The Very-Many-Questions-Not-Worth-Their-Own-Thread Thread XL

Status
Not open for further replies.
Sisko is better when it's intentional that he's a warped fighter. He's the imperfect killer propping up the higher ideals.
 
Windows Calculator can't seem to handle really really really really long numbers. It wouldn't let me put in any more digits after a certain point. What do I do now?

You get a proper calculator, the one that comes with the OS is barely able to add two numbers. I use the python console myself these days, but I get that this my be akin to nuking mosquitos.

Also depending on why you have long numbers in the first case, you may get away with floating point notation and ignore the less significant numbers. You dont care about the centimeters if you are calculating distances between cities, for example.
 
Is there something bigger than kilometres?
 
Is there something bigger than kilometres?
Presumably you just keep changing the metric prefix.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix
Prefix Base 10 Decimal English word Adoption[nb 1]
Name
Symbol Short scale Long scale
yotta Y 1024 1000000000000000000000000 septillion quadrillion 1991
zetta Z 1021 1000000000000000000000 sextillion trilliard 1991
exa E 1018 1000000000000000000 quintillion trillion 1975
peta P 1015 1000000000000000 quadrillion billiard 1975
tera T 1012 1000000000000 trillion billion 1960
giga G 109 1000000000 billion milliard 1960
mega M 106 1000000 million 1873
kilo k 103 1000 thousand 1795
hecto h 102 100 hundred 1795
deca da 101 10 ten 1795
100 1 one –
 
Is there something bigger than kilometres?

In practice, after kilometers the next actually used units are light-seconds, which are 299792548 m, that is just short of three hundred thousand kilometers. Sometimes, fractions of this are used in specialized fields, especially telecommunications and IT. Bigger are of course units used in astronomy: light-minute, light-hour, light-day....up to light year, and specials, AU and parsec.
 
Kirk, of course. To specify, TOS Kirk, not that ridiculous nuTrek caricature that I usually refer to as "Captain Frat Boy."

Kirk might prefer coffee, Romulan ale, and Saurian brandy over "tea, Earl Grey, hot"... but that doesn't make him unsophisticated. It might to Picard, but Picard can go stuff himself.

Thanks for Your opinion ;) That "earl gray hot" might just have tipped the odds in my book for Kirk. In the end I guess that the little things decide, like for example I find it funny when Picard says "make it so number one" or "engage" ... I'm weird I know :lol:
Among the little things I love about Kirk is also his gaze ! I love the way he stares at things and ... in the face of danger ! ^^ When facing danger Picard usually looked "dumbfounded" I think.

VS

Kirk is better at improvising when everything goes to ****. Sisko is good, but a definite third place.

You can say that again. Kirk can think on the fly and is definitely more cunning .

I wonder who would win in a ship to ship combat :think:
 
Thanks for Your opinion ;) That "earl gray hot" might just have tipped the odds in my book for Kirk. In the end I guess that the little things decide, like for example I find it funny when Picard says "make it so number one" or "engage" ... I'm weird I know :lol:
Among the little things I love about Kirk is also his gaze ! I love the way he stares at things and ... in the face of danger ! ^^ When facing danger Picard usually looked "dumbfounded" I think.

VS






You can say that again. Kirk can think on the fly and is definitely more cunning .

I wonder who would win in a ship to ship combat :think:
Enterprise D > Enterprise A
 
@Valka D'Ur interesting...every Trek captain has his derps IMO. So, the logical followup...Kirk or Sisko?
That's almost like comparing apples and oranges. Their command situations are very different, therefore their command styles will be very different. Not to mention that Sisko was trained in the time when Kirk, et. al were looked down on as "mavericks" (in a negative way) and Janeway gets on her judgy judgmental soapbox and says Kirk and Sulu would have been kicked out of the modern, better Starfleet.

Put them into the same situation, however... Kirk is a seat-of-the-pants style of diplomat. He likes quick solutions. He wouldn't have the patience to sit on a space station day after day, year after year, engaging in all the politicking and diplomacy Sisko had to do, while simultaneously fulfilling a religious role he didn't believe in.

I have to confess that I don't pay much attention to the space battles in the post-TOS series. I barely notice details like what color the nacelles are or how many decks any particular ship has (though I do know they carried it to ridiculous extremes in STV: Shatner's Awful, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Movie). So... going by the BermanTrek era as a generality, it seems to me that Kirk would win. If the ship doesn't work, he doesn't let the crew get away with helplessly whining that "the (fill in the blank) is offline, Captain". He'll order Spock and Scotty to figure out how to make it work, and they do.

If you really want to examine Kirk's command style, I recommend the episode "Balance of Terror". It's a classic tale of two enemy captains trying to outthink each other while coming to respect each other's command and strategic abilities. There's a famous line spoken by the Romulan captain: "In a different reality, I could have called you friend."

Sisko is better when it's intentional that he's a warped fighter. He's the imperfect killer propping up the higher ideals.
Sisko has one aspect that none of the other captains do: A spouse and child (so did Kirk, if you want to count Miramanee and David, but both died before Kirk really knew them). Sisko had a family, but Kirk, Picard, and Janeway were, fanfic notwithstanding, essentially married to their ships.

This means Sisko has a more personal part of his life that he has to push aside every time he has to make a command decision that would affect that personal part of his life, whether it's about Jake and memories of Jennifer, or (in later seasons) if it's about Jake and Kassidy Yates.

