Was it? Kirk attributes this motivation to Khan, but he attributes all sorts of nice things to the superman - probably with little or no basis in reality. For all we know, Khan wanted to cool down in space for a few decades, then loop back to Earth to re-conquer it, but his timer malfunctioned. Or then his plan all along was to broadcast an Earth-type radio signal that would lure in soft targets, i.e. non-super Earthmen. And? Many systems no doubt have debris fields - even our own does! If our sidekicks were simply looking for a desert planet in the CA system, rather than for the sixth planet in the CA system specifically, there's no reason they would be concerned with debris fields, either... Timo Saloniemi
^This goes back to the idea that they were looking for Ceti Alpha VI because it was a desert planet. It fits the criteria of their search, therefore it doesn't matter if there are four planets and a debris field between it and Ceti Alpha, or five. They want the desert planet, they go to the desert planet. Only afterward do they even think to check if the debris field is on an orbital path before, or after the desert planet's place in the lineup. What they want is the desert planet. That's all.
I'm not saying this excuses the arguable negligence of the crew, but my impression has been that Reliant was essentially on a long-and-boring survey mission to all sorts of backwater planets and they had achieved essentially nothing useful in that time. Based on what we see it seems probable that morale and protocol had both taken a bit of a nosedive in the process. Which is to say that by this time their priorities probably boiled down to "get into the system, check the target planet, move on", just to make the remainder of the mission as short as possible...and who knew how many other planets were on their list...
Also it seems to me there's a shortage of canonical evidence that Ceti Alpha V would be closer to the star than Ceti Alpha VI would be.
Be interesting if the two planets had crossing orbits, like Neptune and Pluto. And that by the time Reliant returned to the system, Ceti Alpha V was the sixth most distant planet, and they, if they even noticed the destroyed planetary debris assumed that had been Ceti Alpha V (therefore Khan should have been dead and Chekov wouldn't care to make a mention of it).
In the days when Pluto was a planet, it was the ninth planet...except for when it was the eighth planet from 1979 to 1999.
The order in which the planets were discovered, as asteroids and minor moons of of outer planets are numbered. Or the order in which they came up for serious study. Or a basically arbitrary index, as deep space objects are numbered in the NGC. Or the order of importance within the system, paralleling the way the major star in a binary may be labelled A and the minor star B.
To the OP, I think you have a very good point. I think, as some of the other posters pointed out, it's the editing more than anything, but it does seem to be a mistake. I'll also add, it's not a mistake that bothers my enjoyment of enjoyment of the film. And on the subject of ridiculous rationalizations, this movie has an innocent line that was so blown out of proportion it's amazing. They say, only ship in this quadrant, and much later (I think about the time of DS9 starting, that's when quadrants became a thing) the Federation must be across two quadrant's of the whole $^($%@ galaxy to justify that line! That's so silly. I think this is a very good post and CA V and VI being in some kind of system of their own (like a Trojan orbit) must be assumed, otherwise why would it even make a difference? If Uranus went poof, would Neptune suffer any effect at all? Saturn? So they must have been fairly close, somehow. And, what makes a planet explode? Have astronomers documented anything like that with Hubble or the other telescopes that they use to monitor extra solar planets? I'm wondering about that, too. Another thing, why have your super secret test planet right next to where you marooned Khan? Again, it seems that Kirk either didn't elaborate what he did with Khan or something. Chekov had no idea until after the name Botany Bay was read on the belt buckle, and I thought Walter sold it well that Chekov didn't remember until this reminder brought up an old memory. I know with my memory, I don't remember stuff from 15 years ago just like that. And even if Kirk reported, in full detail, which is my personal opinion of what he did, maybe higher ups decided that it would be best forgotten and not publicized the decision to exile Khan there. So Terrell really wouldn't have any source for this information except Chekov and Kyle. And they aren't the story telling types, apparently.
Because maybe after a few years of starting a whole new civilization from scratch Khan realizes it was a lot harder and less interesting than he thought it was going to be. So he decided to repair the Botany Bay and take another shot at finding a pre existing society to conquer and rule. He was a dictator who ruled millions at one time after all. It might have gotten old ruling the same 60 or so people year after year.
Maybe he attempted to build a rocket from the remains of his ship, and launched it towards Ceti Alpha VI to test it out with some of his followers. Unfortunately, the engine was too unstable and caused a chain reaction resulting in Ceti Alpha VI's untimely demise, and reducing Khan's followers to kids recently born, who were white due to not seeing the sun.
In a universe with things like Nomad, the Doomsday Machine planet-killer, the Giants Space Amoeba, whatever was causing Psi 2000 to implode, and that giant antimatter cloud that was going to devour Mantilles ... it seems remotely possible that a planet might explode for some reason.
