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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Timo: [QB] No, I'm not accusing Bernd of being inconsistent! Instead, he has some new commentary in the "Inconsistencies" section of Ex Astris Scientia, and of course it deserves the usual level of careful scrutiny. In the department of "I always had the nagging feeling there was something wrong but I couldn't put a finger on it", the new pages point out the inconsistencies in navigation and propulsion, weapons and tactics, and some tech miscellany. Lots of good points there. In the first category, though, Bernd says that a solid or forcefield-based jet reverser attached to the impulse engines would not alter the net force on the ship. This isn't true, as the end result will still be that the exhaust jet is directed forward, thus transferring momentum in that direction and giving the ship momentum in the opposite direction. The internal structure of the engine does not matter - internal forces will cancel out, save for the one opposite the final exhaust direction. In the second one, I found no nits to pick. Darn. ;) In the Miscellany category, I'd suggest that the oddly shaped "forcefields" are based on the same technology as the "shields". That is, their effect is based on gravitons trapped in a subspace field. The abruptness of the forcefield effect in the direction normal to the field surface would then be easier to explain - an effect is only created in the region where there are trapped gravitons, and that effect doesn't obey the 1/r^2 rule any more than the other gravitic tech (say, deck plating) of Star Trek does. As for the ability of even a single generator to create an oddly shaped subspace field to suspend the gravitons in... I doubt subspace follows 1/r^2, either. On the same vein, I gather that "magnetic" boots are based on gravitic tech, too. They just use a catchy name that has alternate meanings. If any technology in Trek is cheap, reliable and easily miniaturized, gravitics is (by necessity, because artificial gravity always has to be present in even the most unlikely locations for production reasons). As for stairs as an alternative to turbolifts, Kirk's old ship had plenty. There was that vertical ladderway easily accessible from the curved corridor set, and often seen used. And ST2 showed the crew operating efficiently without turbolift access anywhere below the top three decks. Either there was a big staircase somewhere (as Probert originally intended), or then using the stairs wasn't all that hard after all. The E-D crew seldom resorted to vertical Jeffries tubes as an alternative to turbolifts. There just wasn't an obvious need to go from one deck to another during a crisis: most of the heroes would sit on the bridge, while LaForge and perhaps Data would sit at Engineering, and nameless professionals would man the torp bays or the phaser control rooms and so forth, so the heroes needn't go there. Vertical access was only needed for LaForge to access crucial damaged systems - and those systems all seemed clustered around the Jeffries tubes anyway (which is a separate yet very annoying nit). If the crew had to resort to crawling, it was not because the turbolifts were hiccuping - it was because the whole ship, lifts and doorways and corridors and the unseen staircases alike, was locked up by malfunctions or malevolently used security protocols. Voyager had a greater problem with this: a small number of competent crew had to access vital systems distributed on multiple decks, and they were *always* crawling around. The "locals" just couldn't handle the crises. And there were indeed episodes where people were trapped on a certain deck by what looked like a simple turbolift failure or general power failure. Timo Saloniemi [/QB][/QUOTE]
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