SB Wrote:
I can't remmeber the Episode but Archer was on an Aquatic ship. I keep wondering how the E;ectronics (computers and whatever) was handled. the Damned ship is filled with water but the electronics would have to be all over the ship unless the Aquatics could see in the dark. If a heavyly shielded cable somehow broke Zap, Dead Aquatucs all over the ship as they would be electrocuted unless the Cable shorted out but still some of them would be fried. Also, the Aquatic ship is supposed to be faster than the other Xindi ships. A ship that could carry the enterprise would have to be HUGE. Enterprise is not THAT small. None of the Aquatic Ship business makes any sense. For that matter neither do t he Aquatics. All of the other Xindi are Bipedal quadrapeds. They have more or less a humanoid build. The Reptilians looking the most alien. The Sloths, Aboreal and the Humanoid Xinidi less alien. Never bought into the five being the same species.
Archer was on an Aquatic ship, and it was in some kind of reverse fishbowl so he could breathe. The Aquatic language was based on on whale sounds, ironically. Perhaps Star Trek's other irrational probe of doom, the one from The Voyage Home, was built by Xindi Aquatics.
I suppose you don't want to think too hard about it, but there's plenty of precedent in SciFi for advanced, sentient water dwelling species. Dune springs to mind. And since in the Dune universe the Aquatic species controlled space travel by being able to "fold space" and create wormholes - they were extremely powerful. If I recall correctly, however, the species in Dune had evolved into sentience on land. After awhile, they went back into the water, the way scientists believe whales and dolphins have.
What does strike me as peculiar with the Xindi is the lack of opposeable thumbs. I can believe that they could develop some sort of work-around in order to have electricity and various technologies underwater, but how they would do this without opposable thumbs bothers. Unless, as someone theorized in the other thread, they evolved super intelligence and were able to trade for technology with the more humanoid land, dwelling Xindi. Say, they started trading access to fishing spots and underwater minerals, and then the humanoids built stuff for them. At some point, I was always expecting an Xindi Aquatic to tell someone "So long, and thanks for all the fish."
We did see an underwater city in Azati Prime, and maybe the Aquatics needed a city so they could interact with other species and trade for technology.
And yes, the Xindi Aquatic ship was absolutely enormous, enough to carry Enterprise back to Earth in Zero Hour.