Enterprise battle damage differences between ST II and III (Long)
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All this chatter also makes me realize another point:
We're not exactly idiots. We don't need to be lead by the nose all the time. Believe it or not, we don't have to be told everything and see everything for it to be known and we do indeed have to fill in some of our own blanks. Some blank filling is just better reasoned than others.
We're not exactly idiots. We don't need to be lead by the nose all the time. Believe it or not, we don't have to be told everything and see everything for it to be known and we do indeed have to fill in some of our own blanks. Some blank filling is just better reasoned than others.
, only in a general sense
, only in a general sense
Reminds me of that Far Side comic, "... what KIND of fools are they..."
This needs to be posted in the Abrams section.
I've never had a big problem with the ST2 vs. ST3 discrepancy, as "in-between" adventures or repair failures are easy to postulate. But even internally, ST2 offers some interesting possibilities for "minimizing the damage"...
We basically never really see the port side of the vessel after the first encounter with Khan, curiously enough. We can then postulate all sorts of portside damage from the shots we don't see: Khan's first torpedo, but also his second torpedo which is supposed to warn Kirk away from Mutara and seems to pass the ship from port before shaking the ship.
Apart from the blissfully dark funeral scene, there is only a single shot of the port side in the rest of the movie: at the very end, when Kirk sets off to recover the Reliant crew. All we need to ignore, then, is that shot. Or we can assume it's one of 'em flipped shots so common in Star Trek, and will be fixed in a possibly upcoming "remastering"...
Timo Saloniemi
Actually it is the Starboard side and we do get a clear shot of it while the Enterprise is trying to escape Genesis:
[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6oyiDqrDrg[/yt]
I'll take root beer! 
As Admiral Morrow pointed out, Enterprise is an old ship and there was to be no repair detail. Kirk needed the ship immediately so there would be no time to complete repairs. Morrow figured in that poor of a condition it was more likely to fall apart before it had even left Spacedock.
They had just picked up the Reliant survivors, transferred crew to Grissom, sent the trainee crew off to various assignments then warped home. Seems like she was still spaceworthy to me.
Yeah but the Enterprise wasn't even that old. I don't know the number of years that passed in movie time between TMP and TSFS but since TSFS took place immediately after TWOK it can't been more the 3 or 4 years tops.
In TMP they took great pains to say several times that this was a totally new Enterprise with basically every system brand new. I'm assuming these brand new systems were state of the art, I can't imagine the federation giving the ship such a major overhaul and installing 2nd and 3rd grade components. So in essence the Enterprise was maybe 4 years old at most and in that time she's suddenly obsolete? Seems like a huge waste of money to me to do such a rebuild for only another 4 years of service.
And if she was so obsolete then why did she hold several federation speed records according to the Excelsior's captain.
The refit Enterprise should be about 12 years in service by TSFS. They did seem to redo the time based more on the actor's age verse TMP which was suppose to be only a few years after the last episode of TOS. TWOK was said to be 15 years since they left Khan behind (it is actually more like 17 or 18 years).
This. I was under the impression that the refit was between 12 and 15 years old by the time of The Search for Spock.
The is enough time for two more five year missions, if Starfleet continued to use that ship for that purpose. However the next time we see it after TMP, she is a training cruiser. This might have been a temporary assignment to get a new crew on the ship, rather than its permanent assignment under Captain Spock. We know from Generations that Kirk retired for a time before going back to being Admiral and seeing Spock's cadets off on a little training cruise.
It is usually assumed that Kirk ran the ship for a second five year mission after TMP, though some suggest they put him back in a desk as quickly as they could. That doesn't quite fit with the reporters comments in Generations about Kirk's command of Enterprise. It maybe Kirk did keep Enterprise for a number of years until Command finally got him back to Earth. At which point he retired for a but, then came back somewhat defeated and feeling old. Then its adventure time, resulting in him getting a "new" ship and likely running it for another five year mission (or perhaps they didn't and he spend seven years running around Earth and doing more cadet cruises with the Enterprise-A).
The damage done to Enterprise was probably not enough to stop her from getting to Genesis, but it would tax the hull and engines more than Starfleet felt was worth the effort. Who knows what they intended to do with Enterprise following his decommissioning. Kirk couldn't get an answer on the matter, which seems difficult since he is an admiral. Though we aren't sure what he is an admiral of at this point. Enterprise was heavily taxed getting to Genesis when they stole it. Though it seems like they went flat out at best possible warp speed and get there in maybe a day, if not just a few hours. It have been easier if they had a full crew onboard, but they would have had only a skeleton crew I imagine. The seem to have dropped off a lot of cadets on they way home and possibly the remaining crew on Enterprise was Reliant's crew and the senior academy staff officers under Kirk. They would need a new crew aside from just repairing the ship.
