Problem I had with "By Any Other Name"

[Knight Templar]

Depends on how the extra speed was achieved. Perhaps it's just a matter of feeding more power to the warp coils - so once one would yank the portable Kelvan powerplant out of the loop, all the advantages would be lost?

Certainly it seems that the standard way to make the ship go faster than planned is to disengage the failsafes for doing so. It's not as if the drive itself would be incapable of warp 14 or whatever; it's just something that cannot be safely sustained, with the failure points relating to ship's structure (just as in the extreme case of "Threshold"!) but possibly also to the power arrangements.

Timo Saloniemi

Good point. It is possible the Kelvans simply diverted all the power from the shields, weapons, and for that matter most of the life support (that is implied when they reduce the crew to the blocks).

Something completely impractical on a regular basis.

 

[Wingsley]

Would it be safe to say, post Kelvin tune-up, that the Enterprise would be the fastest connie in SF at that point in time?

I cannot imagine Kirk having Scotty de-tune a quicker, more efficient Enterprise.

We don't know. It's conceivable that there's another Connie (or some Federation test-bed descendant of the NX-Alpha) out there, somewhere that either intentionally, or accidentally, achieved Warp 15 or better. Since the Enterprise has survived multiple incidents where the ship surged to double-digit warp factors that the crew had no control over ("The Changeling", "By Any Other Name", "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", "That Which Survives"), imagine what Federation researchers could do with a dedicated starship (or specifically-designed unmanned vessel) that they deliberately test out for high velocity...

I'm not saying that Rojan was not also responsible for the death of Thompson.

But IIRC, in time of war, if POWs attempt to escape and they in doing so assault one of their captors (as Kirk and Spock did) then the POWs are subject to reprisals.

Rojan's team was a preinvasion scout team for the Andromedans so to me that would fall under the "state of war" definition.

All of which assumes that the original Kelvan intent was hostile. Rojan may have already been suffering from human hubris when Kirk arrived to rescue him. It's possible the Kelvan ancestors were mean like Klingons or Romulans, or maybe the stories of Kelvan warrior heritage became exaggerated during the intergalactic journey. We may never know.

The matter of Yeoman Thompson's death, whether Rojan was delusional or not, was as much Kirk's responsibility as it was Rojan's. Kirk couldn't resist trying to escape (to where???), and Rojan was itching to make an example of one of Kirk's crew.

Depends on how the extra speed was achieved. Perhaps it's just a matter of feeding more power to the warp coils - so once one would yank the portable Kelvan powerplant out of the loop, all the advantages would be lost?

Certainly it seems that the standard way to make the ship go faster than planned is to disengage the failsafes for doing so. It's not as if the drive itself would be incapable of warp 14 or whatever; it's just something that cannot be safely sustained, with the failure points relating to ship's structure (just as in the extreme case of "Threshold"!) but possibly also to the power arrangements.

Timo Saloniemi

That's the one thing that perplexed me about this episode for a long time. How did the Kelvans expect the Enterprise to run full-throttle, wide-open for 300 years without relief? No tune-ups, no layovers, and no refueling; just Warp 11 (or better) for three centuries.

Maybe it's possible for any decently-designed warp-driven starship to be able to remain in flight for a multi-generational period without relief. And maybe the Kelvans had already adjusted the food syntheiszer-thingies to spit out those Chiklett-thingies to conserve power and nutrient resources. (Interesting that Kirk and his remaining "crew" were not forced to start adhereing to that same diet.) But if you look at the leap in engine power output (for sake of argument, Warp 8 is supposedly 512 cochranes; versus Warp 11 which is 1,331 cochranes) and then consider that the ship is expected to sustain this for three centuries, structural stress and other breakdown issues aside, that would be pretty amazing. Apparently, nobody is even slightly worried about the ship running out of fuel or otherwise breaking down in the intergalactic void. Remember, the Kelvans have only one ship to work with. If the Enterprise gives out on them, they are as good as dead.

