Re: [ST:TOS:RM][Notes] Assignment: Earth

Phillip Thorne <pethorne@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Assignment: Earth
Season 2 Ep 26 (of 26)
First aired 29 March 1968

<http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/series/TOS/episode/68770.html>

And again, "Ship's Stores" are able to provide period costumes. I
think one of the TOS novel authors added a quartermaster character who
handled these special requests.

I can understand why they never bothered putting a quartermaster
on the show in the second or third season -- no budget -- but I have to
wonder if they might have established a quartermaster had there been some
episode in the first half-season where they actually went on a mission
to a new civilization that needed costuming.


Cool VFX on the alien transporter -- except that it left a black
background whenever Seven stepped out.

The aliens have a replicator slot, complete with glowing VFX. This is
arguably more of a TNG-style replicator than the _Enterprise's_ food
slots.

Yeah, they did a cool bit of work making effects that weren't
Standard Trek but were credible for an alien-spy show. I also wonder
if the effects on the transporter and replicatore were easier to do
than the Enterprise Transporter were; I'd have to imagine after two
years at this the effects people had all sorts of ideas for how to
make these sorts of appear-from-nothing shots simpler.


"Beam us directly to Mr.Seven's apartment," Kirk orders from Florida.
We don't see them pass through the transporter room, but this might
constitute a site-to-site transport.

It could be. Certainly the `directly' suggests it. But
then we also see that it's really quick to cycle people through the
transporter room and back down again, as the crew is *much* sharper
this time about what to do when they unexpectedly beam up security-
based lifeforms.


Why would Scotty need to "bounce a signal off a weather satellite" to
get a view of Florida? Hmmm. We've had close-up sensor scans before,
but ever visuals? And even if it was necessary, wouldn't he lose the
image quickly because the satellite was moving? Were there any
geostats in 1968?

There were, in reality: Syncom II was geosynchronized and
launched in July 1963; syncom III was geostationary and launched 13
months later. Those were communications satellites, of course.

The TIROS weather satellites began orbiting in 1960, and were
low-earth-orbit ones. The Nimbus weather satellites, in sun-synchronous
orbits began in 1964.

However, we have to be careful bringing real-world data into
this because pretty much by definition space history in Trek-1968 is
quite different from real-world 1968. Among other things there's a
military version of the Saturn V, which requires some *big* changes
in the United States political scene. I'll give them a McKinley Rocket
Base for free -- that change could be as simple as changing the name
of Vandenberg or Merrit Island -- but not operational strategic nuclear
weapons on a Saturn V without a point-of-departure mighty early in the
1960s.


Kinda careless of the Mysterious Aliens to leave all of those
purely-manual controls (the pen that opens the transporter-vault, the
servo) lying about the office -- nothing had a biometric interlock.
But this was probably par for the spy-TV genre.

It's terribly reckless of them, at least not to put them
under some kind of lock. But when you have responsible access control
all sorts of adventures don't happen.


Even *more* careless for their two on-site agents to be killed in an
auto accident, and *not notice*. What, they don't check in regularly
with the Beta Five computer (not named as such in the ep, possibly due
to cuts)? There's no deadman's routine? Or maybe there was, and
that's why Supervisor Gary was summoned -- but instead of having a
precis ready for him, he had to puzzle it out.

There's another thing: Seven was supposed to be getting there
apparently simultaneously to the Agents doing their bit of sabotage.
Was he there to oversee their work, review it, or was this entirely a
bit of coincidence he was coming on the same day as a major crisis?
(Or is there just *always* a major crisis?) And what were the agents
doing driving to McKinley when they have a transporter vault?

Maybe the Minimum Necessary Change they calculated to be
cutting off the Range Safety Officer in traffic, or something like that,
and it went horribly wrong.


Also careless of them to design their transporter beam such that it
could be intercepted by any hardware that was in the vicinity. What
if there were Vulcans passing through? You'd think this would require
more of a matching of technologies -- but maybe once Gary's pattern
was in the buffer, Scotty was obligated to materialize it.

I'm interested what the doctype on a tranpsorter beam is like,
if any old piece of hardware is ready to rematerialize it. This does
seem to suggest that the transporter beam is in fact a beam, though,
all the molecules of a person along with a description of how to put
it back together; I'm not sure how this lets alien transporters work
so well together. I mean, it makes sense that Federation ships can
beam from one to another, or that the Enterprise and Kronos One can
arrange a simultaneous transport. It's less sensible that people who
have no intention of ever contacting one another should be able to beam
together.

