Moderator: Vympel
Captain Seafort wrote:Out of curiosity, are there any examples in Trek of technobabble used properly?Isolder74 wrote:lets add almost any version of Star Trek Technobabble. When will we get it through writer's heads that stringing together a bunch of fancy sounding words does not make science?
Per definition no...Captain Seafort wrote:Out of curiosity, are there any examples in Trek of technobabble used properly?Isolder74 wrote:lets add almost any version of Star Trek Technobabble. When will we get it through writer's heads that stringing together a bunch of fancy sounding words does not make science?
IMO, if a movie has lots of unrealism it's not a proper war movie but an action movie posing as a war movie... Real war movies try to be realistic or at least 'within the realm of possible'.Kurgan wrote: Definite no-limits fallacy.
Yeah, but as many agree, that's a common cliche in spy films and detective movies too. Sort of like the action/war movie unrealism cliches that are also rampant in Sci Fi.
Did somebody shit in your Cornflakes this morning? It's not unreasonable to ask if anyone has an easily referenced resource on this commonly mentioned subject. While it is not a point of contention here, there are plenty of people on other forums who will fight that judgement tooth and nail, and it's handy to have such a resource. Unfortunately, there isn't one, so the thread diverged somewhat into a discussion of a bunch of examples people trotted out, but that's an easily understandable direction for the thread to take.RedImperator wrote:Don't forget, phasers don't have trigger guards.
I'm glad Kurgan made this thread, because it's been, like, two days since the last "hurf hurf, Trek sux!" thread, and this forum has a reputation to maintain.
Without a doubt, Star Trek has earned a place in the American zeitgeist. Justifiably so in the case of the perennially-classic Original Series, which combined a well-conceived cast of characters played by fairly talented veteran actors with an eclectic set of writers to examine social, political, and moral issues which still speak to our time. The vision of fostering peaceful contact between the races in itself presented a ray of hope in what was a very dark time in America’s history, and all this combined to produce what was without doubt the most intelligent science fiction series of its time.
However, just like its much poorer cousins Lost In Space and Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, Star Trek could get rather careless with the “science” part of the science fiction. Trek differed from its competition on network television because its ideas were far superior to any series whose idea of science fiction was the crew being chased by the Lobster Men from Centauri or being turned into carrot people. The later spinoff Trek series have become infamous for their ludicrous technobabble, but this article examines some rather basic science flaws which would get any junior high school science student a big fat F on his exams. Indeed, some of them are quite comical.
Power-Orbiting —every time the Enterprise orbits a planet, she must run her engines constantly to stay up, elsewise the ship would be pulled down and sprial into the surface. The ship starts going down at Psi 2000 when Lt. Kevin Riley shuts down the engines in “The Naked Time”; again when Ben Finney sabotages the engines while the ship is in orbit of the planet facility of Starbase 11 in “Court-Martial”. Lacking dilithium crystal power, the Enteprise can only maintain a three-day orbit over Rigel XII before she starts spiraling down in “Mudd’s Women”, and faces the same danger when Lazarus and his evil twin, Skippy, steal the ship’s four dilithium crystals in “The Alternative Factor”. The Enterprise was in danger of being trapped in orbit around Delta Vega lacking engine power in “Where No Man Has Gone Before” and of course was several times nearly tractored into planetary crashes. Whereas in “The Gallileo Seven”, the shuttlecraft Gallileo only has enough fuel, according to Scotty, to stay in orbit around Taurus II for 47 minutes, until Spock jettisons and ignites the fuel reserve for his makshift distress flare to the Enterprise, after which the orbit begins to decay immediately after the burn is done. When the Enteprise self-destructs in the movie Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, the loss of her engines immediately results in the wreck falling down towards the surface of Genesis. Even in the later adventures of Jean-Luc Picard’s Enterprise, the ship is constantly running her engines in orbit.
According to Star Trek, nothing can remain in planetary orbit without engine power. But if that’s the case, then what holds up all those engine-less satellites, space telescopes, and space stations in Earth orbit today? Something which seems completely unknown to either Montgomery Scott, who can’t change the laws of physics, or Geordi LaForge and his tin friend, Mr. Data; the not-mysterious, not-magickal, very mundane force known as momentum. In the real world, which seems to have only a tenuous connection to Star Trek at times, it is not necessary to run engines and burn up fuel to maintain an orbit around a planet. The object’s own momentum will keep it up against the pull of gravity for as long as that momentum lasts. The duration of an orbit depends upon both altitude and velocity (and the object’s mass, of course); the higher an object is, the longer and more stable its orbit.
