TOS' Funniest Science Bloopers

[Patrick Degan]

Without a doubt, Star Trek has earned a place in the American zeitgeist. Justifiably so in the case of the perennially-classic Original Series, which combined a well-conceived cast of characters played by fairly talented veteran actors with an eclectic set of writers to examine social, political, and moral issues which still speak to our time. The vision of fostering peaceful contact between the races in itself presented a ray of hope in what was a very dark time in America’s history, and all this combined to produce what was without doubt the most intelligent science fiction series of its time.

However, just like its much poorer cousins Lost In Space and Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, Star Trek could get rather careless with the “science” part of the science fiction. Trek differed from its competition on network television because its ideas were far superior to any series whose idea of science fiction was the crew being chased by the Lobster Men from Centauri or being turned into carrot people. The later spinoff Trek series have become infamous for their ludicrous technobabble, but this article examines some rather basic science flaws which would get any junior high school science student a big fat F on his exams. Indeed, some of them are quite comical.

Power-Orbiting —every time the Enterprise orbits a planet, she must run her engines constantly to stay up, elsewise the ship would be pulled down and sprial into the surface. The ship starts going down at Psi 2000 when Lt. Kevin Riley shuts down the engines in “The Naked Time”; again when Ben Finney sabotages the engines while the ship is in orbit of the planet facility of Starbase 11 in “Court-Martial”. Lacking dilithium crystal power, the Enteprise can only maintain a three-day orbit over Rigel XII before she starts spiraling down in “Mudd’s Women”, and faces the same danger when Lazarus and his evil twin, Skippy, steal the ship’s four dilithium crystals in “The Alternative Factor”. The Enterprise was in danger of being trapped in orbit around Delta Vega lacking engine power in “Where No Man Has Gone Before” and of course was several times nearly tractored into planetary crashes. Whereas in “The Gallileo Seven”, the shuttlecraft Gallileo only has enough fuel, according to Scotty, to stay in orbit around Taurus II for 47 minutes, until Spock jettisons and ignites the fuel reserve for his makshift distress flare to the Enterprise, after which the orbit begins to decay immediately after the burn is done. When the Enteprise self-destructs in the movie Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, the loss of her engines immediately results in the wreck falling down towards the surface of Genesis. Even in the later adventures of Jean-Luc Picard’s Enterprise, the ship is constantly running her engines in orbit.

According to Star Trek, nothing can remain in planetary orbit without engine power. But if that’s the case, then what holds up all those engine-less satellites, space telescopes, and space stations in Earth orbit today? Something which seems completely unknown to either Montgomery Scott, who can’t change the laws of physics, or Geordi LaForge and his tin friend, Mr. Data; the not-mysterious, not-magickal, very mundane force known as momentum. In the real world, which seems to have only a tenuous connection to Star Trek at times, it is not necessary to run engines and burn up fuel to maintain an orbit around a planet. The object’s own momentum will keep it up against the pull of gravity for as long as that momentum lasts. The duration of an orbit depends upon both altitude and velocity (and the object’s mass, of course); the higher an object is, the longer and more stable its orbit.

All of this adds up to one central truth: it is not necessary to run engines to maintain an orbit. The Enterprise can lose all her power and still stay up, serenly circling a planet for months, years, decades. Satellites orbiting at altitudes of about 25,000 miles are able to maintian a geosynchrynous fix on one point on a planet’s surface by matching its own velocity with the planet’s rotation, and will stay in that orbit more or less forever. According to one of “Mudd’s Women”, the Enterprise was circling above Rigel XII at an altitude of about a hundred miles and supposedly was only able to remain up for three days. Well, a hundred miles is about as high as the orbit of the American Skylab space station, which stayed quite comfortably in orbit for five years and would have remained up for several years beyond that had there not been an exceptionally heavy burst of sunspot activity in 1979, which heated up Earth’s atmosphere and caused its uppermost layer to rise just high enough to brake the station’s orbit through friction to bring her down prematurely. The Russian Mir space station orbited for 11 years at that altitude before she was purposely brought down to dispose of her. You have to wonder why the starship Enterprise is unable to do what a dinky little space station was easily capable of. Even if we take the starship’s far greater mass into account, her hundred-mile orbit should have been able to last for far longer than three days. You also have to wonder just how much fuel and crystal all of Starfleet’s ships waste just orbiting various planets and always under engine power in a single year.

