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Topic: Star Trek (Read 174028 times)
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Azaroth
Terracotta Army
Posts: 1959
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Shit, if you can teleport interstellar distances, why built starships at all?
For DOITDOITDOIT and FIREEVERYTHING!!!!!!!! |
F is inviting you to start Quarto. Do you want to Accept (Alt+C) or Decline (Alt+D) the invitation?
You have accepted the invitation to start Quarto.
F says:
don't know what this is
Az says:
I think it's like
Az says:
where we pour milk on the stomach alien from total recall
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Kail
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2858
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Black holes as small as you're talking about would evaporate almost instantaneously. I R not scientist enough to know what size hole would be needed to be stable long enough to be dropped from orbit, fall into the center of a planet and then consume it.
According to Wikipedia, the idea behind Red Matter is that it creates a black hole when it's mixed with "nuclear matter" so it wouldn't have to stay live for the duration of it's fall, they could just "detonate" it when it got to the centre of the planet. You'd theoretically only need an extremely short lifespan since the pressure would be feeding a ton of mass to it faster than it would evaporate. But yeah, I haven't done the math or anything. |
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Ubvman
Terracotta Army
Posts: 182
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According to Wikipedia, the idea behind Red Matter is that it creates a black hole when it's mixed with "nuclear matter" so it wouldn't have to stay live for the duration of it's fall, they could just "detonate" it when it got to the centre of the planet. You'd theoretically only need an extremely short lifespan since the pressure would be feeding a ton of mass to it faster than it would evaporate. But yeah, I haven't done the math or anything.
Why even bother sending it to the core of the planet at all? A black hole big enough to destroy a planet at the core, would destroy the whole place just as fast from the surface. If I remember one of my Carl Sagan books, a black hole "detonated" at the surface would burrow straight to the center of the planetary mass, overshoot it and bounce back and forth in a super-fast internal orbit - all the while vacuuming up material. The science doesn't matter, Nero could have just nuked Vulcan and Earth from orbit and ended the movie in like 20 minutes. Instead, we had him wasting vital time unnecessarily drilling to the core, waiting for the Enterprise to show up. Like someone else said above, the movie has so many gaping plot holes, nit-picking on minor stuff like this is like criticizing the fashion sense of a bum. |
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Draegan
Terracotta Army
Posts: 10043
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You guys are funny.
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Stormwaltz
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2918
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You guys are funny.
Oh yeah? Oh yeah? Well you're... you're ugly!So there! |
Nothing in this post represents the views of my current or previous employers.
"Isn't that just like an elf? Brings a spell to a gun fight."
"Sci-Fi writers don't invent the future, they market it."
- Henry Cobb
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Draegan
Terracotta Army
Posts: 10043
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UnSub
Contributor
Posts: 8064
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By the end, he's willing to work with a guy who tried to torpedo his entire Starfleet career because he's matured a little.
Are you talking about Spock here? Because Kirk got him removed as Captain. Kirk screwed over Spock as well. It wasn't maturity, it was because the universe (script) decreed that Kirk was right. However, they saved the Earth, so medals all round!  |
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HaemishM
Staff Emeritus
Posts: 42629
the Confederate flag underneath the stone in my class ring
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Yes, I'm talking about Spock. He got him removed as Captain, and could have had him confined to quarters, unable to offer any help. Instead, he takes him on as the second man in a 2-man away team. He doesn't shut Spock out, he gives him a place on the team. An immature douche would have just cut Spock off completely.
I'm hardly saying Kirk was the height of maturity in the situation, but he did realize he couldn't do it all alone, whereas the Kirk at the beginning didn't believe that.
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01101010
Terracotta Army
Posts: 12003
You call it an accident. I call it justice.
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Yes, I'm talking about Spock. He got him removed as Captain, and could have had him confined to quarters, unable to offer any help. Instead, he takes him on as the second man in a 2-man away team. He doesn't shut Spock out, he gives him a place on the team. An immature douche would have just cut Spock off completely.
I'm hardly saying Kirk was the height of maturity in the situation, but he did realize he couldn't do it all alone, whereas the Kirk at the beginning didn't believe that.
