Not Thriving: Vulcan Has No Moon

Then we should move Artistic License examples to that trope page and make this one canonical error only.

After giving it some more thought, the AL pages were supposed to be indexes so I can see the concern with a merge there. However the factual errors and canonical errors are fundamentally different and should not be handled by the same trope. This trope' s title is a terrible name and should be renamed imo. Because of those two things, I think the factual errors should be moved to their own trope unless there isn't enough, in which case they should be moved to the appropriate AL index.

We should have a complete wick check to make an educated decision. If I see correctly we have less than 5 canonical examples on the page itself which hardly warrants a trope page. And the amount of factual errors hardly justifies a branch off from Artistic License - Astronomy.

How many wicks to check?

There's 29 wicks, with at least 1 of those from a Sandbox.

And there's 16 entries on the page.

Do I check all of them?

Yes, please check all (since there's fewer than 50).

Just to be clear, I've been talking about moving the factual errors to the AL page, not to split off from the AL page.

Both wicks and examples?

There's now 30 wicks, 14 coming from other tropes / indexes / the Laconic / Trope Namer related mentions / the Sandbox / Non-entries...

And about 17 entries on the page.

The Trope Namer, Recap.Star Trek S 1 E 1 The Man Trap, has Zero Context uses of this trope...

Funny.Star Trek The Original Series just uses it to turn the Trope Naming quote into a wick.

I dunno what's the right definition, so I'm just listing the 6 wicks that aren't crosswicks, here:

Some might fit better on another trope...

• Film.Queen Of Outer Space: The surviving men of Venus have been banished to a moon orbiting Venus...of which there are apparently several, which you can't see from Earth because of the dense atmosphere.
• Film.Star Trek III The Search For Spock: In an early episode of Star Trek, Spock tells Uhura this in response to her flirting. However, Star Trek III shows a massive "moon" in the Vulcan sky. Justified in that it's so big, in fact, that Vulcan does not technically have a moon; Vulcan is a binary planet. This specificity is quite within Vulcan character.
• Literature.Spocks World: Discussed.
• Series.Star Trek Discovery:
  • Pahvo has two moons, both of which are shockingly close to the surface.
  • Vulcan itself has nearby companions as well, presumably a Call-Back to Star Trek: The Animated Series and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
• StarWarsTheCloneWars.Tropes O To Z: Moons are always depicted to be impossibly close to their planet, and they are quite often at least a quarter of the size of it.
• VideoGame.Starbound: Whenever you are on a planet, you can always see that planet's moons (if any) large in the night sky. Or if you're on one of the moons, you can see the planet and all the other moons. And even though the local sun moves across the sky as you would expect, the planet/moons are in the exact same locations in the sky at all times, which implies some interesting gravitational dynamics.

Edited by Malady on Aug 15th 2018 at 6:40:53 AM

So... um... did we ever figure out what this trope is supposed to be?

- From OP, it seems like it's currently serving as both "Canonical Error" and "Writers Got Astronomy Wrong".

I'm OP. Which is why I asked.

Well, as was previously mentioned, we have Artistic License - Astronomy for astronomy not working like our own...

And there's Series Continuity Error and the other "Lack of Internal Consistency" tropes in Consistency, for continuity errors.

If this is just for Astronomical Continuity Errors... As in, about Astronomy... Would that be The Same, but More Specific in a meaningless way?

Or is astronomy one of the less consistent parts of continuity, even when it's cared about?

I suppose you have a point. What separates this trope from the others?

Yeah, this might be non-tropeworthy for the reasons listed two posts above.

And for the lack of examples.

Cut, then?

I suppose cutting it is the best option.

This is Series Continuity Error. Cut.

What does the "scientifically impossible" version of this trope duplicate? I don't believe we've actually answered that, and we need somewhere to move the examples to.

If we can agree that those examples belong on Artistic License - Astronomy, then we can finish this up.

That seems fine.

Yeah, "continuity error" examples on Series Continuity Error and "scientifically impossible" examples on Artistic License - Astronomy.

We seem to have gone a month with several people agreeing to a course of action and nobody disputing the plan. Is that enough to declare consensus and begin cutting?