Where was Kirk coming from Amok Time

Goggles on, men!

 

From the title, I though this thread was about the route the Enteeprise was traveling passing near to Vulcan en route to Altair VI.

 

I don't understand the question. It's a military ship. While the spirit was based on the Napoleonic navies, the workings of starships was based on WWII aircraft carriers. Lots of tight stairs and ladders.

 

The Stage 9 studio floor plan from The Making of Star Trek shows the triangular ladder directly across from the Brig. So that works.

On Lost in Space, I read that they actually had to cut a hole in the studio floor and excavate it so the Jupiter 2's upper deck elevator could descend toward the supposed lower deck. Later, when the sets were moved to a different stage for the third season, there was no hole in the floor. The elevator couldn't go down anymore, and the ladder next to it had solid floor under it instead of an opening you could climb down into.

 

I can see that Kirk would climb from bow to stern via ladders for the exercise plus visiting the troops, even the lowest crewman cleaning the bilge. No wonder his crew loves him.

 

Assuming it is Deck 3, McCoy could be coming out of an unseen side/rear door of Rec. Room 6 (ref. Charlie X).

 

Or the vast Rec Room 3 of "LTBYLB" fame. These officers sure know how to live it up!

Spock was never said to live on any particular deck, or to share a deck with any particular feature. It would seem logical for him to share a deck with Kirk, who was variously witnessed on Decks 12 and 5 at least - but Deck 3 for all officers is a fine option, too, for a number of reasons.

Indeed, the dialogue there is intriguing. Spock speaks of a detour of "light days", leaving it unclear whether the writer thought this was a unit of time, or whether he really was thinking in terms of the ship having to travel a minimally longer distance.

It would be a weird coincidence indeed for the ship to be on a route that essentially penetrates the Vulcan system to begin with (a "loss of 2.8 ld" would mean bending the original beeline only by a couple of light days, a light week at most, if that's what it means).

But is it the knowledge of the fact that the ship will be flying past Vulcan that triggers the pon farr in Spock? The ship isn't there yet: in terms of distance, the heroes aren't particularly close, and can apparently still debate route choices till the cows beam home. And yes, everybody time and again states that the ship either is not on course to Vulcan, or is off the intended course when on such a course. But still: Spock has supposedly never been this close to having a chance to visit home before. And if he goes into a telepathic mating frenzy as the result, perhaps this is what alerts T'Pring across a distance that things are finally afoot, at which point she hatches her scheme.

That the ship would be flying past Vulcan at a distance of light days of course makes one wonder what the hassle is about. The ship is capable of getting to Altair a full week ahead of schedule, just by adjusting her speed (and not yet to maximum warp, even). Surely the deviation Spock mentions should be trivial, even if we discount options such as launching a shuttle or rendezvousing with a convenient other vessel (shuttles might not have the performance, and Spock might not wish to charter services where questions might be asked).

Or was Spock simply so crazy with lust that he got the length of the detour all wrong?

Timo Saloniemi

 

From the title I thought it was what Kirk was thinking about the Spock situation.
Was his attitude to Spock a friend, a commander, a father-figure?
One of my favourite scenes in Star Trek is where Kirk goes to the bridge after Spock change course without his permission even though Kirk was just about to do it. He stands at the door and says Come with me Mr Spock. Dum da da. Yes Kirk might risk his career to save Spock but its going to be Kirk decision not Spock's.
Yes Kirk goes up and down ladders to get from deck to deck because thats the kind of commander Kirk is. You'd never see Janeway or Picard slumming it even if they had ladders on their ships. KIrk's a man of the people like Henoch says.

 

I think it best just to ignore the "light" part and assume the detour would be 2.8 "solar" days off their route, which then makes the decision to detour or not a bigger deal. To support use of the word "solar" vs. "light":

STARFLEET [OC]: To Captain, USS Enterprise from Starfleet Sector Nine. Inauguration ceremonies, Altair Six, have been advanced seven solar days.​

Maybe language-wise in Vulcan conceptual thought, there is no different word for "light" and "solar", both meaning the same on light bright Vulcan.

 

Or perhaps Spock is trying to better sell his case: "It will only take 2.8 additional days, Sir - and those will be very light ones, too!"

