Starfleet technology: who gets access to what and when?

Which is another reason why I hated "Insurrection." Ridiculous premise is ridiculous.

Starfleet wasn't in charge of that expedition, actually. It was some civilian agency that preceded them. But even if it was, that's really just another check in the "Stupid people who like to waste time" column.

 

But then what is your argument for there being a pressing need to upgrade drives? An upgrade merely bumps a vehicle from one market niche to another, without eliminating the original niche, as evidenced by a wide range of speed categories within each of those vehicle categories you insist are separate markets (say, ships moving at all speeds between two and sixty knots). And faster ships aren't replacing slower ones ITRW: slower ships are replacing faster ones.

It is not "faster motorcycles", that much is obvious. You don't need to upgrade to warp three to get a better cruising motorcycle because the roads are limited to warp two anyway. You can't upgrade your delivery moped to warp two because the traffic keeps you down to warp 0.8. And so forth. Indeed, there has been no significant increase in motorcycle speed for the past century, save for the niche application (not even a "market" by any stretch of the word) of a special type of high speed sporting.

Don't be a coward. Your one and only argument is that vehicles must get faster. You aren't allowed to talk efficiency or operating principle, when there is no known difference in those between warp 2 and warp 3 engines. If you can't argue that any more, just quit, please.

If you want to say that newer is better, then there's no argument - only times of dire distress have ever led engineers to deliberately design replacements that are clearly inferior to what they previously had, to no appreciable gain. It's just that your idea that newer would have to be faster carries no merit - it's based on financial "shoulds" that are demonstrably wrong because the effect on "is" is the exact opposite.

Mind you, there's nothing wrong with logic like this - apart from it obviously being wrong. We know the end result was dictated by a sum of factors amounting to "no speed increase required", so there are other, unknown arguments that countermand the ones you give. Both in the warp freighter example and in the real world of shipping, so you don't even get to plead "Star Trek is silly".

Mayweather says that's what the ECS freighters haul (and the Horizon explicitly does). From this we simply get our first nice excuse as to why, as observed, speed mightn't matter to "freighters" of a certain sort: ore doesn't need to be hurried to the destination, exactly as in the real world of seaborne shipping.

The visuals offer further openings for us. Other items potentially requiring hurry would apparently not require these big containers, because their volume is seen to be minuscule here - just as in those later Trek incarnations where we see fast, small ships hauling stuff that apparently needs to be hauled fast to be profitable.

We could interpret the pseudo-facts otherwise, too. But to what end? There's no point in contradicting what already works fine in terms of Trek continuity and RW precedent.

Why would that market be devoid of alien competition? It's not as if Earth has the military muscle to impose a policy of protectionism.

At this point it might be good to consider that the Boomers didn't survive. OTOH, ore hauling at low speeds did, and freighters moving at warp two did. So the mechanisms behind this would probably be drastically different from the (again as such logical) ones you bring forth.

The Merchantman from TSFS, on the other hand, wouldn't have been a competitor with them in ANY century. For one thing, it isn't shipping to/from Earth. For another thing, it's not a bulk import/export carrier. They're similar markets, but the overlap -- if there even is one -- is very small.

Nobody ever claimed it was, though. That program was supposed to yield benefits in exploration and military applications, and clearly did - but was not suggested to improve commerce, and apparently specifically did not make "freighters" faster as a thing.

There's no reason to mistake "should" for "is" here, then, not even a statement from a potentially misguided character.

Most wars on Earth are over territory you don't actually control (because if you did, you wouldn't need to go to war). Wars are about prestige, about the ability to coerce others into doing what you say. And any lack of means by the colonists might best be compensated for by disproportionate aggression, because that's another page from the real history books right there.

If you managed to frighten him and his ilk to stay off that part of the town, your grandchildren could eventually live under those bridges, in peace and luxury unthinkable of if you let competing gangs of homeless dig in. (It's not as if the scenario would include elements like "police" or "people living in houses" or "means of motion faster than walking", mind you.)

As said, they live in a world very different from ours. There are no "governments" competing to send these expeditions and reap the profits. There's only one government that is conducting a Great Experiment and expecting no known payoff, except perhaps some sort of taxation further down the road.

The situation is perhaps best described in terms of the Boomers. That is, the Oklahoma ones, and furthermore the stereotyped, Lucky Luke version thereof: you rush to grab land, and you can rest assured that no authorities will catch up with you until you have settled in and founded your own little fiefdom. In the Trek version of the scenario, your great-grandchildren may well be the first ones to see an Earth government official.

