Star Trek XI

[watchdog]

Why am I not surprised at that? If he condemns Star Trek XI for that, he needs to do the same in return for Star Wars, since we see numerous examples of ships landing and launching from the surface, and in the case of one of the TCW comics, we see Munificents being built on a planet-side shipyard.
-Mike

He kept going on about how much stress would be put on various parts of the ship due to gravity as well as the fact that they would have to expend energy to launch it into space, noting that building it in space would be cheaper and more efficiant, this mostly started when someone suggested that trek ships would need to be stronger than they thought they are to withstand the gravity stress durring construction. I'm assuming that he thinks Trek does not have anti-gravity devices on par with the repulsorlifts of Wars, he needs to quit complaining and go see this movie. His quibbling sounds like my ten year old nephew when I tell him about star trek and star wars.

I'am not sure where he might get such an idea from. There is nothing to indicate that Trek technology was incapable of anti-gravity that could launch or land a large starship. But he's stil a hypocritte for failing to note the similar issue in Wars. More likely he doesn't like the implications of a Federation that can easily launch a starship of that size from a planet.
-Mike

Well the anti gravity device thing was me, the complaint seemed to me like that was his concern.
He was railing against the inefficency of constructing the starhip on the planets surface, he pointed out that the reason we construct things here on Earth instead of in space was because we have to. That part was really stupid because the real reason we construct things on Earth is because they are being used on Earth, we are not going to build a building on Earth and then shoot it into space or vice-versa. i got the feeling that he has not seen any of the trailors and is just hatin' out of habit.
So he is focusing on how silly it is to build the ship on the ground where it will have to deal with the stress put on it from gravity as compared to building in space where the stress would be almost nil. And he made mention of having to expend energy to then launch the ship into space compleatly ignoring the fact that his side has ships constantly cruising through atmosphere all the time. One of the threads there they were all debating if Federation ships could survive atmospheric entry at all believe it or not. It seems that the idea that they would build the Enterprise on Earth and then launch it into space contradicts their belief that the Federation ships are not structuraly strong enough to do so.

[Sandyin]

My point is that they have changed the timeline in such a way that TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, and all of the other movies cannot happen as we saw them. Everything after 2233 is different. This instance of time travel is incompatible with all of Trek except ENT. Since these events are not undone by the end of the film, the near entirety of Star Trek is.

The writers have no idea what kind of range the transporters are capable. First, Kirk and Scotty transport onto the Enterprise despite the fact that has to be at least an hour away at high warp. Then they transport Kirk and Spock from one of Saturn’s moons to the Romulan ship that is orbiting Earth. Well over the 40,000 km max range in the 24th century.

I honestly didn't care since if you'd watched DS9, it was established that transport across light years was possible, at least using Dominion transporters. Also they explictly stated that this technique was something Scotty would invent called "Transwarp transportation", and Spock gave the younger Scotty the equations for it. As for the max range, that is something that was never clearly established in "A Matter of Honor" they established it not a maximum range, but the safe range for transport.

Just because the Dominion can transport across light years doesn’t mean that the Federation can. And if that kind of distance is possible, why do they bother to take runabouts to Bajor all the time, or any intra-solar system travel. Even without a firmly established maximum range the normal range is much less. But just popping an equation into the transporter isn’t credible as a way to expand the range so vastly. It’s a little like saying if you just enter this equation into your operating system’s programming and it’ll run 6x10^12 times faster.

Why do the Romulans not look like Romulans? Why does Kirk even see a Romulan? Humans aren’t supposed to see Romulans until TOS’s “Balance of Terror”.

Because of the Narada's incursion and identification during the battle with the Kelvin. And they did look like Romulans... green blood, pointed ears... they just styled themselves differently because they were a rogue faction. I mean that was all made fairly clear.

The makeup for Romulans since TNG has been more then just pointy ears. Adding v-shaped bumps and changing the skin color. Now not every Romulan has those features but some of them on the ship ought to have had them. It’s just odd to get bald, tattooed, TOS looking Romulans in new Trek.

Why does the ice monster spit out a perfectly good snow-cat-meal and chase after Kirk? Why did Spock throw Kirk off the ship in the first place? The brig too good for him? Lock him in a broom closet for f**** sake.

Because Kirk ran. And the second part of your question is easily answered by Spock's traumatization by his mother's death and the loss of Vulcan as well as Spock probably not wanting someone as devious and clever as Kirk simply locked up where he can escape and cause problems.

