Star Trek Canon Database

Displaying 1 to 5 of 5 records.

Database started: 1999-07-27
Page generated: 2010-07-30

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TNG Season 6, Ep# 151: "Timescape"

DATA: The emergency Transporter armbands (technobabble blah blah blah)

GEORDI: Yeah, that would certainly isolate us from the effects of the other time frame. But if we want to interact with that environment, we'd have to restrict the field. It would have to be practically skin-tight.

Realism: it's not enough to give us the bizarre premise that there might be regions of space in which the physics of space-time no longer apply (eg. relativistic time dilation without relativistic velocity). They must also spit on the face of realism by having people carry little "pockets" of normal space-time around with them inside these weird regions of space, and interact with their environment!

TNG Season 6, Ep# 151: "Timescape"

(Picard moves one of the bridge chair swing-arms)

PICARD: It would appear that we can move objects in this time frame.

Realism: the scene in which they actually use Data's technobabble armbands is a veritable cornucopia of horrendous realism problems. The timeframe is incredibly slow; so slow that they can see a warp core breach in progress later in the episode (let's just say it's 1 million times slower for the sake of argument, although you can substitute whatever large number you like). In any case, our intrepid heroes do numerous things aboard the ship which should be impossible given this kind of extreme time distortion:

  1. They can see. Why is this unrealistic, you ask? That's easy; in order to see, you need light, and the brightness of a light is the rate at which it emits energy (that's why a 100 watt light bulb is brighter than a 60 watt bulb). In a room where time passes at 1 millionth of its normal rate, 100 watt bulbs would look like 0.1 milliwatt light bulbs. In other words, Picard and the others should have been stumbling about in near-total darkness.
  2. They can move objects, such as the bridge chair swing-arm. Again, the writers completely ignored any semblance of realism. If Picard accelerates a bridge swing-arm at a rate which seems normal to him, then it would actually accelerate a trillion times more quickly in its native timeframe (remember that acceleration is in units of m/s²). Since F=ma, this means that Picard would have to apply one triillion times the force he would normally apply in order to move that swing-arm! And even if he could somehow apply this Herculean force, the swing-arm would merely be torn apart like tissue paper.
  3. They can walk around. I hope you're starting to see how this works; it's impossible because the air is in a super-slow timeframe, and so it would be a trillion times more difficult to move through the air than it would be under normal conditions. And even if they could somehow do it, they would generate enormous air friction and devastating shockwaves, sonic booms, etc. in the ship's native timeframe.
  4. They experience normal gravity. This is unrealistic because the ship's artificial gravity system will cause a downward acceleration of roughly 10 m/s². Again, this will be cut to a trillionth of its normal value by the ship's slow timeframe, so our heroes should be experiencing near-zero gravity.

TNG Season 6, Ep# 151: "Timescape"

DATA: I believe I have discovered the cause of the power surge. There is a warp core breach in progress.

(Data points to a cloud of white gas ballooning outward from the reactor)

DATA: It is the flashpoint of a warp core explosion. And it is expanding.

Realism: a massive, uncontrolled matter/antimatter reaction should produce an effect similar to a nuclear explosion: an enormous burst of X-ray and gamma radiation which superheats all surrounding matter (the reactor structure, the air) into plasma. This will be accompanied by a blinding light as the plasma radiates lower-frequency light in a cascading reaction of successively lower-energy photons until we reach the visible spectrum. After this, we will see a shockwave as the superheated air pushes against surrounding air due to the enormsou pressure increase.

However, the warp core breach we saw in this episode did not follow this pattern at all. Instead, it looked like a mere gas leak! There is no conceivable reason why the first sign of a core breach would be a gas leak; the speed at which gas (even high temperature gas) escapes from a hole in the reactor would be infinitesimal compared to the speed at which the intense radiation of the matter/antimatter reaction affects its environment.

TNG Season 6, Ep# 151: "Timescape"

DATA: I believe my tricorder emissions caused the temporal aperture to activate. I suggest we avoid exposing it to any further energy emissions.

Sensors: they are forced to stop using their tricorders because their emissions are dangerous in the vicinity of the "temporal aperture". In other words, their tricorders are totally dependent on active scans. If active scans are out of the question, then tricorders are out of the question.

TNG Season 6, Ep# 151: "Timescape"

DATA: Captain -- I believe his species mistook the artificial singularity, which the Romulans use in their engine, for a natural one... a black hole. They tried to use it as a nest.

Power: the Romulan artificial singularity isn't quite the same as a real singularity, for reasons which Data doesn't elaborate on but which keep the mysterious alien species from using it in the manner that they had hoped.

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