What exactly was the point of Kirk's "Stop Energizers" command in TWOK

[Iamnotspock]

Re: What exactly was the point of Kirk's "Stop Energizers" command in

It reminds me a bit of the similarly silly technobabble in "Encounter at Farpoint":

PICARD: From this point, no station aboard, repeat no station, for any reason will make use of transmitted signals or intercom!

It always gave me the mental image of the crew communicating between departments via morse code, banging on the adjacent walls.

I assume the idea is to avoid radio emissions that the enemy could intercept, to communicate only through hardline channels between parts of the ship, station to station. Basically, use DSL rather than wi-fi.

That's how I've always read it, since Picard follows the command with, "Our hope is to surprise whatever that thing is out there, try and outrun it."

 

[Christopher]

Re: What exactly was the point of Kirk's "Stop Energizers" command in

Of course, in retrospect we know that the Q could "hear" everything said aboard the ship no matter what form of communication they used. But Picard didn't know that at the time.

It was actually a very reasonable technical detail. It just sounds "silly" because TV and movies consistently give us such a completely unrealistic portrayal of science and technology that we become conditioned to find nonsense plausible and plausibility nonsensical. In other words, Reality Is Unrealistic.

 

[FormerLurker]

Re: What exactly was the point of Kirk's "Stop Energizers" command in

I didn't have a problem with "Right standard rudder." It actually made sense to me that the naval tradition of calling the directional thrusters the 'rudder' would continue to spacefaring vessels of the future. And the argument that they never did that before is easily countered by the argument that just because no script-writer ever used it before doesnt' mean it wasn't done in-universe. They just never went so far as to include those lines of dialog.

Besides, Sulu goes on and on about pitch and yaw in TMP when the Enterprise is being drawn inside V'Ger, two terms that have almost no meaning whatsoever in the gravityless vacuum of space.

 

[Christopher]

Re: What exactly was the point of Kirk's "Stop Energizers" command in

Besides, Sulu goes on and on about pitch and yaw in TMP when the Enterprise is being drawn inside V'Ger, two terms that have almost no meaning whatsoever in the gravityless vacuum of space.

Actually, yaw, pitch, and roll are measured relative to the craft's own axes, so it doesn't matter whether you're in gravity or not. Yaw is rotation about your craft's Z axis, pitch is rotation about your Y axis, and roll is rotation about your X (fore-to-aft) axis. These conventions are, in actual fact, used for spacecraft as well as aircraft and sea craft.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axes_conventions

 

[James Cole]

Re: What exactly was the point of Kirk's "Stop Energizers" command in

TWOK also has the "com-pic" for subspace communication and the "chamber's coil" for the warp core. And this is just from memory after not having seen that particular movie for probably 5 years. The terminology is pretty different.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Re: What exactly was the point of Kirk's "Stop Energizers" command in

^I've refined my search of Chakoteya's transcript site, and while I found that the term "main energizers" was used in "The Doomsday Machine" (I forgot to search for the plural form before), there is no other use in the films outside of TWOK. (Unless it's in the Abrams films, which Chakoteya rather annoyingly refuses to include in her otherwise comprehensive site.) "Doomsday," however, used it in the context of a report of power failure on deck seven. That suggests it was meant to be a localized part of the power systems, rather than the main shipwide power source.

So, in short, TWOK used the term because TOS used the term twice, although TWOK didn't use it in quite the same way. It just never caught on in later productions.

Star Trek 09 is under the Extra, Extra, read all about it... link for some reason.

 

[Timo]

Re: What exactly was the point of Kirk's "Stop Energizers" command in

Maybe because the intercom system is wirelessly networked to the combadges?

Or because standard 24th century eavesdropping methods include tapping into wired communications, either by some analogy of today's "point a sensitive rangefinding laser to a window and use that as your microphone diaphragm" technique, or then by the use of nanoscale physical tapping devices. Some variant of the former allowed Spock to tap into a Romulan CCTV system in "Balance of Terror", and I can't imagine such a system actually transmitting anything radiatively (Spock just "locks on" to some other transmission coming from the ship and then slithers in using some techno-mojo of his to see things that are not being transmitted at all.)

Picard might well assume his ship to have, oh, about sixty million Romulan and Ferengi bugs aboard, with standard countermeasures in place to prevent them from transmitting their findings, to feed them disinformation, to hunt and kill them with counter-nanites or whatever. He would just assume that when encountering a superior opponent, this level of counter-activity would become insufficient. So it's back to basics - running messengers and the like - until the enemy shows his hand on whether even this is insufficient.

How using printouts from printers that handle data via wires, no matter how locally, would be safe in those conditions is unclear.

It actually made sense to me that the naval tradition of calling the directional thrusters the 'rudder' would continue to spacefaring vessels of the future.

