Other mistake: During the inquiry at the start of the movie, the Klingon Ambassador is going over the footage of the destruction of the Enterprise from all the exterior views. This is very nice, but how would they have access to all of these different viewpoints of the destruction? Bearing in mind no-one was there to film it. It couldn't have been the Klingon Bird of Prey that filmed it, because in most of the destruction scenes, the Bird of Prey would have been no-where near or in a position to film it, and was of course captured and still being commanded by Kirk during the course of the inquiry. (00:04:10)
TonyPH
26th May 2009
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.
Suggested correction: Most of the visuals we see on view screens in Star Trek are created from sensors rather than cameras, so what we see doesn't necessarily have to be from the visual perspective of the ship taking it. Though yes, it is quite an amusing coincidence that it all looks exactly like they're watching a copy of Star Trek III on home video.
Suggested correction: It's possible the Grissom and/or the Bird of Prey launched drones into orbit to aid in the scanning of the planet or for communications or sensor relays, and this is where the footage could have come from. This isn't unlike the beginning of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, in which crewmembers of the space station mentioned such drones as the reason images of the aftermath of the V'ger destruction were able to be seen despite no ships being left.
5th Sep 2021
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
Corrected entry: Nothing in space could communicate with whales in the ocean without radios. It wouldn't matter if it was generating the loudest sound in the universe, or had the most sensitive mike and most powerful amplifier - sound can't travel through a vacuum. The probe couldn't "hear" the whales, and the whales couldn't hear the probe.
Correction: This assumes that the probe, which does not appear to be a 'mechanical' device, uses a communications technology that we are familiar with, and there's no reason to assume that it does. It's a fictional, alien probe, which is likely using a fictional, alien technology to communicate with the whales.
You're describing fantasy fiction and not science fiction. The whales are not equipped with alien technology to send and receive, so it doesn't matter what technology the probe contains The movie makes a point of "playing" the sounds of whales and the sounds of the probe. Sounds, by definition, are vibrations of a medium - there is no medium here to carry the vibrations, and even if there were, they would have to be so powerful as to cause worldwide, catastrophic shock waves in order to reach.
Star Trek does often dabble in fantasy under the guise of "too advanced for our puny minds." The probe's signal is not itself a sound but some kind of energy (or something) that can inexplicably drain power from starships, cause giant hurricanes, and produce a sound when it hits a medium. The probe presumably has sensors that can detect the effects of a whale call and extrapolate/ "hear" it much the way the Enterprise bridge screen can "see" across vast distances using sensor data.
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