But they go forward with their plan for the modifications to the Enterprise, no worries on anyone's part.

Galileo Seven is the worst for me, there's like 40 seconds of laughter at a joke that's barely funny, after several crew members died. And it's probably the first occurance of this too.

I always took the final scene of "The Galileo Seven" as either cheesy or otherwise not up to the rest of the show. It's obviously very enjoyable to Kirk and his officers to corner Spock in his own over-wrought hubris. The characters had probably been waiting a long time to give Spock a ribbing like that. And maybe the characters would need something to laugh about after emerging from a crisis like that.

But if everyone was expected to behave by 20th century standards in that scene, Spock might've been brought up on negligence charges for the avoidable loss of Latimer and Gaetano. (Unless Spock's connections through his powerful father would have such a charge quashed.)

All that aside, the laughter scene at the end of "The Galileo Seven" was pure 1960's TV Velveeta, no doubt about it. I think it could've been written more effectively if the laughter sillyness had not been there, but instead Kirk had a final brief encounter with Ferris in which the commissioner expressed relief at the successful recovery of the shuttlecraft crew and getting underway to New Paris. It seems very odd that Ferris is prominent in the rest of the bridge scenes but he is suddenly nowhere to be found. That was even more ridiculous than the laughter.

 

[Timo]

It's conceivable that there's another Connie (or some Federation test-bed descendant of the NX-Alpha) out there, somewhere that either intentionally, or accidentally, achieved Warp 15 or better.

...That would then presuppose that the Enterprise in turn did even better in some unseen adventure, so that she would hold "speed records" as of ST3:TSfS. And not just speed records for the Constitution class, but universal ones which the Excelsior could fairly challenge.

That's the one thing that perplexed me about this episode for a long time. How did the Kelvans expect the Enterprise to run full-throttle, wide-open for 300 years without relief? No tune-ups, no layovers, and no refueling; just Warp 11 (or better) for three centuries.

The Kelvans themselves had crossed the distance without refueling. For all we know, their massive mothership was powered by a larger version of the device they salvaged from their smaller survival craft, and the Enterprise more resembled the survival craft than the mothership in size - so the salvaged powerplant could perform much like originally designed, only now hooked into an alien propulsion system.

If the Kelvan gadget bypasses the whole fuel thing, the rest of the ship may remain largely unaltered, assuming the usual "structural failure" obstacle doesn't arise. But if the gadget also serves to strengthen the structural integrity fields (a likely component in TOS era starships already even if never mentioned), then Scotty's worries might be over. No need to worry about allocating power between keeping the ship going and keeping the ship from falling apart: there's plenty for both applications.

Of course, the Kelvans may have been making false assumptions, failing to consider that the spacecraft of the Milky Way cultures might be inferior to the ones of Andromeda, and unable to operate for a thousand years without pit stops. It's a natural mistake to make: the Milky Way has this extremely hostile barrier at the edge, a barrier apparently not found at Andromeda, so of course the natives are going to have durable ships that are capable of dealing with that!

It seems very odd that Ferris is prominent in the rest of the bridge scenes but he is suddenly nowhere to be found. That was even more ridiculous than the laughter.

Perhaps he went away to sulk when it turned out his doomsaying had not been prophetic after all?

Juvenile behavior at the climax of a hair-rising adventure doesn't sound too unrealistic to me. Military standards of stiff upper lips might have been relaxed a bit aboard this isolated starship on a multi-year assignment, and people on the edge might have learned to dull that edge with laughter so that they could keep on sitting on it year after year. For all we know, that's why they keep the lethal holodecks in TNG, too: if personnel aren't allowed to vent steam in juvenile ways, they'll find more "adult" ways to vent it, leading to suicide, homicide and perhaps navicide as well.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[blssdwlf]

Would it be safe to say, post Kelvin tune-up, that the Enterprise would be the fastest connie in SF at that point in time?

