What is an "ion pod?" - Page 6

StarryEyed · July 21 2010, 05:20 AM

A beaker full of death wrote:

Green Shirt wrote:

That was probably the most unexplained, therefore confusing plot points in all of TOS. But of course, nowhere near rivals the entire Alternative Factor episode.

Really? If ever there was something that didn't need explaining, it was the ion pod.

Only if all the fans are lawyers.

Nothing person Beaker, but you are obviously out of your element. If the pod contains sensors and the sensor output can be reduced to data capable of being read and understood by a human being inside the pod, than the same output can be fed to systems inside the ship so that nobody need be inside the pod. That discrepancy does need to be explained because it's very obvious to people with a technical background - as obvious as Cogley's incompetence is to a real lawyer.

There is a fairly easy explanation though: The pod the Enterprise was carrying was a prototype without an interface to the ship's systems. It was experimental. It wasn't considered a big deal to require a person inside it because it was easy enough to rig a simple red-alert signal through its communications interface that could warn a person to get out fast.

Destructor · July 21 2010, 06:00 AM

StarryEyed wrote:

There is a fairly easy explanation though: The pod the Enterprise was carrying was a prototype without an interface to the ship's systems. It was experimental. It wasn't considered a big deal to require a person inside it because it was easy enough to rig a simple red-alert signal through its communications interface that could warn a person to get out fast.

Or perhaps the pod's instrumentation needed to be calibrated on-the-fly to compensate for the ion storm's effects, and a direct link from the ship to the pod could provide some kind of 'conduit' for the ion storm effects to leapfrog into the ship's systems, so it had some kind of non-networked system that couldn't be controlled remotely, in order to protect the ship. Although if that was the case... why would the pod EVER need to be jettisoned?

StarryEyed · July 21 2010, 06:30 AM

Destructor wrote:

StarryEyed wrote:

There is a fairly easy explanation though: The pod the Enterprise was carrying was a prototype without an interface to the ship's systems. It was experimental. It wasn't considered a big deal to require a person inside it because it was easy enough to rig a simple red-alert signal through its communications interface that could warn a person to get out fast.

Or perhaps the pod's instrumentation needed to be calibrated on-the-fly to compensate for the ion storm's effects, and a direct link from the ship to the pod could provide some kind of 'conduit' for the ion storm effects to leapfrog into the ship's systems, so it had some kind of non-networked system that couldn't be controlled remotely, in order to protect the ship. Although if that was the case... why would the pod EVER need to be jettisoned?

Your explanation works in conjunction with the explanation that the pod was a vulnerable extrusion that might even prevent raising shields in its area.

All they really needed to say was that it was an experimental pod. That gives enough wriggle room to suppose it needs to be manned.

Captain Robert April · July 21 2010, 07:11 AM

Basically, the pod was a small doohickey with a guy inside that's deployed to take readings of any conveniently passing ion storms. This is dangerous to the ship for two reasons: when it's deployed, the shields can't be raised, putting the ship in greater danger than it would be normally, and because the pod is physically attached to the ship, there is added stress at the point of connection. If that connection breaks, we could be talking severe damage to the ship, including having the pod slammed into the hull, hence why it has to be jettisoned when things get too hairy.

I suppose the 1960's equivalent would be a B-52 going up into a hurricane with some sort of sensor drone with a guy inside, hanging out of the bomb bay or attached to the wing, and the pilot having to dump it when the turbulence gets too heavy; the inherent drama being whether or not the guy in the drone can get back inside the plane before the drone gets cut loose.

As for why it has to be manned, as mentioned above, the nature of ion storms makes remote operation and monitoring of the pod problematic at best.

