Also, what the heck happened with no supervision of Khan in exile?

[Timo]

Oh, and

I think another point is there probably is no statue of limitation on genocide or war crimes which Khan is probably wanted for

We never learn whether Khan would have been wanted for any such thing, and whether Kirk and the Federation would rather have wanted Khan or his old accusers jailed for the charges. For all we know, Khan was facing brainwashing solely for his attempted takeover of Kirk's ship, not for anything he did that his contemporaries didn't like.

Oh, ST:ID has Admiral Marcus claim that Khan is a war criminal - but Marcus is quite possibly a much worse war criminal himself, and very probably lying about the issue. He'd be motivated to, and in no way motivated not to.

We do hear Kirk's closest (and least gung-ho) officers say that Khan didn't massacre anybody, or initiate any wars... Those who defeated him would probably face the Federation's wrath for daring to accuse the poor fellow, then.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[drt]

It takes special effort to spot planets, let alone determine their orbits. A starship's navigational sensors might do that as a matter of routine at system entry - but they also might not, as the odds of a distant planet being relevant to insystem navigation are pretty much zero.

In "The Doomsday Machine" both Constellation and Enterprise seemed capable of rapidly enumerating the number of planets upon entering System L-374. If that's the case, it should really only take a few minutes of observation to determine their velocity and direction for a rough calculation of their orbital mechanics.

 

[mos6507]

I think we have to just chalk up that incompetence is alive and well in the 23rd century, both the bureaucracy that would let Khan rot due to some clerical error, and the crew of Reliant not issuing a proper scan of the solar system. I mean, isn't there enough evidence in the 21st century that just because we have all this high tech stuff that it doesn't make us infallible?

 

[Commishsleer]

It takes special effort to spot planets, let alone determine their orbits. A starship's navigational sensors might do that as a matter of routine at system entry - but they also might not, as the odds of a distant planet being relevant to insystem navigation are pretty much zero.

In "The Doomsday Machine" both Constellation and Enterprise seemed capable of rapidly enumerating the number of planets upon entering System L-374. If that's the case, it should really only take a few minutes of observation to determine their velocity and direction for a rough calculation of their orbital mechanics.

But is Pluto really a planet? How many questionable planets in quaint elliptical orbits are there?
Frankly all Starfleet probably cares about are those planets capable of sustaining life or those with interesting minerals.
I assume the Ceti-Alpha system is way off the beaten track. Regardless of reality. Perhaps location and the inhospitality of the system make them not care enough to do proper lengthy scans.

 

[Nebusj]

That said, I'm positive Kirk chose not to file a report on the Khan affair at all. He liked the guy and wished all the best for him, but filing a report would just reveal Kirk's own failures, the fact that one of his officers chose to betray and defect, and the needlessly panic-inducing fact that a shipful of Napoleons did survive the 1990s purges. Lying to his superiors would keep them, the McGivers family and the general population happier.

I question the amount of panic which would result from the public discovering that some warlord from the era of their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents' day was in fact not dead but had rather been marooned on a jungle planet in a star desert nobody has any cause to go near.

As for noticing something amiss at the Ceti Alpha system, this would require the sidekick crew to actually scan the system. We never see Kirk practice such idle curiosity: if there's a planet of interest, no mention is made of the other planets in the system, and if the entire system is of interest (say, a space monster ate it all), then unless a specific distress signal was sent out, our heroes only notice the interesting issue at point blank range. Idle "star charting" is a specific mission that the crew only practices when told or when not busy (we don't know which was the case in "Corbomite Maneuver").

The dialogue in ``Corbomite Maneuver'' states that the Enterprise is the first (Earth/Federation) starship to be in that area of space; it'd seem inconsistent at least with an exploratory mission to not be deliberately charting.

Anyway, we're being rather excessively hard on the Reliant crew for mistaking Ceti Alpha V and VI. We know from on-screen evidence that planet-wrecking events happen all the time in the Trek universe. And in any case, in a dispute between an old record and the current observed state of affairs, the current observed state of affairs has to have priority.

(I note that there's not any on-screen reason to suppose that --- had the original Ceti Alpha VI not exploded --- the presence of Khan's crew on planet V would have impaired the Genesis test. We know the test planet has to be lifeless, but that doesn't say anything about what else the system might have.)

And how often would we expect a checkup visit to Khan and his gang, anyway? It took Star Fleet six years to notice the SS Beagle being wrecked; it took them fifty years to poke around Eminiar for the missing USS Valiant; it took a hundred years to look for the remains of the Archon. They've got other stuff to do on the frontier.

