That Destruct Sequence

[Commishsleer]

More like cheap, badly written, fake drama and suspense. Did anyone think for a second that Kirk was actually going to destroy his own ship?



Or PEBKAC -- Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair.

I love the self-destruct scenes in TOS even more so than in TSFS.
I thought they were dramatic and tension filled and had great suspense.
Kirk couldn't let nutters have control over a ship like the Enterprise which could devastate worlds. Imagine Khan in charge of the Enterprise.

We all know Kirk wasn't going to destroy his own ship just as we know Kirk/Spock/McCoy/Chekov or Scotty was never going to be killed in an episode but I still got worried when they were shot down, captured, trapped.I mean why have them lost or trapped or shot in any episode as we all knew the leads were never going to die

 

[Phaser Two]

I liked how all Kirk had to do was calmly say, "Computer . . . " with about six seconds left after Bele screamed that he yielded, and the computer evidently suspended the proceedings with due patience until Kirk gave the abort code.

 

[Steven P Bastien]

My theory is that Kirk gave the bluff code rather than the real code. The guy that reprogrammed the no win kobayashi maru test is naturally going to request a special bluff code for his self destruct system.. Even his crew does not know about it in order to make it more believable. Remember from the beginning,? it's poker not chess.

I know it's not real life and is not provable as fiction, but it makes sense to me. No way is Kirk going to destroy the ship for that reason.

 

[Phaser Two]

My theory is that Kirk gave the bluff code rather than the real code. The guy that reprogrammed the no win kobayashi maru test is naturally going to request a special bluff code for his self destruct system.. Even his crew does not know about it in order to make it more believable. Remember from the beginning,? it's poker not chess.

I know it's not real life and is not provable as fiction, but it makes sense to me. No way is Kirk going to destroy the ship for that reason.

Never thought of that before; I like that. In any case it's a bit difficult to square Kirk's actions here with those in By Any Other Name.

 

[Desert Kris]

I love the self-destruct scenes in TOS even more so than in TSFS.
I thought they were dramatic and tension filled and had great suspense.
Kirk couldn't let nutters have control over a ship like the Enterprise which could devastate worlds. Imagine Khan in charge of the Enterprise.

We all know Kirk wasn't going to destroy his own ship just as we know Kirk/Spock/McCoy/Chekov or Scotty was never going to be killed in an episode but I still got worried when they were shot down, captured, trapped.I mean why have them lost or trapped or shot in any episode as we all knew the leads were never going to die

I'm the other way, I find the version from TSFS is still definitive for me; however part of that is that TSFS is the first Star Trek story I had on video, when VHS was starting to become a thing. I had seen episodes of TOS, but I hadn't seen "Battlefield" until I bought the DVD set several years ago. I like how the computer sounds, I like how the music builds gradually to a frantic, shrill frenzy. And there was no backing down in the movie.

What I do like about the TV rendition is Kirk selling it with his final pronouncement, "From 5 seconds to zero, no power in the universe can prevent the computer from carrying out it's destruct order."

I liked how all Kirk had to do was calmly say, "Computer . . . " with about six seconds left after Bele screamed that he yielded, and the computer evidently suspended the proceedings with due patience until Kirk gave the abort code.

Yeah, one of those way-cool Kirk moments where he shows no fear in the face of mortal peril. Right up there with the moment Elaan throws a knife at him while his back is turned; and without flinching he turns and tells her how things are going to go.

My theory is that Kirk gave the bluff code rather than the real code. The guy that reprogrammed the no win kobayashi maru test is naturally going to request a special bluff code for his self destruct system.. Even his crew does not know about it in order to make it more believable. Remember from the beginning,? it's poker not chess.

I know it's not real life and is not provable as fiction, but it makes sense to me. No way is Kirk going to destroy the ship for that reason.

This is an intriguing possibility. It makes sense given how easily the computer switches to standby when Kirk addresses it again, and how the whole sequence shuts off with a simple, similar code. I like the idea of it as a possible ambiguity.

 

[Phaser Two]

This is an intriguing possibility. It makes sense given how easily the computer switches to standby when Kirk addresses it again, and how the whole sequence shuts off with a simple, similar code. I like the idea of it as a possible ambiguity.

It's a **great** possibility. I'm embarrassed I never thought of it before but am delighted to have discovered a new angle thanks to Steven. Now I must rewatch to see if Kirk shows any signs of knowing it's a bluff (i.e., whether Shatner betrays any signs of that in his performance - although I would think that would have to have been written into the script unless Shatner and the director came up with it on their own).

It is clear that everyone one else, even Spock, thinks it's legit.

 

[Roundabout]

The destruct sequence from Let That Be Your Last Battlefield always bothered me. The length, repetition and number of personnel involved just seemed overdone. Can one of you Trek technicians think up a better way to blow up the Enterprise? Ka-Booooom!

Khan didn't need no stinkin' codes (in "Space Seed"). Apparently, Khan figured out a way to blow up the ship without going through the destruct code protocol. I guess it paid off that he had a genetically superior intellect that he was able to speed read the Enterprise's tech manuals.

Remember the fight scene in engineering. While Kirk and Khan were going at it, there was a light that kept flashing. Khan said there was an overload in progress. He created an overload(an overload of what?, I honestly don't know what). He said the ship was going to flare up like an exploding sun or something to that effect. Of course, it never happened, Kirk saved the day and the ship.

 

[Timo]

Never thought of that before; I like that. In any case it's a bit difficult to square Kirk's actions here with those in By Any Other Name.

