Question about the ship collsion in Cause and Effect

[Xerxes1979]

Why were the choices use the tractor beam OR depressurize the shuttle bay?

Could not both approaches have been used simultaneously? Assuming the loop is in its first iteration, why did Data only choose one option?

 

[Hedbergian]

I'd say for simplicity's sake and, thus, dramatic effext. Nothing more tedious than listening to meaningless technobable in a life or death scene of Trek. It's life or death, guys. Make your suggestion quickly, then shuddap.

As for an "in-universe" explanation, I think Picard would have gotten a liitle more than irked listening to Data suggest some hybrid of ideas that were already best guesses anyway. Picard calls out for suggestions with, what was it, about 36 seconds from impact? Again, make your suggestion quickly, then shuddap.

 

[Mr. B]

Had they done both they would have had to rewrite Data's "message" and boing both things would have been a lot more complicated in that respect.

 

[nx1701g]

I always assumed that they didn't try both because of the power issues aboard the ship. They didn't have enough power to try both.

 

[Vanyel]

I just don't see why the tractor beam didn't work? They were using the tractor beam to "push" the Bozeman away. But without any power to the engines or thrusters the tractor beam should have pushed the 1701D away too.

Also, out of curiosity, I would like to know if any one would know the thrust vector that would be cause by opening the main shuttle bay. From the FX shots, it looks like that as soon as the shuttle bay door opened, the air in the bay started rushing out. Wouldn't this type of gradual release of air cause the ship to move in a pattern that might have pushed the ship up and into the way of the Bozeman?

 

[Timo]

Probably not "up and into", since the bay was on the top of the ship... If the engines are the most massive part of the ship, then I'd expect her to start rotating her nose down while moving forward. Which would incidentally increase the odds of a hit, I guess, considering the Bozeman originally scraped the nacelle topside. That is, unless the movement forward was fast enough.

As for tractor beams, they never seem to work in a Newtonian manner: a beam isn't like a cable or a rod that would exert a force at both ends - not a lasso, but more like a bolo thrown at the target. It sort of immobilizes the target against the texture of the universe, not against the tractor beam emitter.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Tom Riley]

I just don't see why the tractor beam didn't work? They were using the tractor beam to "push" the Bozeman away. But without any power to the engines or thrusters the tractor beam should have pushed the 1701D away too.

Also, out of curiosity, I would like to know if any one would know the thrust vector that would be cause by opening the main shuttle bay. From the FX shots, it looks like that as soon as the shuttle bay door opened, the air in the bay started rushing out. Wouldn't this type of gradual release of air cause the ship to move in a pattern that might have pushed the ship up and into the way of the Bozeman?

I always assumed the tractor worked with some kind of inertial damper or something to negate the standard "equal but opposite reaction" that comes with any sort of transfer of movement and kinetic energy and such...

And as for opening the shuttle bay, since the shuttle bay is on top of the ship, like Timo mentioned, it couldn't move the ship up. I don't however agree with the nacelles being the most massive part of the ship... Both nacelles could easily fit completely inside the saucer module with plenty of space left over... Now that says nothing about the density of the materials, for all I know the warp coils could be extremely dense and that might make the nacelles have more mass than the saucer... Plus, the Bozeman only hit the nacelle because they used the tractor beam, if they hadn't then there would have been no way it could have reached the nacelle unless the Enterprise was sitting there sideways or backwards or something.

I'd always thought the destruction of the Enterprise in that episode was sort of a "Titanic" situation, it would have done less damage and probably wouldn't have been destroyed had they just hit it head on.

 

[Forbin]

^Yes, volume and mass have little to do with each other if materials are different. The nacelles are chock-full of giant, solid electromagnets powerful enough to warp space/time. I've always assumed they're immensely massive.

 

[Gary Sebben]

The biggest problem with this episode is that the E is utterly destroyed by a minor nick of it's nacelle. Never mind that both of the Constellation's engines were hollowed out by the DD machine, or that the Reliant's engine was completely torpedoed off and both ships were left intact.

 

[Forbin]

Aonther problem (which is typical of the series) is the radically incorrect scaling of the Reliant model to the D model. I have models of both ships in 1/1400 scale, and the Reliant is roughly the same length as the D's nacelle. The episode makes it seem much too large.

 

[SilentP]

Maybe the Soyuz-class (wasn't that the class of the ship?) maybe of been a upscaled Miranda variant?

 

[USS Excelsior]

Another thing is what was going on with the Bozeman the entire time they were there before the ENT-D ever got caught up in it....

 

[Vanyel]

Another thing is what was going on with the Bozeman the entire time they were there before the ENT-D ever got caught up in it....

My theory is that only the 1701D was caught on the loop. The Bozeman just came through it once, but the 1701D relived that time over and over again until it broke itself out of the loop.