 

[Ithekro]

There is another way to view Ceti Alpha V as it was. There was an episode of Enterprise where an alternate future convoy of Earth ships settle there as a last hope for humanity after Earth and several colonies are destroyed by the Xindi.

 

[Shaw]

Maybe I'm missing something here... unless a starship is entering a newly discovered solar system, the navigational computer of the starship would know where all the primary objects in that solar system are. And considering that these aren't stationary objects, the navigational computer would also know where within an orbit a planet should be at any given time as well.

So the Reliant sets course for Ceti Alpha VI, and arrived near a planet. They have no reason to be doing any additional scans of a known solar system, specially when their mission is to scan Ceti Alpha VI for any possible future development of life (which might take weeks or months using all of the Reliant's resources). If Ceti Alpha V was close enough to the calculated position of Ceti Alpha VI by the navigational computer, the navigator might not even note to the captain that the planet was out of place.

There wouldn't be any "counting" of planets in that system because the system had been previously charted and visited a number of times. Anything odd about the solar system would need to be very pronounced for the crew of the Reliant to notice. But this was more than a decade after the event, so they didn't see anything that made them deviate from their mission.

Given that, yeah, finding something that specifically stated "Botany Bay" would be needed to make Chekov realize who they were about to encounter... and even then he still believed that they were now on Ceti Alpha VI, because that is where the ship's navigational computer had taken them (and he was a navigator, so would trust the navigational computer).


So what is the problem?

None of this addresses why Khan and his crew were not checked in on, but that doesn't mean that it had anything to do with Kirk. There was no promise to Khan of future support from the federation, so there would have been no pressing need for any additional contact. There were no outposts or colonies in the Ceti Alpha system, so no one was spending any time watching the system, and even if they were, if they were watching using light... any observer more than 15 light years away wouldn't know about the explosion of Ceti Alpha VI yet.

So you have an essentially abandon solar system (perfect for the Genesis Project) which no one is watching very closely (again, perfect for the project), and Reliant comes across nothing unusual entering the system and finds a planet about where Ceti Alpha VI should be.

 

[Timo]

In "The Doomsday Machine" both Constellation and Enterprise seemed capable of rapidly enumerating the number of planets upon entering System L-374.

...But L-374 was the last in a line of systems they had studied, after (supposedly both) being surprised at stumbling upon a blasted system at L-370. At that system, the Enterprise needed some time to get her bearings before Spock realized that there was something amiss.

Rapid surveying of L-374 thus isn't a good example of what a starship would do as a matter of routine when entering star systems.

I question the amount of panic which would result from the public discovering that some warlord from the era of their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents' day was in fact not dead but had rather been marooned on a jungle planet in a star desert nobody has any cause to go near.

The point our heroes made was that the possibility of a hundred Napoleons being alive and well will frighten people. Khan is harmless now, but his case proves that those hundred Napoleons might pop up one day.

We know from on-screen evidence that planet-wrecking events happen all the time in the Trek universe.

OTOH, our TOS heroes seem genuinely surprised when it happens on their watch: both "Immunity Syndrome" and "The Changeling" seem like first times for our heroes (as does "One of Our Planets Is Missing", but two first times already establishes a pattern of... Well, selective amnesia?).

And considering that these aren't stationary objects, the navigational computer would also know where within an orbit a planet should be at any given time as well.

...However, it might not be possible to rely on such data in practice. As pointed out, perturbations small and large do happen in Trek. A navigational computer making assumptions on celestial mechanics would be recipe for disaster; a computer concentrating on that which can be verified would be the safer choice.

If Ceti Alpha V was close enough to the calculated position of Ceti Alpha VI by the navigational computer, the navigator might not even note to the captain that the planet was out of place.

Quite so. What would it take for the computer or the navigator to actually take issue with a positional error? Even Earth might be off to the side on occasion, due to a visit by a powerful alien entity; starships would be prepared for this, as they by default are prepared for dealing with approaches to wholly uncharted systems.

There was no promise to Khan of future support from the federation,

...And the bottom line would appear to be that if the Federation ever did pay attention, Khan would be sent to be brainwashed for his crimes - a fate Kirk specifically wanted to avoid. Hence no telling the authorities, and only a vague sentiment that a personal, secret visit later on might make Kirk happy about how well his old pal/foe was doing.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Push The Button]

I think another point is there probably is no statue of limitation on genocide or war crimes which Khan is probably wanted for, so if Kirk did mention him there would be a law enforcement party to arrest him. Kirk did say

Captain's Log. Stardate 3143.3. Control of the Enterprise has been regained. I wish my next decisions were no more difficult. Khan and his people. What a waste to put them in a reorientation centre.

