It's possible that it just got too close for the planet killer's comfort.
The 22-Man Transporter
- Thread starter Wingsley
- Start date
Decker said more than that. He also said “We were dead. No power.” No power means unable to move and Scott says as much, “And paralysed. No power.”
Also, I see no reason why the batteries couldn’t have powered the entire evacuation.
So if we put together what happened in rough chronological order:
1. Decker encounters the DoomsDay Machine (DDM) at the 4th planet. “We saw this thing hovering over the planet, slicing out chunks of it with a force beam.”
2. Engages in a long-range firefight with it. “I made a mistake then. We were too far away.”
3. Loses warp power and “couldn’t run”
4. Loses impulse power – controls fused solid. “We were dead. No power.”
5. Decker is forced to abandon the ship. “I had to beam them down.”
6. Crew beams down.
7. Transporters are damaged. “And then it hit again and the transporter went out.”
8. The 3rd planet is destroyed below the Constellation.
Now somewhere between encountering the DDM at the 4th planet and then being forced to abandon ship the Constellation came within transporter range (30,000 km) of the 3rd planet.
So if he had meant to beam down his crew and ram the DDM, how would he do it with no impulse or warp drive since they went out before the beam down?
And if the impulse engines were repairable given that Scotty was able to do so then why didn’t the crew fix the impulse drive to stay maneuverable? As Kirk points out, “I can’t imagine a man like Matt Decker abandoning ship while his life support systems were still operative.”
Hypothetically then, the only reason I can see is that they were forced to abandon ship rather than sticking around to repair it because they had no time to perform repairs. With no power to maneuver and being within transporter range of the 3rd planet then the best reason to abandon ship was that they were in immediate danger to fall into the planet before the ship could be repaired in time. That seems far more immediate than being attacked by the DDM since they know what the DDM does
Is there another reason that they “had” to abandon ship given that they could’ve restored partial impulse power? Or was Decker’s engineering crew subpar compared to Kirk’s and missed the recognizing the opportunity altogether?
I’ve included some relevant dialogue below to refresh the ol’ memory banks
SCOTT: Captain, I've checked the engines. The warp drive is a hopeless pile of junk. The impulse engines are not too badly off. We ought to be able to do something with them.
KIRK: Phaser banks?
SCOTT: Exhausted. They didn't give up without a battle.
KIRK: But where are they? I can't imagine a man like Matt Decker abandoning ship while his life support systems were still operative.
DECKER [OC]: Captain's log, stardate 4202.1. Exceptionally heavy subspace interference still prevents our contacting Starfleet to inform them of the destroyed solar systems we have encountered. We are now entering system L-374. Science Officer Masada reports the
fourth planet seems to be breaking up. We are going to investigate.
DECKER: We tried to contact Starfleet. No one heard. No one! We couldn't run.
KIRK: What happened to your crew?
DECKER: Oh, I had to beam them down. We were dead. No power, our phasers useless. I stayed behind, the last man. The Captain, the last man aboard the ship. That's what you're supposed to do, isn't it? And then it hit again and the transporter went out. They were down there, and I'm up here.
KIRK: What hit? What attacked you?
DECKER: They say there's no devil, Jim, but there is. Right out of hell, I saw it.
KIRK: Matt, where's your crew?
DECKER: On the third planet.
KIRK: There is no third planet.
DECKER: Don't you think I know that? There was, but not anymore. They called me. They begged me for help, four hundred of them. I couldn't. I couldn't.
KIRK: Matt, your log stated that the fourth planet was breaking up. You went in to investigate.
DECKER: We saw this thing hovering over the planet, slicing out chunks of it with a force beam.
KIRK: Did you run a scanner check on it? What kind of a beam?
DECKER: Pure antiproton. Absolutely pure.
KIRK: Spock? Spock? Come in, Spock. Spock? We're stuck, blind, and deaf.
SCOTT: And paralysed. No power.
KIRK: Well, we just can't stand around while our ship is being attacked. Scotty, you've got to get me some manoeuvering power.
SCOTT: I can't repair warp drive without a spacedock.
KIRK: Then get me impulse power. Half-speed, quarter-speed, anything. If we get this hulk moving, maybe we can do something.
SCOTT: Aye, the impulse engines are still in fair shape. I might coax them.
KIRK: Then get moving.
DECKER: I made a mistake then. We were too far away. This time I'm going to hit it with full phasers at point-blank range.
SCOTT: Captain, the impulse engines' control circuits are fused solid.
KIRK [OC]: What about the warp drive control circuits?
SCOTT: Aye, we can cross-connect the controls, but it'll make the ship almost impossible for one man to handle.