I won’t argue too much about how the mind of an alien creature works but it seems silly to me that you would spit out a meal to chase a smaller one.

Sure Spock is traumatized but no one objects to marooning a guy on an ice covered planet? Why send him down in a pod that lands a considerable distance away from the outpost when there are large carnivorous animals roaming about? Why not beam him to the outpost? And sure people always bust out of jail in fiction but if the characters all think that there’s a 50/50 chance that their prisoners will break out, the jail doesn’t have much use. And if the brig is no good they could have sedated him or something. Dropping him on a planet in such a way that he faces death from exposure or animal attack is just cruel. Someone in the chain of command should have objected.

Why does Uhura try to make out with Spock after he loses his mother, his planet, and his people? “I’m sorry your planet has been destroyed and your mom is dead, maybe some sex or make-outs will cheer you up.” Not to mention his mom should be alive for another 40 years or so.

Hello! Timeline altered by Nero's incursion! Hello? Vulcan isn't supposed to be imploded into a mini-black hole, either. But Nero wanted his revenge for the death of his wife and the loss of Romulus and so he proceeded to do the things he did. It was also nice to see this relationship between Spock and Uhura, and in a highly traumatic event like this, I can see what happened. It is a realistic reaction and it was believable since the two of them had obviously been working together for a while longer than anyone else.

Hello! You’ve missed my point entirely! My objection is that the timeline has been changed. The fact that Spock’s mom is dead means she can’t be alive to talk to Spock in ST:IV.

If I found out a friend’s mom had just been killed I wouldn’t be making sexual advances on them. Nor would I welcome such advances if the situation was reversed. Maybe it’d be different if we just witnessed the destruction of Earth and the human species but I doubt it.

Why are the Romulans bothering to drill to the core of the planet? A black hole with destroy a planet just as nicely on the surface. I didn’t find the Nero character interesting at all. “You didn’t save my family, so now I’m going to kill billions!” It must have been one hell of an unexpected supernova if he couldn’t get his family off the planet on his own. I read they were trying to capture a Wrath of Kahn vibe in the film and it’s pretty damn obvious. Dead wife, mind controlling slugs, doesn’t like Kirk, those sorts of things.

It wasn't just his wife, it was the loss of Romulus as well in the supernova that drove him over the edge. As for the drilling, they aren't shooting a little black hole down into the planet's core, the "red matter" apparently had to be injected deep enough inside were it could be made to react with enough normal matter to create one.

I didn’t say it was just his wife. The stuff in quotes is to be read in mocking tone. But everyone should have been able to see the supernova coming. It takes time for a supernova to occur. When a volcano is about to erupt people leave the area likely to be affected. If the star in question was Romulan sun Romulus would need to be abandoned anyway and they would have several minutes to evacuate even after the event. And if it were another star they’d have had years to prepare.

The Red Matter didn’t need to be in the core of a planet to make a singularity, the whole plan was to save Romulus was to create a singularity in space to stop the shockwave (or whatever they called it). They did say that the Red Matter needed to be ignited but didn’t elaborate further.

I try not to see much about a movie online if I have any intent on seeing it so I avoided a lot of the info that was released before the film but I did see a few things where the crew said things to the effect of wanting to say true to the franchise and wanting to keep the fans happy. And to be fair they did remain fairly true to the characters but they didn’t seem to give a damn about continuity.

They did keep quite a bit of continuity... it was all over the place, if you'd payed a bit more attention. The whole point of this that it is a reboot. They gave enough respect to the old continuity, and are now starting over. That was fairly obvious. And I for one am very happy that the reset button was not hit at the end, and that Spock Prime did not disappear once the crisis was over.

How is a reboot keeping continuity? I said they were true to the characters and there are many references to things in TOS but that’s not keeping continuity. Seeing the origin of McCoy’s nickname is nice but finding out that the 79 episodes he was a part of didn’t happen is a lot less nice.

Does anyone else feel a twinge of disappointment and anger to read that, “They hoped to bring the feel of the original Star Wars trilogy into the movie, since Abrams has often said he's more a fan of Star Wars than Star Trek.”?

No. It looks like it's only you. Frankly speaking, this movie had something special about it that was clearly far and away missing from the abortion that is the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy; fun, interesting characters who are highly competent, but also very flawed and only when they work together do they overcome those flaws.
-Mike

It just seems strange to me that they want to capture the feel of Star Wars rather then capture the feel of Star Trek. It sounds an awful lot like Coke wanting to capture the taste of Pepsi. And I find it disappointed that they can’t find a Star Trek fan to direct a Star Trek movie.

