More Star Trek nits

Now that the new Star Trek movie is out on DVD and BluRay, it's possible to nitpick it in greater detail. Now follow some nits that I didn't catch in my theater viewing, and some that I were on my mind but which I forgot to mention in my previous posts.

First of all, the USS Kelvin is NCC-0514. Why the leading zero? The Enterprise is not NCC-01701. Nor is Voyager NCC-074656. Or, most forcefully of all, the USS Horizon (whose crew was responsible for the cultural contamination of Sigma Iotia), was not NCC-0176. While we're on the subject of the USS Kelvin, shouldn't the crew wear an insignia other than the Enterprise's arrow? After all, that arrow was not supposed to become the official insignia for all Starfleet until after the time of the original series. Furthermore, the Kelvin crew started their service prior to Nero's temporal incursion, so the alternate timeline excuse doesn't hold water here.

I had been wondering about General Order 13, and it seems to have been made up specifically for this film. But at least it doesn't conflict with previously invented General Orders.

Why are Earth letters used at the Vulcan school for children? One would think that the Vulcans, supposed to be so far ahead of humans in mathematics and science, would have their own symbol for the mathematical constant 3.14159... Same goes for the elements of the periodic table: helium, hydrogen, lithium, etc.

Dr. McCoy's line that his ex-wife took the whole planet in the divorce is mildly amusing, but it does make me wonder about the economics of divorce in the 23rd Century. If money is supposed to be a thing of the past, along with the need to acquire material things, would there be any need for alimony in the future? Or perhaps it can be explained away as that all their friends sided with her, and thus he still had a roof and daily bread but was socially isolated because of the divorce.

In my first post I had talked about Nero's inexplicable stupidity in the face of the fact that he's smart enough to know he's in the past and that Spock exists in the past. But in viewing the film at home, it is now painfully clear that Nero is even smart enough to calculate when Spock will show up in the past!

So Uhura speaks all three dialects of the Romulan language. How exactly did she accomplish this feat, given that the mere act of a Federation ship wandering into Romulan space is an act of war? Or does Spock somehow know Romulan and taught Uhura?

I had also talked about the importance of coincidences in the film in my first post. A coincidence I had missed is that Sulu started the ship late when the cadet-manned ships went off to Vulcan's rescue. If Sulu hadn't made the amateurish mistake that caused the Enterprise to be late to Vulcan, the Enterprise would've been destroyed like the others.

But why doesn't Spock beam closer to entrance of the temple when he beams down to rescue the elders? He knows time is of the essence, yet has himself beamed down to a point where he has to run up the side of a mountain to enter the temple.

Apparently the pooch Porthos from Star Trek: Enterprise has his own fan club, and that club hoped that Scotty's reference to "Admiral Archer's prize beagle" referred to the NX-01 skipper's best friend. As for me, I'm more willing to believe that another Starfleet officer named Archer, related or not to Jonathan Archer, would also have a dog, specifically a beagle, than I am to believe that both Jonathan and Porthos were still alive and active in Starfleet in Kirk's time.

And speaking of Scotty, I'm wondering about the way he falls down with a bunch of water out of a pipe after a slight miscalculation beaming into the Enterprise at warp. The Enterprise apparently has artificial gravity similar in strength to that of Earth. On Earth, wouldn't falling out of a pipe with so much water kill you by breaking all your bones, if not by drowning?