Admiral!
There be WHALES here!
Humpbacked?
People?
I’m impressed that you speak Klingon, but that’s not a polite thing to call someone when you ask a question. 
That was awesome, Malacandra
You see, when I first watched it, I thought there was some line after Scotty gave him the formula, saying that the concept of transparent aluminum was made up. When does he say he need transparent aluminum? If it’s near that scene, I probably thought it was part of the ruse.
I’ve since watched it and realized my interpretation was wrong, but it was a nice one.
I do have one fanwank on why the Timecops (or whatever they’re called) didn’t try to stop them: without the trip, Earth would have been gone, and that would have messed up their future. How else can Bones get away curing a patient just for the heck of it?
Anyone else bothered by the idea that only Kirk and Spock were smart enough to modify the alien transmissions to sound like they would below water? I mean, surely someone back at Starfleet Headquarters or elsewhere on Earth would have figured out the same thing?
Starfleet isn’t used to having to figure out how to understand other people since all aliens speak English and all broadcasts are encoded such that they are immediately decipherable.
Someone very well might have, but what could they have done about it with the Probe’s energy dampening field shutting down their systems? Kirk and crew weren’t affected by it and had experience with time travel, which is why they were able to do something about it.
The thing that I always notice is the exchange where Kirk tells Uhura to modify the sound accounting for “density, temperature … and salinity factors.”
She jumps through all kinds of audio-filter hoops to get the sound the way he wants it, and then he asks: “Then, this is what it would sound like underwater?”
Her reply (“Yes, sir.”) is delivered in a way that makes me think she’s thinking to herself, “If that’s all you wanted, you could have just said, ‘What would this sound like underwater?’ jackass. Salinity factors. Puh-lease.”
She was a Time Cop’s Nth power Grandmother.
I was under the impression that pretty much everyone else who had access to the signal had lost power to any of their computers. Or at least lost the ability to communicate what they’d discovered. Kirk and co. were the only ones who could actually do something about the problem, so they’re the only people we see figure it out.
And, yes they were in the right place at the right time. Close enough to get the signal first (or at least before anyone else could contact them), but far enough away to not get their stuff shut down. Plus, they already performed the slingshot technique before.
If you want to get upset, it would be about how only the Enterprise crew seem to know how to perform that maneuver, as every other time it would seem like a good idea, it’s never even been mentioned.
Fanwanking again: the Enterprise’s logs of the first time travel incident were immediately classified; the information was not generally disseminated, and Kirk and his officers were forbidden to discuss it with it any ship’s company. Had Starfleet been more ruthless they’d have immediately offed Kirk, his entire bridge staff, and Scott as well.
Starfleet HQ, deep in the Federation would no doubt be used to the usual, known in advance visitors for whom translators were available. Kirk and co. out on their five year mission to the back end of beyond, might be expected to be a bit more on the ball. That and the maelstrom on Earth creating a little static on the airwaves I guess 
That scene does bring up a question. If keyboards are so quaint and presumably rare, how was Scotty such a fast typist?
It was’t that keyboards were rare; it was that a computer without any voice interface at all was rare. I can imagine plenty of times in which a person might go back and forth.
Current-day example: a programmer can use a mouse for general GUI applications, but when it’s time to be productive they (usually) prefer working through text on the command line. It’s possible to type out instructions a good deal faster than it is to perform them via mouse or voice.
Yeah, right, like Commissioner Gordon could “off” the Dark Knight. :rolleyes:
So, when did the Enterprise do this slingshot maneuver before?
Spock (or Scott) invented it in “The Naked Time,” I think, though it was an accident. They used it on purpose in the episode with Teri Garr.
Ah, that’s how they get back.
Something that always bothered me - isn’t 60’ by 10’ a little small to hold two adult humpback whales?