I think reorientation center is a place like Dr. Adams ran, or in quaint terms, jail. Kirk didn't want Khan in the klink, so he left him there unmentioned. I guess Marla was just MIA, that happens to historians sometimes.

My only problem with 'Kirk fudged the details' is it requires 430 people to never mention "That time we unfroze 'Hitler', and he and his High Command took over the ship. Then we stranded him on a planet."

Though the image of Kirk pondering that very problem in his quarters is hilarious: "Hmmm...I can count on my officers to keep it on the hush, as for..'Crewman Joe the Janitor'. Who's going to believe him?? Bahahaha."

This is exactly what the moon-hoax advocates refuse to acknowledge, that to maintain a conspiracy of that magnitude, you would have to have tens of thousands of people telling the same lie for the rest of their lives. Even in a group as small as 430, someone would eventually let their guard down after a while and spill the beans about Khan.

 

[Lance]

I never bought the "Kirk fudged his report" thing. We know there were occasions when Kirk deliberately misinformed on his reports, but Khan wasn't one of them IMO. I'd sooner believe that Starfleet simply maintained a watch on Ceti Alpha V for one year then rubber stamped it and stopped looking in on them..... just before the cataclysm happened. An unfortunate turn of events.

We need to remember that Khan's declaration in TWOK that Kirk never came back to check on them are the ravings of a mad man hell bent on vengeance. Kirk never said he'd personally come back and check on them, and if another vessel ever checked on them then Starfleet probably figured their obligation to the 'colony' (if indeed they bore any obligation whatsoever) was over after that report came back as an all-clear.

Also bear in mind that Kirk makes specific mention of Australia/Botany Bay..... where the historical aim was that it was a far-flung corner of the world where the Empire could send their criminals and never have to see them again. Kirk dresses it up in the notion of them being colonists battling against a hostile environment in order to forge a civilization, but I can tell you the convicts being sent to Australia in 1788 were NOT looking at their new home in such romantic terms. It would seem reasonable to theorize that, while Kirk himself might be fascinated by the "seed that has been sown today" or whatever his speech was, the hard reality is that Starfleet Command might not give a s*** about the colony, Khan or no Khan.

 

[Maurice]

re the whole "Reliant doesn't notice the messed up planets" thing requires...

1. This ship that zaps into systems at FTL and routinely putters around at significant fractions of c to just not scan ahead to make sure nothing unexpected is in the way, or that nothing has changed since the last survey umpteen years ago.
2. That the exploding planet VI didn't leave a ring of debris or asteroids flying around or collapse back into another large body or to catch the attention of the crew of USS Blinders On.
3. The crew are stupid enough or lucky enough to find a planet roughly in the area where their charts says planet VI ought to be, and, coincidentally, this faux VI...
   • follows the recorded orbit of VI
   • has the recorded orbit velocity of VI
   • has the expected rotation rate of VI
   • has the expected axial tilt of VI
   • has the expected atmospheric makeup and density of VI
   • has the expected magnetic field or lack thereof of VI
   • walks like a duck and talks like a duck
   ...or surely someone, or their high tech computers, would notice one or more of these wasn't matching their records and maybe raise an eyebrow or make them, oh, do some additional scanning.

No, lucky for the story, V became VI, otherwise the crew of the Reliant would be incompetent morons.

Which. They. Were.

 

[MacLeod]

Unless by some quirk Ceti Alpha V and VI are in the same orbit but on opposite sides of the star. Or the planetry orbits bring Ceti Alpha VI sometimes with the orbit of Ceti Alpha V.

 

[Ithekro]

Or the incident that caused Ceti Alpha VI to explode was recorded after the fact, but that the shifted orbits in the system made it seem like it was Ceti Alpha V that exploded, and the it was Ceti Alpha VI that had survived in whatever state it was in. They didn't really go to investigate much farther until there was a reason to go to that system again to find a lifeless world for Genesis (the requirements for size, crust composition or something must have been pretty strict aside from just "no life", or else any old rock would have done the job rather than send USS Reliant out looking for a place without success until they get to Ceti Alpha and then hope against hope that the reading they get is in error so they can be done with this mission).

 

[Timo]

This ship that zaps into systems at FTL and routinely putters around at significant fractions of c to just not scan ahead to make sure nothing unexpected is in the way, or that nothing has changed since the last survey umpteen years ago.

