Like you're indirectly doing right now?
"...all 72 torpedoes are still in their tubes."
- Thread starter Flying Spaghetti Monster
- Start date
Like you're indirectly doing right now?
Umm, what? Marcus never indicates he would have known. Khan's plan appears to be a complete success: he has smuggled out his crew from a facility controlled by Marcus, with the help of Marcus, without Marcus realizing what the hell happened.
So the torpedoes would not have fired, and nothing wrong with that. Marcus was in the belief that they would fire, would rain death on Klingons, and would ignite a war. He didn't care about whether Khan would live or die; the useful agent had helped with the plan to ignite the war, and if 72 of the 72 torps missed and hit Klingon targets instead, all the better.
(Also, the torpedoes probably would not have exploded, either, so McCoy was never in real danger. Khan would have had no motivation to leave an explosive charge in place in any of the torpedoes!)
But please remember when exactly Spock learned of the fact that the tubes contained people. He had all the time in the world to do the removing, before the battle, without telling the audience. And he wouldn't have told the audience, because Khan would then have overheard. That is, there was no plot slot for a scene where Spock would discuss this thing with Kirk, because Kirk was with Khan all the time the camera showed him to us. It's just a sneaky yet extremely logical thing for Spock to have done ASAP when McCoy literally blew the lid on the big secret.
Which makes one wonder whether Khan came up with a completely bogus "rationale" for why Marcus would need to equip the starship of a gullible young officer with exactly 72 torpedo launchers.
Although in fact we don't see anything like 72 (or even 36) holes on the side of the ship. Rather, it seems there are a bit over a dozen holes at most, and each is supposed to allow several torpedoes to "swim" out of the shuttle hangar where they were being stored. What purpose those holes would serve is not known, but it's quite possible they were never intended specifically for the launching of torpedoes, but rather for the delivery of some generic if small auxiliary craft from the hangar.
Timo Saloniemi
To wit: the plot point about the missing planet only applied to the set up of the film.
Yes, aside from the fact that the general language of Trek was still kind of being formed at the time it came out (no spin-offs yet) but the important thing is that it was just something that it set the story in motion.
But the torpedo thing is worse. It's both the set-up, plot mechanics, and resolution all in one. For a movie about people pointing weapons at other people, this story is more confusing than a time-travel story.
But I really do believe that 72 torpedoes is a lot. The shot where Bones shows Kirk all the removed cryo-tubes showss us only 13 torpedoes. That's it. Yeah people can explain how big the ship is and all that... but it also took so much damage, crew-memebers were flying out at warp speeed, that I find it hard to believe that all of those people could be removed from them during a crisis. It happened in five minutes.
From a writing point of view also seemed like a pretty bland way for Spock to solve the proble. Maybe it works, maybe it's acceptible, but it's not something that wows me, that tells me "oohhh that was a fantastic solution."
Yes, aside from the fact that the general language of Trek was still kind of being formed at the time it came out (no spin-offs yet) but the important thing is that it was just something that it set the story in motion.
But the torpedo thing is worse. It's both the set-up, plot mechanics, and resolution all in one. For a movie about people pointing weapons at other people, this story is more confusing than a time-travel story.
But I really do believe that 72 torpedoes is a lot. The shot where Bones shows Kirk all the removed cryo-tubes showss us only 13 torpedoes. That's it. Yeah people can explain how big the ship is and all that... but it also took so much damage, crew-memebers were flying out at warp speeed, that I find it hard to believe that all of those people could be removed from them during a crisis. It happened in five minutes.
From a writing point of view also seemed like a pretty bland way for Spock to solve the proble. Maybe it works, maybe it's acceptible, but it's not something that wows me, that tells me "oohhh that was a fantastic solution."
Timo said:
Not only does Marcus demonstrate that he knows when he shows up and has his conversation with Kirk, but Khan tells Kirk & Spock about how his plan was discovered. Marcus did indeed realize what the hell happened; the film tells us this explicitly.
Timo said:
But Marcus would have, and the torpedoes were in Marcus' possession, not Khan's, when they were given to Kirk. The warheads on the weapons were live, as Carol said.
You keep telling us again and again and again that we must focus our criticism on nuTrek and not make comparisons to old Trek.
Why?
That's crazy. The entire story is predicated on an easy-spotted error: there are fewer planets in the Ceti system than the last time we were here. Additionally, TWoK also depends heavily on the notion that Chekov would only remember Khan after seeing the belt buckle or that there were no records of Khan's location from the Enterprise logs. Without these easily-corrected blunders, Khan would have continued to rot on that planet and everyone would have continued on their merry way.
It's all contrivance, built upon more contrivance. And don't even get me started on Kirk and Spock's super-sekkrit 'By the book' code. Yeesh.
I didn't find it confusing at all. There were 72 weapons because that's how many of Khan's supermen were hidden. I expect there were more unaltered torpedoes at the secret Section 31 base in London or elsewhere. Marcus would have given Kirk hundreds of torpedoes if that's how many men Khan had hidden. The Enterprise is friggin huge, I have no problem believing that it could store hundreds of munitions in that massive engineering hull.
One of the things that bother me about the Abrams films is that they play fast-and-loose with event timings. Trips take minutes instead of hours or days, Scotty makes off-handed comments about being off-ship for 'one bloody day' when the events of STID couldn't have happened in such a short time-frame. There is clearly a kind of narrative short-hand that is occurring where the pacing of the film is being treated with more importance than establishing a strict continuity of events.
I think that, on the whole, that it's the right tradeoff to make but sometimes the seams show a little too clearly.
I thought it was great because it serviced the Kirk-Spock relationship and demonstrated yet again that these two men, working together, can accomplish miracles. They're both still finding their way, their rhythms, and it was a great moment when it paid off later during the reactor scene.