How so? "Name" entails blowing up the ship for real, without even attempting to blackmail the baddies with it. Every other "self-destruct" is bluff. Kirk does not want to die, even if the fate of the galaxy is at stake. So he bluffs, or arranges for the saving of his own hide.

Except for that one time in TMP, if we trust a cut we didn't see in the theaters. But he was feeling a bit suicidal that day anyway.

The same with Picard. He bluffs and blackmails, and his opponents fold. But when the timer for the kaboom is broken in NEM and won't let him escape the blast, he skips destruct and rather bets the fate of Earth on a crazy stunt. Although said stunt basically shows he avoids scuttling because of a will to protect his crew rather than his own person. Which we might charitably assign as Kirk's motivation, too.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[DonIago]

Khan didn't need no stinkin' codes (in "Space Seed"). Apparently, Khan figured out a way to blow up the ship without going through the destruct code protocol. I guess it paid off that he had a genetically superior intellect that he was able to speed read the Enterprise's tech manuals.

Blowing up a starship is easy in and of itself. Steer it into a planet, set it to travel at dangerous speeds, point a phaser at the warp core, whatever...

Blowing up a starship in a way that will do minimal damage to anything else in the vicinity and give people a reasonable chance to get off the ship (and be aware that they should get off the ship),that's hard.

 

[Lance]

Blowing up a starship is easy in and of itself. Steer it into a planet, set it to travel at dangerous speeds, point a phaser at the warp core, whatever...

Blowing up a starship in a way that will do minimal damage to anything else in the vicinity and give people a reasonable chance to get off the ship (and be aware that they should get off the ship),that's hard.

Exactly. I remember hearing somewhere that when it came to actually depicting the self destruct in TSFS, thought was given to this exact point. It was ultimately decided that the solution was a set of charges throughout the ship that would be designed to eat away at it in crucial structural areas rather than explode in a big boom per se, a little like the controlled explosions used to bring down tall buildings safely. A starship can be blown up in a variety of ways but the SD is (in theory) supposed to be the method that minimizes the impact of that destruction on the surrounding environment.

In that vein, the 1701-D saucer landing on Veridian III was something of a disaster, as we see the effect the crash landing has on a good stretch of some of the planet's forests (one hopes the Federation sent a sustainability team in afterwards to replant all those trees!)

 

[DonIago]

^To be sure, there's probably other SD options intended to maximize the impact of the destruction, but the circumstances in TSFS would have made that undesirable.

 

[Roundabout]

Blowing up a starship is easy in and of itself. Steer it into a planet, set it to travel at dangerous speeds, point a phaser at the warp core, whatever...

Blowing up a starship in a way that will do minimal damage to anything else in the vicinity and give people a reasonable chance to get off the ship (and be aware that they should get off the ship),that's hard.

You made some good points. There are better ways to destroy the ship without turning it in a weapon of mass destruction, like Khan tried to do.

In TSFS, IIRC, it was basically the saucer section that imploded and that was enough to effectively destroy the ship. The rest of the ship had a fiery reentry into the Genesis planet. The destruct sequence method was relatively clean and efficient.

 

[DonIago]

Also led to arguably one of the most iconic visuals of the entire franchise too...both the destruction itself and Kirk et al. watching from the Genesis Planet.

It still makes me want to throttle the person responsible for including any footage of it in the trailer for the film.

 

[Tenacity]

In that vein, the 1701-D saucer landing on Veridian III was something of a disaster

The explosion of the antimatter in the warp core and the storage bottles probably didn't do the planet much good either.

Gamma radiation, anti-protons, exotic particles, all washing over the side of the planet directly below the explosion.

 

[The Old Mixer]

In TSFS, IIRC, it was basically the saucer section that imploded and that was enough to effectively destroy the ship. The rest of the ship had a fiery reentry into the Genesis planet. The destruct sequence method was relatively clean and efficient.

Was it? What if there's no convenient planet nearby to burn up the rest of the ship? That's leaving the entire engineering section floating in space to be captured.

And then if there is a planet for the rest of the ship to crash down onto, and it's not a planet that already happens to be in the process of self-destructing, you've got...

the antimatter

...falling down to the planet.

 

[DonIago]

Then presumably one would use a different self-destruct sequence.

 

[Shawnster]

I assumed in ST3 the destruct mechanism was damaged or affected by close proximity to Genesis and did not function properly and this is the reason why the engineering hull did not explode but burned up in the atmosphere.

Of course, the real reason is artistic license so we could see the Enterprise fireball decent with Kirk's "my God, Bones, what have I done?" moment.

So, like warp speed and distance, self destruct is affected by the plot.

 

[DonIago]

I assumed that the self-destruction system had an option in which the engineering hull intentionally wouldn't go up in a big explosion (most likely by dropping antimatter containment). Put another way, if there's two destruct sequences available, one being a firecracker and the other being an H-bomb, both of which will effectively scuttle the ship, Kirk chose the former. Beaming down to Genesis wouldn't do him much good if the destruction of the ship wiped the planet or the BoP out as well.

 

[Shawnster]

Why are we assuming a Starship has potential WMD level energy release on explosion?

 

[GNDN18]

Why are we assuming a Starship has potential WMD level energy release on explosion?

“Obsession”:

GARROVICK: Just think, Captain, less than one ounce of antimatter here is more powerful than ten thousand cobalt bombs.
KIRK: Let's hope it's as powerful as man will ever get. Detonator.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture:

ROSS: Why has the Captain ordered self-destruct, sir?
SCOTT: I would say, lass, because he thinks, he hopes, that when we go up ...we'll take the intruder with us.
ROSS: Will we?
SCOTT: When that much matter and anti-matter are brought together, oh yes, we will, indeed.