All of this adds up to one central truth: it is not necessary to run engines to maintain an orbit. The Enterprise can lose all her power and still stay up, serenly circling a planet for months, years, decades. Satellites orbiting at altitudes of about 25,000 miles are able to maintian a geosynchrynous fix on one point on a planet’s surface by matching its own velocity with the planet’s rotation, and will stay in that orbit more or less forever. According to one of “Mudd’s Women”, the Enterprise was circling above Rigel XII at an altitude of about a hundred miles and supposedly was only able to remain up for three days. Well, a hundred miles is about as high as the orbit of the American Skylab space station, which stayed quite comfortably in orbit for five years and would have remained up for several years beyond that had there not been an exceptionally heavy burst of sunspot activity in 1979, which heated up Earth’s atmosphere and caused its uppermost layer to rise just high enough to brake the station’s orbit through friction to bring her down prematurely. The Russian Mir space station orbited for 11 years at that altitude before she was purposely brought down to dispose of her. You have to wonder why the starship Enterprise is unable to do what a dinky little space station was easily capable of. Even if we take the starship’s far greater mass into account, her hundred-mile orbit should have been able to last for far longer than three days. You also have to wonder just how much fuel and crystal all of Starfleet’s ships waste just orbiting various planets and always under engine power in a single year.
Don’t they teach orbital mechanics at Starfleet Academy?
The Sound And The Fury —this, of course, is Star Trek’s most famous scientific blunder, the one that probably gets the most laughs at physics department cocktail mixers. In “A Taste Of Armageddon”, the Enterprise finds herself caught between two planets fighting a computer war that’s lasted for 500 years. Declared a casualty in the latest computer attack from Vendikar, the leaders of Eminiar VII demand that the ship’s crew beam down to obediently trot themselves into the disintegrator booths to keep up the agreement which regulates the conduct of the computer war. Anan 7, the head of the council, tries tricking the crew down, then when that fails orders the planetary disruptor banks to open fire on the Enterprise. The ship, in orbit, is hit by very powerful sonic waves but is protected by her deflector screens.
By now, everybody knows what’s wrong with this scene. The Enterprise is in orbit. Sound waves cannot propagate in a vacuum. No atmosphere, no sound. The very idea of attacking a spacecraft with a sonic weapon is so ludicrously absurd that it took the technobabble-obsessed writers of the Trek-spinoff series Voyager to finally outdo it for sheer absurdity.
Mr. DePaul reported that the sonic waves registering against the screens measured 18 to the 12th power decibels. That’s one powerful sound system they’ve got on Eminiar. According to Professor Lawrence Krauss, that measures to over eleven trillion times louder than a jetliner on takeoff. Hell, it’s probably even louder than a Who concert. The Eminians probably had banks of fusion reactors pouring power into the sonic projectors. The problem is that once the atmosphere thins out, so do the sound waves. Doesn’t matter how much power you pump into the disruptor; past the edge of the atmosphere the sound simply melts away into nothing. About the only conceivable explanation for the Enterprise experiencing any effect is that the ship is actually being hit by a wavefront of superheated atmospheric gasses pushed ahead of the sonic beam. But once that wavefront is gone, there’s nothing left to hit the Enterprise with.
And since sound is produced by atmospheric displacement, you have to wonder at the pressure-wave that must have resulted when the Eminians fired their sonic beam at the Enterprise. Somehow, I get the impression that “collateral damage” would be too poor a phrase to describe the effect.
You’ve Seen One Earth, You’ve Seen Them All —Earth is only one planet of nine circling a rather insignificant little yellow sun located within a more remote part of the western spiral arm of the galaxy. So what accounts for the discovery by the Enterprise of a carbon-copy duplicate of the Earth, occupying the same orbit around the same type G2V yellow star supporting a system of nine planets occupying the same orbits as those in our own little star system in the episode “Miri”, and supporting a human culture which developed in such a complete parallel to our own until they started fooling around with biotech, which they probably regarded with even greater enthusiasm than we did as the Wave Of The Future until the glitch in the lab happened? Later episodes would invoke the truly absurd Hodgkins’ Law of Parallel Planet Development to explain away all the various theme-park planets encountered by the Enterprise crew in their travels, but the duplicate Earth truly takes the cake. The number does not exist to express the improbability of such a world’s existence.