I cannot imagine Kirk having Scotty de-tune a quicker, more efficient Enterprise.

We don't know.

We sort of do. By ST3, the Enterprise herself still has standing speed records for the Excelsior to attempt to break.

Also, of calculable distance-times in interstellar space, Enterprise is almost twice as fast after "By Any Other Name" if you compare "Obsession" (pre-BAON) and "That Which Survives" (post-BAON).

That's the one thing that perplexed me about this episode for a long time. How did the Kelvans expect the Enterprise to run full-throttle, wide-open for 300 years without relief? No tune-ups, no layovers, and no refueling; just Warp 11 (or better) for three centuries.

Or how did Kirk and the crew expect the Enterprise to run full-throttle, wide-open for thousands of years without relief? Remember that Kirk objected saying it would take too long, not that they would ever run out of fuel. And this is before they were aware of any Kelvin modifications. Later on Spock offered up a robot ship to send the message to the Andromeda galaxy. Even with Kelvin mods on the robot ship, it would have been expected to make the several hundred year journey. TOS does offer up that their power "regenerates" as mentioned in "The Mark of Gideon" and a couple of other episodes and as long as their regenerating mechanism works, they have unlimited fuel.

 

[Timo]

Remember that Kirk objected saying it would take too long, not that they would ever run out of fuel. And this is before they were aware of any Kelvan modifications.

We could chalk this up to there being many impossible things about the proposal, and Kirk shooting it down on basis of a randomly chosen one.

The same way we could say that a voyage to Sha-Ka-Ree is impossible for a dozen reasons, and Kirk quotes the Great Barrier rather than the distance because that nearby phenomenon is the first impossibility they will run into...

I'm sort of hesitant to accept the idea of Starfleet ships running on a fuel-less power system, even though we do lack references to things like refueling, tankers or fuel shortages (except when relating to impulse travel). Supposedly, antimatter fuel is involved, after all. And while antimatter isn't exactly a naturally occurring substance and indeed might need to be generated and re-generated, it would be a bit odd for the ship herself to be capable of doing that. If she can generate or re-generate antimatter at the rate the warp drive consumes it, why the need for antimatter in the first place? Why not hook up the generators directly to the warp engines?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Knight Templar]

It is possible that the Enterprise Warp 11 speed was NEVER supposed to be sustained very long. That it was just to get safely through the barrier and that afterwards, as stresses built up, perhaps over days or even just hours, the the Kelvans began to "throttle back" to a more reasonable sustained speed.

 

[Timo]

Of course, there would really have been very little need for all that - because the Kelvans could have sent a signal towards Andromeda the moment they got clear of the Barrier, and then turned back and initiated conquest of the Milky Way on their own.

But the Kelvans were probably rather confused to start with, and had difficulty weighing different courses of action.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[siskokid888]

Well, "The Apple" featured cartloads of quite comical deaths (redshirt replaced by a stain on the ground) at the start, and lots of sex education -themed giggling later on, plus the destruction of a way of life via the destruction of a papier-mache monster. It's not as if the writers or the directors really felt the need to steer away from "mixed bag" type stories... To the contrary, it seemed that there was often a drive to insert some comedy to overtly somber episodes.

Also, the coda to an episode was rather seldom in the mood of the episode itself anyway. But it always served the higher purpose of making it clear that our heroes would face no consequences of any sort, and there would never be a sequel. The ability to alter history discovered? "Let's get the hell out of here." Kirk is under such a strain that he breaks into a sobbing fit over a fembot (or perhaps her master and creator?)? "Forget."

Timo Saloniemi

IIRC, at the end of "Catspaw", Kirk mentions the death of the redshirt who bought it at the begining of the ep. Might be the only time that happened.