Don’t they teach orbital mechanics at Starfleet Academy?

The Sound And The Fury —this, of course, is Star Trek’s most famous scientific blunder, the one that probably gets the most laughs at physics department cocktail mixers. In “A Taste Of Armageddon”, the Enterprise finds herself caught between two planets fighting a computer war that’s lasted for 500 years. Declared a casualty in the latest computer attack from Vendikar, the leaders of Eminiar VII demand that the ship’s crew beam down to obediently trot themselves into the disintegrator booths to keep up the agreement which regulates the conduct of the computer war. Anan 7, the head of the council, tries tricking the crew down, then when that fails orders the planetary disruptor banks to open fire on the Enterprise. The ship, in orbit, is hit by very powerful sonic waves but is protected by her deflector screens.

By now, everybody knows what’s wrong with this scene. The Enterprise is in orbit. Sound waves cannot propagate in a vacuum. No atmosphere, no sound. The very idea of attacking a spacecraft with a sonic weapon is so ludicrously absurd that it took the technobabble-obsessed writers of the Trek-spinoff series Voyager to finally outdo it for sheer absurdity.

Mr. DePaul reported that the sonic waves registering against the screens measured 18 to the 12th power decibels. That’s one powerful sound system they’ve got on Eminiar. According to Professor Lawrence Krauss, that measures to over eleven trillion times louder than a jetliner on takeoff. Hell, it’s probably even louder than a Who concert. The Eminians probably had banks of fusion reactors pouring power into the sonic projectors. The problem is that once the atmosphere thins out, so do the sound waves. Doesn’t matter how much power you pump into the disruptor; past the edge of the atmosphere the sound simply melts away into nothing. About the only conceivable explanation for the Enterprise experiencing any effect is that the ship is actually being hit by a wavefront of superheated atmospheric gasses pushed ahead of the sonic beam. But once that wavefront is gone, there’s nothing left to hit the Enterprise with.

And since sound is produced by atmospheric displacement, you have to wonder at the pressure-wave that must have resulted when the Eminians fired their sonic beam at the Enterprise. Somehow, I get the impression that “collateral damage” would be too poor a phrase to describe the effect.

You’ve Seen One Earth, You’ve Seen Them All —Earth is only one planet of nine circling a rather insignificant little yellow sun located within a more remote part of the western spiral arm of the galaxy. So what accounts for the discovery by the Enterprise of a carbon-copy duplicate of the Earth, occupying the same orbit around the same type G2V yellow star supporting a system of nine planets occupying the same orbits as those in our own little star system in the episode “Miri”, and supporting a human culture which developed in such a complete parallel to our own until they started fooling around with biotech, which they probably regarded with even greater enthusiasm than we did as the Wave Of The Future until the glitch in the lab happened? Later episodes would invoke the truly absurd Hodgkins’ Law of Parallel Planet Development to explain away all the various theme-park planets encountered by the Enterprise crew in their travels, but the duplicate Earth truly takes the cake. The number does not exist to express the improbability of such a world’s existence.

The only conceivable explanation is that this was in reality the duplicate planet Earth commissioned by the hyperdimensional mice in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. Next time you watch “Miri”, take a good look at Africa and see if you can spot fjords indenting the coasts.

