Because he heard English being spoken.
A question about the Botany Bay.
- Thread starter Tenacity
- Start date
Did he ask it in English? Or was he speaking Hindi or Punjabi and it was translated for our benefit?
Space is also very, very, very big and very, very, very empty. A ship the size of the Botany Bay could easily, by not transmitting any emissions, just float right outside of the Oort Cloud and never be spotted for centuries.
Probably farther, though, since Spock says, regarding Earth ships, "there have been no flights into this sector for years." He probably doesn't mean an entire Sector, but maybe the Botany Bay is in empty space a few light years outside of Earth where no ships would expect to be. Space Seed opens with them chasing the ship down because of sensor readings. Maybe this is the first time that sensors were strong enough to catch this ship in the middle of nowhere.
Probably farther, though, since Spock says, regarding Earth ships, "there have been no flights into this sector for years." He probably doesn't mean an entire Sector, but maybe the Botany Bay is in empty space a few light years outside of Earth where no ships would expect to be. Space Seed opens with them chasing the ship down because of sensor readings. Maybe this is the first time that sensors were strong enough to catch this ship in the middle of nowhere.
Not entirely impossible as well that early Boomer ships did notice it but kept the news private, in case they ever had time to go salvaging on those early routes. They wouldn't have known what the old ship was either, apart from DY class, or some leftover relic of the earliest Kzin conflicts. Boomers had no loyality to anyone but themselves and if that information was discovered, it would have died with the crews or once again faded into legend.
For even augments like Malik's gang only knew in vague terms about the legend that Khan left earth. They had no time to go looking, and in any case Malik would not have wanted to submit to a superior intellect. Whatever Malik knew, he almost certainly obtaind second hand from Soong, who probably had poured over any augment information he could find. He himself almost certainly would have been interested in getting genetic samples of Khan and his followers if he could have found them.
May I remind you of the dialog from "Space Seed":
So it took years just to travel from one planet to another. I don't know how many years it took to travel a specific distance, but McGivers wouldn't say years if there weren't at least some interplanetary voyages that lasted for at least one Earth year. So even imagining that the longest possible voyage between known planets in our solar system lasted merely one Earth year, that establishes a maximum possible speed for the ships of that era.
So all it takes to calculate how long a voyage to another star would last in that type of ship is knowledge of how far away even the nearest stars are compared to even the most distant planets in our solar system. If only one of us had such elementary astronomical knowledge, and made a post on this thread using that knowledge to demonstrate how far the Botany Bay could have traveled in about two hundred years and whether it could have reached any stars.
And of course I am being sarcastic, because I did make a post on that subject, post number 48 on page 3 of this thread.
I calculated the average speed and thus the speed change (Delta-v) necessary to make the longest possible voyage between recognized planets in our solar system, between Uranus and Neptune when they are on opposite sides of the Sun (without checking whether they would have been that far apart in the era of Khan).
I then wondered whether McCivers could have been talking about a trip to the hypothetical Planet Nine, which would be a much longer trip. And I calculated how far the Botany Bay could travel in on 100, 200, or 300 years at the speeds necessary for a a one year voyage to the hypothetical Planet Nine, which was a little more impressive for interstellar travel..
And the speeds in that calculation were "about 0.0253 to 0.1012 of the speed of light, two and a half to ten percent of the speed of light."
So even assuming that McGivers was talking about one year trips to Planet Nine the speeds necessary would only be 0.0253c to 0.1012c, small fractions of the 0.5c you speculated about.
In order to have the Botany Bay travel much faster and travel much farther, you would have to come up with a body in our solar system that McGivers might count as a planet and which would be even farther from the Sun than the hypothetical Planet Nine.
I note that among known exoplanets orbiting single stars, the one with the widest orbit around its star is believed to be 2MASS J2126-8140 2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2MASS_J2126–8140
But with an estimated mass of about 13.3 Jupiter masses, pus or minus 1.7, or between 11.6 and 15 Jupiter masses, it is near the line between planets and brown dwarfs, and so might not be a planet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exoplanet_extremes#Orbital_characteristics
Among known exoplanets orbiting binary planets, the one with the widest orbit is DT Virginis b:
DT Virginis b orbits with a semi-major axis of 1168 AU. So that offers some slight hope that the Sun might have an unsuspected planet that far out.
