Mith wrote:Recent Narada thread is just that. I now have to prove that the black hole that was called a black hole multiple times was a black hole? Now I have to prove that the Narada really fought 47 Klingon ships and it wasn't some other ship? I'm sick of harping on special effects like Stargate, Star Trek, and even Star Wars. I shouldn't be able to get away with telling people to suck it on cartoon special effects. People shouldn't get away with tossing out gigaton nukes in SG because the mushroom cloud didn't last three minutes because the VFX guy doesn't know how to produce a 100% accurate nuclear explosion effect. Or have to listen to a dipshit masturbate to a quote taken out of context and claiming that a single room with a flapping door can withstand an 80 megaton nuke and then still try to argue it when the author of the damn book said that was wrong.
Poe, I think I might join you out of sheer frustration to the stupidity of the rules. I don't mind some sort of clinging to physics--I like that. But it's really getting out of hand I think.
I've looked at that thread, and I'm noticing a couple things. Yes, the documentarian approach is absurd. I've said that time and time again. VFX are dramatized at least as much as dialogue. Here's what stuck out to
me:
1.) Complete absence of any attempt to quantify
anything. Almost no actual
arguments are being offered - the main argument I see in all five pages for the
Executor is that it's a warship instead of a converted mining ship. Which, on the scale of arguments, is pretty primitive.
2.) Complete absence of creative interpretation of Treknology. I would feel frustrated,
too, in your shields, but with my knowledge of physics and how severely Treknology violates it, I would be addressing the argument directly and materially. See below for an example of an explanation.
3.)
Argumentum ad ignorantiam en masse. The response to arguments in favor of the
Narada is exactly this.
It's established canonically in TNG that Romulan ships are powered by quantum singularities,
aka black holes. Do you know how Romulans play with black holes? I had a pretty good idea well
before the new Star Trek movie came out, and it's an idea that fits surprisingly well with the
completely absurd "red matter" weapon. Yes, the physics of red matter is absurd, but the fact that something violates physics absurdly does
not render you unable to use in a VS debate. You simply need to quantify it.
"Deja Q": Warp fields operate by varying G, the gravitational constant of attraction, for a local region. Warp fields
also mess with the "effective" speed of light, since we can
see - visually - ships travelling at warp. Provided the viewer is also at warp. So under normal circumstances, a warp field would decrease the local value of
G (definite) and we can speculate that it would also increase the local value of
c.
"Timescape" and "Face of the Enemy" tell us that Romulans
force quantum singularities into existence, but once forced into existence, they can't be shut down. Now, the Schwarzschild radius is given by 2Gm/c^2. Put the warp field in reverse.
Increase G locally by a factor of 1000, and you create a 1000x larger black hole. If you
also decrease the local value of
c by a factor of ... oh... 10, you're looking at the Schwarzschild radius of the Earth increasing to 90 kilometers. (Fiddling around with these constants
also messes with Hawking radiation.)
Weaponizing black holes
ala red matter simply requires violating physics sideways with warp fields in ways that are actually somewhat reasonable given what we've seen warp fields
do. Red matter weapons
are more warp-field weapons than anything else; all you really need is that red matter is some degenerate form of matter that binds/generates/stabilizes inverse warp fields in the appropriate proportions. Not even necessarily permanently.
The fact that stray inverse warp fields would
also have a serious effect on anything trying to get away using their own warp field is icing on the cake and clobbers the last part of the complaints about the black hole weapons. You
have to have a Treknological explanation, but if you can come up with a good one, it'll extend to tell you what will happen if you put the
Narada in other circumstances.