- So now our heroes witness "extreme tachyon interference" where the earlier two times they missed the phenomenon altogether, and the second time a dedicated science ship just barely sensed the tachyons without any comment on this being "extreme" (or our heroes would have commented on the comment, or found the extremeness less worthy of a comment). Is the Red Angel making a greater effort at this with every adventure, or does every time-piercing point slowly grow more extreme like an infected wound?
I think it has more to do with timing and showing up at the temporal incursion that the "Red Angel" chooses to interfere in. Even Tachyons have a certain amount of time before they dissipate from the area of incursion. If you're late to the party, you see squat. And as you've stated, they missed the phenomenon the first 2x times. Some other science ship barely got there in time. Only this time did they get to witness it up close & personal. Part of it is timing / luck / plot device!
- Pike was a test pilot on his first Starfleet assignment, from which it follows he knows the DSC shuttles better than the other heroes (or so he claims). Does this establish something about the age of those shuttles? Or has Pike merely been reading the relevant literature in the field as new stuff gets introduced?
With that statement from pike, I'm willing to make the assumption that he was a test pilot to certify that class of shuttles into mass production / fleet wide usage. He was probably one of the many test pilots who help validate all the stock systems for that shuttle when it was his first assignment. I would assume the age of service life for that shuttle is similar to how long he has been in StarFleet since Shuttle Certification for fleet use was done when it was his first assignment and he probably was a pilot / conn officer right out of StarFleet with an amazing piloting record and lots of hrs to get him such a premiere position that is in modern day reserved for more Senior Pilots. The current F-35 JSF certification usually has all their test pilots with at least 1,000+ flight hrs on multiple aircraft behind each Test Pilot and they are much older (average age seems to be >= 35) before they are chosen to be part of the Test Pilot / Certification program for IOC (Initial Operating Capability). IOC is separate from FOC (Full Operational Capability). Given the complexities of modern systems, I wouldn't be surprised if it took over a decade+ to certify every single system, sub-system, maintenance train, logistic supplies, etc.
- On that vein, is the forest of flip switches on the shuttle dashboard a sign of the age of the design? And in which way? Brand new supertech or outdated interfaces?
I wouldn't call it outdated, many aircraft in current day are switching over to "Glass Avionics" where there are plenty of touch screens, but there are also buttons, switch, and dials everywhere as well. It's just that the prevelance of AIO (All-In-One) big screens is currently coming to trend after lengthy certification by FAA for the civilian side while the F-35 is the first figher with a Heavily Glass focused cockpit. Think of the paradigm shift from Dumb Phones to Smart Phones is what the F-35 is bringing to the fleet. Even then, the F-35 still has some switches and buttons, just not as many as in past eras.
The individual dials / switches is a more classic way of doing things where each sub system has it's own physical interface. But given TNG era with it's all glass panels, I wouldn't be surprised if all the sub systems were far more integrated and programmable like a Smart Phone.
The STS / Space Shuttle wasn't that integrated and even current day rockets aren't nearly as integrated, but eventually they will be.
The current one big screen at each seat and then lots of buttons, switches, and dials above seems to be a half way point similar to what's going on IRL in civilian aviation.
- For a rare once (indeed a Trek first?), we see where a probe comes from when leaving a shuttle. Yay for CGI. It's a big probe, and a big bay - barely enough room for it underfloor. The same shape as the torpedo we followed up close when Pike fired at Spock's/Georgiou's shuttle? Not the classic Ray-Ban casing at any rate, which is sorta odd for the torp even if not for the probe.
It looks similar enough, but hard to tell given the Go-Pro esque PoV for when the Torpedo was in flight. But the torpedo casing seems closer to ENT era casings with modifications and a size enhancement.
- The shuttle also has mechanical shutters for the windows (called "external shielding"). TOS style, except not, because these big windows require a lot of clickety-clack action...
I like Window Armor =D, but I wish there was a Camera view projected virtually in place when the shutters go up!
- It also has a set of "Farenheit tools", which include a crowbar.
Oh Yeah! The CrowBar is still relevant that far in the future =P
- Using plasma venting and ignition is an established Starfleet trick for calling attention. Spock's "The Galileo Seven" awesome factor isn't decreased by this: he's aware of a test pilot trick that the other DSC heroes don't seem all that well informed on.
It's probably not taught in regular piloting school because it's not necessary except in a worst case scenario that would rarely happen to regular pilots in regular situations. Test Pilots can get into all sorts of tricky situations since a lot of the systems are experiemental. Just look at X-Planes and Aircraft Certification, all sorts of things can and do go wrong while the systems are being tested / validated / jurry rigged to work.
- Doing it thrice means the shuttle is nearly out of fuel. In a storm where it probably needs to actively stationkeep, though, so we don't learn any exact consumption figures or tank sizes here.
The size of the bursts aren't mentioned, so we can't get enough info to guestimate the size of the plasma tanks.
In the meantime, Burnham takes a shuttle to Vulcan. Or then she hitchhikes on a starship (there might be plenty of Starfleet ships swarming over Kaminar at the time) and only completes the last leg of her trip in that red shuttlecraft, the exact markings of which I forget.
It looked like a 05 or 06 in white big numbers on the bottom of the small printed numbers on top at the Aft StarBoard side of the shuttle. There seems to be 3 Alphabetical letters on top that looked like DSC, but that's me guestimating based on a fuzzy screen shot blown up.
- Local flight control only challenges Burnham when she's already flying between some Vulcan skyscrapers. That's a Mathias Rust level incident, really... Regardless of whether Burnham was challenged sixteen times previously and the information never reached this final bureaucrat, or whether nobody spotted her before she was...
