Mr. Oragahn wrote:
And that's supposed to be a problem in space? There is no range as long as the torp can work on minimal power and make course corrections. Its speed can remain constant.
Why the Klingons wouldn't get closer? I think the reasons aren't exactly hard to imagine.
Sidenote: and why didn't the Klingons get away faster?
From a tactical standpoint it makes little sense to have torpedoes that take such a slow amount of time to reach their target. It also flies in the face of other examples, such as "Flashback", "Encounter at Farpoint", "Half a Life", "Q Who?", and more where torpedoes are clearly warp capable, and as we have seen in "Flashback", the torpedoes actually caught up to and hit the high warp speed
Excelsior. Those torpedoes not only look the same, but were likely fired from the same class of K'tinga battlecruisers like the ones that attacked V'Ger.
Also remember the Klingons got hit pretty hard compared to the
Enterprise as seen on the Epsilon IX monitors view of the battlecruiser's bridge. They were also in the original theatrical version of the attack stated as "continuing to attack" and the lead Klingon commander had not ordered retreat, but "Evasive!" action. Only when the second ship had been digitized is there any indication of a retreat, but by then it was too late.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Who knows? Perhaps it wasn't sure what to do. It loathed the biological lifeforms crawling inside the ship, but torps don't have such things. It could have very well been in doubt about the nature of those things. Emissaries? Probes? Weapons?
It's not like the probe that sits at its core ever was inhabitated.
So we don't know.
That ignorance, however, is not sufficient to make a claim about relative speed. You must provide that evidence, not speculation.
V'Ger was so highly advanced and had knowledge of the entire universe, I sincerely doubt it was "in doubt" for more than nanoseconds. If it was in doubt of anything, it was probably the initial intent of the Klingon ships themselves, and like with
Enterprise later on, was attempting to communicate until the Klingons fired on it.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:
What? That makes no sense. Prove they were traveling at warp when they fired those torpedoes.
Mike wrote:The Enterprise had to intercept V'Ger at warp 7 and neither V'Ger or the Enterprise slowed down at any time during the intial phases of their rendezvous, and it was continuely stated that the intruder would reach Earth in within 2 days. Nowhere does anyone state V'Ger or anyone is slowing down. It was a major plot point that time was running out because of the speed which V'Ger was closing in on Earth. The only change in the clould and V'Ger's speed occurs when it reaches the the solar system.
-Mike
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Even if that were true, the torps were still moving slowly in that frame of reference. Perhaps they were moving at warp 7 outside of that warp field, but then everything was moving at warp 7. We've seen torps fired while ships moved at warp, but I'd love to see evidence of torpedoes being capable of increasing their own warp speed significantly.
The "Flashback torpedoes as well as the "Half a Life" torpedoes are just that. The fact that the Enterprise had to make a warp speed intercept indicates that the Klingons had to do the same as well, and therefore any torpedoes they fired also had to accelerate while at warp. More interesting in regards to V'Ger's plasma weapons, they did not do a straight from the heart of the cloud to
Enterprise intercept since the
Enterprise was stated to be using a
conic section flight path which means both plasma weapon and starship were flying eliptical or parabola shaped flight paths around the center of the cloud. So even with the Director's Cut 2 AU V'Ger cloud, it still requires a relatively fast intercept by
Enterprise at high warp (the
Enterprise being at warp the whole time is supported additionally by the fact that the warp nacelles and navigational deflector are glowing substantially. When at sublight, neither showed significant glow). The same would likely be true of the Klingons.
-Mike
