Ah, that’s better! I fixed the angle that the planet killer flies past the camera so that the viewer can now more clearly see the four component lances of the antiproton beam coalescing together, and I composited in the missing asteroid field and volumetric space dust layers that were missing from the previous test video.
This will not end well
I probably could spend another week or two endlessly tweaking this 66-frame sequence, but I think this is the best it’s going to get. It’s a shame, because there are a few things that have always bothered me about this particular sequence… more after the jump.
Mkay, so first, it was a dumbass move for Kirk to order the shields lowered while the Enterprise was in the line of fire of a leviathan that fires antiproton beams to slice up planets. My initial thought for fixing this was to somehow re-edit the sequence to excise Kirk making such a boneheaded mistake, but it basically would have meant cutting to the attack sequence immediately after Spock says “I also believe the nature of this machine precludes the possiblity of easy access to its control mechanisms” as a communicator voice-over while the camera is on the Constellation. I gave it a test try, but the transition was just too jarring and abrupt. So, our brave captain stays a dum-dum for this one.
My next objection was a little less straightforward but bothered me even more: When the Enterprise was struck by the antiproton beam the first time with shields down, everyone onboard got tossed to starboard and the ship careened out of control. Yet a few minutes later (after Decker’s disastrous strafing run on the planet killer when deflector shields are damaged and gone for good), the planet killer fired three more times on the Enterprise… and it didn’t seem like a big deal at all! All that seemed to happen was the ship shuddered, the warp drive went offline, some Enterprise crewmembers were injured or possibly killed, and some hull ruptures occured (the latter three all occurred off-camera). But no one got tossed to the deck, and the Enterprise stayed pretty much in level flight. Maybe she stayed stable because she was caught in a tractor beam, but that presents another problem: she was probably CLOSER to the planet killer for those last three shots!
To fix these glaring inconsistencies, I storyboarded an initial attack sequence where the Enterprise (which was flying like an F-18 desperately trying to evade the doomsday machine) dived behind a largish asteroid just as the planet killer fired its antiproton beam. The beam would strike the asteroid instead of the Enterprise–protecting the ship from direct damage by the beam–but the megaBOOM!! explosion of the asteroid would cause the ship to ricochet off-course and toss our gallant crewmembers out of their safety-beltless chairs. My thought here would be that this would explain why the Enterprise didn’t suffer the extreme damage she suffered later on in Act II, and it would also explain why she spun out of control (because of the shock wave from the exploding asteroid). Yeah yeah, shock waves don’t travel through the vacuum of space. Well, warp drive’s impossible too, so :p
Unfortunately, no matter how I timed it out I kept bumping up against some hard limits storytelling-wise. Because I have to cleave to the original soundtrack, I only had 66 frames for this shot and I just couldn’t figure out a way to squeeze all that visual information into less than three seconds. I suppose if I was more proficient with sound editing I might have been able to stretch out the soundtrack (perhaps by repeating some of the beats) so that I’d have more time to show everything, but I just couldn’t justify spending all that time for what was originally 2.75 seconds of film. In the end, I felt it was more important to have the camera concentrate its attention on the first glimpse of the planet killer’s main weapon being fired… the interior shot of the Enterprise crew getting tossed out of their chairs was enough of a clue to the audience that some bad juju was going down.
#1 by Metryq at December 30th, 2009
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Maybe there would be a shockwave. An anti-proton beam sounds like anti-matter to me, and where the beam strikes solid matter evaporates. The asteroid outside the direct blast might vaporize into plasma like a nuclear weapon explosion (there’s your shockwave). And for that you’d need a rapatronic camera, so three seconds is plenty of time to show all this! :)
As for the diminishing power of the attacks, the berserker had just destroyed a solar system. Maybe it needed recharging, or…
I hadn’t meant to make a debate about whether or not the berserker had FTL drive in a previous thread, but the following demands that I introduce a few concepts.
Jack McDevitt’s “Academy” novels posit a stardrive known as the Hazeltine engine. The small starships in the series must cruise for a few hours on their sublight engines while the Hazeltines charge. When ready, the Hazeltines push the ship into hyperspace. In the novel CHINDI the pilot explains to one of her passengers that it is perfectly safe to spacewalk on the hull while in the misty, gray void of hyperspace, but that falling off would have certain consequences for the ship when returning to normal space. The loss of mass from the closed system would turn into added momentum in real space.
This expose is used later in the novel when one of the Terran explorers is trapped on board the massive, automated Chindi ship as it accelerates onto its appointment with another star. The Hazeltine pilot cannot match the Chindi acceleration with her space normal engines, but figures she can plot its next destination and meet it there. She jumps to the next star, but the Chindi never arrives. After some trial and error, the pilot realizes the Chindi does not have hyperspace engines. How can she save her missing passenger before his life support gives out?
She eventually plans a multi-ship rescue with other Academy ships. The first stage involves one ship latching onto a small asteroid like a space tug and hauling it off into hyperspace. The rock is jettisoned and the ship drops back to normal space at a speed matching the Chindi, thanks to the mass left in hyperspace. Other Academy ships in series bring the rescuer back down to space normal speeds they can handle.
