Why did Kirk let Chekov "Man the Weapons Console" in TWOK

[f14peter]

I was surprised the Weapons Console was not being used until Chekov got there- while Sulu had some controls for the weapons the specialized console had more and better sensors. I know Kirk wanted Sulu at the helm during the battle, but in a fight like that you would think having every advantage you could get.
Chekov was very unsteady and probably had delayed reaction speed as well, but there should have been somebody on the ship that could have taken his place.
Having a few people with communicators looking out hte windows for the Reliant would have helped also...

I would go so far as to submit that the weapons console was not to be manned for the training cruise. Thus Chekov's skills, even if he was of somewhat diminished capacity, would be welcome.

Remember that during the "prefix code" scene, Spock went over to the weapons console to enter the prefix numbers. Of course, nothing to suggest one way or the other that there was a trainee Spock had to move out of the way, but at the very least there was no fully trained officer already there.

 

[Richard Baker]

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Having a few people with communicators looking out hte windows for the Reliant would have helped also...

I don't see how. That'd only work at point blank range, and at such a range, the viewscreen worked just fine, too.

Timo Saloniemi

I do remember one scene where the two ships were nose to nose before the flickering viewscreen let them see each other. Both fired but almost collided they were so close. Spotters would have helped then- our view was behind the Enterprise and the Reliant was clearly visible, the windows along the front of the saucer would have had a better view.
The Prime universe seems overly reliant on electronics- a dual purpose window/HUD like on the NuE makes a lot of sense at times.

 

[Shat Happens]

commandos? whenever Star Trek had any commandos?

Don't be so literal. My point was that maybe knowing there was a powerful destructive device on board maybe it would have been a good idea to send over an armed boarding party to find genesis and secure it. Instead of just assuming "Well Khan's dead I'm sure, and even if he isn't I'm sure he won't activate genesis knowing that it's over for him and he has nothing to lose now....He certanily hasn't shown over the film he's complete crazy and obsessed or anything like that."

I swear Spock's head would explode if he read this board. "commandos, the enterprise doesn't carry commandos so your whole idea of securing genesis with any kind of group you can muster up is wrong"

Well, if the sensors couldn't work well enough for a weapons lock, I'd be even less confident about a transporter lock. And I think we can infer from the pacing and dialogue that there'd be even less time to send over a boarding party via shuttle (or even that fancy-schmancy space suit sequence in STID).

You guys forgot the dialogue just after Enterprise blew Reliant's engine off?

KIRK
Uhura, send to Commander, Reliant:
prepare to be boarded.

UHURA
Aye, sir.
Commander, Reliant, this is
Enterprise. Surrender and prepare
to be boarded.

Seems to me Kirk did exactly what you are saying he should have done. Only once Spock and Marcus announced the Genesis wave Kirk had to abandon that plan.

 

[urbandefault]

It's amazing to me that Trek Cons aren't riddled with slapfights.

 

[SchwEnt]

As first officer of the Reliant, I'd guess Chekov would have specific and detailed knowledge of the ship, perhaps very useful in a battle where they're trying to defeat said ship.

OTOH, I always thought Chekov would have some mixed feelings about destroying the Reliant. He was first officer, that was his ship, now he's the one blowing it up.

Sure, it's worth it to stop Khan and all that. But still... easy come, easy go?

 

[DonIago]

I figured anyone engaging in a slapfight at a Trek con was phasered out of existence...

The weapons console is manned through the time of Khan's surprise attack, as there's an injured guy shown sitting at it who's shown earlier in a less injured state during the KM scenario.

I agree with Cyke about the advisability of running the low-powered Enterprise's transporters while in the middle of a nebula that's wreaking havoc with conventional sensors.

 

[EnriqueH]

Kirk was being a LEADER.

After years in the captain's chair and in leaderships roles, Kirk knew that the best thing for Chekov was to TRUST HIM to be the man he is.

With that responsibility, Kirk was basically telling Chekov not only that he trusted him, but that he knew that the Ceti Eel was what made Chekov act the way he did earlier in the film.

