The Communicator
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Captain X
Rear Admiral
Why would they? They think their enemy has produced vastly suerior technology and was testing their prototypes within the heart of their country, and that it was mere chance that this was uncovered. Why wouldn't they strike before this advanced technology had a chance to give their enemy an overwhelming edge?
actually the city evidently was on the border and the other side had already made claims to the city.
taking that into consideration they would possibly look at the whole thing as a spy mission in preperation for an invasion.
add in that they are told that malcolm and archer are military,, the leader even makes note that this was unusual for the other side to be turning military into spies and not just that super soldiers.
taking that into consideration they would possibly look at the whole thing as a spy mission in preperation for an invasion.
add in that they are told that malcolm and archer are military,, the leader even makes note that this was unusual for the other side to be turning military into spies and not just that super soldiers.
Sorry about being anal-retentive, but
1) I take it you meant "above that of human life", and
2) "no man left behind" has always meant "we promise to get your son's corpse back after we have expended him in a futile attack".
The mission comes first, protection of life second. Of course, if the mission is to protect the planet from alien influences (a goal ill fitting ENT), our heroes screwed up big time from the get-go. Yet if the mission is to prevent the planet from gaining Earth technology (a perfectly plausible goal for the UESF, and one that makes dramatic sense), they again screwed up, but perhaps not quite so badly.
Of course, it's only T'Pol who says "It's crucial we retrieve the technology - we can't risk contaminating a pre-warp culture". Whether our heroes buy into that logic is not established; they may proceed with the recovery mission for completely different and far more human-rational reasons. None of them echoes T'Pol's party line when choosing to go down to the surface, even when none of them actually bothers to contradict it, either.
It's only Archer, sucking up to T'Pol after she rescues them, who expresses the sentiment that the cultural contamination of the natives would have mattered one iota. It's not the sentiment he held when flying down to the planet in the first place.
Not that this would make the episode any better as such. But it does play out differently when you don't watch it with the (IMHO false) expectation that Archer and Starfleet are acting out of Prime Directive concerns.
Timo Saloniemi
Captain X
Rear Admiral
No, having served in the military, I can tell you that it means your comrades will do everything they can to get you out alive. It also means that if you are killed, that they'll still do everything they can to get you home, but the point is to save your fellow soldier/airman/sailor/Marine before he or she is killed.
Not at the expense of getting the mission completed, though. So to say that UESF would not believe in "no man left behind" when they choose to expend personnel is basically to say that no military mission should be launched in the first place. Personnel are protected whenever possible - which won't be particularly often in the sort of "special ops" missions that Starfleet landing parties perform.
Timo Saloniemi
Timo Saloniemi
Wow. I'm always amazed at other people's takes on an episode. I don't think Archer was sucking up to T'Pol. The one thing we know Archer doesn't do is suck up.
T'Pol has definitely influenced him though. She did that by being right multiple times and providing a way of seeing things he's not used to. Archer has also made some mistakes and is learning from those as well.
I think when Archer got there and understood the dilemma he re-evaluated and made another decision. From season 1 they continued to show how Archer's changing his views on the Vulcan's theory of non-involvement. It starts pretty heavy in Dear Doctor when he condemns a species to die (if you want to look at it harshly) and seems solidified when Trip tries to save the co-genitor and Archer refuses to give Charlie asylum.
It's nice progression and starts the prime directive theory -- the one that Archer hated in the beginning of the show and why he blamed the Vulcans for holding back technology - rather nicely. It's also irony.
Agreed on a lot of that. I rather think Archer went down without concern to cultural contamination or any such nonsense, simply to retrieve a piece of military hardware that shouldn't fall into the hands of a potential enemy. He came up a somewhat changed man, having listened to things getting way out of hand when Reed spun his story.
It sounds quite a plausible junction for Archer to develop these sensibilities. It would be a near-literal deathbed conversion for him - a defining moment in life, certainly, especially considering that his personal decision had placed him at mortal danger via a "cultural mechanism" for the very first time here.
