Also sick of hearing the whine about not building starships in space.
You don't build submarines underwater.
Invalid comparison. Utterly. A submarine is not trying to break Earth's gravity to operate in its intended environment, masses several dozen times less, has the buoyant effect of salt water to help it maintain appropriate depth, etc. A staple of both science-fiction and planned long-range space missions for
decades, on the other hand, has been building a ship never intended to operate in atmosphere or gravity outside of both. Space stations with null-gravity furnaces to make perfect alloys with no settling. Microgravity assisting in moving massive components more easily. Mining asteroids for raw materials so as to use less energy/fuel to get it to the construction site. And so on.
What I've seen in Trek fiction over the years had, around the TOS/pre-TOS era, the primary hulls built on the ground and boost into space on their impulse engines to be mated in synchronously-orbiting drydocks with the warp engines that were some 90% of the ship's mass (and the secondary hulls that supported them, where applicable). YOu wanna build something the size of a movie studio lot, meant to operate in space, and massing fifty times more than a modern aircraft carrier on some scaffolding outside of Riverside, Iowa, go ahead. It won't make it
not about the worst approach for such an endeavor.
Flew in atmosphere in earth low enough to be filmed by a starfighter.
Not that low deliberately, and climbed to altitude ASAP.
Was modified to travel between galaxies cruising at warp 15.
By ultra-advanced aliens.
Was shrunk down to the size of a model, and subject to gravity at the same time.
By ultra-advanced, extradimensional aliens.
Was held in place by a giant god hand.
By an ultra-advanced alien once worshipped as a god on Earth thousands of years before.
Got shot multiple times on an almost weekly basis without ever showing signs of damage.
Okay, that one I'll have to check on to determine the actual spans between various combats...
Flew near dark stars with no ill effects.
This one I'll have to abstain on, as I (and very few people, really) have any notion how close is too close.
This one I'll give you, as time travel has almost
never been depicted well in fiction, and Star Trek slings conflicting and mutually-exclusive models of how it might conceivably work into the same mix. Any one element I'd want to fix in Trek, it's the time-travel stuff.
Basically the enterprise did everything the script required it to do that week, but none of that was in a JJ film so I guess its ok.
No running to TOS for a bye. Since that series ended, we've had higher standards set by the majority of TNG and DS9 (Voyager and Enterprse are more iffy), but beyond that what I have is a general disdain for contrivance, coincidence, serendipity, and lack of motivation or believability (in the characters
or the setting) standing in for writing.
They could have been so much better with so little effort. And as I've said, I
did enjoy a lot of elements and moments in both, but they were all combined together into what were, ultimately,
seriously bad films. This is said as someone who cried and how good Chris Hemsworth's George Kirk was and how much it hurt to watch him die, who loved this version of Captain Pike, who loved the terrific renditions of Spock and McCoy and Chekov, who was dazzled by the
Enterprise taking off out of the ocean even as my brain was shrieking at how ludicrous that was...
But I've made the study, deconstruction, appreciation, and pursuit of what makes a good story my life's passion. These weren't it. They dropped the ball, and there was no reason to.
I like you, @
glunark, and I agree with you on a lot. Definitely not this, though.
Meanwhile, I hear there's a new Star Wars flick coming out soon or something... :$
--Jonah