The only conceivable explanation is that this was in reality the duplicate planet Earth commissioned by the hyperdimensional mice in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. Next time you watch “Miri”, take a good look at Africa and see if you can spot fjords indenting the coasts.
Living In The Fast Lane —”Wink Of An Eye” is another episode that gets laughed over for its absurdity. Professor Krauss has pointed out not only the hyperimpossibility of the accelerated Deela being able to outrace a phaser beam in his book The Physics Of Star Trek, but also that even in order to do so, she and the other Scalosians, and Kirk as well, would be existing at a level where they all would have ended up ageing ten years for every second that passed aboard the Enterprise. The fact that no more than the time it took Scotty to descend from the bridge to arrive at the transporter room to stand by for action after Kirk’s “disappearance” passed aboard the Enterprise before Kirk returned to normal is enough to suggest that the level of acceleration is no more than 300X normal time. Certainly not fast enough to outrace a beam of pure radiation or even a much slower charged-particle beam. What’s worse, the episode is completely inconsistent with its own goofy physics. The Scalosians can move faster than a phaser beam but they go through the transporter as normally as any member of the Enterprise crew? If a phaser beam propagates at lightspeed, and the Scalosians can move faster than c., then how can they even see? How can Deela’s own weapon function effectively? The accelerated Kirk, Deela, Rael, and Spock should all be blind, since they wouldn’t be receiving photons. They shouldn’t be able to stand on the decks, since gravity also propagates at lightspeed. They certainly shouldn’t be able to hear anything, since sounds propagate at considerably slower speeds than c. Their mere movement throughout the ship should be accompanied by blasts of Cerenkov radiation if they’re accelerated faster than c. Doors shouldn’t open for them, since the sensors register and transmit orders to the door circuits electromagnetically, and electromagnetic signals also propagate at c. The Scalosians’ own communicators shouldn’t function either. And how could they brake their own movements and remain within the confines of the Enterprise’s own hull if they’re moving faster than light in the first place? And if they bump into something, the resulting release of energy from the impact force would vapourise the ship.
If Kirk and the Scalosians are only accelerated at 300X normal speed/time, they’d still be visible, even as blurs of movement. Not only that, the effects they would generate in their wake would be impossible not to notice. Their presence aboard the ship and their movments would be accompanied by pressure-wave displacement of the ship’s internal atmosphere. Gale-force winds would be blowing through the corridors and passages of the Enterprise. Again, if they bump into anything or fall down, the impact force of a body moving at 300X normal speed would wreak damage to the ship’s structure. Any accelerated person would simply punch through the hull and wind up in open space —very dead.
None of these things happen to Kirk, Spock, or the Scalosians. The ship isn’t affected by their movements, nor does anyone experience any effects in the wake of their movements. In comparison, the hyperimpossible phase-state experienced by Geordi LaForge and Ro Laren in the TNG episode “The Next Phase” is infinitely more reasonable. The only even remotely plausible explanation is that somehow, Kirk and the Scalosians are existing in a different time-frame altogether and are completely out of synch with normal time, but it’s hard to swallow the idea that such a violation of temporal mechanics could conceivably be caused by radiation and water pollution which accompanied a series of volcanic eruptions.
Finally, Kirk beds Deela, but is it really plausible that she would be satisfied with a man who’s faster than a speeding bullet?
The Incredible Shrinking, Freezing Planet —in “The Naked Time”, planet Psi 2000, a frozen and dead world on which a Federation science team died after contracting the water-borne sickness, was in the process of contracting itself prior to a planetary breakup. There were shifts in gravity and mass, which made the job of maintaining the Enterprise in orbit a difficult one even before Lt. Kevin Riley goes nuts, locks himself up in Engineering, and deactivates the ship’s engines while singing “I’ll Take You Home Kathleen” horribly off-key.
