Question about the ship collsion in Cause and Effect

[Trekker4747]

Also, early in this episode someone suggests reversing or changing course to prevent the disaster. This idea is dismissed because it is not known if reversing course would CAUSE the accident.

WRONG

The first time through the Expanse they would've had no reason to change course and they ended up in the loop. Reversing or changing course would prevent them from getting into the loop.

 

[mattburgess]

But they don't know that they didn't receive a message from the future the very first time they travelled through the region.
Or maybe Picard forgot to pack socks the last time they left space-dock and they decided to go back for them, and caused the loop. There's just no way for them to know.

 

[Trekker4747]

But they don't know that they didn't receive a message from the future the very first time they travelled through the region.

Time-travel logic in TNG is dicey, but the thing is that the first time they came into the area they would've had no reason to turn around -presumably under time-travel logic they wouldn't recieve any messages/clues because they hadn't yet gotten stuck in the loop. As for turning around for some other reason that's hard to refute and might be a good point but it is also possible the likelyhood of them needing to turn around is remote.

Turning around would've been the right thing to do. We as the auidience -with the value of hind, and fore, sight know this.

 

[Unicron]

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.

IIRC, it wasn't the nacelle damage that destroyed the ship, but a loss of containment in the warp core which was caused by the structural damage to the nacelle and the loss of drive plasma there. Not unlike how the battle in "Yesterday's Enterprise" caused a warp core breach, despite all the energy the shields absorbed.

 

[mattburgess]

The only reason the question of "should we turn around" came up was because they knew a huge number of the audience would sit there thinking it with a smug smile on their faces, certain in the knowledge that they had found 'the major loophole' of this particular episode
Better to bring it up and quickly (and somewhat intellectually) dismiss it from the point of view of the characters.

 

[Timo]

There's a very good and logical reason not to turn back if you stop to think for a while.

Remember that these people have already realized that they are in a time loop. They are already stuck. This has happened to them before. Now, they know they aren't idiots - so it's very probable that the last time 'round, they did every smart thing they could think of. And that failed them.

Turning back is a smart thing. It observably did not help the last time around; it's not statistically likely that the previous-loop heroes would have failed to turn back, and yet they remained stuck.

So forging on is better than turning around or stopping still. Doing something even more illogical would probably be even better, but our heroes also know that if they fail this time, they still have high odds of surviving onto the next loop where they can try again. If survival odds were low, there would be no loop...

Of course, here logic fails our heroes: turning back would indeed have helped. But all evidence speaks against it, and the heroes might be smart enough to read the evidence and draw the conclusions, even though unfortunately (and very improbably) the wrong ones.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Unimatrix_0]

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.

This is what I thought as well.

 

[nx1701g]

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)?

That was something I assumed as well. We saw in Booby Trap that it doesn't take much to move the Enterprise.

 

[Bertie]

Of course, here logic fails our heroes: turning back would indeed have helped. But all evidence speaks against it, and the heroes might be smart enough to read the evidence and draw the conclusions, even though unfortunately (and very improbably) the wrong ones.

I was just a kid when this thing first ran, but honestly the first thing that came to my mind back then was "use a random number generator to pick a course and speed, and then go that way." The only way this wouldn't work is if things were exactly the same each time loop, but they weren't due to the memory effect, and you only need the slightest, most marginal of marginal differences for a random number generator algorithm to give wildly different results.