Paradise Syndrome thoughts and question

[22 Stars]

Hey guys, I've been watching Paradise Syndrome on CBS.com and have always wondered something. The tribal Elder and others talk about how the skies have darkened 3 times since the harvest, does this mean that the asteroid as been on some sort of spiraling orbit and it is the last fatal orbit that the Enterprise is trying to deflect?

Growing up I always thought the asteroid was just on a collision course with the planet, like a bullet in a straight path, but I know few things in a solar system travel in a 'straight line'.

PS I'm watching it now because I have plans to frame a gift I got a few years ago, Matt Jefferies' original drawing of the Obelisk, and I want to include a screen cap from the episode and I'm looking for just the right shot of the Oblelisk Any suggestions are welcome!

 

[simmsbc]

It was traveling in a straight line but I think the sky darkened as a warning from the obelisk to do something. The sooner you deflect the object the less energy you use. I am guessing the subsequent warnings were like the snooze control on an alarm clock. What really makes no sense is that the system was smart enough to warn that it was coming but not smart enough to automatically deflect the asteroid.

 

[22 Stars]

Wow, the obelisk affects the weather on the planet, I'm not so sure that was the intended conclusion? I never thought the obelisk was anything but a deflector mechanism, that's what Spock calls it anyway, but he really doesn't know much about it.

Your idea makes sense if it's supposed to be like Vaal, the natives do worship it a bit, but I'm just not sure.

 

[Lieut. Arex]

I always assumed it was the asteroid causing a series of eclipses, though I've never tried to figure out how the orbital mechanics of that might work. Their relative orbital velocities might cause them to overtake one another. If the asteroid's approaching from sunward, the alternating forward and backward motion would account for the increasingly dark eclipses.

The thing that bothers me about the episode is why does Spock choose to escort the rock all the way back to the planet. The asteroid's not moving that fast. It took six months to reach the planet after the Enterprise's failed deflection attempt. Why not fly back under impulse which might take a few days or a couple of weeks (at most) to search for Kirk? And if he thought the obelisk had something to do with the Space Indians survival, he could have, oh, I don't know, studied the damn thing for four or five months instead of staring at the limited data from his tricorder.

 

[Zeppster]

I always assumed it was the asteroid causing a series of eclipses, though I've never tried to figure out how the orbital mechanics of that might work. Their relative orbital velocities might cause them to overtake one another. If the asteroid's approaching from sunward, the alternating forward and backward motion would account for the increasingly dark eclipses.

The thing that bothers me about the episode is why does Spock choose to escort the rock all the way back to the planet. The asteroid's not moving that fast. It took six months to reach the planet after the Enterprise's failed deflection attempt. Why not fly back under impulse which might take a few days or a couple of weeks (at most) to search for Kirk? And if he thought the obelisk had something to do with the Space Indians survival, he could have, oh, I don't know, studied the damn thing for four or five months instead of staring at the limited data from his tricorder.

It took 2 months not 6 months.

 

[Lieut. Arex]

Two months, mea culpa.

 

[Timo]

...OTOH, that two months at asteroid speed equated several hours (more than two at any rate) at warp nine!

Assuming that warp nine is anywhere near the thousand-times-lightspeed figure that so many other episodes suggest, the asteroid in turn would have to be traveling nearly at the speed of light. This would incidentally also mean that, thanks to Einstein, the two months that would pass for Spock might be longer for Kirk (thus allowing for even his slow and chaste progress to lead to the observable state of pregnancy on Miramanee).

A Moon-sized asteroid moving at relativistic speeds would indeed be difficult to deflect even two months before impact, whereas it should have been possible for a starship to nudge the Moon away from a destructive course if it were moving at very low speed.

But a lightspeed asteroid wouldn't give a warning shadow even if it approached from the direction of the sun. Or at most, it would give only a few minutes of such shadow, and at an extremely narrow spot on the surface of the planet, and even that only in extremely unlikely circumstances.

So we're sort of back to the obelisk doing the darkening and the wind, as a sign of warning. And the point about the odd need for medicine-man-in-the-loop is an interesting one all right.

But let's look at this a bit deeper. The planet was in the middle of an asteroid storm, as stated in the beginning, and as evidenced by the stories of previous darkenings of the sky. Without a functioning obelisk, there'd be no life on the surface. Why transplant humans to such a planet, and why protect them with a non-automated obelisk? And why does the obelisk have very complex controls, when all that is needed in the end is the pushing of a single button?

