Remember from your physics class that the force from gravity is proportional to the product of the masses of the two interacting bodies divided by the square of their distances:Īlso remember that the acceleration of a body is equal to the force acting upon it divided by mass:
Instead, I’ll whine about one particular science fact that should play into the storytelling at this point: the acceleration caused by gravity. I could argue about the relative timing of deceleration from faster-than-light speed, or the scramble time of Earth’s defense forces, but all of those points could be waived away by invoking the fiction part of SciFi. They were, in fact, close enough to the Earth that their battle should have been clearly visible to any on-planet observers. However, light travels at ~300,000 km/s, so they were less than one second away from their destination when they “crashed” into regular space. I can tell why they chose it: the moon’s orbit is about 380,000 km from Earth, so they were able to show some sexy shots of the moon in the background while the Killerprise took the Enterprise apart. I was surprised at this number, when I saw the movie. Sulu! We’ve come out of warp 237,000 km from our destination (Earth, remember?). Then, surprise! The Killerprise shows up and blasts our heros out of the ‘warp stram’ and into regular space. So, after apparently escaping from the Killerprise and evil Admiral RoboCop, the Enterprise is travelling merrily along at faster-than-light speeds towards earth. Nope, I want to harp on a single point that bothers me: the physics of the USS Enterprise falling into Earth’s atmosphere. Nor will I cut into the overall problems with the plausibility of a Star Fleet ship undertaking a state-sanctioned assassination.
I’m not going to write about these problems. now!Ī lot has been written already about other problems with STID, including plenty on the infamous fan-service underwear scene and the whitewashing of a famous ethnic character. If you want to avoid spoilers for Star Trek Into Darkness, stop reading…. UPDATE: I fixed all the formulas with the WP LaTeX plugin, so you can read the sub- and superscripts now.