What happened on the Klingon moon of Praxis in ST6: TUC? We know a few key facts from ST6 and VOY: Flashback, like that whatever happened, it was strong enough to create huge subspace shock waves, and that Praxis was a key energy production facility for the Klingon Empire (what did they do, mine dilithium or make matter or antimatter?)??? Any thoughts on this?
Posted by David Templar (Member # 580) on :
About time the update's finished. Wouldn't have to update if silly people don't sign up for the express purpose of being inactive!
I keep saying that the explosion of Praxis crippled the Klingon Empire to the extent that what happened in "Yesterday's Enterprise" should not have been possible. Everything in space in the Klingon home system should have been destroyed, which means a great deal of Klingon's military infrastructure, shipyards and asteroid-based manufacturing facilities, gone. Now since the Klingon's are fragmented in terms of their military, meaning that their armed forces comprises of different Houses with their own systems, the damage to their industries should not have been total. Still, I highly doubt the Klingons would have been able to carry out a successful military campaign against the Federation.
Posted by Tahna Los (Member # 33) on :
1) Praxis is a Dilithium Mining Facility. 2) There are several large reactors on Praxis. 3) One of them overloaded, causing a chain reaction explosion. The Klingons maintained the facilities there like the Russians did Chernobyl. 4) Apparently, the explosion did some severe damage to the atmosphere on the Klingon Homeworld.
There are a couple of questions that I have about these facts. The first is that the explosion looked big enough to perhaps decimate the entire moon, but at least 35% of it was still standing when Sulu and the Excelsior checked it out. Also, an explosion like that would have likely killed everyone on the moon, yet there were people still alive. Finally, the fact that the Excelsior was also hit bad by the shockwave implies that Praxis is near the Fed-Klingon Border. Assuming that the explosion damaged the Klingon homeworld as well, that means that the moon is also close to the Klingon homeworld, and that the Klingon homeworld is very close to Federation space.
What say you?
Posted by David Templar (Member # 580) on :
I say that the hyperspace gate explosion in Cowboy Bebop "only" cracked the moon, yet it still irradiated 1/2 of Earth.
Were the people Sulu spoke to on the moon, or on Q'ronos?
According to "Enterprise", the Klingon homeworld's 4 days away at warp 4. Posted by Siegfried (Member # 29) on :
The Praxis Incident has always bothered me for several reasons. First, an explosion big enough to decimate most of a moon and knock an Excelsior class starship around has should caused much more damage to the Klingon homeworld than environmental problems. It should have left the planet surface in complete ruins, in my opinion. However, there was never any mention of helping the homeless or the massive injuries that should have resulted. Instead, we just get the issues of the atmosphere. Also, it would seem that the Klingon homeworld survived intact (assuming that the Chancellor and his party were on Praxis at the time or assuming that Brigadier Kerla was talking to Sulu from Q'onos). Of course, did anyone actually say if Praxis was Q'onos's moon or simply a moon in the Klingon empire?
Indeed, the dire consequences of Praxis were never really explained. How come the Klingons couldn't take care of the issue on their own? What exactly did unlocking the Fedo-Klingon border have to do with anything? Why was there worry of Starfleet being mothballed? That aspect of the movie has never satisfied me. The only explanation that I can come up with is that there used to be a unified Klingon fleet, Praxis caused an economic collapse, and the military became fragmented with the Houses taking over key parts.
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
You seem to forget that the shockwave was one of those infamous "ring" waves, rather than a more realistic sphere. The shockwave need not have even come close to touching the planet.
Posted by MrNeutron (Member # 524) on :
I don't recall it ever being explicitely stated in TUC that Praxis is the moon of Q'onos. merely that it's a Klingon moon. Perhaps it was the moon of some planet elsewhere in the same system. Or, of the subspace shockwave could travel light years, maybe it was in a nearby system.
If I'm incorrect about there being no explicit mention its proximity to Q'onos, I'm sure someone will "enlighten" me. Posted by David Templar (Member # 580) on :
Maybe it wasn't a ringed shockwave. Maybe the shockwave was simply invisible to the naked eye. The only reason that we saw a ring was because that was the particular portion which swept through the ecliptic of the Klingon home system, and that it caught a lot of debrie in the wave, which was turned into superheated plasma, rendering that part of the shockwave visible. And as we seen so often in Star Trek, starships have a tendency to align themselves with the ecliptic of starsystems. It's a lot more likely that that was what happened to the Excelsior, rather than a ringed shockwave shooting off at a random vector and just so happens to hit the Excelsior.
