The age of the antihero

[Refuge]

Also, this.

But, apparently being a starship captain means "glory" and can never be questioned-EVER!

Oh please, Fireproof are you suggesting he should be seen as normal? Why did he get Discovery to command when he's nuts! Do you think he should have been offered a medal?? Oh the rewards! This is not about simple 'questioning'.

 

[fireproof78]

Oh please, Fireproof are you suggesting he should be seen as normal? Why did he get Discovery to command when he's nuts! Do you think he should have been offered a medal?? Oh the rewards! This is not about simple 'questioning'.

I know that in times of war, there are things that get overlooked for the sake of skill. It may feel wrong, but guess what? If humans are animals, the survival of a species will be considered preferable.

I don't like Lorca. I don't admire him. I don't think he is a good captain. But, he's there, for the fact that he has a set of skills that Starfleet needs.

" I feel I must remind you that it is an undeniable, and may I say a fundamental quality of man, that when faced with extinction, every alternative is preferable."

Sorry that he isn't as moral as you or I would prefer. But, wars are not pretty or always won in a moral way.

ETA: Is he "normal?" I don't know, honesty. I listed off several starship captains who have pushed their own agenda regardless of Federation principles. Even the heroic ones, the leads on a show, are not always moral.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

That's not true. There are a fair few people who think there are plot holes in Discovery

Yes. I happen to be one of them.

The non-scuttling of the Shenzhou is NOT one of those plot holes.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

We can't equate what Starfleet does with what the show does; Starfleet glorifying Lorca isn't the same thing as the show glorifying him.. And anyway, Cornwell wants Lorca relieved of command, and she's right to.

My bet is that Lorca goes full Ron Tracey eventually.

I'll take that bet. Because Burnham having to lead another mutiny after Lorca finally goes off the deep end is going to be the penultimate "fuck my life!" moral conflict in Star Trek history. It'll make the death of Edith Keeler feel like a cup of coffee.

 

[Megapolis]

No, Kirk didn't order that to prevent the ship from falling into enemy hands. He ordered it in the hopes they could destroy V'Ger before it reached Earth.

KIRK: Mister Scott, be prepared to execute Starfleet Order 2005.
SCOTTY: When, Sir?
KIRK: On my command.
SCOTTY: Aye, Sir.
ROSS: Why has the Captain ordered self-destruct, Sir?
SCOTTY: I would say, lass, because he thinks, he hopes, that when we go up, we'll take the intruder with us.
ROSS: Will we?
SCOTTY: When that much matter and anti-matter are brought together, oh yes, we will indeed.

And anyway, once again it was (effectively) a brand new ship with advanced tech, not an old junker.

Even in this case, the dialogue shows that there is a Starfleet Order that involves destruction of a Starfleet vessel with an intruder aboard. This means that Archer may not have been bluffing in "The Catwalk" because it was also an intruder situation, and that Starfleet orders about keeping his ship from falling into enemy hands may have been real.

 

[ralfy]

That is literally the exact opposite of what I said.

The "power core" whatever that is, was ALREADY DISABLED. If there was any hope of the Shenzhou actually leaving the system under its own power, they wouldn't have abandoned ship in the first place.

By "disabled," I mean unusable. The Klingons recovered and used it.

You're asking me? Aren't YOU the one insisting that preventing Starfleet technology from falling into enemy hands is supposed to be their highest priority above all other considerations?

What are the reasons for Stafleet "not [sharing] that reasoning," i.e., it is SOP to disable or destroy devices that can be used by the enemy?

They weren't. They took the engine apart and scavenged a (relatively) intact component of it to repair their OWN "power core" as you call it. This is the equivalent of stealing a coil pack out of a wrecked car with a completely different make and model and using it to get your own busted jalopy moving again just so you can drive it to a service station and fix it for real.

I can't remember that. What was the component?

Do you suppose the U.S. Army has standing orders to rip the spark plugs out of all their humvees whenever they abandon them just in case the enemy manages to scavenge the remains?

My understanding is that the power core is not a spark plug.

That is literally the OPPOSITE of what happened.

Are we talking about the same show? It was the Klingons who retrieved the power core, not Star Fleet.

