"That Which Survives" Ship Peril Makes No Sense

Good points, but with minor corrections: no shuttles in The Cage, rather The Menagerie Part 1; Lokai's stolen shuttle was not destroyed, rather it was stowed in the shuttle bay, Bele's space ship was destroyed in the episode.

 

Definitely an inconsistency, the only defense being that the show was embryonic and finding itself. Indeed, "The Alternative Factor" shows Engineering (as a unique one-off) as a teensy weensy room with some cupboard drawers and Engineers wearing blue instead of red. Unless a prequel shows her on a date with Scotty and he spills spaghetti on her uniform so she borrows her friend's at last moment that also happens to have the correct insignia... or let's not say that because I'm not sure that's important enough a detail to make an entire series out of.

Which might be for the best, since every since TNG "Contagion", a plot device that is rendered plausible only after a highly improbable set of circumstances occurs, now happens about 15 times per season - ha!

Yeah, the episode played incredibly fast and loose with the velocity... for me, there's enough surrounding material - like mystery, character interaction, the reality of being stuck on such a planet, etc, that holds the piece together. It's a mixed bag, but this episode - in terms of keeping it real - ranks up there with the Enterprise flying to the center of the galaxy in the southern quadrant and back in a jiffy the way "Battlefield" had or "By Any Other Name" (another one where certain human nature and philosophical ideas cleverly outweigh some throwaway plot devices) where they go beyond the galaxy's edge and get back by episode's end and with no ship damage.

Ditto!

 

Per the script, that was specifically the dilithium crystal charging station.

Only Lt. Masters did. There's nothing in the episode that explicitly establishes her as an engineer; she could be a science officer who's working with the engineering department on something related to dilithium. There's a part where Kirk orders her to "prepare an experimentation chamber," which sounds like something a scientist would do.

Huh? Kirk only said "the southernmost part of the galaxy," and Chekov referred to the Coalsack Nebula, which is known for being in the southernmost part of the sky as seen from Earth, so Kirk was speaking from an Earth-centric perspective there. The Coalsack is only about 590 light years away.

Actually they did take damage. Scotty reported "several systems out" or "operating on emergency backup" after the barrier passage, though none that affected flight operations. But the Kelvans have enhanced their drive so they're going at warp 11, so presumably their contact with the barrier is briefer and does less damage.

 

It's still somewhat interesting that for all their technology, the Kelvin's Generation ship was destroyed, but the much more primitive 1701 came through with hardly a scratch by comparison.

 

I'd guess it's because the Kelvans didn't know what to expect in the first passage, but in the second were able to prepare for it by modifying the Enterprise's shields and engines appropriately.

 

If WNMHGB is any indication, leaving the barrier is less treacherous then entering.

 

And the episode does well to move the engineering action to a small special corner with just two characters in attendance: the guest star can then much more plausibly steal the dilithium, twice, without getting caught immediately.

It's something of a plot shortcoming that Scotty isn't there to help her, though. The adventure of the week hinges on an engineering problem, and if Scotty were there to alleviate that, Kirk would have far less patience with the Lazari and their lack of helpfulness in solving that problem.

Well, Earth's south is towards the galactic core. OTOH, the galaxy, too, has a south, as would any spinning thing.

It is in "Is There In Truth No Beauty?" where we fail to get any references to damage from Barrier passage, both in and out...

But by that time, Kirk crossing the Barrier has become boring routine, and the damage control teams probably fix the ship without explicit verbal prompting!

Timo Saloniemi

 

Kryten would beg to differ - in Elaan of Troyius he snuck into the main Engine Room and spent a great deal of time tinkering with a bit of machinery RIGHT IN THE CENTRE OF THE ROOM without being caught!
Engineers, it seems, are just not that observant once buried in their work

I never thought of it that way - and certainly an off handed Earth-centric comment by Kirk makes a lot more sense than a ubiquitously accepted "southern" part of the galaxy

 

In any case, our heroes have a much more definite definition for "the galaxy" than we could ever hope to have: it's marked for them in red! (Or purplish.)

