It is awful chilly in space...
"...all 72 torpedoes are still in their tubes."
- Thread starter Flying Spaghetti Monster
- Start date
I suppose one could argue the line was originally "... located aft of the nacelles...", and was botched by Cumberbatch (a 'batch-botch?)
Then again, it was likely bad writing.
FWIW, the line in the script is "in the vicinity of your warp engine nacelles" which probably means somewhere in engineering.
Just face it: that line would be a lot less confusing if Khan had said something like "Located in that big module thingie on the bottom of your ship," but that wouldn't have sounded nearly as menacing. Khan is intelligent, but not experienced; he isn't fully up to speed on the lingo.
Just face it: that line would be a lot less confusing if Khan had said something like "Located in that big module thingie on the bottom of your ship," but that wouldn't have sounded nearly as menacing. Khan is intelligent, but not experienced; he isn't fully up to speed on the lingo.
A
Amaris
Guest
I think exploration is what we'll get. Orci wanted it for ST2, but he was just a writer, which is pretty low on the movie direction totem pole. ST3, though, will be all him. Hopefully, we'll get exploration.
YARN
Fleet Captain
Our cultural memory of torpedo tubes is that one torpedo is fired from a given tube at a time, then reloaded. This is something audiences have been shown numerous times in films like Das Boot and U-571. And this historically is how torpedo tubes work:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxeyYn8q9qA
Imagery in Star Trek II and Star Trek VI reinforces this naval image (e.g., the single torpedo running along the conveyer and the hatch closing behind it when they launch the funeral torpedo).
What you have in mind is an extrapolation beyond the text and beyond our cultural memory which serves no purpose except to preserve your preserved hypothesis.
Consequently, the preferred reading of that line is conclude that Khan is speaking of 72 torpedo tubes.
But again, EVEN IF the new E has "only" 18 tubes along her secondary hull, we must still add the tube (or tubes) at the base of the "neck" (we saw torpedoes launched from that location at the end of the '09 film) and conclude that this ship has more than 9X as many tubes as the TMP-era Enterprise. We must still consider what all those opening hatches (outer doors) signal in the language of cinema. She is a ship of war.
This only explains why she is warship. In Yesterday's Enterprise we find an alternate Enterprise D which is described as a "battleship" on screen and it is explain on screen why she is a battleship. What matters is not the "why" but the "is."
He lodged two objections, a prudential one and a moral one. I am speaking of the moral objection which is lodged when he states, "I thought we were explorers." Scotty should have either concluded (a) that they were post-Nero age explorers who needed to "be prepared," or (b) that the Enterprise was already a warship, given ALL the phase-cannons and dozens of torpedo tubes she boasts. His moral objection gains no purchase.
Is terminating the life support system supposed to be an "instant kill"? If the crew has even a few minutes of consciousness left, that's enough to kill Khan's people, isn't it? In fact, given Khan's warning, somebody could put on an environmental suit to guarantee the opportunity to kill Khan's people if he attacks.
Seems to me it's a Mexican standoff. If Khan makes good on his threat, the lower lifeforms can retaliate by killing his people.
Seems to me it's a Mexican standoff. If Khan makes good on his threat, the lower lifeforms can retaliate by killing his people.
YARN
Fleet Captain
Doesn't matter. Not one bit. A person may have ever HEARD the word "schadenfreude" in his or her life, but still no what it feels like to take pleasures in the misfortunes of others and they are aware of other doing the same.
What you, in particular, have seen does not factor significantly in the analysis. What matters is our cultural collective memory, our filmic iconography, and the grammar of visual story telling.
I am not black, a slave, a slaveholder, a Southerner, or a nineteenth-century man. Should I have had no interest in 12 Years a Slave?
The age of the fighting sail is not just an historically relevant period when Brittania ruled the waves, but it is also a cultural memory which informs our literature. Captain Kirk refers to this memory when he says, "All that I ask is a tall ship and a star to sail her by."
Old naval vessels fighting with pirates and delivering broadsides is one of our narrative playgrounds. It is a romanticized period in our collective memory.
Films, like other texts, are all interconnected in our collective memory. Indeed, if you read the post I made before this one, you'll see that my analysis taps into our cultural memory of submarine films too.