Agreeing to share is stupid when you don't have to. Humans know to only give away things for free if there's hope for some sort of a return. It need not be a concrete and immediate one, but possibly a social one: I played fair, you think I'm a nice guy and may play fair, too. But the colonists here have nothing to gain from being nice and giving away land.

Timo Saloniemi

 

This is a possibility.

OTOH, Scotty is their resident expert on freighters, as per his working history. Spock knows his comets by rote, too, and Scotty's performance here would be nowhere near as superhuman. And Scotty's task is made doubly easy by him also knowing his Starfleet and being able to eliminate the known government ships from the list of suspects ("I know the one and only USS Dierdre isn't supposed to be here, and anyway they didn't follow Starfleet comms protocol")

Fundamentally, though, this does not alleviate our problem of "a freighter" being limited to warp two. It's not that the Deirdre could be an exception to a general rule and slower than most, both because Sulu says "a freighter" and because the mystery at hand is the disappearance of an entire convoy.

Finally, if the Deirdre really were supposed to be somewhere around there, how could the Klingons use her for the ruse? Scotty could simply hail the real Deirdre (innocently, by dialing her number while thinking she was where the Klingons claimed, or then because he suspected something), or find out more about the nature of the convoy. I can only see two ways for the Klingons to exploit the freighter:

1) They destroyed her and her fellow freighters for real, only in a different location.
2) They knew she was off the grid (and indeed that most freighters usually were) and could be "dropped" near Capella with X hours of safety margin before the real one could be located.

The first scenario suffers from quite a few problems. If they could destroy the convoy, why did they need to fake it to boot? They couldn't have done it too much in advance (in preparation for a "drop" in a place and time of their choosing) because they'd risk Starfleet finding out. And faking it doesn't seem to present any advantages: a true debris field strewn with bodies and survivors would delay Scotty much worse than the fakery.

Also, favoring the first scenario over the second means favoring the model where the presence of the Deirdre was known to Scotty. Why, then, did he fly to a completely wrong place, one that he knew contained no Deirdre?

Why there's a convoy in the first place is a bit of a mystery. Unescorted convoys are tactically advantageous only in the sense of decreasing the footprint of X tons of shipping, and therefore perhaps decreasing the odds of the enemy detecting and sinking those X tons. But if Klingon scanners can't readily locate freighters in the vastness of space, then individual ones should make the run all by themselves, with low odds of intercept and with just X/N tons lost, N being the total number of ships. And a "lane" would negate the stealth argument altogether.

Was the convoy unescorted? The other mystery is why Scotty only corresponds with the Dierdre rather than with the other ships in the convoy. This is best explained if Scotty doesn't know the first thing about the convoy, but doesn't explain why he makes so little effort to find out. If it were an escorted convoy, then finding out whether Starfleet is escorting it should be a breeze. (If it's customary to have a mercenary escort, not so easy.)

I don't see much advantage in the model of known lanes and a well-established Dierdre, either in explaining what was supposed to have happened, or in circumventing the "freighters move at warp two" tidbit. That doesn't mean the real Dierdre couldn't have been a small vessel - it just still leaves her smack in the middle of a generic pool of warp two freighters, large or small.

Timo Saloniemi

 

No, it doesn't. The upgrade gives a cargo ship a competitive advantage in its existing market niche; more ships getting the same upgrade will give them similar advantages over their slower counterparts. If enough ships do this -- which they will -- then anyone who doesn't upgrade won't be able to remain competitive in that same market niche. They'll either have to change their business model and switch to a different market niche, or cash in their pensions and retire.

Assuming I understand your analogy, this is completely wrong. There's no inherent limit to warp speeds that applies to freighters but not to starships. If a freighter is equipped with a warp five engine, it can travel at warp five. That's just how Star Trek works.

No, my argument is that WARP DRIVEN STARSHIPS must get faster. This argument is based on the fact that the captain of the Horizon outright SAYS they have to get faster in order to stay in business. This is SIMILAR to the steam revolution in merchant shipping that made sails obsolete and allowed cargo ships to travel almost four times faster than they previously could. It's just a coincidence that the jump from warp 2 to warp 3 is a similar factor of speed increase and therefore has similar advantages.