 

[Rowdy Roddy McDowall]

There's a good point there. Kirk usually mentions them just moments after they die in his personal log....as in BY ANY OTHER NAME, or Act One of FRIDAY'S CHILD. Then that's usually it. Arlene Galway died sickeningly in DEADLY YEARS, but by Act Three there's no mention of her again. And it's all smiles at the end. Oh, well, at least all the five male regulars are okay and there are no breakables in sickbay.

It's very rare for a guest crewman to make it to Act Four. Marple in THE APPLE and Kelso, Mitchell and Dehner in WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE are the most notable exceptions to this.

My guess is that if you make it past Act One, your chances of survival grow exponentially every 15 minutes for the most part. About 60 crew died in classic TREK episodes, but we've already been through that on a previous thread.

Here's a possible eulogy for Thompson, by Mr. Scott:

''Attention.........Dismissed.''

 

[Wingsley]

It is possible that the Enterprise Warp 11 speed was NEVER supposed to be sustained very long. That it was just to get safely through the barrier and that afterwards, as stresses built up, perhaps over days or even just hours, the the Kelvans began to "throttle back" to a more reasonable sustained speed.

The problem with that: Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light-years away, and if the Enterprise is going to make it there in 300 years, it would have to sustain double-digit warp factors greater than 11.

 

[Knight Templar]

It is possible that the Enterprise Warp 11 speed was NEVER supposed to be sustained very long. That it was just to get safely through the barrier and that afterwards, as stresses built up, perhaps over days or even just hours, the the Kelvans began to "throttle back" to a more reasonable sustained speed.

The problem with that: Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light-years away, and if the Enterprise is going to make it there in 300 years, it would have to sustain double-digit warp factors greater than 11.

Depends on the Warp scale you use. None was ever given for the Original series.

For example in That Which Survives, Warp 8.4 was apparently capable of taking the Enterprise 880 light years in less than half a day.

 

[blssdwlf]

.

I'm sort of hesitant to accept the idea of Starfleet ships running on a fuel-less power system, even though we do lack references to things like refueling, tankers or fuel shortages (except when relating to impulse travel). Supposedly, antimatter fuel is involved, after all. And while antimatter isn't exactly a naturally occurring substance and indeed might need to be generated and re-generated, it would be a bit odd for the ship herself to be capable of doing that. If she can generate or re-generate antimatter at the rate the warp drive consumes it, why the need for antimatter in the first place? Why not hook up the generators directly to the warp engines?

I suspect that antimatter is necessary for creating a space warp (at least in TOS) thus the whole matter-antimatter engines in the nacelles. In TNG, that's a bit different as it's more about the warp plasma going to the coils although it could be that the plasma needs to a result of a M/AM reaction.

Interestingly, "Booby Trap" has an instance where it appears that the matter-antimatter supplies are regenerated. The ship is expending her supplies faster than normal because of the trap. But what is Laforge's and Brahm's solution? Increase the amount of matter-antimatter fuel being used! But instead of burning through their fuel even faster, they almost offset the drain rate. Perhaps TNG also retained the idea of re-generating fuel...

LAFORGE: Matter-anti matter mixture ratio settings at optimum balance Reaction sequence corresponding to specified norms. Magnetic plasma transfer to warp field generators per programme specs. Commander, we should be going like a bat out of hell.
...
LAFORGE: Great. Another woman who won't get personal with me in the holodeck. Leah, I want to find a way to supplement the energy supply to the ship and to the engines. Could we alter the matter-antimatter paths?
LEAH [OC]: Theoretically, yes. The system should be able to accept more reactants at a faster rate of injection.
...
LAFORGE: Then, if we use multiple injector streams, hitting more than one crystal facet, we could do it, we could hold our own.
Leah, you're beautiful. La Forge to Picard.
PICARD [OC]: Go ahead.
LAFORGE: Captain, we've found a way to extend the matter-antimatter energy supplies.
​

 

[Timo]

That's an intriguing point. Everything but the last phrase would be consistent with our hero and his holographic counterpart struggling to increase the rate of energy transfer into the applications that can yank them out of the booby trap. That is, the supply of antimatter would not be of concern (not because it's infinite but simply because it's abundant, intended to last for years), but the rate at which it could be transformed into motive power would be riddled with bottlenecks, preventing the warp engines from defeating the alien weapon that drains their output energies.

