Hmm - one thing that should happen normally in sublight SR travel is that the starfield should compress along the axis of your travel (rather than spread out).

But yeah - any multi-apparent-solar-mass/anti-mass configuration of matter and energy contained within a km or two is going to do wacky things to incoming light rays.

I wonder what the Star Trek screenwriters would pay for a GR consultant to come up with the "realistic" looking background warp that would happen under the standard alcubierre warp-drive fields? Surely computer special effects time doesn't cost that much more these days than "screensaver #5".

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Nothing, now. And of course when the franchise was on the air, they paid GR consultants... nothing. I guess they wanted audience familiarity, not realism.

<Minor nitpick> (Since ST warp drive is not Alcubierre warp drive, operates on totally different principles and would look totally different from the inside if either one were "real", they likely wouldn't care what AWD looks like anyway.)</Minor nitpick>

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Yes; it's trivial and just a director's "looks cool" effect.

But; no one knows what warp speed looks like, so extending the possibilities is a good thinking exercise, and the directors have given us a building block to work on that exercise.

And; Since the stars wouldn't look like that, its easier to adopt a reasonable explaination for the effect rather than just saying "it's wrong".

Now; can somebody explain the floating morphing heads effect under time warp.

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Ooh, let me think about that one for a bit...

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Simple: small spatio-temporal fluctuations experienced by the traveler during the trip can cause signals within the brain to, on a microscopic scale, end up in the wrong places or arriving at the wrong times, thus causing hallucinations. Other potential side effects include itchy skin, dry mouth, unusual cravings, and heart palpitations. Ask your doctor if time travel is right for you.

You'd think they'd have a pill for that by that time like Warpstabulon. Of course the generic Timestillprofun might work just as well.

Every time I get that effect, I end up barfing up yarn. It seems like the result is not drive system dependent.

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It's probably a mild case of Improbability Sensitivity Disorder. If it's just yarn, it's likely not a serious case. If you start harking up sperm whales, you should consult your doctor yesterday.

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If we applied some rule like that to the Small Media at Large forum, than there would be about 2 threads in the entire forum. Really, this forum should be titled "SF Geeks Endlessly Debating Movie Trivia".

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Some "ST-Einstein-Level-Foamite -Fan" has to answer this....ZC and TNG/Crew takes off in a thrust chemical rocket. They leave that behind and travel briefly in warp. How did they land?? How did they get thru the atmosphere?? What kind o'heat shield?? Etc etc...This was not as annoyingly mindless as Numbisis, but still, one does wonder, just how did ol'Zeph get back to the bar and have a drink??

Dale

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I think I recall the Enterprise gave him a ride, otherwise he would have had a few days' trip home. Visually, it looks like he reached about Lunar distance, give or take a bit.

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Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Actually, to refocus the question, how did he intend to get back home? ZC's test platform didn't look like it had a reentry vehicle. Good catch, vonmazur.

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IIRC it was supposedly built from a ICBM, which wouldn't have a re-entry system.

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A "Titan IV" in the script: probably to disguise that a Titan II wouldn't have got something that big out of the atmosphere...

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QQR

[quote=ASEI;1204856] SNIPPET.....Hmm - one thing that should happen normally in sublight SR travel is that the starfield should compress along the axis of your travel (rather than spread out). SNIPPET

ASEI. Right on the money. The other thing that happens is the Doppler shift of the encountered neutrino sea increases the cross-section there as the square of the velocity....giving a sense that you need more force to generate a given acceleration, or that your rest/inertial mass is increasing proportional to the square of the velocity. pete

see: Ultimate Neutrino Page:Cross sections

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Maybe they already had a prototype antigravity by then; not strong enough for launch, but providing enough bouyancy to soft-land.

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Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Likely so. Given, also, that they likely had stronger engines and a steadier supply of fuel, it's possible he intended to re-enter Rutan's way. Brake to zero (or near zero) so that you don't actually have to shed orbital velocity in atmosphere, and that some kind of anti-gravity to make the descent/landing a bit more comfortable.

Considering the weight of an entire unplanned passenger wasn't a make-or-break to the voyage, this seems at least somewhat reasonable.

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I wondered that myself (once, briefly, and not worth mentioning). But; if you look at drawings of the Pheonix, it is concievable (to me) that the crew cabin can be detached and reenter like any other capsule.

It doesn't take a great leap of imagination.

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I think you hit the nail on the head. In this mod for Orbiter Simulator the phoenix's crew cabin is a self-contained capsule. http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=2835

The raised arches directly opposite and to the sides of the windows are depicted as being the housings for the thrusters that deorbit the capsule once it's separated from the drive section. http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/sc...r/phoenix1.jpg

The drive section simply remains in orbit and the nose cone of the capsule contains the parachute. If I remember correctly, it also depicts the heatshield as deploying from the rear of the capsule where it had been mated to the drive section. In the mod they simply animated it to expand a bit in order to properly cover the profile of the raised arches and not just the body of the capsule. Basically, it would have had to have been some kind of inflatable shield. The idea's not from canon per se, but it does fit.

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(I actually saw people CRYING coming out of Nemesis because it was so bad.....)"

Nemesis reminded me a lot of Alien Resurrection: it was one of those--thankfully!--rare flicks in which I could literally hear the franchise collapse with each frame.

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