Ships on the surface of a body of water can turn in two directions, on one axis (port and starboard, or left and right rudder), and translate along one axis (fwd/aft). Spacecraft can turn on three and translate on three - and Trek ships have at least three distinct propulsion systems for doing so. It might indeed make sense to have boatlike behavior described in seagoing terms and un-boatlike behavior (such as moving sideways without turning) described in new, more appropriate terms - as different-sounding as possible to avoid confusion.

It might actually be very rarely that a starship would have to mind "rudder", which would be a command about turning the ship relative to her current line of motion (be it left/right or the more futuristic up/down). Normally, Kirk would simply want to point his ship towards a desired direction, which would be accomplished by stating out that direction (xxx mk yyy) rather than micromanaging rudder settings. But when matching course with the Klingon ship in ST6, direction is secondary; orientation is paramount.

(Of course, "right standard rudder" today would mean something like "turn to starboard with the greatest efficiency and angular speed short of emergency setting" which is a funny thing to do when fine-tuning your attitude during a close encounter! But perhaps Kirk wanted to show off; near-ramming of the Klingon ship would be just the "Nixon in China" attitude Starfleet was expecting of him.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[The Old Mixer]

Re: What exactly was the point of Kirk's "Stop Energizers" command in

I think that the silly thing about Picard's communications protocols in "Farpoint" is that we never see such measures being taken again under various emergency situations involving hostile forces...an example of what I'd call "pilotitis."

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Re: What exactly was the point of Kirk's "Stop Energizers" command in

Regardless of technobabbly implications in relation to pre-existing canon, in context I think the "stop energizers" command is given to discontinue all tasks associated just with the training mission, which the crew will soon learn to be in preparation for a mission of active duty, in addition so that the crew can give Kirk their complete and undivided attention.

 

[Timo]

Re: What exactly was the point of Kirk's "Stop Energizers" command in

I think that the silly thing about Picard's communications protocols in "Farpoint" is that we never see such measures being taken again under various emergency situations involving hostile forces...an example of what I'd call "pilotitis."

Certainly so. But in in-universe terms, such anti-eavesdropping protocol would be needed in relatively few of the later adventures. With Q, they now know better. With the likes of Nagilum, they can consequently guess that it probably won't work any better. And when lesser forces gain access to the ship, such as with the Ansata and their super-suicide-transporter, our heroes are typically busy doing something more active and interesting about the problem. "Farpoint" has the time to show such protocols because, alas, it has basically nothing else going on...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

Re: What exactly was the point of Kirk's "Stop Energizers" command in

TWOK also has the "com-pic" for subspace communication and the "chamber's coil" for the warp core. And this is just from memory after not having seen that particular movie for probably 5 years. The terminology is pretty different.

The Chambers coil was mentioned in connection with communications -- Reliant claimed that their coil was "overloading their comm system." It could be a part of some other ship's system that could interfere with the comm system, but it was never specified as part of the engines. (And the term "warp core" wasn't coined until TNG, although it was later retroactively used in ENT.)

And somehow, in all these years, I've never caught on that they were saying "comm-pic." That's weird.

I think that the silly thing about Picard's communications protocols in "Farpoint" is that we never see such measures being taken again under various emergency situations involving hostile forces...an example of what I'd call "pilotitis."

Well, the silliness isn't with its use in the pilot, it's with the failure to use it subsequently. But you can say that about a lot of basic procedures in a lot of shows -- the pilot will establish the details of the procedure, but then later episodes will gloss them over for story convenience. Like how early ENT episodes showed Hoshi translating alien languages, but later episodes just handwaved the translation away as an instantaneous thing. Or how in the first one or two storylines of Batman '66, you saw Commissioner Gordon conferring with his police brain trust and determining that they couldn't crack the case themselves and needed to turn to Batman, but afterward he just defaulted to the Batphone with no prior consultation.

 

[enterprisecvn65]

Re: What exactly was the point of Kirk's "Stop Energizers" command in

I didn't have a problem with "Right standard rudder." It actually made sense to me that the naval tradition of calling the directional thrusters the 'rudder' would continue to spacefaring vessels of the future. And the argument that they never did that before is easily countered by the argument that just because no script-writer ever used it before doesnt' mean it wasn't done in-universe. They just never went so far as to include those lines of dialog.

Besides, Sulu goes on and on about pitch and yaw in TMP when the Enterprise is being drawn inside V'Ger, two terms that have almost no meaning whatsoever in the gravityless vacuum of space.

On a similar note when the Reliant first hits the Enterprise there is a quick shot of the control panel that has outlines of the ship with "pitch" "roll" and one other and the pictures tilting in the direction the Reliant's hits caused her to.

