shower thought: Could the fall of galton exposed bolthole?

tlb wrote:Perhaps some intermediate place, such as an uninhabited system around a dwarf star, so not even the wormhole location is given away.

There's value in that, especially if the system-of-the-month isn't known in advance. Then the enemy can't sneak up on it because they can't know which one it is. Moreover, the handover being done literally in the middle of nowhere means the enemy wouldn't have a chance to get close to the ships, even if they knew which systems it would be.

The downside is that you don't have the infrastructure that is protecting the wormhole to protect the handover. No one expects it to be as fortified as the MWHJ, or even Mannerheim or Erewhon (a.k.a. Nowhere), but there will be some defences. If someone who shouldn't be there shows up, there will be ships and forts protecting the zone to shoot them down.

Jonathan_S wrote:True - but it was deployed to the repair ship from a shuttle that was itself locked to the outer hull of said repair ship. (And the Honor's engineer presumably did have to space walk to attach it to Warnecke's shuttle; with Honor and her armsmen inside with him)

So, yes the demo charge had to be mobile enough to move itself from the shuttle to the repair ship's hull -- but that's a lot easier than sneaking up on a ship in open space to get close enough to deploy a demo charge onto it.

But even that level of mobility was simply falling down "the tractor pads holding the demolition charge to the shuttle disengaged. The device Warnecke had blithely assumed was only a demolition charge clanged to the repair ship's hull, and the amber telltale flashed confirmation as a second set of pads locked it in place." [IEH]

It may have needed a someone to attach it to the shuttle as a way of hiding its ability to move by itself.

The idea with Bolthole is to sneak an optical unit onto the hull in order to gain astrographic information. Depending on how long the return ship is motionless, this could be done autonomously with just thrusters. But this requires knowing where the change over takes place.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

tlb wrote:Perhaps some intermediate place, such as an uninhabited system around a dwarf star, so not even the wormhole location is given away.

There's value in that, especially if the system-of-the-month isn't known in advance. Then the enemy can't sneak up on it because they can't know which one it is. Moreover, the handover being done literally in the middle of nowhere means the enemy wouldn't have a chance to get close to the ships, even if they knew which systems it would be.

The downside is that you don't have the infrastructure that is protecting the wormhole to protect the handover. No one expects it to be as fortified as the MWHJ, or even Mannerheim or Erewhon (a.k.a. Nowhere), but there will be some defences. If someone who shouldn't be there shows up, there will be ships and forts protecting the zone to shoot them down.

Who says it's even in a system - a rendezvous could easily be in the middle of literally no where, just a series of coordinates in the black between systems. And the handoff could have an escort. A squadron of CLACs and another of SD(p)s could jump in to the rendezvous 24 hours in advance, and a globe of LACS could create a sphere of control, allowing the full transports and the skeleton crewed new ships to jump into secured space at their leisure. Rince repeat next month at another different random secure rendezvous. 48 hours after the first ship hypers in - everyone is gone, without even a candy wrapper floating around to suggest that anyone had ever been there.

tlb wrote:Then why not use the ordinals: primus, secundus, tertius, quartus, quintus, sextus, septimus, octavus, nonus, decimus and so on? Prime more closely means of first importance these days (for example Darius Prime), which the first planet (Mercury) clearly is not.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:So you want Star Trek script writers to be consistent and come up with that detailed nomenclature? And actors to pronounce it? Even the books which have an editor ensuring consistency aren't that consistent.

Why are habitable planets called "Class M" instead of "Class A?" Or "Class One?"

Well I do not particularly care about the Star Trek writers, I stopped watching decades ago. I just do not like a naming system that makes an insignificant planet seem like the most important, just say first, second, third etc... to indicate position, if you do not like Latin. Anyway actors that play doctors have to pronounce things that are much more complicated.

I have no idea what habitable planets are called, nor why the nomenclature was chosen.[/quote]

I always knew that the level of technology was made up on Star Trek, but once learning the actual science as a teenager, and how much BS they manufactured for the show, was disheartened - Of course college doubled down and made Star Trek science more disheartening. I was building a PC out of spare parts for data collection and analysis for a paper I was working on while watching the premier episode of ST:Voyager, throwing frustratingly non-functional parts at the tv when they made mistakes discussing Quantum mechanics and Einsteinian physics.

The PC- I got working and it soldiered on for the next 8 years; ST:Voyager, I only watched a few handful of episodes, constantly wondering how they had any crew left, and how they kept the ship moving (and in the right direction) with a faulty understanding of early 20th century physics.[/quote]


Very early on with Voyager there was a critical problem with the linkages of the various systems in what I remember as kind of of Neuron junction (looked organic) which was the type of connections for various systems. Did mention critical---and there were only a few spairs onboard. They "found" a solution.....or some kind of clugged together alternative.....and never had that problem again with their very great problem with functional replacement parts. Very odd. And then there was the encounter with the ...reptilian looking....race that was very militant and ONLY spaced space based having NO planets on which they had their recorded history and while they seemed to have originate on a planet somewhere way back in their now mythic portion of their history in the Delta Quadrant they somehow had a "DNA" match with the mammals which originated on earth which was the majority of the crew of Voyager. Sigh.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Why are habitable planets called "Class M" instead of "Class A?" Or "Class One?"

Class M is in reference to the Vulcan word Minshara, and if I remember correctly it was kind of a Vulcan joke to classify Earth as a Minshara Class planet since the word loosely translates to "mentally defective". They jokingly used that classification for planets that contained intelligent species that the they found mentally inferior, showing a bit of the same racist/superiority streak that their Romulan cousins show to every other race.

The "Class M" classification stuck around and came to mean life giving and/or habitable within the Federation, ie there is no real logic behind the classification even though it's Vulcan in origin...

Joat42 wrote:Class M is in reference to the Vulcan word Minshara, and if I remember correctly it was kind of a Vulcan joke to classify Earth as a Minshara Class planet since the word loosely translates to "mentally defective". They jokingly used that classification for planets that contained intelligent species that the they found mentally inferior, showing a bit of the same racist/superiority streak that their Romulan cousins show to every other race.

That's a retcon, because "Minshara" wasn't added to the canon until Enterprise in the 2000s.

The books do explain some of the nonsense, though, like the inconsistent naming convention with Greek letters (the early Earth Cargo Service was naming planets/systems and they didn't have a convention). And Lower Decks pokes fun at some of those, like why Starfleet consoles have rocks inside (they are subspace-tuning rocks).