There was a fairly large crack in the lower housing, presumably caused when Khan attacked after beaming Kirk, Carol and Scotty to the Enterprise brig. It's more visible in the set photos than in the movie itself.
What's Up with the Warp Core (SPOILERS Into Darkness)
- Thread starter Brent
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I thought whatever it was, it was Section 31 sabotage.
That was a coolant leak, which dropped them out of warp earlier in the movie.
If it wasn't Khan's attack on the already-helpless Enterprise that damaged the warp core, Spock's reaction to Kirk's sacrifice would be somewhat random and unjustified.
If it wasn't Khan's attack on the already-helpless Enterprise that damaged the warp core, Spock's reaction to Kirk's sacrifice would be somewhat random and unjustified.
I always figured that the area on the cube Picard told the fleet to target was where the voices in his head were originating from, ie. the Queen's chamber aboard the escape pod sphere (and possibly where the Vinculum thingie is located as well). Though Picard didn't know about the Queen's presence there consciously at the time, he knew that's where the voices came from, and figured shutting that down would prevent the Borg from communicating and stop them. The escape hatch for the sphere hangar and the area Picard targeted are roughly the same height from the bottom of the cube, but on different faces of the cube, so they could have been burrowing a hole to the sphere from behind and to the side of it.
That's why the Queen had to evacuate before the phasers and torpedoes dug a hole all the way to the sphere hangar. It would be the one centralized weak spot on the cube now that they introduced the concept of a Queen instead of tens of thousands of drones operating as one with no central control. Maybe the cube itself wasn't even technically destroyed by the fleet; maybe she self-destructed it, as she has done with other cubes (on Voyager), to prevent the cube's capture and to give her a chance to enact Plan-B (the time travel) in the chaos.
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OK. That makes sense, I suppose.
There was a graphic made for the movie that had information on the warp core. It can be seen at this site - http://www.inventinginteractive.com/2013/05/16/star-trek-into-darkness/
Some of it is readable, and I suppose for those more educated than me might make some sense.
Some of it is readable, and I suppose for those more educated than me might make some sense.
Does the interior of JJ-Prise's warp core remind anyone of the Death Star reactor?
I can see where someone might think that. We have a upper part and a lower port and they are connected by a stream of energy.
A question here. A person can access the status of the warp core. If the warp core is out of alignment, shouldn't there be means to bring it in alignment, via console, without exposing a crew member to radiation? Or, as this is the future, wouldn't there be machines that could repair the core and bring the connectivity ports into alignment?
(Speaking of the comparison between Star Wars and Star Trek, I feel the former has had a better grasp on the role of robotics in a futuristic society. I would think that a futuristic society would have robots performing a broad range of tasks, and Star Trek, with its reluctance to embrace robots, seems contrary to me in that aspect.)
A question here. A person can access the status of the warp core. If the warp core is out of alignment, shouldn't there be means to bring it in alignment, via console, without exposing a crew member to radiation? Or, as this is the future, wouldn't there be machines that could repair the core and bring the connectivity ports into alignment?
(Speaking of the comparison between Star Wars and Star Trek, I feel the former has had a better grasp on the role of robotics in a futuristic society. I would think that a futuristic society would have robots performing a broad range of tasks, and Star Trek, with its reluctance to embrace robots, seems contrary to me in that aspect.)
Your car doesn't come with the means to bring its drive shaft back into alignment if it gets bent. A jet aircraft doesn't come with the means to repair a damaged turbine or whatever while in flight. We're talking serious damage here, the kind that would normally take a lot of time and effort to repair. Kirk's percussive maintenance was probably a stopgap -- enough that they could reactivate thrusters (although, why the hell did they need the warp core to power the thrusters?) and return to orbit, but if they'd tried going to warp, they probably would've blown up.
My rationalization is that it's not needed for the thrusters, but for the impulse engines - that they couldn't make orbit on thrusters alone, and that the impulse reactor was taken out by the damage to the ship. They needed the warp core online to drive the impulse engines in lieu of it.
Bullshit.
You can't check the oil or jumpstart the battery in an automobile flailing around as clumsily as Spock did in that scene. Yet you suggest that Nimoy's plausibly miming some kind of emergency maintenance on an FTL engineering system.
That's the worst kind of excuse making.
Bullshit.
You can't check the oil or jumpstart the battery in an automobile flailing around as clumsily as Spock did in that scene. Yet you suggest that Nimoy's plausibly miming some kind of emergency maintenance on an FTL engineering system.
That's the worst kind of excuse making.
Well, I floated the same idea upthread as a possibility, under a hypothetical but false assumption of what the overall layout of Main Engineering was. My point then was that they never said what Spock was doing, beyond fixing the ship. They never said on screen what anything was in main engineering, for that matter, as far as I'm aware.
Does anybody know what procedure the script said Spock was doing?
If we're going to open up the TWOK scene to criticism, it is ridiculous on many levels. The props aren't suggestive of anything sensible, Spock's glove is oversized and clumsy, and for all that we can see, maybe all he's doing is pressing the Galaxy Quest Blue Button, which, instead of beyond the chompers, in this case is located deep inside a radiation-spewing pedestal. If it is supposed to be an upgrade of the same thing he and Scott fiddled with in Elaan of Troyius, they should have splurged a little and have it eject up some settings with some props that at least looked like crystals, and have him, you know, put one back in place. If that was the intent, then what we got was the ultra-low budget version of that.
In contrast, what we got in STID was in many ways the exact opposite of that. Rather than vaguely and suggestively doing nothing sensible inside a pedestal that's way too small for the gloves he's wearing, Kirk gets up on something bigger than he is and puts his whole body into it; at least we can see on some level that something is being moved back into place.
It's understandably vague (since that's all a script and usually a film requires), referring to the reactor room, control panel, manual control, blue energy arcing around Spock, and damping rods.
http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Star-Trek-II-The-Wrath-of-Khan.html
That makes sense, assuming it's possible to direct warp power to the impulse engines.
Locutus covered most of it (for instance, the reference to "damping rods" as if it were a fission reactor), but in one draft of the script, after Scotty says "I've got to take the mains offline," he adds: "The energizer's shaken loose and I can't get in there to fix her."
I would assume that the intention of the scriptwriters was for the main reactor itself, aka the energizer as it was repeatedly called in the film, to be closed off in a separate, radiation-shielded room. However, due to the film's low budget, they couldn't radically rebuild the existing engineering set to fit the script, so they best they could do was stick in that little booth on the side of the existing set and pretend it had something to do with the engines.
As if he's fixing an energizer that's been shaken loose...
You have no way of knowing how the systems on this ship work.
"Energizer" was originally a word used to obscure another point of technology in the film - someone objected to Kirk's naval command "stop engines" earlier in the movie, saying that it was unlikely that the Enterprise's engines would have an "all stop mode." The phrase became "stop energizers."
Thanks!
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