posted
Bit of a placeholder this, as I'm still DL'ing the ep - but each week I see these unimaginative Official Tech Thread titles and it's been driving me nuts, all those lost opportunites. . .
Anyway, person who spots the most blatant steals from Voyager's "One" wins a prize. 8)
posted
OK, not a lot of tech in the episode, apart from some transdimensional equivalent of last week's Giant Bubbly Space Pizza, and some bits and pieces about starting warp cores that went in one ear and out the other. But. . .
- Impulse vents get clogged if you don't check them every two hours. Clogged with what?
- Tucker mentions 4 years of Starfleet training - the same amount of time that cadets spend at the Federation Starfleet Academy. . .
- Phlox Club! I figured out pretty early on that it wasn't the real T'Pol; while it was conceivable that Phlox might not have mentioned her prior to her first appearance, the way she acted for the rest of the ep was totally off.
- Porthos!
- Menage � Phlox! He likes to go to nightclubs and pick up a "companion or two."
- Austin Phlox: Interstellar Denobulan of Mystery! Bit of a giveaway, really - would he be likely to wander the ship naked if T'Pol was awake? Brilliantly done, though. . .
- Film Night is improving - they're showing The Exorcist, and Danny Kaye in The Court Jester.
- Anyone else think the fact that they hadn't reached the edge of the disturbance might turn out to be a hallucination?
posted
- Everyone apparently likes to sleep in full uniform.
- Phlox mentions Spican (?) spacemoth. It can travel half a lightyear. Nice.
- Dr. Lucas, Phlox's penpal, is back. So are Phlox' freaky toenails.
- Phlox eats leeches. Yuck.
- Last weeks anomaly (like this one) was a transdimensional anomaly. "Nothing from this universe survives contact". Well, only human 'neocortices' are affected, and can be shut down with some neural device.
- The computer runs most systems, but Phlox has had some tutorials.
- Phlox is still a great character, it's a shame they've barely used him in this season.
- Denobulans have funky ridges on their back.
- So are those movies in the Viacom/Paramount portfolio, or do they have to pay outrageous fees to show those clips?
- Chef is mentioned again. He's not very good in alien dishes.
- Crew-count: 80 humans (+ 2 aliens and a dog, obviously). Although T'Pol later says "over 80 lifeforms, not counting your [Phlox's] pets".
- The Dr. Phlox Horror Show. There are some pretty disturbing shots. That Hoshi thing was just wrong!
- Phlox mentions his "medical staff". This is consistent with last week, were we saw a Starfleet medic for the first time, IIRC.
- "I'm a physician, not an engineer". No comments.
- "Output must be confined to within 300 and 312 millicochranes to prevent fusion of the dilithium matrix, unless the spatial compression index is greater than 5.62% or the ship is within 2 parsecs of a Class-C gravimetric field distortion." - From the procedures on restarting the reactor in the ship's database. The anomaly is apparently a Class-C or greater distortion.
- Control of the hull plating is also located on the warp-engine console. And so are, rather unsurprisingly, the magnetic constrictor coil controls.
posted
Hey.. just a thought. Might this "spatial compression index" be the often-speculated "Cochrance factor" that makes up for the sometimes ulikely travel-times (Rigel system, 4-day Qonos trips)?
posted
What I liked was the fact that you felt that the warp drive was a really complicated piece of equipment for the first time in a while. I know that when I heard Phlox's description of the stuff in the manual that it sounded like a lot of manuals that I've read...
-------------------- Fell deeds await. Now for Wrath... Now for Ruin... and a Red Dawn... -Theoden, TTT
Lord Vorkosigan does not always get what he wants!
Registered: Feb 2004
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posted
Did anyone notice that T'Pol said Phlox needed to sleep? I thought he only needed a few hours each month?
I noticed something else, but I can't remember it now, the scene where they're trying to use the Warp Drive kinda made me lose it--- it was near there.
-------------------- Later, J _ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ _ _ The Last Person to post in the late Voyager Forum. Bashing both Voyager, Enterprise, and "The Bun" in one glorious post.
"Anyone else think the fact that they hadn't reached the edge of the disturbance might turn out to be a hallucination?"