And why Finney and not Ensign Ricky? Nobody in the military has just one job. You've got your primary occupation (in my case while in the Air Force, Administration Specialist, in Finney's case, records officer), your "war skill" (what you do when the shooting starts; I worked in Rapid Runway Repair, and learned all kinds of nifty ways to patch up a torn up runway and about the various types of bombs that are used to tear up the aforementioned runway...who knows what Finney did when the order came to assume battle stations), and apparently in Starfleet, when you're on a ship on a scientific mission, you occasionally have scientific duties to perform, like manning the ion pod when it's your turn.

And don't worry, Ensign Ricky's name is somewhere on that duty roster, too. It was just Finney's turn.

Timo · July 21 2010, 08:26 AM

The above highlights the dramatic/logical problems of the story rather nicely. If Finney went to the pod completely at random, because he was part of a duty roster 430 names long, then we're watching a coincidence of cosmic scale unfold. How often would the ship face ion storms? Not another time in the three or five years we witnessed! Yet Finney based his whole plan, calling for careful preparation, on such an event...

Of course Finney could and probably would have manipulated the roster. Yet it would help if the list of names weren't that long - if indeed only certain top officers had the training or the authority to operate the pod.

Another dramatic/logical shortcoming is the idea that a tiny pod would endanger the mighty starship in any fashion. It just doesn't sound intuitively possible; nothing else did, at least not in TOS. Unless we count the magnetic containment pod in "That Which Survives"...

Which makes me wonder if the ion pod in fact was unrelated to the ion storm and was not an observation instrument at all. Perhaps it was a key component of the ship's engines (or perhaps some other system Finney was in charge of), and was in danger of exploding in an ion storm unless carefully monitored? Kirk would want to keep the pod aboard as long as possible, because the ship needed the pod - but would have to eject it if problems arose. And Finney would be sent to establish that the pod was safe; if he didn't confirm it was, by taking the required "readings of the plates", it would have to be jettisoned at red alert by default.

I'm still more partial to the idea that the pod was a delicate scientific instrument that posed no danger and was not intended to be crewed, but was to be prepared for launch by a member of the crew and then fired away uncrewed to study an ion storm. In this analogy to tornado hunting, the preparations would have to be performed on short notice, since ion storms were unpredictable, and would call for a trained specialist. And like StarryEyed suggested, it would be a rarely used and largely experimental piece of hardware, so the list of competent specialists would be short, but their workload high.

There'd be no scientific return if the pod were released prematurely (it would not be ideally positioned, and Finney would not have all the experiments running yet), but there'd be risk to the ship if she stayed in the storm too long - so Kirk would personally control the complicated joint action of the launch and the escape from the storm with a single button push. When red alert sounded, the crew would snap to desired action: Sulu would start saving the ship, as always in red alerts, while Finney would know that the alert was his signal to leave the pod prior to its launch.

Tornado hunting is a simple enough analogy here: it explains Kirk's seeming desire to sail into the storm and covers all the technicalities that follow with the same sort of accuracy we saw in Twister - that is, sufficient for carrying the drama. Alas, it's probably not what the writer had in mind, so he didn't insert cues that would make it more obvious that this is a logical motivation for our heroes and villains...

Timo Saloniemi

T'Girl · July 21 2010, 05:55 PM

Captain Robert April wrote:

And why Finney and not Ensign Ricky?

To be fair to the episode, the Enterprise has always been top heavy with senior officers, a near ridiculous number of Lt. Commanders and Commanders.

blssdwlf · July 22 2010, 04:18 AM

Considering the ship was making way at Warp 1+ when the pod was ejected, I wonder if the reason that the ion pod threatened the safety of the ship was because it was an attachment? The ship could withstand the stress of the ion storm but with the pod attached it might have had a higher chance of ripping off and doing some major damage on its own.

StarryEyed · July 22 2010, 06:02 AM

blssdwlf wrote:

Considering the ship was making way at Warp 1+ when the pod was ejected, I wonder if the reason that the ion pod threatened the safety of the ship was because it was an attachment? The ship could withstand the stress of the ion storm but with the pod attached it might have had a higher chance of ripping off and doing some major damage on its own.

