ENT Tech

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Re: ENT Tech

Postby aadarshinah » Sun Aug 15, 2010 10:45 pm

I still get a syfy rush when I use my kindle... though it does make me curious as to why we don't see more airborne padds in the middle of firefights...

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Re: ENT Tech

Postby honeybee » Sun Aug 15, 2010 10:47 pm

I wonder why there are 1) no seatbelts and 2) why the gravity isn't the first thing to go LOL

You'd think a good jolt would knock out the artificial gravity.
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Re: ENT Tech

Postby aadarshinah » Sun Aug 15, 2010 11:35 pm

My own personal artifical gravity theory goes something like this:

Any artifical gravity plating would have to release graviton particles to work. Gravitons may be mass-less and charge-less, but they probably stick together and, the more of them there are, the more likely they are to attract others - in essence, they behave like magnets would, only the force in question would be gravity, not eletromagnetism.

The upshot of this, in my mind at least, is that even if the power to the grav plating is lost, it would be a long time before the gravitons dispersed and so, even though the grav plating wouldn't be on, per se, it would still function for at least as long as it would take to repair. Oh, the strength may lessen with time, but it would still function...

That, and it would probably be prohibitivly expensive on a tv show's budget to build a duplicate set in a "vomit comet" and do filming there with all the cast and extras they'd need, as they did for Apollo 13.

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Re: ENT Tech

Postby Rigil Kent » Mon Aug 16, 2010 4:07 am

honeybee wrote:I wonder why there are 1) no seatbelts and 2) why the gravity isn't the first thing to go

'Cause zero gee is a bitch to do on their budget? :lol:

There are so many things about Trek tech that make no sense, I wouldn't know where to begin. Don't get me started on some of their utterly stupid weapon & defense systems...
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Re: ENT Tech

Postby honeybee » Mon Aug 16, 2010 12:06 pm

Space battles without sound would be pretty unexciting, as would faster than light travel without any . . .light. Although, I assume the inertial dampeners would also somehow trap light inside the ship.

What's really interesting about that article on TNG's PADDS, is the touch-screens were developed because they couldn't afford the buttons and switches that they would have made.
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Re: ENT Tech

Postby Rigil Kent » Mon Aug 16, 2010 2:13 pm

honeybee wrote:Space battles without sound would be pretty unexciting, as would faster than light travel without any . . .light.

Nah, that's not my boggle. My boggle revolves around the kinds of weapons and defenses they use which are, frankly, less sophisticated than what modern US Navy ships utilize. There are, for example, apparently only two kinds of defenses on a Trek starship - shields and armor, neither of which are all that effective. With how often the shields fail (for dramatic purposes, of course), I'd personally want a couple of redundant back-ups online. Apart from that scene with the Kelvin in the nuTrek movie, you never see anything like a CIWS (close-in weapon system) whose whole purpose would be to take out enemy torpedoes, and while ECW (electronic counter-warfare) systems are implied, they are never actually shown to be in use. For that matter, they don't have much in the way of countermeasures to baffle incoming ordnance, which is just kind of dumb, IMO. Their weapon systems are equally dumb, literally so in the case of torpedoes which, barring that sole instance in "The Undiscovered Country" (I think, with General Chang?), never track and appear to be nothing more than dumb torps no more advanced (apart from the explosive yield) than a torpedo fired from a modern Navy submarine. Granted, the implied ECW suites are at least a partial explanation for why the torpedoes so often miss (that, or the Trek gunnery crews really need to brush up on their How To guides), but apart from that movie where it is a plot point that Spock & McCoy rewire a torpedo (why Bones, I have no idea), we never see a torpedo track its target.

There are all sorts of other dumb things about Trek tech that irk me as well, but to no one's surprise, the armaments and the utter Fail surrounding them really irk me.
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Re: ENT Tech

Postby aadarshinah » Mon Aug 16, 2010 2:59 pm

Rigil Kent wrote: My boggle revolves around the kinds of weapons and defenses they use which are, frankly, less sophisticated than what modern US Navy ships utilize


Maybe there'd be some reason why all torpedoes et al in space would have to be "dumb", though for the life of me I can't think why. Prohibitively expensive tech? Doubtful. Too easy to hijack? Possibly. Oh, what kind of tracking systems do "normal" bombs use? If it's heat, I can see that, while a tracking bomb in the middle of open space might work well, any time they were used near a planet or a star their systems would be thrown off, probably, from the greater heat of things-that-aren't-their-targets.

As for the defenses, well, as always, you're right. If I were sending a ship into space where it might see battle, I'd want 3 reduncant sheild systems at the very least and as strong hull plating as I can realistically manage. And sensor baffles so that the enemy can't scan for any weak systems... you know, make that as many redunant systems as possible because, even if I'm not being shot at, I don't want my ship to be dead in the water because one system broke down and it's impossible to fix...

