posted
In the opening of 'Star Trek: Generations' the Enterprise-B is christened by a bottle of champagne (not Picard vineyards) impacting and shattering on the docking hatch.
Where the heck is this hatch? I've searched every pic I can fine, and no hatch. Don't tell me they forgot to include on on the model!
-------------------- 'One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.' - Lazarus Long
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted
Logically, it would have to be on the saucer underside. Otherwise, the bottle cannot get to it (at least not with nothing but stars on the background), and the audience cannot see it impact.
But I have to admit it bothers me as well - it doesn't seem to be a "real" fixture of the vessel.
posted
The guys watching the bottle could have been watching it on a monitor or something too. Realistically-speaking, there's practically no way you can see a tiny bottle like that impact on the hull from the distance away they were, unaided anyway.
posted
"Computer, replicate a 20 foot bottle of Chateau P�trus, 82."
-------------------- I'm slightly annoyed at Hobbes' rather rude decision to be much more attractive than me though. That's just rude. - PsyLiam, Oct 27, 2005.
Registered: May 1999
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posted
I've always wondered about this too. I thought we had discussed it at some point in a "Design and Creativity" thread... but I don't remember what was decided. I don't think the hull detail from the opening sequence is on the actual model, though.
posted
Well the bottle must have hit something from the Enterprise-B... the secondary hull perhaps?
-------------------- "It speaks to some basic human needs: that there is a tomorrow, it's not all going to be over with a big splash and a bomb, that the human race is improving, that we have things to be proud of as humans." -Gene Roddenberry about Star Trek
Registered: May 1999
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posted
Maybe, but the docking hatch was of a similar design to the gangway hatch on the refit E-nil's saucer. The E-nil didn't have that kind of hatch on the secondary hull and the Excelsior model through all its incarnations never had any docking hatches on it.
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Registered: Feb 2000
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posted
My guess would be that it was *supposed* to be the main gangway hatch on the secondary hull. The detail doesn't look right for the saucer edge. But, I don't think that detail was actually on the model. We can use our imaginations, though.
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As cool as the effect was, the part that got me ticked is that the bottle would've been solid. How does it stay a liquid when outer space average temperature is only a few degrees above absolute zero?
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Heat doesn't travel well in a vaccum. (At least as compared to how it travels outside of one.) I imagine there's a formula for figuring out how fast a given object will radiate heat, something complicated involving black bodies and who knows what, but suffice it to say that I don't believe a bottle of champagne is going to freeze solid in the time between someone chucking it out an airlock and its impact.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
And, of course, there are eleventeen treknological ways to prevent the bottle from freezing and, more importantly, to make it splash its contents in an Earthly manner when shattered.
The question isn't what laws of physics would dictate - the question is what tradition would dictate, and laws of physics can and will be bent by advanced treknology to allow for the tradition.
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