There's no reason to care about surveys past or present - the ship isn't tasked with those, only with finding a suitable desert world. Why waste time with extra work?

And "scanning ahead for the unexpected" would not reveal anything relevant at Ceti Alpha - no divine chainmail blocking the way, no gripping hands, no black holes, and evidently not enough debris to be a navigation hazard. The exact positions of local rocks would not be relevant to the ship's safety unless they were on her path, and there's no reason to assume any of them would be.

That the exploding planet VI didn't leave a ring of debris or asteroids flying around or collapse back into another large body or to catch the attention of the crew of USS Blinders On.

Why would they care? A few asteroids here or there is neither here nor there.

The crew are stupid enough or lucky enough to find a planet roughly in the area where their charts says planet VI ought to be, and, coincidentally, this faux VI...

They were looking for a desert world. They found one. The odds of that in the Star Trek universe are not particularly low - the galaxy is littered with planets that probably were terraformed to Class M by assorted ancients and have often deteriorated quite a bit when left to fallow.

follows the recorded orbit of VI

No need. The ship can spot desert worlds; once she does so, she goes there. Orbital parameters are utterly irrelevant, and there would be no motivation to cross-check them against any old (and probably faulty) records.

has the recorded orbit velocity of VI

Actually, that would be the exact same thing as above, and the same argument applies.

has the expected rotation rate of VI

Irrelevant, as long as it is a desert world. They weren't going to give the world marks for how well it follows the records - they were going to study it for its compatibility with Genesis.

Relying on existing records would not only be unnecessary, it would be detrimental to the end result: reinforcing prejudices is what scientists want to avoid like plague, since they are so damned susceptible to it due to human nature being what it is.

...or surely someone, or their high tech computers, would notice one or more of these wasn't matching their records and maybe raise an eyebrow or make them, oh, do some additional scanning.

Records are totally irrelevant to the plotline and the mission. If records told exactly what CA VI was like, the Reliant would not need to go there! She wasn't carrying Genesis for a test firing, she was merely checking out planets that on paper looked promising - and clearly the paper wasn't particularly accurate or else the ship would not have been sent.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Shaw]

re the whole "Reliant doesn't notice the messed up planets" thing requires...

Well, first, would the Reliant be actively scanning for anything other than objects in their path when going to some place that is known? The ship would be constantly scanning forward and deflecting small objects and making course corrections for larger ones... but a full scan of a known system? Most likely not.

Does Ceti Alpha V have to be in the same orbit as Ceti Alpha IV? No, but if it's new orbit crossed the path of Ceti Alpha VI's original orbit, there would be two periods during that orbit that Ceti Alpha V might look like Ceti Alpha VI.

Would there be significant debris from Ceti Alpha VI? Unless Khan's people were avid astronomers, they only witnessed the aftermath. The destruction of Ceti Alpha VI might have been into relatively large pieces, one of which coming close enough to Ceti Alpha V could change it's orbit. 15 years later and the casual observer wouldn't see anything odd (specially as Ceti Alpha V most likely cleaned up a lot of it's own orbital path by that time).

And most importantly, do navigation teams get overly confident in their data and skip double or triple checking to make sure that they are on a safe course? Absolutely, this happens all too often and the results can be significant.

I spent the last year trying to get people to understand that skipping steps and not having awful consequences doesn't mean that it was okay to have skipped those steps or that it would be fine to do it in the future. Checks are in place to catch the unexpected, but if you get comfortable not doing them, you could be putting lives at risk. But it is hard to reverse that mind set.

Did the crew of the USS Reliant approach their jobs the same way that the crew of the USS San Francisco did? I'm sure that both crews thought of themselves as professionals and better than other ships. But it seems like both crews made the same mistake of thinking that traveling from one place to another can ever be routine. The crew of the Reliant sure seemed to have looked on their mission as very routine, when there is nothing about space travel that should be thought of that way.

As for the planet not following expected aspects of the original planet they were heading to... if it was close enough on the first scan to seem like Ceti Alpha VI, everything else would start to fall apart as they looked closer. Did it seem like they were waiting for a closer look? The Reliant was supposed to spend quite a bit of time studying Ceti Alpha VI... a very boring (and routine) mission. At the first sign that something was off, they beamed down! Yeah, I'm sure that they would eventually realized what was going on... but they sure didn't wait long enough before jumping into doing something different (and stupid).