That is completely NOT what STD showed us. First of all, to repeat, if the "power core" had been serviceable at all, Shenzhou wouldn't still be there in the first place, they would have just limped away at impulse power and met up with another starship or else just repaired their battle damage and flown to the nearest starbase. Second of all, nobody used the "power core" from the Shenzhou, just one intact component of it that probably only worked as a temporary fix.

There's nothing to disable. The core was dead. YOU were referring to the effort of going through the entire ship, deck by deck, compartment by compartment, stripping out any engine components that could POSSIBLY be of value to anyone ever. That is a silly thing to ask your crew to do, especially in the case that they are actually sitting in their ship sending out a distress call, trying to get someone from Starfleet to rescue them.

According to this review, it was a fully-functioning power core. I don't know what component that was.

 

[ralfy]

Why would you go out of your way to disable something that has already been rendered inoperable by enemy gunfire?

Because according to one review it was fully-functioning. That's what I remember but I might be mistaken. Were there scenes where the Klingons noticed that it was disabled and only wanted a component from it?

Because "the enemy retrieving and using it" is not something any of Starfleet's enemies have ever been known to do. This is mainly because anyone with a level of technology sufficient to threaten Starfleet will have their OWN so-called "power cores" in mass production and have ZERO reason whatsoever to scavenge one from Starfleet wrecks. Pirates, freighters and Ferengi might do this on a for-profit basis, but Klingons have shipyards and factories of their own, if they need a power core they just order one from the quartermaster.

But that wasn't possible because the Klingon ship was stranded for months in that area. It even reached a point when they started running out of food.

T'Kuvma's people weren't military. They're just a bunch of whacky cultists flying an ancient starship that they slapped together by scavenging parts. That Shenzhou had the one missing engine component they actually needed was really just an amazing coincidence. More importantly, it's an irrelevant one: if the dilithium processor HADN'T been recovered, Kol would have just had one of his ships deliver one from his own supplies. He probably intended to do this anyway, but then L'Rell handed him the processor and started eating chicken and he was all "Well, fuck it, we can leave right now."

Where is the evidence showing that Kol was going to deliver supplies?

What makes you think it's the same tech?

Because according to one of the threads in the forum, STD writers insist that the show is part of the same timeline as TOS, set a decade previously, and will bridge to TOS.

 

[The Mighty Monkey of Mim]

According to this review, it was a fully-functioning power core.

Are you basing your comments on other people's reviews, or on the actual show? According to the dialogue in the episode, it was a dilithium processor. And it was in a condition such that it couldn't be removed without significant risk of blowing up:

L'RELL: I have located the dilithium processor. The coupling unit is covered in crystal residue. Unplugging the processor could cause an explosion. One sudden move and we join the Black Fleet.

-MMoM

 

[ralfy]

You're a little late to this party, but it was earlier asked, Why are we talking about the evacuation like it was a time-critical situation? With their ship dead in the water and the battle effectively over, they wouldn't have been in any particular hurry. They weren't evacuating because the ship was about to explode, they were evacuating because they were stranded and were running out of power. Basically, the same reason Picard's crew evacuated the Stargazer after the Battle of Maxia.

Again, if it was not time-critical, then they could have disabled the power core.

 

[ralfy]

That's like saying that after installing the Transporter onboard the NX, ENT should've shown us which way every single character arrived on the ship, because the transporter was a new technology and most people would still prefer arriving by shuttle instead of having their molecules scrambled through space.

If they tried to explain every little detail to justify every scene we would end up with 3-hour long Episodes. There's things the audience can handle. You don't need to explain everything because there's stuff that is just self-explanatory.

Or just remove the plot hole.

 

[ralfy]

Are you basing your comments on other people's reviews, or on the actual show? According to the dialogue in the episode, it was a dilithium processor. And it was in a condition such that it couldn't be removed without significant risk of blowing up:

L'RELL: I have located the dilithium processor. The coupling unit is covered in crystal residue. Unplugging the processor could cause an explosion. One sudden move and we join the Black Fleet.

-MMoM

That means it was functioning!

