No. It was “Day Of the Dove”.
Sure you can. “It’s just a show.” A show that is often inconsistent.
And “unfair”? How? No one’s under any obligation here.
How The U.S.S. Excalibur Was Destroyed
- Thread starter There Be Whales Here
- Start date
And “unfair”? How? No one’s under any obligation here.
Here's a fun thought: Maybe the crew of the Excalibur survived by playing dead. We've seen Starfleet officers play all kinds of sensory games against other Starfleet ships.. there was a TNG episode involving a wargame where Worf did just that.
So perhaps... perhaps the crew of the Excalbur survived by spoofing the Enterprise's sensors. "Make the damn computer think we're all dead so it'll leave us alone."
If we shoehorn Discovery into the past behind TOS and look at Kirk's track record destroying sentient AI or planet-spanning computer systems and take that as fallout from the Control incident... We can assume that Starfleet is out there peacefully exploring and also dealing with anything that might be a lingering fragment of Control or lead to a Control-like situation. Other ships (like the Excalibur) would have a similar side mission and know various tricks and traps to fool evil sentient computer systems.
Which makes the M5 experiment even more puzzling -- after Control nearly ended all life you'd think Starfleet would say "ah yeah F*[K no."
Anyway, my personal head-canon is the crew of the Excalibur survived otherwise Kirk would have been drummed out of the fleet.
So perhaps... perhaps the crew of the Excalbur survived by spoofing the Enterprise's sensors. "Make the damn computer think we're all dead so it'll leave us alone."
If we shoehorn Discovery into the past behind TOS and look at Kirk's track record destroying sentient AI or planet-spanning computer systems and take that as fallout from the Control incident... We can assume that Starfleet is out there peacefully exploring and also dealing with anything that might be a lingering fragment of Control or lead to a Control-like situation. Other ships (like the Excalibur) would have a similar side mission and know various tricks and traps to fool evil sentient computer systems.
Which makes the M5 experiment even more puzzling -- after Control nearly ended all life you'd think Starfleet would say "ah yeah F*[K no."
Anyway, my personal head-canon is the crew of the Excalibur survived otherwise Kirk would have been drummed out of the fleet.
We don't know what kind of ship the Enterprise fought and destroyed at the beginning of "Errand of Mercy". We just know that the Enterprise detected it's approach, automatically raised shields and came under immediate fire. The Enterprise returned fire with the proximity blast phaser bolts so I like to think it was a long-range engagement.
In "Day of the Dove" we can clearly see that it was a Klingon Battlecruiser.
I suppose that's fair, though the lumbering around at WW1 battleship speeds and trireme engagement distance is something that gets carried over to TNG and beyond. Is there an example of an extended range combat after TWOK?
The Enterprise shoots a photon torpedo at Reliant -- it just knocks off a damaged nacelle rather than utterly destroying the ship. One would think it would do more damage to an unshielded vessel.
For that matter, it has always bothered me that the Enterprise didn't just blow up the Genesis device. It's not a bomb. It's a highly sophisticated computer. Destroying it wouldn't have made it "go off".
In early scripts featuring McGiver(s) the intent was to blow the Enterprise to bits. She gripes that the ship should be bits of “tinfoil” but Khan’s people had approached too fast and not made a decisive hit, then had to circle back and finish the job, with McGiver(s) taking over the weapons console. As the script got revised this changed.
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I don't have a problem with it in that she lived on a hostile planet for 15 years. That will most assuredly change a person. Especially when they feel abandoned because no one came to check up on them and a nearby Planet exploded causing them a whole new host of issues.
There are a small number of long range combat post-TWOK. Just a couple from memory:
1. TNG's "The Wounded" has an exchange between the Phoenix and a Cardassian ship between 200,000km - 300,000km.
2. DS9's "By Inferno's Light" the Defiant fires something and hits a runabout near the Bajoran star. The Defiant I think was so far away it had to warp over to tractor the runabout.
Given that both ships were unshielded and they are inside a nebula that was dense enough to slow/stop the ships entering them the detonation of a full-power torpedo would've been fatal to both ships if they are firing at point-blank range. I thought there was a scene insert where we see the power level of the torpedoes reduced to zero?
There's no such thing as a nebula dense enough to stop anything. It did disrupt sensors (though they could have, I dunno, had a window). I do not recall a scene where a photon torpedo was nerfed.
A nebula that has been contracting for ages, to where it's just about to start forming a new solar system, would surely be dense as hell. And that's what I think Mutara is. It's thick and swirly, hard to see through, and its particles get in the way of your phaser beams, reducing their effectiveness.
