- Prompted to cause bodily harm to the tardigrade, Landry grabs an energy rifle from Lorca's collection. It's not Starfleet issue at all. One wonders if there was any thought that went into what sort of weapon it was. Landry obviously knew how to use it.
Burnham recognized the collection as "some of the deadliest weapons in the galaxy". Has she traveled much? We see Klingon blades and this gun and perhaps a pair of others. And samurai swords, so Lorca doesn't
exclusively study the UFP/Klingon conflict and its associated weapons. Unless Starfleet officers carry samurai swords as commonly as Klingons carry their blades, that is (which might well be true in light of TOS).
So no telling really whether that's a weapon built by the Feds and then ditched as too weapon-y, or an alien thing, or a gun from the future. But all gun interfaces in Trek seem intuitively clear to our heroes (even if they may cost a primitive kahn-ut-tu her life).
- At the inquest into Landry's death, will Lorca get any heat for playing his recording of miners suffering? It's a dramatic thing to do, but I wonder if Landry's actions could be considered carrying out orders, with or without undue influence by the officer that gave those orders.
What inquest? "She gave her life in pursuit of her duty" should cover it nicely, no matter whether the lady in question gets torn to shreds by a water bear, fried by a fellow demigod, transformed into a robot and then into noncorporeal being, or defects with a superman.
- Seeing the hulk of the Shenzhou's bridge...
...One wonders why the debris is there. The hole in the windows is very large, and the debris in
very active motion. Thermodynamics should dictate that in six months, the debris would bump its way out and not back in.
- Klingon space suits retract much like the Goa'uld and Jaffa's armor disappears in the various Stargate shows.. Given that we haven't seen ANY other Klingon space suits in the rest of the franchise, I don't see this as a canon problem. It IS cool that they have this advanced tech, even if it might be considered incongruous in this era - but it looks fine used in this show's context.
Our heroes have hardsuits, tinfoil suits, life support forcefields and the occasional urge to do shirtsleeves spacewalks. I doubt anything about Klingon spacesuits could ever be declared "inconsistent" in comparison.
I do wonder if the retracting suit is their lightweight, low protection option, comparable to the Starfleet life support belt... In combat, they might don something heftier, and the thing worn by the previous Torchbearer might count as such.
- The Shenzhou's engineering set is a redress of the transporter room. You can see the hanging rectangular shapes in the darkness beyond the core.
Good eyes! Should we perhaps now assume that those shapes are the pre-DSC equivalent of the TOS red hexagon grilles, a type of (radiation?) protection found everywhere?
- So the Glenn's Engineering (Glengineering?) space didn't have a mushroomroom at all, which sorta explains how the away team ran right through where it should be, during their mad dash to the Glenn's lower Engineering deck. Still, it's an awfully big space to simply not have.
OTOH, it's an awfully
weird space to have, when one looks at the walls, which don't show simple deck lines but rather a wildly undulating set of lines, windows, hatches, balconies, panels and whatnot, making anything like "deck count" impossible. Perhaps creating the space involved ripping out lots of stuff that really shouldn't be ripped out of this particular starship design at this particular spot?
- I understand that they split Stamets and Straal into two teams to work independently, but if the Glenn had basically solved the navigation problem, shouldn't this have been enough to share with the other team?
Perhaps Stamets might solve the problem better, if not corrupted by the first solution? For all we know, Starfleet has sixteen teams working on this (not all on ships of this type, and perhaps not on ships at all), and keeps most of them secret from each other for fear of cooperation and subsequent squandering of innovation potential.
- Battlestations! The closeup of the helm position, aside from showing a large and useless graphic of the ship's spinning sections
...Perhaps one would at a suitable stage of operations be able to see the exact geometry of this "cavitation" going on, and spot any asymmetries or other ship-shredding issues?
- During Discovery's earlier drill, there's a sort of target reticule over the viewscreen that reads "Tactical Combat". Later, under black alert conditions above Corvan II, the same reticule reads "Tactical Stand By". What is this all about?
Perhaps the thing Kirk refers to when calling "Tactical" on his screen? That is, if the thing is on "Combat", it shows reality augmented with Combat graphics. If it's on "Stand By", it shows plain old reality. If on Tactical Evasion, there are aids for stealth or dodging. Etc.
- Is it just me, or is Lorca making the sign of the horns with his hands up and waiting for the cue to spore out?
...I sort of got a generic "orchestra conductor" vibe out of it only.
- After Discovery spores out, a gaggle of miners heads outside to see what happened. Unprotected. As flaming debris rains down around them. Maybe they were all concussed or overjoyed at not being dead and all (and someone DID shout "Evacuate!" in their last scene), but IMO this isn't the best time to stare at the night sky in awe.
Or then their mine, which was about to collapse from Klingon bombardment,
did collapse from Lorca's bombardment, and they had no option but to rush out?
I'd imagine certain precedents would be in place from when Starfleet was first formed and presumably absorbed various members' existing forces into their ranks, including perhaps going as far back as T'Pol's time, or Spock, or that Constitution-class ship full of Vulcans that may even be tooling around in 2255.
Each individual member military would probably have its own traditions going even farther back. I mean, Benedict Arnold found work easily enough...
First off, people are evacuating the Shenzhou, and someone stops to grab THIS? [..] I suppose that given the Shenzhou was dead in space at the time and presumably could not self destruct, they took a little time to strip anything of particular value
Or then they grabbed something of emotional value, like people leaving their homes to an advancing wall of fire or water do. The telescope would be an obvious thing for Saru to grab; the rest would just float out on its own eventually.
I don't think the crew would have attempted to destroy the ship. I mean, Starfleet never does, except if they think this will allow them to directly hurt the enemy. Supposedly, there's nothing of worth left to salvage in an abandoned ship as a first approximation.
- Second, how did the scope to get to Burnham in the first place?
I'd think it would be strictly against regs to send it to her in the jail, and it's not as if she's getting out like, well,
ever - so the question then becomes, who's gonna keep it?
Saru could be sending it to Burnham from two decks up, suitably obfuscating the origin. Or Saru could be informing the Department of Withheld Mementos, which would make the delivery swifty enough (cf. the swiftness of delivering Burnham). But Lorca could be informing them, too - and possibly several days in advance of the "unexpected occurrence" that brought Burnham to his ship, at that.
Or is the prison life in the Federation already like the New Zealand colony?
It's around this time that Dr. Adams' work is starting to bear fruit, but ten years later McCoy still thinks penal colonies are hellholes and Kirk has to tell him otherwise. Or at least Kirk thinks McCoy thinks that. I very much think the primary purpose of imprisonment at that day and age still remains that of freedom-deprivation torture, and it wouldn't work unless the soft cushions in the comfy chair did have all the fillings lumped in one end.
Timo Saloniemi