In my post number 48 on page 3 I calculated the maximum speeds that ships in Khan's era could have, consistent with McGivers saying that voyages from one planet to another took years.. Using the most favorable calculations I found that at best they could have gone about 30 light years in 300 years.
If Ceti Alpha is a goofy version of the name Alpha Ceti, then Alpha Ceti or Mankar is believed to be about 249, plus or minus 8,.light years, or about 241 to 257 light years form Earth. Thus it would appear that the Enterprise would have found the Botany Bay relatively close to Earth and carried Khan's people most of the distance between Earth and Alpha Ceti.
As i said in post number 48 on page 3 above, the words of McGivers about voyages between planets lasting for years in the time of Khan puts an upper limit on the speeds available to the ships of that era, whether they were DY-100 class, DY-200 class, or whatever.
Discussion about what speeds DY-500 class ships could achieve is moot, because if DY-500 class ships existed before about the year 2018, they must have been so slow that mere interplanetary voyages lasted for years.
Why would you assume that Spock was wrong about the Eugenics Wars being the last wold war on Earth, when it is so simple t o assume that they were the same conflict as the Third World War in First Contact. All that you have to do for that is to assume that Spock was using an Earth calendar counting the years from an epoch about 57 years after the epoch in the calendar used by Riker in First Contact.
Spock mentions the first three world wars, implying the possibility of later ones, and asks if he should go on after giving the death sin the third world war, also implying further world wars on Earth.
So it seems logical to deduce that Riker's third world war, where 600 million died, would have been Spock's fourth world war (or possibly a higher numbered one), because they used different lists of world wars, and thus in the era of TNG at least one war was dropped from the list because it wasn't big enough to qualify.
So spock's third world war would have been Riker's first tor second world war, and Spock's Eugenics Wars and fourth or higher and final world war would have been Riker's third and final world war.
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The faster a spaceship travels, the less gravity bends its trajectory and the straighter it travels. My discussion is about speeds many time greater than present day spacecraft or probes have ever achieved, starting at 0.1 percent of light speed and going up to about 10 percent of light speed. At such speeds their trajectories would be much straighter than those of present day spacecraft.
Kirk was towing the BB to Starbase 12. I assume SB12 is not near Earth. If the BB was near Earth, then if I was Kirk and I found a historic space ship, I'd tow it to Earth (or just report it and have Starfleet send a tow vessel) and not tow it many lightyears away from Earth using my top-of-the-line Starship. No, the BB was found many lightyears from Earth with the closest Starfleet asset, SB12. Time to drop the pretense that the ship was near Earth.
Going to Starbase 12 might simply have been the most convenient thing to do if it was on the Enterprise’s agenda anyway rather than going out of the way to go back to Earth.
If the Botany Bay managed to exceed .5c then it might have gotten a respectable distance from Earth. If the engines just stopped (for whatever reason) then the ship would continue on its way at whatever velocity it attained. And this is how the Enterprise would have found it and then could easily match the velocity to come alongside. And there is no mention of the ship adrift and tumbling out of control.
If the Botany Bay managed to exceed .5c then it might have gotten a respectable distance from Earth. If the engines just stopped (for whatever reason) then the ship would continue on its way at whatever velocity it attained. And this is how the Enterprise would have found it and then could easily match the velocity to come alongside. And there is no mention of the ship adrift and tumbling out of control.
Exactly. But tossing in a bit of real science we can guesstimate the BB got somewhere around 135+ light years from Earth. For the BB to have gotten around 200+ light years from Earth then it had to have achieved a respectable sublight velocity. On an interstellar or galactic scale that doesn’t seem like much at all, but in real terms it’s a respectable distance.
That's not Spock. That's later writers.
