Nerd Rage

http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2009/04/15/nerd-rage.aspx

by lmacvittie • 17 years ago

10 9 17 years ago

devcentral.f5.com

gaius• 17 years ago

It's not the case that the Enterprise is too large to escape Earth's gravity (what does that even mean? It has warp engines!) but that it has been previously stated in Star Trek that it was constructed in an orbital shipyard.

sven• 17 years ago

I feel building nerd-rage building up in me, when I have to celebrate a click-orgy to watch the movie-trailer.

jgrahamc2• 17 years ago

"In the case of the latest Star Trek movie, the trailer clearly shows the construction of the Enterprise – on earth. This is the source of Nerd Rage for many who will not-so-calmly explain that a Constitution-class starship could not possibly be built on earth because it is too large to escape the earth’s gravity."

Wha?

So when the Enterprise comes near to the Earth what happens? It just can't escape the Earth's gravity, or does it only get stuck when it's near the Earth's surface? It's not the moon you know; it has engines.

NCC-1701-D is supposed to weigh about 400,000 tonnes. Leaving the Earth's surface to reach LEO requires a delta-v of 10km/s so you've got to accelerate 400,000 tonnes to 10km/s. The Space Shuttle does this and it weighs around 2,000 tonnes. So are we really expected to think that a vehicle 200x the size of the Space Shuttle could not be launched into orbit?

RiderOfGiraffes2• 17 years ago

I'm having trouble understanding your problem with the original statement. To me, it clearly means that with the facilities available (no enormous rockets, for example) it can't easily start from the Earth's surface and get into orbit.

Approaching the Earth is a completely different issue, and I don't understand why you mention it. It simply isn't a problem if you're already in space because you make sure you go into some sort of orbit (elliptical, parabolic or hyperbolic - any will do). You easily have enough speed to do this because you're falling into the gravitational well, and you simply need to deflect your path to one side, miss the atmosphere, and you're on a hyperbolic orbit. Slow a little and you're in a large elliptical orbit. Slingshot properly around the Lagrange points (including "bouncing off" the unstable ones) and you can convert to a "standard orbit" with very little effort.

Launching from the Earth's surface requires a huge amount of energy, and it's been stated that it wasn't done.

Now, what was your question?

jgrahamc2• 17 years ago

"Launching from the Earth's surface requires a huge amount of energy, and it's been stated that it wasn't done."

This appears to be the key to the nerd rage. If Starfleet didn't build the craft on Earth then showing them in the new movie being built on Earth is a mistake. But it's not a question of physics.

randallsquared• 17 years ago

The statement that it wasn't done apparently applies to a different canon; there's apparently quite a lot that's changed in this one. However, the amount of energy is trivial compared to what starships in the Trek universe must be capable of. Impulse engines are supposed to be able to drive the ship to some respectable fraction of the speed of light, so no matter how they work, they should be able to get the ship off the surface of the Earth. I think the fact that the Trek universe has artificial gravity solves all of the handwavy problems, though, even apart from that, so there's no canonical technical problem here.

apmee• 17 years ago

The ~10km/s figure refers to the speed an unpropelled object needs at the Earth's surface in order to escape gravity, so it doesn't apply to rockets and shuttles. Assuming it could keep the engine running, the shuttle could go into orbit at 1km/h.

Sorry to nitpick, but I couldn't resist as I used to have the same misconception.

jfarmer• 17 years ago

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand it's nice to see people so invested in something that they care this much.

On the other hand, sometimes I think that fans are the biggest impediment to good storytelling.

Who cares if it's on Earth? Being non-canonical isn't a crime -- it's about telling a good story.

(<fan> Besides, I'm pretty sure the new movie involves time travel, so that's not even the "real" Enterprise. </fan>)

Nerd Rage

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