Nero beats Shinzon, two rounds to one, and it’s the ship that settles it. I know that’s the one in the title, so you’ve got it up front, and the full death match is at the bottom of this page.
This is the very beginning of the Know-It-All Files. Put simply, I’ve gone through the internet, the likes of Quora and the comment sections and everywhere else, and I’ve found your burning questions about Star Trek. I get the chance to show off, and hopefully you’re a know-it-all yourself by the end of it. So welcome aboard the USS Know-It-All. I’m your captain.
The Corrupt Admiral Who Hurt the Most
Stefan Ritter asks: of all the corrupt admirals seen in Star Trek, who’s your favorite and why?
There have been a few. The most recent was Admiral Buenamigo from Star Trek: Lower Decks season 3, in the finale, “The Stars at Night.” There are the classics, like Norah Satie from the Next Generation episode “The Drumhead.” She was pretty awesome, and she came out of retirement just for that situation. There’s Toddman from Deep Space Nine’s “The Die Is Cast,” and I love that episode. Erik Pressman from The Next Generation’s “The Pegasus.” Alexander Marcus in Star Trek Into Darkness. Leyton from Deep Space Nine’s “Homefront” and “Paradise Lost.” Mark Jameson from “Too Short a Season.” Who could forget Dougherty from Star Trek: Insurrection. And from “Ensign Ro” there was Admiral Kennelly.
But for me the cake goes to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and specifically to Cartwright.
Cartwright goes back to Star Trek IV in terms of importance. He was there. He was fundamental. So that particular betrayal is one of the bigger, more important betrayals you can really delve into. If you have to have a favorite bad admiral, Cartwright’s definitely mine.
Why Science Fiction Works on Me
From World of Science Fiction on Quora, Michael asks what element makes science fiction enjoyable for me.
If you’ve ever dreamed or imagined anything beyond our world, that’s where a lot of sci-fi takes its cues. For me it might go as far back as Back to the Future, which gave me my first idea that the future was a thing. Then I got into Star Trek, and Star Trek was the first place where I fundamentally began to think about what it would take for us to get that kind of world.
I’ve always jokingly called it Gene Roddenberry socialism. Really it’s mankind working toward a future together, where we go out and explore because it’s a post-scarcity era. With the invention of the replicator, we could just make things out of thin air. Anybody could have anything, which means the acquisition of wealth becomes secondary, becomes unimportant. So it’s much more about moving forward and advancing as a species, and those things capture my imagination.
Isaac Asimov’s run of books, I, Robot, Foundation, made me begin to look at science fiction beyond that. Even in my fantasy role playing I was looking for ways to look to the future, whether it’s steampunk or the actual quote unquote future. The dystopian futures are there, but I’m much more of a utopian future person. Star Trek, in other words.
So the elements, for me, are hope, a better tomorrow, technological advancement, exploration, and the idea of opening our minds as a species. The Day the Earth Stood Still stands out as one of those pivotal sci-fi movies that genuinely made me go, wow, what if.
The Top Three Engineers
Michael, again from World of Science Fiction on Quora, asks who was the most proficient and knowledgeable engineer on Star Trek, and what distinguishes that person from the others.
Right below this question, a guy had put, why do you want to make everything a competition? Because we’re humans. Quantifying traits has been in us since the first Viking tossed a log, looked at his buddy and said, you can’t do any better. Translated from the original Viking.
When you line them all up across the main shows, it has to do with difficulty.
Number three is Miles O’Brien. He had to do an awful lot with another species’ technology when Starfleet took over Deep Space Nine for the Bajoran government. O’Brien had a Herculean effort in front of him, which was getting their technology to speak to our technology. At its core a lot of it serves the same purposes. Whether you have a food replicator or a food synthesizer, it’s ultimately the same idea. But rethinking how they think so it works with how we think is a huge leap.
Number two, and you’re going to stay with me for a second, is B’Elanna Torres from Star Trek: Voyager. She had an even more Herculean effort than O’Brien. She had to maintain a Starfleet vessel on hopes and a prayer, 70,000 light-years from Earth, with no viable repair options. They didn’t have full-on industrial replicators. They could replicate some smaller parts, but ultimately she had to do what she could with nothing, and sometimes they found people they could trade with and jury-rigged something together. So she had the job O’Brien had, and she had to do it with no connection to Starfleet and no ability to get regulation parts whatsoever. They got from point A to point B, and it’s all on the back of what she did as an engineer.
Number one, and before I get all the hate, hear me out, because this isn’t pandering. It’s Scotty, from the original series.
Scotty had to do a lot of what the others had to do, except he had nobody who had done it first. O’Brien and Torres had the journals. He wrote the book those two followed to become amazing. He went where no one had gone before and actually had to make sure the ship survived two five-year missions. That’s ten years of deep space exploration with very little contact with Starfleet, other than occasionally at far outlying outposts, not to mention the times they got in trouble.
Geordi La Forge gets the honorable mention. I’m a product of The Next Generation. My future exists in the 25th century, and Geordi was a miracle worker in his own right, building on the foundation Scotty laid. He did plenty of impressive things on his own. I do believe Torres and O’Brien dealt with circumstances well beyond anything Geordi dealt with on a regular basis. If you want to go into Enterprise or Discovery, I’m totally down, but when it comes to people who had to do a lot with a little, you start with Scotty and move forward from there.