There's one scenario where all of the above makes good sense. Remember "The 37s" or "North Star"? Or any of the other abduction/transplant stories like "Caretaker" for that matter. Apparently, it is viable for a ruthless band of adventurers to kidnap a bunch of primitive folks, move them to a distant Class M planet, and use them as manual labor in a mining enterprise. That's what the whole deal with the Preservers could be, too: they'd have a deflector that brings in valuable asteroids and performs complex adjustments on their trajectories to allow them to be brought down either to low orbit or indeed to the surface, after which the slaves cut them to marketable pieces.

Given the shady nature of the business, or the successful slave revolts of "The 37s" and "North Star", it's no wonder the Preservers would have left in a hurry and abandoned their gear. The skies would still be full of asteroids deliberately nudged to lethal paths, though - and the ability of the slaves to operate the gear would (despite the built-in tutorial system) have deteriorated to mindless button-pushing that barely deflected the incomings at the last moment.

That's how I think the entire episode could hold together, odd orbital physics and all. What this still leaves unexplained is why Kirk (Spock? McCoy?) decided to stop there in the first place and mess with the seemingly natural order of the star system. Why not evacuate the few "natives" instead - an easier effort for a starship, surely.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[22 Stars]

I always felt the 'Medicine Man' was supposed to play the sounds, or chant the sacred chant that opens the darn obelisk, but Salesh's dad broke the traditions (probably because Salesh was such a jerk-off) But only need to do it in case of a malfunction.

The Enterprise is rendered warp inoperative after trying to destroy the asteriod. I probably should have opened this in Trek Tech maybe, either that or the general math just doesn't add up anyway you slice it.

 

[Lieut. Arex]

Just two hours at Wf9, by my lousy math, would put the asteroid over 970 billion miles away from the planet at the time of the Enterprise's interception. This thing's coming from 1/6 ly away! To get to the planet in two months, it'd have to be moving almost 700 million miles an hour, just about Wf1.04.

Kiss the notion that it's causing the darkening goodbye. Was Anubis behind this and was that rock full of naquadah?

Perhaps the darkening and storms are caused by other asteroids passing (eclipses, tidal forces, etc.), asteroids which might've been deflected had Salish the knowledge to activate the obelisk. I don't buy the notion the obelisk was warning the people. If the system were that automated, why not go ahead and let it deflect asteroids as needed rather than rely on the knowledge being passed from medicine chief to medicine chief?

Thinking about this thread I wondered why the Enterprise couldn't deflect the asteroid. It's described as being nearly the size of the Moon yet it's depicted as having an irregular shape. Any body 300 miles or so in diameter is going to be basically round and anything Moon-sized unavoidably so... unless is had been blasted apart as Uranus' moon Miranda was once supposed to have been. In this case, an impact shatters the asteroid a few thousand years ago. The material clumps back together, but hasn't had time to be squeezed back into a sphere. When the Enterprise uses its tractor beam, this loose material's compressed, absorbing some of the energy and minimizing the deflection. Imagine pushing a snowball and a rock with a pencil with the same force and for the same time. You'll leave an indentation in the snowball and move it a shorter distance than the rock. Ditto with the phasers. The asteroid may have been split, but it would just "puff" apart, leaving a tight cluster of huge rocks all flying on the same path toward the planet.

 

[Shatmandu]

Miramanee's breasts were beautiful.

Joe, got nothing

 

[Forbin]

Miramanee's breasts were beautiful.

I still can't hear "I am Kirooook! I have coooome!" without saying "Yes, we know, she's pregnant!".

 

[Timo]

Just two hours at Wf9, by my lousy math, would put the asteroid over 970 billion miles away from the planet at the time of the Enterprise's interception. This thing's coming from 1/6 ly away! To get to the planet in two months, it'd have to be moving almost 700 million miles an hour, just about Wf1.04.

We might factor in some sort of acceleration and deceleration times to make this more presentable. Or we might say that certain star systems (or certain weather conditions within star systems) render the warp factors slower than how they work in deep space. That would be a good way to rationalize why our heroes sometimes resort to impulse drive within star systems while at other times they freely use warp. Miramanee's star might have been having a bad day, turning warp 9 into the equivalent of usual warp 3 or less.

