I grew up on TNG (mostly reruns), DS9 (still not a fan of that one), Voyager, and Enterprise…but had not seen the original when I saw this movie a few years back being born in 1990. But I have to say I loved it. Even my mom, who did grow up with Kirk/Spock, loved it…I think she had seen that movie so many times now. She will love what you’ve written here!

Also now I’m very proud to say I’m mostly through re-watching all of the shows. From Star Trek to Enterprise. It really has made me a true trekky and very much interested in real astronomy. It would be really cool for another Star Trek TV show to come out too. Some day I can only hope!

skip it….

Nobody would be that stupid to use a general condensor microphone in space,
Of course our imaginative future camera man (or spectator in suit) would choose a system like a laser based vibration pickup system to record the sound.

The sad thing is:
how many of your people complaining about the sound in space thing, do have watched some nature documentary footage wich displays chewing insects, without wondering about that sound ?

1. The Enterprise. I was SO looking forward to this movie, just to see the original, unrefitted Enterprise more or less straight out of TOS. AFter all, didn’t they just recreate all those glorious sets for the mirror universe episode of “Enterprise”? The ship itself was,thus, a terrible disappointment for me.

2. The whole Kirk goes from Cadet First Class to Captain in one fell swoop?!?! Is Starfleet really THAT hard up for senior officers that they’ve gotta take a butterbar, no matter how demonstratively competent he was in one isolated crisis) and hand over the keys to a starship? I don’t think so. A MUCH better way to handle that would’ve been to have COMMANDER Kirk at a promotion and change-of-command ceremony, getting his 2-1/2 stripes and relieving Pike, prefaced by a “THREE YEARS LATER…” subtitle. Remember when Pike told Kirk after the bar brawl he could become an officer in 4 years, command a ship in 8. That’d be 4 years of the Academy, then 4 more years to command. Next morning, Kirk tells Pike, “I’ll do it in three.” Maybe Kirk could whisper to Pike , “Told you I’d do it in three…” and grin at him as they shook hands, with Pike shaking his head and muttering “Show-off” or somesuch.

3. “And yet, you can be in two places at the same time.” – one of the better lines in the whole flick.

4. Amusing moment – when Uhura walking out of the Transporter room after playing tonsil-hockey with Spock, Scotty just sort of stares at her. In the later of the first batch of ST movies it became apparent that Scotty was developing a “thing” for Uhura. And the “So her first name’s Nyota?” “I have no comment on the matter.” was the BEST bit of dialog in the flick.

2) same problem as in First Contact. In that one the Borg sent a cube to Earth and after a gigantic space battle, the Borg go back in time to assimilate the Earth in the past, with Picard in hot pursuit.

The problem here is why wouldn’t the Borg send their Cube to some nearby unimportant star system, launch their sphere, go back in time and assimilate the Earth at their leisure? They get the biological distinctiveness of the humans without pesky interference from Picard or Starfleet. Oh, they could even have beamed some Borg down to the Cochrane’s Earth and assimilated it too, we saw how hard it was to stop them on a modern starship, scattered all over an earlier tech Earth, lights out.

Why did I bring all this up? It’s a really good reason why having a WORKING TIME MACHINE basically renders plot points moot.

http://structureddream.blogspot.com/2009/06/my-take-on-star-trek-2009-001.html

Click my name here & find out!

About point #2, if one drop of that stuff is able to make a planet sized black hole and Spock had maybe 30 gallons of the stuff, how many worlds could he wipe out had he wanted to? Is there even more of the stuff where Spock came from?

6) Time travel happened a lot in the old Trek universe and this reboot of the franchise establishes that its possible right away. If they know it’s possible, I would think a concerted effort by the worlds with no concern to how much time and money it takes, to go back in time to stop the future mining ship.

Okay, I did the math, and assuming I got it right…

According to Wikipedia, the rings start at about 6,600 km above Saturn’s surface, and extend out to about 120,700 km above the surface, making them about 114,000 km wide.

Titan orbits Saturn at a distance of 1,221,870 km (semi-major axis), and has a diameter of 2576 km. Assuming that the Enterprise rises up out of Titan’s atmosphere at Titan’s pole, the big E is about 1288 km above or below the plane of the ecliptic of Saturn’s planet/moons system.

At that range, the rings would be about .01 degrees wide. Pretty near edge-on. Assuming I’m right, the outer edge would be at an angle of about 89.93 degrees, and the inner edge at 89.94 degrees as measured from an axis normal to Saturn’s ecliptic at Enterprise’s vantage point.

What does the moon cover from Earth’s surface? About 0.5 degree? So the rings would be 1/50th the size of the moon?

So in the first encounter, Kirk’s daddy could have put his ship into warp speed and rammed it down the throat of the Romulan mining ship, putting an effectively infinite mass through its center and vaporizing it. Problem solved and no movie needed.

The warp engines were one of the first things taken out by the Romulans, along with LR communications and transporters.

Here’s a question:
If you would use a “gamma ray burst” as a plot device to be a threat.
Wouldn’t it be kind of a stretch, since a planet must collide with it, which is kind of hard, since the 2 gammaray bursts would erupt at the suns poles?

The accuracy of the science in this and other films is irrelevant, because it’s Science Fiction. Sci-Fi is about taking variables we are comfortable and familiar with, in hard science as well as the everyday world, and altering those variables to see what happens. If astronomers ran Hollywood then no movie would ever get made and those that did would be boring, soulless black-and-white snooze-fests, devoid of any fun (see: variables) and replaced (blotted out) by elitist probabilities and by-the-numbers formulas. Like a movie about someone counting enough digits of Pi to fill two hours. Any iota of “fun” would be stamped out.

I prefer to get my boring science from where it belongs– old, dusty volumes stacked disinterestedly on my bookshelf. Your article is still pretty cute though.

Pike rocked, though. I want to see the series where Pike is the captain.