Even in the last phrase, we could take "m/am energy" as the kind of output energy that is generated from the annihilation of m/am supplies. But LaForge really should be extending the "rate" or "output" of this, not the "supplies" of it.

...Perhaps LaForge is actually saying "Captain, we've found a way to expend the m/am energy supplies"?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[blssdwlf]

To put the "extending their supplies in context":

LAFORGE: With the engines idling, the energy loss has been limited, but our reserves will be depleted in less than three hours. We won't be able to hold our shields in place.
​

After the "extending of supplies" shields were no longer a problem.

PICARD: Well done, Mister La Forge.
RIKER: Geordi, can you give us enough power to get us out of here?
LAFORGE: Sorry, Commander, we haven't addressed that one yet. First priority was to maintain the shields.

​

Basically, rather than finding ways to conserve their energy reserves they found ways to use more of it... which apparently makes more energy reserves

 

[Timo]

Well, it does make sense in a, uh, sense... If LaForge finds a way to fight the propulsion-draining effect more effectively, there's more to spend on shields before the total expenditure leaves too little for an escape attempt.

Or something. It's a case of the writers not really paying attention to what they were writing anyway.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Rowdy Roddy McDowall]

Which was a recurring problem for TNG and VOYAGER in particular. When you develop technobabble-dar as I have, it's obvious the engineers AFTER Scotty have been saddled with time-filling chaff to the expense of meaningful things like characterization and relevant plot. So many of Geordi's dialogue comes down to ''If we can (FILL IN THE BLANK)'' and is usually snooze-inducing. Scotty never set out to bore the audience. You could completely understand his technical terminology and it was never just cut and pasted in by lazy writers.

Had Rojan decided to pull a mass neutralizing operation on Picard's ENTERPRISE, would the ship's counselor be considered remotely essential? Or, since TNG's ship is slightly more automated, would chief engineers, doctors and first officers still be allowed to exist? I'm not sure about Worf's value since he gets flipped around a lot, but besides Picard and Data, I can't see the Kelvans needing anybody. They can't necessarily transform Data into the six-sided dried cocaine block anyhow. If they somehow did, what could Picard do other than bore the Kelvans to death?

ACT ONE, SCENE ONE:

ROJAN: ''You will now surrender your ship to me.''
PICARD: ''Very well.''
ROJAN: ''I won't have to use my field?''
PICARD: ''No. You forget I previously surrrendered my ship 15 minutes into my very first adventure to a soap opera actor in a funny hat.''

 

[Timo]

They can't necessarily transform Data into the six-sided dried cocaine block anyhow.

Why not? They easily transform the boots, communicators and other non-biological paraphernalia of our TOS characters, after all.

The Kelvans had funny ideas about who was essential anyway. Kirk's role was to command, so he should have been utterly superfluous...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Timewalker]

Well, "The Apple" featured cartloads of quite comical deaths (redshirt replaced by a stain on the ground) at the start, and lots of sex education -themed giggling later on, plus the destruction of a way of life via the destruction of a papier-mache monster. ...

Also, the coda to an episode was rather seldom in the mood of the episode itself anyway. But it always served the higher purpose of making it clear that our heroes would face no consequences of any sort, and there would never be a sequel.

I remember reading a story where Kirk did reap the consequences of his actions. Because the weather was no longer controlled, the planet's seasons naturally reasserted themselves and fall came. The leaves turned and fell, the weather got colder... and the people of Vaal panicked, since nobody had bothered to explain all this to them. They didn't know that the cycle of seasons is natural and that summer would have returned. They thought the world was ending, so they all killed themselves.

I agree at the change in tone halfway through the episode.