I totally agree that the Botany Bay was at least 100 lightyears from Earth and probably under 200. My in-universe theory is that the BB is driven by an early version of "impulse drive" powered by a fission power plant. The rear "rocket cones" on the ship may have nothing to due with its deep space propulsion, rather, they may have been used for the assent from orbit plus used to break and make orbits around planets. Using a nuclear submarine as an allegory for the BB, its nuclear power plant could run 20-40 years without refueling, but I assume it would fail due to some other maintenance problem with its steam/coolant recirculation system or electrical generators which would cause a shutdown. We don't know whether impulse drives have a terminal velocity like at 1/10 or 1/4 or 1/2 c, or can it keep accelerating near the speed of light like to 0.999 c. Knowing how far out would help answer this question.
Per Wiki, Alpha Ceti (not Ceti Alpha?), officially named Menkar, is the second-brightest star in the constellation of Cetus. It is a cool luminous red giant about 250 light years away.
We know that the BB is found under SB12's command range. SB12 was also mentioned in Who Mourns For Adonis:
So, we can bracket the position of SB12 and thus the BB location by those two systems. Per Wiki, Beta Geminorum or Pollux is 34 lightyears from Earth, so, I infer the BB is in the 34-250 light year range out from Earth which doesn't really help with the maximum speed for the BB, but it puts it over 0.17 c up to c.
<edit. It makes one wonder why Apollo wasn't found earlier since the planet location was so close to Earth...maybe he was cloaking himself and maybe the planet from Earth's sensor scans...>
Question. Did the Enterprise go back and retrieve the Botany Bay hulk? Because the vessel that Khan's survivors were living in looks nothing like a Federation shuttlecraft and is similar in length to the BB! That or it's container like we see on the docks today?
JB
JB
That's certainly possible as we know from an earlier draft of the script that the Botany Bay was to have been a step above your normal DY100, granting it much higher speeds than the "it took years to travel from one planet to another" velocities implied by Lt Macgyvers:
This doesn't take into account black-body radiation.
There's one final obstacle to hiding ships in space, though, that comes from fundamental physics. While you can avoid radar pulses sent out by other ships, it turns out that there's no way to avoid having your own ship emit radiation that another ship could detect. Not if you want to keep people alive inside your ship, anyway.
The key issue here is the phenomenon that launched quantum physics, namely black-body radiation. The most familiar form of this is the glow of a hot object, so you see it every time you turn on an incandescent light or cook breakfast. This radiation is a very simple and universal phenomenon, and the exact spectrum of the light emitted depends only on the temperature, not the composition of the object, or how it's heated.
While you need to get objects very hot before they emit enough light in the visible part of the spectrum for us to see, every object, regardless of its temperature, will emit thermal radiation with a blackbody spectrum determined by its temperature. This applies even to exotic objects like black holes-- that's what Hawking radiation is all about-- and the universe as a whole is permeated by the Cosmic Microwave Background, which fits perfectly to a blackbody spectrum with a temperature about 2.7 degrees above absolute zero, leading to the most iconic xkcd comic ever drawn.
Any object at a temperature higher than that background will emit radiation with a black-body spectrum showing a higher temperature. And the amount of power radiated also increases rapidly with temperature-- the Stefan-Boltzmann law tells us the power goes like the fourth power of the temperature, so if you double the temperature, you get 16 times as much radiation.
What's this have to do with stealth in space? Well, a spaceship that's trying to hide will still be emitting thermal radiation, and would show up very brightly in the right regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. And there's no way to turn this off-- it's a consequence of the fundamental structure of quantum mechanics. The only way to truly avoid detection would be to arrange for the outside of the spaceship to be at almost exactly the same temperature as the Cosmic Microwave Background, but since you want the inside of the ship to be at a temperature comfortable for the humans inside, this is a very tricky thing to do. You can try to pile on massive amounts of insulation, so the outside surface is at a lower temperature, but then you make your ship enormous, and thus harder to hide.
The key issue here is the phenomenon that launched quantum physics, namely black-body radiation. The most familiar form of this is the glow of a hot object, so you see it every time you turn on an incandescent light or cook breakfast. This radiation is a very simple and universal phenomenon, and the exact spectrum of the light emitted depends only on the temperature, not the composition of the object, or how it's heated.