The question is, which memories are primed in any given context? The Enterprise is an odd ship which is sometimes like a submarine (e.g., Balance of Power and the nebula battle in Star Trek II), but sometimes also like a ship of the line (e.g., the first Encounter with Reliant in Star Trek II when they exchange broadsides and when Sulu opens the gun ports in STiD).
To make sense of space battles (to which we cannot appeal to our historical memories, since the human race has yet to fight battles in space), Star Trek refers to tropes and conventions that are familiar to us. Trek redeploys the past in making sense of the future.
Thus, the Enterprise refers BOTH to submarine tropes and fighting sail tropes.
"Good guy being good" isn't a trope, it's an identity statement.
The connection to the military is established by the hierarchy, the weapons, naval terminology, etc.
Can the good guy be in the military? Yes. The two are not mutually exclusive (as evidenced by my prior observation of our ambivalence with regard to the military - we're suspicious of purposes of leaders and generals and we voice skepticism about the need, value, and true purpose of our foreign wars while, almost in the same breath, we unconditionally salute our troops and their sacred mission of protecting our liberty by sacrificing their lives in these foreign wars).
Is the nu-Enterprise a military ship? She sure looks like one. She sure acts like one.
And if we watch Jason Statham beat people to death for an hour and a half, but then return to a monastary to be a monk, we will know that - for whatever reason - the character he portrays is not a violent guy, but a quiet monk. Amirite?
The line signals uncertainty. If the mere presence of 72 torpedoes is a deal-breaker for Scotty, maybe he should have considered what sort of ship he is aboard.
He should either recognize that he is on a tough exploration vessel (Hoorahh!) in which case he should have no objection, or he should have known prior to the delivery of the torpedoes that they were not explorers.
Scotty is not an omniscient narrator. He is a character in an ensemble. Moreover, his supposition appears to have been incorrect on his own analysis.
And we have to balance this line with what we see depicted on the screen and with what other characters say and do. We see Kirk, for example, jazzed about the possibility of a five-year mission. This is something NEW - Starfleet is looking to get into the deep space exploration business. So far, we've only seen Starfleet in space ship fighting business, the secret military projects business, etc.
Yes, because modern movie audiences know exactly what old-time gunports on sailing ships look like.
Yes, they have seen a lot of movies. They've seen the Pirates of the Carribean films, they've seen Master and Commander, and they've seen iconic images of old ships.
And they know what a row of squares looks like.
Put a row of squares along the hull of a ship and people can make the connection. This ain't rocket science. Try this out - Peg leg, skull and cross bones flag, says "Arghhh!" a lot. Can you guess what the reference is? No, we have a good understanding of what it depicts. The line is uttered at the precise moment we see the infographic. The infographic is in the exact same area of the ship that revealed five gun ports earlier in the film when Sulu menaced Khan.
Whether or not he knows that the particular torpedoes are his frozen bros has absolutely no relevance to the question of whether the Enterprise has a whole-lotta torpedo tubes (Answer: She does!).
That's funny, because this is the same movie that tells me that Khan is responsible for designing the Vengeance and those super-torpedoes with his buds in them. He's smart enough to create and/or use a transwarp beaming back to escape Earth. He's a veritable IT guy.
If the Enterprise's life support is not behind the aft nacelle (a plausible thought, since she does not appear to have an "aft nacelle), then this would NOT be a credible threat to Spock and Co. (i.e., he would not know precisely where to hit them to get his way). Keep in mind that this was not a casual line of dialogue. This is what finally forces Spock to comply--Khan establishes that he get precisely what he wants by damaging the ship in just the right way.
If it is not the presence of the torpedoes then why does he say, "Letting those torpedoes on this ship is the last straw"?
He didn't know what the specific mission was. He only knows they're on a military operation. Knowing this prompts him to ask, "Is this what we are now? 'Cause I thought we were explorers."
Scotty is mad because he does not have access to classified information (such as the fuel components of the torpedoes).
He has suspicions, but the fact that he can only say that he knows it's a military operation shows how much he doesn't know.
Is he bluffing? McCoy says, "Remind me never to piss you off."