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Re: ENT Tech

Postby Rigil Kent » Mon Aug 16, 2010 3:11 pm

aadarshinah wrote:
Rigil Kent wrote: My boggle revolves around the kinds of weapons and defenses they use which are, frankly, less sophisticated than what modern US Navy ships utilize


Maybe there'd be some reason why all torpedoes et al in space would have to be "dumb", though for the life of me I can't think why. Prohibitively expensive tech? Doubtful. Too easy to hijack? Possibly. Oh, what kind of tracking systems do "normal" bombs use? If it's heat, I can see that, while a tracking bomb in the middle of open space might work well, any time they were used near a planet or a star their systems would be thrown off, probably, from the greater heat of things-that-aren't-their-targets.

How do Trek "sensors" work? That's all you'd really need - incorporate the same sort of scanning capability they already have with hand-held scanning devices and add a fairly sophisticated computer brain to control it (which they clearly possess since they can make androids, and the brain is much larger than they'd need to be.) As to them being easy to hijack, I find that a little hard to swallow. The only equivalent I can think of is the Romulan drone & the Aenar stuff, which is an exception to the rule. I guess the remote "taking down the shields" in Wrath of Khan might qualify, but again, that's an exception, and not exactly analogous. If the computer brain on the warhead is sophisticated enough, you don't need to have any send/receive capability so it can't be remotely taken over, and remains a fire-and-forget weapon.

Besides, when has "money" ever mattered in Trek?
If I were sending a ship into space where it might see battle, I'd want 3 reduncant sheild systems at the very least and as strong hull plating as I can realistically manage. And sensor baffles so that the enemy can't scan for any weak systems... you know, make that as many redunant systems as possible because, even if I'm not being shot at, I don't want my ship to be dead in the water because one system broke down and it's impossible to fix...

Add in some CIWS point-defense weapon systems, a whole crap load of countermeasures (the equivalent of flares or chaff), and so on.
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Re: ENT Tech

Postby Silverbullet » Mon Aug 16, 2010 4:04 pm

The one breakdown that always irritated me ws the Transporter. one could take it to the bank that when it was most needed it would breakdown. Only transport one person at a time leaving the heros stranded. Never seemed to fail when the riters got lazy. If the damned transporters were that bad junk the things. they had to be realiable. Bad enough getting your atoms scramlbed in the buffer.
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Re: ENT Tech

Postby WarpGirl » Mon Aug 16, 2010 4:09 pm

To be fair, the transporter in ENT time was still VERY new, it wasn't even supposed to be used on humans unless ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY. The Andorians didn't have them if I remember right... Think about old cell phones, or the first home computers... I thought it was a brilliant piece of writing that they were so unpredictable.
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Re: ENT Tech

Postby Rigil Kent » Mon Aug 16, 2010 4:12 pm

Unfortunately, they really weren't unpredictable. How many times was there a transporter failure on ENT? I can think of just two - "Strange New Worlds" and then later in season 3's "Countdown" which could be attributed to battle damage since they were fighting the Xindi at the time. Contrast that with all of the numerous transporter errors in TOS, set some 100 years later. "Daedalus" doesn't really count because they were using the transporter for something it wasn't entirely designed to do.

Personally, I wish they hadn't had the transporter on ENT at all, but that's just me.
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Re: ENT Tech

Postby WarpGirl » Mon Aug 16, 2010 4:29 pm

OK let me re-phrase. People didn't trust the transporter, in ENT. They trusted it in the other Treks, and it bit them in the rear. Better? ;-)
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Re: ENT Tech

Postby aadarshinah » Mon Aug 16, 2010 6:20 pm

It could be something along the lines of, in ENT the transporter isn't trusted, so its used only sparingly and for (relatively) short distances, but by TOS it's probably better trusted than it should be and used over longer distances, so it's more likely to have issues. I don't have any backups for this, nor any statistics to quote, but I imagine that the percentage of car accidents that occured when cars went slower and there fewer on the road is much smaller than the percentage that occurs with our super-fast cars and more casual and commonplace use of them; I imagine transporters would be much the same thing.

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Re: ENT Tech

Postby Silverbullet » Mon Aug 16, 2010 7:30 pm

Wasn't there a Transporter failure when Trip and Malcom were on that Romulan ship. One time in strange new world, then when Hayes go it in countdown and finally when Trip and Malcom were on the Romulan ship. It was fixed in the last instance so they got picked up out of space.

But my ppoint is, in the Trek series the damned Transporter broke down at very bad times.
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Re: ENT Tech

Postby WarpGirl » Mon Aug 16, 2010 7:33 pm

Well... Drama drama drama. :D
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And by people WG had herself in mind, but then the quote would have been ruined.
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