To save power on the cloaking device, most likely. Those things use up a lot of energy, and it had to hide for a fair period of time.
Explaining away hiding a giant space ship in the water....
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To save power on the cloaking device, most likely. Those things use up a lot of energy, and it had to hide for a fair period of time.
Nah.
Trek has done it before and will do it again. It's pretty much rotational.
Second verse, same has the first. A little bit louder and a whole lot worse.
Yet the vessel was cloaked AND underwater at the same time.
When we saw it. Maybe not the whole time it was there.
It's also possible that it allowed the cloak to operate at a lower power level. The most difficult aspect of stealth in space is dealing with waste heat. If you don't radiate any heat, it builds up fatally inside the ship, but if you do radiate, it gives your position away to infrared detectors. Whatever mechanism cloaking devices use to prevent a ship's waste heat from being detected must be some kind of hyper-advanced black-box technology and thus probably requires a lot of energy. But in water, heat can be dissipated far more easily than it can in the vacuum of space, since you've got conduction and convection working for you as well as just radiation. (A reminder that the "space is cold" idea is misleading; vacuum is an insulator, and spacecraft are at more risk of overheating than freezing. It's well-known that you freeze faster in water than in air, because water is denser and carries heat away more efficiently. By the same token, you lose heat more slowly in vacuum.) If the body of water is sufficiently large compared to the ship, or has a current, its waste heat would be dispersed quickly enough that it wouldn't noticeably affect the water temperature, and whatever super-sci-fi magic mechanism the cloaking system uses to mask or eliminate waste heat could be disabled, allowing the cloak to save power.
Wow, now I'm imagining a Starfleet ship that was being decommissioned could be sunk underwater or tethered in space, sans engines, to create a station. Alternately, you could jury-rig engines onto a station and fly it away to evacuate personnel.
My guess would be to hide from Starfleet if anyone. The crew seemed to know they were violating the Prime Directive, and didn't want anyone to know what they were doing.
Who else in Starfleet, non-Enterprise, is watching their actions in real time with a goal of scrutinizing them? Pike knows where they went because of their after-action reports and mission. He's not observing from an orbiting craft.
They were in a Prime Directive gray area until the ship took off in full view, there's a deleted scene where the entire crew is giving Kirk the stink-eye as he records a log saying absolutely nothing happened during their mission (which I do think it is a bridge too far, it's better in the final film to keep it ambiguous exactly how Kirk and Spock's accounts differed). Even then, I'd argue the interference was minimal. One isolated population saw a couple of extra impossible things in a day already full of impossible things. The mountain became angry, a couple of pink imps stole their sacred scroll and took it into the water, a giant one-eyed dragon with one big wing in front and two small wings in back came out of the water, flew over the mountain, the mountain calmed down, and then the dragon left.
In a few hundred years, there'll be a moderately interesting local legend about the volcano having dragon eggs in it that'll be completely unrecognizable to anyone from Starfleet who didn't already know what had happened.
In a few hundred years, there'll be a moderately interesting local legend about the volcano having dragon eggs in it that'll be completely unrecognizable to anyone from Starfleet who didn't already know what had happened.
Or they'll say it was some prophetic vision and have a cultural upheaval about varying interpretations of it.
Well, no.
It was a routine survey mission, so Starfleet knew of Nibiru. Who is going to come spying on the Enterprise in Starfleet?
The goal is presented in the text of the film. Be able to get Spock to the volcano but the ash cloud makes transporters not possible, naturally.
They also are trying to move the natives away but can't beam away once they give chase. So, they need access to the ship without revealing it to the locals.
Then it becomes a Prime Directive problem but not initially.
Only if the culture was already primed for an upheaval. The "cargo cult" myth is racist and condescending because it assumes an indigenous culture is a passive blank slate ready to imitate any outside influence like a trained animal. The reality is that every culture's people have their own agendas, goals, and motivations, and they'll only adopt images or ideas from an outside culture if they have some use for them within their own culture. Say, if there's a group that doesn't like the dominance of the current religion and wants to reform or replace it, they might decide to co-opt the sighting of the Enterprise as a "sign" that a new faith has been revealed and use that symbol to rally people around the new faith. But if there's no such internal incentive for change, the sighting would either be dismissed as unimportant or identified with some entity or idea in the existing faith -- say, if they already worshipped a sea spirit, they might just say the Enterprise was a new form of the sea spirit and go on believing what they'd already believed.