There's lots of things in Star Trek that probably do not exist in reality but we do see that both the Enterprise and Reliant slow down to almost a stop as they push into the nebula. Both the Enterprise and Reliant experience (from the bridge's POV) an impact sensation. That's a dense nebula to affect these massive ships, IMHO.
The photon torpedo nerfing scene is right after Kirk says, "Z minus 10,000 meters stand by photon torpedoes". There is a close-up insert scene of a hand pulling down all the sliders for "TORP ENRG LVL" on the Photon Torpedo control panel.
Perhaps the crew could've looked out the portholes of their ships but it seems there must've been reasons why it didn't happen like the nebula lightning could cause blindness (like how the sensors were all static), etc...
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It'll still not be dense enough to do jack-all.
Space is very big, there may be a core around the proto-star(s), but the upper range is around a measly 10,000+ particles per cm^3, or, for a cubic kilometer, times that by around 100,000,000,000.... 1,000,000,000,000,000 particles, with temperatures colder than Pluto. The Reliant and Enterprise would be glaring hot and able to see each other nearly no matter where they would be in a nebula.
For comparison, A mere cubic meter on Earth has around 10 trillion trillion molecules, and a cubic KM much more so, and we're not generally in swirling purple mists and can't detect heat or see anything past a few feet, unless a fog rolls in.
Nebulas do not work like they're shown to in Trek, period. (or nearly any scifi).
Whatever the Enterprise and Reliant was fighting in, it wasn't a nebula. Something that thick with those properties would be more befitting for a gas giant's atmosphere.
Ceti Alpha VI didn’t explode in the early McGivers scripts. Planet V was just hellish, and Roddenberry complained the Kirk would not leave them on such a world, hence the stupidity of the Reliant crew not knowing which planet they’d gone to. Planet VI exploding got added at the same time McGivers was dropped.
As to the torpedoes, yes the hand seen moving the sliders pulls them down instead of pushing them up as in TMP, but that could simply be someone shooting inserts filming hands pushing the sliders in both directions and the editor using the opposite direction to TMP. Certainly there was no big thought given to this stuff during production.
As to the torpedoes, yes the hand seen moving the sliders pulls them down instead of pushing them up as in TMP, but that could simply be someone shooting inserts filming hands pushing the sliders in both directions and the editor using the opposite direction to TMP. Certainly there was no big thought given to this stuff during production.
Is that like saying, "yeah in another movie they filmed a close-up of hands turning the steering wheel left and right and they used the turning right insert moments before the car in the movie was shown to turn right" ? Well I'm glad the TWOK production didn't use the insert of the hand pushing up the torpedo energy sliders then!
Wow! The original script just had the crew of the USS Reliant openly mistake Ceti Alpha VI for Ceti Alpha V?
^^^
That would have seriously had me rolling my eyes at that point had the film been executed in that fashion. It's not like the film doesn't already have major continuity issues. (like Ensign Chekov not being aboard the Enterprise during space seed, yet somehow remembering Khan) that fans gloss over because they just like the rest of the film, (especially some of the character moments.)
The fact that the U.S.S Reliant's free didn't recognize the fact that the makeup of the set the alpha system itself had changed in a major way (IE One planet missing and replaced by what I assumed would be a large asteroid field, and other planets in the system with orbital paths that are different than what was previously on record); but at least the catastrophe gives hey minimally plausible explanation as to how they didn't immediately recognize Ceti Alpha V as a habitable planet.
The dialogue in the film that was made still seems to indicate somehow that they believe the planet is completely hostile_ poisonous to human life and I still find it interesting that all they show Khan and his people using to breathe are metal masks with some sort of filter cloth; but yeah I guess we fans back in 1982 or a lot more forgiving if we liked the overall execution / story being told in Star Trek production.
I've never had a problem applying my imagination to these questions -- what bothers me is people spend hours and hours ranting over this stuff when a little handwavum makes it so much better. It's not religion, there is no reason to get caught up on a Holy Canon and worry about what happens when you stray or deviate from the One True.
Which is ironic because a lot of Trekkies are anti-religion/anti-faith/anti-God, often lashing out at people who follow a Holy Canon and recite dogma. If irony was river it would be jumping it's banks...
Anyway.
Here's how I'd handle it:
1) The charts for Ceti Alpha were never completed in detail as there was no major interest in the system. Cursory scans, inclusion in a database.
2) The planet they stranded Khan on was chosen for expediency and the very lack of complete charting I just mentioned above. The decision was made to strand Khan and keep him out of mainstream society. A humane execution rather than just putting him back on BB and torpedoing it.
