You're assuming they had steel or deckplates available or that the cargo bay was useful as-is. Allow me to point a couple of things out for you:

1. They already had to use a bunch of their resources to fix battle damage to their ship and it's unlikely Vulcan would have re-supplied them with extras since it was a short jaunt to Earth to .. uh.. be arrested. They also couldn't scrounge up anything to barter, thus relying on selling Kirk's glasses, lending credibility to the idea that they didn't have random valuable crap just lying around.

2. Scotty made a point of having to beam up a lot of water. The less water, the better. Even after shrinking the room he still had uncertainties about whether he'd be able to pull it off.

I wouldn't mind but the movie did spend a significant amount of time setting this up. "It's not just the whales, it's the water!"

And how would not seeing them be in any way better? There's no reason to assume an all-or-nothing scenario.

Heh. In other words: "see more." You really kinda made my point for me with that one.

What they have on hand they do not have to barter for. Getting steel plating from a junk yard dealer would require just as much effort, possibly more since he wouldn't likely take only information in trade unless it was a sports almanac.

Getting a little ahead of your self, there.

Actually nobody in this thread said they used transparent aluminum.

Yes. The Klingon Bird of Prey has flight sensors integrated into its design to allow it to fly, it's reasonable to assume it doesn't have whale sensors integrated into its cargo bay.

Seeing as how they only traveled in time with one round trip, this question is senseless. Instead you should ask what would Mr. Scott want to plan for? Would he want to verify the whales are safe after beamup? Yes. If the sensors inside showed the whale in distress would he want to at least make a visual account of it? Yes. Would the transparent tank be better for them to have if the time travel jump failed and they were stranded? Yep.

Why don't you go into a little more detail here? Produce a diagram for showing that they could have safely cut a hole between decks without, say, cutting through main power lines or something and that it would have been done in roughly the same amount of time. Bonus points if you can show us their parts manifest that shows they had the hatch already pre-fabbed and the metal for the walls ready to be installed for just such a purpose.

I stand corrected, thank you.

It's hard enough to be scratchproof to the vast majority of things we encounter in our daily lives. Once you're harder than quartz and tool steel, there's not much you'll encounter in normal circumstances that can scratch you.

It's really not the spinel aspect that I find neat. It's the blurb about their process. They say they got it to work by two things: one, extreme purity (no surprise there), and two, mixing. No matter how well you try to mix fine powders together by any normal means such as shaking, you're never going to get a perfect mixture where all of the particles pack down together to their optimally dense arrangement. Apparently they've come up with a process that allows just that (they don't go into details).

Well, that's worth far more than spinel. Cheap and scalable production of materials comprised of perfectly arranged microstructures? It seems like such a thing could things in every field of materials science, from batteries to superconductors.

If, that is, it lives up to how the article makes it sound. TFA is rather high on hype and short on details.

You most certainly can. It makes sense from a "show the audience what's happening" point of view AND it makes sense from a "if I'm responsible for the safety of the beasties then I need to be able to see them" point of view. If you have a problem with the time travel element or the origin of the probe then you are, pardon the expression, lightyears away from judging the quality of the movie based on the mistaken impression that Klingon sensors negate the need for a transparent tank.

There are too many imature idiots and spoiled brats in college. That's a plain and simple fact.
So many times I've wished to be rich enough to start my own ivory-leage style university for that exact reason.

Best teachers in the world. Best equipment in the world. Best building in the world. Best campus in the world.

But:
Babble in class: You're out.
Babble repeatedly: Get a warning.
Cheat: Fail and you get a warning.

Drink and misbehave: You're out.
Drink and misbehave repeatedly: Get a warning.

Dress and/or behave like a bum: Get a notice, then a warning.

Three warnings and you get booted from campus for all eternity, you're last semester tuition forfeight. End of story.

I am effing sick and tired of these countless spoiled f*ckwits clogging up the first two or three semesters until they're weeded out by the math curiculum in CS.

I further propose that every student should do 15 months of German-style civil service (Zivildienst) taking care of elderly or handycapped or do some other solid useful work like fixing damns or cleaning out environmental disasters before he/she is allowed to enter any higher education of any kind whatsoever. Grow the f*ck up before you waste my, the teacher/professors and everybody elses time!

If you want to drink yourself into a coma or slack off for a year or two: By all means, go ahead. Every yound person should take a year or two to travel the world, slack off and surf in indonesia or hawaii. But they should also be sternly corrected if they can't act like grown-ups when they finally come to college.

It's also for this very reason that I'm probalby going to roll in a remote tutoring college. (I'm planing on heading a CS degree or someting real soon now in part-time)

No, I'm nitpicking at the nitpicking of the pointlessness of putting the windows in the tanks. It wasn't a valid complaint.

Nope. You see, I went in without missing the point of going to a movie. For example: I can totally buy that the crew of a stolen alien starship decided to spend a few months repairing it so they can fly home cloaked to turn themselves in for blowing up a more valuable ship that they had also stolen only to be side tracked by a time-travel excursion to save the whales. However I have trouble believing that the radiation shielding of a nuclear reactor on board an American aircraft carrier was weak enough jam a Klingon disruptor without affecting the crew aboard. The difference? I wanted to go see a movie about a crew repairing a stolen alien ship returning home to face justice but were side-tracked by a time travel excursion to save the whales along the way, but was not interested in lazy writing about how shitty a weapon from an advanced space-faring warrior civilization is.

Also so the crew taking care of them could see them and make sure that they arrive still living. But don't let common sense reign in a scenario involving a crew piloting a stolen alien starship in poor condition.

Alrighty then.

Everything else in KSP has had months of testing (perhaps even years) and they change fundamental things like the aerodynamics model without letting it be tested by the established community?

But isn't that so in the Kerbal spirit? ;) Hmm, what's the coding equivalent of forgetting a ladder? :)

Yeah, the old aerodynamics was pretty horrible. Add a nosecone to your blunt-tipped rocket and it increases the drag? What kind of logic is that? It needed to be fixed.

There's a couple balance issues I'd like to see fixed, mind you. For example, it's possible to make small solar ion-powered aircraft in Kerbal. But only small ones, because all of the ion engines available are tiny, and all of the fixed solar panels are tiny, so while technically it's possible to make bigger craft, the necessary part spam makes the game unplayable. Fuel for ion engines is also absurdly and unrealistically expensive for no obvious reason. Yet solar panels and RTGs produce orders of magnitude more power than they should for a given size, if ion engine power to thrust ratios for a given ISP are used as the baseline.

Drop xenon costs, tweak power production / consumption for existing hardware, and add in nuclear reactor power sources (after all, they have nuclear rockets, we know kerbals understand nuclear physics), and and you could balance that out pretty well in terms of both gameplay and at least slightly more approaching realism.

(Note that one may be tempted to say that the ion thrusters are far too high power, but at least that's plausible if we assume that they're MPD thrusters with some type of advanced cooling system - you can get crazy power to weight ratios (by ion standards) out of MPD thrusters if you could somehow supply them many megawatts of power and dissipate all the waste heat - they manage it in pulsed mode, at least. But Kerbal's solar panel area-to-thrust ratios at the given ISP are not even close to being compliant with the laws of physics)