By any measure, the Enterprise is witness to an anomaly of physics so improbable that it goes right off anybody’s scale. Firstly, the planet is on the verge of breaking up because of its contraction. Which means that somehow, despite the fact that gravity is pulling its mass ever inward, at some point the planet will disintegrate into a cloud of rubble. There’s only one slight problem: if mass is collecting toward a central point due to gravity, it will simply keep collecting and contracting until either mutual electromagnetic repulsion holds its mass up, or assuming a hyperimpossible exponnential increase in mass it would end up collapsing into a black hole. Psi 2000 has nowhere near the mass to make this possible, and the gravity which is causing the planet to contract would not allow it to then break up into free-floating rubble afterward, because mutual gravitational attraction would still keep the planet in one piece.
Psi 2000 experiences sudden, weird shifts in mass and gravity —so much so that the Enterprise must adjust its orbit to keep the ship from being pulled down. Unless Psi 2000 is magickally acquiring mass from elsewhere, its gravitational attraction should remain a constant. If the planet is somehow magickally losing mass, its gravity would be consequently reduced, and the Enterprise’s problem becomes one of slowing her own momentum to maintain the orbit instead of flying off into space on a free trajectory. The only factor which could affect the Enteprise’s orbit would be Psi 2000’s tidal force, but this would require the planet’s rate of rotation to increase by orders of magnitude, yet it is supposedly doing so while collecting additional mass from somewhere, which would tend to slow angular momentum.
If that isn’t enough to cause the solons at the Interstellar Geophysical Conference to scratch their heads in utter bewilderment, there is the fact that the planet is a frozen wasteland despite the fact of its contraction. If Psi 2000 is indeed contracting, then this means that gravitational collapse is occuring. The matter of the planet is being forced to squeeze in upon itself, which means that a huge amount of molecular friction is being generated. Which means that Psi 2000 should actually be heating up from its own internal friction; so much so that it should have been impossible for the Federation to plant a science station on the surface, which would have been molten slag.
All this, amusingly, is taking place in the very same episode in which Scotty famously tells Captain Kirk that he can’t change the laws of physics. He’dve never had a chance to even if he wanted. The writer beat him to it.
Actually in real life most Naval captains, in most competent navies at least, are required, I believe, to have college degrees in the physical sciences or engineering fields; my brother went to the US Naval Academy and graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering. So I don't think your assertion that a captain wouldn't understand the basic principles of his ship's operation is correct. A specific problem could certainly be something he wasn't familiar with, granted, but not beyond his understanding at all. He might need a 'plain language' explanation rather than a technical one, but he would definitely be able to comprehend the problem.bz249 wrote: A real engineering/scientific crew would use slang among themselves and a real captain would understand nothing of specific problems (most probably he/she would not understand even the basic principles) so it is not worth trying to explain the problem in the style of a Physical Review B Rapid Communication. In case he/she understands the problem then engineering slang would work nicely.
I don't think that's quite correct. TNG certainly depicted the captain to be able step in for most of the bridge officers, but I can't recall him ever successfully replacing Engineering on the bridge, leave alone down in Engineering.Darth Wong wrote:A captain would understand the basic principles of his ship's operation. That does not, however, mean he could step in and replace any member of his crew if necessary, which seems to be the case in Star Trek.
I was exaggerating of course... but about the anomaly of the weak the captain should not know anything.Elheru Aran wrote:
Actually in real life most Naval captains, in most competent navies at least, are required, I believe, to have college degrees in the physical sciences or engineering fields; my brother went to the US Naval Academy and graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering. So I don't think your assertion that a captain wouldn't understand the basic principles of his ship's operation is correct. A specific problem could certainly be something he wasn't familiar with, granted, but not beyond his understanding at all. He might need a 'plain language' explanation rather than a technical one, but he would definitely be able to comprehend the problem.
In Trek on the other hand, I can definitely see a lot of captains having majors in... Psychology or something. Engineering seems to be a highly specialized, rather esoteric field (thanks to subspace and warp), so while most officers probably do have a basic understanding of how their ships work ("the subspace field makes the ship go faster because of its shape" and so forth), they're lost otherwise.