Presumably they are creating a new separate continuity, akin to what Marvel has done with their Ultimate universe. A modern, updated version of their characters that is separate and distinct from the mainstream Earth-616 continuity. But for 40 years Star Trek has maintained a single continuity and to create a new continuity is off putting. Epically when it is done in a movie with a plot revolving around time travel. I’m fine with Marvel’s Ultimate universe because the primary one is still being supported, but that is the nature of the medium. It is far easier to support multiple continuities when you put out new material every week. But with Star Trek it takes a lot longer to get a lot less.

The Star Trek that I’ve enjoyed is apparently done. We have an entirely new continuity. It’s an alternate reality where everything’s the same but different. It’s like the ENT’s “In a Mirror, Darkly”. I tuned in to see an episode of ENT and while it was good, it had no bearing on the characters I wanted to see. With this movie the best case scenario is that it has no bearing on everything else because the alternative is erasing everything else.

[watchdog]

Why does the ice monster spit out a perfectly good snow-cat-meal and chase after Kirk?

It's possible the big red creature was territorial and was defending it's territory from interlopers. Not every animal kills something for food (although I do think it would have eaten Kirk).

[Sandyin]

Animals tend to protect their territory from other similar animals. Wolves don’t chase birds and groundhogs and foxes out of their territory, the keep out other wolves. But again, we can make up any reason why this creature did what it did because it’s a fictional alien creature unlike anything we’ve seen in real life.

I’m just saying the scene smacks of cliché. “Then the hero gets chased by the snow monster, and then the snow monster gets taken out by the snow behemoth, which then chases after our hero. Causing things to go from bad to worse.” They could have had just as interesting a chase with one animal or a pack of the same animal.

I found what they did to be a silly way to up the stakes of an already perilous situation that didn’t make sense in the first place.

And does anyone remember if Kirk had a phaser on the planet? I don’t remember seeing one. He certainly should have had one for protection and heating rocks.

[Praeothmin]

He was railing against the inefficency of constructing the starhip on the planets surface, he pointed out that the reason we construct things here on Earth instead of in space was because we have to. That part was really stupid because the real reason we construct things on Earth is because they are being used on Earth, we are not going to build a building on Earth and then shoot it into space or vice-versa. i got the feeling that he has not seen any of the trailors and is just hatin' out of habit.

Well, according to an interview (read in Wiki, bolding mine):

Orci had sent the fan art to Abrams to show how realistic the film could be.
Orci explained parts of the ship would have to be constructed on Earth because of the artificial gravity employed on the ship and its requirement for sustaining warp speed, and therefore the calibration of the ship's machinery would be best done in the exact gravity well which is to be simulated.

[Mike DiCenso]

Animals tend to protect their territory from other similar animals. Wolves don’t chase birds and groundhogs and foxes out of their territory, the keep out other wolves. But again, we can make up any reason why this creature did what it did because it’s a fictional alien creature unlike anything we’ve seen in real life.

Not always, you talk of foxes and wolves, yet these two species of canide sometimes are in conflict with each other for prey and other times not so. In the case of two disparite felines species, lions will hunt down and kill, though not eat, cheetah cubs, but will not kill leopard cubs.

And does anyone remember if Kirk had a phaser on the planet? I don’t remember seeing one. He certainly should have had one for protection and heating rocks.

It was probably not given to him so that he couldn't fight back before he was ejected onto the planet. He was also landed 15 km from the base.
-Mike

[Mike DiCenso]

He kept going on about how much stress would be put on various parts of the ship due to gravity as well as the fact that they would have to expend energy to launch it into space, noting that building it in space would be cheaper and more efficient, this mostly started when someone suggested that trek ships would need to be stronger than they thought they are to withstand the gravity stress during construction. I'm assuming that he thinks Trek does not have anti-gravity devices on par with the repulsorlifts of Wars, he needs to quit complaining and go see this movie. His quibbling sounds like my ten year old nephew when I tell him about star trek and star wars.

