What The Heck?....That Makes No Sense.

Or even somebody Kirk wouldn't rub the wrong way or immediately warm to him based on his personality type/reminding them of someone they liked or didn't.

 

I always thought that was strange, too, but I think the buttons on the chair arm are like the "soft keys" on our various devices now, they can program them for the occasion and the Captain is (presumably) the only authority to jettison the pod so it's his responsibility exclusively. I doubt that would be a dedicated hard wired pod eject button when they encounter those phenomena so rarely, it had to have been just for this particular mission just as activating the pod in the place would also be.

 

Even if the crawlway were in the secondary hull, there's still plenty of "in the guts" engineering space where Scotty could be to effect his repairs - the M/AM reaction equipment isn't limited to just the large tubes behind the grill (and not at all, IMHO!)
And while Drexler's diagram is certainly pretty and fun to look at, it doesn't really reflect the tech or the talk in TOS episodes very well - it's much more of a TNG retrospective viewpoint.

Two possibilities:

1. Yes, there are a limited number of maintenance rooms in the nacelle.
2. The hallway & room was at the base of the pylon and Scotty rode it all the way up to the nacelle in zero-G

 

Probably right, but that's not what the display looked like. And I think the captain should have probably just been able to say, "Jettison pod!" to any other person on the bridge manning a far more complete station. If the captain doesn't directly control phasers or the shields from his chair, the pod should be no different. It was just sort of a silly idea.

 

Probably, but Kirk still had that specialty button programmed to immediately eject the pod. When questioned about if he personally saw Kirk push the button, Spock said he was otherwise occupied. It would have been similar with others on the bridge while in the worst part of the storm, they were all loaded down.

So who exactly was Kirk supposed to issue the order to once he made the decision?

Kirk pushed the button himself.

 

I understand that. I'm saying it makes little sense for the captain to be doing something so critical himself when (e.g.) firing phasers and raising shields, arguably more critical actions, are not so handled. It's a plot hole without which there would be no story.

 

She probably was, since Starbase 11 had construction equipment and may have been a new base at the time.

I think the opposite. She recommended Cogley because she knew he'd win, and she did not want to see Kirk disgraced. She did say, "I had pretty good luck; I lost didn't I?"

I agree, it is more of a way to make the TOS ship fit fit into the TNG mental image. So, are you a fan on Engineering in the secondary or primary hulls, or nacelles, or some combination? That seems to be a hot topic lately.

 

I believe that David Goodman made the "Jettison Pod" button a plot point in The Autobiography of James T. Kirk. He had it so that

Spoiler: reason for the button placement

Chris Pike ordered that button to be a part of the Captain's chair so that nobody else ever had to take responsibility for that life and death decision.

It was a good character bit, I thought.

 

Honestly, the more you think about it, technophobe characters like Sam Cogley and Robert Picard make no real sense in the Star Trek era. They both eschew the use of technologies that have been around for literally hundreds of years in their respective eras. If you hired a lawyer in 2018 who refused to use computers for anything, he'd be eccentric at best. In the 23rd Century, he'd be downright insane. It's like Kirk hiring an Amish guy as his lawyer.

 

One thing that I liked about how Kirk was portrayed is that he was very amiable and charming. People liked him and he liked people. He could have been arrogant because of his youth and his elite position, but in fact he was almost always the opposite. Two unusual examples come to mind: the way he goes out of his way to say "Thank you" to the technician in Dagger of the Mind, and the politeness and courtesy (tempered with steel of course) he shows Thelev, an alien imposter who tried to kill him, in Journey to Babel. Heck, the Romulan Commander in Balance of Terror wanted to be friends with him.

Kirk says in Errand of Mercy that he's a "soldier, not a diplomat," but his interpersonal skills were pretty darn good. It's not hard for me to believe that he made an impression on a lot of people.

 

While it seems the writer of "Court Martial" had little idea of or concern over what he was doing, as long as it was cool, the ion pod element of it strikes me as easy to comprehend. It's just tornado hunting at its most familiar.

Kirk is clearly tasked with entering ion storms - he could easily avoid this one, but barges right in and stays in, grinding his teeth while his ship slowly falls apart. His hand hovers over a button dedicated to jettisoning a device. His underlings perform vitally important duties with extreme concentration, pressed for time; one of them is preparing the device, while another keeps flying deeper into the storm. And then Kirk decides the balance of risk vs. gain is right, and orders the carefully orchestrated show to reach its culmination point: the device is jettisoned and the ship can finally fly to safety. Alas, one of the underlings fucked it up and didn't pay heed to Kirk's final call, paying with his life. But Starfleet is fine with the casualty, as getting the device jettisoned in the center of the storm was well worth risking 430 lives and a starship.

But then it turns out Kirk was lying about the final call... Is the willful perjury for trying to hide something even more sinister? Everybody turns against the stubborn captain: his superior officer arranges for him to be accused of murder, and his old flame vectors him to a hack lawyer who is certain to lose the defense case, then proceeds to trample over the realities of Kirk's mission and present the storm hunting as an "emergency" wherein Kirk "panicked"...

Timo Saloniemi

 

Hm. I like that ingenuity by Mr. Goodman. But the use of phasers (or PTs) and the shields could mean the lives of everyone on board and those weren't hardwired to the captain's chair as far as we know.

 

Controlling the guns would be micromanaging; Kirk has people for that. But controlling the ion pod jettison is decisionmaking, and Kirk can't delegate that.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Given that Scotty mentions multiple engine rooms in The Naked Time and the numerous different configurations of the set seen on screen, I tend to think that there are at least 3 (maybe 4) around the saucer and secondary hull.
BTW, These rooms are not like "main engineering" in TMP and TNG, but more like decentralised control rooms, responsible mainly for local power systems but with the potential to cover the whole ship if required.

Nice idea, but those buttons weren't even there in the previous episode!

(episodes in production order)

IMHO, the "buttons" are reconfigurable devices which Kirk can reprogram at will.

 

I have to take issue with the design of that control panel:
http://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/1x20/Court_Martial_223.JPG

Having one single, exposed button to "Eject Pod" - and possibly kill its occupant - is an accident waiting to happen. Kirk could set his coffee down on it and BAM, Finney's dead. Surely a pair of switches with a flip-up safety cover would have been better.
On the other hand, these were apparently the only switches on the bridge that were actually labelled.

 

...It's a mission waiting to be performed. A mission specific to this adventure, mind you: the button isn't there at any other time, as far as we can tell.

But Kirk is just about to push the button when we first (and last) see it. A safety cover would not be helpful there, and would not be needed at those other times when the button does not exist.

...For their novelty and temporary nature, I guess.

Timo Saloniemi

 

No, no, I believe a lot of them had labels actually. Feek would know for certain. But in any event, the lettering from CM just looks cheap and silly.

 

Maybe it was a panel quickly inserted into the command chair for such an emergency and not there at all other times?
JB

 

They saw the storm before they flew into it to study it, breaking out the pod and getting the ejector switch ready was part of the prep of the study. The fierceness of the storm requires a split second decision, and while you can argue, with a good point, that the guns and shields are just as critical, the ship isn't in combat that often and when it is it's not planned, the storm study was planned as soon as they discovered it. So I still think with preparation, the chair button is the captains exclusive responsibility. Contrived? Possibly, but I could see it being a procedural requirement because of a previous miscommunication from a prior storm study. While the captain is undoubtedly important, he has no other duty but to assess the level of the alert and eject the pod, the science officer(s), helm, and engineers are all very busy.