The most common way they get anywhere in TOS is to "plot" and "lay in" a "course." That's navigation. To navigate, you have to have a model to tell you where your destination is, or, with a planet, where it will be when you arrive. The best way to keep a schedule would be to plot the most direct course. The Ceti Alpha system was known and charted, Kirk knew it was along their route and Spock knew which planet was habitable. The idea the Reliant came into a charted system and just bumbled around looking at planets, never using its navigation data, is ridiculous. TWOK is a good movie that has some dumb stuff in it. Meyer approached it on the level of a classic adventure yarn, where deep scrutiny and questioning would be missing the point.
I thought that speeds were different in Next Gen. I just can't remember if that was mentioned in the actual show, or if it purely an EU thing.
By the most efficient means possible, as always. And for Trek, this could well be activating the scanners, pinging the system once, spotting the world you want to go to, and going there - while completely ignoring all the other worlds revealed by the ping. The universe is full of wonders, but our heroes have a job to do, and they would have zero motivation to stop and stargaze. Another thing they would have zero motivation for is worrying about the orbital parameters of their target. Sensors tell them how to get to X; if X isn't quite where some old records say it might be, then those records obviously are wrong, and in any case irrelevant. It's only if sensors specifically say that X is on a decaying orbit or dancing pas d'Espagne instead of being naturally planetish that the heroes should take notice. This takes our heroes to star systems. It is an unncessary step for getting to a planet when at the destination system. No, you don't. That's anachronistic and out of context: you don't need the coordinates for your friend's house if you know his street address. You "navigate" to said street and then let your eyesight take over. And while your GPS navigator may operate on coordinate basis, it's not something you as the user will pay any heed to. Wasting time with coordinates that may be right or wrong is the stupid way to do it. Going where the target actually is should be the superior approach. In Trek, there are anomalies to take into account - superbeings playing pool with planets, sudden hypernovae or spatiotemporal slipknots or whatever. And you take those into account by ignoring them and going straight for the actual goal of spotting your target and sailing there. Timo Saloniemi
Timo, I gotta say, I love you, man. Seriously, you are one of my favorite posters and I very much enjoy your responses. But this one is just idiotic. I'm sorry to say so, but, seriously. You're arguing exactly what I said. In pinging the system once, you reveal all the big stuff, including the other planets. Then you pick the one you want, but you cannot know which one you want without being sure which ones you don't want. This requires knowing, in a reasonable way, what else is around. Nope. It is absolutely required for any time you move the ship. You lay in a course to get out of spacedock. Laying in to reach a planet is perfectly normal and necessary. Yes you do No, the street address is the coordinate system that works well for the ordinary human brain. A street and a cross-street or address block is more useful than strict Cartesian coordinates in a world navigated by defined roads. Your "eyes" are the starship's sensors. The "address" is the galactic coordinates. And, what the heck does a GPS system have to do with this? Flying is space is not driving on Earth. You will need a computer driven navigation package, even when flying right at a planet your pilot can see with his natural eyes. Yet, you still need to identify your target. Consulting the coordinates is not wasting time. It's the only way to get there ever. Even with exotic BS happening now and then, these things are going to be, by far, in the minority. In almost every case everything will be as it should. And if it's not, that's the time to doublecheck the charts to see what the heck happened. --Alex
Then why do they do it? It happens in "The Galileo Seven," off the top of my head. An example that specifically uses a model for navigation (streets, house numbers) is supposed to be evidence of why no such model would be needed? To parallel that example to what happened in the movie, you would not go to the address at all, but to a similar looking structure miles away with a completely different address and just assume it was the friend's house. You wouldn't know exactly what the target was unless you had enough information to make that determination. Foremost among that information would be where it was supposed to be on the "map." If it wasn't there, then you'd know something was wrong.
They seem entirely uninteresting in much of anything in the Ceti Alpha system. The captain looks bored on entering orbit. Chekov is trying to figure out why one sensor if giving them a reading they don't want to see. They want this mission to be over and are willing ot overlook things to get it over with. Chekov doesn't seem to have any notion that being in Ceti Alpha system could be a problem. Either they figure that this planet can't be Ceti Alpha V due to it not being a barely M-class planet, or Starfleet thought Ceti Alpha V blew up over a decade ago and didn't notice that is was Ceti Alpha VI that exploded instead (could Ceti Alpha V and VI have been a binary planetary system?)
Huh? I haven't watched any TNG in a decade or so. I thought full impulse was basically the speed of light.
The behind the scenes stuff set Full Impulse firmly at 0.25 C. The idea being that faster would start to have serious time dilation effects. --Alex
Old joke. I think it is based on Riker ordering La Forge to increase to warp six and La Forge responding "Aye, sir. Full Impulse".