Living In The Fast Lane —”Wink Of An Eye” is another episode that gets laughed over for its absurdity. Professor Krauss has pointed out not only the hyperimpossibility of the accelerated Deela being able to outrace a phaser beam in his book The Physics Of Star Trek, but also that even in order to do so, she and the other Scalosians, and Kirk as well, would be existing at a level where they all would have ended up ageing ten years for every second that passed aboard the Enterprise. The fact that no more than the time it took Scotty to descend from the bridge to arrive at the transporter room to stand by for action after Kirk’s “disappearance” passed aboard the Enterprise before Kirk returned to normal is enough to suggest that the level of acceleration is no more than 300X normal time. Certainly not fast enough to outrace a beam of pure radiation or even a much slower charged-particle beam. What’s worse, the episode is completely inconsistent with its own goofy physics. The Scalosians can move faster than a phaser beam but they go through the transporter as normally as any member of the Enterprise crew? If a phaser beam propagates at lightspeed, and the Scalosians can move faster than c., then how can they even see? How can Deela’s own weapon function effectively? The accelerated Kirk, Deela, Rael, and Spock should all be blind, since they wouldn’t be receiving photons. They shouldn’t be able to stand on the decks, since gravity also propagates at lightspeed. They certainly shouldn’t be able to hear anything, since sounds propagate at considerably slower speeds than c. Their mere movement throughout the ship should be accompanied by blasts of Cerenkov radiation if they’re accelerated faster than c. Doors shouldn’t open for them, since the sensors register and transmit orders to the door circuits electromagnetically, and electromagnetic signals also propagate at c. The Scalosians’ own communicators shouldn’t function either. And how could they brake their own movements and remain within the confines of the Enterprise’s own hull if they’re moving faster than light in the first place? And if they bump into something, the resulting release of energy from the impact force would vapourise the ship.

If Kirk and the Scalosians are only accelerated at 300X normal speed/time, they’d still be visible, even as blurs of movement. Not only that, the effects they would generate in their wake would be impossible not to notice. Their presence aboard the ship and their movments would be accompanied by pressure-wave displacement of the ship’s internal atmosphere. Gale-force winds would be blowing through the corridors and passages of the Enterprise. Again, if they bump into anything or fall down, the impact force of a body moving at 300X normal speed would wreak damage to the ship’s structure. Any accelerated person would simply punch through the hull and wind up in open space —very dead.

None of these things happen to Kirk, Spock, or the Scalosians. The ship isn’t affected by their movements, nor does anyone experience any effects in the wake of their movements. In comparison, the hyperimpossible phase-state experienced by Geordi LaForge and Ro Laren in the TNG episode “The Next Phase” is infinitely more reasonable. The only even remotely plausible explanation is that somehow, Kirk and the Scalosians are existing in a different time-frame altogether and are completely out of synch with normal time, but it’s hard to swallow the idea that such a violation of temporal mechanics could conceivably be caused by radiation and water pollution which accompanied a series of volcanic eruptions.

Finally, Kirk beds Deela, but is it really plausible that she would be satisfied with a man who’s faster than a speeding bullet?

The Incredible Shrinking, Freezing Planet —in “The Naked Time”, planet Psi 2000, a frozen and dead world on which a Federation science team died after contracting the water-borne sickness, was in the process of contracting itself prior to a planetary breakup. There were shifts in gravity and mass, which made the job of maintaining the Enterprise in orbit a difficult one even before Lt. Kevin Riley goes nuts, locks himself up in Engineering, and deactivates the ship’s engines while singing “I’ll Take You Home Kathleen” horribly off-key.

By any measure, the Enterprise is witness to an anomaly of physics so improbable that it goes right off anybody’s scale. Firstly, the planet is on the verge of breaking up because of its contraction. Which means that somehow, despite the fact that gravity is pulling its mass ever inward, at some point the planet will disintegrate into a cloud of rubble. There’s only one slight problem: if mass is collecting toward a central point due to gravity, it will simply keep collecting and contracting until either mutual electromagnetic repulsion holds its mass up, or assuming a hyperimpossible exponnential increase in mass it would end up collapsing into a black hole. Psi 2000 has nowhere near the mass to make this possible, and the gravity which is causing the planet to contract would not allow it to then break up into free-floating rubble afterward, because mutual gravitational attraction would still keep the planet in one piece.