When I saw "The Doomsday Machine" for the first few times in the 1970's, it never occurred to me that it was odd how the Constellation's communications system "looks to be shorted out", but Kirk and Scott keep pushing buttons and flicking switches and the ship responds. Years later, it occurred to me that a starship's systems are all basically a self-contained LAN of sorts. So if communications are down, wouldn't the ship be completely dead, with no power or services whatsoever? Not even lights?
It would just seem to me that communications would be fundamental to ship's operations on any level, since Federation Starships appear to be essentially "fly by wire". After all, they don't spin a helmsman's wheel that's physically connected to a rudder, do they?
As far as the "power" quotes above, they have me scratching my head. The basic notion of teleportation/transmat beams suggests quite a bit of power is being expended to beam 400 people anywhere. You don't convert matter to energy, beam it from one place to another, and convert it back to its original form without expending a considerable amount of power. If the Constellation was truly powerless, her crew should've been stranded. I don't see much wiggle room there, whether there were 22-man stations employed or not.
Comments?
It would just seem to me that communications would be fundamental to ship's operations on any level, since Federation Starships appear to be essentially "fly by wire". After all, they don't spin a helmsman's wheel that's physically connected to a rudder, do they?
As far as the "power" quotes above, they have me scratching my head. The basic notion of teleportation/transmat beams suggests quite a bit of power is being expended to beam 400 people anywhere. You don't convert matter to energy, beam it from one place to another, and convert it back to its original form without expending a considerable amount of power. If the Constellation was truly powerless, her crew should've been stranded. I don't see much wiggle room there, whether there were 22-man stations employed or not.
Comments?
To the contrary, I'd think a starship's (internal) communications system would be kept carefully separate from everything else - just like it's kept that way in modern warships, or tanks, or helicopters. Control signals travel on entirely different pathways from the ones relaying human-to-human messages, mainly because both systems are crucial but in different ways. A ship incapable of maneuvering still needs internal communications for giving the orders to restore mobility or to abandon ship. OTOH, panicky people shouting at each other should not overload a system intended to keep an aircraft flying straight.
Which suggests transporters don't operate that way.
Or if they do, they simply recover most of the energy used in process A when they run the reverse process B.
Regardless of how it's done, we know it is done. Transporters are low-energy devices, and have been seen operated by ships low on power, or even energized with the battery of a sidearm.
..."Rough" meaning that any two or three items could swap places easily enough. Most of the list consists of half-crazed hearsay, after all.
"We were dead; no power" can be taken literally, meaning that Decker's heart stopped beating for a while - or figuratively, meaning Decker was certain his heart would soon stop beating because of the dire situation. Picking and choosing an "intermediate" interpretation where "dead" means the ship was immobile is not a particularly defensible alternative. Not when assuming that the ship was merely as crippled at moment A as it later was at moment B would solve the entire dilemma and allow for the ramming plan.
Really, a steadily degrading situation aboard the ship is only to be expected considering she's under fire from a superior hostile. We already know Decker was distressed that he couldn't help the people down below; apparently, then, the crucial downturn of events wasn't that Decker became unable to join his fellow crew on the doomed planet, but that he lost the ability to help them. Since the helping could not have involved phasers, which definitely were out already and were also indicated to be impotent anyway, it should have involved the use of systems that only recently ceased functioning. Which includes transporters, but might quite well also include impulse drive - the system that ultimately saved the day.
Timo Saloniemi
Which suggests transporters don't operate that way.
Or if they do, they simply recover most of the energy used in process A when they run the reverse process B.
Regardless of how it's done, we know it is done. Transporters are low-energy devices, and have been seen operated by ships low on power, or even energized with the battery of a sidearm.
..."Rough" meaning that any two or three items could swap places easily enough. Most of the list consists of half-crazed hearsay, after all.
"We were dead; no power" can be taken literally, meaning that Decker's heart stopped beating for a while - or figuratively, meaning Decker was certain his heart would soon stop beating because of the dire situation. Picking and choosing an "intermediate" interpretation where "dead" means the ship was immobile is not a particularly defensible alternative. Not when assuming that the ship was merely as crippled at moment A as it later was at moment B would solve the entire dilemma and allow for the ramming plan.
Really, a steadily degrading situation aboard the ship is only to be expected considering she's under fire from a superior hostile. We already know Decker was distressed that he couldn't help the people down below; apparently, then, the crucial downturn of events wasn't that Decker became unable to join his fellow crew on the doomed planet, but that he lost the ability to help them. Since the helping could not have involved phasers, which definitely were out already and were also indicated to be impotent anyway, it should have involved the use of systems that only recently ceased functioning. Which includes transporters, but might quite well also include impulse drive - the system that ultimately saved the day.
Timo Saloniemi
The dialogue does go in that direction since the impulse controls are fused and the ship is essentially blind. The ship's individual systems were still operable, but with required manual control and some creative repair work control was restored to the impulse, sensors and phasers though. And as we've seen in TOS, battery power (until it runs out) is always available for functioning life support even under superior alien intervention.
