Star Trek range and distance issues

[Ted C]

Why would showing two ships at range NOT be eye candy? The camera could pan between the two really fast, perhaps showing blurred stars in the background, FX simiilar to what they use for warp drive. You don't NEED to show both ships at the same time.

Babylon 5 tried that ONCE and it failed.

Excuse me? Babylon 5 routinely depicted spacebattles without putting the firing ship and the target in the same shot, and I personally think they had great success.

You're probably referring to "The Long, Twilight Struggle", but we didn't see shooter and target in the same shot in "All Alone in the Night", "The Fall of Night", "Severed Dreams", or "Walkabout" either. Babylon 5 consistently kept the range vague and potentially quite long.

[Alyeska]

I was under the impression that the battle between the Narn and the Shadows was about the only time they ever tried that.

[Alyeska]

I notice you quietly dropped the 200km figure, and of course, it's obvious you don't realize that your scaling contradiction on ST2 is not a contradiction at all. How about that Miranda? Are you going to produce the screenshot which shows that they can't possibly be 30km apart?

As I said, you are relying on a combination of unjustified preference, ignorance of scaling methods, and a predestined conclusion that dialogue must override visuals in order to declare that visuals are intractably flawed.

I will adress the rest later.

First, I didn't quietly drop it. We were already talking about it and I figured I didn't need to list it for a third or fourth time. I was just trying to bring back these instances. Second, I will try and get some screen shots. The TWOK one will be easy, the other season 2 example will take a while, although Kazaa ought to help out in that regard.

[AdmiralKanos]

Second, I will try and get some screen shots. The TWOK one will be easy, the other season 2 example will take a while, although Kazaa ought to help out in that regard.

I've got the TWOK one on my screen. All you have is a ratio of size onscreen between the E-Nil and the Reliant behind it. The Reliant's saucer is roughly 15 pixels wide, and the E-Nil's saucer is roughly 100 pixels wide. This means that the Reliant is 6-7 times farther away from the camera than the E-Nil is, which means that the camera is roughly 600km away from the E-Nil given Chekov's dialogue, and presumably using a zoom lens.

No contradiction there; at the risk of being condescending, I think you really need to read posts more carefully before attempting to answer them. My point about scaling methods obviously sailed over your head; you obviously had a gut-feeling about the range problem in that shot and decided that it must be intractable, rather than actually doing the legwork and trying to understand how scaling works.

[Yogi]

This, of course, brings up back to the question of what exacrtly we're examaning. Is Star Trek, Star Wars etc. just an imaginary world in someone's mind which is being brought forth in terms of scripts and special effects, or is it an actual universe we are somehow sticking a camera into and viewing?

[Warspite]

War movies and scifi movies are very much different. Its possible, but its also not nearly as easy to do so. I notice how you didn't really contradict what I stated about B5 and Andromeda. The visuals are mostly for eye candy and while we like to say they are accurate, we know they can have just as many errors as the dialogue because these are virtual creations done by people who are not perfect.

On the contrary, they have a lot in common, ships trading shots in an open expanse, outside visual contact. Like I said, check any war movie (except sailing movies, and Pearl Harbour) with ships firing, not one shows two antagonists in the same shot, except for a few clouds of smoke in the horizon. (Possible exception to "They were expendable", but that involves PT boats...)
Anyway, shooting a real (space)ship action carefully, involves a only lot of editing, in fact, it may be easier to do, since the animators (if CGI is involved) don't have to deal with million-plus polygons at the same time...
As for B5, a local station is currently showing season 5, and like Ted C said, rarely are two space ships trading shots in the same scene... but, I'm not touching that.
Andromeda... hummm, so far I've only seen 2 episodes, both of them involving a lot of running around the ship, with the ocasional outside shot... Nope, can't touch that either.

Yes, I agree that the visuals are eye-candy, but when analysing something, one has to go by the method that provides the least amount of error, and that is the visuals, since dialogue is always open to interpretation, even when a clear stated number is said.

