That is absolutely awful!!!
Surely they cleaned that ship out of human remains before reusing it? But knowing the military mind, probably not!!! 
JB
That is absolutely awful!!!
Surely they cleaned that ship out of human remains before reusing it? But knowing the military mind, probably not!!! JB
In many cases, "repaired" should probably be replaced by "rebuilt". Say, West Virginia retained her hull and the barrels of her main guns, but the rest was essentially all-new, and probably a totally wasted effort in providing late in the war the USN with a battleship it didn't actually need.
Are starship hulls similarly valuable templates for installing an all-new ship inside? The "refit" of Kirk's ship puts that in some doubt: nothing about the hull contours was retained in that process. Now granted, West Virginia also had her hull form altered with the addition of anti-torp/stability bulges, but that's still different from re-contouring every single curve on NCC-1701.
So, what is valuable in a starship to be recycled? One might say (and fan works indeed do) that warp coils are analogous to gunbarrels: they are painstakingly cast in a time-consuming process, and may be replaced one by one, perhaps moved from one nacelle to another, from one starship to another. Then again, Starfleet decided to install new warp nacelles and supposedly new coils in the TMP refit.
Is an internal component of some other sort valuable enough to have a new ship built around it? The TOS and TMP warp cores don't look alike - or is it just that we never properly saw (or heard of!) the TOS core, which was actually the same all along? Is the ship's structural skeleton or "keel" something to be retained, even if the hull plates bolted onto it are of all-new shapes? Does a ship have a "soul" of some sort that is handed over, perhaps its AI control system that has accumulated experience and skill within one hull and is now a valuable asset to be grafted to another hull?
Might be the Excalibur gets repaired even when there's no tactical or engineering rationale to it - much like West Virginia. Perhaps Starfleet doesn't want to acknowledge the M-5 incident and needs to pretend that all parts of it eventually unhappened? Or perhaps the treaty signed in the aftermath of "Errand of Mercy" puts limits on building of new ships, so Starfleet is forced to build its new ships underneath the skins of preexisting ones?
I'm all for the "haunted ship" concept in any case, dramatically speaking. The Exeter, suffering 100% casualties without any structural damage, would be another interesting case. Or is it even possible to purge her of the agent that turns people into mineral heaps? Or would this require melting every surface to the depth of half a centimeter, or radiating everything so that the ship still glows as of ST:PIC?
Timo Saloniemi
Are starship hulls similarly valuable templates for installing an all-new ship inside? The "refit" of Kirk's ship puts that in some doubt: nothing about the hull contours was retained in that process. Now granted, West Virginia also had her hull form altered with the addition of anti-torp/stability bulges, but that's still different from re-contouring every single curve on NCC-1701.
So, what is valuable in a starship to be recycled? One might say (and fan works indeed do) that warp coils are analogous to gunbarrels: they are painstakingly cast in a time-consuming process, and may be replaced one by one, perhaps moved from one nacelle to another, from one starship to another. Then again, Starfleet decided to install new warp nacelles and supposedly new coils in the TMP refit.
Is an internal component of some other sort valuable enough to have a new ship built around it? The TOS and TMP warp cores don't look alike - or is it just that we never properly saw (or heard of!) the TOS core, which was actually the same all along? Is the ship's structural skeleton or "keel" something to be retained, even if the hull plates bolted onto it are of all-new shapes? Does a ship have a "soul" of some sort that is handed over, perhaps its AI control system that has accumulated experience and skill within one hull and is now a valuable asset to be grafted to another hull?
Might be the Excalibur gets repaired even when there's no tactical or engineering rationale to it - much like West Virginia. Perhaps Starfleet doesn't want to acknowledge the M-5 incident and needs to pretend that all parts of it eventually unhappened? Or perhaps the treaty signed in the aftermath of "Errand of Mercy" puts limits on building of new ships, so Starfleet is forced to build its new ships underneath the skins of preexisting ones?
I'm all for the "haunted ship" concept in any case, dramatically speaking. The Exeter, suffering 100% casualties without any structural damage, would be another interesting case. Or is it even possible to purge her of the agent that turns people into mineral heaps? Or would this require melting every surface to the depth of half a centimeter, or radiating everything so that the ship still glows as of ST:PIC?
Timo Saloniemi
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Yes of course they did. These were people's buddies and messmates who they lived and worked with every day. Every compartment was entered and cleaned out as soon as it was safe to do so. Everything that could be determined to be human remains was removed and treated with proper respect. One of the ship's dentists and his corpsmen worked all through the night trying to identify sailors by their teeth. There were fourteen missing and presumed dead on board and four who went overboard and were never recovered. The unidentifiable remains of fourteen crew members were buried in eight caskets, if that gives you an idea of the state they were in.
