The only ship within 3 days' journey? (TMP)

I've believed from the beginning that the warp scale in TNG was the one designed for transwarp.

 

As for our heroes being "the only ones", most of the movies have this covered despite the action being so Earth-centric. In the first one, say, the whole point is that Jim Kirk wants to be Earth's savior, and wipes his feet on his bosses to achieve that. Even were USS Superior and USS Preferable standing by, the Chief of SF Ops would make sure they remained standing by...

Conversely, in TFF, Starfleet would be happy to see Kirk bite the dust in his rust bucket of a ship, preferably taking that St John character with him, while Styles had his big promotion party at Spacedock, with fifty ships and skippers attending. That'd teach Jim manners. The nerve, to become public hero through mutiny!

Timo Saloniemi

 

I highly doubt Admiral Bob’s intention was to purposely get Kirk killed.

 

I would say that TMP was the best Trek movie with the best plot.

1. Starships and other warships of Starfleet are to defend Federation territory as a whole from invaders. Earth, Vulcan, Andor, Tellus and other individual planets are defended by planetary defense systems. So Earth was not defenseless except for the Enterprise, it was defenseless except for the Enterprise and the Earth Defense System, which V'Ger deactivated:

In the Lensman novel Second Stage Lensman a fleet of millions of space battleships from one galaxy defeats the fleet of millions of space battleships from a second galaxy. Then the victorious fleet of millions of space battleships heads for the Trallus system, the capital of the enemy galaxy. But it doesn't dare attack the two inhabited planets in the system. Instead it disguises itself as the defeated fleet and sneaks up to Tralle (Trallus III) and lands troops to take over before the natives realize what's up. And the fleet still doesn't dare to even try attacking Onlo (Trallus VII) because of the super powerful defenses of that planet.

And that is what Earth and the Federation thought Earth's defense system was like, though on a smaller scale since they probably only anticipated attacks by hundreds or thousands of space battleships. This was before the Earth defense systems failed to stop the Borg, the Whale Probe, and V'Ger itself, when it was believed that nothing could get through Earth's defenses.

2. Kirk's reaction does seem odd for having just seen two people die horribly while transporting.

3. As said, V'Ger had not already "joined" with Ilia.

4. What good would cleaning Voyager 6 do the people of the Machine Planet if Voyager VI didn't have enough examples of Earth language and writing aboard for them to learn English? Why should Voyager VI have English language data banks? A better question would be how could the surface of Voyager VI get dirty in outer space which is a vacuum and thus the cleanest environment imaginable?

 

Just because it's a vacuum doesn't mean it's empty. Any number of particulates could have caused the scoring and burn marks seen on Voyager VI. Remember, everything that was there first is traveling at speeds far in excess of that Voyager VI was pushed out into space at.

 

The test engineers and developers called it "transwarp", after reading your posts it makes a sense that they would augment the existing technology and keep the current name "warp" to prevent mass confusion. It's like growing up looking at boxes of "Corn Flakes" with a bizarre red/green chicken mascot for some reason, only to find a week later that it's now "Super-dee-duper Corn Flakes" with a chemistry lab's worth of new ingredients and a giant purple pterodactyl licking its lips for some even more bizarre reason that, unlike for the chicken, nobody wants to know the origin or the why regarding.

Or a more plausible parallel, most of us just don't care about the mechanical nuances of the engine in our vehicles after a certain point. They can add another piston, change the direction of the fuel flow, use a new blend of oil that lasts longer and improves lubrication under greater conditions, and so on... they rarely go out of their name to make huge name changes. Sometimes small ones, but "engine oil" is still "engine oil". Not "super engine oil".

And yet that worked for Mario Bros...

 

Small meteroids, cosmic dust, et al... there's a reason space ships would have deflector barriers of some type (plating, high energy vibration, etc). Add in the speed in which it is traversing and even smaller objects could leave a big impact if not a detrimental one.

I recall TVH at the start stated 9 violations. When Kirk is lassoed in, only 6 are stated and there's nothing stating what happened to the others. Just a script boo-boo not caught in time.

They replaced from archive or fixed the altered code, got the circuits back from McCoy*, put them back in, and Captain Stiles' finally got to do the test drive, and found new flaws that had to be fixed. "Ready for trial runs", which is also stated in canon, but Scotty's meddling was just before the runs were to take place per that line of dialogue. It's still possible for transwarp to have had problems, regardless of Scotty's antics.


* Scotty gave them to him as a dramatic thrill

 

You have to watch out for that space dust, it's everywhere!