Psi 2000 experiences sudden, weird shifts in mass and gravity —so much so that the Enterprise must adjust its orbit to keep the ship from being pulled down. Unless Psi 2000 is magickally acquiring mass from elsewhere, its gravitational attraction should remain a constant. If the planet is somehow magickally losing mass, its gravity would be consequently reduced, and the Enterprise’s problem becomes one of slowing her own momentum to maintain the orbit instead of flying off into space on a free trajectory. The only factor which could affect the Enteprise’s orbit would be Psi 2000’s tidal force, but this would require the planet’s rate of rotation to increase by orders of magnitude, yet it is supposedly doing so while collecting additional mass from somewhere, which would tend to slow angular momentum.

If that isn’t enough to cause the solons at the Interstellar Geophysical Conference to scratch their heads in utter bewilderment, there is the fact that the planet is a frozen wasteland despite the fact of its contraction. If Psi 2000 is indeed contracting, then this means that gravitational collapse is occuring. The matter of the planet is being forced to squeeze in upon itself, which means that a huge amount of molecular friction is being generated. Which means that Psi 2000 should actually be heating up from its own internal friction; so much so that it should have been impossible for the Federation to plant a science station on the surface, which would have been molten slag.

All this, amusingly, is taking place in the very same episode in which Scotty famously tells Captain Kirk that he can’t change the laws of physics. He’dve never had a chance to even if he wanted. The writer beat him to it.

[NecronLord]

You’ve Seen One Earth, You’ve Seen Them All —Earth is only one planet of nine circling a rather insignificant little yellow sun located within a more remote part of the western spiral arm of the galaxy. So what accounts for the discovery by the Enterprise of a carbon-copy duplicate of the Earth, occupying the same orbit around the same type G2V yellow star supporting a system of nine planets occupying the same orbits as those in our own little star system in the episode “Miri”, and supporting a human culture which developed in such a complete parallel to our own until they started fooling around with biotech, which they probably regarded with even greater enthusiasm than we did as the Wave Of The Future until the glitch in the lab happened? Later episodes would invoke the truly absurd Hodgkins’ Law of Parallel Planet Development to explain away all the various theme-park planets encountered by the Enterprise crew in their travels, but the duplicate Earth truly takes the cake. The number does not exist to express the improbability of such a world’s existence.
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The Preservers

[TheDarkling]

The sonic weapon just shoots a force field up and fills it with matter, then shoots the sonic weapon inside that, convolted? yes but at least it works (kinda).

[seanrobertson]

Patrick,

Impressive!

I have one to potentially add to the list: "deactivation of antimatter" in "The Doomsday Machine," supposedly the reason that photon torpedoes couldn't be shot into the device's maw.

Then there's the expectation of blowing off a planet's atmosphere with a small amount of AM..."The Changeling" maybe?

I'm not as familiar with TOS as I'd like to be. If it wasn't for you, Mike and Wayne Poe, I'd totally be in the dark. If only I could afford those DVDs!

[Vexx]

All of this adds up to one central truth: it is not necessary to run engines to maintain an orbit.

Actually, you're wrong there. While you don't have to maintain 100% engine burn to remain in orbit, you actually do have to apply some sort of force to keep from being sucked in by, dun dun dun dun... gravity! Ever see people weightless in space? Ever see how they take people up in special jetliners and then stop, and free-fall towards earth for a few minutes, and during that time everyone is floating around exactly like in space? Well, thats whats going on in orbit, you're in a free-fall towards the earth. You're not going quite as fast as if you were in the atmosphere, but it's still there; you stay up because gravity is weaker, and it all evens out to weightlessness.

