"...all 72 torpedoes are still in their tubes."

Right, it's a ship of exploration that has more torpedo tubes than we've ever seen on a starship named Enterprise. She's a 72-gun "peace keeper."

 

It's not that the ship is armed, or even heavily armed that defines what it is. While Starfleet does have a defensive purpose, the primary mission of the ship is exploration. In STID, it's said only a few Federation ships were built just for war.

Whether any other Enterprise had 72 torpedo tubes or not, they were all quite well-armed. In TUC, the torpedo manifest on board the Enterprise looked very large.

For all we know, the Enterprise was retrofit with extra torpedo tubes for the Khan mission (considering how easy it could be done with modular construction and the size of the ship, that wouldn't be a hard thing to imagine). It would be the oddest coincidence in the world, after all, if the Enterprise was built with exactly the right number of torpedo tubes to accommodate all of Khan's torpedoes/people at once.

Edited to add: Out of curiosity, I looked at a screencap from TUC which showed the Weapons Record for the Enterprise. There were 96 torpedoes in the inventory. Two had been fired. Ninety-six was probably a regular complement. That's two dozen more than the other Enterprise was given for its special mission.

 

72 torpedo tubes is just ridiculous. And what about the life support system "located behind the aft nacelle"?
How does such a line even make it into the script?

 

One can avow that the purpose of an aircraft carrier is strictly to provide a "mobile airport services" but the country whose coast you park next to will feel differently.

What is a ship armed to the teeth with torpedo tubes good for?

What something is, has a lot to do with "what it's good for," because "what it's good for" provides a clue not only about how people intend to use it, but also how people will be likely to use it in the future even if they have no present intention (e.g., Fred owns a bank, but avows no interest in lending money to people. He may be sincere, but Fred might change his mind when he realizes he can make money via interest and fractional banking or necessity might require it when he learns that to keep the bank running, he needs to provide banking services).

Indeed? How large did it look? And how many torpedo tubes did we see on the TMP Enterprise? That's right, she had two.

Sorry, you're just spinning your own retcon here. "For all we know..." is just a plea to ignorance. Sometimes such a plea is respectable, for example, when there is palpable presumption that such a thing would be happening behind the scenes. What you've offered, however, is the merest conjecture.

LOL, or she has even more torpedo tubes! Or it is what it looks like - bad writing.

 

And Marcus never grew suspicious when Khan said "we'll build exactly 72 torpedoes".

And nobody of the construction engineers wondered why they had to put stasis pods into them.

 

I'd agree that seventy-two tubes in the ship's original design would be odd if not downright weird. Since a movie can't be filled with exposition, I just supposed the ship was fitted with extra torpedo tubes to support Kirk's mission. Wouldn't have been that hard to do that.

As far as the "nacelle" line goes, odd lines and slip-ups occasionally make it all the way to the final cuts of the best of movies. For example, "The Godfather" has quite a few little bloopers that would be picked to death and probably ruin the movie for some if they were in a Trek film.

 

I just try to imagine how they wrote that line in the first place. They already knew very well how the Enterprise looked like. There is no "aft" nacelle. And nothing can be located "behind" it.

I can understand stuff like that in a pilot episode of a TV show, or a first film, when the ship isn't even designed at the time the script is written.

 

It's hard to say. Could be Cumberbatch blew the line, it got by everyone, and when it was caught, it was either too late to reshoot the lines, or it would've been too expensive to redo it.

For what it's worth, in the time that has passed since this topic first appeared on these boards, does anyone know for sure how the line was written?

 

I'm pretty sure we see the launchers being unloaded from the shuttles along with the torpedoes themselves. Even if I'm wrong, Scotty's protest was about how the weapons were being used, not that the ship was heavily armed. The TOS Enterprise supposedly had the ability to raze an entire world, after all.

This whole "72 launchers is too many!!!1!" thing is basically assuming two (from classic Enterprises) is the "correct" number. I always said if the TOS or classic movie Enterprises ever needed extra torpedo launchers that hatches would open on the hull exposing as many as needed.

Cumberbatch likely flubbed his line. In ST'09, Pike says "transfer auxiliary power from port nacelles to forward shields!" when the script says nacelle singular.

 

18 tubes, 4 torpedoes each, 9 each side.

Unless someone analysed the screencap and counted 72 tubes, I think the hull showed a lot fewer than that along it.