Umm, yeah - but this very movie rather carefully establishes that a "quadrant" is a subdivision of a "sector", and such a small unit of space that it is incredible that two starships would be in the same quadrant at the same time, unless by design. This doesn't contradict the fact that the word "quadrant" has another use in the later movies, later seasons of TNG, and later spinoffs. Early TNG still refers to quadrants that are subdivisions of sectors, and while this practice eventually goes away, this doesn't mean that anything should have changed in-universe. References to "non-galactic" quadrants were few and far in between in TOS, the early movies and early TNG anyway, so it's not as if our heroes were quitting a major habit there. Having those large quadrants be called "quadrants" is logical since they really are 1/4 segments of a flat galactic whole (how do you divide a cubical sector into four is less clear). It's perhaps unfortunate that the name was already taken by a less credible claimant, but not "silly" as such. And we need not concern ourselves with the "rationale" for inventing the galactic quadrants, as it isn't explicit in Star Trek, nor does it really work... In Trek, a thousand things - it's among the least implausible issues of Trek astronomy, really. But others have stated before the rather significant fact that we only have Khan's word that CA VI "exploded". What would he know? Assuming the mysterious kaboom was above the horizon when Khan happened to look up, what did he see? Did Khan have recording devices to properly analyze the calamity? When CA V became a hellhole, did Khan still have bright skies on occasion to continue the observations and confirm his claimed "orbital shift"? It's largely guesswork on Khan's part, and none of the heroes get the chance to check up on the facts. Which may be "mundane and realistic", but IMHO there is no dramatic need for such a thing in Star Trek. Both versions of "Space Seed", original and remastered, show Khan leaving his old ship adrift soon after he hijacks the Enterprise. There is no evidence they ever went back for that ship, and indeed no plot moment where that would have been practicable. What Khan lives in, down on CA V, is modern 2260s freight containers with Federation graphics on them. They are identical in shape to the containers seen in ST:TMP, even if probably exaggerated in size a bit... Heck, there's even a workbee towing rig still attached to the containers! So that's not "remains of the Botany Bay", but something donated by Kirk - although this dramatic intent isn't all that clear and can only be truly verified from backstage photos and detailed staring at screencaps. What did Khan have remaining of his old ship? Apparently just his collection of books, bundled together with those old cargo straps. Everything else in his sorry hut is just random junk, cobbled together for survival and attempts at comfort. Why reduce? Why not just have kids recently born? It's not as if Khan's cohorts would have had a reason not to start breeding like rabbits right after touching down on CA V. And they no doubt breed well and fast, being superpeople and all... Timo Saloniemi
I don't think it's unusual to think that Khan (or one of his subordinates) actually did see Ceti Alpha VI explode. What reason does he have to lie?
Xindi. Exactly. Even Chekov -- WHO WAS THERE -- didn't remember what planet Khan was on. It was just one of literally hundreds of planets the Enterprise had been to and there was nothing all that special about it. But he remembered "Botany Bay," and in turn remembered Khan, and in turn remembered that they'd dumped Khan in some backwater planet nobody had ever heard of before somewhere in the constellation Ceti... oh shit, this is THAT planet?! All kinds of weird stuff happened to the Enterprise during Chekov's (seen or unseen) career. 79 distinct incidents spread out over five years... it probably just never came up in conversation.
The usual - hubris that makes him unable to admit that "I don't know what the heck happened". Not that Khan mightn't have seen CA VI go kaboom. It's just that his speculation as to what exact effect this had on CA V could be ignored for the sake of convenience. OTOH, "the planet exploded", even if a true statement, carries a connotation of spontaneity that might not be accurate. Dugomite minerbeasts or J'hadian fanatics might have been at it for months, or a massive space battle between the H'tfieldi and the Makkhoi might have done in the planet, and all Khan would see is an "explosion". Heck, perhaps a Doomsday Machine had a snack in the CA system! Provided he even knew what constellation it was. Kirk typically isn't very forthcoming with his public announcements; unless Chekov was the navigator who took the ship to the place of the marooning, he might never have learned where he had been when the marooning happened, even in the somewhat unlikely scenario where Kirk honestly told his crew what ultimately happened to Khan. Timo Saloniemi
"Do you mean he never told you the tale? To amuse your Captain, no? Never told you how the Enterprise picked up the Botany Bay, lost in space from the year 1996 with myself and the ship's company in cryogenic freeze?"
Even if Kirk didn't falsify all his logs and wipe clear all the flight recorder data, odds are that the did tell his crew not to gossip about this incident. After all, the heroes admitted that the correct choice back in the 1990s had been not to tell the world that eighty modern Napoleons were still on the loose. The world of the 2260s would probably be even less equipped to cope... Timo Saloniemi
That was exactly what was in my mind when I posted Chekov and Kyle aren't storytellers. And I don't mean that it couldn't have exploded, just why that one and not the one Khan is on as it's rather close. Most listed examples wouldn't be so precise as to only destroy one planet. But that's minor compared to other aspects of the story. I was mostly wondering if anyone heard of a reason a planet might "explode" Wouldn't the gravity of the mass cause the chunks to kind of hang about as a dense pack of asteroids?