Which is why the usual lazy Prime Directive assumption that any outside intervention is automatically harmful is simplistic and anthropologically ignorant, and why episodes like TNG: "Homeward" are absolute nonsense. Cultures are not passive sponges. They make their own decisions for their own reasons. That's what the PD is supposed to teach us -- not that less advanced cultures are stupid primitives who need to be kept ignorant, but that they have as much intelligence and agency as we do, understand their own cultures far better than we do, and have the right to make their own choices without us assuming we have the right to play God and impose our culture on them.
It would be the impetus for something that would have or ought to have happened eventually, but perhaps too early in their history for it to lead to progress rather than regress. Wait a few years and an individual with unique motives and perspectives would die, fall out of power, or change perspectives. How the same event affects us depends on who and what we are, when.
Edith Keeler's calls for peace would have come at the wrong time in history if she had lived and been the key figure in the movement. The same movement later in Earth's history with different individuals, tech, and specific world events would have an entirely different result (bringing the peace it promised instead of tyrannical rule by the evil faction of the generation.)
Unlikely. If the cultural and personal impetus for change were there, they would've latched onto some other event as the catalyst for change. (Aside from the fact that they all would've been dead if the E crew hadn't stopped the volcano from exploding.) And if the cultural forces at the time didn't create an impetus for change, then as I said, the Enterprise's appearance wouldn't have had as much impact. Cultures aren't houses of cards that collapse at the slightest touch; if they're exposed to an idea that they don't want, they'll just ignore it or reinterpret it to fit their existing belief system.
But that's basically the point -- that it's about the choices of individuals, that you have to treat the indigenes as people with individuality and agency, not just an undifferentiated mass of mindless natives. If a member of the culture latches onto the sighting of a starship as a catalyst for founding a new religion, it's not the starship that caused that religion to be formed, it's the desire of that founder to use it that way and the work they do to sell the idea to their people. Look at TNG: "Who Watches the Watchers?" It's not just any random Mintakan who latches onto his encounter with Picard as a motivation to found a new religion -- it's a man who's grieving the loss of his wife and has a personal incentive to embrace belief in an afterlife.
"Crowd-sourcing your excuses? What's the matter, Jim, did your imagination finally atrophy along with the rest of your brain?"
I just figured they wanted to be as close as possible to the volcano as they reasonably could without the natives seeing them, and they could have stayed in space but something was going to interfere if they needed to react quickly and mount a rescue. Also Kirk came up with the stealing the scroll plan and had them park there so he could do his jump. I love the underwater stuff. I was imagining that kind of nonsense back when I was teenager, with the Enterprise-E being chased by the Sovereign under the water on some planet. I loved seeing the actual Enterprise rise up from it's watery slumber to cast it's blue eye upon the masses and fly off to defeat the great god Vulcano.
What I find ironic is that so many people complain about a starship being underwater, which isn't that unreasonable if you think about it, yet nobody (but me) complains about the absolute idiocy of the "freezing the volcano" sequence. Aside from the ridiculous misuse of the term "cold fusion," there's the fact that solidifying the top of the magma layer of an erupting volcano would actually make things far, far worse, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who owns a pressure cooker.
The only part of the sequence that isn't stupid is that they actually had the sense to put Spock in an EV suit to protect him from the heat and toxic gases, unlike many movies and shows that depict people standing directly over a river of molten lava and not being roasted alive by the heat and suffocated by the toxic gases.
The only part of the sequence that isn't stupid is that they actually had the sense to put Spock in an EV suit to protect him from the heat and toxic gases, unlike many movies and shows that depict people standing directly over a river of molten lava and not being roasted alive by the heat and suffocated by the toxic gases.
Those movies depict people standing in the open air near flowing lava, don't they, as opposed to being surrounded on all sides by it? I suppose they might think not being in an enclosed pit would be easier to endure, but then they'd be wrong.
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