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

[Timo]

They're supposed to be seeking out new life and new civilizations

...But only in the opening credits, it seems. Starfleet PR Corps may be painting a rosier picture of the reality than the one the grunts in the front lines really face.

Because of the events of Space Seed, the ship was likely behind schedule.

That presents an interesting question: Kirk was traversing through space nobody from Earth or the Federation has any business traversing, not for the past few centuries anyway. Why? Was he taking a shortcut to Gamma 400, or was he actually tasked with checking up on this volume of space?

If the latter, then him filing a "All Quiet on the Mutara Front" report might be neglect of duty. Not because it hides the existence of Khan (which is fine and well) but because Kirk failed to conduct his scheduled mission because of Khan.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[MacLeod]

Or it could simply be a case that the Enterprise scans an entire system, and depending on what they find they investigate or another more science specialist ship follows up and they move onto the next system. That way the science ship can spend months running scans etc..

 

[Timo]

One wonders what can be divined from a quick scan and what cannot. Apparently, finding planets with Genesis specs was difficult and called for close investigation. Determining that a planet has life might be trivial (just do a spectral analysis of the atmosphere - you don't even need to get within subspace scanner range, you can watch at lightspeed to see if the planet used to have life a few decades or centuries ago), but determining what sort of life might be really tedious work (when our TOS heroes hit the Shore Leave Planet, it's only landing party tricorder studies that reveal there's no animal life there, save for outsize white rabbits; same with Omicron Ceti III).

A quick scan of the Ceti Alpha system might not reveal anything helpful, then... No matter whether done by Kirk in "Space Seed" or Terrell in ST2.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ronald Held]

Quick scans may be necessary for chart building and finding planets to be investigated in detail by science vessels. I would think the Enterprise only does detailed scans if directly ordered to or preliminary scans shows something unexpected enough to investigate.

 

[T'Girl]

All Starfleet's database records could have shown is that there actually was a Ceti Alpha Six, and that it existed in the "goldilocks zone."

If there had been a previous detailed scans it would not have been necessary to send Reliant there at all.

.