Bluffing or not, the Enterprise is shown to have a bunch or torpedo tube, and a bunch of torpedoes. It's no bluff that she has these weapons and that she is designed to fight.
Last edited:
I think Khan's banking on them not committing murder even under that circumstance.
One could also wonder why there wouldn't be at least one environmental suit stored on the bridge in "Space Seed".
Besides, hearing Cumberbatch say, "...cold corpses," was so worth it.
Please don't do that. You're supposed to know better.[...]
And this is the part where Crazy Eddie attempts to explain away bad writing with even worse writing.
I will remember you for this, always. This is a golden moment.
[And here's the part where I remind you—one more time—to refute what's posted without taking a swipe at the person who posted it. - M']
[...]
Also: be more careful using QUOTE tags. I had to mend some bargled tags in your post to prevent the sloppy attribution being re-quoted downthread.
This is not what torpedo tubes have ever been in Star Trek. Even the Wrath of Khan torpedo launchers were able to fire twice in succession without having enough time to reload; this happens again in Search for Spock and Undiscovered country. By TNG, the ship's single torpedo launcher is capable of firing up to six torpedoes in a single launch and occasionally is seen spitting photorps in salvos like a giant chain gun. Quantum torpedo launchers on the Defiant and the Enterprise-E also fire torpedoes in burst salvos, three or four torpedoes at a time.
Star Trek is part of the same cultural memory you keep alluding too; if the audience isn't familiar with Star Trek, they probably won't be familiar with any of those other movie references either.
But that's not what you're arguing here. You're basically claiming that a Starfleet mission code named "Operation Schadenfreude" would reigster in the minds of movie viewers as something rather cynical and gross for Starfleet to be doing, but THAT follows from the assumption that most of the audience knows what schadenfreude means. It doesn't matter one bit whether or not they're familiar with the concept if they don't actually know that the concept is being invoked.
More to the point: Horatio Hornblower is NOT so universal that one would recognize references to it without ever having seen or heard of it. Hell, even Star Trek isn't quite that universal.
Unless you're claiming some sort of massive telepathic field that binds together the experiences of everyone who has ever gone to the theater, this statement is nonsense.
No. Obviously, he's an incredibly violent quiet monk (a well known character staple in Kung Fu movies). He is exactly what he appears to be: a monk who beats the living crap out of bad guys.
Starfleet, by the same token, is exactly what it appears to be: an exploration agency that carries weapons.
It isn't. It's the presence of 72 torpedoes whose specifications he does not have access to, torpedoes which were brought aboard in the first place specifically for the purpose of performing an assassination which, if successful, would very likely plunge the Federation into interstellar war.
Exactly. The balance comes out that Starfleet is an exploration agency that has humanitarian, law enforcement and peacekeeping duties and is well equipped, well armed, well trained and well disciplined. STID establishes pretty firmly that it is not technically a military organization, and that there is a very active faction within Starfleet that seeks to change this.
Hence Khan's later line about how Marcus had recruited him to help realize his "vision of a militarized Starfleet." You could conceivably claim that Scotty is an idealist who has a lofty vision of what Starfleet really is, but that rationale doesn't fly for Khan, who is way too cynical and way too twisted to make that sort of mistake.
It's also the same area of the ship that contains the weapons bay and the shuttle bay from which the torpedoes were loaded in the first place.
Note that Khan says the torpedoes are "still loaded into their launch tubes." Still implies they were loaded there in the first place, which Khan doesn't actually know for a fact. More to the point, we see the same graphic that Khan sees, so we know exactly what he knows about those torpedoes. The graphic DOES NOT SHOW that the torpedoes are inside the launch tubes, it only shows that it has located the torpedoes in the secondary hull.
So Khan is assuming they have not been moved from where they were loaded in preparation to be fired at him. He's obviously wrong, since Spock had to have removed them from the tubes in order to get the sleeper pods out of them in the first place.
Yes, a veritable IT guy who doesn't know the lingo of the 23rd century.
