Solar Sail Episode

[All Seeing Eye]

I know its been brought up before but I have such a beef with it I cant help but rant about it.
The episode where Sisko builds that Bajoran Solar Sail ship is (although a decent episode) completely bonkers.

1) Any vessel travelling faster than light can only accomplish that by warping space time because otherwise time dilation would take effect so when Sisko reached Cardassia although a small amount of time passed for him about 300 years should have passed elswhere.

2) Without inertial dampeners the Siskos should have been squashed like pancakes on the back wall of the solar sail ship but low and behold they completely fine!!!! why the hell does it have inertial dampeners when it was never intended to go to warp?????

3) Without a navigational deflector even the smallest particle would rip a hole through a starships duranium hull the size of a football and the fact the solar sail ship was made from thin material and wood the darn thing shouldnt have even made it past the denorias belt let alone all the way to the Cardassia System

4) The wormhole is supposed to be in the denorias belt and the station is pretty much next to the wormhole so why was it taking hours for the solar sail ship to reach the denorias belt when as soon as it set sail it was already in it!!!

5) It takes a starship at high warp hours to reach the cardassia system and then it would be intercepted long before that by Cardassian cruisers (take for example the episode 'defiant') so how could the solar sail ship have gone all the way to the cardassia system? it would have taken hours at warp and why wasnt it intercepted?

I love DS9 and there are A LOT of good episodes but when I see an episode that so clearly ignores Star Trek fact and science then I have a serious beef with it, who the heck wrote this epsisode anyway?

 

[misskim86]

The Bajoran ship had all those things you described since it obviously made warp speed

 

[All Seeing Eye]

misskim86 said:
The Bajoran ship had all those things you described since it obviously made warp speed

The ship didnt 'warp' because siskos explanation was that tachyons hitting the sail pushed the ship to FTL speeds which is impossible since time dilation would occur since space wasnt being warped by any nacelles. Then theres the rest of the points I made which are impossible.

 

[cylkoth]

^^ The Prophets obviously protected them...

 

[P0sitr0nic]

If a soliton wave can be generated to push a ship into warp (TNG) then im sure something in the denorious belt could have pushed the solar sail ship into warp.

 

[Kegek]

The thing that bugs me is that Sisko built the entire ship by his lonesome, in a matter of days. And, plot-wise, given his intentional super-fidelity even to things that aren't important... installing gravity generators made no sense at all.

Oh, they made budgetary sense; (floating people expensive stuff), but there was no decent plot rationale as to why he'd put himself and his son through zero-G rations and a zero-G toilet but won't allow actual zero-G.

 

[Trekker4747]

1) Any vessel travelling faster than light can only accomplish that by warping space time because otherwise time dilation would take effect so when Sisko reached Cardassia although a small amount of time passed for him about 300 years should have passed elswhere.

If I remember the calculation right at 99% of C 1 second for the travler is like 8 seconds for the "stationary" observer.

Even at .999c 1 minute is like 22.
.999999c is 1 minute = about, a day.

At c time stops (and the traveler is infinitly thin) so it's unobtainable. So, no.

 

[NKemp3]

Complaints like this somewhat astound me. Honestly most of the science in Trek is baloney anyhow. I mean for God's sakes Trek gives us ships that LOUDLY explode into bursts of flames in space. Hello? This ep was meant to be a bit magical and wondrous despite its lousy science. It was meant to be a great character oriented episode for Ben and Jake, a father and son adventure not much different than, say, a modern day father and son who take an old relic of a boat out on the ocean and sail beyond their wildest dreams. You either ride along the emotional wave of the episode and accept the almost mystical aspect to ancient Bajoran civilization and its technology or you don't. But to dissect its flawed science? That seems like a waste of time.

 

[Timo]

Frankly, I don't think any of these objections make sense in the context of standard Trek technobabble - so as long as we accept that, "Explorers" should work fine.

1) Any vessel travelling faster than light can only accomplish that by warping space time because otherwise time dilation would take effect so when Sisko reached Cardassia although a small amount of time passed for him about 300 years should have passed elswhere.

And since warp suffers from no time dilation, and since the ship was at warp as far as we know...