By saying, "Man, the weapons console." Kirk was forgiving him, absolving him and saying everything is going to be ok.

And Chekov came through.

He had to take a certain risk, but as Kirk said, risk is part of sitting in that chair.

I can understand certain criticisms, but not this one.

 

[cgervasi]

Don't forget that the majority of the crew is cadets originally on a training cruise. So it's possible there are no commando units aboard, no one more qualified than Chekov at tactical, and other questions that might arise.

Right. Kirk told Starfleet all they had was a boatload of children.

 

[Cyke101]

Don't be so literal. My point was that maybe knowing there was a powerful destructive device on board maybe it would have been a good idea to send over an armed boarding party to find genesis and secure it. Instead of just assuming "Well Khan's dead I'm sure, and even if he isn't I'm sure he won't activate genesis knowing that it's over for him and he has nothing to lose now....He certanily hasn't shown over the film he's complete crazy and obsessed or anything like that."

I swear Spock's head would explode if he read this board. "commandos, the enterprise doesn't carry commandos so your whole idea of securing genesis with any kind of group you can muster up is wrong"

Well, if the sensors couldn't work well enough for a weapons lock, I'd be even less confident about a transporter lock. And I think we can infer from the pacing and dialogue that there'd be even less time to send over a boarding party via shuttle (or even that fancy-schmancy space suit sequence in STID).

You guys forgot the dialogue just after Enterprise blew Reliant's engine off?

KIRK
Uhura, send to Commander, Reliant:
prepare to be boarded.

UHURA
Aye, sir.
Commander, Reliant, this is
Enterprise. Surrender and prepare
to be boarded.

Seems to me Kirk did exactly what you are saying he should have done. Only once Spock and Marcus announced the Genesis wave Kirk had to abandon that plan.

Could have boarded via shuttle and their big windshields. But I'd still posit that if they couldn't even look through the viewscreen, then transporters would have been risky at best, suicide at worst, because sensors were down.

 

[enterprisecvn65]

Don't be so literal. My point was that maybe knowing there was a powerful destructive device on board maybe it would have been a good idea to send over an armed boarding party to find genesis and secure it. Instead of just assuming "Well Khan's dead I'm sure, and even if he isn't I'm sure he won't activate genesis knowing that it's over for him and he has nothing to lose now....He certanily hasn't shown over the film he's complete crazy and obsessed or anything like that."

I swear Spock's head would explode if he read this board. "commandos, the enterprise doesn't carry commandos so your whole idea of securing genesis with any kind of group you can muster up is wrong"

Well, if the sensors couldn't work well enough for a weapons lock, I'd be even less confident about a transporter lock. And I think we can infer from the pacing and dialogue that there'd be even less time to send over a boarding party via shuttle (or even that fancy-schmancy space suit sequence in STID).

You guys forgot the dialogue just after Enterprise blew Reliant's engine off?

KIRK
Uhura, send to Commander, Reliant:
prepare to be boarded.

UHURA
Aye, sir.
Commander, Reliant, this is
Enterprise. Surrender and prepare
to be boarded.

Seems to me Kirk did exactly what you are saying he should have done. Only once Spock and Marcus announced the Genesis wave Kirk had to abandon that plan.

That's a good point about Uhura saying being ready to be boarded, so I guess there was a plan in place.

To me it's more a matter of urgency, it would seem logical to me that knowing there is this immensely powerful weapon aboard Reliant and Khan has clearly demonstrated his crazy obsession with revenge has no bounds, it's not that far fetched that, besides the reason of getting the weapon back quickly, Khan would be likely to activate it as a last resort to fulfill his quest for revenge if it came to the point where he had lost and had no other way.

