In regard to the classification discussion have there been any moments in canon which showed that a specific persons logs were classified other than the big Discovery classification? Just curious, none are coming to mind at the moment.
Spoilers ST: Khan by K. Beyer, D. Mack & N. Meyer Review Thread
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Why would Starfleet/UFP still keep the system interdicted after they think Ceti Alpha V exploded? Once the calamity occurs (along with its ensuing misunderstanding), they would think the risk of anyone making contact with Khan was gone. The interdiction on Ceti Alpha V would have been in effect for only about … six months. By the time Project Genesis went back to Ceti Alpha VI, the system's relevance re: Khan had likely been long forgotten. And for those who had no need to know, it would not have come up.
So the idea is that Starfleet knew about the destruction before Reliant's visit, and stopped worrying about the system then?
I could buy that, except... then why keep everything classified when there's no longer any reason to? And also, based on the revealed circumstances, and the idea that Starfleet actually knew about the planetary destruction when it happened instead of only discovering it when Reliant arrived- wouldn't the spontaneous destruction of a planet that censor scans at the time showed had no reason to explode and which had formerly housed a person of interest be the kind of thing that Starfleet would investigate to find out why said planet had exploded? Especially if they thought it was Ceti Alpha V that hadn't even shown any signs of instability?
I could buy that, except... then why keep everything classified when there's no longer any reason to? And also, based on the revealed circumstances, and the idea that Starfleet actually knew about the planetary destruction when it happened instead of only discovering it when Reliant arrived- wouldn't the spontaneous destruction of a planet that censor scans at the time showed had no reason to explode and which had formerly housed a person of interest be the kind of thing that Starfleet would investigate to find out why said planet had exploded? Especially if they thought it was Ceti Alpha V that hadn't even shown any signs of instability?
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Ah, we could pick these kind of nits in any episode of Star Trek from now until The Burn, and never come up with a consensus that would satisfy everybody.
The orbit-switching explanation reminds me of the bit of trivia that occasionally came up when I was young, that between 1979 and 1999 Pluto was the eighth planet and Neptune the ninth because of how their orbits overlapped.
It'd be kind of embarrassing. It's already embarrassing. Kirk avoided a media circus by unilaterally exiling a historical criminal and his followers to a planet, knowing that they may well have succeeded in establishing a society and their descendants may well return to wreck havoc. That's gonna take some spin in a society where, even if Khan isn't recognized by sight, everyone knows his full name, to the point of bullying his progeny in the schoolyard. And then six months later they're all dead? I wouldn't want to be the one to write that press release. Let it come out after everyone involved is dead or moved on in a few decades as part of a normal declassification process (I do agree that remark about putting logs under seal upon Kirk's death was odd, normally confidential records become more accessible once the people involved are dead, at least after a while).
Or, if we really want to annoy Khan, Starfleet did investigate the debris, maybe even looked for survivors in the airtight cargo pods, but no one looked closely enough at the remaining planet to see any life, even if they did survey it. Reliant only found anything because they were going over the planet with a fine-toothed comb, and there was still so much interference that they thought 50 or so people might've been a sensor glitch or a microbe that wasn't even technically alive. There would've been no chance of detecting them at all with everyone (but Ivan) underground.
It'd be kind of embarrassing. It's already embarrassing. Kirk avoided a media circus by unilaterally exiling a historical criminal and his followers to a planet, knowing that they may well have succeeded in establishing a society and their descendants may well return to wreck havoc. That's gonna take some spin in a society where, even if Khan isn't recognized by sight, everyone knows his full name, to the point of bullying his progeny in the schoolyard. And then six months later they're all dead? I wouldn't want to be the one to write that press release. Let it come out after everyone involved is dead or moved on in a few decades as part of a normal declassification process (I do agree that remark about putting logs under seal upon Kirk's death was odd, normally confidential records become more accessible once the people involved are dead, at least after a while).
Not to be callous, but these things happen, especially in TOS. If some passing ship noted that there was a cloud of asteroids where CA5 was more-or-less supposed to be (and a planet more-or-less where CA6 was supposed to be), the bigger priority would be to check the surrounding area for robotic extragalactic weapons, or giant amoebas, or senile hybrid space-probes, to stop any other planets from being destroyed. If there was no further threat discovered, forensic analysis might've been backburnered.
Or, if we really want to annoy Khan, Starfleet did investigate the debris, maybe even looked for survivors in the airtight cargo pods, but no one looked closely enough at the remaining planet to see any life, even if they did survey it. Reliant only found anything because they were going over the planet with a fine-toothed comb, and there was still so much interference that they thought 50 or so people might've been a sensor glitch or a microbe that wasn't even technically alive. There would've been no chance of detecting them at all with everyone (but Ivan) underground.
