Kevin's Watch

Fist and Faith wrote:True enough. And it's glaringly obvious at times. Just as it's possible for a scientist to not be educated in writing screenplays, novels, or whatever. In all cases, we hope for the best.

And the aspect that I rate most important might not be the same as any other particular person. For me, maybe the concept is more important than the scientific accuracy or the construction of the story. Maybe the whole idea highlights on a philosophical thought that I find fascinating. Maybe someone else doesn't like it, because they need the story to follow some particular model of storytelling. And a third might not be able to watch/read it at all because the science is inaccurate.

Fist and Faith wrote:To be sure, I don't watch Trek for the science. I've loved TOS since it was first on, and I love TNG as much. But for other reasons.

Fist and Faith wrote:And the aspect that I rate most important might not be the same as any other particular person. For me, maybe the concept is more important than the scientific accuracy or the construction of the story. Maybe the whole idea highlights on a philosophical thought that I find fascinating.

Matrixman wrote:Terrific defense of Star Trek, Fist.

I agree, Gunslinger. You need just enough science to make the premise credible. If complete scientific accuracy is an absolute must, then I suppose one could do as Stanley Kubrick did for 2001: A Space Odyssey in conducting intensive research on his own. But even 2001 wasn't good enough for some.

A Gunslinger wrote:As do I. If we all got caught up in scientific accuracy as the predictor for liking any Sci-fi, we'd never see any. The writers couldn't produce it. and b0 most of the audience would need 4 years of college, and then some to get it.

Give me time conundrums and positronic nueral pathways aplenty!

Fist and Faith wrote:Loremaster, I'd be interested to know about times the science they spouted was dead wrong!

Bad: Well, it's Trek. That means we hear sounds in space.

Good: Sound doesn't travel through space, ordinarily. Space is a vacuum, and sound needs some sort of medium through which to travel. In a vacuum, there is nothing to vibrate, and therefore nothing to carry the sound.


Bad: We see stars in the sky when looking out windows on board the Enterprise, and in outside shots looking back on the sunlit Earth from space.

Good: This is another minor one. It's difficult or impossible to see stars out a window from inside a lit room. Go ahead and try it some clear night! Internal reflections make it difficult; the bright light is reflected back to you from the glass. An astronaut friend of mine said that seeing stars from inside the Space Shuttle was difficult for just that reason; the internal lights, even when dimmed, made seeing the stars very hard.

The same situation applies in long shots showing the Earth. The planet is so bright it drowns out the much fainter stars. If this sounds familiar, it's basically the same argument I use to show why the Apollo Moon missions were real!



Bad: In the beginning of the show, the captain and one of his crew are talking about the ship. Captain Archer says it can go to Neptune and back in just six minutes at warp 4.5. Later in the show, Archer mentions that warp 4.4 is 30 million kilometers per second.

Good: Sometimes this Good/Bad format fails me. Those numbers work out! Neptune is about 4.4 billion kilometers from the Earth. Getting there and back in six minutes means moving at about 80 times the speed of light, or 24 million kilometers per second. The difference between that number and 30 million is negligible, given that Captain Archer may have been using a rough number. They aren't equal, but neither are they off by much. Again, this is pretty close.

Having said that, there was a misstep later in the show. It was said that the Klingon home world is four days travel away. That comes out to about 8 trillion kilometers (just less than one light year) away from Earth at 80 times lightspeed. The nearest known star to us, Proxima Centauri, is about 40 trillion kilometers away (more than 4 light years), or 20 days travel time. I'm not sure how this inconsistency slipped past the Trek writers, to be honest, but late rewrites are usually the culprit. Again, I'll note that while this is an error, it's not a terribly big one. I would be remiss to ignore it though.

However, I should also note that in several scenes, we see stars streaming past the window as the Enterprise warps past them. If it takes 20 days to get to the nearest star, then it should take roughly that long on average for just one star to flash by. I have heard some fans say that those aren't stars we see going past, but pieces of space dust. That explanation doesn't work; when the ship slow to subwarp, the streaks of light clearly coalesce into stars. So really, we should see the stars something like we do now: not streaking past, but moving verrrry sloooowly, like distant mountains on a long drive.

Larsen chides one episode of the original Star Trek Voyager series ironically titled "The Scientific Method," in which atoms feature surfaces on which barcodes can be stamped. "I'll let them slide with transporters, but when we're talking about something where we possess the technology, such inaccuracies aren't acceptable," says Larsen.

Lord Mhoram wrote:So, you actually think that the presentation of stars and the like in a television drama science fiction show takes away from the quality of the show (keeping in mind that it is a drama)?

Loremaster wrote:Yes, but being scientifically accurate doesn't preclude good story telling. If it suits the story, fine. But ST has a reputation for being scientifically accurate when it's not (psychic powers???).