Sparky Prime wrote:I hated the "transwarp" beaming thing. That just screamed that they came up with it for nothing more than plot convenience, completely ignoring everything Star Trek had ever established about the technology. Transporter range, what's that? Can't beam onto a ship moving faster than the speed of light? Pssh. It's even more glaring when the first film goes out of the way to point out how difficult it is to lock on to a moving object in the first place.
The way a lot of that stuff felt was the way pop culture used to view Trek before the movies and TNG caught on, where regular non-fan people were familiar with the basic concepts of the show but didn't care about the underpinnings and thought behind them, so they treated those elements like a joke, like magic. To me, the way the '09 film plays out seems like it was written that way, by people who are familiar with it but don't care about it, they are simply elements to be used however they want - so when they write themselves into a corner one way, they can "magic!" their way out with another. Chekov is so amazing because he beams Kirk out while moving when nobody else could, Kirk carries so much momentum that he breaks the pointless glass floor, but somehow not all the momentum he had or else he'd have been strawberry jam all over the transporter room; yet as you said, they beam onto a ship at high warp from a stationary planet with little effort only 20 minutes later, and hardly the worse for wear - it's VERY clumsy to have those 2 scenes in the same film.
I thought about counting the Phoenix, but decided against because the stage 1 rocket and cowlings are shed when she breaks atmo, so the first stage stuff is what is really being aviation-like; while the post-orbit second stage ship borne from that discarded stuff has warp nacelles and exposed sections that wouldn't be feasible for in-atmo aviation.
True enough, but you have to figure they'd have to get back down to Earth and Picard said he'd seen the ship in the Smithsonian. Not sure how though, as you say it's not designed to be feasible for atmospheric flight.
Were I to speculate, I'd say the Phoenix's cockpit capsule was sent back down with the rest of the ship left in orbit to be retrieved later. But it isn't so obvious that it MUST be that way, they could have cheated their way back down - not seeing how that'd work though, it's just warp engines and a cockpit, can't picture it gracefully landing in any way or having landing gear at all, much less the flight systems capable of landing.
See, that one's a camcorder, that one's a camera, that one's a phone, and they're doing "Speak no evil, See no evil, Hear no evil", get it?