 

Thank you all for your input and insights! Helpful as always!

 

Just to play Devil's Advocate here, TSFS and TFF are two years apart in the official ST Chronology (2285 and 2287). We don't know what Styles' status was at the time. He could've been dead, he could've retired, he could've gotten promoted, he could've resigned in disgrace... A lot can happen in two years.

Yes, this is a valid question.

The real world answer, of course, is that because STIV was such a big hit, Paramount wanted to be sure to have humor in the movie, and the wacky hi-jinks of the new Enterprise being broken were thought to be a good way to provide that.

I'd argue that Styles probably would've done a better job on the Nimbus III mission than Kirk, because presumably he didn't have any of Sybok's relatives in his crew and wouldn't have surrendered to the guy. Hell, assuming that the Excelsior was working properly, Styles could've just beamed the hostages out in the first place.

Honestly, Styles might've been a pompous jerk, but that's no reason to assume that he couldn't also have been an effective Captain. The two aren't mutually exclusive. I also think that Terrell deserves a little slack, as he was obviously bored with a rather dull assignment at the beginning of TWOK. So Terrell got a little sloppy and, as Kirk said about himself later in the film, he got caught with his britches down.

But yeah, Esteban and Harriman both seem rather hopeless from what we see in their respective films.

I personally don't see Kirk being that conscious & duplicitous in TMP. I think he didn't realize just how desperately he wanted the Enterprise back until McCoy pointed out to him. I think Kirk was lying to himself and thinking "I'm not sure that Captain Decker is up to the task yet" when in truth, he probably was.

I LOVE those ship names, though.

Yes, this is one of the things that really bug me about TMP whenever I rewatch it now. Kirk being wryly amused that his old friend McCoy doesn't want to step into the transporter would work in practically any other context outside of Kirk having watched the transporter horribly mangle two people just a few hours before. But it's presented as "Oh, that wacky eccentric McCoy, not trusting the transporter even though it's perfectly normal" for some reason, and it makes Kirk look like a boorish ass. If they'd cut the transporter accident scene, it might've worked.

 

There are a few extra frames in the SLV where Rand raises her eyebrows in response to the yeoman's comments as if to say 'ouch, too soon' before smiling at Kirk's joke.

But the whole scene would work so much better if they were grim until McCoy arrives. Even Kirk's comment works well with his famous gallows humour if delivered seriously.

 

...Since when does Kirk have a gallows sense of humor?

 

You never noticed? He makes all sorts of wry comments on the bridge during times of crisis. It's part of his armour. Even his line in Star Trek III, saying he'll recommend the crew for promotion knowing full well their actions will end their careers.

 

That line might qualify as gallows humor, but I'd characterize Kirk's humor as much more wry than dark. He doesn't tend to joke about dark or grim things. When there's a crisis, he's usually all business. He'll make a joke after the crisis has passed, but not during.

In any event, Kirk wouldn't have such bad taste as to make a joke about a couple crewmen that just died. If nothing else, that'd be disastrous for ship morale.

 

It's not a joke per se if it's played with a straight face; it's an acknowledgement of McCoy finally being proved right with a tinge of grim humour. At this point, the viewer doesn't know who's coming.

 

But that's not how they play it. Shatner and Whitney play it in a slightly drier way than how they would've done it on the series (drier because Wise wanted everyone in the movie to be restrained), but the subtext is still, "Oh, isn't McCoy silly for not liking the transporter? Isn't that cute?" There's no "McCoy was right" subtext at all.

And besides, real gallows humor is darker and more twisted than that. If you want real gallows humor, check out Homicide: Life on the Street, where the detectives are constantly joking over the dead bodies they encounter in the average day. Here's an exchange from when a patrolman finds a severed ear at a crime scene:

Or when Richard Belzer's John Munch finds an obvious drug killing in a city with a ton of them:

Joking over the dead bodies that are right in front of you... That's gallows humor.

 

Lol. Yeah I won't defend the scene as is, the smiles need to go, although I'd class gallows humour as joking in the face of death rather than literally joking over dead bodies. I'm sure there's some room in between.

Would McCoy making Spock recite Gilbert and Sullivan while re-attaching his brain count as gallows humour.

 

I haven't seen the end of "Spock's Brain" in forever, but that sounds more like camp to me.

 

“The only ship in range” has been used many times in Star Trek. Wasn’t it used in TWOK too?

 

True, I suppose it's more realistic when it's a remote outpost as opposed to Starfleet Command Headquarters.