Whilst the Ceti Alpha system was known we don't know how well it was actually charted. All Starfleet might have had on it was the basics, what type of star it is, how many planets are in the system.
Except he clearly did, because Kahn recognises him. That the actor wasn't on the show at the time is a different issue.
The only thing about the film that bothers me is when Khan recognises Chekov, which is strange as he was not part of the crew in space seed
I thought Catspaw was set before Space Seed? If that's the case, he would have already been on the ship and we just didn't see him in the episode.
I have to admit, it would be funny if, just one time, in a Trek ep or movie, we hear a toilet flush, and then we see a crewmember walking out of the head (Naval term for bathroom), or the flush and then the Captain walking out of the head in his quarters/ready room.
I don't know why people get so hung up on the whole Chekov thing. Given the headstands people are willing to do to justify the weirdest things, Chekov not being on the BRIDGE CREW when Khan was on the Enterprise is not the same as him not being on the SHIP. There was plenty of time for Khan to have unseen interactions with crewmen, and we DO see him giving a little "lecture" where every crewman in the room is not clearly visible, with the implication being that he's done more than one such speech -- Chekov could easily have been in one of those meetings, asking Khan about his Russian heritage.
I can picture that. Chekov: "Augments were invented by a little Russian woman from Moscow. They only had to invade the rest of Asia because they were not strong enough to take the cold..." Khan: When we're done with Kirk and the Vulcan, torture the short guy.
No prob. As I feel the opposite about the issue, I'll make every effort to make my viewpoint clearer, and hope that it will still keep entertaining you and the other parties here! Yet it does not. Once you have spotted the Desert Planet, you need no knowledge of anything else around in the system. The other planets are not of interest: you won't be going there, and they won't affect your travel to your one and only destination in any way. Planets won't get in your way (space is way too big for that); they won't affect your path of travel with their gravity (your ship is way too powerful to be bothered by that); and your horoscope won't really affect the mission much, either (Starfleet always assigns a Chief Occult Officer to spell away such hazards). Why would you need to know anything about the seventh planet if you are going to the sixth? Indeed, why should you wish to know whether your target is the seventh planet or the sixth? You don't go through the "Laying a course, Sir" song and dance when heading for the spacedock door. You simply go where you need to go, without much in the way of plotting. Only interstellar travel ever requires you to talk about it, suggesting the process there is non-trivial. In insystem applications, it is trivial. And you can worry about the trivial, but you don't. The Captain doesn't need to worry, even the Helmsman doesn't need to worry, because the computer already does all the necessary worrying. None of this has anything to do with the alleged requirement to know what the seventh planet is doing when heading for the sixth. Because there is. no. such. requirement. Come on, why not stop and think about it? You never use models like that in your life for getting from A to B, even when B is moving. You always use terminal homing, because that's not just the easiest way to do it, but typically the only possible and reliable way. Why should starships behave differently from the world around you today? Because they are staaaaaarships and must obey NASA rules of what is cool? NASA and Starfleet have nothing in common: they operate hardware in completely different categories, for completely different purposes, and even obey different laws of physics. Starships are good at terminal homing. NASA craft suck at that. So the balance is different, and heavily biased towards terminal homing for Starfleet. How so? This "staaaaaarships" thing must be confusing you somehow. But in space, just like on today's Earth, or yesterday's oceans, or in tunneling through no-man's-land, you use separate means of navigation for short and long distances, and one does not apply to the other. And in Star Trek, "short" is defined as "insystem". And? That package will only do what you tell it to do - in this case, Go To the Desert Planet. And it has no reason to assume anything about where the Desert Planet "ought" to be, when its senses already tell it where it really is. Those are the parameters it will use for performing the mindless task of getting you to your destination. Should the package red-flag a deviation between where the planet "ought" to be and where it is? Not in the Trek universe, and especially not if there is no previous knowledge of any sort of an "ought". How can you claim such a patently false thing? You don't know the coordinates to me. But if I invite you to my house, and give a few coarse pointers for the early stages of the trip, you can drop the "coordinate" act right at my door at the very latest, and start terminal homing. And once you start that terminal homing, you won't consult any maps, paper or mental or iPad or whatever - not for coordinates. You consult them for what I might look like - the analogy for the Desert Planet thing. How many planets in the Trek Universe have an "ought" attached to them? Tellingly, we never hear of our heroes spotting a deviation in the orbit of a planet, unless third parties inform them of such. Charting really is a largely dead art in Starfleet, it seems - and for a good reason, because technology has outdated any practical need for it. Timo Saloniemi