The age of the antihero

[Crazy Eddie]

See! The Shenzhou's dilithium processing unit was a specific resource that the Sarcophagus couldn't get otherwise for six months.

Which, since no one anywhere had any way of predicting what specific part the Klingons would just happen to need, remains irrelevant.

You were saying?

I was saying that the Ship of the Dead is not the Klingon flagship, which it isn't. Starfleet, who has no idea what the hell is going on right now, is in no position to know this.

But the Klingons evidently know it, which is why none of them provided Voq with supplies or resources needed to get the ship working again. It certainly isn't the "flagship" of anything since no one on either side thought bringing it into the war would matter to anyone until Kol decided it would.

The direct hit from the Sarcophagus after the Shenzhou boosted power to its forward shields:

... and is quite possibly the only shot this vessel even fires in this entire battle.

It's been six months and Voq thought they were abandoned.

They WERE.

He definitely felt he needed it against the Discovery:

He felt he needed it in order to escape, once discovery started literally flying circles around him with the Spore drive. That same battle demonstrates that the ship of the dead is NOT notable for its maneuverability, as demonstrated by Kol's frustration with their inability to actually land a shot on Discovery.

Voq said, "But we still lack a dilithium processor." He didn't specify any further.

He specified earlier in the episode, when he mentioned "there are no birds of prey within range."

The key word there might well be "in range," as T'Kuvma is also talking about the orbits of various objects. It's possible that the other ships he could have used for salvage were simply too far away and Discovery was nearby just by accident of orbital mechanics.

It sounds more like they needed any intact dilithium processor.

That remains unlikely, given the other wrecked Klingon and Federation vessels in the area.

Unless, of course, the dilithium processor is one of those scifi components that's made of explodium and will tend to self-detonate if the ship takes a direct hit to the engine room.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

So, it was functional then!

The processor was. The warp core, not so much.

What they had to do was unplug and remove it...

... from the warp core, which itself was non-functional.

How can I lack that when you just confirmed my argument above?

Because, again, you seem to be drawing inferences from second or third hand sources and have basically admitted you have never actually seen the episode. So you quite literally do not know what you're talking about.

 

[AlanC9]

Those who are fond of the show will adamantly defend against such criticism, and the most sure defense is to argue that it's not actually a plot hole.

It's a convenient position since it puts the burden of proof on the other side. And you're playing with house money anyway; what's one plothole more or less when Trek has been crammed with them forever?

 

[Prax]

Apparently they couldn't fly circles around the ship of the dead, because that would have gotten all the data they needed much more quickly. They used Stamets to navigate 100+ micro jumps. This seems like a "work smarter, not harder" scenario.

Speaking of which, why use Stamets at all. They should have just operated the spore drive the old fashioned way. He should've been dead.

 

[fireproof78]

Speaking of which, why use Stamets at all. They should have just operated the spore drive the old fashioned way. He should've been dead.

 

[Prax]

They don't need a Tardigrade(or whatever Stamets now is) to make short jumps. According to Stamets, the problems come in when trying to jump light years away.

They didn't need to put poor Stamets in the agony booth, but the whole plan might have been accomplished simply by flying once or twice around the Klingon ship.

All this, because no one on Discovery knows about hugging the donkey.

 

[cultcross]

They needed precise navigation, which is what the tardigrade/Stamets provided.

 

[Captain of the USS Averof]

I have to agree here. Even a brief reference in dialogue helps consistency AND continuity.

Exactly.

 

[fireproof78]

They don't need a Tardigrade(or whatever Stamets now is) to make short jumps. According to Stamets, the problems come in when trying to jump light years away.

They didn't need to put poor Stamets in the agony booth, but the whole plan might have been accomplished simply by flying once or twice around the Klingon ship.

All this, because no one on Discovery knows about hugging the donkey.

They needed precise navigation, which is what the tardigrade/Stamets provided.

I agree with @cultcross. They needed to be able to make precise and rapid calculations for their jumps. I highly doubt the plan would have been successful if they couldn't randomize their attack pattern.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Apparently they couldn't fly circles around the ship of the dead

Yes they could, using the spore drive, which is exactly what I was alluding to in that post.

Speaking of which, why use Stamets at all. They should have just operated the spore drive the old fashioned way. He should've been dead.

Probably because they needed to be able to calculate all of those jumps very very quickly. Calculating them with computer only would have taken too long.

 

[Prax]

Yes they could, using the spore drive, which is exactly what I was alluding to in that post.

I was referencing your post. What if they flew around the Klingon ship, without using the spore drive, and set their computer to ping the devices that Burnham set up every 50 milliseconds. A few "hugs" would give them a far greater abundance of data, and much more quickly, right? And it would save poor Stamets from the booth.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I was referencing your post. What if they flew around the Klingon ship, without using the spore drive, and set their computer to ping the devices that Burnham set up every 50 milliseconds.

It would have taken weeks, which I'm pretty sure they actually SAID in the episode.

The visuals don't really reflect this, but it seems like they needed to get data on the ship actually ENGAGING the cloaking device to figure out what the phase shift frequency was. That means they weren't scanning the ship from 132 random points around it, they were outrunning the ship's light curve and literally photographing the cloaking event from 132 different locations, successively farther and farther from the ship. That this took a little over four minutes tells us that each jump took about two seconds to pull off, but that also means the light cone expanded to about 4 minutes, or half an AU.