We know nothing of the sort. In fact, knowing that the Xhosa is capable of much greater speeds, covering distances of at least several light years within a month, we have established AS FACT that some freighters are capable of speeds in excess of warp five. That being the case, there's no call for the assumption that the ships serving the Sol Import/export market wouldn't be; at lower speeds, their voyages take YEARS to complete and are both dangerous and highly expensive. The 15 year round trip from Earth to Draylax takes only three months with a warp five engine. There's just no way you can justify the longer travel time economically.

You don't know what they are, but you're sure they exist, and are correct, despite not knowing what they are?

And yet Horizon still carries dozens of those stock cargo barrels and big container boxes like any other freighter we've seen in Star Trek. Some of them are even the same physical props that were sometimes loaded or unloaded from the Xhosa. So basically, you can claim the Xhosa never carried ore just as easily as you can claim that of the Horizon.

What aliens are going to export goods to a planet they've never heard of, using a language they don't speak, for a currency they can't use anywhere except on this same planet they've never heard of that also doesn't have anything they want to buy? That's exactly how international commerce doesn't work.

In the 2150s, Earth is basically the interstellar equivalent of Barbados. They just came out of a recession and modernization (thanks to the Vulcans), and they don't have anything that anyone wants except guns, porn and dilithium. Vulcan is probably their largest trading partner; Draylax and Denobula should be as well, as well as Vega Colony for whatever they happen to have there. Yet even then, Earth-based importers haven't been doing business with the Vulcans or the Deonbulans long enough to have acquired the kind of capitol they'd need to actually pay for the services of alien exporters; assuming those alien freighters will even TAKE Vulcan currency, Earth doesn't have nearly enough of it to support an industry.

As did freighters moving at much higher velocities, which supports Captain Keene's predictions. IF the boomers survived into the Federation era, however, they didn't do it by maintaining their decades-long trade routes.

Nobody ever claimed that the goal of the warp five program was to develop a faster starship???

Incorrect. Territorial wars occur over one country's TAKING of control and another country disputing that claim with force. China, for example, claims ownership over the Spratly Islands and the United States and Japan dispute that claim; war would break out only if China actually took steps to exclude the United States and Japan from using those Islands and the U.S. (not Japan, because they don't really care) sent in a fleet to stop them. If they don't send the fleet, it's not a war, it's just China planting a flag and the U.S. whining about it to anyone who'll listen.

Now imagine if the United States didn't even HAVE a fleet, or really any kind of military to speak of, and China decided to annex the Spratley Islands over U.S. objection. We declare war on them, which consists of us angrily shaking our fists at them from 6,000 miles away while they do whatever the hell they want.

That's what the colonists at Terra Nova were spoiling for: a pointless fight they couldn't even begin, let alone hope to WIN, over territory they could extend no control, didn't really need, and wouldn't be in a position to exploit for generations at least.

This is because they are stupid and like to waste time.

 

And if Spock had named the ship class off the top of his head, that would be one thing.

In fact, of the literally THOUSANDS of merchant ships that the Enterprise might stumble across, the chances of them getting a distress signal from a specific ship that Scotty just happens to know is a freighter are incredibly SMALL, but still plausible.

But then you have to ask yourself how is it that the Klingons know enough about Federation freighters to just happen to name one that Scotty is already familiar with in their fake distress signal? The only way they could do THAT is if they had some reason to believe the crew of the Enterprise would actually know what the Deirdre was. This fits their overall M.O. in this operation: they specifically know the Enterprise and the Carolina are in the sector and they use that knowledge to spread disinformation and keep the Enterprise away from Capella. Which means they obviously know what CIVILIAN ships are supposed to be in the area, and the Deirdre is most likely one of them.

Which makes it a local ship, not a long-range hauler like the boomers.

Of course it does. A short-range freighter intended only to travel within a star system wouldn't need to go much faster. That's thirty one minutes from Mercury to Neptune, an hour or so for a cross-system sprint.

On the other hand, Capella is a a double binary system with the red dwarf pairs in an orbit about 10,000 AUs away. At warp two, a freighter could travel from one star to the other in about seven days.

That right there? That's your market for cheap, low-maintenance short range freighters traveling no better than warp two.

Same way they used the USS Carolina when they tried it the second time.

No it's not. It's a commercial convoy with no escort in peace time. The only reason they'd send a convoy is because they're sending a very large shipment all at once that is too large for a single ship to handle. Which implies the Deirdre is a rather small vessel, not a bulk carrier like we might think of ships like the Fortunate or the Xhosa.