This does suggest that transporter beams can be used to carry
substantial bits of momentum, too.


In the novel _Prime Directive_, the _Enterprise_ is able to disable a
bunch of alien ICBMs -- remotely. No need to rewire the flight
computer; they just tickle the circuits using narrow-beam subspace
trickery.

I had thought they just phasered the thing, but it's been about
fifteen years since I read the novel. Also the Enterprise in that case
wasn't worried about preventing nuclear holocausts that had never been
part of recorded history, but just wanted to get the weapons blown up
by any means available. I could easily be wrong.


There was lots of stock footage of Saturn V Apollo rockets used in
this ep -- too much for the RM crew to replace, it seems. Whereas a
Saturn V is a dandy heavy-lift choice for lofting a nuclear weapons
platform (but the dialogue said "suborbital" which makes no sense),

The suborbital thing *really* throws me. It seems like the
writers were confusing suborbital with low-orbital, which would ...
well, it's hard to make actual strategic sense of orbital nuclear
weapons, but it's better than having them on the Moon or something
really silly like that.


Also, did you notice that Sulu and Chekov project the impact
of the out-of-control rocket as somewhere on the Eurasian landmass?
Jeez, guys, could you be a little more vague?


it
wouldn't have an Apollo CSM topped with the spire of an escape rocket.
But they wouldn't have Skylab (a Saturn in, basically, cargo
configuration) until 1973 ... which used a Saturn IB. Aha.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_IB>

Careful there: Skylab 1, the launch of the space station,
used a cargo-version Saturn V. It was the three missions bringing
crews to and from the station, which were probably meant to be called
Skylab 2/3/4 but got the numbering really confused, that used the
Saturn I-Bs. The Saturn-Skylab shroud looked like:
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/mirrors/images/images/pao/SL2/10076075.jpg



(What did the shroud for the Apollo-Soyuz link-up look like? The U.S.
craft had the ungainly docking adapter on its nose. This also used a
IB.)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo-Soyuz>

There wasn't any special shroud for Apollo-Soyuz. The Docking
Module for that was stored inside the Spacecraft Launch Adaptor panels,
just like the Lunar Module was. Unfortunately the good pictures of it
in its S-IVB housing are not available online thanks to numerous NASA
redesigns of its photo archive.

Apollo 5 had an odd shroud as well, because that was a Saturn
I-B launch of just the Lunar Module:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a410/ap5-onpad-noID.jpg


Something that is hard to appreciate with the stock footage:
Apollo 4, the mission from which endless movies and TV shows which
would use the interstage ring falling away was only in November 1967;
Assignment: Earth aired just a few months later. This wasn't quite a
ripped-from-the-headlines event, but it was close, and I'm curious just
what the first pop-cultural use of the interstages falling away was.
(Getting film footage of these rocket launches was an amazing task,
and it wasn't at all reliable.)

Note that Gary Seven's computer calls the falling away of the
interstage (between the first and second stages) as the second stage
separation, and the ignition of the second stagee as the third stage
ignition.

*But* that's not the only stock footage confusion from this
episode: they used, necessarily, footage of the two Saturn V rocket-
shaped creatures they had, which was the Apollo 4 launch as well as
footage of the Saturn 500-F facilities testing article. This was just
a mock-up of roughly the correct size and weight distribution built so
that the hardware for moving about the Saturn V could be tested.

It's obvious if you build Saturn V rocket models, because the
500-F had a different paint scheme which *every* Saturn V kit uses in
its instruction sheets. Notably the first stage has a horizontal band
on it; the third stage also has dashes rather than a continuous band
on top. The 500-F:
http://images.ksc.nasa.gov/photos/1966/medium/KSC-66C-5246.jpg

and Apollo 4:
http://history.nasa.gov/MHR-5/Images/fig380.jpg

If you look closely, you can see where extended black marks on the first
stage were painted over white; Apollo 6 and onward would have white there
not painted over. (It was a matter of controlling heat distribution with
different colors of paint.) The first stage can be problematic -- even
the movie _Apollo 13_, which used not a second of stock footage, messed
up on rendering the Saturn V.

The show's stock footage necessarily jumps back and forth in
them, of course, but also shows things like the rocket being rolled out
to the launchpad well after the point it should have been on the pad.

--
Joseph Nebus
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