As we know, someone's personal writings can come back to haunt them and their organizations after they die, and if Kirk is dead, he can't explain or defend himself. Starfleet didn't need a "Kirk sucks" movement then if people become upset by something he said, wrote or did. Maybe later when they had another seemingly unimpeachable highly visible hero. If Kirk is the face of Starfleet to many, what he did reflects on them.
Well, that's different, because their orbits are still entirely distinct, they just happen to cross each other a little.
The thing is, there are six distinct parameters that define an orbit's exact shape and orientation, so it's hardly just a matter of counting outward from the star. Any alien observer who'd visited our system between February 7, 1979 and February 11, 1999, if they'd stayed long enough to track Pluto's motion and extrapolate its overall orbit, would have known that it was an impressively large Kuiper Belt object rather than an unimpressively tiny cis-Neptunian planet. That's why it never made sense to me that Ceti Alpha V could be mistaken for Ceti Alpha VI. Even if the orbit were shifted, the odds of all six orbital parameters being shifted into an exact match for VI's would've been infinitesimal. Dave & Kirsten's orbit-switching theory is the only believable explanation I've ever seen, since if the two planets' orbits were that chaotic to begin with, it would've been difficult to predict what parameters they should have had at any given time.
Kirk didn't "avoid a media circus." People keep forgetting that the very first line in the hearing scene in "Space Seed" was Uhura assuring Kirk that it was being recorded. He wanted it on the record. Kirk, as we know, is a history buff, and the discovery of living survivors of the Eugenics Wars, a period for which records are fragmentary, was a historian's Holy Grail. Logically, Kirk would've wanted it publicized so that historians could interview Khan's people and add to their knowledge of that period of history. That may have been part of why he agreed to let his own ship's historian join them in exile.
And how exactly could their descendants "return?" An uninhabited planet is the perfect prison, since there's no way off short of someone coming to get you. All the more reason it would've had to be publicized, so that it could be interdicted and monitored. One of the many, many nonsensical ideas in TWOK was this idea that nobody knew what Kirk had done.
Although one other thing that tends to be overlooked -- and the podcast was guilty of this -- is that Ceti Alpha was supposed to be out on the remote frontier. There shouldn't be Federation planets just a couple of systems away. The whole reason Kirk had to exile them was implicitly because the ship was way out in the deep frontier and there weren't any Federation penal facilities in range. That very remoteness should've made it an ideal penal colony, like Australia was for the British. That's what Carey Wilber was explicitly referencing when he named Khan's ship the Botany Bay.
This makes no sense to me. In a 3 body problem,you could get low mass particles in tadpole or horseshoe orbits. Both V and Vi are Planetary mass bodies, presumably orbiting Ceti Alpha. The other 4.planets, presumably interior, will have some influence on both bodies.
Except that it’s my understanding that JWST might already have documented a system with orbital mechanics like these. And the authors of the paper I linked to seem to have done their homework.
I take it you haven’t had much direct experience dealing with the institutional sclerosis of large bureaucracies, have you?
The problem with both of these is that... that just doesn't seem Starfleet to me. Keeping information suppressed because it was embarrassing, or ignoring a spontaneous planetary destruction because you don't care... that just doesn't seem in-character. Kind of what we were talking about earlier- information classified only if it is a security risk, not simply to avoid embarrassment (or, as the subsequent post suggests, to avoid some sort of 'movement' around Kirk). Classifying information for that reason seems like something our government would do, but would be disappointing behavior for Starfleet and its ideals.
See, I could buy that based on the movie, but then in episode 7 (I believe), the Excelsior can scan the entire surface for a specific compound within seconds, and a high degree of certainty, no mention ever made of interference... :-)
Space is so big that every time something big comes up, lots of other big things come up one after another and some things fall by the wayside.
I don't think mystery planet destructions are the kind of thing that fall by the wayside, especially ones that contain a VIP that Starfleet was concerned about and classified records for. I mean that's the kind of thing that the Enterprise would be diverted to check out all the time in TOS. When a planet is unexpectedly destroyed.
Look, it seems as if people here are invested in accepting this. And that's fine. I'm just saying that to me, the idea of scrutiny plus neglect necessary to maintain this balance of concepts just doesn't wash, that's all. It requires two contradictory things to be true, in terms of being important enough to justify one thing, and unimportant enough to justify another. And an excuses that permit that contradiction to be true also seem to drag the character of Starfleet through the mud a bit. So for me it really is just kind of a square peg in around whole.
And it's not the make or break of the audio series or anything. The quality of the plot and writing and performances exist quite independent of putting these particular concepts under the microscope. It's just an idea that for me, doesn't bear up to scrutiny.
Look, it seems as if people here are invested in accepting this. And that's fine. I'm just saying that to me, the idea of scrutiny plus neglect necessary to maintain this balance of concepts just doesn't wash, that's all. It requires two contradictory things to be true, in terms of being important enough to justify one thing, and unimportant enough to justify another. And an excuses that permit that contradiction to be true also seem to drag the character of Starfleet through the mud a bit. So for me it really is just kind of a square peg in around whole.