Yes.

Considering Enterprise didn't actually travel far enough to even leave the system they were in, it's kind of the obvious explanation.

There's also the issue of the Capellans themselves. They have no technology more advanced than a boomerang, and while they are aware of extraterrestrial life they have no space travel or advanced weapons to speak of. So much like the Novans of a century earlier, asking this one puny tribe of barbarians for permission to mine stuff on their planet would be like a bunch of aliens asking Tecumseh for permission to drill for oil in Japan.

In fact, the whole point of this mission was to get permission from Aka'ar's tribe to setup mining installations in territory that he HE controlled, which -- in the scheme of things -- probably isn't a lot of land. We're talking about an area maybe the size of South Dakota AT MOST. We have no idea what the rest of the people on this planet think, what their culture is or what their arrangement with the Federation might be, but given the Dierdre's slow speed, AND given the fact that it only took the Enterprise a couple of hours to fly back to the planet at warp five, we can safely conclude that the there were already OTHER mining interests on this planet outside of Aka'ar's territory and that Dierdre is one of the ships known to be shipping ore from Capella to the local processing facility, along with whatever they've been mining from the other (at least three) planets in this system and god knows how many moons and dwarf planets.

Being in a convoy implies that it's small, and being part of local traffic implies that it's probably cheap and short range. Those are likely the only freighters known to be in the system, since even by TOS standards (as you yourself pointed out) many freighters are capable of much higher velocities.

 

The Terra Novans thought Earth had nuked them....from roughly 20 light years away.

 

That's because they are stupid and waste lots of time.

 

We both agree that this logic sounds good. It just happens that it is totally false, both in the real world and in the Trek world.

Now, the reasons can't be the same in the two realms. Or can they? ITRW, ships practice "slow steaming" because fuel costs more than it used to, and profit from arriving at the destination weeks later than they otherwise would. Perhaps freighters that hike it up to warp three burn too much dilithium, which appears to be an extremely scarce resource even for the military in the TOS era?

In the end, we can't know for sure. And we probably should give up, because we can come up with sound logic for why things shouldn't be, and that just proves we're completely misguided here.

How Star Trek works is that freighters travel at warp two. Their potential ability to travel at higher warp is just a minor variable in the big equation that cruches out "warp two = profit".

Now, it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out why commerce plays by different rules than the military. The Concorde was too fast for her own good, but that never stopped the air forces from flying at mach 2. But conversely, while a container ship may move at 30 knots, a navy may decide there's no point in doing so. All we have to do is start believing in rules that match the observed (pseudo-)reality.

Exactly. And lo, the next time we meet freighters in Trek, the captain is no longer in business, nor is his business model valid. The two just might be connected...

Sure there is, because longer travel times demonstrably are acceptable. It's just a matter of figuring out the required way.

This, pretty much. Because your equation gives the wrong answer, yet we do need an equation (because that's how business works) and we already know the right answer, so what's missing are the unknown elements in the equation.

Naturally, that one container out of the many where our heroes are seen would be fitted for human comfort, on those long voyages, and therefore would have all the human-compatible cargoes and supplies...

Really, the nature of Trek setbuilding is our friend here. It would be pretty much impossible to show ore being hauled without going fully greenscreen, and that wasn't the thing back then. OTOH, using props to create the background suffers from there being too few of the costly props for credibility. So what we get is just a few boxes and barrels - which is perfect for the "supply corner" interior while inappropriate for the "cargo segment" one.

I guess one could cram some ore aboard the Xhosa, too. But dialogue and visuals work side by side here, with the Xhosa credited with supply missions, and the ECS ships with ore hauling, and with the ship designs matching this by showing lack of "too large to be internally realistically depicted in goods hauling role" containers on Kasidy's ship vs. presence thereof on the ECS trains.

What?! Of course it works that way whenever the scenario pertains. That Quark buys berries is not much different from Europeans trading in baubles: primitives are always worth exploiting Heck, all that hauling of ore fits the picture nicely enough - Earth could be buying alien gadgets on the price of teratons of their natural resources.

Nobody ever claimed warp five was going to do any good to commerce specifically. And events show that it did no good to the Boomers. OTOH, it did not eliminate the warp two freighter concept, either.

These are the pseudo-facts we have to live by. Any arguments over them are only valid as far as they conform to the pseudo-facts.

