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Don't kill me, I'm charming!

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Wes Button � [email protected]
TechFX Studios � The United Federation Uplink �
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I don't like Wesley Crusher.

As you can see, this dramatically decreases, uh, drama. So it's not like we support realism in battles, but some semblance of balance between realism and dramatic effects.

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"A celibate clergy is an especially good idea because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism."

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"Babies haven't any hair;
old men's heads are just as bare;
between the cradle and the grave
lies a haircut and a shave."

1. At the speeds these ships should be traveling they shouldn't be more than momentary blurs to stationary observers. Probably not dramatic per-se, but there are creative ways would can indicate ships are are great speed and far apart and yet still slugging it out. We did it in te opening animation for a computer game I worked on years ago. One ship swooshed by the camera, and one star waaay off in the distance emerged from the background and roared in in a matter of seconds and then flashed by...revealed to be a pursuing spacehip.

A good example of how to use speed in the Enterprise A's approach to Khitomer in ST6...the ship flashes past the camera, which whip pans around after her, only to see her waaaay off in the distance. It gave a great impression of speed.

2. Beams don't have to be shown to be dramatic. We don't see bullets in motion, after all. You could show flashing hits on shields and it would just as exciting as machine-gun fire in a contemporary film.

3. It's more dramatic to show the immense power these weapons would have than to minimize it. Let's face it, we all know that a single phaser hit on an enshields ship should blast it apart. The one shot I always wanted to see was a full power phaser blast flaring like a nova against a weakened deflector, and seeing a few sparks get through, and watch THOSE blow holes in the hull. This would scare the pants off the audience who then sees that 99% of that enegry is barely being withstood, and can visualize that will happen if it gets through.

4. You don't need sound effects in space, but some kind of sound on the soundtrack can make it more dramatic. I proved this to a friend by putting my lasredisc of TWOK on and killing the sound, then synchronized the CD of the score to the video. The music acted as all the sound effects, and it was no less dramatic.

My two forints worth.

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2. Beams don't have to be shown to be dramatic. We don't see bullets in motion, after all. You could show flashing hits on shields and it would just as exciting as machine-gun fire in a contemporary film.

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You obviously never saw Blakes 7. There the guns had a clear muzzle that lit up (it was bloody torch, basically), and where it hit would just be a little flash and a puff of smoke. INDESCRIBABLY undramatic!

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"If Morden is afraid of green penguins, and Draal is shown to have
access to them, a speculation would be that Draal will use them
against Morden in the future. However if Draal only has a purple
moose, saying that he could use it against Morden would be a story
idea."

- rastb5m FAQ

Are citing the exceptions, not the rule. Plenty of exciting gunfights in a century of movies and no bullet-trails are required. Just because Blake and Logan's Run did it badly doesn't mean it can't be done well.

And, getting back to the point of my earlier posts, it's energy and momentum that give life to an action sequence -- plus doing the unexpected. There are numerous (and relatively realistic) tactics that can and could have been tried in SF shows and movies but haven't been done. All kinds of interesting and dramatic camera angles and POVs that don't require two ships to be racing around like two Indy cars trying to pass each other. It's just that the producers and effects people are stuck in a rut and not trying to push the envelope.

As far as a shot being instantaneous, not necessarily. The Galaxy Class' Type X phaser has a range of 300,000 km. So in that extreme there would be a period of about a second (at light speed) between a phaser shot being fired, and the impact on the target.

Also, perception of the speed of a vehicle is relative. In a regular space scene you have no solid background information with which to form a tangible frame of reference for a ships relativistic speed. The camera is supposedly only interpretting what the eye would purportedly see if it were veiwing the scene. But it has to be flexible enough to show what's going on without going overboard for drama's sake.

You either show the ship flying by at warp 1 in the way we expect and are familiar with, or you show a red Doplar shift blur for a fraction a milisecond, with all the time dilation effects thereof. Which isn't much fun. So without being ridiculously phoney like Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon, and without being Nth degree sceintifically true like 2001, (as brilliant as that movie was) Trek is the perfect marriage between the two, delivering satisfying, sensible FX.

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"Synthetic scotch, synthetic Commanders...."
-Scotty

Sure, no one knows if a "phaser" beam would show up in a vacuum, but I'm supposing for it to show up as a superhot glowing beam the particles within it would have to be radiating photons, which implies elements of the beam are themselves colliding and releasing energy in visible wavelengths, and also means at least some tiny fraction of the beam's energy is lost in the process.

I suppose one could argue that phaser beams are made up of several kinds of particles that interact with one another, producing the characteristic "glow".

"Have we ever seen a laser emission in space to know what we'll see? Not really no. As far as the beam being visible, who knows."

Ye gods... That has to be one of the most misinformed statements I've ever heard. First off, in a laser, or any beam of light, the only way for you to see it is if the light goes into your eye. If the laser isn't pointed at your eye, the only way for the light to get there is to reflect off something. If you shoot a laser in space, there isn't enough matter to reflect enough light for you to see it. If there were, the same matter would reflect sunlight, and you'd be able to see the matter.

Now phasers, that isn't exactly a moot point. PHASER is supposedly an acronym for PHASed Energy Rectification. Anything involving energy in that sort of sense I assume involves electromagnetic radiation. That one of the few (possibly only, but I'm not sure) types of energy that can travel in a vacuum.