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

[gottacook]

Yes, I meant the inverse of what I wrote. But the whole thing is still untenable, even assuming that phaser beams are very slow in normal time.

Let's arbitrarily say that a phaser beam travels normally at 500 meters per second (or 0.000001666 times the speed of a flashlight beam) in air, versus 850 meters per second for a rifle bullet. If the phaser beam sidestepped by Deela travels at 3 meters per second, then the acceleration is a factor of 167. Let's assume that all the activity of the Scalosians until they are foiled (setting up the deep-freeze device, Kirk and Deela's bedroom time, etc.) takes what they would perceive to be 12 hours. That would mean that Spock plays back the Scalosian distress call at various speeds, then plays back Kirk's tape (after figuring out the proper playing speed), and McCoy isolates the accelerating agent consumed by Spock, all within 4.3 minutes. That's at least as implausible as slower-than-bullets phaser beams.

 

[Timo]

We already know that phasers don't travel at the speed of light - between starships, they travel faster than light. So we can rule out them being light, or at least we can ignore any speculation of them being light as not particularly well supported.

Phaser beams have none of the qualities we would associate with light anyway. They glow intensely to the sides, which doesn't happen even to intense beams of light (they stop being intense if they scatter that much). They do this even in space devoid of a scattering medium. They splash against their target. They appear significantly slower than paintballs, as we can easily see them in flight (a pulse with front and aft ends travels through our field of vision in about three - five frames of film because that's what it takes to convey movement). And of course they achieve things light never could.

Using a stun phaser beam as our gold standard for the passage of time thus seems the least workable approach imaginable. Now if we could observe something falling... (something other than these people Kirk decks, because for some reason people move really fast here, no matter what they are doing!)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Marsden]

This is a great post, but you inadvertently reversed the time effect. You mean each minute of ship time would be 190 years for accelerated Kirk.

Also, I'm in the camp that says phaser beams do not go at the speed of light. If the fx are any indication, they're a lot slower than real world pistol bullets. This interpretation greatly eases the math problem you're exploring.

It's even worse in the later shows, like TNG on. I've often felt that a few marines with SAWs would probably be able to conquer a whole planet with how slow their phasers are.

 

[Timo]

OTOH, Marines run out of ammo in two days, tops, and that's with pro-level firing discipline which doesn't go well with the SAW thing. Phasers are forever and then some, at least when you slaughter 'em injuns on the gentle corpse-leaving setting.

And supposedly phasers can solve your line-of-sight problems by removing mountains. Now there's a what-the-heck phenomenon - why futilely blast away at folks hidden behind rocks when you could remove the rocks? VOY got that right in "Future's End" at least.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kemaiku]

It's possible that phasers are an accelerated nadion infused form of matter that stretchs out into something beam like, or a pulse, as needed but is still too heavy to go that fast. More of a fast moving (but SLT) superheated vapour than a particle stream.

 

[Forbin]

I've heard it referred to as a particle beam. I assume "particles", whatever their particles OF, travel slower than light.

 

[Timo]

We could compare a phaser beam to a stream of glowing water from a hose. The funny thing is, while the "water" moves fairly slowly from A to B, it doesn't "lag" at all when the beam is swiveled rapidly across an angle. That is, there's no curve to the phaser "stream", even though the A-to-B speed would suggest there ought to be. So it's a bit more complex than just a stream of nadions going from emitter to target, no matter how rapid..

Timo Saloniemi

 

[UssGlenn]

Maybe we should look at this from the other direction. Estimate how much time passed for Kirk and how long it was in real time, find the ratio and that will tell us how fast the phasers move. And if we are really lucky it will work with the slowed phaser effect.

 

[Kemaiku]

I've heard it referred to as a particle beam. I assume "particles", whatever their particles OF, travel slower than light.

Nearly all particles are slower than light. Bosons and fermions get a lot of attention, but they're nearly entirely massless allowing them to do so.

 

[Timo]

Maybe we should look at this from the other direction. Estimate how much time passed for Kirk and how long it was in real time, find the ratio and that will tell us how fast the phasers move. And if we are really lucky it will work with the slowed phaser effect.

The thing is, we can't readily tell. If the intent was to impregnate Deela, and this happened in the approximate human fashion, Kirk might have had to wait for weeks, possibly even months, to get it right. And note that the Scalosians were about to freeze the crew for preservation, when for all practical purposes the crew was already frozen to them - suggesting they had really long-term plans and were in no hurry with anything, including Kirk.

