Random Star Trek discussion

Is there more than just the image being from TUC?

@Tuckerfan 'cause I'm not quoting all those spoilers, the Klingon Neutral Zone being relatively close to earth by 23rd-century standards probably makes sense considering how quickly Archer's Enterprise was able to get to Kronos.

Because "you can go explore the final frontier but everybody you've ever known will be long dead when you get back" is a lot less appealing than being able to warp off, explore the unknown, and still go back home to a place you recognize.

Well, there's the presence of MAX in the corner and HBO to the right of that.

And if you really get nitpicky, there's one more.

Looking at mine, the HBO is a menu item -- when you select it, you get only the MAX offerings that are from HBO.

In the original release of the movie (which that's the version they're streaming) the title of the film was Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. They didn't add the "II" until later.

Aluminium people will tell you that adding I's to a thing's real name is a perfectly correct and normal thing to do.

An article in one of the Best of Trek collections postulated the existence of a series of teleportation gateways linking star systems together (think the hyperlanes in Stellaris) as a way to account for the writers just making transit times up make the warp factors make sense.

Uncle Al and Federal Farmer better knock it off, or I'm calling in the U.S.S. Motherfucker to sort you out!

The technology behind stasis and warp speed are largely independent of each other.

You would want the ability to go to warp to get items from Point A to Point B in essentially no time at all. The ability to do that is good for trade, travel, exploration and so forth.

There are a few issues with stasis inherently --Mechanical failure can happen as with Khan. Outside people could intervene, as the Ferengi did in TNG's The Perfect Mate -- that would mean that you would want people to be able to deal with things that might come up in long-distance travel.

Even if you could perfect stasis, that doesn't address the notion of someone wanting vaccines or dilithium crystals or gold-pressed latinum within the next week, or getting to see the Great Plume of Angosoria at a certain time or whatever.

I dunno why in the Alien universe, they don't keep the android crewmember awake to tend to the sleeping humans.
They put the freakin' android in stasis too.
Like, okay, I get that Ash had to pretend to be human to be a mole for Weyland Utani, but Bishop was under no such restriction.
Do organic androids age?
Do they go space crazy if left alone too long?
Well....yeah, David went crazy so.....
That's a really bad design flaw.

The Ender's Game sequels do a good job describing an interplanetary society without faster-than-light travel. They have instantaneous communication via the ansible, so when somebody on Lusitania calls for a Speaker, Ender gets the call instantly, but in order to answer it, he has to accept that he'll never see anyone he knows again. The Hundred Worlds are depicted as far more heterogenous than the Federation, despite all being the same species and originating from the same planet, and the Starways Congress is depicted as desperately trying to maintain its control via means like remotely controlling the colony's computers.

In the absence of FTL communication, any interstellar society without FTL travel would quickly cease to be a single society.

"Shore Leave".

Sulu fires the gun he finds, and Kirk, McCoy, and girl-redshirt come a running.
As they run, the Star Trek theme plays!
I think this might be the only time they play it inside an episode!

Oh, wait, no, they use it was a comedy cue; the upbeat goofy flute version.


Okay, "Shore Leave" is the first and last time they play it seriously.

Star Trek V was the first Star Trek movie I watched in theaters.

Good lord what a bunch of bullshit. I want those six minutes of my life back.

They must have been playing it at a revue theatre, because the film came out in 1989.

Yes I know when the film came out, I was 10. But keep beating that dead horse, Jackass.

If you were ten years old, you must be thinking of 2016's Star Trek Beyond.

ENT: "The Catwalk".

Discovery, we see Stametz and Culber using motorized electrical toothbrushes.
Here, we see Hoshi using a tooth laser.
Dental technology went backwards!

Didn't they eventually fix that whole problem with the transwarp drive and remaking the warp numbering to be more of an algorithmic increase between TOS and TNG than a linear one? It has been 30+ years since I was really familiar with it, but IIRC warp speeds were not the same between TOS and TNG.

It improved things, but not to the level where you could still respond quickly enough to an attack.

TOS scale was warp factor cubed - so warp 9 is 9^3 = 729 times lightspeed

TNG was never actually stated but it's been mostly commonly worked out (based on the warp 1-9 speeds given in the TNG Tech Manual) as warp factor to the power of 3 with that number of decimal threes after.

So warp 9 becomes 9^3.333333333 = ~1516 times lightspeed.

Twice as fast, but still too slow for an emergency:

Let's consider a colony under attack 10 light years away, or 3650 light-days. At TNG warp 9, you're still going to take 2.4 days to get there.

In theory the closer you get to warp 10 in the TNG scale, the faster you go since warp 10 is infinite speed and the above calculation is unclear after this point as it would just marginally improve speeds up to ~2150c... Anyway this just ends up having to do warp 9.99+ which very few ships were ever stated to do (there's a theory that the "warp 13" used in the TNG finale by the future Enterprise just shorthands this i.e. warp 9.9 became warp 10, warp 9.99 is warp 11, etc).

OTOH Tom Paris told Amelia Earhart in the VOY ep where they found the abducted humans that Voyager could travel at 4 billion miles a second (and is specifically referring to warp 9.9), which is about 21,473 times lightspeed, but that's a lot faster than any other stated speed and relies on very different metrics past warp 9 (the TNG Tech Manual guys did say they had to hand draw the warp curve past 9 in order for warp 10 to be infinite).

Even then, you're looking at about 4 hours to respond to that distress call.

Additional to the above, this is an area Seth MacFarlane got right with The Orville, where quantum drive is ~88,000 times lightspeed (about an hour to go 10 light-years and in later seasons she's up to 17ly/hour).

Yes, but you neglect the emergency can of liquid schwartz. Not to mention I think there is a just in time setting for the engines. Just in time speed would seem to be part of the physics of the star trek universe. They also seem to have a just a bit to slow speed which they often use when they need to miss something by just enough so the resolution of the mission coincides with the end of the episode and not within the first 10 minutes.

I thought the TOS scale was previous factor cubed, so 1 is 1, 2 is 3, 3 is 9, and so on...