MovieChat Forums > Star Trek: First Contact (1996) Discussion > Building a warp drive out of some disuse...

Building a warp drive out of some disused ICBMs and spare parts??

posted 9 years ago by zooeyhall
10 replies | jump to latest

Ok---the Earth has been through a devastating war, and people are living in huts, technology is gone, and basically everything has gone to hell and back to a primitive level. Yet this Cochrane guy is single-handedly able to build a warp drive in his workshop, out of some disused ICBMs and spare parts? Something that the best scientists and engineers weren't able to do in the years prior when Earth's technology was still intact? Where did he get the anti-matter? The di-lithium? Did he just happen to find some anti-matter lying around on a shelf in the back room? Even with our most advanced technology today, we can produce only a few atoms of the stuff. Huge plot hole!!!

[–] ManuelManipulation 9 years ago

To be honest they never showed us the rest of the world, just Cochrane's encampment of people who helped build the phoenix up in the mountains, odd place to build an ICBM launcher, but whatevs.
Was he working for himself, a company? Who knows.

We know San Fran was never touched by nuke war and the war was amongst Asian countries with some terrorist bombs going off in a couple of cities on the east coast ( I read this back in 96 somewhere) the film makers probably kept details of this WWIII nebulous for some reason.

NYC was probably destroyed because nobody in the old treky verse is from NY, sucks for me... I hope I got vaporized instantly :(

[–] mikeyg24 9 years ago

just Cochrane's encampment of people who helped build the phoenix up in the mountains, odd place to build an ICBM launcher

You're not saying you believe Cochrane and his people built the silo are you? Because that would be very silly.

Either way missile silo's are positioned for strategic purposes so why not the mountains? It's possible that the missile, along with the silo, was existent from before the war but for one reason or other had never been fired.

Hey! You're not old enough to drink! Now go and die for your country!!!

[–] arto-helenius 9 years ago

why would they need antimatter? Or dilithium crystals? it is possible that it was nuclear missile, so maybe he used fission (or fusion) energy to generate enough energy. In Star Trek universe space travel was a lot more advanced than it is currently in our world (eugenics war in 1992-1996 and Khan was sent then in space in a sleeper ship) In some stories it is told that dilithium was found from moon of Jupiter, so it was available. In those small 24th century shuttles they have warp drive, but not huge antimatter intermix chamber, because they use some other method to generate enough energy for short flights. Nowadays we have electric cars and all new ships are electrically driven. They use diesel engines, gas turbines and nuclear power in some military ships to generate electricity. It doesn't mean that all electric cars and ships have nuclear plant or diesel engines, but they use rechargeable battery to store that energy.

http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Dilithium

[–] Klein_Returns 9 years ago

Interesting.

[–] 9 years ago

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[–] zooeyhall 9 years ago

Oh puh-leeze! Comparing Cochrane's building of a warp drive to Henry Ford' creation of the Model T? Come off it dude...there's a world of difference here. The Otto engine existed from the 1880's, and self-propelled cars with gas engines were being built a decade or more before the first Model T appeared.

Ford didn't invent the motor car. Or even the basic technology. I stand by my original post, and your stupid non sequitor "failure to think through implied logic" is a spurious red herring argument. Go and study your technological history before making such asinine statements.

[–] 9 years ago

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[–] theguitarman18 8 years ago

For starters, Henry Ford didn't live in a small camp with a handful of survivors after the entire world was devastated by an atomic war...

[–] etoatreides 8 years ago

That bit of the movie has always bugged me. I bet the only reason why a rag tag group of humans living in the forest made first contact was to save money. It's a lot cheaper to have a small set in a forest and a couple extras taken from Xena than to actually depict a futuristic pre-Starfleet humanity.

[–] mikethemartian (6750) 3 years ago

:-)