And it's not the make or break of the audio series or anything. The quality of the plot and writing and performances exist quite independent of putting these particular concepts under the microscope. It's just an idea that for me, doesn't bear up to scrutiny.
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It isn't even a matter of "investment", it's a matter of the simplest explanation being the best one, and the fact that this is all fiction anyway and even in the best maintained continuities, sometimes you have to squint a little. This is minor compared to some issues.
Certainly, I guess my point is that the simplest explanation is that this idea simply contradicts itself and doesn't make sense. The amount of mental gymnastics required to try and actually reconcile starfleets various level of classifications yet completely neglect of the planetary system when one of the planets blows up, in order to actually get all of this to fit logically within its own framework, much less with the movie, just feels to me like it has long since left the realm of 'simplest explanation' behind.
I'm reminded a little bit of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, were the first order is it organization made of individuals so hateful toward the new Republic that they broke away from the Empire rather than accept any idea of a peace treaty, and have enslaved entire worlds whose representatives are known to the new Republic, and have apparently kidnapped millions of children from across the galaxy to brainwash and the stormtroopers, and have the most powerful dreadnought ever created with a crew compliment three times that of the death Star - but are also somehow considered no threat whatsoever by the new Republic, who disarm because they are so unconcerned about the potential of an attack. At a certain point, the concept eats its own tail, requiring two completely contradictory things to be true as a setup in order to get to the point where the author wanted it to be, that a big really powerful force comes out of nowhere and ambushes the new Republic and conquers it, so that they can have another story about a evil dominating Empire being opposed by a small, scrappy rebellion. The setup for the story is the author wants to tell simply requires too many contradictions to actually make sense as a setup for the story itself. It requires the main villain organization to be overwhelmingly powerful and have demonstrated that in multiple places yet simultaneously be considered non-threatening.
And just as with that, the actual individual stories still rise and fall on their own merits hyphen certainly in the case of the Star Wars movies, they tend to fall whereas generally I think this podcast tends to be on the 'rise' side. :-) But I do think that is still okay to acknowledge that sure, the individual story may be fine, but the framework that it was set up upon to deliver the exact stories the author wanted to use is unworkable (which doesn't have to ruin your enjoyment of the product.)
I'm reminded a little bit of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, were the first order is it organization made of individuals so hateful toward the new Republic that they broke away from the Empire rather than accept any idea of a peace treaty, and have enslaved entire worlds whose representatives are known to the new Republic, and have apparently kidnapped millions of children from across the galaxy to brainwash and the stormtroopers, and have the most powerful dreadnought ever created with a crew compliment three times that of the death Star - but are also somehow considered no threat whatsoever by the new Republic, who disarm because they are so unconcerned about the potential of an attack. At a certain point, the concept eats its own tail, requiring two completely contradictory things to be true as a setup in order to get to the point where the author wanted it to be, that a big really powerful force comes out of nowhere and ambushes the new Republic and conquers it, so that they can have another story about a evil dominating Empire being opposed by a small, scrappy rebellion. The setup for the story is the author wants to tell simply requires too many contradictions to actually make sense as a setup for the story itself. It requires the main villain organization to be overwhelmingly powerful and have demonstrated that in multiple places yet simultaneously be considered non-threatening.
And just as with that, the actual individual stories still rise and fall on their own merits hyphen certainly in the case of the Star Wars movies, they tend to fall whereas generally I think this podcast tends to be on the 'rise' side. :-) But I do think that is still okay to acknowledge that sure, the individual story may be fine, but the framework that it was set up upon to deliver the exact stories the author wanted to use is unworkable (which doesn't have to ruin your enjoyment of the product.)
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Star Wars is a repetitive epic?
memory-alpha.fandom.com
Repetitive epic
The repetitive epic was a genre of Cardassian literature characterized by a repetition of plot elements and themes. The Never Ending Sacrifice was generally regarded as the genre's greatest example, as a novel depicting seven generations of the same family, all of whom selflessly dedicate their...
memory-alpha.fandom.com
I will have to look at the link Mr. Mack referenced, and see what I make of it.
I read only the link. I see what is going on but I am uncertain that planetary formation will produce two planets in that configuration. Also the other 4 Ceti Alpha planets will cause perturbation which may destabilize those 2 planets.
I read only the link. I see what is going on but I am uncertain that planetary formation will produce two planets in that configuration. Also the other 4 Ceti Alpha planets will cause perturbation which may destabilize those 2 planets.
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And I'm curious how people compare it with the comic 'Ruling in Hell'.
We have 3 different stories telling similar events, the comic: Ruling in Hell, the book: To Reign in Hell and this audio drama.
Did anyone have a favorite?
I don't have the attention span to be able to sit and just listen to an audio drama like this without getting bored and distracted and missing what's going on but it has been interesting to read up on the plot and the things that have been added to fill in the gaps.
