The new movie raises the question, can you parachute from space? Ed Driscoll investigates, with video. Meanwhile, I want to know why they had to send a hand-to-hand combat team to disable the space drill. Why not just shoot the drill bit with some phasers or torpedoes from space? Heck, doesn’t the planet Vulcan have any planetary defenses? Some artillery shells? Frickn’ lasers? The Enterprise had to drop Sulu with a switchblade sword to take out the drill? Sounds awfully illogical.
Update: From a reader:
Geez, Johan,[sic] if you start down the path of logic in any Star Trek movie, your fate may be like NOMAD (“You are The Kirk. You are The Creator. I am NOMAD!”).
Why not just beam a nuclear weapon (with a short fuse) on board an enemy spaceship?…
Why was Spock carrying a 6-foot sphere of “red matter” around in his hot-rod spaceship (to create a black hole to suck in a soon-to-be-supernova star), when a BB-sized sphere would do? Why would Spock jettison Kirk to the ice world rather than just toss him in the brig? When Spock crashed his red matter-carrying spaceship into the enemy ship, shouldn’t all of that red matter have created the biggest black hole the universe ever had seen (and if memory serves, they weren’t all that far from Earth at the time).
Entertaining? Very much so. Logical? Eh, no
Update II: A bunch of readers say that the drill jammed the targeting of the phasers or some such, just like it did with the transporter. Okay. So why not send a shuttle craft? Why not send some ships from the Vulcan surface. The Vulcan equivalent of an F-16 sure seems like it’d have done the trick.