They are going to a location. The known location of the already charted CA6.
But where is that location?
In space, you need reference points, of which the most practial is the destination itself.
That is readily available to you through scanning. And when you establish the location of your location by scanning it, scanning for anything else would be an absurd waste of time.
What sort of an alternative are you thinking of? A galactic GPS of some sort? This would be literally astronomically less precise a tool for establishing the location of a location in a distant star system than on-the-spot scans. Dead reckoning? Same thing. Nobody lands an aircraft on a runway on GPS or dead reckoning. Terminal homing is the only way to go, after GPS or dead reckoning takes you into the general vicinity. And Ceti Alpha won't have local aids to terminal homing analogous to, say, ADS-B.
That is navigation. Go where your instruments take you, and then disregard those instruments and trust that which is actually there. Because there is no profit in going "Uh, that runway is a mile to the east of where it
ought to be", and especially not in "We'll land in the
right spot anyway, those runway lights be damned"!
Planets are an immense distance apart, have different masses, orbital speeds, volumes, densities, axial tilts, different rates of rotations, atmospheric densities and pressures. There are dozens and dozens of metrics that can easily distinguish any two planets. You just arent going to confuse one for the other.
Except here our sidekicks don't know what CA VI looks like, save for it being a desert - establishing the specifics is their very mission.
Just think it through (and ignore for now the fact that the writers did not, because that's not what they get paid for). Space basically by definition is full of "lifeless worlds". So our sidekicks must be looking for something relatively specific and special, or they would have found it already. But their maps and records don't tell them whether CA VI would be right for them. They just hint that the place is worth checking out. So the very premise is that the planet is an unknown quantity and an interchangeable element. Just like basically every uninhabited planet in Star Trek. So naturally starships would operate in a fashion that copes with this issue. Just like we see the
Reliant doing.
Suppose your automobile GPS is directing you to 1313 13th street and you are told the destination is a red brick house but when you get there you see a pile of rubble with many red bricks and beside it at 1311 and at 1315 13th street there are red brick houses. Are you going to assume that 1311 or 1315 13th street is your destination or are you going to wonder what happened and suspect that possibly the destination house has been destroyed?
That's just it, the mistake people seem to make - that planets would have addresses attached.
They do not. They can be identified by their "fingerprint", or their position can be guesstimated. But a planet going missing will provide neither fingerprint nor position - it will merely remove those. So for
really finding the location, see above.
You claim that planets being out of position happens all the time in Trek and in the real world.
Well, in Trek, we have never gotten any indication that a planet would be
in position. If the heroes could trust them to be, why don't they warp directly to orbit (a thing technologically perfectly possible, as seen many times) instead of doing this "We are here"/"Great, so let's
go there" standard orbit dance?
As for the real world, we're yet to satisfactorily tackle even the three-body problem. The one thing agreed upon about celestial mechanics is that they are chaotic: we have no bloody idea where Jupiter might be a few million years from now, and any harebrained theory of where it used to be is no better or worse than any other. Trek just takes that to the logical conclusion and suggests that change is standard even in shorter timescales.
Of course a starship can easily cope with reaching a planet a few million miles out of its calculated position. But considering all the problems that Kirk's Enterprise had with menaces that destroyed planets, finding a system with a planet out of position should have rang alarm bells both literal and figurative.
We might think so. Kirk didn't, though. An encounter with a mobile planet did not alter his approach to, well, approach. And "The Changeling" is telling in establishing that the heroes can perform "long range scans" to see whether there's life in a star system -
but they don't. Not until prompted by something concrete like a distress call.
If the two scenarios the heroes may face involve those where the map can be relied on and those where it cannot, the response to both ought to be the same - the one appropriate for the latter. Our problem isn't that our heroes (wisely) distrust their maps, because distrust is exactly what Kirk's adventures ought to teach him. Instead, it is that they do not perform extensive preemptive scans for unexpected things wherever they go. Instead, they perform reactive scans. Which is only a problem for us, not them: they come out of their adventures alive by doing them their way.
Excuses for Starfleet doctrine are readily available (besides the demonstrated success of that doctrine): there's way too much to scan in the "unexpected things" category, there's way too much space to point the sensors to unless you already have a point target, there's way too little time to worry about these things.
The most plausible explanation for the fate of Ceti Alpha VI I can think of was that some sort of planet destroying menace worked on it for a period until it exploded as part of the menace's procedure, and then the menace went to another planet in the system to work on. So apparently it takes the menace at least 15 years to get a planet ready to explode, which seems reasonable.
I'm not quite following. What's plausible about that? That is, why's it better than the planet just blowing up all of a sudden?
Starfleet can't assume that planets being in slightly wrong places would be indicative of the DDM scenario: there is no commonality there, as the DDM never moved any planets that we'd know of. OTOH, and this is the crux of the whole issue with Ceti Alpha, you can't spot a planet not being there
unless you scan for that planet specifically. The lack of a planet doesn't manifest unless you turn your sensors directly at the very spot and find nothing. So if our heroes scanned for CA VI and found nothing, they would start searching - and they would then find CA VI (which really was CA V). After which they would be
doubly unlikely to scan for missing planets!
Timo Saloniemi
