Nerd Rage
devcentral.f5.com
devcentral.f5.com
Wha?
So when the Enterprise comes near to the Earth what happens? It just can't escape the Earth's gravity, or does it only get stuck when it's near the Earth's surface? It's not the moon you know; it has engines.
NCC-1701-D is supposed to weigh about 400,000 tonnes. Leaving the Earth's surface to reach LEO requires a delta-v of 10km/s so you've got to accelerate 400,000 tonnes to 10km/s. The Space Shuttle does this and it weighs around 2,000 tonnes. So are we really expected to think that a vehicle 200x the size of the Space Shuttle could not be launched into orbit?
Approaching the Earth is a completely different issue, and I don't understand why you mention it. It simply isn't a problem if you're already in space because you make sure you go into some sort of orbit (elliptical, parabolic or hyperbolic - any will do). You easily have enough speed to do this because you're falling into the gravitational well, and you simply need to deflect your path to one side, miss the atmosphere, and you're on a hyperbolic orbit. Slow a little and you're in a large elliptical orbit. Slingshot properly around the Lagrange points (including "bouncing off" the unstable ones) and you can convert to a "standard orbit" with very little effort.
Launching from the Earth's surface requires a huge amount of energy, and it's been stated that it wasn't done.
Now, what was your question?
This appears to be the key to the nerd rage. If Starfleet didn't build the craft on Earth then showing them in the new movie being built on Earth is a mistake. But it's not a question of physics.
The comments about the physics also sparked a conversation about escape velocity here in the office. It's easy to compute that orbital velocity at grazing altitude is about 8 km/s. People confuse that with escape velocity, which is sqrt(2) faster, or about 11.3 km/s.
The real confusion arises in that a craft never needs to reach escape velocity to escape. You can happily escape without ever travelling faster than 6km/hr - walking pace.
If this confuses you, it's fun to work out why. And how. And why NASA doesn't do that. The sums are fairly easy, it's the conceptualisation that's hard.
Sorry to nitpick, but I couldn't resist as I used to have the same misconception.
On the other hand, sometimes I think that fans are the biggest impediment to good storytelling.
Who cares if it's on Earth? Being non-canonical isn't a crime -- it's about telling a good story.
(<fan> Besides, I'm pretty sure the new movie involves time travel, so that's not even the "real" Enterprise. </fan>)