Her warp field just wasn't generated internally by onboard engines, it was imposed on her by the tachyon stream thingamabob. The effects witnessed were indistinguishable from warp in every other respect, so why not this one?

2) Without inertial dampeners the Siskos should have been squashed like pancakes on the back wall of the solar sail ship but low and behold they completely fine!!!! why the hell does it have inertial dampeners when it was never intended to go to warp?????

There's no evidence that there would be inertia in warp drive. Indeed, to accelerate things past lightspeed would call for negation of inertia first and foremost: the warp field probably does that already. Sure, Sisko describes the warp effect as "the sails dragging the ship into warp", to paraphrase freely... But the effects we witness are more like the tachyon stream enveloping the ship (including her interiors and occupants) in a more or less regular warp field, where the ship stays thanks to the sails.

3) Without a navigational deflector even the smallest particle would rip a hole through a starships duranium hull the size of a football

But the stream would act as the deflector, as everything within it would be moving in the same direction and at the same speed as the lightsail.

and the fact the solar sail ship was made from thin material and wood

So she was probably stronger than an Apollo capsule. Wood isn't that bad a construction material, really. Once you vacuum-acclimatize it, getting the fluids out of the interior, it should be pretty stiff, and probably a far better protection against meteors than an identical thickness of steel or aluminum or other such easily punctured and fragmented material.

4) The wormhole is supposed to be in the denorias belt and the station is pretty much next to the wormhole so why was it taking hours for the solar sail ship to reach the denorias belt when as soon as it set sail it was already in it!!!

Because it would take years to get to the next planet. The thing was slow. That's the one bit of real-world science that was allowed to triumph over usual Trek conventions in the episode: space travel was realistically snail-paced.

Yes, both the station and the wormhole are theoretically inside the Denorios belt. But "Invasive Procedures" establishes that the belt is quite variable, with severe bouts of "weather". Other episodes, such as "Things Past" and "The Visitor" hint at such periodic changes as well. It's quite possible Sisko picked a day when the belt would be a short distance away from the station/wormhole, allowing him to get the feel of the ship before plunging in.

5) It takes a starship at high warp hours to reach the cardassia system and then it would be intercepted long before that by Cardassian cruisers (take for example the episode 'defiant') so how could the solar sail ship have gone all the way to the cardassia system? it would have taken hours at warp and why wasnt it intercepted?

We have no reason to think the lightsail wasn't intercepted. Ben and Jake were quite blind inside, without warp sensors. They probably picked a Cardassian escort right at crossing the border.

The thing that bugs me is that Sisko built the entire ship by his lonesome, in a matter of days. And, plot-wise, given his intentional super-fidelity even to things that aren't important... installing gravity generators made no sense at all.

That's probably something dictated by Federation law. There would be all sorts of safety regulations regarding space travel, so Sisko would have to install the gravity (how convenient for the set builders! ) and take with him an emergency transceiver and beacon, plus no doubt a set of spacesuits etc.

But he'd stay authentic in all the other respects. And he probably spent more than just "days" building the ship, as "Explorers" sits in the middle of an extra-long stretch of stardate-free episodes. The preceding two episodes were an intense two-parter, essentially compacting four weeks of "audience time" into a couple of days of plot. The following episode in turn is a Ferengi romp that may easily take place in parallel with "Explorers". So for all we know, the construction part spans a month or even two. (Also, the prologue could take place before the adventures depicted in the preceding episodes, giving a total time of half a year for all we know.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[TeutonicNights]

Yeah, what also helps the episode is that Sisko is determined to exactly use the materials the ancient Bajorans used.
We could always speculate those Bajoran materials or the combination of the materials used had special properties that can explain any oddities, like why the sails could be so small and tachyons could propel them to warp, also why spatial radiation wasn't a problem.

BTW the outer shell sure wasn't made of wood, as the script states, but rather of iron.