Had Terrell lived, he would have most likely been stripped of his command for fostering a caviler attitude among his crew towards their duties. Given 12 to 24 hours of additional research on what they thought was Ceti Alpha VI most likely would have shown it to be Ceti Alpha V... but they decided to beam down before knowing what was going on and at the first sign of something not showing as they expected.

... otherwise the crew of the Reliant would be incompetent morons.

Which. They. Were.

Absolutely! No argument there.

But here is the thing... and I always looked at this as the point of the Reliant's fate, in the original series Kirk often jumped into situations before looking. Terrell's actions weren't all that different from some of those of Kirk, just that Kirk was luckier in most cases.

 

[Timo]

That's the interesting thing: odds are high that "cavalier" space exploration has already worked just dandy for the Federation for the past 200 years. Why bother with rules and procedures that never backfire if you neglect them?

It boils down to starships being pretty robust. The Reliant suffered no ill effects from mistaking one planet for another. She did not run aground, she did not fail to reach her intended target (the local desert world), she did not blow a single fuse. Sure, she got taken over by a superman, but that also happened to Kirk's ship without the failure-to-check-on-local-orbital-debris element.

That is, "cavalier" navigation procedures were not at fault; security (ha!) protocols might have been, but if Kirk never reported back on how dangerous it is to entertain an Augment aboard, Starfleet might never have had a reason to doubt the effectiveness of the standard security procedures.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[T'Girl]

There's only one fanwank theory that makes the vaguest of sense:

Starfleet lost Kirk's report.

Kirk's report said to look in on the impromptu penal colony in a century, to see how they were doing, Starfleet made the appropriate notation.

If Starfleet quarantined the Ceti Alpha star system

Why the whole system? A "do not beam down" restriction for the one planet would have been good enough. And there is no reason to suspect that the Reliant command crew didn't know of the restriction.

It wouldn't prevent them from investigating the next planet over.

Spock would be fascinated by what Khan could do with the resources he had

Why would Spock be interested in the least?

And I'm going to assume McGivers has no family.

Even as a child, she would constantly betray family members. Starfleet likely told them exactly what happen to her and where she was, happy to see her gone.

 

[Commishsleer]

Had Terrell lived, he would have most likely been stripped of his command for fostering a caviler attitude among his crew towards their duties. Given 12 to 24 hours of additional research on what they thought was Ceti Alpha VI most likely would have shown it to be Ceti Alpha V... but they decided to beam down before knowing what was going on and at the first sign of something not showing as they expected.

This is TOS era. They don't beam up at the first sign of trouble. They investigate.

Would Terrell just have left Khan and his crew to their fate if he'd known they were there? Perhaps he might have been more careful but he still probably would have attempted a rescue.

 

[cgervasi]

Finding Khan's ship was of historic importance. Then Khan's group attacked the crew, took over the ship, and almost blew it up. There's no way Kirk could cover up all that. Moreover he doesn't have reason to. He held a hearing, shown in the episode, on what to do with Khan's crew. He decided to give them the choice of being marooned on CetiAlpha 5 instead of going through the criminal justice system, which would have sentenced them to rehabilitation. It's unlikely they would be "rehabilitated" there, and there's a risk they would stage a takeover of the facility. So Starfleet and the legal authorities probably were thrilled to see them marooned.

As to Reliant mistaking CetiAlpha 5 for CetiAlpha 6, this was a mistake, but not an outrageous one. '6 had exploseded and changed the climate of '5 to be similar, by chance, to '6. Scientists had only limited info on '6, and had sent Reliant to get more data. This means it would have been difficult for Reliant to have identified discrepancies between '6 and the planet they were visiting. If someone had warned them, they probably could have figured it out, but it wasn't obvious.

 

[cgervasi]

Questions about Khan's Exile

I can understand how Reliant misidentified CetiAlpha 5. What confuses me, though, is their mission was to look for any traces of life. There was a whole little community of human being and presumably minimal subsistence farm plants and maybe animals. If Reliant was equipped to detect traces of life, why couldn't it detect there was more than a trace on the planet?

The OP mentioned McGivers' family. I wonder if they took any precautions against her family or some other crazy person freeing the prisoners. I could see her family saying she was young and under the spell of these super humans. They would says she should have plead guilty and done some in a rehabilitation colony and gone on with her life. I think living with historic figures was a dream for her, so her family would have been wrong, but it was a risk.

I could also see a criminal, revolutionary or dissident freeing some of them. For example, someone like the Maquis (but 100 years earlier) might have freed them thinking he would help their cause or give Starfleet someone else to fight, and the augments would leave them alone or maybe even help them as thanks for freeing them.