 

[ralfy]

It isn't a plot hole, it's simply unexplained. Stories often skip trivial details and the reader/viewer is left to fill in the blanks. When Holmes and Watson arrive at remote location to investigate a case after an interview with their client, do you consider it a plot hole if you're not told exactly what manner of conveyance they employed to arrive at their destination? Of course not, such pedantic story telling is left to the reader's imagination. They could have taken a train or a carriage. Perhaps they rode on horseback. Or maybe they just plain walked. In the same manner, Georgiou's telescope was somehow recovered, and there's no need to show that exact scene. It's easy to think of many different paths it could have followed to go from the Shenzhou to the Discovery.

Plausible explanations for the dilithium processor have also been presented. Again ... no hole. You want every eye dotted and every tea crossed, but this isn't a cross-examination or a scientific experiment, it's a story.

That's exactly why it's a plot hole. If it was recovered because the crew had time to do so, then the power core could have been disabled or destroyed. Same thing if it was recovered later.

The pedantic storytelling I've seen to counter that includes claims that the crew members are hippie explorers or irrational, that it's irrational for Starfleet to disable or destroy what they can use later, and so on.

 

[fireproof78]

I still maintain that it isn't standard Starfleet protocol to destroy ships, regardless of what the audience might think.

Agree to disagree and all that.

 

[The Mighty Monkey of Mim]

Even in this case, the dialogue shows that there is a Starfleet Order that involves destruction of a Starfleet vessel with an intruder aboard. This means that Archer may not have been bluffing in "The Catwalk" because it was also an intruder situation, and that Starfleet orders about keeping his ship from falling into enemy hands may have been real.

Well, there's a whole bunch of fallacies in there that seem to suggest you're not actually familiar with the context of those stories...but even so, it still doesn't get you to there being a standing policy of destroying an already-critically disabled ship with no intruders on board after abandoning it. Especially not an old dinosaur like the Shenzhou.

-MMoM

 

[AlanC9]

I'm losing the thread here. Nobody's saying that a "blow up the ship" policy actually exists, right? Just that it ought to have existed?

Well, maybe it should have. But since we've never seen such a policy in all the decades of Trek, it's a little odd to start being bothered by it not existing now.

(Did we have complaints about the premise of "the Battle"?)

 

[Refuge]

I'm losing the thread here. Nobody's saying that a "blow up the ship" policy actually exists, right? Just that it ought to have existed?

Well, maybe it should have. But since we've never seen such a policy in all the decades of Trek, it's a little odd to start being bothered by it not existing now.

(Did we have complaints about the premise of "the Battle"?)

In all the decades of Trek there has been no blow up the ship? What about the Buran and Glenn?

 

[Refuge]

Again, if it was not time-critical, then they could have disabled the power core.

It's a mess. Apparently it was not time-critical for a telescope but time critical to disable usable resources or even salvage them.

 

[fireproof78]

In all the decades of Trek there has been no blow up the ship? What about the Buran and Glenn?

That's an ovesimplification and the Buran and Glenn were differen than the Shenzou. As has been stated repeatedly.

 

[The Mighty Monkey of Mim]

That means it was functioning!

In a manner of speaking. Certainly not "fully." And if trying to take it was likely to cause it to blow up, that itself could be a reason why (1) they wouldn't try to take it, and (2) they wouldn't worry about someone else coming along to take it. (Not that I think they'd do either anyway. Just running with you for a minute here.)

In all the decades of Trek there has been no blow up the ship? What about the Buran and Glenn?

The Buran had already been boarded by the Klingons at the point Lorca blew her up (at least that's the story we've been given thus far). The Glenn was a top-secret prototype. Neither of those conditions applied to the Shenzhou.

-MMoM

 

[Megapolis]

Well, there's a whole bunch of fallacies in there that seem to suggest you're not actually familiar with the context of those stories...but even so, it still doesn't get you to there being a standing policy of destroying an already-critically disabled ship with no intruders on board after abandoning it. Especially not an old dinosaur like the Shenzhou.

Such as? The original post that brought up "The Catwalk" dialogue had the question "Standard orders?" at the end. It did not exclude the possibility of a bluff. Yet, you've already concluded that it was all a bluff in your reply to another poster, excluding the possibility that it was not.