There have been more wars over theoretical spheres of influence than over actual (and generally worthless) square miles of land. Indeed, wars over spheres of influence seldom even take place at those spheres of influence.

Except they knew there would be no fight. And all they had to "do" was mouth off. A planet won for nothing lost or paid - only an idiot would not go for it.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Agreed, although not to the degree that this would be a requirement for the Klingon ploy. Any ship the Klingons knew existed would suffice - it would be Scotty's task to find out that she did exist, and that's a task he should be trivially capable of completing.

This is a well-working scenario.

Nonsense. Or do you wish to claim that the Carolina (and for that matter the Enterprise) is a local ship, too?

And? The problem is that in the dialogue snippet, "a freighter" is limited to warp two, and not e.g. "the Dierdre" nor "a specific short range type of freighter".

So our problem here remains that of figuring out why Sulu would feel that the Dierdre and her at least two tagalongs all belong to some special category of freighter, plus why he refers to that special category in generic terms.

Of course, we can argue that Sulu really said "At best, the freighter might travel at w2" and we misheard him. Sulu would then have gained knowledge of the special properties of the Dierdre by some means unknown and irrelevant to us.

And the question remains, how? If the ships are present and extant, why aren't they accounted for? If the Klingons have seen to it that they really no longer exist, why fake a less convincing and less effective rescue scenario?

That's an interesting concept, with no known counterpart in the real world. If you want to ship a million bottles of Coke, you don't convoy your trucks and hinder your movements that way. You string out the shipment instead. That is, unless you fear Pepsi has laid an ambush with antitank guns or whatever.

Hmh? Scotty says they are forced to "leave" Capella. Subsequently, all we learn is that the site of their search is still "this sector", that is, the sector where Capella lies.And they make their return trip at warp five, but not in order to do "three minutes from the local Neptune to the local Earth" - they do it only until they can accelerate to warp six for the rest of the trip, of which thirty minutes still remain after the next cut.

Makes zero sense. The planet is contested between two interstellar powers - it's not a local affair, except perhaps from the irrelevant viewpoint of the locals. The action is not local, but sector-wide, and it's without precedent or the Klingons wouldn't be there.

How?

Except there's nothing local about the convoy or the freighter or the Carolina or the Enterprise or the Klingons or any other element of the episode. Save for the Capellans, who only get the baubles.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Theory to put a spin on the concept of slow 23rd century freighters verses the as fast as possible technologically speaking early 22nd century freighters.

The mention of fuel, or in this case dilithium crystals. The warp two engines that were as powerful as they could be before the 2140s breakthrough by Starfleet into Warp Three and eventually Warp 5 by the 2150s likely use dilithium. A century later though, is it possible the low warp freighters and the slow robotic ore freighters use more advanced deuterium only warp engines? Basically have, impulse power only, but be able to maintain some form of warp travel, like the Romulans seem to be able to do in "The Balance of Terror".

Deuterium is cheap in the galaxy really. Almost as common as hydrogen. A freighter run off common fuel that might not go fast, but would be cheap to operate would solve the issue of why there are slow freighters in the 23rd century, while in the 22nd century the Boomers were going to need to get Warp Three engines during the 2150s in order to compete.

 

You keep saying that, but every time you do you start fishing for increasingly speculative "could be" explanations for WHY it's false, all to justify a false premise that doesn't bear close scrutiny.

Yes we do. Many freighters can and do exceed warp two. The Deirdre doesn't, and neither do any of the freighters in the Capella sector; an explanation for THAT fact is required, but this doesn't actually tell us anything about what's happening in the Sol import/export market or in galactic commerce in general.

And I'm not even going to point out the fact that you are effectively trying to fit a late 2000s technical factoid into a 1960s TV episode that was based on completely different assumptions. TOS didn't actually make an effort to stay consistent with any sort of speed scale, so it's just as likely that the writers intended for a freighter's "warp two" to be capable of traveling several light years in less than a week. IF we're going to try and be consistent, you should at least be consistent with the explanations we're using and not just make shit up to support what you'd PREFER to believe.

Yeah, no. That's already contradicted by the existence of the Xhosa. It's further contradicted by Gul Dukat in "Return to Grace"

DUKAT: I know where they'll go next. Loval.
KIRA: That's on the other side of the sector.