Is Warp Speed Possible?
From Physics on Quora: is it possible to achieve warp speed, what would the process of building the ship be, and what challenges might arise for the ship and its crew? Leave it to a bunch of actual science reality nerds to come to the science fiction nerds for their answers. I’m kidding.
By today’s standards, no. That’s the simplest answer I can give you. We live in Star Trek land, though, so by tomorrow’s standards, maybe. As for building it: lots and lots of years, and guys like you working with the applied physics and mechanical engineering people to make it happen. Basically, get the guys from The Big Bang Theory.
Seriously though, the challenges. When you’re traveling faster than light, debris is a big problem. Each of the ships has that little dish guy on the front of it, and it’s doing a job. That’s the deflector dish. At all points while moving forward, it’s projecting an invisible energy field that moves debris out of the way. It’s very much like a reverse tractor beam, only it’s creating a kind of energy scoop.
There was a book once that gave the design. A warp shell is created, and it moves in a way that looks very much like a chevron. The delta. That symbol symbolizes warp speed. The little star in the middle is your ship, so to speak, and the point at the front is created by your deflector dish, because you have to create that triangular effect so things roll off the front shields and don’t hurt you.
Another real life issue with faster than light travel is time dilation, the concept that the faster you move, the more time passes on Earth than passes for you. This is not how time dilation actually works, by the way. If you want that, please go to a science channel. There are many of them, and they’ll give you scientifically based answers. Mr. Know-It-All is giving you an answer based in fictional engineering for Star Trek, and in Star Trek’s warp, dilation isn’t even a thing. But in real life, say for every day you travel, a year passes on Earth. You’re gone three days and three years have passed. You come back three days later and three more have passed. You’ve been out six years. None of those are accurate time frames. I’m not a scientist. I’m just a general busybody who knows things.
The other hurdle may ultimately be supplies, because in the time it takes you to go and do certain things, you’d have to keep yourself supplied. I’d love for the real life scientists out there to jump in and educate us, because that’s literally what this channel is about.
B’Elanna Torres Was Exactly What She Needed to Be
Justin Crest asks about someone who thought Voyager’s B’Elanna Torres was too Klingon and should have been used to show Latin culture, simply because Roxann Dawson, the actress who portrayed her, is Latina.
First off, Mr. Know-It-All is Puerto Rican. And I was a Klingon in my persona for Starfleet, the international Star Trek fan club, which I’m no longer part of. I was a commissioned chief engineer and later commander of the USS Star Quest, which up until a few years back was a ship in good standing.
I disagree. The point of Star Trek is to take real life and create allegorical mythology, stories that teach us something through the characters. Klingons were a stand-in for Cold War Russia. Romulans were based on communist China. B’Elanna comes in as a half-breed, if you will, half Klingon, half human, and her human side is Torres, Latina. She was a great allegory.
There are almost no Boricua Taíno left, the original Indians that made up the Puerto Ricans. There are no Aztecs anymore. What you have are Mexicans and Puerto Ricans and Hondurans and Argentinians and Spaniards, the whole bit. Everyone’s mixed with something else. We are all very much that combination, and if you ask any one of us, some of our women are hotheaded, and some of our men are too.
I believe she was exactly what she needed to be. Within the concept of an allegory, she was that Latina presence aboard Voyager and within the Star Trek universe. Obviously today we love to have characters who are diverse, absolutely. But her being that allowed the series to tell unique stories from a perspective she could come from, and that was a very important place.
Death Match: Shinzon vs. Nero
Shields up. The question: in a fight, who wins between Shinzon from Star Trek: Nemesis and Nero? The question said Star Trek Into Darkness. Nero is from the 2009 J.J. Abrams reboot of Star Trek.
The tale of the tape. Shinzon was a clone of Starfleet captain Jean-Luc Picard, created by the Romulans to replace Picard with a Romulan agent. He later became the leader of the Reman people, staged a successful coup against the Romulan Senate, and plotted the annihilation of Earth in the name of Reman freedom. Nero was a Romulan miner from the 24th century and captain of the mining vessel Narada. Following the destruction of Romulus in 2387, he sought vengeance against those he felt were responsible, which ultimately got him transported back in time to 2233.
Both of these guys are strong fighters in their own right. Nero is a very, very physical combatant. Shinzon has combat training too, but he has the more interesting background. He grew up in the mines of Remus, and he has actual military training. Nero doesn’t. He’s a miner, a miner who got himself some Borg technology and a very powerful ship.
Three rounds. Round one, intellectually, I believe Shinzon takes the win. His military training and his prowess as a warrior take the cake. Round two, physically, I think Nero comes out on top. Round three is the ships, the Narada versus the Scimitar. The Scimitar is definitely a bird of prey in the literal sense, not the name of the ship, meaning it’s a ship designed to hunt people down. But the Narada has Borg technology, and I think the Narada wins a battle of ships. Fire everything.
That’s two for Nero and one for Shinzon. In my opinion, it’s undoubtedly Nero who comes out on top.
If you disagree on the death match, let’s talk about it. Tell me your favorite bad admiral, give me your own top three engineers, and submit your questions for the next Know-It-All Files (tag them KnowItAllFiles, all one word, and I’ll happily read them). The conversation lives in the comments on the video above. Never forget, everyone loves a know-it-all.
