To me, the manual torpedo loading stuff is kind of a callback to the below-decks phaser control room that was seen in "Balance of Terror" (and never again). Kor
Or a physical representation of nattering and/or grommishing.* Money was tight in the third season. Spoiler: * ”I suppose this should be explained. Being theatre arts students, we were conscious of what all the extras—or ‘atmosphere people’—in any shot were doing. We had come to the conclusion that they were ‘nattering’ and ‘grommishing.’ That is, in order to fake a conversation in the background, you mumble softly: ‘natter, natter, natter...’ And your partner replies: ‘grommish, grommish, grommish...’” David Gerrold, The Trouble with Tribbles, p. 24.
That whole four digit prefix code thing always seemed a little too 'easy' to me. I groaned one time when the exact same thing was done in a Trek comic book in the 90s. Kor
More common was "Peas and carrots. Peas and carrots. Peas and carrots." And that stuff is called "business". Five digits. /pedant
Are there any insights as to why the digits 16309 were chosen? I just Googled and was mildly surprised that Trek references were the first things things that came up. Nothing about any behind-the-scenes rationale though.
Just so. I tried nattering and grommishing in my first foray into regional theater and was quickly set straight about the proper way to do business. Damn you, David Gerrold, for leading me astray and exposing me to the ridicule of community theater actors and directors. Damn you.
In a real organization it would be drilled and drilled and drilled some more as exactly what to do with casualties in battle. This is done so things become "muscle memory" and don't require higher-order thinking in a stressful situation. "Pick them up and carry them to the bridge" does not seem an effective route to medical attention, not to mention the effect on a patient who may not be stabilized. In the very same movie, we see that medical personnel go where they are needed. It's an example of Scotty being dumbed down in the movies to a kind of an caricatured, eccentric, blustering tinkerer. In TOS he was consistently portrayed as the most competent and canny military commander in the ship next to Kirk. Scotty, as characterized up to that time, would be one of the last people who would lose their head in a stressful situation. They are navigating to a known, charted planet. Unless this cosmic disaster caused CA5 to exactly duplicate all the orbital elements of CA6, they should know upon "landfall" there has either been a navigational error or something is wrong in the system. The navigation could be checked by fixing other stars. The idea that there would not be enough of a discrepancy to prompt at least a little double-checking is hard to suspend disbelief over. This thread and others over and over, year after year. That wouldn't happen if there weren't some significant issues in the narrative, whether you want to call them holes or whatever. And each digit input was an on-off switch, each number could only be used once! Cutting the possible permutations by two thirds...
You are assuming they have the system mapped that precisely. What you say would be true in a well mapped system, but in a rarely visited and remote system, it is entirely possible that the planet they see fits the data they have in their computer. And fixing on the stars won't help identifying what planet they are at. The stars don't move much between two planets in similar orbits. It is safe to say that Kirk picked the system because it was remote and not well surveyed to help keep Khan isolated. He spoke of returning in a century in Space Seed to see if Khan had flourished or not. So it being poorly mapped fits logically with both stories. But the point really is that the planet's orbit shifted and so that planet was not where it should have been but was were they expected to find the other, and now destroyed, planet. And I'm sure that with the systems the Reliant crew has encountered over the years that finding something not quite in line with what the computer says is not abnormal. And when you add in that millions of possible bad things that can happen in space, that we don't see more of it in our solar system or in Star Trek is surprising. Impending natural disaster or post disaster survival makes for great stories. The beauty of TWOK is how simple the story idea is. What if shortly after being marooned, something disastrous happens to Khan? What if another starship arrives? The rest plays out much as you would expect. But nothing about the explanation of the planets in the films is beyond reason.
There are supposed to be six planets, but now there are only five. Investigate that first instead of assuming anything. Sorry, the explanations of the planets in the film is a big sticking point for me. Even with a cursory survey of the system, they still had enough data to have numbered the planets and to know the basics of the system. "Remote and isolated" doesn't mean "we don't know jack."
It seems relatively well-known in "Space Seed," Spock doesn't have to look it up when Kirk mentions it. If the Federation has visited a system, surely one of the first orders of business would be to chart orbits. "Not much" would be enough, and even if the error was small it would be cause for follow-up. Of course plotting navigation to a specific planet would mean predicting where it will be at arrival time. The idea that a second planet would be in a position matching the original destination point so closely that the difference can be ignored is just not believable. A "similar orbit" would not mean two planets are anywhere near each other at any given time; they could be on opposite sides of the star. So it would be an astoundingly remarkable coincidence for one planet to be in a position that could be reasonably mistaken for another. And if CA5 and 6 formed some kind of double-planet system they would be close enough that the absence of one should be noted immediately.
Again, you assume exactness. It depends on the quality of the survey as to how well a system was mapped and as I said, natural disasters happen so if Ceti Alph V's orbit was disrupted it could easily end up in a different orbit that could be mistaken for Ceti Alph VI. You make it sound like a star system can be mapped like a country but it involves lots of calculations and measurements over a great deal of time to get an exact map. A good computer could guess the general orbits from where planets are found initially, but you need to know where perihelion and aphelion are and inclination to the plane, and several other factors that you can make a good guess at but just don't know unless you spend enough time. So I've always taken what is said in the movie at face value, the obit changed enough for the Reliant crew to make a mistake and they likely made that mistake becuase they were in a system that had not been exactly mapped. We don't see Reliant warp into the system and find the planet right where they expect. We join them when they are in orbital approach. So we aren't privy to any events prior to that, like arriving in the system, finding the planet, or any of that. They are just there. Sometimes such omissions aid in believability because they allow room for things we don't see. So I think the mis-indentification of the planet is completely logical and is in no way a plot hole. As for Spock knowing that Ceti Alpha V was habitable, he always knows such thins. He is always prepared for what they might find ahead. Usually he has looked it up and it is in his head, such as the comet in Balance of Terror. So it might be the most obscure system in the region, but it had been surveyed so Spock had looked it up. And Kirk had looked it up. The description Spock gives of the planet is not all that detailed which agrees with a quick survey. But just going by the movie itself, we have no reason to believe the mis-identification was not an honest mistake any crew might have made due to what happened. And considering the oddball things we got in the original series, an exploding planet shifting the orbit of another planet is not even the least probably things we'd seen at that point. So complaining about that in an otherwise great film makes little sense. It is finding a problem where there isn't one.
Once again, there could be twenty planets in the system. Finding the debris of a destroyed one, and the next one over seems to match the one they expect to find? That's not a deal breaker. Reliant's crew is already long since bored with their mission. That's plain from Chekov's initial log entry. Finding a planet that matches the potentially minimal specs of a century old mapping mission, in a similar orbit to the one they expect it in? Mission protocols demand they check it out anyway. It's probably the one they want.