Solar Sail?
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There was a scene in the movie The Voyage Home, where a Starship Captain (of the Yorktown) reported to Starfleet Command that, "Our systems engineers are trying to deploy a makeshift solar-sail. We have high hopes that this will, if successful, generate power to keep us alive."
This really doesn't make much sense. The best that I've been able to figure it is, instead of generating a deflector shield in the shape of a "bubble." they intended instead to generate it as a flat plane, oriented perpendicular to any radiation emitting from a (hopefully) nearby star. This would generate motive power. It's difficult to imagine the ship's company constructing a physical solar sail large enough to move anything as massive as a Starship, although we never saw the exterior of the Yorktown in that movie. It could have been small.
Using solar sail to somehow generate electrical or EPS energy isn't how I understand a solar sail to work. A "makeshift" solar array might, but that's not what the captain spoke of.
This really doesn't make much sense. The best that I've been able to figure it is, instead of generating a deflector shield in the shape of a "bubble." they intended instead to generate it as a flat plane, oriented perpendicular to any radiation emitting from a (hopefully) nearby star. This would generate motive power. It's difficult to imagine the ship's company constructing a physical solar sail large enough to move anything as massive as a Starship, although we never saw the exterior of the Yorktown in that movie. It could have been small.
Using solar sail to somehow generate electrical or EPS energy isn't how I understand a solar sail to work. A "makeshift" solar array might, but that's not what the captain spoke of.
^ The sail wasn't intended to MOVE the ship. Only generate emergency power.
^Yeah, calling it a sail rather than a collector was a misnomer on the captain's part, but we can forgive her given that she was in the middle of a crisis. (Sometimes we're too quick to take every spoken word in a movie or episode literally. We must remember there's such a thing as an unreliable narrator.) And there's no way a deflector would've been at all useful as a solar sail or collector. Presumably it was a physical structure fabricated by the ship's equipment and deployed in an EVA.
And there was definitely no reference to solar sails in TOS. Although the concept was proposed as early as the 1920s, it didn't begin showing up in prose fiction until the early '60s, and there's no way a TV show in the '60s would've been that up to date with the literature.
For that matter, there were no TOS episodes where a probe was launched toward a planet, period. The only time the Enterprise was ever shown launching an unmanned probe was in "The Immunity Syndrome." It was TNG that made unmanned probes a standard part of a ship's equipment, and they never mentioned solar sails either.
And there was definitely no reference to solar sails in TOS. Although the concept was proposed as early as the 1920s, it didn't begin showing up in prose fiction until the early '60s, and there's no way a TV show in the '60s would've been that up to date with the literature.
For that matter, there were no TOS episodes where a probe was launched toward a planet, period. The only time the Enterprise was ever shown launching an unmanned probe was in "The Immunity Syndrome." It was TNG that made unmanned probes a standard part of a ship's equipment, and they never mentioned solar sails either.
We must also remember there are such things as writers who don’t know science from Shinola.
Anyone remember Arthur C. Clarke’s short story The Sunjammer, first published in Boy’s Life in 1964?
Forgive me, but wasn't the Captain of the Yorktown a male? It was the Captain of the Saratoga (beginning of the same movie) who was a she.
My thought on the deflector shield being employed as a solar sail is based upon it ability to deflect energy (weapons fire), or in the case of a sail light photons. We've seen the deflectors stuck with energy and have it move the ship many times, move in the form of a "lurch," occasionally throwing the crew to the deck.
Because it's deflecting only sunlight photons, the deflector shield could be spread quite "thinly," covering thousands of square miles.
IIRC there was an episode of DS9 (the name escapes me) that was similar to your description.
Now, be fair. Even acknowledging the concept of a starship using emergency solar power is a step above most mass-media SF. So much SFTV and film assumes that starships' power would rely on exotic made-up elements and they never even consider the unlimited free energy of the stars. It was impressive that the writers of TVH were even aware of the concept, and they shouldn't be condemned just because they got a single word wrong.
Err, yes, that's one of the early '60s stories I was referring to. But as I said, it's almost unprecedented for any SFTV show to be that current with SF literature. Usually concepts from the literature don't show up in SFTV or movies for a decade or two.
Oh, that's right, it was Vijay Amritraj, wasn't it? Yeah, I was very aware of that at the time because he was costarring in a sitcom I watched at around the same time. It's been quite a while since I saw the movie, though. (I recently completed my home video collection of all 11 Trek movies and I've been meaning to watch them all in a row, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.)
I don't think deflectors really work that way. Really, the shaking is poetic license. A beam of radiation shouldn't "push" a ship to a noticeable degree; only a physical impact or explosion should have that effect.
Besides, as others have already said, the dialogue in TVH made it clear that the purpose of the "solar sail" was power, not propulsion. An actual propulsive sail, regardless of how it was constructed, would only impart a very small acceleration to the ship; it would take them weeks or months or years to get anywhere even if they were within an inhabited star system. And by then, they would've all suffocated to death. What they needed was energy.
Solar sails were mentioned frequently in the Pocket Books novels at the time.
No, Pocket didn't get the license until '79, and didn't begin publishing original novels until '81. The only works of Trek fiction published during the run of TOS were James Blish's first three episode adaptation collections from Bantam, Mack Reynolds's young-adult Mission to Horatius from Whitman, and the first few comics books from Gold Key in the US and in Joe 90 Top Secret magazine in the UK.
Maybe he means at the time of the movies. However, I don't recall much mention of solar sails in Trek literature.
^ Thirty-fifty-six. Ninety-nine are correct. Limited four and eight are missing.
Oops! Wrong solar sailer.
Oops! Wrong solar sailer.
Okay . . . I don’t get it.Thirty-fifty-six. Ninety-nine are correct. Limited four and eight are missing.
Oops! Wrong solar sailer.
^ It's from Tron
OK, I'm going to keep looking. I watched season 1 and 2 of TOS and all the movies before the latest movie and I swear there was a scene with a probe launched from a Federation ship, towards a planet. As it got close to the planet a huge golden sail unfurled. There was no mention of "solar sail" but I'm pretty sure that's what it was. Not sure if it was the Enterprise and I don't think it was Kirk.
Well, my mission continues...Thanks for the replies
There's no way in hell that was done in the original series. The special effects technology wouldn't have been capable of showing it even if the concept itself had trickled down to the mass media yet. I suppose there's a possibility that something like that could've been added as one of the new digital effects shots in TOS Remastered, but it doesn't ring a bell. The only TOS-R episode I can recall that involved a ship releasing any kind of probes around a planet was "Operation: Annihilate!" where they showed the release of the UV satellites. But that looked like this:
http://trekmovie.com/images/opan3.jpg
Not a huge golden sail, just a few panels.
Maybe you're thinking of something from elsewhere in the Trek franchise. "Huge golden sail" suggests the Bajoran sailship from Deep Space Nine's "Explorers" (although that was actually a ridiculously tiny sail by solar-propulsion standards):
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/File:Bajoran_lightship_(aft).jpg
...or the Son'a collector ship from Insurrection:
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Son'a_collector
^^That helps a lot. I'm going to go through Insurrection, that ship looks pretty close to what I remember. I noticed in TOS collection I have, all the planets are different, so It is possible that It was an enhanced version of a ship, I think they changed some of the ships as well for the DVDs.
I'm trying to avoid going through all of season 1 and 2, hopefully I find it in Insurrection.
I'm trying to avoid going through all of season 1 and 2, hopefully I find it in Insurrection.
"At the time" referred to the TVH part of the conversation.
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