It’s a no-win situation comprised of a damaged starship filled with dying people who are trapped in an area that serves as a no-fly zone. If you enter during the test, you will be attacked by a superior force and it means war. It’s used in Star Trek to teach prospective captains that sometimes there is no good solution. I know in the movies Jim Kirk cheated to beat it (which should have disqualified him from being a captain, but that’s just IMHO). But why not just not go in to save them? it would seem to be better to save lives (to start, yours and your crew) by avoiding war and not entering the Neutral Zone. You’re outside of the Zone to start the sim, aren’t you?
EVALUATION: Candidate follows standing orders, adheres to interstellar treaties, and respects the Prime Directive.
CONCLUSION: Candidate is disquallified for command of a Starfleet vessel
Stranger
I guess the “win” condition for the exercise is “save the damaged starship’s crew & passengers and your own crew, without starting a war”
And the scenario is contrived in such a way that only James T. Kirk or Diego Armando Maradona could achieve that.
IIRC, that’s exactly what Sulu did in the test, and then he — made his way up the command-track ranks and eventually captained a big fine ship.
There is a novel where various folks explain what they did:
Brian
The boring answer is that saving the Kobyashi Maru is one of the three objectives. So it’s still a failure even if you achieve the other two goals of avoiding an Interstellar war and escaping with your ship intact.
That said, according the Memory Alpha, the novel The Kobiyashi Maru establishes that your crew will mutiny if you refuse to attempt a rescue. That’s what happens to Sulu, forcing him to attempt the rescue anyways.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but that’s exactly one of the two apparent choices in the unresolvable dilemma. It’s not some no-brainer that has somehow escaped everyone’s attention.
Go in to save them, and risk destruction and war. Stay put and obey protocol, but everyone in the other ship dies. Them’s the choices, all right.
If the Kobyashi Maru was a trolley the solution to the problem would be obvious.
It was interesting how Scotty solved it by cheating and how he “got in trouble” for it.
At which point you conclude that a significant fraction of your crew are Romulan agents and the whole thing is a false flag operation, and you open a comlink to Starfleet Command and attempt to disable your ship.
I thought in Saavik’s test when she went in it became apparent there was no KM ship in the neutral zone. To quote another franchise, “it’s a trap!”
So the choices are:
Attempt rescue, get sucked into a trap, die
Don’t attempt rescue, get scorn for failing to rescue passengers and crew
There probably isn’t a “attempt rescue of real ship, get both ships blown to bits, die” but their could be.
As a test of character, nether choice is good. Recklessly getting your crew killed doesn’t make you someone I’d want to serve under. Likewise, not attempting a rescue marks you as overly cautious, with maybe a callous disregard for lives not your own. Being cautious probably helps a lot when shuttling dignitaries around (Journey to Babel), but not much when dealing with the events in The Cobormite Maneuver.
“Candidate allowed their entire ship to be overtaken by enemy operatives. A new and until now, inconceivable way of failing the test.”
As for the OP, sure you could just leave them to die, but then there’s the lingering question, “Would they really have gone to war with us because we tried to rescue civilians?” That’s why it’s a failure. You’re not trading lives to avoid a war, you’re trading lives to avoid the risk of a war. The ambiguity makes it far more murky a choice.
That’s not the captain failing the test; that’s on the Admiralty. Captains don’t choose their own crews.
The treaty surely has policies in place for dealing with situations like disabled civilian vessels in the zone. You follow those policies. And if those policies are inadequate, again, that’s not on you, it’s on whomever negotiated the treaty.
“Candidate shows an overly-bureaucratic attitude towards technicalities of treaty obligations.”
If that is canon, then the test is even stupider than it appears. If the test is biased to always force the attempt at a rescue, it’s not really a test. It’s an exercise in (simulated) suicide.
What does that teach you about the real world? Nothing! If you reduce a situation from two choices to effectively one, why even have choices? Why have captain’s discretion? I bet the captain of the Intrepid followed procedures exactly, made entirely logical choices. Look what that got him.
There is a possibility that realizing it is a trap, and then not going, is the correct choice. Wonder if they ever “get” that in the simulation.