It probably wasn't. Spock was COUNTING on Khan betraying them in the end, which is why he went through the trouble of arming the torpedoes. He assumed -- correctly -- that Khan would be in a much stronger position and that he would be able to force Spock to hand over the torpedoes. He didn't know or care what cards Khan was going to play to make this happen, but he DID go out of his way to make him play those cards instead of just saying "I suppose you want your torpedoes back, eh? Well, fine, go ahead and take them. Please take them. I'll lower my shields for you, okay?"
Because he has no idea what's IN those torpedoes, their propulsion systems or warheads. The mission itself would be bad enough if they were just using conventional torpedoes, but now they've given him a set of special weapons that are potentially just as dangerous to the Enterprise as anyone else who might be in their path.
"You just sat that man down in a high-stakes poker game with no cards and told him to bluff!" <-- McCoy's exact words to Kirk, moments after Kirk tells him "Tell him we've got a bunch of really big torpedoes pointed at him if he doesn't cooperate."
It's a bluff.
YARN
Fleet Captain
Your side of the aisle keeps reminding me that the fans are of no consequence, a vanishingly small portion of the audience, and that the lifeblood of the new franchise is new fans. Indeed, below you remind me that there are (allegedly) not so many Trekkies that we can say that even general knowledge of Trek is widespread.
Anywho, TNG takes place many decades after the TMP films, which is something the fans also know. TNG Starships have Holodecks, higher speeds, and newer and better weapons systems.
What fans remember seeing in TMP and TOS, the continuity which nuTrek parallels, is that of phaser rooms where people have to push buttons when the captain gives an order to fire (i.e., Balance of Terror) and torpedo bays that need people to pull of gratings for conveyer belts to load torpedoes - one at a time.
Now at the end of the '09 film we see the Enterprise fire a salvo of torpedoes from the neck of the ship at at rate comparable to that of a semi-automatic weapon like a 45 or 9mm pistol--that is she doesn't machine-gun torpedoes, but pushes them out one at a time. A semi-automatic handgun has a magazine which loads bullets - one at a time - into a chamber to be fired. Semi-autos can fire pretty fast, but they still do so one at a time.
What you have in mind is something more like an experimental technology like "Metastorm" -- something with which John Q. Public has little to no familiarity.
Was I speaking to the audience in my post? No, I was speaking to you. You didn't get the reference, I explained it.
It really does not matter whether or not people would specifically recognize Horatio Hornblower, per se.
Really? So does one LITERALLY allege telepathy when one says something like, "the American psyche was scarred on November 22, 1963."
Do I have to allege that the world is psychic to say that Star Wars was massive shared cultural event?
If Crazie Eddie, personally, had never heard of the Kennedy Assassination or ever seen Star Wars, would it really matter? Of course not, when we are speaking of the audience's response, we are speaking of them as an aggregate (and we don't need to assume telepathy to do so).
No, we would not say he is a quiet guy. We would not say he is nonviolent.
Actions speak louder than words. If I claim to be a teetotaller, but every time you see me socially I am drinking, you will conclude (rightly) that I am not really a teetotaller.
Trek luminaries like Harlan Ellison and Nicholas Meyers would disagree with this assessment. Meyers, for example, rejected the notion (director's commentary TWoK) that Starfleet was anything but an old fashioned Colonial power that solved it's problems-when push came to shove-with "gunboat diplomacy." Indeed, it was this insight which allowed him to make the connection to Horatio Hornblower, and once he conceived of it as Hornblower in Space (i.e., a military in space which in his 'verse was "nautical but nice") he "got it" and was able to click make it work. And lest you think that is a random connection Roddenberry also explicitly referred to Trek as Hornblower in space, and so did Shatner in interviews about the show. Ellison once referred to Trek as spacemen acting like cops, interfering with matters and setting them right from their POV - much like today's United States (and the U.S. of the 60's projecting it's power around the world) as a globocop.
Such assessments even make me uncomfortable, because I like to think of TOS and TMP as offering us innocent explorers. And yet, there is an uncomfortable truth in these comments which deserves consideration. Starfleet is an ambiguous organization. Kirk in TOS once refers to himself as "a soldier not a diplomat," for instance. Consider that in episodes like "Private Little War" we see Kirk drawn into interfering with a primitive planet in an arms race with the Klingons.
