Recent content by MarkB

Skyrim really is... here?

She's not on duty while she's suspended. That doesn't mean she wouldn't find a way to help out in a crisis, in some manner other than trying to fly something.

Kirk bemoaning his suggestion to send an away team down to the planet felt like a bit of a Space Whale Aesop. "Don't recklessly send down away teams without thoroughly checking the local conditions first" is a reasonable lesson to learn. "Don't send down away teams lest the planet they're...

It's not a matter of time. In a previous episode, Una reinstates her to the helm in spite of her suspension the moment they encounter a difficult flying situation, and that's the last we hear of it. On the contrary, the whole issue is that, prior to her Gorn PTSD, her one and only character...

And didn't even need to serve out her full suspension. Why do they have so much trouble following through on any development of this character?

Low compared to what? Geostationary orbit is at a distance of nearly three times the Earth's diameter. We send out communication satellites to that distance because they need the geostationary part to operate, but most satellites operate at far lower distances.

My head canon about the look of the ship and its big maw is that it really was a giant space creature that they repurposed into being part of their ship. Possibly they were even swallowed by it and had to kill it from inside, then hollowed it out and started salvaging other vessels for parts.

I thought this week's episode was really good, but was anyone else annoyed by the term "low geostationary orbit"? First off, only Earth has a geostationary orbit - the "geo" refers to Earth specifically, not any old planet. For instance, if you wished to establish an orbit of equivalent...

Yeah, they travelled between galaxies in world ships, which pretty much were what they said on the tin. Not sure I particularly buy the concept of making Palatine a retroactive attempted galaxy-saver, though.

Yeah, this concept was actually explored really well in Star Wars The Old Republic, in the Imperial Agent main quest line. The Sith Empire has this really great, solid government and bureaucracy which would be doing a really good job of running things, except that they're in the service of a...

And the glitching of the transporter monitor at the end of the episode happened in Sickbay. How often though, especially in the less-used medical transporter? Kirk's pattern was still in the main transporter.

And it does. They have whole sets of rules and protocols on the matter. The point of the Death Star isn't that it gives them a capability they didn't already have, it's that it provides an immediate and overwhelming threat - genocide and destruction in one handy, easily-delivered package, only...

My theory is that, since they've now been put into a hibernation cycle, that Gorn from Arena was just really groggy from having only just woken up.

My impression was that he was there only for the ceremony, and that the Enterprise was assigned to this specific mission with him, presumably having travelled to pick him up offscreen prior to the opening of the episode.

Honestly I'd have assumed that the medical transporter's systems were all isolated from the rest of the ship, both for quarantine purposes and to ensure that it could continue operating independently in the case of general system failures. However, the fact that it was the medbay transporter...