3) We've seen Starfleet slam classification on stuff, and pretend things don't exist to protect society. Witness what happened with Discovery. Ceti Alpha was quietly forgotten about, and the charts left as-is rather than updated by Enterprise's recent scans.
4) Reliant had the old charts and bad data when it arrived, which is why there was such confusion. The planetary upheaval royally screwed up the habitable planet, dropping it from marginal to uninhabitable. Pockets of the planet's environment were "barely livable" but it was only a matter of time before the entire planet was rendered uninhabitable.
5) On top of that the upheaval may have been VERY recent, adding even more fuel to the confusion. Perhaps it was even artificially induced. Perhaps a section of well meaning but evil/misguided folks caused the other planet to explode hoping to kill off Khan indirectly...
6) As for Chekov-- This was always easiest for me: He wasn't on bridge duty but he was part of the crew elsewhere. And with Khan's memory it would be no stretch for him to have memorized names from reading the ship's computers... And whatever Chekov was doing aboard at that time, he clearly had some involvement because he knew who Khan was and what he represented.
To me this is much more fun than nitpicking and wondering why something that happened decades ago wasn't immediately corrected by the Holy Keepers Of Canon when a newer different Trek came out with newer different information.
You do realize... the majority of the people who write and create Trek don't consider it to be The Holy Work, it's literally just a job. Just a story they wrote. Not something that had to be maintained pure so it would fit into the Grand Tapestry 50 years later.
Which is ironic because a lot of Trekkies are anti-religion/anti-faith/anti-God, often lashing out at people who follow a Holy Canon and recite dogma. If irony was river it would be jumping it's banks...
Anyway.
Here's how I'd handle it:
1) The charts for Ceti Alpha were never completed in detail as there was no major interest in the system. Cursory scans, inclusion in a database.
2) The planet they stranded Khan on was chosen for expediency and the very lack of complete charting I just mentioned above. The decision was made to strand Khan and keep him out of mainstream society. A humane execution rather than just putting him back on BB and torpedoing it.
3) We've seen Starfleet slam classification on stuff, and pretend things don't exist to protect society. Witness what happened with Discovery. Ceti Alpha was quietly forgotten about, and the charts left as-is rather than updated by Enterprise's recent scans.
4) Reliant had the old charts and bad data when it arrived, which is why there was such confusion. The planetary upheaval royally screwed up the habitable planet, dropping it from marginal to uninhabitable. Pockets of the planet's environment were "barely livable" but it was only a matter of time before the entire planet was rendered uninhabitable.
5) On top of that the upheaval may have been VERY recent, adding even more fuel to the confusion. Perhaps it was even artificially induced. Perhaps a section of well meaning but evil/misguided folks caused the other planet to explode hoping to kill off Khan indirectly...
6) As for Chekov-- This was always easiest for me: He wasn't on bridge duty but he was part of the crew elsewhere. And with Khan's memory it would be no stretch for him to have memorized names from reading the ship's computers... And whatever Chekov was doing aboard at that time, he clearly had some involvement because he knew who Khan was and what he represented.
To me this is much more fun than nitpicking and wondering why something that happened decades ago wasn't immediately corrected by the Holy Keepers Of Canon when a newer different Trek came out with newer different information.
You do realize... the majority of the people who write and create Trek don't consider it to be The Holy Work, it's literally just a job. Just a story they wrote. Not something that had to be maintained pure so it would fit into the Grand Tapestry 50 years later.
Applauding intensifies.
No, the crew of the Reliant did not mistake the planets in the early scripts. In one they went to planet and Chekov thought something about it sounded familiar but he couldn’t remember. In another draft they went there to check if Khan’s party was still alive, and if not, then the planet could be ground zero. Don’t assume all the details line up from draft to draft.
No. It’s saying the production wasn’t concerned with such minutiae.Is that like saying, "yeah in another movie they filmed a close-up of hands turning the steering wheel left and right and they used the turning right insert moments before the car in the movie was shown to turn right" ? Well I'm glad the TWOK production didn't use the insert of the hand pushing up the torpedo energy sliders then!
If it is "minutiae", why bother to film and include such an insert of a hand adjusting the photon torpedo settings right before they are about to be fired? And even if this was filmed before in TMP, why bother to go dig up the film and include it? If it is just the whim of a film editor or director to include it then I go back to my previous comment, "I'm glad the TWOK production didn't use the insert of the hand pushing up the torpedo energy sliders then!"
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