Now Scotty, being on a ship covered with turrets and ports, should have had a clue that the UFP has such an ambiguous identity before the delivery of those torpedoes.
Scotty doesn't know what the specific mission is - he does not even know what's in the torpedoes.
I should note, however, that your point is not without merit. I agree that this mitigates my analysis a bit.
Strange that our military so often has "peacekeeping duties" are they not really "the military" when they do so? Ditto for international/interplanetary "law enforcement."
A fair point. I read this line as Starfleet becoming COMPLETELY militarized. That is, no longer a navy with an exploration/humanitarian mission, but a pure navy ramping up for war.
It does not matter if he is wrong about where his special torpedoes are. It does matter if he is wrong about the number of launch tubes on the Enterprise.
Spock tricks Khan, but he can only do so by misleading him using certain details that he knows - he knows, for example, where the torpedoes are, but he does not know that Spock removed the crewmen from the torpedoes.
Let's not blame bad writing on Khan. Again, he is only a credible threat if he does, in fact, know where the life-support unit is. If Khan said, "I will disable your life support by knocking out your primary gerbafrizzle," Spock would have reason to believe that Khan was wrong and have reason NOT to lower his shields. Spock must be convinced that Khan, more or less, knows what he is talking about to have reason to lower his shields.
NOTE: You are making the same type argument here that I made with regard to Hornblower above (i.e,. knowing a particular name doesn't matter, but rather knowing function or collection of practices associated with a name). In this case, however, I would say that the analysis is faulty, because knowing the proper names of these systems and correctly calling out their locations is crucial to showing that Khan can knock out their life support with pin point precision (thus not putting his frozen mates at risk).
This is plausible enough, but reading doesn't require all this tortured speculation - OK, Khan is factually wrong in making his threat: Spock knows this and has good grounds for doubting the threat: However, Spock wants to give up the torpedoes and so he ignores Khan's ineptitude as a menacing mastermind (i.e., the guy who designed these weapons and the Vengeance) in the first place.
If we brought in Occam's Razor here, your reading is the one which would get eliminated.
Is it? Is Kirk kidding when he refers to all those torpedoes? McCoy seems awed by Sulu's resolve. Khan has no scanners down on the planet, he isn't on a ship or in an HQ, so Sulu didn't need to actually open the torpedo tubes to make that threat - but he did open the tubes, tubes Khan couldn't see, because he was ready to let him have it.
If he is bluffing, he's bluffing with the guns of a naval warship.
And thus you undermine your own argument that "everyone knows" that torpedo tubes can only fire one weapon at a time before having to be reloaded. Anyone who watched the PREVIOUS MOVIE should already know better.
Only if one is claiming that everyone who witnessed the events of November 22nd reacted to it the same way and drew the exact same conclusions. Which you know full well is nonsense.
We WOULD say he was a quiet guy if he rarely speaks even while he's beating people to death. Nor would we imply he is "nonviolent" just because he is a monk.
Hence, if he lives in a monestary, dresses like a monk, meditates and rarely speaks, and then spends the entire movie beating bad guys to death with Kung Fu, what does that make him?
It makes him a monk who beats people to death with Kung Fu. Such things are not unheard of in American films.
I take at face value what Starfleet claims itself to be. One thing it has not claimed to be -- especially in the JJ verse -- is a military organization.
Were not consulted in either of these films.
Exactly. I think they PREFER that ambiguity because it allows them to accomplish multiple mission roles without having to worry so much about the broader legal implications of what they're doing. They can easily take on a law-enforcement role without having to worry about the militarization of Federation law, and they can conduct scientific exploration and colonization surveys so that everyone -- particularly Federation members and allies -- can rest assured that the data collected in those surveys will PRIMARILY be used for civilian purposes. It allows Federation members to trust Starfleet to act on their behalf and not have to worry about what is a predominately Earth-based organization setting a military policy in its own favor at the expense of everyone else.
Partly that's a rationalization, but no more so than the common (and by now, centuries-old) folklore of just how it is that the otherwise peaceful Shaolin Monks were the ones to invent a highly effective fighting style just to defend themselves from aggressors; and even then, it is well understood that there is no such thing as a "Shaolin Warrior."
