1. When the bioships open fire, the first geyser is seen moving away from the planet at what would be thousands of kilometers per second, yet approaches and hits the Borg Cube at a much slower speed (10 km/s or less). With the ejecta's initial velocity that's observed, gravity couldn't explain the severe reduction of speed.Mike DiCenso wrote:.Mr. Oragahn wrote: On the other hand, the Cube that got a lock on the Voyager got hit by molten rock traveling at less than 10 km/s and was taking severe damage.
The Cubes also explode when they get hit by the milky translucent surface of the expanding sphere of doom.
In reality, in the 3D software, the planet was probably barely bigger than a dozen Cubes.
It's just the crappy way they "shoot" such scenes. It's fine when there is no interaction between the ship and whatever would come from the planet. But when it does you can appreciate the messed up scales. You have the same problem in that episode when Voyager is hit by a rock projected by a nearby so called planet's explosion. Scales and velocity of ejecta don't match with the expected speeds
I don't see what this has to do with anything. The Borg cubeship's shields start taking some damage not from the huge and modestely dense spray of molten rock, but from the intital attack by a passing S8472, and it's shields are not completely knocked down until the energy shockwave hits it. You can see the proper order of the scenein this video here (watch from 6:43 onward). The scaling problem has always been an issue in SF shows and movies. Stargate, for example, with the Daedalus from "Echoes" with the slow moving column of solar flare material that hits it's shields.
What you are bringing up are two different things; kinetic energy versus EM energy resistance. In both Star and Star Trek as well as other SF shows, those are often two seperate things. But in this case, the Borg ship held up against the molten debris spray just fine.
-Mike
2. The sphere of doom is seen expanding as fast as reaching twice the diameter of the planet within one second, yet again passes the Cubes at a speed that's about a few tens of km/s at best. You would say that the Cubes were then moving almost as fast as the fields of debris, therefore at more than a radius of that planet per second, which would be about 5~7 e6 m/s. But such is not true as the planet doesn't shrink in the slightest: we clearly see that the camera doesn't move away from the planet, which is the unavoidable consequence of flying that fast away from it.
The sphere passes through the Cube at a speed which would correspond to the kinetic energy you used for the calculation, and yet it's clearly the KE which would be dangerous here.
I actually happen to be able to check the video frame by frame, and it takes five frames for a Cube to be completely engulfed inside the white sphere. That's about a fifth of a second. Nothing considerable here.
If the cube is 3 km wide, that's 15 km/s. Since the wall that kills Cubes is largely transparent, there's not much matter here. It's just worth an expanding cloud of dust and debris. Nothing fancy, but somehow Cubes are sensitive to that.
I don't see any problem with Alderaan, since there's nothing on screen safe the planet blowing up that would reveal a major VFX error besides sheer VFX age.Praeothmin wrote:Neither does Alderaan's explosion, which didn't stop Warsies from using it to calculate the speed of the ejecta to obtain firepower figures... :)Mr. Oragahn wrote: Scales and velocity of ejecta don't match with the expected speeds.