Starfleet Jedi

STANDARD SPOILER SPACE


.




.




.




.




. you were warned.


So what are the implications of a starship built on the frickin' ground? It seems as if they took the "San Francisco, Calif." thing literally:

http://www.aolcdn.com/aolmovies/star-tr ... prise-full

There's something not quite right about this.... especially this early in the movie's production. Kind of reminds me of more than 10 years ago for the early trailers for ST:FC with a CGI Enterprise-E fighting a Borg cube that had little to do with what is actually shown in the movie itself.
-Mike

Here's the actual trailer that it's supposed to be a part of:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RllSZW_Y ... llSZW_YLk8

Nice.
-Mike

Look at the YouTube video at about 40-41 seconds. You can see in the background what looks like some sort of a space station structure. Maybe this is taking place inside a giant Spacedock-like platform with air and gravity.
-Mike

Nice!
I can understand how Trekkies may wet their pants there.

Nope, it's on the ground, per one of the script-writers. As he put it, starships aren't fragile yachts. So he seems to get, to some degree, that the ship would have no problem with making her way out of an atmosphere.

Of course I'm sure they'll want to have a blastoff sequence with the appearance of stress and strain on the ship or the requirement of 110% thrust or something, just for drama's sake, so there's only so far that line of reasoning will take them. Or, maybe they watched Star Wars and realized that maybe it shouldn't be a big deal to park a massive ship wherever the hell you please . . . like a 400,000 pound gorilla.

Personally, I have no huge problem with the ship being built on the ground, other than the fact that it is perhaps the least ground-friendly design imaginable. Better to build it upside-down, but then that would've looked entirely silly. But at no point would there be any problem with getting the ship to orbit.

But despite the lack of huge problems with the idea, it still seems a bit silly. It wouldn't be impossible to pressurize a large volume with air so as to create a shirtsleeve environment with grav plating where appropriate, and vast airlocks or forcefield emplacements for big-part ingress or egress. That's the best of both worlds, and a point where the spacesuit-centric Trek construction site views we've had fail.

Well, as we've seen both with Voyager and with ST IV, Trek ships are more then able to land on planets, or at least to get into low orbit around them without any adverse effects on their hulls, so I don't see why the first Enterprise needs to be built in space...

In "Tomorrow is Yesterday" [TOS1], the E-1701 was thrown back into the past by a black hole and deep into the Earth's atmosphere, which it climbed out of, dispite the damage it suffered during the sling shot around the black hole. So I have no problem if they want to show the ship take off from the SF shipyards on Earth. Hell, even the NX-01 was shown making dips in and out of various planetary atmospheres, including gas giants.
-Mike

I'm leery about this film; on the one hand they might do a good job of it, but on the other hand they might fuck it up in the same way that they fucked up the first three seasons of Enterprise, Star Trek Insurrection and that hypothetical tenth film that I refuse to acknowledge the existence of.

I'll still watch it, though; Simon Pegg as Scotty is bound to make it at least bearable from a comedy angle.

It's most likely that the Enterprise design seen in the trailer is none other than Gabe Koerner's:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP6PEVWy ... re=related

This retro-reimagined design first appeared in the 2007 Ships of the Line calendar.
-Mike

I've made that point elsewhere, too . . . the humpy front end of the nacelles with the 45-degree line separating the hump from the rest is visible in the shot from the bow. Also it appears in the now-released-online trailer, with guys standing on the nacelle rear with the shot looking forward.

No guarantee the whole ship looks like that, but at least in part they seemed to go with that vision.

Well, if you look at the video around 27-34 seconds, you'll see that the design most closely resembles the original TOS version. You can also see that the bridge structure and the dorsal superstructure looks very much like the one seen in the movie.

As a design it's not that bad since it recalls enough of the original versions, yet still is modern enough. It also has a few elements in common with the NX class, which if this truely is the launch of the ship before Kirk or Pike, it's a nice touch in showing the transition from the ENT-era to the TOS era look after some 90 years.
-Mke

The nacelles do really look like they're from Koerner's model.
Some people say it is that model. So?
It may not be the same, but his has style, and seems to have inspired parts of the new design.

I would like to see the design modified so that the photon torpedo tubes are removed from off the connecting dorsal base, and placed on the saucer underside.
-Mike

It is quite interesting looking. Of course, it again opens the question of how literally we should take onscreen depictions of starships, and having mixed messages as to where Starfleet was building ships in the 23rd century will keep things lively for fans.