Recovered after the battle.
...when
Shenzhou was evacuated?
Apparently, a complex and delicate procedure that a Klingon managed to do?
Is that some sort of not-so-subtly racist dig at Klingons? Kirk would be so proud!
A pair of Klingons managed to do it, yes, with concerted and carefully coordinated effort, and at great risk of it blowing up in their faces, highly motivated by a heady combination of impending starvation, religious fervor, and sexual tension. Potent.
VOQ: [looking at a PADD displaying holographic images of Georgiou and Burnham]
L'Rell. There is nothing worth taking on this deck, or in the captain's ready room.
L'RELL: I have located the dilithium processor. The coupling unit is covered in crystal residue. Unplugging the processor could cause an explosion. One sudden move and we join the Black Fleet.
What we need to consider is what makes sense. We have no evidence showing that Burnham or Saru did not want the scope left behind
They quite obviously both knew of its significance to Georgiou. Georgiou died and they weren't able to recover her body. It makes perfect sense that they would want it brought back to her family rather than left behind. It was the least they could do, really.
the first thing crew members look after are the lives of those who are helpless or their own
Yes. And there is no suggestion that taking the telescope would have needed to come at the expense of this. None at all.
then retrieving or rendering useless (note the "or") anything that is critical for their military organization or side (such as encryption devices and ship logs), then anything that might be used by the enemy to their advantage (such as power cores)
Well, there is no indication they
didn't wipe or fry the computer core, if you prefer to believe that they did. The dilithium processor (I take it that is what you keep referring to as the "power core"?) was found in a precarious condition and could well have blown up at the first attempt to remove it. What reason is there to think other components were in any better shape? Besides, they were inferior components to begin with.
Shenzhou was already an old and outdated vessel a decade before any of this. These two particular Klingons only bothered because they were desperate.
As much as one wants to insist that people in battle and who have to deal with emergencies like abandoning ships are sentimental, it is highly likely that they are more sensible, especially given trained personnel in such organizations.
If you were to look into it, I'm sure you would find real-life accounts of exactly such battlefield sentimentality among trained service personnel. But again, the evacuation of the
Shenzhou did not take place in the midst of battle. It took place after the battle was over.
Given that, what is more likely is that the container was recovered after the battle
Again, the container we saw it in later was from Starfleet Command. Not that there's any reason the telescope
couldn't have been put in
a container when it was initially recovered after the battle...during the evacuation of
Shenzhou.
especially given the point you raised that the Klingon did not see anything else worth taking, which means Star Fleet or others were recovering various things from the abandoned ship.
Or it means the none of the other stuff floating around this lifeless hulk of a ship that was already old and outdated a decade earlier was of any value to them. They just happened to need that one particular part, which again, they had a deuce of a time getting away with in one piece.
Also, I don't understand why the ship was located inside Klingon territory. Didn't the battle take place near a Star Fleet relay?
The battle took place at the very edge of Federation space, so once the Feds lost the battle and withdrew, the area became
de facto Klingon territory.
If they were left to drift for months in that area filled with debris, and with no one bothering to recover the power core, then that could only mean that the place was not kept secure by the Klingons or the Feds, and thus accessible to anyone to recover ship contents.
The Klingons and Feds were busy fighting each other
elsewhere. The war had moved on from this initial battleground, further into Federation territory, leaving the area inaccessible to the Feds (because it was now behind the Klingons' lines) and of no interest to the Klingons (because they already had the Feds on the run).
Reasonable is where you lose your argument. Blowing up an empty ship (note to Lorca - empty) is reasonable. Please don't suggest it was in the too difficult basket. Torpedoes are 'reasonably' available in war situations.
Lifeboats have torpedoes?
Self-destruct options and settings are an option too.
I wonder.
Nemesis showed us that extensive battle damage can render self-destruct mechanisms inoperable. Oh, I'm sure they could have found some fairly straightforward way of doing it, like leave a torpedo warhead next to the dilithium processor...but what if they'd then encountered difficulties in the course of the evacuation and needed to
return the ship for some reason? Then they'd
really be screwed! And in any case, as
@Crazy Eddie and others have said, destroying one's ship after abandoning it has simply
never been portrayed as standard operating procedure for Starfleet. It's only ever been done under extraordinary circumstances for some very specific and pressing reason, like in STIII (because they needed to even the odds by taking out as many Klingons as they could in one fell swoop in order to have a fighting chance against those left) or in "Context Is For Kings" (because the
Glenn, unlike the
Shenzhou, was an advanced prototype with top secret cutting-edge tech on board).
Frankly I don't know what other invaluable resources were left on the Shenzhou but if there was anything that was left there to be exploited by the enemy OR not protected by Starfleet it should have been either transported or destroyed.
Yet again, you're not far off, but don't seem to realize that you've essentially answered your own complaint. Anything they cared enough about not to leave behind
was taken—right down to the telescope—meaning whatever was left wasn't deemed exploitable, nor even worth destroying. The unlikely scenario that these two desperate Klingons nonetheless
were able to find something which to them was worth exploiting, and then managed to do so, was basically a fluke. Of course, you could make the case that Starfleet with its vaunted reputation for "tech hygiene"
should have foreseen this possibility and are great blundering hypocrites for not doing so. Which once again would be entirely in line with the thrust of the story: they may be fools, but they're
our fools!
EDIT:
"Starfleet's reputation for tech hygiene is exemplary."
–Commander Michael Burnham
Ninja'd!
Is it because the technology is good but the military leadership sucks?
Like Starfleet?
-
MMoM