So I'm just saying it would have made sense to have a boarding party assembled, armed and ready ahead of time and the instant Reliant's warp engine was blown off and she was no longer a threat then BOOM get that group over to the Reliant as quickly as humanly possible, whether it be by transporter if it worked of by shuttle craft. Don't assume Khan must be dead and waste precious minutes by having Uhura radio over and over to Reliant surrender and prepare to be boarded. Would they have made it in time to secure Genesis, maybe not, but you don't dick around in a situation like that at all. If Khan didn't have Genesis then sure you could be more casual about the process but the element of the Genesis torpedo changes the whole dynamic of the situation and makes it IMPERATIVE they take steps to get over and get it secured as fast as possible. So Kirk's first order after Reliant was disabled beyond repair should have to been "Launch or beam Genesis recovery team now!" not to Uhura to radio surrender and boarding insturctions

 

[DonIago]

Given how little time passes between the crippling of Reliant and Khan's irreversible triggering of Genesis (it's the first thing we see him do), I think if Kirk had sent a team to Reliant by shuttle the only result would have been a dead team.

Nevermind that Reliant might still have possessed the ability to shoot down any incoming shuttle.

Which raises a good point: evidently transporters were still functional, Our Heroes did know that Reliant's weapons capability was moot, or Kirk was bluffing when he told Reliant to prepare to be boarded.

 

[Cyke101]

Given how little time passes between the crippling of Reliant and Khan's irreversible triggering of Genesis (it's the first thing we see him do), I think if Kirk had sent a team to Reliant by shuttle the only result would have been a dead team.

Not disputing that. I'm just saying, Khan activated the device *after* Uhura sent that hail. Even if he didn't activate the device, I would imagine the primary way to board in that specific instance would be shuttle.

Of course, my original point was that sending over anyone in hindsight would have been moot anyway precisely because the sensors were down AND there would be no time for shuttles anyway.

 

[enterprisecvn65]

Given how little time passes between the crippling of Reliant and Khan's irreversible triggering of Genesis (it's the first thing we see him do), I think if Kirk had sent a team to Reliant by shuttle the only result would have been a dead team.

Nevermind that Reliant might still have possessed the ability to shoot down any incoming shuttle.

Which raises a good point: evidently transporters were still functional, Our Heroes did know that Reliant's weapons capability was moot, or Kirk was bluffing when he told Reliant to prepare to be boarded.

Yeah but as it's been mentioned a few times on Star Trek, and shown many times in reality, part of the responsibility of command is ordering men and/or women in to situations that have a high likelyhood of them dying. Sure Khan activated the device pretty quickly and a boarding team probably couldn't have stopped it but Kirk had no way of knowing if Khan was alive or not and regardless priority#1 should have been getting Genesis secured as fast as humanly possible just because of the sheer magnitude of the weapon. Maybe Khan was dead, maybe he was knocked out, maybe he was alive but couldn't move or he could only move so slowly it would have taken him 10 minutes to crawl over to the control panel and activate instead of the 1 or 2 it did.

The point is when something that powerful is not under your control, priority #1 is to get it back in your control and there is ZERO time to mess around. If Khan activates the device before they get there and the Enterprise has to flee and leave the team behind, well it was pretty much assumed that everyone was going to die regardless because noone knew Spock would sacrifice himself to save the Enterprise, so that's a non issue. If the Reliant has a functioning phaser and blows the shuttlecraft away.....well that sucks but it's a risk that they had to take. Everytime a flight of B-17's lifted off to bomb Germany the ground commanders knew some of them wouldn't make it back and men would die, but the importance of defeating the Third Reich took precedence.

To put it in real life perspective say there was a terrorist group that had a nuke in a wearhouse in NYC. And somehow the military was able to strike from outside in a way where they assumed everyone was dead or incapacitated. They aren't going to sit around with a bullhorn radioing instructions to surrender and come up with your hands up. They are going to send in a recovery team the instant they can, if some guy sets off the bomb or they get mowed down by a survivor with an AK47 before they get there......well that pretty much sucks but there are no guarantees in life, but the stakes are too high NOT to respond immediately.

 

[enterprisecvn65]

commandos? whenever Star Trek had any commandos?

Don't be so literal. My point was that maybe knowing there was a powerful destructive device on board maybe it would have been a good idea to send over an armed boarding party to find genesis and secure it. Instead of just assuming "Well Khan's dead I'm sure, and even if he isn't I'm sure he won't activate genesis knowing that it's over for him and he has nothing to lose now....He certanily hasn't shown over the film he's complete crazy and obsessed or anything like that."

