REDEMPTION, part 2 and tachyon grid.

[JesterFace]

A question that many might have wondered when watching 'Redemtion' part 2, why don't the Romulans just go around the tachyon net.

I have my theory trying to make that detection grid work, do you have one?
Here's my weird theory, sorry in advance if there are mistakes in there...

Tachyons are (hypothetical?) particles that cannot travel below light speed. Tachyons move faster the less energy they have.

So the grid continues to expand beyond the ships but they are able to monitor the particles because they sent them, perhaps there's something about the tachyons that is detectable by the blockade.
It's scifi, they marked the particles somehow...

Well, like I said, weird, but it's something that makes the detection grid work, at least for me.

 

[Timo]

Assorted solutions previously discussed:

1) The net we see in the Okudagram is decidedly 3D. Why use 3D to blockade a 2D border? Perhaps this tiny net (explicitly measured in mere millions of kilometers) is in fact around the Romulan ships, or Picard's best (and correct) guess as to where the Romulans would be? Indeed, perhaps the net originally was wider and flatter, but was constricted around the prey once Sela lost her nerve and made herself known to Picard?

2) We only see part of the quoted twenty-something ships in the Okudagram. Perhaps the net consists of a big central node where miltiple ships pump out tachyons like crazy, and then the "missing" half a dozen ships much farther out, catching the telltale signals of a tachyon hitting something?

3) Perhaps we misunderstand and the scale-establishing figures quoted when part of the net goes down are referring to something else than the size of the visible gap in the diagram? The net might be wide enough to make circumventing impractical, even in the 20 hours Sela waits procrastinating. After all, the failure of warp drive on one of the ships is quoted as a reason for her to pull back. Why would warp be needed unless the net were vast and even minor relative positional corrections a matter of lightyears?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JesterFace]

Thing that makes me wonder, Picard was trying to fool the Romulans to go through the tachyon net by faking a warp drive malfunction in one of the ships in the blockade.

But, wasn't the blockade stationary? Or was it moving somewhere, maybe expanding? How would a warp drive malfunction cripple a stationary ship?

 

[BillJ]

Why didn't the Romulans just go around? The net couldn't have been more than a couple dozen light-years deep/wide/tall in the time they had to set it up.

Sela was an idiot.

 

[Christopher]

A question that many might have wondered when watching 'Redemtion' part 2, why don't the Romulans just go around the tachyon net.

Because it's a very wide net covering dozens of square parsecs, no doubt. Obviously the way to make such a detection system work is to spread it across the entire border, like the DEW Line and other early-detection lines that the US used as an alert system for Soviet missiles. Naturally it's possible to come around by a longer route, but that takes a lot more time and allows detection by other means.

If we go by the cartography in Star Trek Star Charts (which was the basis for the onscreen map graphics in Discovery and thus could be considered more or less canonical now), Klingon and Romulan space share a common border that's flanked by Federation space on both sides (in 2 dimensions -- no telling what's going on "above" or "below" the plane of the page). That suggests that the Romulans' only alternative to crossing the Klingon border directly would've been to pass through Federation space, and that carries its own risks of discovery and diplomatic incidents. So they'd prefer to stick to the border itself, so that's the only region the tachyon grid had to cover. STSC shows that border as being about 50 light years long in 2 dimensions, so if we treat that as a circle of radius 25 light years, that makes for a planar area of about 2000 square light years to cover with the grid. With 23 ships, then, each ship would've had to defend an area of about 85 square light years, or a circle about 5 light years in radius. We've seen that Starfleet long-range sensors can easily detect things much further away than 5 ly, so that's a reasonable distribution.

 

[Timo]

The problem inherent in the "too big to get around" rationalization is one independent of the scale of the setup, alas.

A) The Starfleet force arrives, and then deploys. This does not consume much plot time. Going around would consume just as little plot time by default.
B) At one point, two ships from the already deployed net rendezvous at point blank range. This does not consume much plot time. Going around would then consume at most one order of magnitude more plot time, given the proportions of the net we see, even if the two ships came from immediately neighboring nodes, and less if they came from more distant nodes.
C) When one ship fakes warp engine trouble and withdraws (At warp speed? Way to blow your cover!), her node on the grid is vacated in plot time. Again, going around the whole net should only take at most ten times that amount of time...

...That is, much less than an hour in every instance above. Instead, Sela sits on her hands for the better part of a day.

All of this would be a problem regardless of whether the net were miles or megaparsecs in diameter. Deciding that the scale is dictated by, say, the known nature of warp speeds only gives us a couple of additional hard figures to play with ("hard" being defined by our assumptions about the nature of warp - perhaps "fluffy" would be a better word?). But we already have the ones relating to travel times down pat - as per above, they are independent of the speeds involved.

There's no mending all that. The entire plot structure would fall apart if we insisted Sela could not fly around the net as depicted. Unless we chose old rationalization 1 or 2 above, that is, 3D encirclement or the major role of unseen ships much farther out than the ships involved in A, B and C.

Or, as Christopher says, decided that Sela did not want to risk venturing into UFP space. But she risks more here. And nothing suggests UFP space should be dangerous to cloaked ships before the introduction of this tachyon net thing, and "Redemption" very much is the introduction.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JesterFace]

I guess one just has to see past the weirdness of the tachyon net to enjoy this episode.

But even after that the thing that raises questions is that why did Riker visit the Enterprise? His ship was a part of the net, who replaced his ship? And if it was so quick to go visit other ships, it shouldn't have been a huge trip for the Romulans just to go around.
Maybe it's a good idea to just watch Redemption part 1 to the point where Gowron returns Worf's family honor and then press stop button and move on to the next episode without the Sela cliffhanger.