Maybe 72 isn't that conspicuous of a number.
In Arena Kirk orders a search team of 30 medical officers.
I always wondered about that until I realized that it's divisible by 6, the number of transporter pads.
So 5 fully manned transporter beam-downs equals 30 people.
72 would be a dozen. Maybe 72 is a common number for shipments in the Star Trek universe.
-just a thought.
In Arena Kirk orders a search team of 30 medical officers.
I always wondered about that until I realized that it's divisible by 6, the number of transporter pads.
So 5 fully manned transporter beam-downs equals 30 people.
72 would be a dozen. Maybe 72 is a common number for shipments in the Star Trek universe.
-just a thought.
For the lulz
I think how they got 72 people out of each torpedo in 5 minutes in a battle situation (transporters were not working) is a MUCH larger hole than how Reliant forgot a planet. Maybe remnants of Ceti Alpha big enough to be mistaken for a planet were still orbiting the sun.
The ship doesn't appear to be all that big when you look at the exterior shots (during Sulu's transmission) and we see the doors opening for the tubes...
Completely agree. I chalked it up to a scientific error, like the fact that although they had visited that system before (obviously the Enterprise did) they might not have had an outpost near there, so all of data was through sensors, telescopes, and all of that. I mean, even today, we can detect exoplanets based on radiation fluctuations, but that doesn't mean we know everything about those systems.
But the bigger issue for me is the sheer number of torpedoes the plot uses as it's MacGuffin, and (staring from before the movie proper actually begins) who has them, why they have them, what they will do with them, etc. Oddly enough, the issue of the torpedoes connects directly into other issues. For example, why did Khan go to Kronos? I have no idea, and the movie doens't tell us. The answer to this question is connected to anotehr question that the film doesn't tell us? How long were Khan and Marcus working together, and how far did they get? Did Khan go to Kronos becuase, even after Marcus exploited him and his crew, he still agreed (for whatever reason) with the notion that STarfleet should be militarized and that S31 should start a pre-emptive strike with the Klingons? I mean, Khan could have gone anywhere, so it stands to reason he picke dKronos for a reason, and that this reason had to do with Marcus' desire to fight the Klingons? And that also brings to light of what Marcus was going to once he started the war. How would he fight it with one ship?
But the fact that there are so many torpedoes accentuates all these other plot problems, but is unweildy unto itself. The ship was being torn apart and people were flying out of the hull at warp but every torpedo of these seventy two survived? Really?
Now I know you're trolling. Cut it out.
Not your call to make, Daniel. Please don't mini-mod, and especially don't bring the dreaded and invasive Starship Size Argument™ into this - there's a thread for that already.
As for the Ceta Alpha system.
Spock mentions in Space Seed that the system has been fulled charted and that "planet number 5 is habitable." stating that the environment is harsh, which means a survey ship was in the system monitoring each planet not all that long ago.
The Enterprise warps back to the Botany Bay, takes everything to CA5, settles them on the planet by bringing (somehow) the cargobays from the BB to the surface, which could have taken a while, got the colonists down there, Spock likely scanned the region while they were there, then left.
Reliant was at least the 3rd Federation starship inside that system in 30-50 years, with no less than one entire system wide survey and all of Spock's readings from the previous trip.
Suddenly it's all 'how do i science'.
Spock mentions in Space Seed that the system has been fulled charted and that "planet number 5 is habitable." stating that the environment is harsh, which means a survey ship was in the system monitoring each planet not all that long ago.
The Enterprise warps back to the Botany Bay, takes everything to CA5, settles them on the planet by bringing (somehow) the cargobays from the BB to the surface, which could have taken a while, got the colonists down there, Spock likely scanned the region while they were there, then left.
Reliant was at least the 3rd Federation starship inside that system in 30-50 years, with no less than one entire system wide survey and all of Spock's readings from the previous trip.
Suddenly it's all 'how do i science'.
I'm not trolling. I also don't want to get into Starship size argument, save for the fact that the film shows us how big these tubes are in scale with the rest of the ship.. and I was using that to counter the arguments of the number of torpedoes and the storage space needed for all of them (in comparison to the areas where the hull was breached)
Don't accuse me of trolling when I'm not.
I already wrote a response to this before I saw yours. Thank you (not sarcastic) and you can delete my previous post if you wish.
Well, maybe. We have maps of the oceans. We've been making maps for centuries. We could still discover something about the oceans that we don't know.
The real issue is that Star Trek, while a franchise back then, was not a thriving franchise when Bennet and Meyer did the film.. they just had a story idea and bent continuity and a few little rules to tell an awesome story. But now, Trek is a huge franchise, people do care about this stuff, and the writers getting paid millions shouldn't puke out screenplays in a weekend and let such a sloppy project out to the public. I mean, the torpedoes are the MacGuffin of the film
I recall an on screen graphic in ST6:TUC, displaying icons representing torpedoes on board. The first time they are shown all are present but later two have turned red, indicating there absense/use.
IIRC there were quite a few of them represented, though I never actually counted them.....
ETA When I first saw the broadside cannons my eyes rolled so hard they nearly stuck that way. But now after considering it, it's a nice homage to sailing vessels of old and may make for a neat space battle in the future. I don't care how how they fit into the ship or not, I outgrew starship porn a while ago.
IIRC there were quite a few of them represented, though I never actually counted them.....
ETA When I first saw the broadside cannons my eyes rolled so hard they nearly stuck that way. But now after considering it, it's a nice homage to sailing vessels of old and may make for a neat space battle in the future. I don't care how how they fit into the ship or not, I outgrew starship porn a while ago.
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