The "melted into the ship" thing sounds like a tall tale or a ghost story.
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Sailors and space-sailors will probably always have a bit of superstition going on.
Many modern ships still have two coins for Neptune put in their hull or under the radar mast. That probably includes the last cruise ship you were on, fwiw.
Cosmonauts piss on the truck tires of the vehicle that gets them to the launch pad, for luck (but same cosmonauts will NOT watch the Soyuz rocket being rolled to the launch pad, to avoid bad luck). NASA astronauts have steak and eggs for breakfast before launch, in honor of Alan Shepard (who had them to avoid having to poop during his flight), while mission control staff will celebrate with beans and cornbread on a successful landing.
I could see Starfleet personnel not being particularly happy to serve on an unlucky ship.
The USS Exeter must have been the unluckiest Starship of the lot!
JB
JB
More than Constellation, Intrepid, Defiant?The USS Exeter must have been the unluckiest Starship of the lot!
JB
I tend to agree. The Forrestal fire (and the lessons learned from it) was central to Navy damage control training in the 1980s. It's a major reason that all sailors, regardless of rank or rate, undergo so much of that training. Yet in all that training, I never heard this sea story until now.
Edit to add:
Standard training fare in the 80s.
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Well yes, really! The Constellation was wrecked by the Planet Killer, The Intrepid's crew weren't even aware of what was happening to them from what we understand from Spock and The Defiant all went mad so were also far from Compos Mentis at the end! The Exeter crew were all in their own personal agony when they died and no one knew for more than six months anyway!
JB
However, since the same basic sets were used for the interiors Constitution-refit, Miranda, Oberth, Excelsior, Constellation, Galaxy, and Intrepid classes (and probably others), it seems to me that it would be possible to largely update a ship's interior without changing its overall class. For example, I suppose that if we had seen the inside of a new build Galaxy during DS9, it might have looked a lot like Voyager (with some exceptions).
I wonder if Ron Tracey, one of the most experienced Captains in Starfleet had a number of uniforms beamed down to him when he stayed on the planet to talk with the Village Elders? If not, then six months of pheewww unless the Kohms washed his kit twice a week! Unless it was a self cleaning outfit or no sweating was another result of the bacteriological war on Omega IV? 
JB
JB
We might assume Tracey beamed down wearing some sort of a costume to keep the natives from getting suspicious. So that's at least one full set (full enough to cover all of the uniform at least) to change to when the smell became overwhelming...
But Tracey certainly dons his uniform at that random moment when Kirk and pals arrive. He probably slept in it, too - all Starfleet folks appear to, in the 23rd century! I gather the self-cleaning feature is really nice. And the built-in heater must do wonders to the lower back in primitive conditions.
Timo Saloniemi
But Tracey certainly dons his uniform at that random moment when Kirk and pals arrive. He probably slept in it, too - all Starfleet folks appear to, in the 23rd century! I gather the self-cleaning feature is really nice. And the built-in heater must do wonders to the lower back in primitive conditions.
Timo Saloniemi
There's always the possibility he protected it with a life-support belt, lol. Seriously, though, in Spock's Brain I always thought the mention of 72 degrees was telling us the temperature they were usually feeling onboard ship, then later I see from fans and in the subtitles a reference to "suit." The were wearing the their normal uniforms, so if the subtitles are really, really right, then maybe this is the only use of life-support belts in live action, and with no visual effect. (By stardate, there are animated episodes with life support belts before this, but that's another can of worms).
Relating this to the original post? The poster could use this idea: the life support failed, temperature dropped within the ship, and the Excalibur crew could not get into suits in time, and so died. Life support belts were put into use not long after to prevent such a disaster from happening again.
A new can of worms, maybe for a new thread: if life support belts were used with no effect (just as deflector shields were in TOS), could they have been in use on TNG and we just never knew because no one complained of the "weather"?
Yup, forcefields in TOS never involved an "effect" unless something challenged them. So in all likelihood, our heroes wore TAS style belts in "Squire of Gothos", with the forcefields protecting them from the horrid environment until they noticed it wasn't so horrid after all. Only, they chose a belt-and-suspender approach and additionally donned face masks with the forcefield belt.
Those TMP belt buckles obviously were forcefield generators, too: everybody was required to wear this "life jacket" all the time in a ship sailing out with untested engines.
But where would the generator have been hidden in TNG? Those suits revealed all. (And they sure complained about weather when there was some!)
Timo Saloniemi
Those TMP belt buckles obviously were forcefield generators, too: everybody was required to wear this "life jacket" all the time in a ship sailing out with untested engines.
But where would the generator have been hidden in TNG? Those suits revealed all. (And they sure complained about weather when there was some!)
Timo Saloniemi
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