What's With Enteprise-Ds starboard power coupling?

[Knight Templar]

On ST:TNG, I've lost count of the episodes in which the Enterprise takes a few weapons hits and the "starboard power coupling is down".

Just off hand I can think of "Yesterday's Enterprise", "The Wounded", "The Defector", and I think "Rascals" and a few more.

Why was it always the starboard power coupling taking damage? Why not the port power coupling?

And why if this particular power coupling kept taking battle damage didn't La Forge add some extra shielding to protect it?

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

Because the Klingons are always off the starboard bow.

"Again with the Klingons..."

 

[-SS-]

And why if this particular power coupling kept taking battle damage didn't La Forge add some extra shielding to protect it?

"A study had been made of the damage to returning aircraft and it had been proposed that armor be added to those areas that showed the most damage. Wald's unique insight was that the holes from flak and bullets on the bombers that did return represented the areas where they were able to take damage. The data showed that there were similar patches on each returning B-29 where there was no damage from enemy fire, leading Wald to conclude that these patches were the weak spots that must be reinforced.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald#cite_note-Mangel1984-2" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald

 

[sojourner]

^Hey! non sequitur!!

 

[Psion]

^Hey! non sequitur!!

No ... not quite a non sequitur ... just lacking a proper introduction and thus leaving us peons the task of figuring out what -SS- meant. I believe the intent was to point out that if the Enterprise kept having trouble with the starboard power coupling, yet continued to survive combat, then enhanced shielding around the device would be wasteful.

Either that, or the intent was to tell Knight Templar to go back and re-take his Operational Research class.

 

[MacLeod]

^I got the meaning, but then again I was already familiar with idea that you needed to strengthen armour in areas where damage wasn't. As if a plane returned with damage it showed it could take damage there and still return safely. So the logical conclusion would be. It was the areas that showed no damage were the weak spots as planes that recieved damage there did not return home.

 

[Santaman]

Armor good.. more armor better..

As for Ent-D, either its a "lucky shot" even't, a coincidence or writers deciding that its always the starboard one getting damaged.

 

[-SS-]

Sorry if my post was unclear. I was having a hard time figuring out how to word the idea. But yes, Psion and MacLeod got it.

 

[blssdwlf]

In the cases of "Rascals" and "Yesterday's Enterprise" the loss of the starboard power coupling appeared to contribute to their loss. The Sutherland, a Nebula-class, in "Redemption" suffered a failure in the starboard power coupling as well. It might be just a part that is predisposed to fail on that generation of ships

 

[Crazy Eddie]

^Hey! non sequitur!!

No ... not quite a non sequitur ... just lacking a proper introduction and thus leaving us peons the task of figuring out what -SS- meant. I believe the intent was to point out that if the Enterprise kept having trouble with the starboard power coupling, yet continued to survive combat, then enhanced shielding around the device would be wasteful.

Either that, or the intent was to tell Knight Templar to go back and re-take his Operational Research class.

An old instructor of mine once wrote a letter to the Chicago Metra complaining that his home neighborhood was severely under-served by the commutor train; for some reason, the Metra trains no longer stopped at the local station, so residents had to either drive four miles to the next station or use a PACE bus to the main transit hub and then transfer from there. He wrote to Metra that something like 3000 people commuted downtown every day and it was in everyone's best interests to resume stops at the otherwise disused train station.

Metra wrote him back saying that one of their consultants had recently visited the station in question and noticed that there didn't seem to be a lot of people waiting at the station for the Metra train, and furthermore, according to their research, a very small number of people from his community actually used the Metra train every day. Based on this, the letter said, there was clearly no need to reopen the old Metra station.

Over the years, I've cultivated the opinion that "research" or "scientific study" is really just a marketting tool that allows smart people to justify things they've figured out to stupid people who otherwise wouldn't get it. The problem is, stupid people don't realize this, and make the mistake of actually using research studies to support a highly erroneous conclusion.

 

[Knight Templar]

I remember something now. IIRC, it wasn't uncommon when a Star Trek episode in the modern era to be written that the writer would need some technobabble thrown in to explain something.

And if a writer came upon need the terminology in their script, the writer would simply write "tech" in the script and someone in production would fill in later with the appropriate reference.

I'm wondering if this was why the same "starboard power coupling down" was thrown in. A writer needed to indicate damage to the Enterprise and the person who inserted the proper tech reference simply used the same terms.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Probably because the person who filled in the [tech] tags had a list of random technobabble phrases sitting on a desk somewhere and would pick one at random to fill that space. Most likely, depending on the context, he would either take one from the "ship parts" category or "space anomaly" category and slap it in there at random.

 

[B.J.]

^Possible, but some of the guys behind the scenes actually put in the time to try to be consistent. I'd wager that it was a conscious decision on someone's part to constantly have the starboard power coupling go out.

 

[Knight Templar]

^Possible, but some of the guys behind the scenes actually put in the time to try to be consistent. I'd wager that it was a conscious decision on someone's part to constantly have the starboard power coupling go out.

Kind of like in TNG they liked to throw the number "47" into the dialogue as much as possible because it was rumored to be "lucky".

 

[Forbin]

I laughed out loud when I saw this thread. I've noticed the same thing and started rolling my eyes every time it happened. I even put it on a T-shirt back in the 90s.

Check the lower right corner:

 

[Santaman]

^^^

 

[Albertese]

I wonder if maybe the starboard power coupling was designed to fail, like a fuse, to prevent cascading damage to other more important equipment.

But why the portside one never went out (or even if there is a portside one) I couldn't say...

--Alex

 

[Crazy Eddie]

There is no portside power coupling.

Also, there is no women's bathroom.

 

[Blip]

And in the men's bathroom there is no toilet.

 

[Timo]

No reason why the ship ought to be symmetric from the inside. The starboard coupling could handle "combat-related" loads while the port one could be dedicated to loads not encountered in combat.

Let's not forget the real reason: that "port power" sounds silly to the Hollywood ear in a way that "starboard power" does not. Remember, these people hesitated with promoting Kira because they thought "Colonel Kira" would sound too silly - or too similar to "Colonel Klink"...

Or, rather, let's ignore that one - but let's instead consider that for the very same reason (and I do use the word loosely), the enemy always indeed attacks from the starboard rather than port bows.

Also, typically our hero ship faces to camera right (because that's "forward-looking"), so the enemy sits to the right and faces camera left. Which means that if he's supposed to be offset to our heroes' starboard, he's actually closer to the camera than the hero ship is. Which nicely explains why those Klingon BoPs tend to look bigger than they ought to!

Timo Saloniemi