And you also have the underlying tie with Nero being the direct cause of the death of a parent for each of them. |
Does any one know where the love of God goes...When the waves turn the minutes to hours? -G. Lightfoot
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Venkman
Terracotta Army
Posts: 11536
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During this part I thought to myself, "Kirk is an asshole who deserves to be thrown out of Star Fleet". He hacked a system to succeed at an important test. It's not winning when you cheat, but we are meant to side with him because he's the lead character. Oh they did that in the movie? That idea came from a trek novel, believe it or not. The idea came from Wrath of Khan, an establishing line to frame Kirk the problem-solver (as evidenced by what happens immediately following the scene in which he explains how he won to Saarek). It was further explored in the book Kobayashi Maru where Kirk, Scotty, Chekov and Sulu were marooned on a shuttle where the author explained how each solved the test (I liked Scotty's solution most). But how Kirk cheated in the book is different from the movie. I won't bore anyone with the details since it was a retcon of a retcon which will probably never be explored again. But suffice to say I liked the book's treatment far more than the movie's. At the same time, people often overlook the fact that was brought up both in this move and Khan, that this was the third time he took the test. People want to bitch about him cheating at the test when the real complaint should be about him gaming a system entirely set up as a psychological evaluation tool. He should never have been allowed to captain a ship when it's anathema to him that he could lose at all, like exists outside of reality. That mentality only works when you want the can-do-no-wrong hero of the 50s and 60s. Or Wall Street |
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Slyfeind
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2037
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Oh man, I LOVE the Wikipedia entry, particularly the first sentence: "The Kobayashi Maru is a test in the fictional Star Trek universe." As opposed to the REAL Star Trek universe! |
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NowhereMan
Terracotta Army
Posts: 7353
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Reading the Wiki account of Kirk's cheat from that novel I liked it more too |
"Look at my car. Do you think that was bought with the earnest love of geeks?" - HaemishM
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Venkman
Terracotta Army
Posts: 11536
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Scotty's test wasn't well explained there in my opinion, and the author didn't properly convey the irony of it all. Scotty only won a few rounds because of stuff he tried that he himself said were impossible, in published articles. And he was as disinterested in the test as Kirk was shown to be in the JJ Abrams version. The narration of it really conveyed it well. Whereas the other three went through big descriptions of how they got to and into the Neutral Zone, Scotty's was all "Yea, we went to this part of space, some warning about it, some Klingon got all up in my shit, and then <insert pages of Trek-ish tech engineer solutions". Like a big puzzle for him.
Anyway, at his review hearing, they're going through his antics, they find an article that shows that it should have been impossible. Then the the Admiral reads the name of the author of that article. He finally turns to Scotty and asks: "Do you even want to be on the command track"? (or something like that). Which of course Scotty said no, because he was forced down this path by his family.
My favorite particular tactic was firing photon torpedos at the extact intersection points at a bunch of Klingon ships, causing a cascade failure of all the shields and their ships. I think that was the exact thing that Scotty wrote should be impossible, but here I'm a bit fuzzy.
Anyway, I also thought Sulu's solution was as a propos for the character as Kirk's. Chekov's just showed he wasn't ready for the test, much less command (too emotional).
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Tannhauser
Terracotta Army
Posts: 4436
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I've always looked at it from the Academies point of view. Here's this test we have run thousands of times in order to observe each cadet's approach to it. Then along comes one cadet whose approach is to 'change the conditions of the test'. Clearly he'd be caught 'cheating'. But he was willing to risk his career to beat a bullshit test because he wants to win SO BAD.
Instead he got a commendation for original thinking.
/nerd out
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Margalis
Terracotta Army
Posts: 12335
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Watched it last night.
God it was awful. The plot made no sense whatsoever, it was a million contrived coincidences strung together. A lot of the acting was downright terrible. Any how many times did a guy hang from a ledge? That was like the go to suspenseful situation - hey let's have a guy perched over the edge of a ledge holding on by his nails again!
So many things took me out of the movie. Kirk has an iPhone with a standard ringtone and rocks out to the Beastie Boys? What?
Also it had basically none of the Star Trek spirit to it. A lot of people do not like Gene Rodenberry's vision because it is constricting and something other than pew pew lasers and that's all this movie was. It had the trappings of Trek but not the heart. It had no imagination and no high-mindedness. One thing about Trek is that it has always portrayed a humanity that strives for higher ideals, tells classic SF stories and has some wits about it. Even dreck like ST 5 had an interesting premise and some thought behind it. This was just Luke and Han fighting the Death Star with a Trek veneer.
The enemy ship looked cool. That's pretty much all I can say about it.
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vampirehipi23: I would enjoy a book written by a monkey and turned into a movie rather than this.
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