Explorers (season 3)

[konitzlee]

Howdy everybody!

I've just seen the episode "Explorers" and I thought of something. Sisko builds a ship that supposedly travelled all the way to Cardassia. But since they knew it had to be a ship not-capable of warp speed, they simply build a sub-light ship. That'd be fine, until they encounter the partcles that hit their sails and the ship goes to warp. Only problem is: if you build an ancient sub-light speed ship, why would you mount inertial dampers on it? Because without inertial dampers, Sisko and Jake shouldn't have survived the jump to warp... Not to mention the fact that a hand-made ship is probably not capable of sustaining warp speed anyway.


What's your take on it?

 

[kkt]

My take is it's a wonderful story about father and son bonding.

If you need a plot point to justify it, assume the particle field that pushed them to warp accelerated them much more gently than a starship's warp drive. After all, they were only making a short hop and didn't need any Warp 6 speeds.

 

[Tosk]

My take is it's a wonderful story about father and son bonding.

 

[Smellincoffee]

My take is it's a wonderful story about father and son bonding.

...that also features O'Brien and Bashir drunkenly singing "Jerusalem".

 

[Mytran]

The whole concept of Sisko building a working spaceship, BY HAND in a mere three weeks (using only authentic original tools) has always been a bit daft.
It's a spaceship, for crying out loud!
I suspect he got fed up after the first week and, having proved he could do it that way, proceeded to pump the rest out of a replicator and stuck it together. It was one if those things that the senior staff was simply "not to mention"

 

[kkt]

Yeah, the next time I need to assemble Ikea furniture, I'll ask Sisko to use the Orb of Time to come help me...

 

[Mage]

I will never understand why people feel the need to take an episode with a wonderful plot and some solid acting, great moments between the Sisko men, and then complain about something like this......

It's not what this episode is about, and if you really get annoyed about little things like this not making sense, you shouldn't be watching Star Trek.

 

[konitzlee]

I will never understand why people feel the need to take an episode with a wonderful plot and some solid acting, great moments between the Sisko men, and then complain about something like this......

It's not what this episode is about, and if you really get annoyed about little things like this not making sense, you shouldn't be watching Star Trek.

THANKS, that was a useful comment!! Understanding that the episode is about Sisko and his son bonding is the first level of comprehension. I think we can safely assume that we've all got past that point. I was merely pointing out a "technicality"; sure it is not fundamental and it can be seen as a specious and useless thread, but hey, then 100% of technobabble threads shouldn't take place because, as you've ingeniously pointed out, Star Trek IS NOT about real technology but it's about the human adventure.

 

[Timo]

It's a spaceship, for crying out loud!

Well, it's not rocket science (no rockets on a lightsail, after all).

What would be too demanding for the dedicated enthusiast? People build working aircraft and submarines as hobby projects all the time. And Sisko only need push this thing out of a cargo hold hatch by hand, so there aren't any rocket-like accelerations involved. (One wonders how Bajorans launched these things. Did they use separate spacecraft or beanstalks or whatever to leave their planet first?)

Also, spaceflight back in the 1960s was rather exciting for the difficulty of navigation. Today, a mobile phone app might take care of all the computations involved; in the 24th century, something in Sisko's back pocket certainly would be up to the task. Compare this to the problems of navigating a boat just a century ago, all gone now that any landlubber can grab a GPS and set sail for the faraway shores (and possibly end up dead from navigation-unrelated issues of seamanship, but that's a different story).

What I like the most about this story is what it tells us about the Bajorans. And all of that is wholly external to the writer intent! We learn truly intriguing facts, many of them indirect:

- Achievements from just 800 years ago are myth territory now, in this culture supposedly hundreds of thousands of years old.
- That Bajorans ventured offworld at all before the days of the lightsail is historically unverified. What were they doing for all those tens of millennia of not seeing the point of reaching for the stars?
- The lightsail's only historically known use was for meditation ("Accession").
- Bajorans didn't even bother to settle their own paradise moons ("Progress") until the Cardassians came.
- Or is all of that just an artifact of the first issue, of Bajorans losing their sense of history somehow and starting to believe in a false past?

There still is no interest in the history of Bajor on Bajor, it seems. Benjamin Sisko makes all the historical discoveries on his free time. What he learns may be unpleasant, such as the potential joint past with Cardassia. Do Bajorans live in deliberate denial?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mage]

I will never understand why people feel the need to take an episode with a wonderful plot and some solid acting, great moments between the Sisko men, and then complain about something like this......

It's not what this episode is about, and if you really get annoyed about little things like this not making sense, you shouldn't be watching Star Trek.

THANKS, that was a useful comment!! Understanding that the episode is about Sisko and his son bonding is the first level of comprehension. I think we can safely assume that we've all got past that point. I was merely pointing out a "technicality"; sure it is not fundamental and it can be seen as a specious and useless thread, but hey, then 100% of technobabble threads shouldn't take place because, as you've ingeniously pointed out, Star Trek IS NOT about real technology but it's about the human adventure.

Yup. Sure, I see/hear the same little 'mistakes' everyone does. Except, it doesn't take me out of the narative. Something goofed up, I accept it and the focus on what's actually important; the effing story.

Star Trek is NOT about Heisenberg Compensators or Inertial Dampeners.... If you honestly believe THAT's the point/meaning/story of Star Trek, you need to find a new fandom.

 

[Timo]

Why? Sometimes the story is paper-thin, the acting dull, the moral or gimmick hamfisted, and even the visuals leave a lot to be desired - but one can always count on the technobabble!