I'm not sure where he might get such an idea from. There is nothing to indicate that Trek technology was incapable of anti-gravity that could launch or land a large starship. But he's still a hypocrite for failing to note the similar issue in Wars. More likely he doesn't like the implications of a Federation that can easily launch a starship of that size from a planet.
-Mike

Well the anti gravity device thing was me, the complaint seemed to me like that was his concern.
He was railing against the inefficiency of constructing the starhip on the planets surface, he pointed out that the reason we construct things here on Earth instead of in space was because we have to. That part was really stupid because the real reason we construct things on Earth is because they are being used on Earth, we are not going to build a building on Earth and then shoot it into space or vice-versa. i got the feeling that he has not seen any of the trailers and is just hating' out of habit.
So he is focusing on how silly it is to build the ship on the ground where it will have to deal with the stress put on it from gravity as compared to building in space where the stress would be almost nil. And he made mention of having to expend energy to then launch the ship into space completely ignoring the fact that his side has ships constantly cruising through atmosphere all the time. One of the threads there they were all debating if Federation ships could survive atmospheric entry at all believe it or not. It seems that the idea that they would build the Enterprise on Earth and then launch it into space contradicts their belief that the Federation ships are not structurally strong enough to do so.

Okay, you have to be kidding me... they were actually arguing whether or not Trek ships are strong enough to enter a planet's atmosphere, even theough we've seen this many, many times throughout Trek? No really, I just can't believe they'd come up with that. From the time of TOS' "Nake Time" and "Tomorrow is Yesterday" we've seen starships enter and survive in an atmosphere. This movie was no exception to that rule.
-MIke

[watchdog]

The SDN thread can be found at;
http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... 8&t=133398
start on page 5.
I did not feel like re-reading 17 pages of reviews again, but the first guy to bring up the ship being built on earth was someone called tezunegari, one thing he said was;

If ENT is still canon* (at least it should be considering Nero arrived after the Federation was founded) so I would consider it to be an interesting piece of information. Wouldn't gravity put a heavy strain on the pylons holding the warp nacelles and the saucer section?

And the ability to land on a planet or take off from a planet was never a common ability of the bigger Trek starships. Though it was hinted in Generations that they could scavenge the crashd saucer section but didn't because of severe damage to it.
The only ships with landing gear to my knowledge are runabouts and Voyager and all ship construction of the original timeline where conducted in spacedocks.

I dont think this was the thread where I read about trek ships not bieng able to enter atmospheres, I remember someone had posted a pick of Voyager crashing on the ice planet so that could be anywhere.
Mike Wong had an interesting little debate on the construction of the Enterprise;

I don't see why building it on the surface is a) in any way related to what it does once it is in operation and b) necessarily inefficient.

Are you serious? It is ridiculously inefficient to build any kind of large structure in a gravity well. The only reason we do it is because we have no choice.

Take a domed stadium for example; while the dome may be strong enough to support itself against gravity once it's built, it is incomplete during construction, so it won't support itself. All of the structural girders won't be in place yet, and it won't have anywhere near the strength it would have at completion. So you have to scaffold the fuck out of it, or find other creative ways to keep it from falling apart while it's half-built. You also have to expend all kinds of energy moving material to the top of it while you're building it.

The writer who said it made sense because the ship can handle multiple Gs when complete is an idiot. Gravity adds a huge amount of unnecessary difficulty to the process of building any large structure, no matter how strong it will be when it's complete.

I do see the point about the gravity well, but impulse power is pretty cheap.

You can't refute an accusation about inefficiency by claiming that they can afford to be inefficient.

Perhaps they have a few "sleds" that they use like slipways - platforms that support all the protruding parts of the ship while it's under construction and then loft it into orbit, and that's easier than fabricating and assembling components in space.

So you're suggesting that they use anti-gravity sleds as a form of scaffolding, which must maintain position and rigidity for months at a time, and that this is "easier" than fabricating the ship in space despite the fact that they have extensive space-based facilities and personnel and they have to expend the energy to get that mass into orbit sooner or later anyway?

The point is if we really want to rationalize it we can, in the mean time who cares?

No you can not rationalize it. You can say "who cares" if you want, but that's not what you're doing: you're pretending that it's not as stupid as it is.

You can't refute an accusation about inefficiency by claiming that they can afford to be inefficient.

I'm not refuting anything, I'm positing that they can do something. Perhaps there was recently a disaster at an orbital construction facility and they need to build some ships on the ground as a stop-gap measure, or perhaps it became politically useful to do so. Sheesh, I even said "I do see the point about the gravity well" to make it obvious that I'm NOT being dismissive. Chill.

So you're suggesting that they use anti-gravity sleds as a form of scaffolding, which must maintain position and rigidity for months at a time, and that this is "easier" than fabricating the ship in space despite the fact that they have extensive space-based facilities and personnel and they have to expend the energy to get that mass into orbit sooner or later anyway?