Timo Saloniemi

 

Kirk was down in the ship’s galley taste tasting the Vulcan Plomeek Soup.

“Ugh! Too much sea salt.”

 

True; Picard and Janeway usually had their noses too up in the air (or somewhere else) to be "of the people".

 

At the end of "The Apple" Kirk also climbs up the red tri-ladder and just happens to meet up with McCoy and Spock!

 

and Scotty used it on the Constellation coming up presumably from engineering

 

Sulu climbs it as well in DOTD after Engineering is taken over by the KIlngons, and he, Scotty, and the nonspeaking redshirt "split up and try to make it back to the bridge." Sulu climbs up despite being right outside Engineering.

 

As we all know, in TOS "The Man Trap" Spock tells Uhura that "Vulcan has no moon".

Considering how honest Vulcans and Spock are, that statement must be true - at least "from a certain point of view".

But in the animated episode "Yesteryear", A scene showing spock's hometown of ShiKhar shows a hemisphere at the horizon, which is probably another world, perhaps a moon of Vulcan? That hemisphere on the horizon seems to span many arc degrees of angular diameter, but that might just be an illusion resulting from from using a telephoto lens.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/ShiKahr?file=Shirkahr2237.jpg

A few years later the theatrical edition of Star Trek:The Motion Picture had scenes with Spock undergoing the Kolinahr ritual. I believe that several lines of dialog indicate the ritual is on Vulcan. There is a scene with Spock that cuts away to a scene on the planet Vulcan, or possibly some other planet, showing the horizon of that planet, with a large celestial body at the horizon and a smaller celestial body passing in front of it.

The way the scene is cut it appears to show Spock looking at something, and then what Spock is looking at. However, Spock seems to be in bright daylight, and the the scene with the celestial bodies seems to be at night time, and so should happen on the other side of Vulcan or on some other planet in Vulcan's star system, or even on a planet in some other star system. Thus it is possible that the scene with the celestial bodies was supposed to be on Vulcan, or on another planet in the Vulcan star system, or another planet in another star system. .

Some later editions of Star Trek: The Motion Picture are without that scene, but as far as I have read it was cut out for other reasons and not because it was considered unlikely for Vulcan to have large astronomical bodies visible in its skies.

The larger astronomical body looks like it covers many degrees of angular diameter, but again that might be the result of using a telephoto lens in that shot.

In "Where No Man Has Gone Before" The Enterprise visits theplanet Delta Vega near the edge of the Galaxy.

Delta Vega might possibly have native lifeforms. It seems to have enough oxygen in the atmosphere for humans to breathe.

In the movie Star Trek (2009) a planet also called Delta Vega is very cold, at least in the area that is shown, but does have a breathable atmosphere and native lifeforms. In a flashback Spock Prime seems to witness the destruction of Vulcan from the surface of Delta Vega, with Vulcan seeming to be close enough to be seen as a disc and not a point of light.

So there is considerable evidence for an astronomical body in the Vulcan star system that is sometimes or all the time close enough to Vulcan that each world can be seen as a disc from the surface of the other one.

1) The most obvious guess would be that other world is the moon or a moon of Vulcan, which orbits around the planet Vulcan. But Spock's words in "The man Trap" seem to rule that out.

2) If Vulcan and that other world are both planets which have separate orbits around Vulcan's star, they would usually be far apart on their orbits would periodically line up so that a straight line between their centers would point toward Vulcan's star, and them move apart again. In our solar system, no two planets orbit close enough to each other to be seen as discs, not even at the closest parts of their orbit.

But in the TRAPPIST-1 system the planets, including the ones in the circumstellar habitable zone of TRAPPIST-1, do sometimes pass close enough to be seen as discs from the surfaces of other planets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST-1#Planetary_system

So a possible configuration of the solar system of Vulcan would be that Vulcan and the other planet have orbits very close together and the inner planet will periodically catch up with and pas the outer planet, and then will then briefly appear very large in each other's skies.

3) Some novels and other non canon sources describe the world in Vulcan's sky as T'Khut.

https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/T'Khut

However, I believe that one novel, probably Jean Lorrah's The Vulcan Academy Murders, 1984, and the 1988 sequel The IDIC Epidemic, described it as a planet on a separate orbit which was only sometimes close to Vulcan and hightly visible.