Well, there's a problem either way. If they were outside the anomaly when Phlox started messing with the engines, I don't think Tucker would have said he'd done "a hell of a job". More like "dammit, the whole engine's screwed up, and there wasn't even a reason for it".
However, if the sensor readings that Phlox and "T'Pol" were looking at were correct, then they were going to be able to cover almost a quarter light-year in ten weeks. That means full impulse is superluminal.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Well, she said it was "nearly" a quarter of a light-year, and given that she was a hallucination of Phlox there's a bit of fudge factor one can employ. .25 light-years would be something like 1.3c, and even .2 light-years would be just over 1c. But, if it were somewhere closer to an eighth of a light-year (i.e. .125ly), then the speed would be 0.65c, well within the bounds of impulse reason.
Also noteworthy is that the anomaly was supposed to take four days to cross at impulse, whereas at warp four it would take an hour. Assuming a speed of .999999999999999c for impulse (just as a rough upper limit), that makes warp four 96c . . . which is consistent with "Broken Bow", at least, but in reality constitutes another monkey wrench in the warp speed issue.
-------------------- . . . ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
posted
Also of note is that Phlox loads a phase pistol with one of those weird red glowing dual-battery-looking things. We've seen it before in another Enterprise ep, and we saw something similar inside the Nemesis phasers and phaser rifles.
I personally find it unlikely that this little red doohickey is the power cell. For starters, the power cell on the Type III is suggested in "Siege of AR-558"[DS9] to be a much larger object on the rear of the rifle. Further, the stock of the ST:FC-style rifles would seem to be superfluous if the power cell and phaser beam/pulse generation are all going on well forward of the trigger and other controls. Last but not least, a similar red cell is seen in the Type II phasers, once again forward of the controls, and also on the phase pistols of the 2150's in a similar location. As with the rifles, this would render the handles of those devices superfluous. I would surmise that this red object is in some way connected with generating the nadions associated with phasers (as referenced in "Endgame"[VOY7]).
-------------------- . . . ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
posted
As long as we are playing in the 1 c ballpark, we should remember Unca Albert. Were those "ten weeks" shorter than one quarter of a year, or longer?
And agreed about the phaser/phase pistol doohickey. A phase-weapon-thing probably has more than one component that requires frequent cleaning or replacing. Cf. Bashir twiddling with his rifle's front end in "AR-558".
posted
Something that I just remembered, doesn't it take !20 minutes to charge up the warp coils from a dead stop? I think that was the time mentioned in "Catwalk." And if it's the same reason as in The Naked Time, wouldn't it send them like four days back in time if they charged the things up any faster?
-------------------- Fell deeds await. Now for Wrath... Now for Ruin... and a Red Dawn... -Theoden, TTT
Lord Vorkosigan does not always get what he wants!
Registered: Feb 2004
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posted
You saw the red glowy thing being instered in close-up in "Fight or Flight," I think (or was it "Sleeping Dogs?" One or the other, anyway, can't be bothered to look it up right now). And in "The Xindi" you saw Reed take a pistol from storage and then insert the thingy.
I don't know if it's a power cell, or perhaps some sort of prefire chamber that is best stored outside the weapon when not in use for extended periods. Because we still don't know if a Phase Pistol is the same as a Phaser. We've seen nothing to confirm or deny they're the same thing. I suppose the original name could have ben changed, perhaps when the first Type-1s were introduced: you couldn't call them Phase Pistols, what would you call them? Phase TV Remotes? Phase Cellphones?
Just checked, it's "Sleeping Dogs" - but they don't refer to the component by name.
But I don't have a problem with it being the power cell - the size of Type-1s we've seen establishes that the overall barrel length doesn't have to be that large; and comparing the power cell on a TNG rifle with that on a Phase Pistol, with 200 years of tech in between, doesn't work for me. I think I'll reserve judgement for now.
posted
I also noticed they forgot about the 20-minutes-for-cold-start rule. While the VFX certainly implied the engines were completely offline, they may have actually been in some form of hibernation mode. I also seem to remember that in TOS, you actually needed an intermix formula to reboot the engines!?
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