And most satallites do have systems with which to keep from re-entering the atmosphere. How do you think the Hubble Space Telescope maneuvers to look at things? The Space Shuttle fires off maneuvering thrusters at regular intervals so that, in effect, it skips around the earth, firing blasters, then free-falling, then firing them again and going back up a little, then falling again.

Anyway, I too think ST for the most part is full of glorified bullcrap meant to dazzle people with their l33t techno crap. Just not "power-orbiting".

[JodoForce]

Is it a sign of how SD.net has affected my character that I find it impossible to write a polite explanation for Vexx?

[JodoForce]

Actually, you're wrong there. While you don't have to maintain 100% engine burn to remain in orbit, you actually do have to apply some sort of force to keep from being sucked in by, dun dun dun dun... gravity! Ever see people weightless in space? Ever see how they take people up in special jetliners and then stop, and free-fall towards earth for a few minutes, and during that time everyone is floating around exactly like in space? Well, thats whats going on in orbit, you're in a free-fall towards the earth. You're not going quite as fast as if you were in the atmosphere, but it's still there; you stay up because gravity is weaker, and it all evens out to weightlessness.

And most satallites do have systems with which to keep from re-entering the atmosphere. How do you think the Hubble Space Telescope maneuvers to look at things? The Space Shuttle fires off maneuvering thrusters at regular intervals so that, in effect, it skips around the earth, firing blasters, then free-falling, then firing them again and going back up a little, then falling again.

Anyway, I too think ST for the most part is full of glorified bullcrap meant to dazzle people with their l33t techno crap. Just not "power-orbiting".

BZZZT! Wrong answer!!

hint: ever wonder why you circle the Earth in orbit instead of hovering in one place? Ever heard of something called centrifugal force?

I'd imagine the Hubble would have manoeuvring thrusters. They're there to turn the telescope to point at different directions, not to overcome gravity

[Vexx]

my point was to try and say that you need some power to remain in orbit, whether its adjusting your position or moving your position from high to low orbit or whathaveyou, and just to get in the exact right position needs some sort of thruster action. also a starship in orbit would theoretically want to stay above a landing party on the surface, if there is one, citing the need for powered orbit thing.

[JodoForce]

Actually, you're wrong there. While you don't have to maintain 100% engine burn to remain in orbit, you actually do have to apply some sort of force to keep from being sucked in by, dun dun dun dun... gravity!

Sure didn't sound like that's what you were saying in your last post. Quit backpedalling. Alright, concession accepted.

Your point NOW (:lol:) is that you need thrust to CHANGE orbit; his point was that you don't need thrust to STAY in orbit. Quite different

also a starship in orbit would theoretically want to stay above a landing party on the surface, if there is one, citing the need for powered orbit thing.

This is the only real rationalization you have provided for why ST ships need power-orbiting, and I don't think this could possibly apply to all the cases listed by Patrick.

[RedImperator]

Why in the world would you need to power orbit to stay above the landing party? If a communications satellite can be parked in synchronous orbit, I don't see why the Enterprise can't.

[Ted C]

Actually, you're wrong there. While you don't have to maintain 100% engine burn to remain in orbit, you actually do have to apply some sort of force to keep from being sucked in by, dun dun dun dun... gravity!

Tell that to the Moon.

[Ted C]

Why in the world would you need to power orbit to stay above the landing party? If a communications satellite can be parked in synchronous orbit, I don't see why the Enterprise can't.

It would only be necessary if you were in a low enough orbit to be experiencing at least a small amount of atmospheric drag. Skylab had that problem.

[Crayz9000]

Why in the world would you need to power orbit to stay above the landing party? If a communications satellite can be parked in synchronous orbit, I don't see why the Enterprise can't.

A geosynchronous satellite does need to burn a little fuel to stay parked in that one spot. However, even a geosnchronous satellite can stay up for years... just look at the Galaxy-series communication satellites.

[Publius]

However, even a geosnchronous satellite can stay up for years... just look at the Galaxy-series communication satellites.

... which evidently have better orbital mechanics than Galaxy-class starships.