If T'Khut was 149,895.3579 kilometers from Vulcan, using the fomula two pi r, where r is the radius of a circle, and using 3.14159 as the value of pi, the circumference of a circle with its center on Vulcan and passing through the center of T'Khut, would be 941,819.46 kilometers. So with 360 degrees in a circle, an object one degree wide at the distance of T'Khut would be 2,616.1651 kilometers wide. So if T'Khut was 30 degrees wide, it would be 78,484.953 kilometers in diameter, which is 6.152 times the diameter of Earth, 1.593 times the diameter of Neptune, 1.547 times the diameter of Uranus, 0.651 of the diameter of Saturn, and 0.548 of the diameter of Jupiter.

So T'Khut should be a gas giant or ice giant planet, instead of a terrestrial planet like Earth. T'Khut should have 3 to 4 times the volume and mass of Neptune, which has 17.2 times the mass of Earth, and so should have about 50 to 70 times the mass of Earth.

It is possible that Vulcan is more massive than Earth. But it seems highly unlikely that humans could function on Vulcan as well as they do if Vulcan was more than two or three times as massive as Earth. So Vulcan should be much smaller than T'Khut according to the data in various novels and other sources. Thus Vulcan and T'Khut are certainly not twin planets, and iseem much more like a planet with a moon than a double planet.

4) So the double planet theory more or less shades into the fourth theory, that Vulcan doesn't have a moon because Vulcan is a moon, a habitable, more or less Earth sized moon orbiting a giant planet within the circumstellar habitable zone of their star.

If there were hypothetical intelligent beings on T'Khut, they would have a word for the period of time it took Vulcan to orbit T'Khut. That word would be translated into English as "month".

If Vulcan is a moon orbiting T'Khut, the tidal interactions between Vulcan and T'Khut should have slowed down the rotation of Vulcan until Vulcan was tidally locked to T'Khut. That would mean that Vulcan would rotate 360 degrees durin each orbit around T'Khut, thus keeping one side eternally facing T'Khut and the other side eternally facing away from T'Khut. Thus Vulcan would rotate in relation to Vulcan's sun, with one Vulcan day lasting one orbit around T'Khut.

So the period of time that it takes Vulcan to make one orbit around T'Khut could be called a month, since it is the period of time it takes amoon to orbit around a plent. Since the Vulcan day-night cycle happens once during that period, that period of time can also be called a Vulcan day..

So maybe it would make sense to call that period of time a "day/month" or a "month/day".

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country begins on stardate 9521.6 as the starship Excelsior detects the explosion of Praxis, a Klingon Moon.

In the next scene:

Spock does not specify what type of month he is using.

The Enterprise is sent to meet Chancellor Gorkon. On route, Kirk makes a long entry.

Later they meet the Klingons, trouble happens, Kirk and McCoy are arrested by Klingons, the Klingons try them and sentence them to prison, and after a lot of trouble things are resolved.

So a stardate difference of 1.0 equals 2 months of some time. Thus the entire span of the movie should be about 15 of those months, whatever type of month they are.

In the Voyager episode "Flashback", Tuvok has a flash bock tohis time o the Excelsior during Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

So according to the movie Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Kirk and McCoy were arrested two months or more after Praxis exploded, but according to "Flashback" Kirk and McCoy were arrest about two days after Praxis exploded. That seems like a big contradiction. If only there was a Vulcan time unit that could be translated both as "month' and as "day" which Spock and Tuvok might have used. A time unit such as the hypothetical orbital period of Vulcan around its planet, which would also be the Vulcan day. a hypothetical Vulcan time period which would be a "day/month" or a "month/day".

I have reason to believe that the orbital period of a habitable moon around a giant planet would very probably be between 1.0 and 20.0 Earth days long.

See my answer to this question:

https://worldbuilding.stackexchange...ourish-on-a-tidally-locked-moon/174453#174453

So the Vulcan "day/month" or "month/day" should be between 1.0 and 20.0 Earth days long, making the two month or two day period last about 2.0 to 40.0 Earth days,and the entire move Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country last about 7.5 to 150.0 Earth days.