-...Yes, where was she? She requested permission to land at the Sarek residence, but was she in downtown Shi'Kahr (which looked nothing like the TAS/TOS-R place) at the time, or somewhere else? If the latter, why buzz the skyscrapers?
Maybe she wanted to take a more metropolitan route through her favorite city before reaching her dad's place? She has some time given how fast shuttles travel at STL in atmosphere.
Later, Burnham delivers Spock to the S31 ship (callsign NCIA 93) in that same shuttle. And then has to bail him out when Georgiou convinces her this was a bad idea...
- She bails out shortly after the ship was "less than four hours from SB23", which is relevant in terms of what happens between this episode and the next, and SB11, and stuff...
I'm not sure why she would trust Mirror Georgiou given all the crap that has happened between them previously.
- Three of the S31 ships chase her, but she hides inside a hole in a small asteroid (and nothing tries to eat her). The ships fly in extremely tight formation, each busily scanning a specific "sector". Sign of them having fairly poor sensing abilities and having to cluster up to bring enough sensors to bear? It's not as if they'd need three ships to overpower or corner a single shuttle.
Huzzah! No random space worms in random astroids like in Star Wars!
Given the density of that Asteroid field and who knows what was causing that EM disturbance, I wouldn't be surprised that they had to do a 3x ship formation to search for her tiny shuttle amongst a lot of Asteroid debris + local EM disturbance.
- Burnham finally figures out Spock's ranting: the string of numbers is the set of coordinates to Talos IV. Although actually the shuttle computer does this figuring, supposedly without accessing the internet or the S31 ships would home in on her in a heartbeat. The logic of how the search engine decides that 749148 can be nothing but "749 mark 148" which equals coordinates to Talos IV is fascinating, to say the least!
I'm sure all shuttles have a local copy of the Star Charts, given the amount of worse case scenarios, having Star Charts stored locally and not depending on Federation Space Internet seems like a logical design decision. I doubt S31 is able to have spy apps implanted across every single StarFleet Ship / Shuttle. They would be found out and S31 would blow it's cover. That's why they need field agents planted usually. So that it's truly covert and localized to the target only. I highly doubt Leland was expecting the reaction from Burnham, otherwise he would've planted bugs. But that's because he didn't expect Mirror Georgiou to still be in good graces with Burnham, which is his mistake on analyzing Burnham's relationship status with Mirror Geoorgiou.
My bigger part is how did Burnham figure out to reverse the digit order then search for that key word in that order?
The searching for those numbers isn't that big of a deal, but the reversing of the digit order is. Maybe human intuition with the way vulcans interpret numbers in their native tongue compared to English? I know in Mandarin that when you mention fractions, that you speak of the Denominator first, then the Numerator second. While in English, it's in reverse. There could be something about the way of interpreting Vulcan Number order in the language that would be backward compared to English? Given that Burnham grew up on Vulcan, she would know the Vulcan language fluently without a Universal Translator by now given that she had to grow up in that education system.
- That is, okay, even though Burnham didn't tell the computer the search concerned Lieutenant Spock specifically, the computer may have realized (or may have been told earlier) to do the search in this context only. It's still a whopper of a hit, even before we come to the next hurdles:
- "749 mark 148" would be one of those headings where you apparently first gather momentum by doing two full circles before launching towards "29 mark 148"!
- Regardless of whether it's a heading or a location in a spherical coordinate grid - where does the third coordinate come from?
- If it's a heading - what is the starting point? Vulcan, or that rock they are hiding in? Was Spock prescient with exactly where and when Burnham would get his meaning?
- Even if it's a set of spherical coordinates - how come they nail "Talos IV", and not, say, "Talos"? If the accuracy is sufficient for specifying the planet (but how could it be with that few digits?), then again Spock is prescient with the exact moment when Talos IV happens to be exactly there and not millions of kilometers to some other direction, easily confused with Talos III or Talos VI. If it's only good for nailing the star, why then jump to the conclusion that it's relevant to the planet instead?
But again, the computer probably thinks in terms of context. And in the context, "749 mark 148" need not be the coordinates to Talos IV as such. When the computer says "One planetary system, located at 749 mark 148, identification: Talos IV", it may skipping a conclusion or fifty. But it still seems that "749 mark 148" specifies the location of Talos, in what Burnham immediately calls "coordinates", rather than, say, a catalog number.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Heading
The ### mark ### Heading is relative between the current position of the vessel and the center of the Galaxy.
However! If it was fixed angle relative to the center of the galaxy with 749 being a more precise form of Horizontal Angle relative to a virtual galactic plane that would splice the Milky Way, I can get behind that. But did they just multiply the first set of digits by 10 and call it a day? Where accuracy was between 0 & 3600? If that is the case, where is Angle 0 defined as? Earth's relative location?
All right, one final attempt to wriggle out of this jam... Perhaps Spock's 2254 logs contain a bit where he writes down "I am studying an intriguing SOS and trying to locate its origin. So far, I have only found one candidate: one planetary system, located at 749 mark 148 (as seen from the then-location of Pike's ship, that is), identification: Talos IV" and this is what the computer quotes in full?
Also, Spock used to suffer from spatial and order dysphasia as a kid, having inherited it from Amanda; Lewis Carroll helped with that. And it rains on Shi'Kahr at least every now and then, perhaps helping that cherry orchard live long and prosper.
Timo Saloniemi
I don't remember his logs mentioning that, which ep was it referenced in?