While you need to get objects very hot before they emit enough light in the visible part of the spectrum for us to see, every object, regardless of its temperature, will emit thermal radiation with a blackbody spectrum determined by its temperature. This applies even to exotic objects like black holes-- that's what Hawking radiation is all about-- and the universe as a whole is permeated by the Cosmic Microwave Background, which fits perfectly to a blackbody spectrum with a temperature about 2.7 degrees above absolute zero, leading to the most iconic xkcd comic ever drawn.
Any object at a temperature higher than that background will emit radiation with a black-body spectrum showing a higher temperature. And the amount of power radiated also increases rapidly with temperature-- the Stefan-Boltzmann law tells us the power goes like the fourth power of the temperature, so if you double the temperature, you get 16 times as much radiation.
What's this have to do with stealth in space? Well, a spaceship that's trying to hide will still be emitting thermal radiation, and would show up very brightly in the right regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. And there's no way to turn this off-- it's a consequence of the fundamental structure of quantum mechanics. The only way to truly avoid detection would be to arrange for the outside of the spaceship to be at almost exactly the same temperature as the Cosmic Microwave Background, but since you want the inside of the ship to be at a temperature comfortable for the humans inside, this is a very tricky thing to do. You can try to pile on massive amounts of insulation, so the outside surface is at a lower temperature, but then you make your ship enormous, and thus harder to hide.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chador...the-physics-of-stealth-in-space/#31ea824b6482
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation
The temperature of the cosmic microwave background is about 3K (three kelvin), by the way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background
I really don't believe that the surface temperature of the Botany Bay was that close to absolute zero when the Enterprise found it. It was emitting a Morse code signal, for one thing.
Depends on what "near" is, but I would agree. Days or weeks at warp speed perhaps.
If Kirk was headed towards starbase 12 originally, let's say he had order to go there, then he would continue there after investigating a unknown ship where it didn't belong. Even if Earth was closer.
Twelve of the occupants were already dead, and the ship had independently attempted to wake another who nearly died. Leaving it for later would have been irresponsible on Kirk's part.
Personally I think the Botany Bay was more likely in the outer solar system.
it was going to take the Botany Bay tens of thousands of years to get to any star.
Nope. Lt. McGivers pointed out that the space craft prior to around 2018 were slow. And the Botany Bay was over twenty years before that.
A bit late to the party on this one but I love a good debate about Star Trek minutiae. 
I'm a continuity junkie and love this kind of stuff.
Re: whether it's DY100 or 500, I've just assumed it was DY100. It's not really incongruous for Spock to say it was the most advanced ship 'of its time'. No doubt more advanced ships came out later like the 500s, but it happened to match the period we know Khan came from 1996.
I am curious how Spock came up with incorrect numbers of casualties of WW1 and WWII. In reality that was a case of bad writing, who ever wrote that number in the script (I'm too lazy to look it up right now) obviously didn't double check on that, which is regrettable. Star Trek going back to it's earliest days always tried to base itself in reality to a certain extent. It's a shame the writer didn't check on that and give realistic numbers for casualties. Even back in 1967 it should have been easy enough to find that information.
Now regarding the differing numbers of WWIII. Until TNG came out I think the continuity generally assumed the Eugenics Wars and WWIII were one and the same. So retroactively Spock's statement could be referring to the Eugenics Wars. Since TNG we know the two conflicts have been separated and are now two distinct events. First Contact decided to give a much higher number for WWIII casualties than "Bread and Circuses". I suppose they could have made it consistent but 600 million dead definitely gives the impression that WWIII was beyond cataclysmic and it feeds into the idea that Earth had entered a dark ages after, making the post-atomic horror that was described in "Encounter at Farpoint" that much more horrific.