And in "Amok Time", when Spock says:

Spock might not mean the distance that light travels in 2.8 Earth days, but the distance that light travels in 2.8 Vulcan month/days or day/months. 2.8 Vulcan month/days or day/months could equal about 2.8 to 56 Earth days.

 

Ignore him. He’s incorrect. I’ve been chatting with the women’s wardrobe person on TOS seasons 2 & 3 and the says the uniforms were minidresses with standard dancers briefs underneath dyed to match.

 

Uhh, fascinating!

My point rather was that it's incredibly sexist to start babbling about sexual harassment when Rand climbs ahead of Kirk but not when Kirk climbs ahead of Rand. And associating the presence of a hem with it is purely fetishist.

No doubt these tri-ladders and their vertical shafts are all across the ship, not just connecting the Officers' Deck with the one below. And quite possibly they are the TOS equivalent of Jeffries Tubes - that is, had Jeffries ever agreed with such an idiotic concept, when he could just as well place all the maintenance-hungry and access-craving things along standard corridors instead of needlessly forcing the service people to crouch or climb.

The thing is, that sphere is on the exact same point of sky above Shi'Kahr day and night. So it is highly unlikely to be in orbit around Vulcan: to be geostationary, it would have to be so close as to tear the planet to shreds.

Yet it's not a case of Shi'Kahr always facing the gas giant around which Vulcan orbits, either: the skies above the place are clear on occasion (to wit, the TOS episode we're discussing here, say!). And space shots of Vulcan never suggest companion worlds.

So the big thing on the sky is probably best interpreted as seasonal, that is, your Alternative 2. Another planet brushing past Vulcan once a year while both orbit the local star would also match the canon setup at Romulus, perhaps chosen by the Romulans as it reminded them of home. Remarkably, Vulcan is only ever demonstrating volcanic activity in that TMP scene when the monstrosity (along with smaller companions) hangs in the sky: tidal stresses from a close passage... No doubt crucial to the rhythm of life on Vulcan, and perhaps even relevant to the seven-year cycle?

On the other hand, this Delta Vega suffers from almost constant cloud cover. Spock actually seeing anything with his eyes would be extremely improbable, and this would negate Nero's plan of having Spock "witness" the loss of his home planet. Unless we instead interpret the celestial display as an "Alderaan moment", a repeat of Spock witnessing the mass death of the crew of the Intrepid from afar by telepathic means. And this in turn removes the need for this Delta Vega to be anywhere near Vulcan - which is for the better, as the space around Vulcan at the time is a beehive of activity and emergency communications (or, initially, suspicious silence), and would be unlikely to allow Scotty to remain ignorant of what's happening.

And others as T'Rukh, with the disclaimer that it's more a celestial display than a world, and gets different names at different times of its nondescript cycle.

And the scant visuals from TMP would allow for that: we can't tell modest craters from giant storms there.

The main reason I favor your #2 over your #4 is that when flying to Vulcan, we always utterly fail to see this giant that Vulcan is supposed to be orbiting... Missing something that big every single time would be a real chore. For comparison, we got to see a #4 setup when Archer's team visited Andor, which indeed was a moon to a gas giant - and, interestingly enough, nobody wanted to comment how Vulcan-like this setup was, even though this was the heroes' first visit to this important and interesting system.

Very true. This, however, causes the problem of us observing Vulcan day-night cycles, which are no different in length from Earth's. Also, the month of tasmeen has at least 20 days in "Yesteryear"...

Also, he is stark raving mad from a disease that causes false memories as its prime symptom, so that's the end of that...

Timo Saloniemi

 

Never mind about Kirk, where was McCoy coming from? It's certainly not Sickbay (despite the reused turquoise doors) and in fact it's barely a room at all - look at how little floorspace there is between the doors and the back wall!
And is that really the best place to position a stand-up console?

 

...If this is indeed Deck 3, the smaller the rooms, the better. We can sort of pretend that the curved corridor would fit, but it takes some doing.

Might be McCoy was on the Holodeck aka Rec Room. All it ought to take is a small booth with a console, after all. Even if the default illusion there is a vast hall with a console.

Timo Saloniemi