I swear Spock's head would explode if he read this board. "commandos, the enterprise doesn't carry commandos so your whole idea of securing genesis with any kind of group you can muster up is wrong"

Well, if the sensors couldn't work well enough for a weapons lock, I'd be even less confident about a transporter lock. And I think we can infer from the pacing and dialogue that there'd be even less time to send over a boarding party via shuttle (or even that fancy-schmancy space suit sequence in STID).

Well we could argue whether or not the transporters would have worked until we are blue in the face. Kirk seemed to think they did when he said "We'll beam it aboard and stop it" once Genesis had been triggered. Of course in the panic of he moment he may have forgotten they were in a nebula and couldn't use the transporters or transporting it might have been so unsafe it would have detonated it.

But it's no big secret that ST has a history of playing fast and loose with what does and doesn't work in certain situations. I remember many episodes where some person or force caused a certain system or systems to fail, usually the weapons, but other electronic devices like transporters, sensors, tricorders, the ship's engines and even the lights seemed to be unaffected. So it's not beyond the pale for the other systems to be ineffective by the nebula but not the transporters because they operate on a different frequency or something like that

 

[DonIago]

Given how little time passes between the crippling of Reliant and Khan's irreversible triggering of Genesis (it's the first thing we see him do), I think if Kirk had sent a team to Reliant by shuttle the only result would have been a dead team.

Nevermind that Reliant might still have possessed the ability to shoot down any incoming shuttle.

Which raises a good point: evidently transporters were still functional, Our Heroes did know that Reliant's weapons capability was moot, or Kirk was bluffing when he told Reliant to prepare to be boarded.

Yeah but as it's been mentioned a few times on Star Trek, and shown many times in reality, part of the responsibility of command is ordering men and/or women in to situations that have a high likelyhood of them dying. Sure Khan activated the device pretty quickly and a boarding team probably couldn't have stopped it but Kirk had no way of knowing if Khan was alive or not and regardless priority#1 should have been getting Genesis secured as fast as humanly possible just because of the sheer magnitude of the weapon. Maybe Khan was dead, maybe he was knocked out, maybe he was alive but couldn't move or he could only move so slowly it would have taken him 10 minutes to crawl over to the control panel and activate instead of the 1 or 2 it did.

The point is when something that powerful is not under your control, priority #1 is to get it back in your control and there is ZERO time to mess around. If Khan activates the device before they get there and the Enterprise has to flee and leave the team behind, well it was pretty much assumed that everyone was going to die regardless because noone knew Spock would sacrifice himself to save the Enterprise, so that's a non issue. If the Reliant has a functioning phaser and blows the shuttlecraft away.....well that sucks but it's a risk that they had to take. Everytime a flight of B-17's lifted off to bomb Germany the ground commanders knew some of them wouldn't make it back and men would die, but the importance of defeating the Third Reich took precedence.

To put it in real life perspective say there was a terrorist group that had a nuke in a wearhouse in NYC. And somehow the military was able to strike from outside in a way where they assumed everyone was dead or incapacitated. They aren't going to sit around with a bullhorn radioing instructions to surrender and come up with your hands up. They are going to send in a recovery team the instant they can, if some guy sets off the bomb or they get mowed down by a survivor with an AK47 before they get there......well that pretty much sucks but there are no guarantees in life, but the stakes are too high NOT to respond immediately.

You're still exaggerating the amount of time that I believe occurs between the crippling of Reliant and the triggering of Genesis.

Enterprise cripples Reliant.
Kirk orders Uhura to contact them.
Khan activates Genesis.
Spock detects that Genesis has been triggered.
David tells Kirk that the process is irreversible.

That all happens within less than 5 minutes in the film.
Now for all we know Kirk was about to handle the boarding of Reliant when Spock detected that Genesis had been triggered...but once that happens the whole idea of a boarding party is a pointless waste of time because there's nothing they'll be able to do.

At best I can see it being a situation where a deployed boarding party would be ordered to turn back to the ship.

