colbert (04/07/83)
In response to your many questions reguarding Star Trek II (& those of others), I offer the following suggestions & comments: 1) I suggest you read the book, in order to understand why Savik is so emotional & apparently irrational (to some extent). You will also get your answer to whether Kirk's son was born out of wedlock. I think the books for both Star Trek I & Star Trek II are worth reading even if you've seen the movies a dozen times (as I have since I have them on videotape). They are both well written stories that fill in some details that were left out of the movies (e.g. Why doesn't Checkov (spell ?) immediately signal the ship to beem him & Capt. Terrel up as soon as he realizes that he is in the Botany Bay? Why does he instead drag the Capt. out of the ship, right into Kahn's hands?) 2) As to your questions about 'why the torpedo tubes are not automated?', 'why does Solo have to look at some other crewman to determine, whether the sheilds are up?' and 'why does the enterprise have blinking exterior lights?' -- these all fall in the same catagory as 'why do the phasors look like a continous stream of light? [very unrealistic in space]', some producer or director thinks these effects look good! I think two more interesting questions are: Why does it take seconds (minutes) to raise the shields, when in the old TV series it took as much time as it took to push a button (& often they went up automaticly when sensors detect certain energy radiations)? Is it so we can watch that panel with a picture of the Enterprise with little lights all around it, that light up as the shields go up? Why can't the phasors fire (ST-I) when the warp engines are out of commision? According to Capt. Decker is because 'they are routed through the warp engines to increase their power.' Ok, so why don't they have the backup mode of operation, where the old unrouted phasers mechanism is employed? (After all "Captain, the engines, they're go'n to blow") Finally, if any one doesn't feel like reading the books, then contact me & I'll answer your questions to the best of my abilities. If I get a lot of questions I'll try to post them & the answers. ed colbert trw-unix!colbert quasi-trekkie (I figure since I can't name the episodes I don't qualify as a full trekkie)
richl (04/14/83)
Boy, follow your own advice! In the book about ST-TMP, it clearly states that Scotty was working on a bypass circuit for the phasers; it just wasn't completed at the point they had gone into the wormhole. Why was it like that in the first place if it was so dangerous? To quote Bones: "You know engineers. They LOVE to change things." Rick Lindsley richl@tektronix ...!ucbcad!tektronix!richl