Or we might accept the high relativistic asteroid (still sublight, so that the time-dilated travel time would be two months but the corresponding distance to be spanned at warp 9 would be more than two light-months).

If the system were that automated, why not go ahead and let it deflect asteroids as needed rather than rely on the knowledge being passed from medicine chief to medicine chief?

The cargo-cult approach would explain this nicely enough: while occasionally used for deflecting asteroids that are about to hit, the obelisk would have been built for something else altogether, and the villagers and Kirok would simply be using it incorrectly.

Thinking about this thread I wondered why the Enterprise couldn't deflect the asteroid.

It's too bad we never learn if the 0.0013 that Spock achieved was anywhere near close enough. Perhaps 0.004 would have done the trick? I'd hate to assume an Armageddon-category 45 degree deflection, because then Spock would be out of his mind to even attempt the maneuver. To make Spock look good, the attempt should have failed by the smallest of marigins.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[EliyahuQeoni]

Or we might accept the high relativistic asteroid (still sublight, so that the time-dilated travel time would be two months but the corresponding distance to be spanned at warp 9 would be more than two light-months).

Well, it would have to be sublight, since--so far as I'm aware--it would impossible for a normal asteroid to be traveling anywhere near light-speed. In fact, I doubt very much any asteroid could be traveling fast enough to be at a relativistic speed. But my knowledge of such things is admittedly limited.

 

[Timo]

Possible causes for high speed could include direct Preserver influence (if they mined those things, why wait an extra second?), birth of the asteroid storm in some sort of a nasty encounter between Miramanee's star system and a black hole, or origin of the storm as an interstellar weapon of mass destruction.

But the math is malleable. The slower one makes warp 9 (within that star system), the slower the asteroid becomes. And a speed around half lightspeed would in fact be a good idea, because it would make deflection extremely difficult and would allow for relativistic fudging of the timetable, plus it might make it difficult to the point of uselessness to actually achieve anything with impulse drive.

But one can't readily make warp 9 here so slow that the asteroid could become low sublight and would plausibly cast that shadow and raise that storm. One might claim that the asteroid was in fact somewhat cometary in nature, having a giant cloud of debris and gas surrounding it, and that this helped cast the shadow, perhaps hindered the starship in some ways, and also preceded the asteroid to impact and thus caused the atmospheric effects. Too bad the TOS-R visuals don't back this up...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Nebusj]

The thing that bothers me about the episode is why does Spock choose to escort the rock all the way back to the planet. The asteroid's not moving that fast. It took six months to reach the planet after the Enterprise's failed deflection attempt. Why not fly back under impulse which might take a few days or a couple of weeks (at most) to search for Kirk?

Spock didn't choose to escort the rock, exactly -- he orders Chekov back to the planet, but McCoy points out, without warp drive that's going to take months. Apparently, the rock is moving as fast as the Enterprise can on impulse drive.

Spock guesses that the asteroid deflector has become defective, which is something that can happen in time. It's not unreasonable to suppose that the obelisk design was meant to be basically self-sustaining with the human intervention used as backup, and trouble emerging only when both the automated and the human systems break down simultaneously. After all, every really good disaster requires the simultaneous breaking down of different systems, any one of which working would have prevented the disaster.

 

[Timo]

Apparently, the rock is moving as fast as the Enterprise can on impulse drive.

But that is physically impossible, unless the rock also has an impulse drive.

As soon as Spock would order the starship's impulse drive engaged, the ship should be propelled away from the rock. This would not depend in the slightest on whether the rock was stationary, or moving faster than a speeding bullet. (It would depend ever-so-slightly on whether the rock was moving near lightspeed, though - but we shouldn't be able to see the difference.)

Happily, we never see evidence of this physical impossibility. Apparently, Spock never even attempts to use the impulse engines: we always see the Enterprise floating unpowered in front of the rock, facing the rock.

Spock might have valid reasons for not attempting to go to the planet. Dialogue establishes that the ship can precede the rock to the planet by four hours. That's plenty of time to search for Kirk, really. And what else could Spock do down there? He probably isn't allowed to evacuate the natives, or that would have been his first choice, rather than this harebrained asteroid deflection scheme. And he isn't aware that the obelisk would have more than what can be seen on the surface, literally - and he already has extensive tricorder scans of the surface.

