Star Trek: No Subtitle

[Wowbagger]

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

1. Why do Vulcans have art?
...Tradition.

If "tradition" is not un-Vulcan, then it provides an entirely sufficient justification for the reconstruction of New Vulcan with certain reflections of Old Vulcan.

I don't share your view of Vulcans, mind you; I think the fact that the kohlinar movement exists at all (to say nothing of T'Pol) proves that your treatment of Vulcans as soulless calculators misses a very important, very deep, and very personal center at the heart of Vulcan life. After all, the kohlinar people could very easily have destroyed or at least moved the art off their mountain. Certainly the same is true of its clerics.

All canonical evidence suggests that the logical Vulcan people nonetheless found some need to maintain these things as they had been handed down to them. The reconstruction of New Vulcan to resemble the Old makes perfect sense.

Replacing key structural members to increase size and replacing key structural members to decrease size are different propositions. And at least to increase a ship's size you can simply technobabble-bolt on more bits of beam.

And you can simply technobabble-bolt off more bits of beam. The beauty of technobabble: you can do whatever the hell you want with it. That was Gene's basic vision of it. That's been the basic vision of it throughout Star Trek's history. Why do you suddenly insist on resisting every attempted justification through technobabble for everything related to this movie, and this movie alone?

Unless its a matter of personal animosity to the new movie and its creators, of course.

Every piece of a starship's infrastructure is based around supporting a crew of X people traveling at Warp Y assuming the warp core has power capacity of Z. This guy is suggesting that Z proved unstable, so that had to be shrunk, requiring X and Y to be shrunk as well. This is drastically altering the fundamental formulas that dictate the design strategy of a ship.

You misunderstand the writer's argument. It has nothing to do with warp core power supply, but with the efficiency of the structural integrity field, which functions as a single member. (Each individual member would snap like a twig if not for the SIF field; the magnitude of forces they can individually withstand is so tiny on the vast scale of warp power as to be utterly insignificant. This is why you never see a nacelle sheer off at warp speed -- you only see success or near-instantaneous complete structural failure.) The SIF field efficiency is furthermore unrelated to the number of crew X and the warp core's power capacity Z. It relates only to Warp Y. And -- math majors feel free to correct me here -- if one determines in advance that the maximum warp must remain constant (and, according to the evidence, the maximum warp of the 2253 Connie, the 2258 Connie, and the 2263 Connie consistently remained at Warp 8 [TOS scale]), then the relationship between structural integrity field strength A and maximum size of the vessel B can be described by a simple linear equation.

In short, once you have less efficient SIF fields, you've got to cut off a chunk of the ship. Since the precise equations are already well known and were in fact used on the Enterprise for ten years before the refit, defitting it back to that point wouldn't alter the "fundamental design equations" one iota. In fact, the defit would be a much, much easier than the refit, because it would simply return the ship to an earlier state.

I'll note lastly that the fact that you must resort to extremely speculative technobabble-based attacks only loosely grounded in canon or warp physics as generally understood or real-life physics is fairly good evidence that you're scraping the bottom of the barrel here.

Give up, Nate. Give up and enjoy this highly enjoyable addition to the Star Trek saga. You'll thank yourself if you do.

(Otherwise I'm going to have to start calling you a sedevacantist. )