[[ mmHg is a perfectly serviceable unit of measure for atmospheric pressure, and is still used in the 21st Century.]]

WHERE? I haven’t seen it used for years, and it certainly isn’t used in the scientific literature.

To my ST knowledge, the Enterprise-D (NCC-1701-D) from ST:TNG was constructed at Planetia Utopia on Mars. By contrast, I remember Commodore Robert April in “The Counter-Clock Incident” (Animated Series) saying that he was there “at the San Francisco Navy Yards” when the original Enterprise’s “unit components were built.”

I don’t mean to outgeek you, but there it is.

Point. A meaningless point, to be sure, but a technicality which should be acknowledged in case anyone actually cares.

“I can think of an exception — the medical technology. If you remember the episode “Journey to Babel,” they needed a relative of Sarek’s to transfuse blood to the poor guy — apparently the 23rd century hadn’t come up with a blood substitute. ”

Or they didn’t have any blood substitute in stock which was appropriate to Sarek’s physilology. Modern medicine doesn’t have a vulcan blood substitute either, so no points there.

“And I remember Doctor McCoy in another episode giving an atmospheric pressure reading from a tricorder in “millimeters of mercury.” Any climatologist or meteorologist in the 23rd century should be using pascals, or at least millibars.”

Units of measure are not a matter of technological advance. mmHg is a perfectly serviceable unit of measure for atmospheric pressure, and is still used in the 21st Century.

I recall reading a review – I didn’t study the episode in question – where there were -two- folks in red shirt, a woman and a black guy, and the aliens did a thing to them and only the black guy came out alive. I hope I got that straight.

So if you are the -only- red-shirt person in a scene, is when you ask the captain if you can make a phone call to your loved ones. Otherwise, you could be lucky, and you don’t want to reduce your chances by admitting you -have- loved ones. Or plans to quit the service and go into the shoe business. Or musical ability. (Unless you are good at funeral tunes, then you can play out at the end of the show. Picard and Riker, for instance, have those skills.)

[[“Modern technology is actually more advanced than is shown on Star Trek”
Based on what?
” except for the gizmos granted: Warp drive, antigravity, transporter and some medical gadgets.”
Some gizmos? /Everything/ aboard a 23rd-century Starship is more advanced than anything we had in the 80s, and only the most recent advances in 21st-century technology are starting to eclipse some of the less important advances of 24th-Century technology.]]

I can think of an exception — the medical technology. If you remember the episode “Journey to Babel,” they needed a relative of Sarek’s to transfuse blood to the poor guy — apparently the 23rd century hadn’t come up with a blood substitute. And I remember Doctor McCoy in another episode giving an atmospheric pressure reading from a tricorder in “millimeters of mercury.” Any climatologist or meteorologist in the 23rd century should be using pascals, or at least millibars.

Then there’s the fact that soldiers shoot at each other with guns — where are the robot soldiers? How long will human soldiers survive as an institution once governments can field robots that can seek, aim, fire and take down thirty or so opponents every second? The idea of Han Solo getting behind the battle droid in “The Empire Strikes Back” and shooting it while it’s distracted makes for nice special effects, but it isn’t terribly realistic. (Yes, I know we’re discussing Star Trek and not Star Wars. Just making a point about robot soldiers.)

Hmm. Someone got themselves a “Build Your Own Treknobabble” kit for Christmas.

Personally, I think the ship collect the subether hoopa juju and routes it through a pentagonal transfusion crystal to create an intense physical/metaphysical reaction that warps the quantum modality of the intersecting timepsaces surrounding the starship’s imprint on the adjacent reality dimensions.

Or they could just paint the hull with Cavorite.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavorite

Re: the Enterprise name going the wrong direction. Good catch! Ties in with why I said it looked more like the TMP saucer than the TOS saucer. Even the concave curve of the suacer in the pic above is TMP-styled… it was a convex curve leading up to the bridge dome in TOS. (This becomes obvious to anyone who’s built models of both versions, and should have been obvious to the new movie’s producers. Unless, as I suggested, this is the E getting uprated just prior to TMP.)

Lars Bruchmann says: “TOS did have a spinning effect going on. Looking at the rest of the nacelle it appears to be round, whereas the TMP nacelles were not round, but rectangular along the entire length.”