It is usually assumed that Kirk ran the ship for a second five year mission after TMP, though some suggest they put him back in a desk as quickly as they could. That doesn't quite fit with the reporters comments in Generations about Kirk's command of Enterprise. It maybe Kirk did keep Enterprise for a number of years until Command finally got him back to Earth. At which point he retired for a but, then came back somewhat defeated and feeling old. Then its adventure time, resulting in him getting a "new" ship and likely running it for another five year mission (or perhaps they didn't and he spend seven years running around Earth and doing more cadet cruises with the Enterprise-A).
The damage done to Enterprise was probably not enough to stop her from getting to Genesis, but it would tax the hull and engines more than Starfleet felt was worth the effort. Who knows what they intended to do with Enterprise following his decommissioning. Kirk couldn't get an answer on the matter, which seems difficult since he is an admiral. Though we aren't sure what he is an admiral of at this point. Enterprise was heavily taxed getting to Genesis when they stole it. Though it seems like they went flat out at best possible warp speed and get there in maybe a day, if not just a few hours. It have been easier if they had a full crew onboard, but they would have had only a skeleton crew I imagine. The seem to have dropped off a lot of cadets on they way home and possibly the remaining crew on Enterprise was Reliant's crew and the senior academy staff officers under Kirk. They would need a new crew aside from just repairing the ship.
The extra damage seen in III is something I attributed to additional damage inflicted by:
1. Debris in the Mutara Nebula (shields were down)
2. Additional battle damage while in the Mutara Nebula inflicted by Reliant
3. Damage from the Genesis wave while escaping
4. Debris from the Genesis explosion
5. Wear and tear during the travel home
I always got the sense that the retirement of Enterprise was more a political decision than actual battle damage preventing travel or being too damaged to repair,and the Khan incident and battle damage was just the pretext needed to enact the retirement of Enterprise. I assumed Starfleet probably had some out of touch admirals in charge that also saw Kirk as a renegade (Trek II was the beginning of era where Starfleet was less like the wiled west, and more like the TNG era) and they wanted Kirk to return to a desk job. Also, other powers simply wanted to roll out the next, latest, and greatest generation of ship. If the Enterprise was deemed too old and replaced, then it would be easier for Starfleet to phase out other Constitution class ships.
1. Debris in the Mutara Nebula (shields were down)
2. Additional battle damage while in the Mutara Nebula inflicted by Reliant
3. Damage from the Genesis wave while escaping
4. Debris from the Genesis explosion
5. Wear and tear during the travel home
I always got the sense that the retirement of Enterprise was more a political decision than actual battle damage preventing travel or being too damaged to repair,and the Khan incident and battle damage was just the pretext needed to enact the retirement of Enterprise. I assumed Starfleet probably had some out of touch admirals in charge that also saw Kirk as a renegade (Trek II was the beginning of era where Starfleet was less like the wiled west, and more like the TNG era) and they wanted Kirk to return to a desk job. Also, other powers simply wanted to roll out the next, latest, and greatest generation of ship. If the Enterprise was deemed too old and replaced, then it would be easier for Starfleet to phase out other Constitution class ships.
Except that we see that side of the ship as it warps away from the explosion, and the hull there is unscathed, so that doesn't fly. 5 seems pretty far fetched.
They had just picked up the Reliant survivors, transferred crew to Grissom, sent the trainee crew off to various assignments then warped home. Seems like she was still spaceworthy to me.
Yeah, but the transporters can still work independant of the other problems and you're forgetting how warp works; it warps the space around it, pushing space moving the ship -- the ship itself doesn't shot off liek a rocket and it's in a vacuum. If the TOS ship can take a pounding and still go on, so can the upgraded refit 1701-A.
Morrow's statement about Enterprise being twenty years old only works if he means it in the sense that the ship was effectively rebuilt about fifteen years earlier (there's enough room I think, to place The Motion Picture between 2271 and 2273, depending on when Kirk got back from the five year mission).
Or that it was about twenty years ago when "The Enterprise" (pre or post refit, doesn't matter) became the figurehead for Starfleet's P.R. department. Now, with the advent of the "New Excelsior" imminent, Top Brass believe the day of the old figurehead are over.
On towards the future!
On towards the future!
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