Also I don't see why the Cardassians would be a problem. As I said in the other topic, the Cardies just HAVE to have known about the tachyon shortcut, or they shouldn't have been worried about Sisko's project at all (a ship slowly going to the Denorius Belt and back would hardly have proven anything).
They probably were monitoring the whole thing all along, but what would intervening have gotten them? Sisko finding out about the shortcut was annoying to them, but stopping him would have endangered the improving relations with Bajor and the Feddies.
Plus, it would have been to late to keep Sisko from finding the proof for ancient interstellar travel anyway.
This was obviously a phase in the ever-changing Cardie/Bajor/Federation relations when the Cardies had become more than the ever-lurking baddies from the beginning, sabotaging and bullying at any cost. The welcome fireworks in the final scene proves that quite effectively. At that time, playing the nice guys seemed obviously more beneficial to the spoonheads.

 

[Timo]

..the Cardies just HAVE to have known about the tachyon shortcut, or they shouldn't have been worried about Sisko's project at all..

Were they worried? It sounded to me that Dukat was just casually checking on what Sisko was doing, finding it harmless (although probably finding it difficult to believe that there wasn't something shady going on elsewhere), and then forgetting about it altogether - until Sisko did sail out, and did reach Cardassia.

After the sailship crossed into Cardassian space, Dukat would have had plenty of time to get aboard a starship, fly to the location where the sail stalled, and break out the "in case Bajorans do make it here, here is how we will save face" envelope of instructions that must have existed ever since the Cardassians found the old lightsail remains in their system.

"Revealing" the "recent" discovery was an excellent way to show the baddies putting up a good guy act for the first time. The Cardassians were a bit clumsy about it, sure, but there was promise of better things to come. All the more jarring, then, to have Dukat ally with the Dominion and take things back to hell...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kegek]

Your explanations are quite adequate, Timo, but the episode itself makes no reference to the passage of time or any reason at all that Sisko used gravity generators. So I'll still chalk them up as problems.

Timo said:
"Revealing" the "recent" discovery was an excellent way to show the baddies putting up a good guy act for the first time. The Cardassians were a bit clumsy about it, sure, but there was promise of better things to come.

That struck me as a bit of blatant face-saving of their part. Obviously there had been a coverup, and then they simply dispensed with the coverup when there was no longer any point to it.

The Cardassians didn't need to know about the tachyon shortcut... because they already knew about the secret crashed Bajoran ship. Their fear of admitting the existence of a truth they already knew was the reason Dukat attempted to dissuade him.

 

[Mistral]

The ship was probably caught in a slipstream effect caused by conditions in the Denorious Belt-and was therefor outside of physical contact with our old friends meteors and "G" effect. Sisko built it but they never said how long he worked on it and biological material either implodes or petrifies in space. My only beef was "How did they get the darn thing UP there?" A wood ship on an Atlas?

 

[Timo]

Why not? The combination of a rocket and a lightsail would be an elegant way of doing it, and the use of wood in some components of the payload would save weight. The pressure hull of the lightsail seemed to be something weldable, though.

I'd surmise the Bajorans had quite a bit of space infrastructure available to them, including orbital piers where people could switch from surface-to-orbit craft (be they ballistic rockets or spaceplanes) to interplanetary vessels such as the lightsails.

I also suspect the old Bajorans had antigravity down pat. That would simplify their orbital access, and it would explain how the lightsail could work with such tiny sails. They simply wouldn't apply this technology for onboard artificial gravity for reason X. (Say, perhaps they went to space specifically because it was zero gee? From what we hear, the prime purpose for the Bajoran space program was spiritual revelation and spatial meditation...)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Eminence]

This is the episode where Jake channeled MC Hammer..

"It's hammock time. Yo."

 

[CubColtPacer]

Kegek said:
Your explanations are quite adequate, Timo, but the episode itself makes no reference to the passage of time or any reason at all that Sisko used gravity generators. So I'll still chalk them up as problems.

Sisko does give a reason for installing gravity generators. You can dispute his reason, but the reason is clearly stated. From a copy of the script:


DAX
But you didn't have to bother with
detail like this to prove the ship
is spaceworthy.

SISKO
I suppose not... but I want everything to be just right... it's an exact
replica...Except for the gravity net I installed in the floor... weightlessness makes me queasy...

Sisko wanted to make the trip as close to the conditions of the Bajorans as he could, but it wouldn't be the first time that a Starfleet officer can face a lot of tough situations and enemies but are very reluctant to be in a 0G environment.