Posted by Antagonist (Member # 484) on :
Would the explosion of a lunar body in fact create a ring-like shockwave or a spherical one? I'm no physicist but here is something to consider: There are several reactors in place before the explosion. The exact arrangment is unknown, and most likely will remain to be unknown. Could the arrangment of said reactors cause a ring-shaped explosion?
I'm not actually thinking that this FX thing was intentional, rather I'm trying to offer some alternate explanation for the "infamous" ring-shaped shockwave. Posted by Timo (Member # 245) on :
One way to cause a ring-shaped explosion would be to spin the moon or the machinery really fast. There are all sorts of cute arrangements where you could have a "key energy source" that spins - say, a domesticated black hole or a neutron star.
Anyway, the "facts" of the Praxis incident are as follows:
-We observe a big explosion that creates circular shockwaves. We get no indication of the scale of the event, or the speed of the wave. Assuming we are looking through typical Trek sensors, we could in theory see a FTL wave just as easily as a STL one.
-The wave approaches the impulse-speed Excelsior at a speed that gives the ship some reaction time, then washes over the ship at an unknown speed. If we assume the camera speed was normal, then the wave was sublight. But we could be seeing a slo-mo scene. And the ship was probably carried along the wave for a while, so we cannot tell the width of the wave from the elapsed time, or the speed from the above two, or anything.
-The Excelsior is able to pinpoint the source and get a sensor image of "the Klingon moon, Praxis", which is "their key energy production facility".
-The moon is half gone, half intact. Somebody is sending out an emergency hail, perhaps from the intact side of the moon, perhaps from some Klingon ship.
-A high Klingon official is available to comment almost immediately, and sends a static-free message from an undamaged location, telling Sulu to bugger off.
-Later, in the Starfleet meeting, Spock says that "the Klingon Empire has six months (?) to live" because Praxis exploded; that the speculated cause was "overmining" and lax security; and that the explosion means "a deadly pollution of their ozone layer", necessitating evacuation.
No mention of Qo'noS here. In fact, the entire movie never even suggests that Qo'noS is the Klingon homeworld - it is merely part of the name of Chancellor Gorkon's ship.
Now for the scenarios: "overmining" suggests that this "key energy production facility" produced the energy by mining an energy-releasing substance. Or then there were two unrelated things going on there at the same time: mining and energy production - but that doesn't sound like a good thing to do if the energy production was a vital thing for the Empire. Or perhaps the lax security forces placed too many land mines in the corridors when they wanted to cut down on their foot patrol time?
"Pollution of their ozone" suggests that the atmosphere of an important Klingon planet or possibly the atmospheres of several planets received contaminants or radiation that adversely affected the existing ozone there. Alternately, a deadly pollution layer of "therozone" descended on the planets... Only the radiation scenario would allow Praxis to be situated far away from these important planets - contaminants would not travel across interstellar distances.
"Evacuation" must refer to either the homeworld or then to a very large number of other planets. Otherwise, this would not quite spell the end of the Empire.
My personal interpretation is that this moon was a unique source of an energy resource (hence "the" Klingon moon), but not situated quite next to the homeworld. A mining accident caused the resource to release some of the energy in an uncontrolled manner, all across the network of ore veins going through the moon, and shattered half the moon. The explosion released a lot of FTL radiation, which damaged the atmospheres of several planets, including the homeworld. However, no other damage was dealt to the planets. The FTL wave spread out into deep space, leaking some harmful effects into normal STL space as it went, and those effects hit the Excelsior. The planar shape of the wave was due to the mysteries of subspace and not the initial pattern of the explosion - and the Excelsior was flying in the same plane again because the mysteries of subspace made this plane an advantageous place for a starship to be in.
Timo Saloniemi
[ February 07, 2002, 03:12: Message edited by: Timo ]
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
My suspicion is that Spock's comment about the Klingon Empire having only "six months" to live was a financially-based prediction. The main tension in the movie seems to be that the Klingons are facing a problem so expensive that they need to drastically restructure their society to deal with it. All that talk of aggression "the Klingons can no longer afford" and so on.
It could be somewhat ironic that the Federation's intervention appears to have allowed the Klingons to preserve their military largely intact. Though this is of course preferable to having them attack the UFP, or someone else. Plus it's good to make friends.