When I saw “TMP” there, I immediately thought “Turbo Molecular Pump” which is what you’d need to compress interstellar hydrogen to any sort of usable pressure. They’re not turbines, like in jet engines, but gigantic turbo pumps!

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Radwaste says: “I hope somebody who has been on an actual warship has something to do with combat scenes, dialog, and the way the bridge crew operates.”

As corny as “Forbidden Planet” seems today, I’m convinced that the reason so many consider it as seriously great SF is the interaction of the crew. It’s hard to see Leslie Nielson without thinking “Frank Drebin” but the crew on the C57-D did have the look and feel of a submarine crew. I got into this in some detail in “The Saucer Fleet” (coming soon!)

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aiabx says: “I seem to recall the the Enterprise was built at the Planitia shipyards on Mars. Or did I hallucinate that after too many cheetos?”

The Enterprise “E” (TNG) was built around Mars. The original Big E (“no bloody ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’ or ‘E’”) was built in the San Francisco Navy Yards. How they got it into space is not explained.

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Will. M says: “I just spent the last eight minutes searching for a pix of Susan Oliver. I finally found ONE on the Internet Movie Database: it is a still from a Star Trek episode called People Are Alike All Over. ”

That’s actually a Twilight Zone episode. Look up the original pilot “The Menagerie” or it’s production incarnation, “The Cage.” She was Vena, the survivor of an earlier spaceship crash used as bait to get a breeding pair of humans.

- Jack

The role of antimatter and dilithium crystals in this method of propulsion is somewhat vague but the overall scheme was my impression on how the whole thing worked. Did anyone else have the same understanding of the propulsion scheme on Star Trek?

let us have characters that are actually human(even if they are not) and not just cardboard cutouts

Someone needs to do a Lensman series. Just about all space opera today is derived from those classics. The inertialess Bergenholm drive is still one of the best FTL doohickeys.

A single Third Stage Lensman could wake up, pwn the entire Starfleet by 11 in the morning, and then go out and bring down the Borg during his lunch hour.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lensman

But, oh, there’s telepathy involved so I guess we’re not supposed to like it anymore.

I like how they did the paint job on the hull before the ship was even fully constructed. Some janitors gonna flip when they get to deck 10 and find all that black paint that was supposed to be an “E” splattered all over the walls…

Anyone who have spent just a few days on a construction site, will know that the ceiling panels will go in before plumbers, electricians, everyone and his dog have finished their work above them. Why would the future be any different?

Well, I do hope somebody with a red shirt survives this time. I also hope somebody who has been on an actual warship has something to do with combat scenes, dialog, and the way the bridge crew operates. Nearly everyone gets it wrong because of the mistaken idea that the audience coming to see this flick won’t know what’s right.

For instance, the way an American submarine engages a target is amazing. It takes literally seconds to get to battle stations, because the whole boat is built and maintained to get there in seconds. There’s a lot of suspense and cold calculating on the approach to the firing point. The skipper makes the call, then there’s the flip of a switch, a pop-pssht-zhoom of the torpedo leaving, and then you continue calculations for any other targets and the one you fired on; you have a few minutes to figure out if what you did was right, as the Weapons Officer’s guy steers the fish as long as he can. In the meantime, nobody gets to relax because the problem continues, uninterrupted by ads for Claritin, etc. For some reason, this has never been on-screen.
Something like it would be mandatory for the conduct of operations in space. Anybody in armor will tell you that the warhead usually wins if it reaches you, and so the object of battle is to shoot first and straight. That requires serious teamwork.

Modern technology is actually more advanced than is shown on Star Trek except for the gizmos granted: Warp drive, antigravity, transporter and some medical gadgets. Bad Astronomers of their day would easily find enemy vessels several AU away and engage them. They would also recognize that big ships like Enterprise don’t have to close on a planet to wipe it out – they only have to nudge a bunch of big rocks in the right direction for a “time-on-target” solution.

There are lots of neat ideas still to be explored in the series, neglected in boy-girl, boy-boy, girl-girl fighting found in any bar on Earth. Yes, Susan Oliver was h-a-w-t on-screen and off, but space is the Final Frontier, man, let’s show it!

Cuius rei demonstrationem mirabilem sane detexi. Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet.

No Cloverfield review BA?