a further thought on Star Trek XI (or are we calling it Star Trek: AOS? *is confused*)

[edenfalling]

I present, for your consideration, a logic problem:

Okay. We know that motion and gravitational forces can affect transporters, by making it difficult to get a lock on the person or object to be transported. Transporting without a lock is a bad, bad idea, because presumably it means you haven't been scanned right and would either not materialize at all, would materialize missing important pieces of yourself, or would materialize scrambled like an egg. None of these fates is desirable.

It is a big thing that Chekov can get a lock on Kirk and Sulu when they're falling to Vulcan's surface. Presumably he fails to get a lock on Amanda because the gravitational forces have gotten noticeably more wonky as the black hole develops in Vulcan's core, and because she probably gets buried with a ton of rock instead of being in thin air and thus easier to isolate. I can mostly handwave that.

But. How is it that Scotty is able to beam Kirk, Pike, and Spock back to the Enterprise at the climax of the film? He's beaming people from two moving ships (going in different directions at different velocities) onto a third moving ship. There's a lot of motion and probably some artificial gravity involved there, especially when you consider that Spock is sitting, what, all of ten meters away from a giant ball of red matter. There's also a lot of interference from other objects; the situations are more comparable to being surrounded by rockfall than being isolated in freefall. So how is it that nobody thinks to question his ability to beam them back at all?

Yes, he says he never beamed three people from two places to one pad before, but the motion and the gravity and the interference? Psssh! Everybody seems to assume intership beaming is standard stuff, piece of cake, practically textbook, could do it in your sleep.

And that makes me even more pissed off about the arbitrariness of Amanda's death.

I'm just saying.

---------------

On a totally unrelated subject, we had a thunderstorm in Ithaca around 5pm, which included ten minutes of hailstones averaging as big as my thumbnail. Which translates to... *finds ruler, measures* ...half an inch in diameter.

My landlords' cat dashed onto the porch, crawled under a handy stroller, and projected a general aura of Distinct Unamusement. :-)

Comments

[deralte.livejournal.com]

My assumption was that Scotty's new algorithm from the future allowed compensation for the worst of scenarios like the one they faced since it's something that hardly poses a problem 100 years in the ST future (what I don't get is why Spock arrived standing up rather than sitting down?).

My impression on Amanda's death was not that it was gravitational interference, but simply that she moved after Chekov had established a lock. Their transporters seem to work on the idea of not locking onto a person, but onto an area where the person may or may not be (I believe you can see the transporter try to transport the air where Amanda would have been in the movie.) If the person moves out of that area, then it doesn't work, hence why it was so amazing that Chekov established a lock on Kirk and Sulu when they were falling (like playing a video game basically).

[edenfalling]

Point. But why does nobody question the use of this new algorithm? I mean, yes it clearly worked for transwarp beaming, but who's to say it (or Scotty) is reliable?

[svz-insanity.livejournal.com]

... Apparently my side of Ithaca missed the hailstorm!

[edenfalling]

Huh. Where do you live? Until the end of June, I am right by Hickey's Music Center.

[svz-insanity.livejournal.com]

I worked at the Buttermilk Falls plaza today (I actually live near Pyramid/Ithaca Mall) :) I didn't see any hail. *am sort of sad that I missed that*

[edenfalling]

The cat's opinion notwithstanding, I have to say it was pretty cool. :-)

[joisbishmyoga.livejournal.com]

This is the point where you kinda have to consider that 1. Chekov is portrayed in the film as basically a prodigy supergenius, and 2. Scotty is portrayed in all the rest of canon as smarter/more skilled at engineering and science than Chekov. After all, Chekov's not the one who "canna break th' laws o' physics, Captain!" about five minutes before he proceeds to do so, nor is he the one who believes in quadrupling his estimates so that he tells the captain he'll break said laws of physics in twenty minutes.

Also, I got the impression that Scotty didn't give anyone the chance to protest that he wasn't reliable, just like Chekov didn't-- just shoved the operator out of the way and WHAM, beamed them up.

I assume you mean the fans assume intership beaming is standard textbook piece-of-cake stuff? Because in that case, the fans are working off an extra century-plus of scientific advancement, so they are thinking that it's textbook stuff... because after a century, it is.

(Also, if one reads certain of the books, leading back into paragraph 1, Scotty was genius enough that he took over as head of the engineering corps for technology a century more advanced than his own. That's like Henry Ford stepping into command of a Formula One engineering team or something.)

[edenfalling]

Yeah, I think it can be handwaved, it's just that I wish I didn't need to handwave over science- and technology-related plot holes. Especially when it's one so closely related to Amanda's death, the details of which continue to bother me a LOT.

[uminohikari.livejournal.com]

Er, maybe Scotty is just awesomer than Chekov? :| Or Scotty's new algorithm makes the motion and gravity not important..

[edenfalling]

Yes, but then shouldn't somebody at least mention that beaming Kirk and Spock back is going to be ridiculously tricky and then Scotty could say something about how no, it really isn't, and anyway it's even easier now with this new algorithm he invented.

They could have cut twenty seconds of Kirk running from the ice-lobster-orchid-thingy and papered it over, but clearly the lobster-beast was more important. Bah.