QotD 2015-0607: About Your Childhood

... And What So-and-So Hollywood Person Supposedly Did To It:

"You know, it really pisses me off how some fans [...] take a writing decision they don't like and treat it as a personal attack on them/fans by the creator, as if they generally spend their time coming up with ways to spite the fans. I mean its possible, but it doesn't seem like something that would happen a lot. Frankly it comes off as paranoid and creepy." 

- "The Romulan Republic", "Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens" thread at SDN, Fri Jun 05, 2015 

SMoST: Picard is Wimpy Scum

From the "Some Mistakes of Star Trek" series ...

We all know Picard was written as the weakest captain ever in Generations … to the point that the testosterone-free Kirk of "The Enemy Within" seems like a veritable strongman dictator by comparison.   The justification is supposed to be his grief over the loss of his brother and young nephew at the start of the film.

However, when given access soon after to a means that enables him to go "anywhere" and at "any time", mere moments after seeing his nephew in an anomaly-induced mind-trip, he seemingly doesn't even give a thought to his recently-departed family.   This remains the case even while he's hearing Captain Kirk discuss his own empty house, brought about by too much duty and not enough living.

Space and Orbit

I followed a link to my site back to this spiffy post from a like-interested fellow.  In it, he discusses the energy that a Star Destroyer would have to dump when de-orbiting to crash as in the new film trailer.

I rather liked the cut of his intellectual jib, but the flaw of his calculation was pointed out by a commenter.  The simple fact is that Star Wars ships are rarely seen in what we would call an orbit.  Sure, they're often in space above a planet at orbital altitudes, but that's not the same thing.

New Post Series - SMoST

SMoST stands for "Some Mistakes of Star Trek".  I have composed many such posts over the past couple of months which you'll see soon, and there are more coming in this new series.

This won't be the usual bashing of Voyager and such, but instead aims to be notes pointing out certain philosophical failings, characterization errors, world-building flops, certain tech issues, and that sort of thing.  "Writing fails" would be a way of putting it, but I am thinking of "concept fails" more generally.  Ideally, this is stuff that isn't usually covered by the normal Trek-hate crowd.

One example is something I already covered in the first half of this post about Picard's mistake at Galorndon Core.  But hey, that one's pretty boring, in some ways.

How about this one, then? ... Ben Sisko is a racist.

Real Aircraft Belly Landings

Just mentally comparing here the low-velocity, tangential-angle crashes with planets seen in Generations, "Jedi Crash", or the Rako Hardeen arc of TCW with some real world examples.

First up, a test of an F-16, one of the smallest modern fighter jets at 15m:

Modern Revolver vs. Phaser

Another SciFights oddity, still on the phasers versus tanks stuff, with a little fun about how Brian Young fancies himself the only person to have ever gazed upon a firearm in real life.

In fairness, this is probably at least partially true given the number of Californians, Europeans, and other undesirables involved in the debates.  (Just kidding, Europe. I'd never insult you by comparing you to California.)  But while I am sure he's probably a better long-range shot than I am, the simple fact is that he is no more a firearms expert than I am.

Raising Ship By Raising Shields

Y'know, shields are wonderful things.   One thing we have never seen anyone use them for, however, is lift-off.

Inspired by Buckminster Fuller, I was thinking the other day of using shields in a Cloud Nine fashion, making a big enough shield bubble to let minor air temperature changes float the ship.

But, vacuum would work better, even if it was a bit more taxing to the shields due to pressure difference.   Start with skin-tight shields and then expand them outward laterally and upward, leaving a vacuum in their wake.  At a quoted lifting force of 1.28 grams per liter (based on the displaced mass of air at sea level), my math suggests that a 700,000 tonne starship like Voyager could be lifted by a vacuum volume of 546,875,000 cubic meters.

That's a sphere of 1,014 meters in diameter, or a hemisphere of about twice that depending on how you fit the ship in exactly.

We have seen the Enterprise extend shields to protect a ship at a stated range of five kilometers, IIRC, so in principle it might be doable.  And that doesn't even bring subspace mass-lightening into the equation.

Certainly it would be an interesting way to soft-land a starship rather than crash*, assuming you can figure out how to drop the shield gently on touchdown.   I can't imagine a sudden shut-off, producing a mad rush as air tried to fill a kilometer-wide void, would be healthy for any ship that needed to be using the technique in the first place.

(* In the case of the E-D saucer, of course, it seems this wouldn't be useful as the shields did not seem to be online. )