Actually the book says it attacked the ship and they evacuated down to the planet to get away from it and then it followed them down.
Actually It does something that causes a warp core breach then goes back to eat everyone on the planet.
Before They Were Captains
- Thread starter BritishSeaPower
- Start date
Actually the book says it attacked the ship and they evacuated down to the planet to get away from it and then it followed them down.
Actually It does something that causes a warp core breach then goes back to eat everyone on the planet.
You're not quite remembering it right. I've remembered now, it's depicted as a training simulation in The Ashes of Eden, the first novel by William Shatner and Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens. I should've known, because I remembered seeing it illustrated in the graphic-novel adaptation of that book. In the simulation, they're on the planet surface when the creature attacks, and this time Kirk doesn't hesitate and immediately calls up and orders the ship to fire on the creature from orbit, after which the creature goes into space and blows up the Farragut in retaliation. That outcome of the simulation proves that Kirk was actually right to hesitate the first time, because that spared the ship from bearing the brunt of the creature's attack. Evidently in reality, in this version, the creature never attacked the ship because Kirk's hesitation meant the ship's phaser barrage missed.
I'm not sure how well that tracks with the details stated in the episode, though, since the dialogue says it did attack the ship, and it's hard to imagine why half the crew would be on the planet surface.
An alternative version of the Farragut incident is presented in the DC graphic novel Debt of Honor by Chris Claremont and Adam Hughes. The flashback begins the day after the attack, but says that the ship itself was attacked out of nowhere by an unknown force that killed the captain and a third of the crew (although the events of the flashback lead to considerably more casualties and the destruction of the Farragut's engineering hull, with Kirk and the rest escaping in the saucer).
Yes but the novel goes into detail about the event leading up to that point which includes the creature attacking the ship which like a lot of things was cut from the comic.
Interestingly, when the creature attacked the Enterprise's crewmen, on all three occasions it left one person alive, although they would sometime die later. Why leave anyone alive, unless it was intentional on the creature's part? A cat will attack a mouse, allow it to escape, then attack it again. Perhaps part of the creature psychology was to play with it's prey, for it's own satisfaction, and to spread terror.
But would a open vent be required to enter a starship? Or was it simply a easier access?
The creature quickly removed (ingested) all the red corpuscles of it's victims, approximately a quarter of the cells in the human body are red corpuscles, but there were no marks or punctures on the bodies. It was as if the creature entered it's victims, took what it wanted, and left. All with no marks.
Later in the episode the creature drained a close container of blood, without damaging the container.
Spock said the creature was capable of "being elsewhere." So without a conveniently open vent, could it have simply traveled direct through the hull?
Through the hull of the Farragut.
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But the point is, the warp core breach only happened in the 2293 simulation where Kirk didn't hesitate, not in the 2250s reality where he did. The point was that by correcting his "mistake" in the simulation, Kirk made things worse instead of better. In reality, the ship was damaged but not destroyed.
I know that I was just refering to initial attack wich forced them to evacuate to the surface where the creature started oicking them off before the phaser fire.
I think I may have quoted the wrong part of your post sorry.
Further trivia from the Reeves-Stevens version of the events:
- Kirk's position is not given; his rank of Lieutenant and age of 24 are.
- Kirk was on bridge duty when the cloud first struck.
- Kirk wasn't the Weapons Officer, because that person was separately mentioned to have been a casualty, in a context that makes it unlikely Kirk shared the position. (He just shared a bunk with her!)
- Garrovick died on the surface, among other evacuees from the wounded starship.
- Major casualties were apparently inflicted in the first attack already, as Kirk muses on the ship's complement having been some 400 but now being different.
- It is not told how many further casualties were inflicted planetside, other than Garrovick and at least two others dying and Kirk surviving.
- Transporter escape is ruled out; an evacuation shuttle is mentioned, and may have saved Kirk's life originally.
After the rereading, it's not an implausible account of the events after all. Although it is somewhat convoluted that Kirk never actually operates a phaser trigger, but merely gives fire control commands. Plus, the writers assume there were no hand phasers available at the time, although later Trek stories have established otherwise; the "no phasers until just before Kirk" interpretation was always a risky one, and eventually backfired.
My preferred interpretation would probably try and include the following ideas:
- The cloud doesn't yet demonstrate spaceflight capability; perhaps it attacks the ship by coming aboard via a landing party's transporter beam - or perhaps the Farragut lands on the planet?