Of course in space all of that is pointless unless you accept the fact all ships fly with the same sides facing up and down, like planes, and that those things would apply as it would cause the ship to roll like a plane and the crew world feel it because of the artificial gravity.

But the shot looked cool as hell though.

 

[Christopher]

Re: What exactly was the point of Kirk's "Stop Energizers" command in

Of course in space all of that is pointless unless you accept the fact all ships fly with the same sides facing up and down, like planes, and that those things would apply as it would cause the ship to roll like a plane and the crew world feel it because of the artificial gravity.

As I said above in post #24, this is incorrect. Real-life spacecraft do use yaw, pitch, and roll in their navigation. Those are terms defined relative to the craft's own internal axes, independent of external gravity.

 

[Timo]

Re: What exactly was the point of Kirk's "Stop Energizers" command in

...Also, ST2 is a good example of starships in fact not flying in the same plane and orientation - there's a nice shot of the Reliant rotating against the starfield as she approaches the Enterprise, indicating that while the two ultimately meet at the same orientation, this was not the situation only moments earlier.

Clearly, choosing the same "down" is some sort of a gesture of courtesy. And it seems universal enough, which is no wonder. What I do wonder is whether some species make the embarrassing mistake of choosing the wrong one out of the two possible orientations when meeting with a classically flat Star Trek vessel from an alien culture...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[enterprisecvn65]

Re: What exactly was the point of Kirk's "Stop Energizers" command in

...Also, ST2 is a good example of starships in fact not flying in the same plane and orientation - there's a nice shot of the Reliant rotating against the starfield as she approaches the Enterprise, indicating that while the two ultimately meet at the same orientation, this was not the situation only moments earlier.

Clearly, choosing the same "down" is some sort of a gesture of courtesy. And it seems universal enough, which is no wonder. What I do wonder is whether some species make the embarrassing mistake of choosing the wrong one out of the two possible orientations when meeting with a classically flat Star Trek vessel from an alien culture...

Timo Saloniemi

The Reliant was banking into a line directly with the Enterprise indicating she was "higher", she wasn't flying completely upside down

That is not at all what I was saying. The Reliant was banking into a line directly with the Enterprise indicating she was "higher" before, she wasn't flying completely upside down.

I wasn't saying ships in the films don't fly higher or lower than the others but the ships almost always fly with the "Top" side of the ship upwards and the "Bottom" facing down. The Reliant could have been completely upside down approaching the Enterprise and neither of the two crews would have felt any difference assuming artificial gravity works no matter which way the ship is oriented. If two planes approached with one inverted you can bet the upside down crew would notice a difference.

For audience convenience purposes the ships almost always fly with the same top and bottom orientation, but in space it wouldn't make a bit of difference in reality because there is no up or down.

 

[Timo]

Re: What exactly was the point of Kirk's "Stop Energizers" command in

Hmm... I'm not sure what we are disagreeing on. I'm saying Khan's ship was rolling, so her top certainly wasn't facing in the same direction as that of Kirk's ship originally - which is realistic for spacecraft. It was off by a certain number of degrees; apparently not exactly 90 or 180 degrees, which again is realistic. And it was off in several axes, as the ship also does a yaw there; even better.

There was no "audience convenience" there, for this rare once. And since the original different orientations of the two ships were later matched in this scene, we can then safely assume that whenever in Star Trek we see two ships facing each other with the exact same "up", this situation was preceded (unseen by the camera) by one or both of them doing some rolling so that their originally random orientations would be aligned.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Maurice]

Re: What exactly was the point of Kirk's "Stop Energizers" command in

As seen on Enterprise's viewer, Reliant is already level with the Enterprise before that shot with the "roll" so don't read too much into that.

 

[Ithekro]

Re: What exactly was the point of Kirk's "Stop Energizers" command in

Perhaps Starfleet protocal calls for ships to match their orientation. Maybe even based on rank or status. Reliant would roll to match Enterprise if it is known the Admiral is onboard. Or perhaps based on relative direction from the center of Federation space (inbound and outbound). They seem to pass using proper navigation rules via the port and starboard running lights.

 

[Christopher]

Re: What exactly was the point of Kirk's "Stop Energizers" command in

As seen on Enterprise's viewer, Reliant is already level with the Enterprise before that shot with the "roll" so don't read too much into that.

Maybe the viewer image corrected itself to Reliant's orientation. It's not a window, after all; its version of up and down doesn't have to match the ship's.

 

[Captain Clark Terrell]

Re: What exactly was the point of Kirk's "Stop Energizers" command in

^Which is how I've always interpreted that scene. You'll notice that each ship looks different when shown on the other's viewscreen, which is probably due to each vessel's commander preferring different settings.

--Sran