Willkommen, jolan tru, welcome!

I'm not someone who customarily judges the book by its cover. I am well aware that movies are usually not as lurid as their trailers. Still, the first trailer for "Star Trek Into Darkness" creates expectations that I don't like at all. It borrows heavily from other action and fantasy franchises, rather than from previous Trek movies, and it puts much emphasis on the villain's vengeance and his trail of destruction. While I had many issues with how J.J. Abrams handled the reboot in "Star Trek (2009)", my apprehension is that there will be even less Star Trek spirit in the upcoming movie, perhaps except for some unnecessary namedropping.

While the course of the story and the identity of the villain is mere speculation, one technical aspect is already evident in the trailer and in the IMAX preview. The Enterprise (alt.) is built to operate under water. This may not seem like a big deal, considering that the stress on the hull at warp is possibly much higher than under the sea. Still, the concept of the submerged Enterprise is flawed, if not childish. The intention was apparently to enrich the movie with a James Bond-like gimmick, also considering that underwater CG effects look still cooler than those in space.

Anyway, if we believe in the published size figures for a moment, the ship is some 170m tall. This means that to be useful as a submarine it would require a corresponding water depth to start with, and the bottom of the engineering hull would have to withstand as much as 17atm. Sure, there is nothing that enhanced forcefields couldn't accomplish in the world of Star Trek. But that's only one of several additional features that would have to go into the design of the ship, others being a suited propulsion system (impulse engine under water - bad idea!) and special sensors such as sonar. And everything just for the very unlikely scenario that the captain feels like going down with his ship and crew. Not to mention that hiding a 725m behemoth may work in the open sea but would be a ludicrous idea near the coast. There is a good reason for spaceships and submarines being radically different designs in real engineering. And even if 23rd century technology may allow to build starships like Swiss Army knives, they should still remain where they belong - in space.

Bernd Schneider