We're not really sure how big a "sector" is, but assuming it's something like 20 light years in diameter, that means the Groumal was able to travel a distance of around 20 light years in a handful of days or less. That would give her a top speed of around warp 6 or 7.

Still further contradicted by "For the Uniform" which gives us:

And in this case, Eddington's freighter actually manages to get to the planet BEFORE Sisko does; when Defiant arrives, they've already attacked it. This means a three hour head start was insufficient for Defiant to overtake the freighter and get there before the attack could begin. This, again, implies a speed somewhere upwards of warp seven for this freighter.

In the TOS era, there's Mudd's Class-J cargo ship, which is the same classification (though arguably not EXACTLY the same type of ship) as the Horizon a century earlier. Mudd winds up superheating his engines trying to get away from the Enterprise, which would be an incredibly silly thing to do in a ship that was only capable of warp two. Also, Mudd is heading for Ophiuchus III with a cargo of mail-order brides. Unless Ophiuchus is literally the next nearest system over, this is also a silly thing for him to be doing, unless those three women came aboard his ship as children and spent their whole lives waiting for Mudd to deliver them to their future husbands. But this, too, is untrue, since we know Mudd -- who isn't actually that old -- already has a long rap sheet that includes smuggling, transporting stolen goods, buying a ship with counterfeit currency and operating a starship without a license. He's not puttering around the galaxy on decades-long journeys with nothing to do in the mean time, he's smuggling contraband, stealing ships, trafficking in mail order brides and generally up to all kinds of ill shit. He simply doesn't have TIME to do all of that stuff if it takes him five years just to GET anywhere to be able to do it in the first place.

The next time we meet freighters in Trek, it's Travis Mayweather on the Horizon, flying a ship that is almost 50 years old with a top speed of warp 1.8. Again, you're going to have to come up with something more compelling than a single line in a single episode with no further context to support the contention that civilian engine designs made no improvement whatsoever since Zephram Cochrane designed the reactor for the Horizon.

That, also, hasn't been demonstrated, and is explicitly contradicted in the TNG era. So you're assuming ALOT about the Dierdre that doesn't stand up to close scrutiny.

You've extrapolated a very expansive and all-consuming answer based on a sample size of ONE ship and now you're trying to shoehorn literally EVERY OTHER REFERENCE IN TREK HISTORY to fit this one reference.

It's simply easier to explain the Dierdre in the context of civilian shipping than it is to explain civilian shipping in relation to the Dierdre.

Ergo, the Xhosa could easily be hauling ore.

You mean in some made up scenario that you concocted specifically to be argumentative because you have no idea what you're talking about?

Which is exactly the reason why the Earth Cargo Service exists. Earth is selling its dilithium resources from the Belt and the Jupiter system by the kiloton and trading it with alien markets for more interesting technologies and materials. Those same aliens won't come to EARTH, though, because it's out of their way, because Earth ports can't refit or service their ships, and because Earth doesn't have anything the crews really want to buy except... well, ore.

Which is why the Axanari freighter Enterprise encounters relatively near Earth belongs to a species that never visits Earth; it's why the Horizon had to rednezvous with a Regelian ship to deliver some of their cargo to IT, rather than the Rigelian ship flying all the way to Earth. It's why the Earth freighters make a looping run through a half dozen Earth colonies and only trade with a handful of planets they've pre-arranged contacts with: because Earth is a primitive little backwater that nobody's ever heard of and no one really wants to go because they don't really have anything anyone wants.

That will change in later centuries when it becomes the center of the Coalition and later the center of the Federation. UNTIL then, the ECS is the only show in (this particular) town.

Un fucking believable.

Enterprise is the testbed for this engine, and Trip is being very explicit in his belief that the warp five engine isn't meant to be used exclusively on Starfleet vessels. And Trip has been more integral to the Warp Five project than anyone other than Henry Archer himself, so no one in the galaxy knows more about its intended applications than he does. So we can take it as a given that the civilian version can and WILL be installed on freighters relatively soon, or at the very least, least a scaled-down version capable of warp three or better.

That's not a guess: that's straight from dialog: The Warp five engine is going to change a whole lot of things.

Pretty much any advantage the old engines might have over the warp five engine is massively eclipsed by the reduced travel time. It's simply not worth it to keep the old engines.

So it's actually YOUR turn to explain the Dierdre in the context of the greater weight of evidence. That one ship and the reference in Friday's child is far more likely to be the exception than the rule.