Another thing that’s hard for us on 21st Century Earth to quite grok is how much early ST was set in an era of unexplored frontiers when starship Captains had more in common with Drake or Magellan than with somebody currently commanding a capital ship in any 2023 Navy. Calling HQ and getting satellite intel was not an option: what you could see is all you could know and the buck absolutely positively stopped with you.
They were expected to be aggressive and to handle the knotty life or death problems inherent in a frontier, but be smartly aggressive, not foolishly aggressive. In the real world the line between smart and foolish is often painted with luck and little else.
To the degree the whole scenario wasn’t just a hokey throwaway line with no further thought behind it when first mentioned in ST II: Wrath of Khan, the intent of the exercise is to smoke out folks with the right amount of derring-do; not too much and also not too little.
My personal supposition is no more than a couple minutes of thought went into the original line in the movie; all the rest is retconning by the writers and guesswork by the fan base. So of course it makes no sense; it wasn’t actually a well-thought out command training exercise; it was just more Treknobabble but in this case it was tactics-babble not techno-babble.
The cynical bureaucrat in me also thinks an exercise like that is a great discretionary flush feature, allowing the Academy an easy and unimpeachable way to remove any particular troublesome candidate for whatever reason they might have, be that valid or underhanded. A smart bureaucracy always has one of those laying around to use when advantageous.
This idea popped up as I was watching Star Trek: Prodigy (for an animated show it’s pretty entertaining) and the preteen who thought he could be a captain opted not to go, as he didn’t know any of the people on his ship. This caused his crew to voice objections and one of them (Odo) to resign in protest, but it didn’t actually say why he’d failed. I suppose it’s an answer a lot of people give, but they don’t get to be captain and we never see them.
Well, it wasn’t just a throwaway line. The movie starts showing us Saavik failing the test (as everyone other than Kirk had).
The test isn’t about saving the Kobyashi Maru. The test is about a potential captain handles a no win situation.
That’s clearly not true; ostensible the lesson of the Kobayashi Maru scenario—that any leader may face a “no win situation” where they have to make decisions that will inevitably result in someone dying as a consequence—is a subtext to the overarching theme of the film of Kirk having to face consequences and confront aging. As Kirk himself says, “I don’t believe in the ‘no win’ scenario,” after David Marcus accuses him of cheating. And of course, as a character in the original series never faced an actual threat that he was not able to escape from via narrative conveyance, or at least, not one that resulted in the deaths of anyone higher than a barely named lieutenant (notwithstanding the loss of his exec and protégé in The Motion Picture), and so has to this point lived a charmed life of swashbuckling glory. In the climax of the film, he is only able to escape and save his ship and crew through the sacrifice by Spock. It is, of course, a subversion of the broad narrative trope that however hopeless a situation is the characters will always figure out an escape (and also killed off the character of Spock, which Leonard Nimoy requested and later regretted). It also let the film reuse expensive motion control footage shot from the first movie and provide an energetic and ‘shocking’ cold open.
From a practical standpoint, the response to an escalating and increasingly hopeless situation is an important crisis management and leadership skill. In both trauma response and wilderness medical training classes we were presented with mass casualty simulations where the point wasn’t to ‘win’ the scenario but to experience how chaotic trying to manage such a dynamic situation with limited insight can be, and to learn how to plan, act, and make on-the-fly decisions to minimize hazard to first responders while effecting rescue and treatment as best possible under challenging circumstances.
However, reviewing the scene, it really seems like Saavik failed the test. She allowed the ship to be lured into the Neutral Zone by a rescue call, about which several officers and the ship’s computer warn her is a violation of standing orders and treaty, and then the signal disappears just as the Klingons show up and start attacking. Saavik neither considered that the rescue call might be a ruse nor took preventative measures against the possibility of attack, so even if she could justify violating the treaty (and potentially starting an interstellar war) she still did a terrible job of looking out for the safety of the crew and the ability of the ship to render aid without becoming a casualty itself. No wonder she elects to stay on Vulcan a couple of films later instead of returning to Starfleet.
Stranger