It might be logical, then, to let Scotty do his repairs the best he can, with all systems powered down. Which reminds me, it was made clear Scotty couldn't restore warp drive no matter what. But what about interstellar communications?

That is, what was the reason Spock didn't call for help? Was it that he did call, but help was so far away that the tugship or fellow starship wouldn't arrive until after those two months? Or was it that this star system blocked communications, and the only way to reach Starfleet was to fly out of the system? (Perhaps this would be related to the "foul weather" that putatively made warp 9 slower going than usual...)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Nebusj]

Apparently, the rock is moving as fast as the Enterprise can on impulse drive.

But that is physically impossible, unless the rock also has an impulse drive.

What, a whole spaceship hidden inside an asteroid? What an absurdity, they'd never encounter something like -- whoops. Anyway, to serious work:

After the first attempt to deflect the asteroid with ship's power Spock orders the ship to ``maximum speed, heading 37 mark 010'', which puts them directly in the asteroid's path and yet doesn't take them out of phaser range in the time it takes to reconfigure the circuits for the phaser attempt which does burn out the warp engines. Since the time and distance problems for this episode become impossible if the asteroid is matching their maximum warp speed, then it must be travelling at the maximum sustainable impulse speed.

If it's not at or near the maximum impulse speed then we're left with a logical problem:

While four hours on the planet's surface may be enough time to search for Kirk and determine whether anything can be done with the obelisk, the time it takes to reach the obelisk is the issue. Whether Kirk is in need of rescue or not, he is a valuable -- and rare -- asset and he should be returned to duty as soon as possible. Similarly the Enterprise is a valuable -- and rare -- asset and therefore should be returned to useful duty as soon as possible. Impulse power is available. If it can be used to shorten the return time to the planet, Spock would use it. Spock does not; therefore, it must not be able to shorten the return time.

If using impulse power to shorten the return time would complicate repair schedules, this would be a good reason not to use it. However, Spock orders the course set and McCoy understands the time this requires without any reference to repair schedules other than that for the stardrive there is none possible.

And I agree that it seems more consistent with relativity (Galilean and Einsteinian) and important symmetry principles that impulse power turned on anywhere should serve to accelerate the ship, but we have enough examples of effects that don't pay attention to such things in the Trek universe that I don't feel confident in saying they must hold for impulse-power engines.

Why there's no rescue ship is a mystery left unexplored in the episode. I suppose that the least challenging assumption is that the Federation needs more than the given two months to divert another ship able to do something useful to the Enterprise's position. Note that it took nearly a year for Deneva to be visited after its last contact -- and four months of that was the ordinary lack of anything to talk about. It was only the last eight months that the space pancakes were in charge. The Exeter was out of contact for six months before anyone even noticed it was missing. Space was a really big, empty place in those days.

 

[Timo]

If it can be used to shorten the return time to the planet, Spock would use it. Spock does not; therefore, it must not be able to shorten the return time.

On a general note, I don't think it would be a good idea to second-guess Spock's decisions and motivations in this episode. McCoy attempts it and fails. One of Spock's many "calculated risks" could indeed include the decision not to hurry to the planet even if this were technologically possible.

As Spock insists that the ship will precede the asteroid by four hours "All the way", not gaining a lead, we could just as well assume the ship will be coasting. The visual evidence is powerful enough: surely the Enterprise isn't hurrying towards the planet ass first? Since real-world physics support the coasting interpretation, and since the dramatic tension in this part of the episode depends on the audience not knowing what Spock is planning, it would seem like a win-win solution to assume that Spock doesn't want to get to the planet particularly fast.

The "maximum speed" shift from deflection point to phasering point makes sense, sort of. Spock pressed the ship to her utmost to get to the deflection point in time; seconds mattered. Seconds would continue to matter in repositioning for phasering, too, even if the repositioning itself only involved a few (dozen) seconds of maximum impulse or maximum warp. We need not see a dramatic shift in the ship's position as the result of this maximum-speed jump, then - and the failure to see a shift doesn't mean the ship would be incapable of any shift without her warp engines.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[22 Stars]

On a slightly different note, is this the longest during TOS that Spock is in command, it has to be, right? Most episodes don't take place over the course of a month. Any others that come to mind that span weeks even?