 

[USS Excelsior]

What about the 17.4 days thingy

 

[Vanyel]

What about the 17.4 days thingy

That was just the 1701D. The Bozeman just came through once. The 1701D was hit numerous times because it kept going back in time.

1. The Bozeman enters a space time distortion and exits it.
2. The 1701D enters the Typhon Expanse.
3. The 1701D enters the edge of the distortion.
4. The 1701D looses power.
5. The 1701D sees the Bozeman coming out of the distortion.
6. The two ships collide.
7. The 1701D explodes.
8. The 1701D returns to step 2.

 

[Tom Riley]

What about the 17.4 days thingy

That was just the 1701D. The Bozeman just came through once. The 1701D was hit numerous times because it kept going back in time.

1. The Bozeman enters a space time distortion and exits it.
2. The 1701D enters the Typhon Expanse.
3. The 1701D enters the edge of the distortion.
4. The 1701D looses power.
5. The 1701D sees the Bozeman coming out of the distortion.
6. The two ships collide.
7. The 1701D explodes.
8. The 1701D returns to step 2.

That still doesn't work out, for a few reasons. When the Enterprise finally breaks out of the time loop, the computer's chronometer is off from the Federation time-base beacons by 17.4 days. Now, If the Enterprise travelled back in time, they would have ended up breaking free of the loop at the exact moment they were destroyed the first time, and their chronometers would be perfectly in sync with the rest of the Federation. The only way for the chronometers to be off would be that the chronometers are reset along with the rest of the ship after the explosion, but they stayed in the current time. For example:

Say the Enterprise exploded the first time at midnight, the ship gets reset to what they were 6 hours previously, but it is still midnight. 6 hours later they explode again. Their clocks would say midnight, but it is actually 6am. The ship is reset to the way it was 6 hours previously(which was really identical to the way it was 6 hours before that), but it is still 6am. 6 hours later they reach the point where they explode again, their chronometers still say midnight but it is now in fact noon. Their chronometers would, at that point, be off by 12 hours. This continues until they have been offset by 17.4 days.

Your way would turn out like this: The Enterprise explodes at midnight. They travel back in time 6 hours so it is now 6pm. They continue on unaware and 6 hours later they explode again, and it is once again midnight. They travel back in time 6 hours, to 6pm. They continue along unaware and they once again explode at... Midnight. They eventually break free and it will be midnight, the exact time they first blew up, and they would be right on track with the universe. The only way for them to be off by 17.4 days your way would be if they went back in time but their clocks didn't reset when everything else did. But then someone would notice that the clocks were off...


The second reason that wouldn't work is the way they broke free of the loop. Data sends himself a message by imprinting it on the surrounding dekyon field. Data did this just before the ship was destroyed. Now, if the Enterprise was traveling back in time, like you say, then for Data to subconsciously pick up the imprint in the dekyon field, the dekyon emission Data sent just before the destruction would have to have also traveled back in time with them... However, that doesn't really seem to be the case here, as they compared the dekyon field imprints to "echoes"...


It really seems to me that the events were repeating and happening multiple times in one stretch of time, rather than the Enterprise moving back in time and merely reliving a single event.

 

[Trekker4747]

A quick comment on the scaling:

With the type of effects used in TNG, I often take the scaling we see with a grain of salt. There's only so much you can do with the models.

On to the main topic:

I don't see how the shuttlebay decompression worked. The main shuttlebay is large for sure but certainly doesn't contain enough air to push the massive hulk of the Enterprise's mass away and if it did, it wouldn't be at any appreciable speed. (Since the Enterprise's engines were down it seemed Newtonian physics were full play here, none of the ship's systems that counteract/negate Newton were working.)

The ship has a mass of 4.5m metric tons. Does the piddly little main-shuttlebay which probably makes up all of 1% of the ship's total volume really contain enough air to move that much mass at any useful speed to avoid a collison?

 

[SilentP]

Probably not, and if I remember the dialogue correctly, there was nothing about venting the secondary shuttle bays either. Perhaps there's a residual 'thruster' effect from the shuttlebay's environmental controls trying to pump air in to replace the air being lost, or would the system need to be told to do that (I can guess there's a default that prevents a ship from trying to keep filling a section that's exposed to vacuum)?

 

[USS Excelsior]

Maybe the Bozeman kept on emerging from the distortion over and over again for 90 years and with that being such a short loop they didn't notice that they had been there before.

And the ENT-D's appearance ultimately broke that loop both for them and the Bozeman.

 

[Timo]

I don't see the problem with the 17-day stuckness thing. A specific region in the Typhon Expanse could have kept the E-D in a time loop while time outside the region kept moving forward; when the E-D emerged from the region, seemingly just one loop-length after her entering that region, she found out that the outside universe was keeping a different time.

The E-D did move away from the collision spot before the line about the 17-day mismatch was uttered. Or at least nothing of the Typhon phenomenon is seen in the final shot of the two ships flying side by side.

Timo Saloniemi