case of thinking "they fire pulses, therefore they're plasma rifles," I'm sure I picked it up from somewhere. And the Starfleet plasma rifles also have stun settings, they're used in "Regeneration" - the same scene in which the red beams feature, which may be significant. MACO rifles pulse whatever setting they're on, however.
Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :
This could imply they upgraded the plasma rifles to phase rifles off-screen. Which is technologically unlikely.
Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
I know. Best idea I've heard was emailed to me, someone suggested that the over-under barrel-config of the 2nd variety of plasma rifle meant they had two different purposes; he said that the pulse-fire in "Marauders" came out of one barrel, while the beam-fire in "Regeneration" came out the other. . . Still haven't seen "Marauders" so can't confirm that.
Posted by BJ_O (Member # 858) on :
So, the shuttlepods have idiot lights? Malcolm said something about the engine temp light coming on.
B.J.
Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :
Does the US Navy (or the Royal Navy, for that matter) actually use dynes to measure force (if navies measure forces at all )? Does ANYONE use dynes?
Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
Plenty of people on Belfast's less salubrious council estates use dyners and orpers, you got a forkin' problem wi' tha?
Posted by J (Member # 608) on :
kilodynes have been used in Trek for a while IIRC... I remember seeing them before. Maybe in the Ency is the place to look?
Posted by TheWoozle (Member # 929) on :
quote:Originally posted by BJ_O: So, the shuttlepods have idiot lights? Malcolm said something about the engine temp light coming on. B.J.
These are Mk-I shuttle pods, it's actually a check engine light. His engine was probobly overheating, because they probobly haven't changed the oil since leaving Earth.
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
Firestone makes the shuttle's landing gear. Even in space they fall apart.
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
-They load Sim into a photonic torpedo casing. Note that when the casket enters the tube, a nifty red light conveys the image that it fires right away - moving a little, then accelerating.
-However, the casket exits through one of the regular torpedo tubes, and not the "new" one on the ventral centerline. Damn.
-WRT the shuttlepods working to move Enterprise: well, it's not REALLY a case of zero-gee physics here. There IS a fluid mass to work through, so friction and momentum are in effect. There was also a magnetized centre of gravity, and a whole schwack of it pasted onto the ship; it's possible that they were working against the cloud's anti-polar centre of gravity, as you would when breaking two magnets apart. Or at least, that's what Boramis was feeding the writers.
-They could have busted the aft phase cannons out of their casings by using phase rifles. They're lots smaller than the flight bay doors.
-Okay, so Trip wants to get a STABLE warp five field going by compressing the antimatter stream before the reaction. This is all fine and good, but it seems like a hell of a lot more work than pressing a few buttons. Also, what of warp cores like those on the movie Enterprise and Voyager? We've basically established that they work on different intermix methods than the TNG "compression" cores.
Mark
Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :
From the graphics, it looked like Tucker was (merely) adjusting the magnetic antimatter constraint mechanism, possibly pushing it beyond some Starfleet safety standard. But if it was this simple (and it actually worked before they flew into the cloud), they could've easily done this from the very beginning.
And even IF they couldm't have made this adjustment in the rush to get Klaang to Kronos, there still was enough time to do it later on. Especially considering the refit at Jupiter Station.
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