As to the power requirements, I've yet to find an instance where transporter usage was a bigger burden than say running the sensors (like in "Mudd's Women") or holding orbit.
Well, if we assume that Decker's information is unreliable, then yes we could make anything up.
Timo said:
How does a "steadily degrading situation" warrant beaming down the crew? In most Trek battles, the ship's crew stays aboard to operate the ship even if it's a suicide run.
But, let's say he decided to ram the DDM and that was his plan all along. They all beam down to the planet knowing if Decker failed, it'd be death by destroyed planet. Boom, goes the transporters and we alter the events a little to say the impulse controls are fused solid now rather than earlier according to Decker. If he was in a sacrificial mood, why couldn't he maneuver with his thrusters to put the ship in the way of the DDM's force beam? Or run down to the impulse deck and rig it to explode? Or grab a Constellation shuttle and go ram the DDM? It just doesn't seem that Decker was planning on trying to kill the DDM with himself or his ship until after he "cracked."
Which is idiotic behavior if it is possible to evacuate. We've never seen a ramming where evacuation would have been an option, though: no friendly or neutral planets in the vicinity, and no mercy for those who'd bail out in lifepods.
Although come to think of it, apart from ST:NEM, we've never seen a ramming run where the crew would remain aboard, either. Chakotay beams out in "Caretaker". Kirk beams out in "Doomsday". Both order their fellow crew beamed out in advance. When the Jem'Hadar ram, we have no way of telling whether they do beam out or not.
When Kirk performs a suicide "run" in ST3, he sure as hell does evacuate first. Starfleet heroes aren't suicidal, even if they sometimes are driven to a corner from which it's not possible to crawl out alive.
Quaint ideas there. We know that none of those would help in defeating the DDM. Decker would probably know it, too. He had no appetite for killing himself for nothing.
Timo Saloniemi
One thing I think can be said for certain is that the Constitution Class starship was not equipped with escape pods.
More accurately, the original design of the Constitution-class Starship was not equipped with escape pods. The upgraded Constitution-class Starships, like the USS Enterprise, were equipped with lifeboats. A lifeboat hatch can be seen in the first movie after Admiral Kirk enters the ship.
Uhm - what about "Best of Both Worlds pt2" where Riker is about to do a warp ramming of the Borg Cube and they're clearly in Earth orbit? It's almost the same situation with an "unstoppable enemy" and Riker didn't offer to drop anyone off on Earth.
I seriously doubt it. The very idea that he was going to be the last man on his doomed ship (Captain stays with the ship) already says he's going to kill himself for nothing. What reason would he have to stay on a dead-in-space, powerless ship?
"I stayed behind, the last man. The Captain, the last man aboard the ship. That's what you're supposed to do, isn't it?"
Oops, good point. Or, rather, bad judgement on Riker's part.
But Riker was in a hurry to protect Earth. There was no hurry in protecting the uninhabited and worthless planets of L-374; the hurry was for the protection of the crew only. (Had Decker been able to, he would have prioritized the protection of the ship, because she would have been his only means of delivering a warning about the beast. Destruction of the beast then and there was not a mission requirement as such, and was only made necessary because the initial duel with it had sealed the fate of the Constellation.)
Nope - Decker quite clearly indicates he was stranded up there by the enemy fire. The DDM deprived him of the chance to beam down with his crew.
Skippers seldom feel obligated to go down with their ships, as most of them are not idiots. The obligation is for being the last man or woman to be evacuated, so that the survival of everybody under the skipper's command is ensured. Famous cases of skippers choosing death when survival is an option tend to be of skippers who would be facing an execution squad if they did survive. And apparently Starfleet doesn't believe in execution squads, some interpretations of "Turnabout Intruder" notwithstanding.
Timo Saloniemi
Timo said:
Where does he say he had planned to beam down? Decker never intended to beam down instead planning to die with his already dead ship. The DDM deprived him of the chance to rescue his crew from the planet.
As to choosing death over survival, Decker did seem overly concerned about losing his "command".
That's a reference to the practice of the Captain being the last man to leave the ship. There's no tradition of the Captain refusing to leave, not really.
This is a state of affairs that Decker laments. He wouldn't if his intention all along had been to arrange a "they down there, I up here" situation.
Timo Saloniemi
Perhaps you haven't seen the tvtrope of "going down with the ship?"
Something about living in disgrace that lines up with Decker's regard for his own command... Imho.
It sounded that he was lamenting that he couldn't beam them back up once he realized that his crew was in harm's way and not him and the ship anymore..
DECKER: Don't you think I know that? There was, but not anymore. They called me. They begged me for help, four hundred of them. I couldn't. I couldn't
DECKER: I've been prepared for death ever since I, ever since I killed my crew.
