

Nerd Rage - lmacvittie
http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2009/04/15/nerd-rage.aspx

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gaius
It's not the case that the Enterprise is too large to escape Earth's gravity
(what does that even mean? It has warp engines!) but that it has been
previously stated in Star Trek that it was constructed in an orbital shipyard.

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jgrahamc
"In the case of the latest Star Trek movie, the trailer clearly shows the
construction of the Enterprise – on earth. This is the source of Nerd Rage for
many who will not-so-calmly explain that a Constitution-class starship could
not possibly be built on earth because it is too large to escape the earth’s
gravity."

Wha?

So when the Enterprise comes near to the Earth what happens? It just can't
escape the Earth's gravity, or does it only get stuck when it's near the
Earth's surface? It's not the moon you know; it has engines.

NCC-1701-D is supposed to weigh about 400,000 tonnes. Leaving the Earth's
surface to reach LEO requires a delta-v of 10km/s so you've got to accelerate
400,000 tonnes to 10km/s. The Space Shuttle does this and it weighs around
2,000 tonnes. So are we really expected to think that a vehicle 200x the size
of the Space Shuttle could not be launched into orbit?

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RiderOfGiraffes
I'm having trouble understanding your problem with the original statement. To
me, it clearly means that with the facilities available (no enormous rockets,
for example) it can't easily start from the Earth's surface and get into
orbit.

 _Approaching_ the Earth is a completely different issue, and I don't
understand why you mention it. It simply isn't a problem if you're already in
space because you make sure you go into some sort of orbit (elliptical,
parabolic or hyperbolic - any will do). You easily have enough speed to do
this because you're falling into the gravitational well, and you simply need
to deflect your path to one side, miss the atmosphere, and you're on a
hyperbolic orbit. Slow a little and you're in a large elliptical orbit.
Slingshot properly around the Lagrange points (including "bouncing off" the
unstable ones) and you can convert to a "standard orbit" with very little
effort.

Launching from the Earth's surface requires a huge amount of energy, and it's
been stated that it wasn't done.

Now, what was your question?

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jgrahamc
"Launching from the Earth's surface requires a huge amount of energy, and it's
been stated that it wasn't done."

This appears to be the key to the nerd rage. If Starfleet didn't build the
craft on Earth then showing them in the new movie being built on Earth is a
mistake. But it's not a question of physics.

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RiderOfGiraffes
Yes, I agree completely. The first part of my post was expressing why I found
the question about approaching Earth misguided, irrelevant, or inappropriate.
Clearly the Nerd Rage is just about the inconsistency with the "earlier"
episodes.

The comments about the physics also sparked a conversation about escape
velocity here in the office. It's easy to compute that orbital velocity at
grazing altitude is about 8 km/s. People confuse that with escape velocity,
which is sqrt(2) faster, or about 11.3 km/s.

The _real_ confusion arises in that a craft never needs to reach escape
velocity to escape. You can happily escape without ever travelling faster than
6km/hr - walking pace.

If this confuses you, it's fun to work out why. And how. And why NASA doesn't
do that. The sums are fairly easy, it's the conceptualisation that's hard.

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jfarmer
I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand it's nice to see people so
invested in something that they care this much.

On the other hand, sometimes I think that fans are the biggest impediment to
good storytelling.

Who cares if it's on Earth? Being non-canonical isn't a crime -- it's about
telling a good story.

(<fan> Besides, I'm pretty sure the new movie involves time travel, so that's
not even the "real" Enterprise. </fan>)

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sven
I feel building nerd-rage building up in me, when I have to celebrate a click-
orgy to watch the movie-trailer.

