How big were TWOK's "cargo bays" Khan spoke of?

My best guess is that the interference from the storm required them to return to their beam in point for beam out. The transporter can lock onto them if it knows where they are, but it can't scan the area normally because of the storm.

 

Which brings up another point, if they knew the scanners weren't reliable because of the storm, how can they be trusted to find a planet "completely lifeless?"

 

IIRC, that is actually a spaceship model from some other production that was used as set dressing.

 

Cool. I don't recognize it, but there might be experts here who have the movie or show down pat.

Two equally likely explanations:

1) Because he wasn't told? If he wasn't the navigator on duty when Kirk ordered the ship to this place, he probably wouldn't have been given the memo. Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Scotty marooned Khan in a secret location because they didn't want to give him over to authorities - they liked the guy too much. They wouldn't have squealed to Starfleet, and they wouldn't have told their crew the specs, either.

2) Because he forgot? Chekov must have visited hundreds of star systems, the rate he was going in TOS. If Kirk had made sure there was no official entry about the marooning in the records, then browsing through the databanks for "Ceti Alpha: The Highlights" would not ring any bells for Chekov.

That is more or less the basic premise of Star Trek.

In that show, the only way to find out in real time what is really happening in a distant star system is to go and have a look. Telescopes don't reveal anything much, not in real time: the numerous star systems devastated by the Doomsday Machine were only revealed to have been reduced to rubble when Kirk's ship sailed into that rubble, again and again and again, system after system.

And you don't go and have a look lightly. Deneva, a system inhabited by "almost a million" people and a former major freight port, went silent and remained silent for "over a year" before Starfleet paid attention.

Kirk would have made sure that he dropped Khan in a location that would be even less frequently visited!

We've seen fancy ores and heavy weather screw up sensor readings before; that's probably the state of the art for Starfleet.

Because Chekov was scared out of his wits.

Very good point. Marcus' specs for the planet seemed extremely specific in any case, otherwise the Reliant would not have spent such a long time looking. Not only would the planet have to be dead, it would apparently still have to be Class M (with breathable air, as seen).

Remember that the Marcuses wanted to solve problems of interstellar famine. Perhaps their main goal was to get crops growing on a dead and worthless planet - so their main concern would be finding a planet free of global plant life, and never mind isolated pockets of whatever. If Terrell could prove the desert world only had this one "Garden of Ceti Alpha", then the experiment could still proceed, despite lower levels of plant or animal life elsewhere.

The other possibility is that Marcus shied away from experimenting on a living planet for ethical reasons. The Genesis effect would still obviously work, and the experiment might even yield the desired scientific results, but some lichen would die and that would be a big boo-boo. But there could be limits to the practical application of high morals, and Marcus would be ready to give the go if the sensors showed nothing, regardless of whether there was invisible life down below.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Except that he DID know. From the transcripts:

KHAN (to Terrell): ... Never told you how Admiral Kirk sent seventy of us into exile on this barren sand heap with only the contents of these cargo bays to sustain us?
CHEKOV: You lie! On Ceti Alpha Five there was life, a fair chance.

So, by this statement, Chekov knew where Khan was marooned.

Why would Kirk make no record? It's possible that he didn't want StarFleet to know that he almost lost his ship because he stupidly allowed Khan access to the ship's technical data. But, how would he explain the loss of McGivers if he was trying to cover something up? Then there's the issue of not warning anyone of Khan, it would be too big of a risk not to report Khan and his whereabouts, otherwise something similar may happen to another ship.

I don't think breathable air is necessarily a requirement. The Genesis device could program the matrix so that breathable air was included.

Not according to Carolyn Marcus. Her own words: "You boys have to be clear on this. There can't be so much as a microbe or the show's off."

 

It would be trivially easy for Kirk to tell further lies to improve on his original lie intended to protect Khan. He often lied to his superiors, or left things untold; his logs appear to be dictated well after the fact, with significant omissions and interpretations of events.

Kirk wouldn't be thinking in terms of Khan being a risk to others, not if he were marooned on a planet nobody would visit (remember, the Botany Bay was found by chance in a region of space nobody visited any more - Ceti Alpha would probably be nearby). It just didn't occur to him that others might also seek for the solitude of the location, and that a secret Federation research facility would be established in the neighborhood.

But if that were so, the universe would have been teeming with suitable lifeless worlds. No need to search for one: Regula itself would do.

The very fact that the Reliant apparently spent ages searching through systems that had a desert world listed is proof enough that the requirements were extremely specific, and that the nicely oxygenated Ceti Alpha V/VI met those precisely. It must have been hellishly difficult to find a planet devoid of life but with oxygen - in essence, a world that had died, rather than a world that had never lived.

So that leaves the second theory: that Marcus opposed to the killing of any lifeforms found, but by definition could not complain about those not found, or those that were unfindable.

Although the third theoretical possibility is that the Genesis experiment, while necessarily successfully transforming the planet, would produce inconclusive results if the planet happened to boast life before the detonation already. And that's what it most sounds like.

Basically, then, Starfleet just didn't have the sort of sensors that could have performed the mission. But they didn't know that in advance, so we can't really blame them.

I wonder... Could Kirk have set up an apparatus that hid the presence of Khan and his colonists? Something like the duonetic damper of DS9 "Paradise", perhaps? That would be a good way to ensure that Khan stayed marooned and unbothered by the authorities.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Or Kirk did tell Starfleet and Intelligence or Security scrubbed the records and when Ceti Alpha 6 went boom, tinker with the nav-records a little 5 "becomes" the new "6"-- since it's an out of the way system, no one notices when the next patch for Win 2368 SP1 "corrects' the "error in data file blah blah blah", put the planet off limits, and if Kirk ever asked the official line is "Oh Khan? Yeah we sent a scout by last month, they're doing fine."

What's interesting less Chekov getting the planets confused, but more that fact that he thought (implied by the line "On Ceti Alpha 5...!" and Khan pointing out that they were standing on Ceti Alpha 5) Khan managed to jump from one planet to the next. For that to be plausible, there had to be some form of transport that could, hypothetically, get them from 5 to 6.

 

Not sure if anyone noticed, or has commented on it, but if you look closely on each container in the black and white set photo you can see a weather Federation Olive Branch Logo on each container (One is to the lower left of the "window" and the other is almost dead center on the smaller pod directly in line/below the Work Bee spine clamp.

 

The script also said that, as Chekov passed the side of the containers, he noticed a federation/star fleet logo half buried in the sand and that something about all of this seemed familiar.

They were definitely cargo carriers from the Enterprise.

 

Pffht...I'm an idiot. You saw the logos. That's what I get for not looking at the caption under the photo!