Why would the Milky Way not have a south? And why would there be any ambiguity about its existence, any lack of universality? Anybody worth speaking to would come from a spinning planet and therefore recognize the concept of south, as well as its applicability to the galaxy. There might be fancy words for it, but there are always fancy words: one still needs north, south, widdershins and deosil, as well as coreward and rimward, to properly define the whereabouts, wherefroms and wheretos of the three-dee vortex.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Well, galactic north and south are real things, a way of defining directions perpendicular to the plane of the galactic disk, with the labels corresponding to which side of the sky the poles of Earth point toward.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_coordinate_system

However, the Earth's poles are at a pretty sharp tilt relative to the galactic plane. The galactic south pole is in the direction of the constellation Sculptor, while the Coalsack Nebula is in Crux, which is pretty much right along the galactic plane. That's why we can see it at all -- it's a dark dust cloud (hence the name) that's silhouetted against the Milky Way, which is the galactic plane as seen from inside it. So while there is a galactic south, it doesn't correspond to the terrestrial south that the scriptwriters based Kirk's line on.

 

My thought is that in tos that warp core ejection is impossible, it's inegrated into the ship. Scotty may have placed explosive chatges. Or they were already there in case they needed to "eject" the core room, but doing so would cripple the ship because a good section of the hull would be missing.
So no "ejection system" but could blow the core off the ship.
Now Scotty wasn't in the m/am reactor, looks like the antimatter feed tube to the core, which would have a strong magnetic field as the antimatter pod would to prevent it from touching matter.
So he was "disrupting the feed" to cause the engine to choke from lack of fuel.
That section would probably be jetesoned or opened to space if they ejected the fuel pods.

I would postulate that in tng saucer seperation would be in advisable.. But possible.. In Tos would be suicide. Tng had a controlled seperation, tos would be explosive.

To me the dilithuum crystals are like control rods .. Regulating the reaction... Without it it's just a big bomb.

 

Of course he wouldn't be literally in the reactor, but my thinking is that he was in the maintenance shaft within the module that contained the reactor and would be jettisoned along with it. So he was right alongside it, as close as he could get (since it's not like the TMP-and-after designs where the warp reactor is right there in the middle of the engine room).

 

More realistic than Kirk KICKING the engine in IntoDarkness.. He should have been vaporized when the thing restarted..

Like the Nx-01 I don't think the warp cores were Ejectable, but probably the Anti matter pods were ejectionable.. Why didn't scotty just drop the fuel?? No idea.. maybe he couldn't.. maybe the fusing thingy was also the the emergency system that ejected them.. Who knows

 

The antimatter flow line would no doubt consist of carefully isolated segments, one after another, with forcefield seals/valves in between. And what Losira clearly did was jam all those seals/valves open. So trying to remove any one of the segments would create two big holes in the antimatter containment system - one on the side of the fuel bunkerage, one on the side of the reactor. Both would be likely to catastrophically leak their contents into contact with matter, no matter which part of the line was ejected.

Ejecting the reactor would probably be the less helpful maneuver, as this would just liberate the entire fuel supply from the tanks. But ejecting the tanks would likewise mean that some of the antimatter already in the other parts of the system would leak back, blow up stuff, and soon enough make the tanks blow up, too - they wouldn't get all that far in the nanoseconds it takes for the leakage to start annihilating the pipes and valves.

Timo Saloniemi

 

The Enterprise was transported and rematerialized incorrectly. This is the cause of the problem. Losira(?) Simply made it so they couldn't repair the problem.

 

Or Spock resetting the 'Mains' with just gloved hands in the Engine Core in STII:TWoK.

