Annotations, Ch 47
TOS: “The Balance of Terror”
memory-alpha (dot) org/en/wiki/Balance_of_terror
The rewrite of this episode was partly inspired by Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Shadow of the Ender’s Game series, and the excellent German movie Das Boot, directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Both are highly recommended.
I got rid of the cloaking device and replaced it with a low energy ship because quite frankly, the idea makes no sense in the context of interstellar warfare. In space, where there’s energy emission of any sort, it can be detected. That’s how we know as much as we do about the great blackness beyond us. Assuming that the sensitivity of instruments able to pick up such signals has improved, it makes a high energy cloaking device that shields you from detection along some specific wavelength useless in open space. You’re not emitting signals on one spectrum? Fine. You’re hemorrhaging it out another. Though, a cloaking device might be okay in other situations-maybe against disguising the signature against a specific method of detection.
Also, maybe this is a stupid question, but what the hell does a Neutral Zone look like in 3-D? I could not for the life of me figure it out. Is it a plane, a rectangular prism, a blob, a sphere? How do you know you’re “in” the Neutral Zone? You have asteroid outposts, but depending on how you orient space, that area could get very ambiguous. ...I’m sure they made this all very clear and explicit in the treaty.
Castrodinium was invented by Star Trek. I am not a plasma physicist, and am therefore certain that my science is not accurate. I tried to make it as realistic as possible given my own basic knowledge and some online articles provided by various universities, NASA, and wikipedia.
Check out NASA’s Great Observatories websites. They have four, which take fantastic out-of-this-world images of objects in space at various wavelengths: Hubble (visible, ultraviolet, near-infrared), Compton (gamma), Chandra (x-ray), and Spitzer (infrared).
And I’ll admit it. The Romulan commander of TOS is one of my favorite one-shot characters. “The Balance of Terror” is also probably one of my favorite episodes.