Really, Trek isn't great storytelling in terms of individual episodes. But there's enough of those to amount to a greater story, within which a total non-event like "Explorers" actually works pretty well, as a change-of-pace story if not anything else.

And as for the technobabble... Well, sometimes it can hide outside dialogue, too. The high point of that here is that Sisko is building a zero-gee interior for a craft capable of minuscule accelerations only, and then installing modern AG because he likes his down. And yet he carefully constructs an ancient navigating instrument that very much looks as if it could only work in zero gee! That is, it obviously ought to pivot and twist like the working bits of a gyrocompass (that is, stay put when the ship pivots and twists around it), but Sisko's comfort gravity keeps pulling the poor thing towards the floor...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JirinPanthosa]

When you travel at warp you aren't actually accelerating, you're creating a subspace bubble around you that makes space shorter.

That's my best explanation at least.

 

[Timo]

Certainly the tachyon stream trip of the Sisko boys was an immersion experience. Yes, it was sort of suggested that the sails were (still) pulling the ship along, but it could equally well be argued that the tachyons grabbed every molecule in their path and accelerated it equally - so no part of Ben Sisko would be left behind when the ship jumped to Cardassia, and there would be no need for further damping of inertia. The reason this stream worked on lightsails but not on regular starships would simply be the low density of the former, not the presence of sails outside.

Apart from that, we don't really know if inertia damping is needed at warp in general. It is needed for something, but the answer could be "impulse drive", period.

Or then the fact that IDF is never quoted in connection with warp is due to nobody surviving to tell about IDF failures at warp! But this need not be our final answer.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[RogueVasad]

There is no proof that there is an IDF and even if there was maybe the original verison had some early form of IDF? If the theory of ancient Baorans visiting Cardassia is true, and it was proven plausible here, then clearly the explorers weren't reduced to chunky salsa by whatever carried them to Cardassia.

 

[Terok Nor]

The Prophets took care of the little details.

 

[Timo]

If the theory of ancient Baorans visiting Cardassia is true, and it was proven plausible here, then clearly the explorers weren't reduced to chunky salsa by whatever carried them to Cardassia.

But the thing is, for some reason, there is no proof that Bajorans visited. It may specifically be they never returned (or else Bajoran records on the journey would exist) - so perhaps their ship survived the acceleration fine, but the occupants did not?

The episode never suggests there would have been major accelerations involved. If the tachyons only yanked the tachyon-impregnated sails to FTL speeds, surely the cabin would have been torn to shreds in an eyeblink. Since it clearly did not, there's no reason why the crew would have been smashed, either; apparently, the tachyons affected everything and everybody equally.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[RogueVasad]

All I said was whatever transported the ancient ship or ships to Cardassia did not kill their crews. And there was evidence of the visit. It was just buried so deep it wasn't discovered until Explorers took place. And clearly some word of what happened made it back to Bajor to become the basis of the story Sisko was seeking to prove feasible, which he succeeded in doing along with the proof found on Cardassia Prime proving it had happened.

 

[Timo]

All I said was whatever transported the ancient ship or ships to Cardassia did not kill their crews.

But that's what we don't actually know. Quite possibly, only corpses or goo ever arrived at Cardassia, even when their ship was still recognizable. Or then even the ship was toothsticks; modern methods available to the Cardassians could still establish that it was Bajoran goo on Bajoran toothsticks.

And clearly some word of what happened made it back to Bajor to become the basis of the story Sisko was seeking to prove feasible

Or then it was pure coincidence. After all, Cardassia was more or less the only interstellar contact the old Bajorans were ever credited with having - so any tall stories would naturally relate to that.

OTOH, the role of the Prophets can never be overestimated. For all we know, the stories about Bajorans reaching Cardassia were of the flight of the Siskos!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[RogueVasad]

There is no proof that the crew or crews of the Bajoran ship or ships transported to Cardassia were killed by the transit.

There is also no proof that the crew or crews didn't manage to either get word back to Bajor, or that in the event multiple ships made the journey none of them managed to return home though that is less likely IMO.

The simplest solution is the best one. Which is simpler The Bajoran crews get killed during the transit but somehow the ship comes down and crashes while remaining intact enough to be recognized thousands of years later and somehow the Bajorans figure out exactly where the ship ended up or that the crew of the ship survived and managed to send a message home?

 

[Timo]

The simplest solution is the best one.

O, I very much contest that! Occam's Razor doesn't apply to drama, due to all those false mustaches... The most interesting solution always trumps the simplest one.

Bajorans seem to have lost awfully lot of their history. They even misplaced a whole city once! But that was tens of millennia ago, while these lightsails still operated 300 years before the episode (that is, today!). If live witnesses returned from the trip, what happened to them? Were they laughed at? Stopped from repeating their feat? Silenced to death (possibly with pillows)? If a message was received, how come it is both remembered and not remembered?

"Legend" says these lightsails were used for exploring the Bajoran system 800 years prior. "Scholars" say the vessels reached Cardassia. Is Sisko utterly confused? The loss of Akorem Laam aboard a lightsail is well documented in Bajoran history; is it proper to call Bajoran history "legend" (the way something like the Battle of Britain is both fact and legend)? Or is the 800 years ago thing the "legend" bit, while the 300 years ago issue is uncontested?

Importantly, the episode shows us a method for getting from Bajor to Cardassia. It shows no method for getting from Cardassia to Bajor, though! One of the historical issues revealed is that Cardassians did not have starflight yet when those lightsail adventures supposedly took place.

Timo Saloniemi