"Scott's Brain"

Comments (10)

• #1 by james michael avalos at December 1st, 2009

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  That was so COOL !!Love what you did with the doomsday machine !!

• #2 by Scott Gammans at December 1st, 2009

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  Thanks … hopefully it was worth the wait.

• #3 by Jim Profit at December 1st, 2009

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  I’m really sorry to say that, but am not so impressed. The Enterprise doesn’t look like she’s powered but an engine. Especially at 0:07 she slides aside. I’m quite disappointed, as your sneak preview looked way better. On the other hand, the whole background looks great, very *deep* space (perhaps a little bit too much asteroids).

• #4 by Scott Gammans at December 1st, 2009

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  Hey, it’s cool… can’t please everyone all of the time!

  Regarding your comment on the number of asteroids in the debris field: I figured that I had to depict a pretty dense field of asteroids; otherwise, the Enterprise could just jump to warp speed and leave the planet killer in the dust. (The planet killer obviously does not have a superluminal propulsion system–if it did, the Enterprise couldn’t possibly have evaded the planet killer on impulse power alone, once her warp drive was knocked out at the end of Act II.)

  Once you have a sufficiently dense debris field for the Enterprise to fly though, a straight-line course while evading the marauding planet killer is no longer an option. Thus Spock’s comment on how “we are more maneuverable but it is gaining on us!” Q.E.D.

• #5 by Guy Lester at December 2nd, 2009

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  #3 – The Enterprise’s motion looks fine. Remember, it’s not “flying” like an airplane, it’s moving through space which is relaatively free of gravitational forces and no aerodynamic forces.

  An airplane will always be “pointing” in a direction that is tangent (or really close) to it’s flight path because it’s using aerodynamic forces on it’s wings to turn. A spaceship’s motion is only controlled by thrust, so it will always have a component of it’s motion in the direction it has been thrust until thrust is applied in the opposite direction. Therefore, it will “slide” when banking and turning because the banking and turning provide no force on the ship, like they do to an airplane.

• #6 by Scott Gammans at December 2nd, 2009

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  True enough… unfortunately, the Enterprise is banking tangental to her flight path in this sequence, but the camera angles and the background conspire to make it look as though she’s sliding a bit. I think if the camera had been a bit more stationary the incongruous aerodynamic behavior of the Big E would have been more obvious… but (imo) it would have been a much more static and boring sequence.

  Thanks for your comments (postitive and negative!) everyone… keep ‘em coming as I work my way through Act II!

• #7 by Metryq at December 2nd, 2009

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  Scott, you just invalidated your own argument. You say the Enterprise is safe so long as she can slalom the debris field. How does this prove the berserker does not have a superluminal drive — unless the confrontation gets out into open space? I’d say the berserker must have superluminal drive, otherwise Spock would not have been in such a hurry to get word out to Starfleet. They’d have years to do that.

  As for the animation — nice work, and I realize your timing is constrained by the existing score, but the speed of everything completely blitzes any sense of size, distance and mass. For example, the chunk of debris that vanished into the berserker’s conversion field looked too cartoony. (Roddenberry knew he was dealing in a realm outside of human experience, and chose to cater to human biases anyway, as evidenced by the quote in Stephen Whitfield’s THE MAKING OF STAR TREK concerning the Enterprise “swoosh” in the opening titles.)

  If you are inclined, I would like to see some of these “impossible” animation shots done in the grandiose fashion they deserve — outside of the constraints of the musical score and fitting into the hole left by the original FX shots.

• #8 by Scott Gammans at December 2nd, 2009

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  Scott, you just invalidated your own argument.

  How? At the end of this act the Enterprise warp drive will be knocked out by the planet killer, leaving her with only subluminal impulse power. If the beserker had FTL capability, the Enterprise could not possibly have outrun it, yet Spock manages to keep the ship out of the planet killer’s reach for the remainder of the episode. It therfore follows that the planet killer does not have superluminal capability.

  Spock’s urgency could be explained any number of ways. Perhaps the Orion system is only a couple of light-years away. Even if the danger to the Orion system is still at least 24 months in the future, it would be logical to inform Starfleet of the danger as soon as possible–given the seeming imperviousness of the beserker, the sooner Starfleet starts working on a solution, the better.

• #9 by Guy Lester at December 2nd, 2009

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  #6 – I’m not sure I following you.

  The Enterprise can bank and turn all she wants, but that is independent of any sideways motion or “sliding”. “Sliding” is totally okay in this environment, and banking is not to help turning (as it would be in an aerodynamic situation), but is helpful “stress-wise” on the structure of the ship, since we’re dealing with regular thrust and inertial forces here.

• #10 by Metryq at December 5th, 2009

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  Scott, there may be evidence in the episode that the berserker has FTL drive. I had simply assumed it did, as it would be difficult to launch an interstellar attack without it. The races that were warring in some other galaxy must have had FTL, otherwise they would not have been knocking heads. Anyway, here are my arguments based on the episode.

  The Enterprise passes through system L370 first finding nothing but wreckage where it charted seven planets “last year.” The action starts when the Enterprise reaches system L374, where the berserker is active. That makes the destruction of L370 no more than a year old. Either L370 and L374 are awfully close together, perhaps a binary (in which case why would they have different system numbers?), or the berserker has FTL drive.

  Also, the Enterprise and the Constellation are frontier exploration ships. The Federation has lesser ships for inner system work. Decker beamed his crew down to a class M planet. If the Rigel colony was as little as two lightyears away, a class M would likely have exploratory parties on it, at least. (Maybe, maybe not. Decker said that if the berserker reached Rigel, “millions” would die. So Rigel may be a fairly new colony. He would probably say “billions” for an older colony. Still, Spock said the berserker was aimed at the most densely populated section of the Federation.)

  The first attack and evasion was while the Enterprise still had warp power. It was not until the Enterprise circled back to the Constellation that it tangled with the berserker again and lost warp power. The Constellation was still in the debris cloud, so perhaps the Enterprise managed to keep its distance by dodging around while the berserker ate lunch.

  All we know about the Federation impulse engines is that they are sub-light. Spock said the berserker had a “total conversion drive,” whatever that means. Even if the berserker is faster by whatever measure, Spock said the Enterprise was more maneuverable (at least at the beginning of the fight). A Vietnam era fighter pilot told me that dodging air-to-air missiles, which are much faster than any fighter plane, was like playing chicken — turning away at the last instant. Sulu may be very good at it.