One problem with your debating style, if I may be so bold as to criticize the webmaster, is that you make assumptions. You added the words "anti-gravity." The "sled" could be nothing more or less than a freaking huge scaffold built to stabilize the ship and withstand escape velocity. Turn the engines on when you're ready to go. If you can reuse the sled for several ships it would be practical. Not *better* than building the ship in space, but within the realm of plausibility.

I'm not refuting anything, I'm positing that they can do something.

You said you saw no reason why it would be "necessarily inefficient" to build it on the ground. Remember?

One problem with your debating style, if I may be so bold as to criticize the webmaster, is that you make assumptions. You added the words "anti-gravity."

How does that make any difference to my point, fucktard? If they use huge scaffolds as you suggest, your denial of the inefficiency of the process is hardly any more justified than it is if they use anti-gravity devices. We're talking about a huge structure; the scaffolds would have to be the size of skyscrapers in their own right, and they would need to be strong enough to support massive weight above and beyond their own mass.

That's pretty much the whole of it really.


EDIT:
I was just being lazy, a minute after posting the above, I found the thread where they wonder about trek ships ability to enter atmosphere;

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... 8&t=128634

[GStone]

Why does Uhura try to make out with Spock after he loses his mother, his planet, and his people?

I've seen people say this alot. It's not about sex, it's about comfort. Life affirmation and all that rot.

I know it’s supposed to be an alternate timeline/universe but that’s a BS excuse.

It is explicit that it's rewriting some of history, not moving into a parallel universe.

Just finished reading the review on SDN, everyone there pretty much loved the movie but as I expected MW seemed to be looking for any reason to hate it, or at the least pan it as a crappy movie, he was extreamly offended by the fact that the ship was built on the ground and focused on that as being overtly stupid.

Why am I not surprised at that? If he condemns Star Trek XI for that, he needs to do the same in return for Star Wars, since we see numerous examples of ships landing and launching from the surface, and in the case of one of the TCW comics, we see Munificents being built on a planet-side shipyard.
-Mike

Oh, the unforgivable insult that a ship should ever be built within atmo when it's warp capable or can float into the air. I'm gonna stab myself in the heart right now. I should have felt that way when I saw it in the film. And for shame of them not having ultra efficient processes for building ships just after about a century or so of having the technology. They should have gotten to 100% efficiency immediately. They should have divined it.

In space ship building is not Everest.

He kept going on about how much stress would be put on various parts of the ship due to gravity as well as the fact that they would have to expend energy to launch it into space, noting that building it in space would be cheaper and more efficiant, this mostly started when someone suggested that trek ships would need to be stronger than they thought they are to withstand the gravity stress durring construction.

This is because we all know that only the klingons are capable of highly efficient energy usage for hover technology. That's why the saucer section of the the E-D didn't have hover tech, though Voyager did for the whole ship. And that's why Spock's boot jets were actual boot jets and that little hovering move he did beside the mountain Kirk was on was really a controlled and virtually soundless thrusting of reaction engines on the sides.

* The death of Spock's mother has a profound impact on him, and even pushes the half-Vulcan, half-human into a relationship with Uhura.

That was already established by Uhura's 'talk' to Spock about her not being on the Enterprise. It happened, as if they were secretly together. When Spock leaves her in the lift on another floor, it also screamed they were in a secret relationship. But, she made it public by kissing him on the transporter pad.

"Finally, this new timeline probably diverges quite strongly from the old one, beyond having a Federation with people named Kirk and Spock and a ship named Enterprise. Consider that once you start messing with a temporal "menace" like Kirk, you also mess with all the temporal incursions he has made, and those that follow on. Many of the time travels of Kirk occurred to times well before his own birth.

In this case, they aren't preventing Kirk from commanding the Enterprise, he's put in charge of it earlier.

One of the threads there they were all debating if Federation ships could survive atmospheric entry at all believe it or not. It seems that the idea that they would build the Enterprise on Earth and then launch it into space contradicts their belief that the Federation ships are not structuraly strong enough to do so.

Yeah, despite Voyager doing it more than once.

My point is that they have changed the timeline in such a way that TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, and all of the other movies cannot happen as we saw them. Everything after 2233 is different.

Different, yeah. But, the further you get away from the spot, the less the impact is gonna be pronounced. Things are still gonna gravity more or less towards what they were before. A few details might be different, but that's all. Voyager will still be lost on the other side of the glaxay, the borg and the dominion will come, cardassia will still be made a burnt cinder of a world.

Sure Spock is traumatized but no one objects to marooning a guy on an ice covered planet?

