Yeah, that bugged me too. Seti Alpha VI exploded, shifting the orbit of Seti Alpha V. So unless all the planets of the Seti Alpha solar system switched positions, how could they land on the fifth planet thinking it’s the sixth?
More to the point: How could they land on the fifth planet without noticing that there are only four others between it and its sun? :dubious: 
:smack:
Seti Alpha Sun: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Six goes boom. Perhaps everything got joggled?
Seti Alpha Sun: 2 1 3 9 7 5 4 8
Also, doesn’t the library computer have the vital statistics of all the system’s planets on file? Mistaking Ceti Alpha V for Ceti Alpha VI would like mistaking Venus or Mars for Earth, since each planet has its own dimensions, gravity, atmosphere, and so on.
… And they don’t notice that the ninth planet is missing?!? :eek:
Hey, nobody cares about ninth planets any more.
Some punk plebe defaced the Ceti Alpha Wikipedia entry.
But, really - you folks think that data storage will be any better in 300 years than it is now? I’ll bet data gets lost, misplaced, mis-entered, or corrupted just as often as it happens today. One Cosmic ray…
There’s another continuity boo boo in Undiscovered Country that’s bugged me.
Sulu is captain of the Excelsior. They’re on a mission to catalog gaseous anomalies when they witness the explosion of Praxis.
Fast forward to Khitomer, where they’re trying to find Chang’s ship, which can fire while cloaked. Uhura mentions, “What about all that equipment on board to catalog gaseous anomalies? Thing’s gotta have a tailpipe.”
Wrong ship, Uhura. :smack:
Everybody’s got this image of a solar system where all the planets are lined up neatly in a row. One or more might have been on the “far” side of the sun during their approach. My guess is they just went to where it should have been and, “Oh, there it is, over there.”, presuming the orbit to be more elliptical.
Kirk probably didn’t do a full up survey either, what with all the genetically enhanced supermen trying to take over his ship and stuff.
Maybe they were tired and bored of trying to find a planet with not even a microbe.
Yeah, that was a huge one.
In the novel, Vonda McIntyre states that the Ceti Alpha system had only had a quick-and-dirty survey,by one primitive probe, a long time ago. When Terrell and Checkov are discussing the discrepancies between the survey records and the system they see in front of them, they chalk it up to instrumentation error. But Checkov cannot shake the nagging feeling that the name “Ceti Alpha” seems awfully familiar . . .
I was not sure how they assigned Roman numerals to the planets. If it was distance from the sun, then mixing up V and VI makes no sense. If it was in order of discovery, then the larger planets would get the smaller numbers, and the mixup would be sorta kinda plausible, if you do a lot of handwaving.
I thought I had recognized the swagger of a Stanford man!
IMO what is even worse than mixing up Ceti Alpha Five with Six or whatever is this:
It is STILL Ceti Alpha Whatever. Ceti Alpha. Some crazy assed bastard nearly kills me in Greenbow Alabama, I AM going to remember that fucker lives in Greenbow Alabama even if I remember he lives on Elm Street and I think I am visiting Oak drive.
Yeah, that’s the other thing…Walter Koenig wasn’t part of the cast when Space Seed aired. We’re to assume Chekov hadn’t been promoted to bridge crew yet or something but was somewhere on the ship and heard through gossip what happened.
By the way, for those who haven’t yet seen it:
Yeah. It would have made a ton more sense if they went the other direction. They thought they were on Seti Alpha IV, but it had exploded in some way that messed up Seti Alpha V’s orbit.
They could even play it off (later in the movie) as Starfleet thinking Khan had blown up Seti Alpha V or something.
Not that I really understood why that plot point was even in there. Just have it be Seti Alpha V. Have Chekhov, not being a bridge officer, not know exactly where Kirk had let Khan off and have Kirk not have recorded it. (That way the stuff about Khan remembering where he’d dropped him off still work. Get rid of that, and you don’t need any explanation for Chekhov didn’t know.)
Yeccch! Anything written by this woman should be automatically dismissed as the mad ravings of a warped and delusional mind! :mad:
It’s been twenty-odd years since I saw the movie. What’s the problem? That they wouldn’t be able to detect gaseous emissions through a cloak? 
Exactly. In her mind it was going to be all rose petals, foamy baths. candles and lots of romantic poetry.
Fantasy meet reality.
Pretty slack on the part of Terrell’s bridge crew. What, the sensors wouldn’t automatically scan the entire system and sound an alarm regarding an entire missing planet? How often do those things just disappear?
Kirk didn’t need to do a survey, since the system had already been cataloged and was in the computer’s data base. That’s what he based his decision to maroon them on.