- Kirk actually presses a trigger, preferably that of his own hand phaser, as hand phasers are his preferred weapon in the second encounter.
- Kirk survives through sheer luck, or by fleeing; he doesn't yet learn of a way to actually and actively be safe from the creature.
Timo Saloniemi
- Kirk's position is not given; his rank of Lieutenant and age of 24 are.
- Kirk was on bridge duty when the cloud first struck.
- Kirk wasn't the Weapons Officer, because that person was separately mentioned to have been a casualty, in a context that makes it unlikely Kirk shared the position. (He just shared a bunk with her!)
- Garrovick died on the surface, among other evacuees from the wounded starship.
- Major casualties were apparently inflicted in the first attack already, as Kirk muses on the ship's complement having been some 400 but now being different.
- It is not told how many further casualties were inflicted planetside, other than Garrovick and at least two others dying and Kirk surviving.
- Transporter escape is ruled out; an evacuation shuttle is mentioned, and may have saved Kirk's life originally.
After the rereading, it's not an implausible account of the events after all. Although it is somewhat convoluted that Kirk never actually operates a phaser trigger, but merely gives fire control commands. Plus, the writers assume there were no hand phasers available at the time, although later Trek stories have established otherwise; the "no phasers until just before Kirk" interpretation was always a risky one, and eventually backfired.
My preferred interpretation would probably try and include the following ideas:
- The cloud doesn't yet demonstrate spaceflight capability; perhaps it attacks the ship by coming aboard via a landing party's transporter beam - or perhaps the Farragut lands on the planet?
- Kirk actually presses a trigger, preferably that of his own hand phaser, as hand phasers are his preferred weapon in the second encounter.
- Kirk survives through sheer luck, or by fleeing; he doesn't yet learn of a way to actually and actively be safe from the creature.
Timo Saloniemi
In their defense, The Cage does use the term lasers, and in the mid-1990s when that book was written, it would be safe to assume there were no phasers in that time period.
Yeah it wasn't until Enterprise that primitive phasers were the weapons that predated the modern ones.
But if you look back and review your post to which I responded, you'll see that you claimed there was a warp core breach. I was clarifying that The Ashes of Eden said that the breach only occurred in the simulation, not the real attack.
Not at all. The reason Roddenberry abandoned the term "laser" after the first pilot is because he realized that lasers couldn't do the things he needed the weapons to do, and he knew the audience would probably be familiar enough with lasers to realize that (even though the technology was only a few years old at the time), so he changed it for the sake of credibility. If you'd asked him at any point after 1965 whether they used lasers or phasers in Pike's era, he would've said phasers, because he considered the (only two) references to "lasers" in the first pilot to be a mistake.
Quite so - but the Reeves-Stevenses would never accept the concept of a "mistake" in canon! 
The impression one gets is that they chose starship phasers as their weapon specifically because they were wary of using phaser sidearms, and this was rather overcautious of them when other novels had already featured pre-TOS phaser action...
I don't fault them for their choice as such - I just feel that the use of shipboard weapons introduces aspects we don't need. If there are 200 people down there in jeopardy, and the cloud manages to pounce on a dozen of them because Kirk is too slow, why doesn't the starship fire at the cloud and its out-of-luck victims anyway, from its high and mighty vantage point where callously objective math is an option? Smaller-scale action/inaction is more plausible IMHO. And it's what Kirk puts his trust in the second time around, too.
Timo Saloniemi
The impression one gets is that they chose starship phasers as their weapon specifically because they were wary of using phaser sidearms, and this was rather overcautious of them when other novels had already featured pre-TOS phaser action...
I don't fault them for their choice as such - I just feel that the use of shipboard weapons introduces aspects we don't need. If there are 200 people down there in jeopardy, and the cloud manages to pounce on a dozen of them because Kirk is too slow, why doesn't the starship fire at the cloud and its out-of-luck victims anyway, from its high and mighty vantage point where callously objective math is an option? Smaller-scale action/inaction is more plausible IMHO. And it's what Kirk puts his trust in the second time around, too.
Timo Saloniemi
Actually I was trying to correct the previous poster about how the cloude creature killed everyone on the ship after the change in the simulation.
^Okay, but it might have been unclear to other readers that you were talking about the simulation rather than the reality (as proposed by the book). I was clarifying for their benefit.
Okay, I will try to be clearer in the future.
Now where we in the discussion on the OP topic?
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