So the Kirk Yardstick allows for at least an order of magnitude of leeway with our time estimates. Which is already better than the nothing we get from stun phaser blast speeds. Can we do any better?

There's the nearly continuous action surrounding Scotty's standing in the transporter doorway, seemingly immobile - but this would be skewed if Scotty indeed froze with surprise when entering, by his own time standards.

Then there's the time it would take for McCoy to come up with a cure. But perhaps it was a no-brainer all along, and he just needed to query the computer and press the synthesizer button?

What else can we use?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[gottacook]

If the intent was to impregnate Deela, and this happened in the approximate human fashion, Kirk might have had to wait for weeks, possibly even months, to get it right.

There's nothing in the episode to suggest that he was hoping to get her pregnant, despite her earlier statement that the Scalosian men were sterile and therefore the women had to seek outsider mates. I imagine it was just a dalliance of 1 to 2 hours at most. Perhaps she was fertile and knew it. Maybe Scalosian women are always fertile.

(On the other hand, it would have been amusing for the script to have explicitly indicated that weeks had passed, during which Kirk and Deela had been trying for a while without success, and are now starting to resent each other.)

Of course we can leave all this aside and assume that installing the machinery to turn the entire ship into a "gigantic deep freeze" would take the longest of any Scalosian action.

 

[Maurice]

It's possible that phasers are an accelerated nadion infused form of matter....

Put. The. TNG. Techobabble. Down.

 

[Phaser Two]

There's nothing in the episode to suggest that he was hoping to get her pregnant, despite her earlier statement that the Scalosian men were sterile and therefore the women had to seek outsider mates. I imagine it was just a dalliance of 1 to 2 hours at most. Perhaps she was fertile and knew it. Maybe Scalosian women are always fertile.

(On the other hand, it would have been amusing for the script to have explicitly indicated that weeks had passed, during which Kirk and Deela had been trying for a while without success, and are now starting to resent each other.)

Of course we can leave all this aside and assume that installing the machinery to turn the entire ship into a "gigantic deep freeze" would take the longest of any Scalosian action.

As nearly every Wink of an Eye discussion does, this takes me back to wondering whether any novelist ever went back and explored what happened to the Scalosians. Kirk rather clearly had some quality time with Deela - incidentally there's a similarly suggestive scene in the Mark of Gideon between him and Odona - and it would have been interesting if he left a human-Scalosian son or daughter behind.

 

[johnnybear]

I think in Wink of An eye they got the time thing wrong! I mean Kirk was ambling his way around the Enterprise but Scotty was still stuck between those two half open doors for a little too long, especially when we saw Spock and McCoy working on a formula in the laboratory!
JB

 

[Phaser Two]

I think in Wink of An eye they got the time thing wrong! I mean Kirk was ambling his way around the Enterprise but Scotty was still stuck between those two half open doors for a little too long, especially when we saw Spock and McCoy working on a formula in the laboratory!
JB

Even better, JB, there's no reason whatsoever for Spock to order Scotty to the transporter room! None. I think that was a little sleight-of-hand on the part of the writers, who needed the transporter room doors to be open and to have someone for Kirk to talk to when he decelerated.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Even better, JB, there's no reason whatsoever for Spock to order Scotty to the transporter room! None. I think that was a little sleight-of-hand on the part of the writers, who needed the transporter room doors to be open and to have someone for Kirk to talk to when he decelerated.

Another little trick was that accelerated Kirk left the bridge by walking off camera, and then you hear footsteps seemingly going down a flight of stairs.

 

[Kemaiku]

Put. The. TNG. Techobabble. Down.

They weren't treated that way fully until closer to DS9/VGR.

 

[Phaser Two]

Another little trick was that accelerated Kirk left the bridge by walking off camera, and then you hear footsteps seemingly going down a flight of stairs.

Yup!! I've been citing that as evidence that the bridge had more than one exit (along with Khan saying "I've jammed up your exit routes," plural) for years!

 

[Mytran]

Yup!! I've been citing that as evidence that the bridge had more than one exit (along with Khan saying "I've jammed up your exit routes," plural) for years!

Yep, it was right next to Spock's console, as shown here:

Of course, the console next to Spock has to retract and slide away, but since no-one really ever uses that station is a nought but a minor inconvenience...

 

[alchemist]

Even better, JB, there's no reason whatsoever for Spock to order Scotty to the transporter room! None. I think that was a little sleight-of-hand on the part of the writers, who needed the transporter room doors to be open and to have someone for Kirk to talk to when he decelerated.

The writers actually included a scene in their script to deal with the door situation but it was not included in the final print. See the bottom of this article for details.