Publius

[Drooling Iguana]

Why in the world would you need to power orbit to stay above the landing party? If a communications satellite can be parked in synchronous orbit, I don't see why the Enterprise can't.

Maybe those little comm-badges don't have enough power to transmit to a geosynchronus satellite, so the Enterprise has to maintain a lower orbit.

[Howedar]

Why in the world would you need to power orbit to stay above the landing party? If a communications satellite can be parked in synchronous orbit, I don't see why the Enterprise can't.

A geosynchronous satellite does need to burn a little fuel to stay parked in that one spot. However, even a geosnchronous satellite can stay up for years... just look at the Galaxy-series communication satellites.

Incorrect. Geosynchronous satellites burn no fuel, nor do they even have engines AFAIK.

[Crayz9000]

OK, my mistake. They do need a way to get up into a geosynchronous orbit, and a way to stop from going past it. Once they're there, all they need is maneuvering thrusters so they won't leave the orbit by accident.

[Sea Skimmer]

Tell that to the Moon.

Actually the moon is slowly moving away from the Earth. A perfectly stable orbit is pretty much impossible.

[kojikun]

skimmer: stability is in its usefulness. as far as this arguement goes, you DONT need active power to keep an object in orbit. Especially not a starship 200 years from now.

[Vexx]

However, even a geosnchronous satellite can stay up for years... just look at the Galaxy-series communication satellites.

... which evidently have better orbital mechanics than Galaxy-class starships.

Publius

Lol, too true

Anyway, yes, perfectly geosynchronized orbit is very very very hard. The smallest things can disrupt it, from showering by space dust to a stray object hitting the navigational deflectors. With the deflectors its probably not a problem, but remember that every action in space causes an opposite reaction. PLUS the fact that the Enterprise would somehow need to maintain an orbit parallel with anything on the ground, whether it's something being scanned or an away team or whatever, which is usually the only reason they go to planets in the first place.

As for the moon.. in another million years or so it'll be about half as big.. bye bye moon..

[Vexx]

Wait, here's another science blooper:

Klingons.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

<snipped>
And most satallites do have systems with which to keep from re-entering the atmosphere. How do you think the Hubble Space Telescope maneuvers to look at things? The Space Shuttle fires off maneuvering thrusters at regular intervals so that, in effect, it skips around the earth, firing blasters, then free-falling, then firing them again and going back up a little, then falling again.

Anyway, I too think ST for the most part is full of glorified bullcrap meant to dazzle people with their l33t techno crap. Just not "power-orbiting".

BZZZT! Wrong answer!!

hint: ever wonder why you circle the Earth in orbit instead of hovering in one place? Ever heard of something called centrifugal force?

I'd imagine the Hubble would have manoeuvring thrusters. They're there to turn the telescope to point at different directions, not to overcome gravity :roll:

Just as wrong, I'm afraid. The reason why an object tends to stay in orbit is that it's moving forward fast enough that it falls over the limb of the planet. So, as a result, you're continuously falling, it's just that your fall doesn't end on solid ground.

[Isolder74]

What about the TOS episode "Spock's Brain"

That one is full of science opps!

[Gandalf]

I'm not sure if I remember this right, but in "Balance of Terror", we saw the whole crew acting as if they were on a submarine, not wanting to make a noise on the ship incase they are heard by a nearby Warbird. I think it beats the sonic disruptor one.

[Vexx]

What about the TOS episode "Spock's Brain"

That one is full of science opps!

*Sigh* if only everyone's brain could be removed and replaced like a battery.

I'm not sure if I remember this right, but in "Balance of Terror", we saw the whole crew acting as if they were on a submarine, not wanting to make a noise on the ship incase they are heard by a nearby Warbird. I think it beats the sonic disruptor one.

The entire premise of sound in space is a giant science blooper, unfortunately all sci-fi falls victim to that. Afterall, how could you have dramatic space fights with no sound?