 

Which cannot possibly be the LITERAL truth. For one thing, Sulu can claim no knowledge whatsoever of non-Earth freighter designs, fast freighters, military freighters used by Klingon and Romulan forces, freighters from races they've never encountered, or even the alien freighters from the 22nd century that ALREADY demonstrated speeds far in excess of warp two. So his line here can only possibly be true in a relatively narrow context. The only question is HOW narrow.

The most likely explanation is "As far as all the freighters we were briefed on for the mission to the Capella System." Scotty, of course, knows this is what he means, and Sulu doesn't have to waste time and words by saying something like "A J-class freighter second-hand purchase from the Dytalix Corporation, which all the freighters in the Capella System happen to be, is limited to about warp two." Spock isn't in command right this minute, he doesn't NEED to be that precise.

They called up the Enterprise, claimed to be the Carolina, and said they were under attack. How'd you THINK they did it?

Just because the ship is known to be somewhere in the area doesn't mean the Enterprise has precise knowledge about where they're supposed to be. Space, after all, is BIG.

^ Truck convoy.

Jesus Christ, Timo!

The planet, not the system.

Well, Aka'ar's territory is contested. But Aka'ar doesn't control the entire planet. Hell, we find out later he can barely control his own tribe, considering how efficiently his nearest rival had him killed. The Klingons probably have mining operations on other parts of the planet too that compete with Federation interests in more ways than one, which is part of what makes control of this planet disputed.

Because a bigger ship wouldn't need to fly with a convoy. They'd just fill the hold with the entire shipment and fill any empty space with secondary cargo, if at all.

Other than the fact that they were known to be in the area. Enterprise and Carolina were known because of Klingon intelligence reports; Diedre and the other freighters probably by googling "civilian freighters of the Capella System Mining Guild."

 

Medical Tricorders aren't that powerful when compared to other sorts of scanning devices available to civilians. I'm sure a basic civilian shuttle moving cargo has far more advanced sensors, and I'm 100% a replicator could physically produce one if on file and authorized.

Just if you have one, your practicing medicine, on yourself or others. Those things aren't quite fullproof, and while it gives readings, I haven't seen one diagnose and give prescriptions yet.

But honestly, people can get pretty much everything a emergency room has today minus certain drugs. I be a.... well, more than a little creeper out if I walked into a guys basement and found most of it was unfurnished concrete with cobwebs and and wet drainpipe, but in one corner a exact replica of a surgical operating room. I would straight up ask for explanation, may go to the cops afterwards. But if he just has a large supply of Fish Antibiotics, IV Bags, gauze, a survival kit, old book on surgical procedures in a cupboard, I wouldn't care. He is a survival but, but isn't cutting into people (hopefully).

I'm doubting very much the Federation is permissive in regards to people having photon torpedos, or nuclear weapons, and I'm doubting just anyone can play with Anti-Matter. Wesley wasn't just a teenager with interest innscience, he was a exceptional mind, with access to one of starfleets best mobile science laboratories, with the captain and science officer's blassings. Wesley wasn't like a teenager from the Ozarks named Hank who kills possums while drinking underaged, by throwing knives at them, and wants to make a science experiment by surgically connecting a line of them together into one giant centipede. That boy- you don't let him touch the Anti-Matter, ever. Wesley, he isn't stupid or psychologically deranged, he is a boy genius, bit immature, but not stupid. I only recall one mistake he made, involved Nanobots turning into a civilization or something (may be mixing up memories), but um, doubt that happens much to anyone. First time you make a unique mistake like that, something nobody ever thought of before, you get a pass. Just the first time. Doubt everyone was allowed to randomly screw with nanites on Earth afterwards, each grade school making their own expansionary civilization in the classroom before PE. Seriously doubt that. Can't just put it in a aquarium after class and forget. Laws like....

And that episode Worf terrorizes Riza, I think I recall Judzia bossing people around, having the right to enforce law as a Star Fleet Officer. I can't remember the specifics of that episode cause of the extreme anger and rage of seeing what amounts to a starfleet officer committing war crimes and terror attacks, then brushing it off the next episode like nothing just happened. I'm seriously a bit disturbed by that episode, and glad it is slowly fading from memory.

 

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Evolution_(episode)

In a related note, NASA just gave everyone access to their software catalogue.

https://twitter.com/NASA/status/837368589367795712

 

Can we go ahead and vote for the argument winner? I cast a vote for Crazy Eddie.