Timo Saloniemi
It sounds quite a plausible junction for Archer to develop these sensibilities. It would be a near-literal deathbed conversion for him - a defining moment in life, certainly, especially considering that his personal decision had placed him at mortal danger via a "cultural mechanism" for the very first time here.
Timo Saloniemi
Captain X
Rear Admiral
I'm aware of that. I'm also saying that placing something like a communicator above the lives of people is bass ackwards. I'm also saying its an example of how screwy the TNG and onward interpretation of the prime directive is. All that we have on Star Trek anymore is this insane "don't contaminate the pre-warp culture of the week" tripe anymore, without any real thought about it. Once Archer and Malcolm had been captured, the shit had officially hit the fan, and all that would be left would be to get your people out of there because the "mission" had already failed.
I just feel that this was what was motivating our heroes, throughout the episode. Very down-to-Earth stuff through and through. First, spy on these odd aliens. Second, retrieve forgotten piece of advanced tech so that the enemy won't have it. Third, extract captured comrades.
T'Pol just put a Vulcan spin on it all. And since she happened to be in temporary command for much of the mission, it seemed that the crew did what it did for Vulcan reasons. But in the end, this politruk could blow her hot air all she wanted to, yet still conduct a mission compatible with sound Earth principles and motivations - and it would only be after the action that the human heroes would start to consider the possibility of coming to think about what just happened in Vulcan/TNG terms.
Timo Saloniemi
T'Pol just put a Vulcan spin on it all. And since she happened to be in temporary command for much of the mission, it seemed that the crew did what it did for Vulcan reasons. But in the end, this politruk could blow her hot air all she wanted to, yet still conduct a mission compatible with sound Earth principles and motivations - and it would only be after the action that the human heroes would start to consider the possibility of coming to think about what just happened in Vulcan/TNG terms.
Timo Saloniemi
Hardly- look for example modern cell phones. If someone gave one to an engineer before the microchip revolution it could change the course of human history. From LCD screens to microchips to signal receiver/transmitter protocol to digital cameras, one modern cell phone would give comparatively extremely advanced technology where nothing already exists in comparison.
Oh, I don't know about that particular example. Integrated circuit technology is virtually impossible to reverse-engineer if one doesn't understand what an IC is and how it is put together. Pre-1950s researchers would utterly lack the tools for analyzing the structure and chemical makeup of an IC as compact as those found in modern cell phones, and could not make heads or tails out of the excessively complex electrical properties of the stack.
With more modern materials diagnostics tools, a 1980s person who knows what a semiconductor IC is might be able to gain technological knowledge from a 1990s chip and reap great profit. Possibly Henry Starling could have done something like that in the 1980s to the future technology, but he needn't - the technology would interactively explain itself. A mobile phone doesn't interactively describe its construction principles, or even particularly well assist a novice in operating itself.
Some things might be reverse-engineered without 1980s-vintage diagnostics tools. For example, medieval engineers could just plausibly decipher the secrets of an assault rifle, stretching the metallurgy of the era to its very limits. But ICs are at an annoying threshold that makes reverse-engineering virtually impossible for anybody with less advanced tech than that required for making the ICs in the first place.
As for "The Communicator", the natives might plausibly have had sufficient diagnostic means to decipher ICs. And the transtators and whatnot in Reed's walkie-talkie need not be any more difficult to unveil than today's ICs, in terms of structural-chemical-electric-functional analysis. Whether they feature advanced physics beyond our 21st century knowledge is another matter... I don't think those communicators had any sort of FTL or subspace abilities.
Timo Saloniemi
With more modern materials diagnostics tools, a 1980s person who knows what a semiconductor IC is might be able to gain technological knowledge from a 1990s chip and reap great profit. Possibly Henry Starling could have done something like that in the 1980s to the future technology, but he needn't - the technology would interactively explain itself. A mobile phone doesn't interactively describe its construction principles, or even particularly well assist a novice in operating itself.