In story, knowing what we know now, it's hard to reconcile those figures. It's unfortunate at least the known values of WWI and WWII couldn't have been correct. It does make Spock, in story, look bad. Knowing what we know about Spock it's hard to imagine he'd get facts like those wrong. This isn't just some detail about a long forgotten battle in the middle of the war. This was an overall fact that anyone with a general knowledge of history would probably know, at least to a rounded figure. I'm not sure if there is some in-story method to reconcile what he remembered with something known. Perhaps he was only giving the deaths during a particular period of time during the war. I never sat down to figure it out--is the WWII deaths just from when the US entered the War in 1942, is it from when war was officially declared in 1939, is it just the European or from the Pacific point of view. Again, it's disappointing that a real world fact wasn't used here.
I'm a continuity junkie and love this kind of stuff.Re: whether it's DY100 or 500, I've just assumed it was DY100. It's not really incongruous for Spock to say it was the most advanced ship 'of its time'. No doubt more advanced ships came out later like the 500s, but it happened to match the period we know Khan came from 1996.
I am curious how Spock came up with incorrect numbers of casualties of WW1 and WWII. In reality that was a case of bad writing, who ever wrote that number in the script (I'm too lazy to look it up right now) obviously didn't double check on that, which is regrettable. Star Trek going back to it's earliest days always tried to base itself in reality to a certain extent. It's a shame the writer didn't check on that and give realistic numbers for casualties. Even back in 1967 it should have been easy enough to find that information.
Now regarding the differing numbers of WWIII. Until TNG came out I think the continuity generally assumed the Eugenics Wars and WWIII were one and the same. So retroactively Spock's statement could be referring to the Eugenics Wars. Since TNG we know the two conflicts have been separated and are now two distinct events. First Contact decided to give a much higher number for WWIII casualties than "Bread and Circuses". I suppose they could have made it consistent but 600 million dead definitely gives the impression that WWIII was beyond cataclysmic and it feeds into the idea that Earth had entered a dark ages after, making the post-atomic horror that was described in "Encounter at Farpoint" that much more horrific.
In story, knowing what we know now, it's hard to reconcile those figures. It's unfortunate at least the known values of WWI and WWII couldn't have been correct. It does make Spock, in story, look bad. Knowing what we know about Spock it's hard to imagine he'd get facts like those wrong. This isn't just some detail about a long forgotten battle in the middle of the war. This was an overall fact that anyone with a general knowledge of history would probably know, at least to a rounded figure. I'm not sure if there is some in-story method to reconcile what he remembered with something known. Perhaps he was only giving the deaths during a particular period of time during the war. I never sat down to figure it out--is the WWII deaths just from when the US entered the War in 1942, is it from when war was officially declared in 1939, is it just the European or from the Pacific point of view. Again, it's disappointing that a real world fact wasn't used here.
The Botany Bay being “slow” is relative. Anything under speed of light can be considered slow. Indeed by the time of TOS anything at low warp could be considered slow. A DY-100 would certainly be considered slow by TOS’ 23rd century standards yet still be damned fast by late 20th/early 21st century standards. The Botany Bay doesn’t have to go near the speed of light to get a good distance from Earth over a 260 year period and for the Enterprise to stumble across it while still “out there.”
I suggest .1c might be too slow since that gets the Botany Bay only about 26 light years out, and I think thats too close to Earth for the Enterprise to stumble across it while still being out there. That said, however, the Enterprise will later travel to Vulcan for the events of “Journey To Babel” and Vulcan isn’t far from Earth. So I suggest that DY-100 class Botany Bay can manage something between .1 and .5c.
This is fiction so the specifics don’t really matter unless one is trying to plot exactly where the Enterprise supposedly is throughout the events depicted in TOS.
I suggest .1c might be too slow since that gets the Botany Bay only about 26 light years out, and I think thats too close to Earth for the Enterprise to stumble across it while still being out there. That said, however, the Enterprise will later travel to Vulcan for the events of “Journey To Babel” and Vulcan isn’t far from Earth. So I suggest that DY-100 class Botany Bay can manage something between .1 and .5c.
This is fiction so the specifics don’t really matter unless one is trying to plot exactly where the Enterprise supposedly is throughout the events depicted in TOS.
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