Would it be safe to say, post Kelvin tune-up, that the Enterprise would be the fastest connie in SF at that point in time?
I cannot imagine Kirk having Scotty de-tune a quicker, more efficient Enterprise.
We don't know. It's conceivable that there's another Connie (or some Federation test-bed descendant of the NX-Alpha) out there, somewhere that either intentionally, or accidentally, achieved Warp 15 or better. Since the Enterprise has survived multiple incidents where the ship surged to double-digit warp factors that the crew had no control over ("The Changeling", "By Any Other Name", "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", "That Which Survives"), imagine what Federation researchers could do with a dedicated starship (or specifically-designed unmanned vessel) that they deliberately test out for high velocity...
Knight Templar wrote:
I'm not saying that Rojan was not also responsible for the death of Thompson.
But IIRC, in time of war, if POWs attempt to escape and they in doing so assault one of their captors (as Kirk and Spock did) then the POWs are subject to reprisals.
Rojan's team was a preinvasion scout team for the Andromedans so to me that would fall under the "state of war" definition.
All of which assumes that the original Kelvan intent was hostile. Rojan may have already been suffering from human hubris when Kirk arrived to rescue him. It's possible the Kelvan ancestors were mean like Klingons or Romulans, or maybe the stories of Kelvan warrior heritage became exaggerated during the intergalactic journey. We may never know.
The matter of Yeoman Thompson's death, whether Rojan was delusional or not, was as much Kirk's responsibility as it was Rojan's. Kirk couldn't resist trying to escape (to where???
), and Rojan was itching to make an example of one of Kirk's crew.
Depends on how the extra speed was achieved. Perhaps it's just a matter of feeding more power to the warp coils - so once one would yank the portable Kelvan powerplant out of the loop, all the advantages would be lost?
Certainly it seems that the standard way to make the ship go faster than planned is to disengage the failsafes for doing so. It's not as if the drive itself would be incapable of warp 14 or whatever; it's just something that cannot be safely sustained, with the failure points relating to ship's structure (just as in the extreme case of "Threshold"!) but possibly also to the power arrangements.
That's the one thing that perplexed me about this episode for a long time. How did the Kelvans expect the Enterprise to run full-throttle, wide-open for 300 years without relief?
No tune-ups, no layovers, and no refueling
; just Warp 11 (or better) for three centuries.
Maybe it's possible for any decently-designed warp-driven starship to be able to remain in flight for a multi-generational period without relief. And maybe the Kelvans had already adjusted the food syntheiszer-thingies to spit out those Chiklett-thingies to conserve power and nutrient resources. (Interesting that Kirk and his remaining "crew" were not forced to start adhereing to that same diet.) But if you look at the leap in engine power output (for sake of argument, Warp 8 is supposedly 512 cochranes; versus Warp 11 which is 1,331 cochranes) and then consider that the ship is expected to sustain this for three centuries, structural stress and other breakdown issues aside, that would be pretty amazing. Apparently, nobody is even slightly worried about the ship running out of fuel or otherwise breaking down in the intergalactic void. Remember, the Kelvans have only one ship to work with. If the Enterprise gives out on them, they are as good as dead.
But they go forward with their plan for the modifications to the Enterprise, no worries on anyone's part.
Galileo Seven is the worst for me, there's like 40 seconds of laughter at a joke that's barely funny, after several crew members died. And it's probably the first occurance of this too.
I always took the final scene of "The Galileo Seven" as either cheesy or otherwise not up to the rest of the show. It's obviously very enjoyable to Kirk and his officers to corner Spock in his own over-wrought hubris. The characters had probably been waiting a long time to give Spock a ribbing like that. And maybe the characters would need something to laugh about after emerging from a crisis like that.
But if everyone was expected to behave by 20th century standards in that scene, Spock might've been brought up on negligence charges for the avoidable loss of Latimer and Gaetano. (Unless Spock's connections through his powerful father would have such a charge quashed.)
All that aside, the laughter scene at the end of "The Galileo Seven" was pure 1960's TV Velveeta, no doubt about it. I think it could've been written more effectively if the laughter sillyness had not been there, but instead Kirk had a final brief encounter with Ferris in which the commissioner expressed relief at the successful recovery of the shuttlecraft crew and getting underway to New Paris. It seems very odd that Ferris is prominent in the rest of the bridge scenes but he is suddenly nowhere to be found. That was even more ridiculous than the laughter.