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Re: Why retcons don't bother me anymore
Posted By: Stephen L. (SoundEffect) <soundeffect@hotmail.com>	Date: 5/21/11 8:47 a.m.
: When possible, internal consistency. If nobody ever referred to the : Enterprise as having a number of decks other than 24, then I'd say that : fits the bill for the best value of "right" you're going to get. : I'd probably still take exception to someone saying "in real life the : Enterprise has 24 decks" if an inconsistency is observed, but to the : extent you want to talk about minutiae at all, there needs to be a : baseline: so it's internal consistency. : I think where there isn't any, AND where there are no external references, : like real-life sources in the case of car models, if the detail doesn't : affect plot or other factors, I probably just throw up my hands and say : that I don't know how many decks the Enterprise has, and neither does : anybody else :) : Any fictional value. Given that we already know that it's common practice to : adjust the heights of actors in certain shots to minimize the difference : between them-- I've got no evidence this was ever done on Star Trek or for : the Picard character, but I'd reserve the right for them to do it. : By way of response: should Frodo Baggins' height be Elijah Wood's actual : height? Or do you think they can make it any fictional value and consider : that to be the 'truth'? Yeah, I know there's a ton of examples where you couldn't relay on actor heights. We know Frodo is created with camera trickery and CG work to make his stature appear smaller than average humans. Picard is not and it would be the case for most non-sci-fi television/movies. I was wondering what your stance was. For many Star Trek ships, even some that have never had any or much screen time, I've been able to determine the number of decks. For Starfleet ships specifically, there's an easy was to go about this. One is the caveat that in 90% of cases, each deck of the ship is built to the same height...this is so during television production they can reuse the same dozen rooms and corridors to represent any deck. The second is to measure the minimum window displacement vertically to determine 1 full deck height. Beyond the constructed set corridors there's some height per deck for wiring/ventilation/grav plating, etc., but that is taken into account when measuring the exterior. One notable exception is the Enterprise-A which has deck heights of about 8ft in the saucer and connecting dorsal, but goes to 12ft for the secondary hull. This is reflected in the vertical window heights though and is still easy to obtain a deck-count from. To impose a silly stance, some of what you've been arguing against being able to determine the 'correct' height of a fictional vehicle could translate into the real world. What's your stance here: You and I see a tall building with lots of windows. I count the windows, top to bottom and tell you how many levels the building has. From your argument for fictional vehicle size, would you extend it to not accepting my count, but having to go into the building to verify how many levels? If we assume there are not windows on each floor, we can probably still determine an overall level count from measuring the minimum distance between windows vertically.

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