The pod being a weak point that endangered the ship is pretty easy to understand. The fact that there needed to be a person in there to take readings is what is hard to swallow and takes a creative explanation.

Timo · July 22 2010, 07:59 AM

I still have enough difficulty swallowing the idea that the pod would endanger the ship in any way. The storm was already tearing the ship apart, and Kirk wanted to get out to stop this from happening. Whatever problems the pod might have caused, surely those would also have ceased to matter if Kirk commanded the ship out of the storm?

It seems more as if the pod somehow prevented Kirk from leaving the storm. Yet it sure didn't stop the ship from maneuvering, flying at warp, adding one third more thrust and so forth. So the way the pod kept the ship in the dangerous storm was not a physical one - in physical terms, the ship could clearly have departed if Kirk ordered it to, with or without the pod being jettisoned, but the pod prevented Kirk from ordering such a maneuver.

Which is why I think the idea was that jettisoning the pod in the middle of the storm was the purpose of the whole exercise, and worth risking not just Finney's life, but all the 430 lives aboard. It's also strongly suggested that jettisoning the pod was always part of the plan: Kirk says "It has been suggested that I panicked on the bridge and jettisoned the ion pod prematurely", establishing the idea of a non-premature jettisoning.

There would have been a right time for jettisoning the pod, after Finney was done with whatever he was doing. That sounds to me like the pod was supposed to be launched, to a free-flying mission, even if the terminology sounds unusual. It's also possible the pod was supposed to be discarded after experiments were completed, but in that case there should have been no hurry: the ship was physically free to maneuver even with the pod attached.

Timo Saloniemi

Captain Robert April · July 22 2010, 08:03 AM

Picture the Enterprise flying through the ion storm, shields down, getting tossed around like a rubber ducky in a jacuzzi.

Now attach a shuttlecraft on the end of a long cable and imagine how that sucker is gonna whip around.

How long before that sucker gets slammed against the unshielded Enterprise?

Timo · July 22 2010, 11:35 AM

...Wouldn't allow for Finney to get out of there under any circumstances, though.

Timo Saloniemi

blssdwlf · July 22 2010, 02:31 PM

Timo wrote:

Which is why I think the idea was that jettisoning the pod in the middle of the storm was the purpose of the whole exercise, and worth risking not just Finney's life, but all the 430 lives aboard. It's also strongly suggested that jettisoning the pod was always part of the plan: Kirk says "It has been suggested that I panicked on the bridge and jettisoned the ion pod prematurely", establishing the idea of a non-premature jettisoning.

There would have been a right time for jettisoning the pod, after Finney was done with whatever he was doing. That sounds to me like the pod was supposed to be launched, to a free-flying mission, even if the terminology sounds unusual. It's also possible the pod was supposed to be discarded after experiments were completed, but in that case there should have been no hurry: the ship was physically free to maneuver even with the pod attached.

Hmm that would account for having someone go in and prep it for launching.

Captain Robert April · July 22 2010, 04:41 PM

Timo wrote:

...Wouldn't allow for Finney to get out of there under any circumstances, though.

Timo Saloniemi

We don't know that.

kkozoriz1 · July 22 2010, 05:10 PM

Perhaps it's a situation much like investigating Murasaki objects? In order to research ion storms Starfleet vessels, at least some of them, are required to enter the storms. In order to get proper readings the pod must be a certain distance away from large metallic objects (like the ship) or sources of radiation (like the warp drive). Maybe there are actual physical test objects that must be retrieved, similar to the NASA LDEF satellite. Finney had to retrieve the samples and then get the pod back to the ship. Perhaps he had himself beamed back to the ship and was able to hide the evidence of that from the bridge and engineering. He was the records officer and we know he was able to alter the log.

Timo · July 22 2010, 06:21 PM

We don't know that.

What would be the scenario wherein a pod hanging from a tether would provide a means for Finney to get out and get back into the ship without any witnesses assisting? Did he have a personal transporter that didn't mind ion storms?

