Constitution Refit: Evasive Starboard

[2046]

Huh, never noticed this before.

In ST2:TWoK, while playing cat and mouse in the Mutara Nebula, the Reliant and Enterprise end up nose-to-nose a handful of kilometers from one another, with no apparent relative motion. The Reliant is backlit by some sort of nebular wackiness, then finally appears on the Enterprise bridge's fritzing viewscreen. Kirk orders "evasive, starboard!"

The Reliant fires about three seconds later, dead ahead of herself, in a scene lasting about two seconds. These shots are seen striking the Enterprise amidships from basically due portward, with the classic series of direct hits to the portside torpedo bay.

The Enterprise returns fire and her port ventral phasers erupt on a heading also basically due portward, suggesting the Reliant was there (since she got hit from more or less due forward, taking fire to the bridge). This suggests that the Reliant maintained relative position to the Enterprise, keeping her nose pointed at the Big E.

Doesn't that mean the Enterprise swung around 90 degrees in five seconds from a relative dead stop to the Reliant? And that this wasn't a continuing maneuver, but basically a 90 degree course change which was then stopped?

And this on only partial main power. The condition of the impulse drive wasn't specified, but when the Reliant . . . said before the Mutara battle to be capable of outrunning the Enterprise . . . earlier went to full impulse power to pursue the Enterprise, its sudden burst of speed relative to the Enterprise was quite notable on the viewscreen.

In other words, a half-dead Enterprise is sufficiently maneuverable to turn right and then stop the rotation in about five seconds. This is not surprising to anyone who's been watching Star Trek starships go zipping about like fighter jets, but considering that Trek deflationists like to pretend that Federation ships lumber about as badly as ISDs, it's a nice little point.

Since we know the mass of the ship and her size, we can follow up on this with calculations in which we pretend the ship simply rotated and did not due any further accelerating (which would hardly be very evasive). I'll work on that in the next post, as my time at the moment runneth short.