If they were on the same side, how did they imagine they would both survive the initial encounter? They can't have thought that Kirk would surrender.
I assume they thought that Kirk would fight back, ultimately destroying Kronos 1 in self-defense. They'd both be safe in that case, Valeris was on the Enterprise and Chang was on the Bird of Prey.
Kronos (Qo'nos?) 1 didn't fire at the Enterprise so I assume Chang was gambling on that and therefore with Kirk not having been fired on him not firing on Kronos 1.
BOP fire on Kronos 1 Enterprise doesn't fire on anyone Kronos 1 doesn't fire on anyone Chang assumes Enterprise won't fire unless fired upon. Chang assumes Gorkon won't fire but will talk. Two safe assumptions
The whole idea of Federation officers and Klingons conspiring together to keep war going never worked for me anyway. Cooperation on that scale requires trust. It's contradictory.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, until my other enemy is dead. Gorkon's plan was the enemy of the status quo, and both sides wanted it gone. They agreed to get rid of it so they could go back to what they were comfortable with, their long standing Cold War (though Chang would have loved to make it a Hot War giving the chance). It is not like Starfleet and the Klingons cannot work together for a mutual goal. They've done that many times. This would just be one for a more sinister goal of maintaining the status quo. As for Chang and Valeris, Valeris likely thinks Enterprise can handle the problem in a straight up fight. That is one of the reasons they sent Enterprise under Kirk's command, instead of say Excelsior. Chang is a Klingon warrior. If he died on Kronos One it would be in battle, an honorable death at the hands of a hated enemy. What warrior wouldn't take that chance in his advanced years? He is on Kronos One when he contacts Enterprise to tell them off before bringing her about to fire. Why he accepted a surrender? Honor maybe. Rules of engagement perhaps. While he might have been on the Bird of Prey to give the order to fire, then beamed back to Kronos One during the confusion, he seems more the type to stay on Kronos One for the entire even, just stay on the bridge, which is on the opposite side of the ship from the regions that will be targeted, and from where the assassins will be heading.
That's 100% speculative. At no point int he narrative are we led to believe that Chang could possibly have been anywhere but Kronos 1. And you'd have us believe that in the few minutes after the attack, while there was no gravity on Krono 1, that Chang beamed back aboard their bridge without anyone noticing to order aggressive posturing against the Enterprise? That seems really far fetched fan fiction to me.
The plan was for Kronos-1 to fire on Enterprise, Kirk raises shields and either retreats (his mission basically failed) or defends himself, confirming the Klingons' suspicions. BOTH ships would probably retreat back to their home base with battle damage, and the war is on. NOBODY thought Kirk was going to surrender. Even Valeris was probably surprised he put his own head on the chopping block to prevent a fight. An interesting question would be why exactly Chang decided to honor the surrender and not open fire anyway; this is probably because firing on the surrendering Enterprise would be an underwhelming gesture (the other warriors would consider the matter closed and Starfleet probably wouldn't go to war just for that) and also because the other officers on the bridge would consider it both dishonorable and maybe a little suspicious. So why does Gorkon think that Shakespear is an obscure Klingon playwright? And why does General Chang seem to have entire volumes of Shakespear memorized? Why, indeed, is General Chang heard repeatedly quoting 20th century cold war slogans in his constant taunting of Kirk, slogans which other Klingons seem to find clever and original? Because General Chang is not a Klingon. General Chang is a human that has managed to infiltrate Gorkon's cabinet over several years and has spent the better part of the decade slowly whispering "humanisms" in Gorkon's ear while at the same time managing to keep the war from getting too hot. Which explains why he is the only Klingon who is actually in on the conspiracy (even his bird of prey crew doesn't seem to know what's really going on) and it explains how the entire conspiracy could have developed in the first place, given Section 31 already knew who Chang was and already knew that he wasn't going to doublecross them. Most of all, it explains why they had to get a human to dress up like a Klingon and try to assassinate the President: because there aren't any Klingons in the conspiracy in the first place.
Correct. We aren't supposed to know what is going on at the time of the attack. It's a mystery that is solved much later in the storyline. And once we do find out what happened, we see Chang commanding the Bird of Prey from that point on. My theory is that Chang was aboard the BOP during the attack, thinking that Kronos 1 would be destroyed (or if The Enterprise somehow lost, his plan still works) and then when Kirk did something unpredictable and surrendered, he beamed back aboard Kronos 1 and played the part. You'll notice that Chang is completely absent during the weightless scenes aboard Kronos 1. He only reappears once gravity has been restored.
Took a bribe. All he knows is that Chang wants Kirk killed. He doesn't really know why, and he doesn't seem to care.
If Chang is supposedly aboard Kronos One during the attack, why does Gorkon have to give an order to FIND him?
If Kirk had fired on Kronos One as it moved in for the attack, the cloaked bird of prey lets slip the disruptors of war, once they take down the Enterprise's shields and damage her weapons enough, Valeris could be beamed aboard Kronos One, or Chang would just betray her and let her go up with the Enterprise. Both sides take substantial losses, leads to resentment, the Klingons are already desperate because of the Praxis explosion, war would probably happen, if nothing else, peace would be off the table for the foreseeable future.
On Earth, it's spelt "Shakespeare"... There's nothing even remotely plausible that supports that. No wonder your concept of special relativity is so messed up.
The Klingons managed to pull it off with Arne Darvin and nobody was the wiser until a tribble -- of all things -- tipped them off. Likewise, nobody in the Klingon delegation noticed the guy in the rubber mask until after Scotty shot him out of a window. Chang comes off as a noisy but not overly important functionary in Gorkon's administration. We have no idea how long he's had the job or what he did to earn it. But he's not a military advisor, and he's not in line for the chancellery, so what IS he then, except a glorified secretary? IOW, he's Starfleet's Arne Darvin. He's not IMPORTANT enough for them to bother conspiring with him, and he's also not TRUSTWORTHY enough for them to take the risk... unless, of course, Starfleet are the ones who put him there in the first place. That's not what your mom said last night.
The irony is there on purpose. Similarly, using Klingonesque Efrosian makeup on the Federation's alien President. Members of Starfleet being racist about Klingons, the "enemy" which looks so much like their own leader. UFP President by Ian McLean, on Flickr
You make a good point, and it's a major flaw in the movie. The Starfleet personnel should of been given a credible reason to have been doing what they did, something that in the end would have been seen by the audience as valid and intelligent. This is making the assumption that Valeris expected to survive.
Nope. The movie was crystal clear. Unless something which has happened ample of times in the real world, a clandestine "deep state" operation by parts of the militaries of two countries, is factually unknown or ideologically intolerable to the viewer. Part of the Klingon and UFP military cooperates to maintain the status quo. The motivation for that is simple, to keep your job and your power (We all read our Orwell. Even if you ignore all the economics motives for war there is still the residual motive of power for the warfaring class.). It is like in the real world, although here the military more often seeks new conflicts or invents new enemies. Needless to say, Meyer's movies always strayed from the Trek dogma that Starfleet is a more enlightened form of military which also incorporates other duties like research (in TWOK the research folks are not working for Starfleet and view them as their enemy) in order to tell more interesting stories or to be more precise stories which show a form of progress out of darkness. Be it the darkness of Kirk's youthful ignorance and the ensuing death coming to an end and leading to new life or the darkness of racism, militarism and war ending and leading to a brighter future with the prospect for (an uneasy) peace with the Klingons.