Yes. And by the same token, a law enforcement agency does not cease to be a law enforcement agency just because it is engaged in humanitarian and peacekeeping missions. Law enforcement does not become a military organization by doing so.
So it is not impossible than an exploration agency could ALSO fill those roles.
He may not even mean it that literally. Consider, for example, the militarization of America's police forces. That wouldn't literally make the police part of the military, even though the complete transformation would effectively create a paramilitary organization that treats domestic law enforcement like a combat situation.
Marcus may be pushing for a similar transformation for Starfleet: an exploration agency that treats exploration as a "force recon" mission and takes a militaristic approach to everything it does, whether or not it legally IS a military.
Khan doesn't know the number of launch tubes on the Enterprise, therefore he does not know if all of his torpedoes are loaded. He assumes so because they're in the weapons bay and because they don't seem to have been moved; that they were ever loaded in the first place is not something he could have known.
Consider, also, that the distance between the magazines and the launch tubes is a little less than five meters. Would that distance even REGISTER on the graphic he's looking at?
Why? Khan designed the Vengeance, not the Enterprise. In THIS universe, he hasn't spent several days sitting in sickbay studying the Enterprise's technical manuals and has had no reason to specifically memorize the technical layout of the constitution class starship. Even if he's merely misstating what he's talking about, he is not in a position to know what terminology the crew of such a vessel would use to refer to individual parts.
Yes, considering that IF Sulu fires them it would result in Kirk's landing party being blown up as well.
He's awed by his poker face, to be sure. That WAS a pretty intimidating speech.
Are you sure? He seems to have a really large amount of weapons and equipment in his Ketha Province hideout, and apparently has enough sensor capability to know that the starfleet team sent to arrest him has been intercepted by a Klingon patrol. So he's got SOMETHING down there.
YARN
Fleet Captain
No. What we see in the previous film suggests she fires like a semi-auto firearm. Her rate of fire is like that of a .45 auto - which loads one bullet into a chamber at a time. One can carry a gun with "one in the chamber" in which case one is primed for action with a bullet in the tube. Or if we suppose that the torpedoes are more like shells loaded into cannons (e.g., the military image of a battleship turret or a tank cannon), even fast firing cannons load one shell at a time. Even an automatic weapon only fires one at a time from a magazine (only one bullet chambered at a time)! It just does show very quickly.
The oddball hypothesis that they stack four torpedoes in a tube at a time is out of left field. Where are we told this? What is a cultural literary analogue which would prime this expectation in the audience? Why not load 5 torpedoes at a time? Why not load all 72 torpedoes into the tube at once?
Why would I claim that? What would make you think I am committed to claiming that. Have you not noticed that I am using phrases like "in the aggregate"?
And we would not say she is "mainly an exploration" ship if we only see her explore once, for five minutes.
Again, if you see me drinking, you will have reason to reject my claim to being a teetotaler.
Pike tells us it's a "Peace keeping and Humanitarian armada." "Peace keeping," is an historical euphemism for "We're sending in our military to act like cops in a country which cannot stop us from doing so." MX Missiles were dubbed "Peacekeepers." We were told that the Contras were "Freedom Fighters." In actual fact, of course, the Peace Keeper missiles were designed to incinerate cities and the Contras were bloodthirsty and vicious.
"Peace keeping," in the language of our period of history suggests U.N. style military intervention on behalf of the ruling elite of the world. Thus, we're told by Pike that Starfleet is the blue-helmet military arm of a sci-fi United Nations (a United Federation of Planets).
The humanitarian mission suggest coast-guard/disaster relief type duties as well, but there is no identification of "we're explorers" or "we're primarily explorers" in Pike's assertion of Starfleet's importance.
Nu-Scott has perhaps momentarily forgotten what film franchise he's in when he utters this line?
They didn't need to be. They were offering a diagnosis.
Well, suppose we watched a movie about "police officers" who only do actual police work for five minutes (an opening segment which sets up a character moment and which is not essential to the plot) in the span of two films? Suppose, that for the rest of these two films our cops were doing Halo jumps into foreign countries, engaging in ship battles, etc. We would conclude that they aren't "police officers" in any meaningful sense of the term.