Posted by pIn'a' Sov (Member # 293) on :
In my opinion, the end of empire refers more to the structure of the empire. That has not been discussed much. It might be a loosely based empire with independent governors. That has been suggested in the shows before. If the homeworld is destroyed, there goes the powerbase for the council. The governors break free and declare independence, and there, the empire is lost.
Posted by Vogon Poet (Member # 393) on :
Well, how about this: we see a Klingon capital in Enterprise; we never see one in TOS or the TOS movies; we then see a different capital in TNG etc. Couldn't this mean they move the capital for some reason, and maybe this event was that reason?
Posted by Timo (Member # 245) on :
Could be. Did we see the Klingon Kapital in "Broken Bow", though? Or did we see a random Klingon city? Perhaps the Chancellor's winter resort?
I'm not very fond of the theory that the Klingons would have moved to another planet entirely due to the Praxis incident. But I'm happy to accept the idea that Praxis turned the skies so cloudy that we never saw proper daylight on our TNG and DS9 visits to the Klingon homeworld. And the capital could have been moved several times, and the great Halls of the Councils built anew after each move...
Timo Saloniemi
Posted by Fedaykin Supastar (Member # 704) on :
This is a slight offshootl, i dont remember reading it on this thread but in the real world aspect - wasnt the Praxis explosion an artistic criticsm of the situation in the USSR at the time? i dunno if i heard that from somewhere or it was just in my head - HELP!
Buzz
Posted by Vogon Poet (Member # 393) on :
It was meant to be analogous to the Chernobyl disaster - not that Chernobyl had all that much to do with the collapse of the USSR, however. . .
Posted by CaptainMike (Member # 709) on :
The assumption that Praxis destroyed the Klingons military infrastructure is mistaken i think. There is no evidence towards that. I think that if Praxis was indeed the moon of Kronos, the problem facing the Empire would be the ecology and its citizens. The reason the Empire was in danger of falling was the fact that their ships would be underpowered since they lost their fuel source, and that their planet was probably undergoing massive meteorological and radiation shifts as a result of an explosion in orbit.
If one or both of those are true, either way, peace and help from the Federation was what made the Klingon Empire survive. Im thinking food assistance for the citizens of Kronos, and scientific efforts to minimize damage from greenhouse effects, 'nuclear' winters, crop damage and weather control. And none of this whatsoever has to do with the Klingon war machine, as the military got back on its feet after its home problems were dealt with, because all of the ship building, armament and fleet were never in issue. It also explains why so few new Klingon ships were designed between 2293 and TNG ;-)
Since we have no solid data as to what exactly happened, we have to find a theory that fits the facts, and i think this one does (while the 'Klingon people and military was vaporized by the shockwave' explanation has too many holes to really hold up, both in the context of the way the movie proceded and the way TNG proceded)
Posted by Woodside Kid (Member # 699) on :
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that the whole disarmament thing was due to the fact that the Klingons did not have the economic resources to correct the damage to the homeworld's environment while maintaining the defense expenditures confrontation with the Federation required. (That always seemed strange to me, BTW; an interstellar empire can't afford to clean up one planet?)
Incidentally, Spock's line says gives a date for the death of the homeworld of fifty years, not six months.
Posted by Malnurtured Snay (Member # 411) on :
should caused much more damage to the Klingon homeworld than environmental problems.
It's possible that another moon between Praxis and Quo'nos obsorbed the brunt of the blast. It's also possible that the Klingons invested in a planetary shield generator which deflected a good bit of the blast.
It's also possible that the blast radiated away from Praxis in a way that most of it missed Quo'nos. It seems -- from the image in TUC -- that the explosion cut into Praxis' core, so the shockwave didn't spread in a radius around the whole moon, but only from the point of explosion. In other words, Praxis itself blunted the blast and Quo'nos only got the edges.
Also, somewhere between TUV and TNG, it seems the Klingon Empire and the Federation figured out how to clean up Quo'nos to the extent its still liveable.
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
Yes it was.
Also note that the Kapital in Enterprise, regardless of where it was, was sitting under bluish sky, and diring its TNG era appearances it's a murky, smoggy red/brown for the most part. The planet was still green in both time periods, but when we see it later on in "Sins of the Father" et. al. it's a much more soupy, opaque green. Part of it can be explained by the relatively simple opticals used at the time, but it's a fairly convenient visual cue that the Praxis explosion caused lasting environmental changes on the planet.
Mark
Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
Let's hope the ENT producers realise this before they go turning it back to the TNG version.
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