Do the math: at warp 2, it takes one second to cover the distance to the next point, then -- because the light cone is still expanding -- four seconds to reach the next, then eight, then sixteen, then thirty two, then sixty four, etc. It's a sigma function I am in no mood to actually calcualte right now, but if there is a nonzero travel time between points, the time to complete the scan increases exponentially until you have SEVERAL MINUTES between warp jumps, and then several HOURS between jumps. And that doesn't even include the time it takes to drop out of warp and turn the ship's main sensors to face the Ship of the Dead's position, take a few seconds of readings, and then jump again. All in all, a series of maneuvers that takes four minutes might take days, which is long enough for Kol to figure out what they're doing and either call in reinforcements or maneuver to interrupt their readings. In the mean time, Burnham and Ash are still trapped on board and definitely won't survive that long.

A few "hugs" would give them a far greater abundance of data, and much more quickly, right?

Nope.

 

[Refuge]

I was referencing your post. What if they flew around the Klingon ship, without using the spore drive, and set their computer to ping the devices that Burnham set up every 50 milliseconds. A few "hugs" would give them a far greater abundance of data, and much more quickly, right? And it would save poor Stamets from the booth.

Stamet's is expendable in Lorca world. He did that last jump and it would seem Lorca could override the co-ordinates so whoever is the 'pilot' with the spore drive is almost redundant. It's who sets the direction.

 

[ralfy]

Character motivations are not always logical.

I was referring to understanding character motivations.

 

[ralfy]

The processor was. The warp core, not so much.


... from the warp core, which itself was non-functional.


Because, again, you seem to be drawing inferences from second or third hand sources and have basically admitted you have never actually seen the episode. So you quite literally do not know what you're talking about.

I saw that episode and others. What I remember seeing is a glowing, cylindrical device, and one Klingon pointing out that it will be difficult to extract it because of crystal residue. There is nothing mentioned about it being non-functional, and neither was it disabled. And yet the telescope was for some reason retrieved. There's your plot hole.

 

[fireproof78]

Stamet's is expendable in Lorca world. He did that last jump and it would seem Lorca could override the co-ordinates so whoever is the 'pilot' with the spore drive is almost redundant. It's who sets the direction.

In Star Trek world, people are expendable until they are not.

I was referring to understanding character motivations.

And I'm trying to understand them as people in their context.

I saw that episode and others. What I remember seeing is a glowing, cylindrical device, and one Klingon pointing out that it will be difficult to extract it because of crystal residue. There is nothing mentioned about it being non-functional, and neither was it disabled. And yet the telescope was for some reason retrieved. There's your plot hole.

Captain's last wishes.

 

[Prax]

Stamet's is expendable in Lorca world. He did that last jump and it would seem Lorca could override the co-ordinates so whoever is the 'pilot' with the spore drive is almost redundant. It's who sets the direction.

If Stamets died, or if Lorca let him walk away like he planned, the following would have happened:

(First, Stamets wouldn't have died, they just would've had him go into a coma.)
-Then, Lorca would (successfully)talk Tilly into taking his place. Burnham would throw a fit, and we would get some conflict and backsnapping between the three. Burnham would offer(I mean try to convince Lorca) to do it herself in Tilly's place.
-Lorca would say "No. Absolutely not."
-Burnham would do it anyway.

BTW, can I just say.. This is one the best thread titles right now. It's simple, relevant, and a play on "Age of Heroes." Often times, great thread titles last a page or two then suddenly die without some click-baity words to add longevity, yet this one is successful.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I saw that episode and others. What I remember seeing is a glowing, cylindrical device, and one Klingon pointing out that it will be difficult to extract it because of crystal residue.

Yes. That is the "dilithium processor." It's a device used to hold a dilithium crystal in proper alignment within the reaction chamber. It is not a "power core" or anything similar, as this particular device is a component of the Shenzhou's warp core. The warp core as a whole is non-functional and damaged beyond repair, which is precisely the reason Shenzhou was abandoned to begin with.

There is nothing mentioned about it being non-functional, and neither was it disabled.

"It" meaning the warp core. This was mentioned in the previous episodes, where Saru points out explicitly that their ship is incapable of performing an attack; warp drive and impulse engines are both offline, and they don't have enough power to even keep their shields up.

And yet the telescope was for some reason retrieved. There's your plot hole.

It's not a plot hole at all. The dilithium processor IN PARTICULAR was valuable to Voq only owing to his extraordinary circumstances. It wouldn't NORMALLY be valuable to anyone else, especially to the crew of the Shenzhou, who would have no particular reason to remove that specific piece of technology. As it stands, the processor was the only thing on the entire ship that Voq had any use for.

The telescope, on the other hand, has value to the crew in that it was their dead Captain's priceless heirloom. Considering they failed to recover her body from the Klingon ship, it's probably the only thing they have left to remember her by and may be meant as part of her funeral arrangements.

 

[Refuge]

The plot hole with the telescope is probably less about who collected it and even when. THOUGH that does make you wonder. It's more that it was something physically considered of importance and taken. Time was required for it to be removed and transported. There was a window of opportunity to do so. Yet other procedures were not. Security and military ones. Come on that is ludicrous that in a time of war that if you don't scuttle your ship you are going to be that stupid you don't render anything within useless? What there has to be a regulation for you to do so? Where was the starfleet regulation to take the blessed telescope, yet it was taken. So we have this touching scene later on involving the telescope. We also have these eye-rolling scenes of Klingons on the Shenzhou looking for parts!

 

[AlanC9]

Did anyone claim that there was a regulation ordering someone to take the telescope? You have this habit of making up arguments that we've never actually seen anyone make, and then arguing against them. I'd call it strawmanning if I didn't suspect you were genuinely not following the discussion

And that telescope was almost certainly the most valuable thing on the Shenzhou. In an era with replicators heirlooms are even more valuable than they are today, since they can't be replicated.