Spock wated him dead, no ifs ands or buts about it.

[Sandyin]

And does anyone remember if Kirk had a phaser on the planet? I don’t remember seeing one. He certainly should have had one for protection and heating rocks.

It was probably not given to him so that he couldn't fight back before he was ejected onto the planet. He was also landed 15 km from the base.
-Mike

He was unconscious and didn’t wake up until after the pod had landed. If it’s an escape pod or some special landing pod it should have a phaser as part of its equipment set. I lack of one would mean that either Kirk didn’t find it, didn’t use it, or it wasn’t there. Spock trying to kill someone just isn’t very Spock-like.

My point is that they have changed the timeline in such a way that TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, and all of the other movies cannot happen as we saw them. Everything after 2233 is different.

Different, yeah. But, the further you get away from the spot, the less the impact is gonna be pronounced. Things are still gonna gravity more or less towards what they were before. A few details might be different, but that's all. Voyager will still be lost on the other side of the glaxay, the borg and the dominion will come, cardassia will still be made a burnt cinder of a world.

I’m not sure I agree with that. Even small changes can have large impacts. The whole butterfly effect and all. But in the DS9 episodes “Past Tense, Part I/II” Sisko stands in for Gabriel Bell with little apparent impact on the future, same goes for Scotty giving the formula for transparent aluminum in ST:IV. So there are grounds for arguing that the changes will be minor.

But we are talking with the loss of Vulcan and six billion people. I don’t think anyone can make a very convincing argument that the future will feel little effect from such a loss. If anything the differences will increase the further you get from the spot. Any advances made by the Vulcan Science academy will have to be made through other means. New people will have to get into the sciences instead of the fields they would have. Other people will have to fill the roles on starships that the vulcans would have meaning people will meet people they wouldn’t have and die before they would have. Old Spock can help compensate for the science achievements but it’s a far cry from what “should” happen. Not to mention that Young Spock is now fundamentally different from Old Spock. Having Kirk become a captain sooner then he would have means he’ll lack experiences that he would have effecting everything he will do or would have done.

[GStone]

There is more going on in the Federation, as well as the galaxy, than just vulcans who are slow to increase in population size and are long lived. They also aren't all scientists. Some are musicians, religious people, etc. People don't go that far away from where they live, even if they did travel through space. Most people don't have meaningful interactions with high level people. Even if Sisko didn't take Bell's place, another black guy could take his place.

And even if you drop a pebble into a lake, the molecules are effected by the ripple, but the water molecules are still pretty much near the ones that they were near before the ripple. Just because you're late to return a vid, you just don't get as big a lunch the next day. When you're late 5 minutes or 10, you're still late.

The further you get away from the impact spot of the pebble in the lake, the less things get effected. Things are more or less gonna be the same.

[Mike DiCenso]

I saw the Movie on Friday, and I have to say it is now my favorite Star Trek Movie.

I was rather impressed by the new Enterprise's rate of fire, I don't think I've seen anything with a similar rate of in Star Wars.

Anyways, who else wants Sulu's Sword?

We have seen similar rates of fire. Jango Fett's Slave-I, for example, or the Imperial TIEs. Of course you may mean captial ships, so no, we have not seen anything quite like that, at least not in the movies, nor can I recall anything like that in the TCW.
-Mike

[Sift Green]

I saw the Movie on Friday, and I have to say it is now my favorite Star Trek Movie.

I was rather impressed by the new Enterprise's rate of fire, I don't think I've seen anything with a similar rate of in Star Wars.

Anyways, who else wants Sulu's Sword?

We have seen similar rates of fire. Jango Fett's Slave-I, for example, or the Imperial TIEs. Of course you may mean captial ships, so no, we have not seen anything quite like that, at least not in the movies, nor can I recall anything like that in the TCW.
-Mike

Yes, I meant capital ships, sorry about the confusion.

[Mike DiCenso]

That's cool, and welcome to the forum, Sift Green.
-Mike

[Mike DiCenso]

There is more going on in the Federation, as well as the galaxy, than just vulcans who are slow to increase in population size and are long lived. They also aren't all scientists. Some are musicians, religious people, etc. People don't go that far away from where they live, even if they did travel through space. Most people don't have meaningful interactions with high level people. Even if Sisko didn't take Bell's place, another black guy could take his place.

Damn Syrranites! Not only did the Vulcans give up their cool starships, but they also apparently withdrew from most of their off-world colonies and bases. ;-)
-Mike