 

According to the script, he was operating the manual control to withdraw the "damping rods" in the "reactor room," which doesn't make any sense since that assumes nuclear fission power rather than matter/antimatter. Also because the "reactor room" was this weird little side chamber with no physical connection to the nearby intermix chamber that's supposed to be the actual warp reactor.

Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise rationalizes it as "access to the vessel's dilithium couplings," which are in the pedestal for some reason and can leak radiation if they're overloaded. I guess maybe it's no weirder than "Elaan of Troyius" and other episodes having the crystals be in that little cylinder that rose out of the big boxy thing in the middle of the engine room, but I tend to think the cylinder is just the top end of a shaft that extends into the warp core below the deck. It's hard to imagine how the TWOK reactor room and the intermix shaft work together.

 

It's hard to imagine that pedestal being a major part of the ships power system, because there's no way he could open it without getting blown away by either, electricity, plasma, or anti-matter. It must be tapping of some minute amount of power to do something, but what. And what is it that can be fixed by fiddling around with it?

We never actually hear this shaft referred to as an intermix anything. The original Enterprise, in my opinion, had three reactors, one in the engineering hull controlling the other two in the nacelles (the glowy domes). Perhaps this three reactor system was replaced by a single reactor in the refit. I think that the glowy blue dome near the impulse engines is new matter/antimatter reactor. The shaft we see is actually carrying the output plasma from the reactor down towards some energy systems and out back towards the nacelles. So there really isn't any intermixing happening in that shaft. Just some thoughts.

 

In the Kimble cutaway, it's the other way around, the reactor is at the bottom of the shaft with the energy being carried up towards the impulse engines (and phasers, i guess) and out to the nacelles.

 

That Which Survives muddies the waters further with the introduction of the new matter/antimatter control room. Here's all the references to the new room:

1. SCOTT: Watkins, check the bypass valve on the matter/antimatter reaction chamber. Make sure it's not overheating.
   
2. WATKINS: This is the matter-antimatter integrator control. That's the cut off switch.
   LOSIRA: Not correct. That is the emergency overload bypass, which engages almost instantaneously. A wise precaution, considering it takes the antimatter longer to explode once the magnetic flow fails.
   
3. SCOTT: Then you're right, Mister Spock. Watkins must've been murdered. I sent him in to check the matter-antimatter reactor. There are no exposed circuits there. It couldn't have been anything he touched.
   
4. SCOTT: Aye, Mister Spock, and I found out why. The emergency bypass control of the matter-antimatter integrator is fused.
   
5. (Scott is working on the emergency bypass) < edit. in the room where Watkins was killed>
   SCOTT: It's useless. And there's no question it's deliberate.
   SPOCK: Sabotage.
   SCOTT: Aye, and a thorough job. The system's foolproof. Whoever murdered Watkins sabotaged this.
   SPOCK: You said it was fused. How?
   SCOTT: That's what worries me.
   SPOCK: Worries, Mister Scott?
   SCOTT: Well, it's fused, all right, but it would take all the power of our main phaser banks to do it.

With the bypass valve (emergency overload bypass, emergency bypass control or just bypass valve for short) and the matter-antimatter integrator control in the room, this room is not just a monitoring room, rather it is a control room for the matter/antimatter reaction chamber itself with the bypass valve physically in the room. In addition to a control/monitoring desktop panel and wall mounted controls, there are all those fat red tubes running floor to ceiling. Could those tube have matter and antimatter running through them? Yes IMHO.

Also, comments about the bypass valve overheating implies that it must be in continuous operation to control the correct fuel mixture and flow volumes into the matter/antimatter reaction chamber. Remember, the Enterprise is running full blast at Warp 8.4, so, I imagine the matter/antimatter reactor is running at full at this time. The sabotage (bypass valve fused in the full closed position so fuel cannot be bypassed from the reactor) must have caused engineering to loose control over the fuel flow into the reaction chamber, causing it to run away with no control. The sabotage must have also locked the reactor on full power. Hence, when they commanded the ship to slow down, it didn't comply. YMMV .