 

[enterprisecvn65]

Given how little time passes between the crippling of Reliant and Khan's irreversible triggering of Genesis (it's the first thing we see him do), I think if Kirk had sent a team to Reliant by shuttle the only result would have been a dead team.

Nevermind that Reliant might still have possessed the ability to shoot down any incoming shuttle.

Which raises a good point: evidently transporters were still functional, Our Heroes did know that Reliant's weapons capability was moot, or Kirk was bluffing when he told Reliant to prepare to be boarded.

Yeah but as it's been mentioned a few times on Star Trek, and shown many times in reality, part of the responsibility of command is ordering men and/or women in to situations that have a high likelyhood of them dying. Sure Khan activated the device pretty quickly and a boarding team probably couldn't have stopped it but Kirk had no way of knowing if Khan was alive or not and regardless priority#1 should have been getting Genesis secured as fast as humanly possible just because of the sheer magnitude of the weapon. Maybe Khan was dead, maybe he was knocked out, maybe he was alive but couldn't move or he could only move so slowly it would have taken him 10 minutes to crawl over to the control panel and activate instead of the 1 or 2 it did.

The point is when something that powerful is not under your control, priority #1 is to get it back in your control and there is ZERO time to mess around. If Khan activates the device before they get there and the Enterprise has to flee and leave the team behind, well it was pretty much assumed that everyone was going to die regardless because noone knew Spock would sacrifice himself to save the Enterprise, so that's a non issue. If the Reliant has a functioning phaser and blows the shuttlecraft away.....well that sucks but it's a risk that they had to take. Everytime a flight of B-17's lifted off to bomb Germany the ground commanders knew some of them wouldn't make it back and men would die, but the importance of defeating the Third Reich took precedence.

To put it in real life perspective say there was a terrorist group that had a nuke in a wearhouse in NYC. And somehow the military was able to strike from outside in a way where they assumed everyone was dead or incapacitated. They aren't going to sit around with a bullhorn radioing instructions to surrender and come up with your hands up. They are going to send in a recovery team the instant they can, if some guy sets off the bomb or they get mowed down by a survivor with an AK47 before they get there......well that pretty much sucks but there are no guarantees in life, but the stakes are too high NOT to respond immediately.

You're still exaggerating the amount of time that I believe occurs between the crippling of Reliant and the triggering of Genesis.

Enterprise cripples Reliant.
Kirk orders Uhura to contact them.
Khan activates Genesis.
Spock detects that Genesis has been triggered.
David tells Kirk that the process is irreversible.

That all happens within less than 5 minutes in the film.
Now for all we know Kirk was about to handle the boarding of Reliant when Spock detected that Genesis had been triggered...but once that happens the whole idea of a boarding party is a pointless waste of time because there's nothing they'll be able to do.

At best I can see it being a situation where a deployed boarding party would be ordered to turn back to the ship.

My point is, given the magnitude of Genesis, Kirk shouldn't have been about to handle anything. This thing should have been set up already and the instant Reliant was disabled all he had to do was say "GO". Probably wouldn't have worked, but you gotta be ready to go in an instant over something like this.

And yes I realize if they'd done it in the film it would have resulted in a pointless shuttlecraft scene. But, in case you didn't notice, a lot of people here talk about things in the films like "If this happened in reality.....so and so would have or should have happened instead of this". So that's the perspective I'm taking it from in this post.

 

[DonIago]

I think you're taking nit-picking further than I would care to myself, but knock yourself out.

 

[Shat Happens]

And nobody said the transporter wouldn't work inside the nebula. Ever.

The thing beams people in and out of stone caves, concrete buildings and metal hulls, what problem is a nebula?

(Earlier in the movie they didn't have enough energy but that had been resolved)

 

[F. King Daniel]

Why did Kirk let Chekov "Man the Weapons Console" in TWOK

Chekov's a main character. That's why he mans the weapons console in WoK and why he's picked to replace Scotty in ID. Something to do to include him.

 

[inflatabledalek]

The actual weapons officer on the Enterprise was the Great Great Grandfather of the security chief on the Enterprise E who had to go into a cupboard every time Worf came aboard.