KIRK: No one expects you to die for an error in judgment.
DECKER: The commander is responsible for the lives of his crew, and for their deaths. Well, I should have died with mine.
KIRK: No one expects you to die for an error in judgment.
DECKER: The commander is responsible for the lives of his crew, and for their deaths. Well, I should have died with mine.
...All of which reinforces the idea that Decker wasn't suicidal. Not until he did kill his crew; and even then, he would have preferred to have died with them, rather than separated from them. And of course, he never did get around to killing himself, not until failing a second time in what he had set up to do.
There really isn't much evidence against the idea that Decker was attempting to ram the monster. Since this counters the fundamental illogic of the episode's plot premise, we might just as well adopt the rationalization, even if the writer never noticed his own fumble.
Timo Saloniemi
There really isn't much evidence against the idea that Decker was attempting to ram the monster. Since this counters the fundamental illogic of the episode's plot premise, we might just as well adopt the rationalization, even if the writer never noticed his own fumble.
Timo Saloniemi
On the other hand, up until his failed attempt to phaser the DDM using the Enterprise, Decker's thinking appears to have been to use phasers to blast the DDM at long-range. He never got a chance to test phasers at close-range to know they wouldn't work. That would be strong evidence against ramming which is a point-blank endeavor. It isn't until he thinks about Spock's analysis that he decides on a ramming attack.
So, let's go back to the idea that Decker really meant to be the last person to leave the ship since he's probably operating the transporters. The only logical reason to leave must then be that they thought the destruction of the Constellation was imminent. Otherwise, they would've stayed on the ship since it does not appear that ramming was something Decker was planning to do.
Eyeballing the interior of the shuttlecraft it looks like 22 people could stand close together inside it
So, let's go back to the idea that Decker really meant to be the last person to leave the ship since he's probably operating the transporters. The only logical reason to leave must then be that they thought the destruction of the Constellation was imminent. Otherwise, they would've stayed on the ship since it does not appear that ramming was something Decker was planning to do.
Eyeballing the interior of the shuttlecraft it looks like 22 people could stand close together inside it
The very fact that Decker didn't get a chance to try the Constellation's phasers on the hive of the monster at close range would naturally lead to him trying it out with the Enterprise, quite regardless of whether he had previously attempted a ramming or not. And we know the DDM is capable of inflicting damage at non-point-blank ranges, so it seems natural to assume the Constellation had lost phasers first, and been forced to contemplate point-blank tactics only after this fact.
Ramming was a desperation maneuver, and lost all urgency when there no longer was a crew to protect; it would only again gain in urgency in Decker's deranged mind when he sought out rationales for personally bringing down the monster (imminent danger to Rigel) instead of investigating alternate courses of action. There would be no sense in expending the Enterprise in a ramming attempt - but every sense in using up the Constellation that way, up until she became immobile.
If it were imminent solely because the DDM was closing in, then beaming down would serve no purpose: the crew would die immediately, whether up on the familiar ship or down on the alien planet. That's the very aspect in which the script is an epic fail, without the extra rationalization.
On the issue of somebody staying behind to operate transporters, it doesn't appear to be a necessity even in the TOS era ("This Side of Paradise"). Sure, there would probably be at leasdt half a dozen people concentrating on getting the rest safely to their destination - but then these would beam down at a slightly greater risk, using the automated beaming mode available.
Timo Saloniemi
Ramming was a desperation maneuver, and lost all urgency when there no longer was a crew to protect; it would only again gain in urgency in Decker's deranged mind when he sought out rationales for personally bringing down the monster (imminent danger to Rigel) instead of investigating alternate courses of action. There would be no sense in expending the Enterprise in a ramming attempt - but every sense in using up the Constellation that way, up until she became immobile.
And of course it was - from the ramming attempt!
If it were imminent solely because the DDM was closing in, then beaming down would serve no purpose: the crew would die immediately, whether up on the familiar ship or down on the alien planet. That's the very aspect in which the script is an epic fail, without the extra rationalization.
On the issue of somebody staying behind to operate transporters, it doesn't appear to be a necessity even in the TOS era ("This Side of Paradise"). Sure, there would probably be at leasdt half a dozen people concentrating on getting the rest safely to their destination - but then these would beam down at a slightly greater risk, using the automated beaming mode available.
Timo Saloniemi
But that's the point. Constellation never "lost phasers". Scotty just charged one right up to be fired without any repairs made to the weapons. She lost all power which meant no phasers and also no mobility and no ramming
No power, no mobility and within transporter range of the 3rd planet = imminent fall into planet
That rationalization requires less stretching than the rationalization for ramming and has fewer technical problems, IMHO 
I agree it's not a necessity. It's just part of the trope for the Captain to be the last man to leave. Of course it's possible the last group was 6 people which left him literally the last man for the last beam out.
