Curious minds

[Graham Kennedy]

Call for backup, I would imagine.

[thelordharry]

Hey, maybe the 'motorcycle' cop was a 22nd century Robocop? "Serve the Federation, Protect the Federation, Uphold the Federation......your move, creep."

[Lighthawk]

Transporter.

Aye.

" This is unit XXX, perp in custody at my current location, attaching transmitter for site to cell transport."

[Mikey]

Rope + antigravity suppository. That's got to be at least as much of a deterrent as the actual jail time.

[thelordharry]

I had a thought about the opening scenes of the film where the Kelvin is in contact with (presumably) Starfleet Command and reporting the 'lightening storm in space'. Did you guys pick up the difference in the portrayal of communication in space as opposed to anything else we've seen so far in Trek? It was almost like an Apollo Mission (or contemporary space mission) communication in that it sounded very echoey and staticy and 'far away' as opposed the mobile phone quality of comms in prime Trek (even the preceeding ENT).

[Mikey]

Hadn't thought about that too much before. I always figured it could be attributed to the presence of interference from the 'hole, Narada, or whatever.

[thelordharry]

Don't you think that the film made it all seem a bit more 'real' though? For instance, the fleet sitting there bobbing about in space before going to warp. I don't know, it just looked more real than the rather more sanitised version of space we saw from TOS to ENT. Perhaps I'm not articulating myself very well but to me, the film said to me 'If this sort of level of technology was a reality, this is how it would actually be'.

[Lazar]

Don't you think that the film made it all seem a bit more 'real' though? For instance, the fleet sitting there bobbing about in space before going to warp. I don't know, it just looked more real than the rather more sanitised version of space we saw from TOS to ENT. Perhaps I'm not articulating myself very well but to me, the film said to me 'If this sort of level of technology was a reality, this is how it would actually be'.

I agree. To some extent it's just the fact that movies tend to look better than episodes (and sometimes I've watched really good Trek episodes and wished that they could have received a cinematic treatment), but I think that this movie in particular was made with a different esthetic idea of outer space, with a great attention for little surface details, and an awareness of 3d space that has previously been lacking in Trek.

[Graham Kennedy]

Don't you think that the film made it all seem a bit more 'real' though? For instance, the fleet sitting there bobbing about in space before going to warp. I don't know, it just looked more real than the rather more sanitised version of space we saw from TOS to ENT. Perhaps I'm not articulating myself very well but to me, the film said to me 'If this sort of level of technology was a reality, this is how it would actually be'.

There were a lot of touches like that in the film. For instance the shuttle ride to orbit when Kirk joined up... big metal framing around the seats, X-type seatbelts for everybody on board. In most Trek they treat flying in a shuttle with less care than I take driving my car around! And McCoy talking about "what if the hull cracks, what if there's a solar flare..." helped with that, too. Although you know it's a bit of hyperbole, it also establishes that there ARE dangers here.

I also thought the E interior was a big help in this respect. I know lots of people don't like the engineering set, but I thought that big tanks and pumps and pipes were just right. Though I did assume that a lot of that stuff was not directly connected to the warp drive but was rather ship's stores, disaster relief supplies, etc. But either way, it felt like an actual working machine.

[Tyyr]

I also thought the E interior was a big help in this respect. I know lots of people don't like the engineering set, but I thought that big tanks and pumps and pipes were just right. Though I did assume that a lot of that stuff was not directly connected to the warp drive but was rather ship's stores, disaster relief supplies, etc. But either way, it felt like an actual working machine.

I fully agree. I liked the engineering interior a lot. I'm a bit biased as I work in a power plant but the antiseptic nature of the engineering spaces just never sat right with me. It was always too perfect.

[Mikey]

Too perfect and, as GK alluded to, spectacularly devoid of machinery.

[thelordharry]

The shuttles were a excellent example of more realism. Just take a look at how their hulls were depicted. Dirty, dented, scorch marks.....the sort of thing that would inevitably happen to a vehicle in space, not the pristine white teflon shuttles of the prime universe.

[stitch626]

It looked like ship based shuttles got better treatment (the ones on the Kelvin were cleaner on the outside than the ones on Earth).


Do we have any idea of the crew size of this Enterprise?

[Sionnach Glic]

The attempt at making the universe a bit more realistic was one of the good things about this movie. The shuttles were cramped and looked far from comfortable, ships weren't pristine and perfect, and the bowels of the ship looked just as cramped and jammed full of equipment as you'd expect from what's basicaly a gigantic power plant.

I also quite liked the difference in looks between the upper decks where the officers would be hanging around, and the engineering decks. It looked as though whoever had designed the ship in-universe had decided to make the officers' areas all nice, comfortable and with pleasant interiors, but when it came to the ship's innards had just shrugged and said "who gives a shit about looks down there?". It was a nice contrast, and one that I felt was rather realistic.

[Tyyr]

It's not about not giving a shit. It's about ease of maintenance. You want your machinery exposed so that the maintenance personnel can get a good look at it and inspect it. They don't have to pull an access panel or crawl down a tube each time they want to look something over.