 

I never got my hands on the novel adaptation of STID. How was Khan's line about cutting off the Enterprise's life support delivered there?

And yes, we really don't know how many torpedo tubes the TOS Enterprise had. As I posted above, I counted 96 torpedoes in the Enterprise's inventory from a TUC screencap. Ninety-six torpedoes seems like a lot for only two tubes. Seems like a lot for a ship built only for exploration, too.

 

Pardon the double post, but yes. I think the idea of 72 tubes comes more from suppositions based on the dialog than from any visual evidence that there was one tube for each torpedo.

 

Wouldn't it count as one MacGuffin?

 

Satellite/probe deployment, surveillance equipment deployment, sensor buoy deployment, mine-sweeping, mine-laying, convoy escort, planetary defense, etc. It makes no difference if the ship has 1 torpedo tube or 300, it's what those tubes are used for that makes the difference.

For the record, it is far from certain that the Enterprise actually has 72 torpedo tubes. We only actually see about four of them open, and the interior view of the weapons bay shows no more than about 20 on either side of the ship.

That's the funny thing about Star Trek: the Enterprise is intended to be used to PREVENT wars from starting in the first place, which Kirk and Spock spent a breathtaking amount of time doing. A lot of the times that means firing weapons at somebody who is acting way too aggressively, but even then the intent is usually to neutralize the aggressor so that diplomacy can resume. It's a very rare (and very TERRIFYING) adversary for whom diplomacy is not even an option.

For the record: what happened when the Enterprise was sent to use those torpedo tubes on a premptive military mission whose goal was NOT to prevent the escalation of hostilities? It's chief engineer resigned and the Captain disobeyed his orders anyway. At it's face, this suggests that Starfleet's basic mission statement precludes the possibility of belligerent action (it might not even be LEGAL for them to do so).

 

Of course he did. That's probably how Khan got caught.

 

That wasn't so super of Khan.

 

Don't tell Khan that. He'll come at you with FULL POWAAA DAMN YOU!

 

Do we know they built only 72 torpedoes?

 

We see at least one more torpedo in Section 31's London HQ.

 

How sure are you? Proof?

Scotty started protesting before he even knew what the mission was. His objection "I thought we were explorers" was tied to his objection to the mere existence of these torpedoes on this ship.

Seeing as how the primary hull is covered with phaser turrets and that the secondary hull is dotted with torpedo tubes, you'd think he'd catch a clue.

Well, we knew that the ship was powerful enough to destroy species and civilizations. She was powerful enough to be a life killer, but not a planet killer (like the Doomsday Machine).

Moreover, in TOS the idea was that humanity was simply now so powerful where even an exploration ship had this sort of capability. But in TOS we only see phasers and torpedoes ever come from but one place, suggesting that the majority of the mass/structure of the ship is dedicated to other purposes.

In nuTrek the Enterprise is bristling with turrets and torpedo tubes. A good deal of her surface are is pointed out to the audience to be weapons-oriented.

Beyond this, because this is fiction, we have to consider the visual grammar and tropes being used. To show the side of a ship covered with ports evokes images of fighting ships. All those phaser turrets are reminiscent of battle ships, machine gun turrets on bombers, and so on. The visual message is clear, she's a war machine.

Two or one was always sufficient for the old ship. It seems the new ship has... ...issues.

Well, it's great that you said it, but that doesn't make it true, does it?


EDIT: It's a series of tubes...

When Sulu threatens Khan we see at least 5 tubes in a checkerboard pattern. If there are as many tubes on the other side, that makes ten. But this is not all the visual evidence we have. In the infographic that accompanies the line "I see your 72 torpedoes are still in their tubes," it appears that there are at least 12 tube per side and we should not forget about the torpedo tube(s?) sitting at the bottom of the neck which connects the primary hull to the secondary hull. At the very least, by a conservative count, she's 25-gunner, which is more than 12 times as many torpedo tubes as we ever saw in TOS or the TMP-era Enterprise. It could be as many as 72--at least, my screen capture is not really clear on this point.

Doesn't really matter, dialogue trumps effects work, because effects work is more subjective (e.g., we are not given a clear view of all the ports, the infographics are unclear, there are often continuity problems with SFX and on-screen dialogue--how big is a Bird of Prey?). Khan says that 72 torpedoes are in their tubes, then we must conclude that there at least are 72 tubes for torpedoes to occupy on the U.S.S. Enterprise.