Is there something bigger than kilometres?
Any politician's ego.

Seriously, though... yes.

And since we've been talking about Star Trek, here's something to tie them together. Back in 1989, a friend and I started writing a Next Gen soap opera parody for the clubzine I was publishing back then (Thataway!). Most parodies change the character names, so our characters were Captain Jacquard, Bill Biker, Hellana of Troy, Dr. Smasher, Eastley Smasher, Kilometres O'Brien, and so on.

Thanks for Your opinion ;) That "earl gray hot" might just have tipped the odds in my book for Kirk. In the end I guess that the little things decide, like for example I find it funny when Picard says "make it so number one" or "engage" ... I'm weird I know :lol:
Among the little things I love about Kirk is also his gaze ! I love the way he stares at things and ... in the face of danger ! ^^ When facing danger Picard usually looked "dumbfounded" I think.
Back in the '70s, there were so many fan theories about why Number One was called that in "The Menagerie" and then fast-forward 20 years and we find that some captains simply use that as a way to refer to their First Officer. It makes some of those fan theories seem pretty silly.

Oh, and nobody's mentioned Janeway. She's a synthesis of Kirk and Picard. She's got the judgy attitude of Picard with the tactics of Kirk, and defaults to the hypocrisy of Picard because she won't ever admit to being as Kirklike as she is.

Who would win in a starship combat? Beware of Janeway. Other captains might bluff with the auto-destruct, Kirk actually used it once, in STIII... but Janeway has actually done it several times.
 
I prefer Jean-Luc Picard. I don't think there's anything at all wrong with having paragons in fiction: heaven knows we have so few in real life. I was an adolescent when TNG was on, and I really admired Captain Picard. He had a formative effect on my sense of morality: respect for all life, the pursuit if peace and cooperation, his respect for individual autonomy, and so on.
 
You can say that again. Kirk can think on the fly and is definitely more cunning .

I wonder who would win in a ship to ship combat :think:

Ship combat, that's Sisko's area of expertise. Picard or Janeway wouldn't stand a chance and Kirk wouldn't have time for his schemes when faced with someone who prefers fighting so close that he can smell what his enemy had for dinner last evening.

Most interesting would be a crossover duel between Sisko and Sheridan.

BTW, IIRC the term "Number one" is old Royal Navy tradition.
 
Conservation of energy v relativity and accelerating out of a corner.

A car looses speed in a corner. One has to give it a fair bit of gas to maintain speed. That's an awful lot of energy. If, and it's a big if, I understand relativity right the direction of the cars movement is ultimately irrelevant. So where does the energy go? There is no way the tyre heat energy is equal to the chemical energy of the petrol.

Indeed when the car slows in a corner where has the energy gone? The car moving at speed had kinetic energy. In relativistic terms it changing direction is irrelevant. It now has less kinetic energy. Where has that energy gone?
 
moving forward and moving laterally after the fact (with additional momentum to alter) are not the same energy.
 
The direction of the energy has changed. But where has the chemical energy of the petrol gone?
 
the momentum from the chemical energy is absorbed by the frame of the car, you are now accelerating not only from zero (laterally) but against that momentum.
 
Conservation of energy v relativity and accelerating out of a corner.

A car looses speed in a corner. One has to give it a fair bit of gas to maintain speed. That's an awful lot of energy. If, and it's a big if, I understand relativity right the direction of the cars movement is ultimately irrelevant. So where does the energy go? There is no way the tyre heat energy is equal to the chemical energy of the petrol.

Indeed when the car slows in a corner where has the energy gone? The car moving at speed had kinetic energy. In relativistic terms it changing direction is irrelevant. It now has less kinetic energy. Where has that energy gone?

Relativity works great if considering things in space. Down here, it's a lot different. And by the way...the direction change matters. You're working within reference frame of Earth's gravity well, that matters a lot

Very short, the energy is distributed in many effects. It might come as a surprise, but your whole car imperceptibly heats up. When you drive at constant speed in straight line, most of the energy produced by engine is used to maintain your forward momentum. When you try to turn, you have to overcome the momentum. As your engine pulls in different direction than momentum, it causes stress on the car's structure, which is, due to elasticity of the materials, mostly converted to heat. Some of it goes to compression of air in front of vehicle, as your aerodynamic drag increases when the direction of travel isn't aligned with the axis of the vehicle.
 
The change of direction should not effect the energy, unless it upwards. Eg kinetic becomes potential.

So the whole car flexes and heats slightly, with trivial losses to tyre heat and aerodynamic inefficiencies?
 
The change of direction should not effect the energy, unless it upwards. Eg kinetic becomes potential.

So the whole car flexes and heats slightly, with trivial losses to tyre heat and aerodynamic inefficiencies?


The kinetic energy of that car was not a thing that existed in issolation in the first place. It was created by a force acting on that car to give it that velocity. When reducing the force giving the car velocity, it will naturally slow. This is because of all the frictions involved in its movement. So I think a substantial part of what you are looking at is that you are reducing the force applied to maintaining the velocity, and then the slowing occurs. Because the slowing is the natural state, not the velocity.
 
The loss to friction and heat in the tire contact patch alone is not insignificant.
 
In a reverse universe, heat is reduced when objects collide. Moreover the objects gain energy with each collision. The end of the reverse universe is, obviously, the state with the most possibilities for change, and at the same time (because by definition it is the END) when no change can happen.

A model for a reverse universe (not having to be the only possible model) is our own if time moved backwards.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom