Timo, I gotta say, I love you, man. Seriously, you are one of my favorite posters and I very much enjoy your responses. But this one is just idiotic. I'm sorry to say so, but, seriously.
No prob. As I feel the opposite about the issue, I'll make every effort to make my viewpoint clearer, and hope that it will still keep entertaining you and the other parties here!
Then you pick the one you want, but you cannot know which one you want without being sure which ones you don't want. This requires knowing, in a reasonable way, what else is around.
Yet it does not. Once you have spotted the Desert Planet, you need no knowledge of anything else around in the system. The other planets are not of interest: you won't be going there, and they won't affect your travel to your one and only destination in any way. Planets won't get in your way (space is way too big for that); they won't affect your path of travel with their gravity (your ship is way too powerful to be bothered by that); and your horoscope won't really affect the mission much, either (Starfleet always assigns a Chief Occult Officer to spell away such hazards).
Why would you need to know anything about the seventh planet if you are going to the sixth? Indeed, why should you wish to know whether your target is the seventh planet or the sixth?
It is absolutely required for any time you move the ship. You lay in a course to get out of spacedock. Laying in to reach a planet is perfectly normal and necessary.
You don't go through the "Laying a course, Sir" song and dance when heading for the spacedock door. You simply go where you need to go, without much in the way of plotting. Only interstellar travel ever requires you to
talk about it, suggesting the process there is non-trivial. In insystem applications, it is trivial. And you
can worry about the trivial, but you
don't. The Captain doesn't need to worry, even the Helmsman doesn't need to worry, because the computer already does all the necessary worrying.
None of this has anything to do with the alleged requirement to know what the seventh planet is doing when heading for the sixth. Because there is. no. such. requirement.
Come on, why not stop and
think about it? You
never use models like that in your life for getting from A to B, even when B is moving. You
always use terminal homing, because that's not just the easiest way to do it, but typically the only possible and reliable way.
Why should starships behave differently from the world around you today? Because they are staaaaaarships and must obey NASA rules of what is cool? NASA and Starfleet have nothing in common: they operate hardware in completely different categories, for completely different purposes, and even obey different laws of physics. Starships are good at terminal homing. NASA craft suck at that. So the balance is different, and heavily biased towards terminal homing for Starfleet.
Flying is space is not driving on Earth.
How so? This "staaaaaarships" thing must be confusing you somehow. But in space, just like on today's Earth, or yesterday's oceans, or in tunneling through no-man's-land, you use separate means of navigation for short and long distances, and one does not apply to the other. And in Star Trek, "short" is defined as "insystem".
You will need a computer driven navigation package, even when flying right at a planet your pilot can see with his natural eyes.
And? That package will only do what you tell it to do - in this case, Go To the Desert Planet. And it has no reason to assume anything about where the Desert Planet "ought" to be, when its senses already tell it where it
really is. Those are the parameters it will use for performing the mindless task of getting you to your destination.
Should the package red-flag a deviation between where the planet "ought" to be and where it is? Not in the Trek universe, and especially not if there is no previous knowledge of any sort of an "ought".
Yet, you still need to identify your target. Consulting the coordinates is not wasting time. It's the only way to get there ever.
How can you claim such a patently false thing? You don't know the coordinates to me. But if I invite you to my house, and give a few coarse pointers for the early stages of the trip, you can drop the "coordinate" act right at my door at the very latest, and start terminal homing. And once you start that terminal homing, you won't consult any maps, paper or mental or iPad or whatever - not for coordinates. You consult them for what I might look like - the analogy for the Desert Planet thing.
How many planets in the Trek Universe have an "ought" attached to them? Tellingly, we
never hear of our heroes spotting a deviation in the orbit of a planet, unless third parties inform them of such. Charting really is a largely dead art in Starfleet, it seems - and for a good reason, because technology has outdated any practical need for it.
Timo Saloniemi