Power orbit is not neccesarily unscientific... but requires handwaving. Maybe a running warp core (which should run all the time, since without mass lightening the ship is as maneuverable as a brick... so they could react to nothing) in planetary gravity field causes the ship to emit gravitational waves, thus they will lose velocity. Such interaction is weird, but it is far from impossible (since they are accelerating in a weak gravity field, thus they should lose energy... but normally an inmeasurably small amount). Satellites, starbases whatever have no warp core, thus they act normally.Patrick Degan wrote:Well, there was this I came up with in a thread of my own from a few years back regarding TOS' funniest science bloopers:
Power-Orbiting —every time the Enterprise orbits a planet, she must run her engines constantly to stay up, elsewise the ship would be pulled down and sprial into the surface. The ship starts going down at Psi 2000 when Lt. Kevin Riley shuts down the engines in “The Naked Time”; again when Ben Finney sabotages the engines while the ship is in orbit of the planet facility of Starbase 11 in “Court-Martial”. Lacking dilithium crystal power, the Enteprise can only maintain a three-day orbit over Rigel XII before she starts spiraling down in “Mudd’s Women”, and faces the same danger when Lazarus and his evil twin, Skippy, steal the ship’s four dilithium crystals in “The Alternative Factor”. The Enterprise was in danger of being trapped in orbit around Delta Vega lacking engine power in “Where No Man Has Gone Before” and of course was several times nearly tractored into planetary crashes. Whereas in “The Gallileo Seven”, the shuttlecraft Gallileo only has enough fuel, according to Scotty, to stay in orbit around Taurus II for 47 minutes, until Spock jettisons and ignites the fuel reserve for his makshift distress flare to the Enterprise, after which the orbit begins to decay immediately after the burn is done. When the Enteprise self-destructs in the movie Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, the loss of her engines immediately results in the wreck falling down towards the surface of Genesis. Even in the later adventures of Jean-Luc Picard’s Enterprise, the ship is constantly running her engines in orbit.
According to Star Trek, nothing can remain in planetary orbit without engine power. But if that’s the case, then what holds up all those engine-less satellites, space telescopes, and space stations in Earth orbit today? Something which seems completely unknown to either Montgomery Scott, who can’t change the laws of physics, or Geordi LaForge and his tin friend, Mr. Data; the not-mysterious, not-magickal, very mundane force known as momentum. In the real world, which seems to have only a tenuous connection to Star Trek at times, it is not necessary to run engines and burn up fuel to maintain an orbit around a planet. The object’s own momentum will keep it up against the pull of gravity for as long as that momentum lasts. The duration of an orbit depends upon both altitude and velocity (and the object’s mass, of course); the higher an object is, the longer and more stable its orbit.
All of this adds up to one central truth: it is not necessary to run engines to maintain an orbit. The Enterprise can lose all her power and still stay up, serenly circling a planet for months, years, decades. Satellites orbiting at altitudes of about 25,000 miles are able to maintian a geosynchrynous fix on one point on a planet’s surface by matching its own velocity with the planet’s rotation, and will stay in that orbit more or less forever. According to one of “Mudd’s Women”, the Enterprise was circling above Rigel XII at an altitude of about a hundred miles and supposedly was only able to remain up for three days. Well, a hundred miles is about as high as the orbit of the American Skylab space station, which stayed quite comfortably in orbit for five years and would have remained up for several years beyond that had there not been an exceptionally heavy burst of sunspot activity in 1979, which heated up Earth’s atmosphere and caused its uppermost layer to rise just high enough to brake the station’s orbit through friction to bring her down prematurely. The Russian Mir space station orbited for 11 years at that altitude before she was purposely brought down to dispose of her. You have to wonder why the starship Enterprise is unable to do what a dinky little space station was easily capable of. Even if we take the starship’s far greater mass into account, her hundred-mile orbit should have been able to last for far longer than three days. You also have to wonder just how much fuel and crystal all of Starfleet’s ships waste just orbiting various planets and always under engine power in a single year.
Don’t they teach orbital mechanics at Starfleet Academy?
I haven't seen the episode, but, if the planet is shrinking, wouldn't the increase in density (same mass, reduced radius) mean an increase in gravitational pull? Of course, that would require some external force to change the planet's shapePsi 2000 experiences sudden, weird shifts in mass and gravity —so much so that the Enterprise must adjust its orbit to keep the ship from being pulled down. Unless Psi 2000 is magickally acquiring mass from elsewhere, its gravitational attraction should remain a constant.