You'd better hope not.
You link to Balko's book below. Have you read it?
Well, if so, Scotty should not be surprised. "I though we were explorers with a significant military operational agenda and purpose" doesn't exactly give him the moral high ground does it?
Again, Pike does not identify exploration as a central purpose of Starfleet. The monologue to the shows only tell us the purpose of the Enterprise on her particular mission is to explore.
Yes, let's do consider it! When cops are given special weaponry and are sold military surplus, when they're carrying around assault rifles and dressed in black, when they're told that they're fighting a war on drugs and a domestic war on terror we have to ask if they are properly acting as police forces.
It's literal enough when a two-year old child has to be put in a drug induced coma after the police throw a flash grenade into that child's crib.
"It's not boiling yet," said the frog in the pot.
SWAT teams are troubling precisely because they cross the boundaries of traditional policing. This is not a metaphorical concern, "Well, they're not literally violating your Constitutional rights when they kick in your door in the middle of the night and shoot your dog."
Now, suppose that Sgt. Scott was a member of a Chicago SWAT team and suppose he quit in a moral fit when his unit took delivery of 72 high-power assault rifles. His complaint, "I thought we were about getting cats out of trees" would ring a little hollow, don't you think?
Well heck, they can "legally" refer to themselves as anything their controlling state allows them to! This provides Mr. Scott's moral objection no additional ground.
We've watched our "peace keeping" armada fight Nero and seen the Enterprise not only show off all her guns and tubes, but use them.
Mr. Scott should have recognized that his "Peace Keeping and Humanitarian Armada" (henceforth, PKHA) was already a blue-helmet military organization with regular military operational interests.
"I see your 72 torpedoes are still in their tubes" - he can "see" this, he says. He is getting visual data informing him that the Enterprise has, at least 72 torpedoes in at least 72 tubes.
All the more reason that we must admit that there may be many more tubes that we can actually count in that infographic.
Also, Khan can look at all the displays and read outs on the bridge of then Vengeance. The info-graphic is for our benefit, reinforcing the exposition of Khan.
Because your preferred interpretation adds unneeded complications.
Because we have no positive evidence in the text confirming that Khan is wrong about things like "aft nacelles." Everything we're told suggests that he knows how these ships are laid out.
Because the only thing which speaks in favor of your preferred interpretation is that it protects your preferred interpretation (a circular warrant at best).
No, they are still in the Mudd Spaceship (en route) when Sulu makes his threat. In the next scene, we don't know how much time has elapsed from Sulu's threat to the next scene because movies are always skipping ahead to the next exciting moment, Spock reports that they are still three minutes away from Khan's location. If Khan tries to run away, Sulu can make good on his threat before Kirk arrives.
Also, the Enterprise has had contingent orders to fire in instances where firing would kill the command crew (e.g., Taste of Armageddon).
No, I am not sure. I am sure, however, that the Enterprise opened her ports, and that we saw at least five torpedo tube outer doors opened before we quickly cut to the next scene. Bluffing or not, he's bluffing with a gun boat.
I came to the conclusion that in the new Trek, there is a pathologic "I don't care" way of thinking when it comes to ship/technical details. The ships size and its interiors not matching, the number of torpedo tubes, the life support being located behind the aft nacelle, the ship's speed, the behavior and limits of transporters, the Kelvin's "Autopilot" malfunctions, but nuFatherKirk can still set a "Collision Course", etc... . All this could have been gotten rid of with a little more effort. I can't help it, I like quality in the products I consume.
I do think they concentrate more on the movies being "fun" than on the technical details. It doesn't bother me but everyone has different expectations.
That dead-beat argument again. Seriously, none of this would make the movie unfunny if it was changed to be more coherent.
I'll pick one...
A course could still be set with Autopilot malfunctions but minor alterations would have to be handled manually. Do we really need stuff like that spelled out in the movie?
Has Star Trek ever managed to keep any of it's technical details consistent?
YARN
Fleet Captain
No, but it has been more consistent.
The second dead-beat argument. Just because they have been inconsistent in the past, it's too much to ask to be consistent in the future?
Similar threads