When they notice the Kelvin (Tomar I think) loving the human style food and Scotty taking him to his quarters to get him drunk, the whole thing becomes a farce in my opinion.

I think that the writer realized that he had written the Kelvans as being so powerful that he was going to have to write a "humorous victory" over them as it was fairly obvious that there was no way Kirk, Spock, Scotty, and McCoy had any chance of overcoming them any other way.

Much like lots of the other "victories" over very powerful aliens (such as Q) involved humorous situations.

Well, if you can't fight them with logic or might, fight them with whatever they can't counter... like BS.

I've always felt the crushing of Yeoman Thompson to be one of the most callous murders in all of TOS. Also, after the kelvins reduce the whole crew to foam cubes and since the trip to Andromeda would take 300 years it stands to reason that the kelvins never intended to restore the crew...ever. So after the crew is reduced to foam cubes what did the kelvins do with the cubes??? Just throw them someplace out of the way? Could the crew keep in cube form for 300 years?

I'm surprised nobody was seen picking them up; it's a wonder they weren't accidentally stepped on.

I should hope that Kirk and the others carefully gathered up all the crew and put them away somewhere in a closet or box where they'd be safe from being broken. And of course, I'd hope they were set back in a big enough space when they were restored to human form.

It is possible that the Enterprise Warp 11 speed was NEVER supposed to be sustained very long. That it was just to get safely through the barrier and that afterwards, as stresses built up, perhaps over days or even just hours, the the Kelvans began to "throttle back" to a more reasonable sustained speed.

The problem with that: Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light-years away, and if the Enterprise is going to make it there in 300 years, it would have to sustain double-digit warp factors greater than 11.

Depends on the Warp scale you use. None was ever given for the Original series.

For example in That Which Survives, Warp 8.4 was apparently capable of taking the Enterprise 880 light years in less than half a day.

Obviously, Voyager should have used the latter warp scale, then. They'd have been home much faster!

So if Tom and Janeway turned into lizards because they went faster than Warp 10, what's the TOS-equivalent of that? Why didn't everybody turn into a lizard?

Criticism aside, "By Any Other Name" was the very first Star Trek episode I ever saw all the way through. I remember thinking it "wasn't too bad."

 

[Rowdy Roddy McDowall]

Timewalker wrote:

''I'm surprised nobody was seen picking them up; it's a wonder they weren't accidentally stepped on.

I should hope that Kirk and the others carefully gathered up all the crew and put them away somewhere in a closet or box where they'd be safe from being broken. And of course, I'd hope they were set back in a big enough space when they were restored to human form.''

Do you really expect senior officers like KirkSpockandMcCoy who are joined at the hip to menially take time to pick up disembodied crewmen from the floor? That's a yeoman's job, and at that moment all the yeomans were converted to coke blocks, or worse. So let's have Scotty do it. He's not top-billed, he won't mind.

More seriously, Rojan wouldn't allow Kirk to stow them away. He wouldn't be so stupid as to walk into one (nor would Kirk, Spock or the Kelvans), but if Kirk tried anything else, there's 430 more cessated hostages available if needed. It's rather like being transformed without materializing, when one thinks about it. Wonder whether the Kelvans tested their devices on anyone or anything in the past.

Big spaces for crew restoration shouldn't be a problem if a few are restored at a time. I'm curious whether Kelvan paralyzers or body-erasers have limits in proximity or number of subjects at a time. Since Shea was brought back in the exact same position after basically being thrown upside-down onto the ground as coke, then safe restoration should be easy. But, there's just one more thing.......Chekov and Uhura were wiped from existence while sitting upon their chairs, so having then restored in ANOTHER non-bridge location could lead to the funniest fourth-act conclusion since the all-time yukathon GAILIEO SEVEN. You think?

 

[Rowdy Roddy McDowall]

In other words, they both fall on their asses while Spock barely represses a smirk as we roll credits.