I love the Discovery design itself. Retro but with the bridge cutout of the saucer. I like when the spunk drive spools up and it contra-rotates as well.

I've been spoiling any plot points.

Halfway through the latest episode and I'm just...*sigh*. It's just... not very good.

poprock wrote:

The Klingons are ridiculous... Speech patterns frustratingly slow and stilted.

I know no Klingon, but the subtitles fly past so quickly I usually miss a few lines, they may sound slow, but the language must be quite condensed. Why they’ve stuck with them talking Klingon and not just pulled the old WW2 movies trick of switching from German to English in the first few minutes to establish what they’re using is just daft.

Still enjoying it though, we’ve not seen the dark side of the Federation explored this much before and I’ve seen enough of traditional Trek shows to be happy with something new.

Ugh.

OUR OPINIONS ARE ALL PRECIOUS AND VALID

monkey wrote:

We can teleport photons from the earth onto space satellites right now. FTL is just theoretical.

Escape wrote:

Theoretically impossible without curvature, but humans are so complex to teleport from a distance. We'd need new forms of compact data storage, and massively shrunken scopes with radically improved, atomic-level resolution that could be carried by ships. And then you have to account for disturbances between the ship and the surfaces of planets...

I've remembered a few more teleportation problems...

— Converting us into atoms for matter-stream transportation

To make this easier you could just take a ‘drive image’ of us before killing us, and then replicate. But that's not teleportation. To teleport us, you have to break us up into atoms and then hoover them up across space. The problem here is that the electric fields that both hold and separate our atoms would take enormous energy to tear apart, like say a cluster of our most powerful hydrogen bombs. Beyond atoms, quark-level tearing (for the most accuracy) might be impossible at normal temperatures.

So you'd have to heat someone up to a billion-odd degrees first, and that raises the question of what exactly you're reassembling after firing this Partridge microwave at them. If your image is good then I'd imagine you're okay, but...

— Data integrity and download speed

We lose enough data packets here on Earth between stationary computers, with only limited and/or weather-affected movement along the lines. One bad human packet... And they'd be dealing with wireless, including — if the Enterprise and/or planet were moving, which is highly likely — the Doppler effect. So you'd need a compensator alongside The Greatest Netcode Ever.

But here's the funny bit: at a transfer rate of 1 gigabyte per second, you'd be waiting a couple thousand billion years for your quark-level human to download. Almost a DOOM patch.


I just find it easier to imagine the Enterprise stumbling across the tools for warping spacetime in deep space, and thus unlocking warp. But then again, by the same token they might run into a similar-but-more-advanced civilisation that has a teleporter.

About half the reason I watched Voyager was for Jeri Ryan's bodysuits.

Harry Kim pressing buttons Galaxy Quest-style? It's a been a while.

monkey wrote:

how are you re-assembling humans anyway?

O'Brien does it.

Don’t you need a level of energy equivalent to the mass of Jupiter or something to bend space-time for FTL travel for even something as small as a plane?

Yeah, the Enterprise creates antimatter in quantities far beyond its natural occurrence in empty space. It's not like nuclear power where we're stockpiling what's there via some technical prodding, and antimatter contains so little energy by itself. The Enterprise might struggle to power some ecobulbs with the amounts currently available, never mind bend space.

The gravitational field of the Sun can bend light by a thousandth of a degree at most, so you'd need some alien graviton tech to voluntarily engage FTL travel as the Enterprise does. But you might, somewhere out in deep space, encounter a temporarily stable wormhole that takes you to a faraway place. Maybe into a nascent inflationary universe that pushes them even farther (more likely destroys the ship).

Both are heavily dependent on mind-boggling levels of advancement across a range of other technologies so it’s a silly conversation really.

It is a silly convo! I'm only saying that I find it easier to imagine stumbling into a wormhole that stays open long enough to survive its passage.

God knows why you’ve picked a data transfer speed for teleportation that even a current MacBook Pro can outdo. My last one struggled even on some of the more poorly-optimised, erm, media-oriented sites.

We could probably push our datarates quite a bit, I used a gigabyte-per-second because it's familiar enough to imagine. Looking at Moore's law, 16MB was a high level of RAM twenty years ago, versus 16GB today. Whereas it took about fifteen years to go from 16K to 16MB. Even at lightspeed, it takes a couple of tenths to receive data from the US, and so on.

In terms of transporting humans, it's clearly faster to drive-image them and send them as bits. Sending them as constituent atoms would take even longer due to mass.

Where no Nox has gone before.

When is Q turning up i will start with that episode.

JRPC wrote:

endless silly made up language.

Just out of interest, is it like proper Klingon, to appease the geeks - or is it just made-up gibberish?

The fucking meal they make of it, I bloody well hope it’s ‘proper’ Klingon.

Interestingly, while it's proper Klingon on Discovery, it sounds as though a lot of previous TV Trek just used bollocks with the odd word from the Klingon dictionary.