I don’t believe there was any warp travel required for that battle (it all took place within one solar system), so maybe that’s a critical factor.
Then again, the space hippies managed to hijack and run the Enterprise from “auxiliary control”, basically a small room with flashy-blinky computer terminals, and take it all the way into Romulan space.
Fact is, there’s no fundamental reason the ship couldn’t be run from just about anywhere, assuming a computer system that extends to pretty much every compartment. Heck, with that degree of sophistication in artificial intelligence, why not have every ship run by “Kirk”? Arguably, Voyager’s Doctor is more sophisticated than Data, or at least the Doctor began forming emotional responses (and using contractions) with much greater ease. If “mobile emitter” tech is unavailable, just put regular ol’ holoemitters on the bridge, already, or just build a perfectly-functioning bridge on the holodeck.
Fact is, the shows weren’t being written by engineers, who might have a better idea of plausible technical limitations. The original series kept the technobabble in reasonable check, but NextGen and beyond just went nuts.
The Warp engines of the Constellation were totally trashed, so no warp drive. Kirk ran it from auxiliary control also. You clearly can run the ship from there - that’s what it is for, after all. Perhaps it is set up to be run by fewer people, since I’d guess that there would be a lot of casualties if it is needed.
While Kirk did pilot the Constellation, he joked that he had to do a miracle. Remember all he had to do was move more or less towards or away from the Doomsday Machine, and the ship moved about as well as the car he drove in “A Piece of the Action.” He did manage to get it into the thing, but I bet that he was pulled in by a tractor, so it didn’t require precision piloting.
How come the ENTERPRISE doesn’t have circuit breakers? When the ship gets hit by a Klingon photon torpedo, sparks and smoke fly from under the console-and Spoke pokes around with a screwdriver to get things right!
How come the ENTERPRISE can go faster than light, but they never have flush toilets?
On that planete that is like 1930’s Chicago-how come a “Al capone” type didn’t emerge and take over?
And this continued into the Voyager era - the number of nameless extras who were killed by the 40,000 volt AC exploding death-trap consoles beggars belief.
I have had electronics “arc and spark” at the moment of failure. I usually give a startled little leap and kill the power before some red-shirt buys it, though.
I took an HP Laser Jet printer for repair and when the guy asked me what was wrong I explained, “Smoke comes out the back.”
Hey, it happens on the Flying Sub, too.
Well, yes, but weren’t all of the Doctor’s programming and subroutines contained within the Voyager’s computer systems? And the Doctor and Data had two different creators. The Doctor could have had his emotional simulation and use of contractions programmed into him from the start by Louis Zimmerman. Don’t forget, the Doctor’s personality was based on that of Doctor Zimmerman, who was very smug and arrogant most of the time. Data on the other hand, was deliberately programmed not to use contractions by Doctor Soong in order to distinguish him from Lore, who was stirring up trouble among the inhabitants of Omicron Theta. Data’s emotions were also an effect of the chip created fom him by Doctor Soong and which he managed to liberate from Lore.
And how come these Starfleet computers don’t develop sentience? How many fully-formed (growing, expanding) personalities can they have running around inside them?
Franz Joseph’s Star Trek Blueprints shows toilets. Of course, the blueprints are not considered canon, for whatever it’s worth, so maybe they didn’t have toilets after all.
One explanation could be an Al Capone type would’ve, but Koik and da boys came and took over too soon.
I’ve heard a theory that the “exploding machinery” you see so much of on Trek and other shows is a vestige of a time when machinery could and did explode - the era of the steam engine. The technology is gone, but the memory lingers on in the minds of Hollywood screenwriters desperate to inject some drama into an otherwise flat narrative.
Well, as is frequently pointed out in serious science fiction, the problem with space combat is that either you have serious weapons, or you don’t. Serious weapons will tend to reduce their targets to a rapidly-expanding cloud of gas, or maybe tiny bits of shrapnel, or they will miss. Non-serious weapons will just miss all the time. Again, not good TV.
If a vessel ever did take a good solid hit and somehow survived, cause of death would probably be ‘smeared over inside of ship like cheap bologna’, unless everyone was strapped down at their action stations inside a padded g-suit, in which case they’d just get pureed inside the suit. More bad TV.
And shaking the camera, setting off asquib+some smoke and having people fall to the floor is very very cheap.
Perhaps the Enterprise, like Versailles in Marie Antoinette’s day, looks great but reeks with the stench of human waste. Thank God Desilu didn’t develop Smell-O-Vision.
That’s why Krako, Oxmyx and the others wanted Koik’s “fancy heaters.” No one had been able to climb to the top of the heap before that. The mob wars just went on and on. They needed a game-changer. Koik gave it to them, just not the one they had in mind.