The technology in STAR TREK is never explained in the series, but some of the spin-off novels take a stab at it. One novel likened warp engines to the Hazeltines. Although instead of spending any time in hyperspace, the ship instantly jumps from one location to another. Long hyperspace jumps are dangerous because one might lose one’s bearings on exit and become lost. So starflight is a tedious series of small jumps with long navigational calculations in between. What makes the starships, like the Enterprise, so special is the revolutionary Daystrom computers that can recalibrate for a next jump almost instantaneously. Thus, what appears to be continuous velocity in normal space is really an ultra-rapid series of small jumps. If we assume an Einsteinian Relativity, then there is an obvious gap in the Federation speed gradient between impulse engines and warp engines.
Suppose, like the Chindi, the doomsday machine (which I’ve been calling “berserker” after Saberhagen’s stories) has a continuous speed gradient all the way up to lightspeed and beyond. How is that possible? (In the Academy novel the Chindi is sub-light, but let’s assume the berserker is not, based on the timing of the attacks on systems L370 and L374.)
I suppose it’s complete heresy to question Einstein, especially since I am nothing more than an armchair fan of physics with no degrees in advanced mathematics. Still, some physicists do question Einstein, as well as the Big Bang, quantum mechanics and so on. I’m not a fruitcake; I understand that these theories may be right in some ways and not in others. With that in mind, the late Tom Van Flandern published a layman’s book in the early ’90s titled DARK MATTER, MISSING PLANETS AND NEW COMETS to explain his Meta Model, derived from LeSage’s corpuscular gravity. The link below is an introduction to Flandern’s work, and the rest of the site is food for thought:
http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/PhysicsHasItsPrinciples.asp
Some of the relevant parts of the Meta Model include:
* The speed of light is not a universal limit and there is evidence to this fact. (Flandern likens the Light Carrying Medium, or LCM, to air molecules. Thus any body using this medium cannot accelerate beyond its wave speed the way a prop-driven plane cannot exceed the speed of sound. As for the LCM you’re probably thinking Michelson and Morley. Most physics books do not cover all of those early 20th century “ether” experiments.)
* The Meta Model includes another medium, a sea of “gravitons” made up of particles that are estimated to move at tens of thousands of times the speed of light. Learn how to harness them and even warp drive will seem slow.
Spock said the berserker had a “total conversion drive,” which could mean anything. Did he mean total conversion of matter to energy, a la e=mc^2 ? The Enterprise has anti-matter engines, and it doesn’t get any more efficient than that. So how is the berserker different? Suppose the “conversion” was LCM type matter (planet rubble) into graviton-like speed. The berserker would then have FTL drive with a continuous gradient from space normal all the way up, while the Enterprise might have a “gap” in its speed spectrum. Thus, the Enterprise might be able to evade the berserker even with impulse-only (using the asteroid field to give it cover) because it is low enough in mass to make hard turns, while the berserker would rumble on past with a screeching of tires, as it were. Sulu the bull fighter. (Remember the berserker’s neutronium hull, which would give it tremendous mass. It might even have a gravity field strong enough to collect space debris.)
Assuming the berserker has a graviton drive, as described, what would Federation warp drive look like to its attack computer? Perhaps warp drive would look like enemy ships blinking in and out of existence, or perhaps the berserker was up against an entire fleet of ships with cloaking devices?
Thus, the power of the attacks might vary if the berserker thought it was dealing with a huge fleet of ships, when in fact there was only one-and-a-half.
#2 by Scott Gammans at December 30th, 2009
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OK first–wow! Thank you for taking the time to write all of this.
The beserker’s “total conversion drive” could mean anything, so a graviton-based propulsion system is certainly within the realm of possibility. In fact, it might not even need a gravity field to suck in space debris–the fact it’s made of neutronium means it’s probably the mass of a small star to begin with!
#3 by Metryq at December 30th, 2009
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Murray Leinster’s THE WAILING ASTEROID describes an interstellar war lasting millennia. One of the weapons in the story is an FTL super mass shot through an enemy’s solar system to rip its star to pieces.
#4 by Drew at January 2nd, 2010
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Scott,
Let me just say – WOW! This really is fantastic work! I am really impressed with your efforts and your interpretation of Trek’s
‘The Doomsday Machine’.
I’ve been a graphic designer for 18 years. This
is great work. You should be proud.
I hope when you complete this project that maybe just maybe you will release it in HD ( i know … not going to happen) but if you do, I would love to view this on my 1080p HDTV.
I look forward to viewing it in its completed form.
Warm Regards,
DREW
#5 by Scott Gammans at January 3rd, 2010
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Thank you Drew!
Unfortunately, the number of “layers” required for each scene forced me to limit the resolution to 480p for this project–it would have taken six times as long to render these effects in high definition. So I’m afraid DVD-level sharpness is about the best this will get.
#6 by telestrike at January 11th, 2010
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Okay,
So..
When ARE YOU GONNA put tis all together for the rabib Trek fans who wanna see it?
#7 by telestrike at January 11th, 2010
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Okay,
So..
When ARE YOU GONNA put this all together for the rabid Trek fans who wanna see it?
#8 by telestrike at January 11th, 2010
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Sorry,
I can’t spell……..
#9 by Scott Gammans at January 11th, 2010
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LOL… no problem.
As for when this will all be put together and finished, as I’ve said before it’ll be done when it’s done–I have learned not to make completion predictions because (a) I suck at them and (b) this isn’t my full-time job (or even my only hobby)… life has a way of messing with timelines, so the best I can say right now is that one of my resolutions for 2010 is to finish this project before 2011!