Stefan Viljoen wrote:

> Its movieland! Good science almost never makes for good drama.
> 
> Its like Captain Picard saying "Full stop!" on the Enterprise, and in ten
> seconds they are at relative dead stop from going several hundred times
> lightspeed.

Never mind the "minor detail" of the fact that "stationary" doesn't 
exist in outer space.

Or that you don't actually need engines in order to move, only to 
accelerate or deccelerate.

Or the fact that things don't make that "swoshing" noise in space. In 
fact, they don't make *any* noise!

Or the Weighted Companion Cube will never threaten to stab you and, in 
fact, cannot speak.

> I wonder exactly how much energy you'd need to decelerate ten
> grammes of mass, from, say, 100 * c to 0 in ten seconds - if
> Einsteinian "thou shalt NOT exceed, or even closely approach, C" did not
> apply. Nevermind a gigatonne starship.

Well, the fastest starships reputedly reach Warp 10 (i.e., 10c). Never 
mind the "minor detail" that this would cause the ship to travel 
backwards in time, and have an imaginary mass. (Irony?)

> But it isn't good drama to have the crew become a biological soup one
> molecule thick against the viewscreen each time Geordi or Wesley steps on
> the footbrake, thus exposing them all to 100000000000000000000000000G of
> deceleration.

Perhaps you're forgetting the Inertial Dampers?

Even the teleporters have Hiesenburg Compensators on them...

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