If the pod were deployed, then retreived, and then jettisoned, we should be having lots and lots of dialogue on the reeling-out and reeling-in action. This would be far more crucial than possible jettison commands.

Timo Saloniemi

July 21 2010, 07:11 AM	#79
Captain Robert April Vice Admiral Location: In selfless service to fandom, on the road to becoming a Star Trek trivia god...	Re: What is an "ion pod?" Basically, the pod was a small doohickey with a guy inside that's deployed to take readings of any conveniently passing ion storms. This is dangerous to the ship for two reasons: when it's deployed, the shields can't be raised, putting the ship in greater danger than it would be normally, and because the pod is physically attached to the ship, there is added stress at the point of connection. If that connection breaks, we could be talking severe damage to the ship, including having the pod slammed into the hull, hence why it has to be jettisoned when things get too hairy. I suppose the 1960's equivalent would be a B-52 going up into a hurricane with some sort of sensor drone with a guy inside, hanging out of the bomb bay or attached to the wing, and the pilot having to dump it when the turbulence gets too heavy; the inherent drama being whether or not the guy in the drone can get back inside the plane before the drone gets cut loose. As for why it has to be manned, as mentioned above, the nature of ion storms makes remote operation and monitoring of the pod problematic at best. And why Finney and not Ensign Ricky? Nobody in the military has just one job. You've got your primary occupation (in my case while in the Air Force, Administration Specialist, in Finney's case, records officer), your "war skill" (what you do when the shooting starts; I worked in Rapid Runway Repair, and learned all kinds of nifty ways to patch up a torn up runway and about the various types of bombs that are used to tear up the aforementioned runway...who knows what Finney did when the order came to assume battle stations), and apparently in Starfleet, when you're on a ship on a scientific mission, you occasionally have scientific duties to perform, like manning the ion pod when it's your turn. And don't worry, Ensign Ricky's name is somewhere on that duty roster, too. It was just Finney's turn.

July 21 2010, 08:26 AM	#80
Timo Admiral	Re: What is an "ion pod?" The above highlights the dramatic/logical problems of the story rather nicely. If Finney went to the pod completely at random, because he was part of a duty roster 430 names long, then we're watching a coincidence of cosmic scale unfold. How often would the ship face ion storms? Not another time in the three or five years we witnessed! Yet Finney based his whole plan, calling for careful preparation, on such an event... Of course Finney could and probably would have manipulated the roster. Yet it would help if the list of names weren't that long - if indeed only certain top officers had the training or the authority to operate the pod. Another dramatic/logical shortcoming is the idea that a tiny pod would endanger the mighty starship in any fashion. It just doesn't sound intuitively possible; nothing else did, at least not in TOS. Unless we count the magnetic containment pod in "That Which Survives"... Which makes me wonder if the ion pod in fact was unrelated to the ion storm and was not an observation instrument at all. Perhaps it was a key component of the ship's engines (or perhaps some other system Finney was in charge of), and was in danger of exploding in an ion storm unless carefully monitored? Kirk would want to keep the pod aboard as long as possible, because the ship needed the pod - but would have to eject it if problems arose. And Finney would be sent to establish that the pod was safe; if he didn't confirm it was, by taking the required "readings of the plates", it would have to be jettisoned at red alert by default. I'm still more partial to the idea that the pod was a delicate scientific instrument that posed no danger and was not intended to be crewed, but was to be prepared for launch by a member of the crew and then fired away uncrewed to study an ion storm. In this analogy to tornado hunting, the preparations would have to be performed on short notice, since ion storms were unpredictable, and would call for a trained specialist. And like StarryEyed suggested, it would be a rarely used and largely experimental piece of hardware, so the list of competent specialists would be short, but their workload high. There'd be no scientific return if the pod were released prematurely (it would not be ideally positioned, and Finney would not have all the experiments running yet), but there'd be risk to the ship if she stayed in the storm too long - so Kirk would personally control the complicated joint action of the launch and the escape from the storm with a single button push. When red alert sounded, the crew would snap to desired action: Sulu would start saving the ship, as always in red alerts, while Finney would know that the alert was his signal to leave the pod prior to its launch. Tornado hunting is a simple enough analogy here: it explains Kirk's seeming desire to sail into the storm and covers all the technicalities that follow with the same sort of accuracy we saw in Twister - that is, sufficient for carrying the drama. Alas, it's probably not what the writer had in mind, so he didn't insert cues that would make it more obvious that this is a logical motivation for our heroes and villains... Timo Saloniemi