[Ted C]

I was under the impression that the battle between the Narn and the Shadows was about the only time they ever tried that.

That was "The Long, Twilight Struggle", and it most certainly was not the only time they depicted battles at great distances. It was the first time they did it.

[Darth Servo]

I disagree, check every war movie involving ships, they never show both antagonoists at the same time, with the ocasional shot of smoke on the horizon to indicate where the enemy is. With good a good director and FX people it is possible to create an action scene between spaceships without creating the blatant disagreements between Image-Dialogue...
In fact, this discussion would never happen, if they hadn't these inconsistencies.

War movies and scifi movies are very much different. Its possible, but its also not nearly as easy to do so.

Oh please Alyeska. Why would it be more difficult to show one ship in a scene instead of two?

[Darth Wong]

If anyone's curious, the E-Nil grows onscreen by about 13% in the first 20 frames (at 24fps after IVTC) of the scene just before it goes to warp. Given Chekov's figure of 4000km range from Reliant and the fact that the ships are 6-7 times different in onscreen size (hence the camera is well over 600km away from the E-Nil), this means that its current velocity is at least 100 km/s (just before going to warp).

Interestingly enough, you only need a constant acceleration of 0.14 km/s^2 to cover 4000km in 4 minutes, so the ship's velocity should have been around 30 km/s, not 100 km/s. But then again, they didn't get going instantly and they wasted a fair bit of time turning around first with presumably balky thrusters, etc., so they might have employed a greater acceleration over a much smaller timeframe to cover that distance.

[The Silence and I]

So, are you saying there are no contradictions, or that there are, just not in this scene from ST-2?

If the latter, I think there is evidence of contradictions in TNG's Survivors. The Husnok ship is reported on (long range?) sensors 1st. Then Picard orders it on screen, showing nothing. After magnifying (I think twice) the screen showed the now magnified image of the Husnok ship so that it appeared to be <Km away. A scene cut shows both ships in the same relative position as on the veiw screen. I don't have a screenshot on me now, so I don't know if it could be subject to scaling tricks. Might this suggest visuals are compressed, for the purpose of eye candy? I will look for screenshots, but I have had no luck in the past.

[The Silence and I]

I found a script of the scene,

Data, give us a visual.
Magnification factor 50.

187
00:14:58,360 --> 00:14:59,918
Look at the size of that!

188
00:15:04,920 --> 00:15:08,356
- Where did that come from?
- A Lagrange point,

189
00:15:08,480 --> 00:15:10,596
behind Rana IV's furthest moon.

It appears the vessel came from behind the furthest of the 3 moons (3 moons are mentioned earlier), too distant to see on the viewer's normal setting. A magnification factor 50 caused the ship's image to fill the screen. A cut to outside showed the ship in the same position as the magnified image appeared to be.

[Towlie]

So the E-D fired phasers from places she didn't have emmitters. They could just be small emmitters not seen on a TV screen. Ship scaling "problems," incidentally, are sometimes intentional. For example, there was one ep with a "super Oberth" that was considerably larger than the Oberth in ST:III. There was a deliberate decision to scale it up because it looked too small compared to the E-D and might not have showed up very well. And scaling of that sort happens frequently in Trek, witness the at least 2 kinds of BOP as well as the even bigger ones we see behind Romulan ships in one episode. If the Klingons keep stupidly scaling ships from their original size, then those tiny BOPs that you can't stand up in don't seem so unreasonable.

And none of these so-called "errors" compares to the deliberate shots of starships in extreme close proximity, which we see CONSISTENTLY in almost every Trek episode. That's no mistake. It is deliberate, like it or not. Combat almost always occurs at less-than-WWII-battleship range. When the producers want to show ships far apart, they do so visually such as in ST:II when the screen shows Reliant and Enterprise circling the asteroid.