Some things might be reverse-engineered without 1980s-vintage diagnostics tools. For example, medieval engineers could just plausibly decipher the secrets of an assault rifle, stretching the metallurgy of the era to its very limits. But ICs are at an annoying threshold that makes reverse-engineering virtually impossible for anybody with less advanced tech than that required for making the ICs in the first place.
As for "The Communicator", the natives might plausibly have had sufficient diagnostic means to decipher ICs. And the transtators and whatnot in Reed's walkie-talkie need not be any more difficult to unveil than today's ICs, in terms of structural-chemical-electric-functional analysis. Whether they feature advanced physics beyond our 21st century knowledge is another matter... I don't think those communicators had any sort of FTL or subspace abilities.
Timo Saloniemi
Not necessarily. Time delay to the Moon and back is about a second; the typical stock shot of the NX-01 suggests a distance one-thousandth of that, an orbital altitude of a couple of hundred kilometers at most. No time delay would be discernible.
Subspace would come to play if the ship were on the other side of the planet and "in shadow" in terms of conventional radio waves. But it is just as possible that the ship hovers over the landing party zone of operations, in which case no planet-piercing super-rays are needed for communications.
If Reed's device did produce such rays, though, it would be a major breakthrough for the natives...
Timo Saloniemi
Subspace would come to play if the ship were on the other side of the planet and "in shadow" in terms of conventional radio waves. But it is just as possible that the ship hovers over the landing party zone of operations, in which case no planet-piercing super-rays are needed for communications.
If Reed's device did produce such rays, though, it would be a major breakthrough for the natives...
Timo Saloniemi
Captain X
Rear Admiral
If they could even figure out how it worked. Like you pointed out, I could probably take my Dell minitower back to the '50s and no one would be able to figure out how it worked because no one would know about integrated circuits. Hell I bet even now, if we could theoretically get a hold of a communicator like that, I bet it would take us quite a while to reverse engineer it, and even then it's possible that we might not be able to make one of our own because of lack of materials, or means of manufacture.
We're past a pretty important threshold, though: we can analyze the structure of the device basically down to the last atom, at least if we are allowed to be destructive about it.
We might not understand the operating principles. But we would be massively advantaged over any preceding generation of reverse-engineers, because we already basically have infinite-resolution analysis down pat.
It might well be that we could not manufacture sufficiently small detail or sufficiently complex structures right away, but we would understand that detail on the basic chemical level. And we would know what exact leaps of manufacturing technology to make in order to reach the goal. And it seems unlikely that materials would exist that cannot be manufactured today, given enough impetus and patience.
Timo Saloniemi
We might not understand the operating principles. But we would be massively advantaged over any preceding generation of reverse-engineers, because we already basically have infinite-resolution analysis down pat.
It might well be that we could not manufacture sufficiently small detail or sufficiently complex structures right away, but we would understand that detail on the basic chemical level. And we would know what exact leaps of manufacturing technology to make in order to reach the goal. And it seems unlikely that materials would exist that cannot be manufactured today, given enough impetus and patience.
Timo Saloniemi
The main thing that bothered me about this episode is that it didn't do much for me emotionally. It failed to pull me into its storyline. Plus, that the aliens could freaking speak English with no universal translator was enfuriating. No excuse (don't say other Trek shows failed on this too. While true. the writers should have learned by no. Instead they keep making the same mistake.
Stay away from storylines that REQUIRE subtle, nuanced inter-species dialogue with no understood way of translating languages!
I didn't mind "Dawn", for just the reason that Trip and his alien frenemy communicated as much through gestures (up to and including bashing each other swiftly about the head and neck) and emotions as through language. THAT was far more realistic. even though it cribbed HEAVILY from "Enemy Mine".
Pensive said:
Tom Riker said:
Any episode with a hot alien chick is a good episode
So then you admit to liking ENT!!! (T'Pol=hot alien chick)
I do like Enterprise. I like all Star Trek.
The hot alien chick makes it even better
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