July 22 2010, 04:18 AM	#82
blssdwlf Commodore	Re: What is an "ion pod?" Considering the ship was making way at Warp 1+ when the pod was ejected, I wonder if the reason that the ion pod threatened the safety of the ship was because it was an attachment? The ship could withstand the stress of the ion storm but with the pod attached it might have had a higher chance of ripping off and doing some major damage on its own.

July 22 2010, 07:59 AM	#84
Timo Admiral	Re: What is an "ion pod?" I still have enough difficulty swallowing the idea that the pod would endanger the ship in any way. The storm was already tearing the ship apart, and Kirk wanted to get out to stop this from happening. Whatever problems the pod might have caused, surely those would also have ceased to matter if Kirk commanded the ship out of the storm? It seems more as if the pod somehow prevented Kirk from leaving the storm. Yet it sure didn't stop the ship from maneuvering, flying at warp, adding one third more thrust and so forth. So the way the pod kept the ship in the dangerous storm was not a physical one - in physical terms, the ship could clearly have departed if Kirk ordered it to, with or without the pod being jettisoned, but the pod prevented Kirk from ordering such a maneuver. Which is why I think the idea was that jettisoning the pod in the middle of the storm was the purpose of the whole exercise, and worth risking not just Finney's life, but all the 430 lives aboard. It's also strongly suggested that jettisoning the pod was always part of the plan: Kirk says "It has been suggested that I panicked on the bridge and jettisoned the ion pod prematurely", establishing the idea of a non-premature jettisoning. There would have been a right time for jettisoning the pod, after Finney was done with whatever he was doing. That sounds to me like the pod was supposed to be launched, to a free-flying mission, even if the terminology sounds unusual. It's also possible the pod was supposed to be discarded after experiments were completed, but in that case there should have been no hurry: the ship was physically free to maneuver even with the pod attached. Timo Saloniemi

July 22 2010, 08:03 AM	#85
Captain Robert April Vice Admiral Location: In selfless service to fandom, on the road to becoming a Star Trek trivia god...	Re: What is an "ion pod?" Picture the Enterprise flying through the ion storm, shields down, getting tossed around like a rubber ducky in a jacuzzi. Now attach a shuttlecraft on the end of a long cable and imagine how that sucker is gonna whip around. How long before that sucker gets slammed against the unshielded Enterprise?

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July 22 2010, 11:35 AM	#86
Timo Admiral	Re: What is an "ion pod?" ...Wouldn't allow for Finney to get out of there under any circumstances, though. Timo Saloniemi

July 22 2010, 05:10 PM	#89
kkozoriz1 Fleet Captain Location: Centrelea, Nova Scotia	Re: What is an "ion pod?" Perhaps it's a situation much like investigating Murasaki objects? In order to research ion storms Starfleet vessels, at least some of them, are required to enter the storms. In order to get proper readings the pod must be a certain distance away from large metallic objects (like the ship) or sources of radiation (like the warp drive). Maybe there are actual physical test objects that must be retrieved, similar to the NASA LDEF satellite. Finney had to retrieve the samples and then get the pod back to the ship. Perhaps he had himself beamed back to the ship and was able to hide the evidence of that from the bridge and engineering. He was the records officer and we know he was able to alter the log.