Gravity is a function of mass, not density. In any case, the whole thing is so wildly ridiculous that only V'ger's infamous cracked event horizon exceeds it in sheer stupidity.LordOskuro wrote:I haven't seen the episode, but, if the planet is shrinking, wouldn't the increase in density (same mass, reduced radius) mean an increase in gravitational pull? Of course, that would require some external force to change the planet's shapePsi 2000 experiences sudden, weird shifts in mass and gravity —so much so that the Enterprise must adjust its orbit to keep the ship from being pulled down. Unless Psi 2000 is magickally acquiring mass from elsewhere, its gravitational attraction should remain a constant.
A mass-lightening effect should not radically alter the dynamics of an orbit around a planetary body if the ship is high enough above the surface. Even if, say, the Enterprise is orbiting at 500km altitude and suddenly loses it's subspace field bubble and thus it's entire mass is suddenly again exposed to the planetary gravity well, the ship should not immediately begin to spiral in toward the surface. Indeed, it should not be necessary to use the mass-lightening effect to orbit at all if the ship is inserted at a high enough altitude: gravitational capture would curve it's path into an orbital trajectory and it would certainly last through the duration of the mission on the surface. The Enterprise-D does that while hiding in shutdown mode in the orbiting junkyard at Quaalor II in "Unification (1)".bz249 wrote:Power orbit is not necessarily unscientific... but requires handwaving. Maybe a running warp core (which should run all the time, since without mass lightening the ship is as maneuverable as a brick... so they could react to nothing) in planetary gravity field causes the ship to emit gravitational waves, thus they will lose velocity. Such interaction is weird, but it is far from impossible (since they are accelerating in a weak gravity field, thus they should lose energy... but normally an inmeasurably small amount). Satellites, starbases whatever have no warp core, thus they act normally.
I am not saying "power orbit" superbly well founded in science... but it can be rationalized with some strech. I meant that we know gravitational waves exist, and ships orbiting planets should lose velocity through emiting gravitational waves (an inmeasurably tiny amunt). Some ST system could magnify this effect, thus they need powered orbit. All in all, its not totally unscientific (although not really scientific... even if we forget the fact that warp itself is most probably impossiblePatrick Degan wrote:
A mass-lightening effect should not radically alter the dynamics of an orbit around a planetary body if the ship is high enough above the surface. Even if, say, the Enterprise is orbiting at 500km altitude and suddenly loses it's subspace field bubble and thus it's entire mass is suddenly again exposed to the planetary gravity well, the ship should not immediately begin to spiral in toward the surface. Indeed, it should not be necessary to use the mass-lightening effect to orbit at all if the ship is inserted at a high enough altitude: gravitational capture would curve it's path into an orbital trajectory and it would certainly last through the duration of the mission on the surface. The Enterprise-D does that while hiding in shutdown mode in the orbiting junkyard at Quaalor II in "Unification (1)".
) 
" Even if that is the case, the sudden loss of engine power should not result in an immediate de-orbit from a sufficiently high altitude. But this begs the question of why you would want such an orbit to begin with.Wyrm wrote:The only reason I can think of that one would need a powered orbit is if you want to keep a stationary orbit over any place other than on the equator, or a geosynchronous (or geostationary) orbit closer (or further!) than the 42000 someodd kilometer semi-major axis they require under orbital mechanics. (Or a combo of the two.)
Okay... then i withdraw. This was my only not tremendously stupid guess why they might need powered orbit.Patrick Degan wrote:
In answer to BZ249, I'm also quite dubious about the attempt to rationalise the problem through some sort of gravity-wave mechanism. For a start, an object the size of the Enterprise has such a negligible mass compared to a planet that it's gravity-wave generation would be similiarly negligible. In any case, objects lose orbit not because they generate their own gravity waves but because the much more massive body relentlessly pulls the orbiting object toward its centre and each orbit brakes momentum. And as for any sort of funky gravity wave/warp core interaction, there's no reason not to put the main reactor on standby for a free orbit and thereby conserve power (or to cut emissions to remain hidden from sensors, as was the case at Quaalor II) so this also should not be a factor.
