14 Dumbest Things In Star Trek The Motion Picture
1. The Klingons Take Potshots At V'ger
The film opens with the most epic act of idiocy by the Klingons. Ever.
Three of their battlecruisers approach the ginormous V'ger cloud, which Spock later describes as a “12th power energy field” that makes Sulu’s jaw drop. It's a power level which Decker says “thousands of starships couldn’t generate”. Faced with this unbelievable enormity, what do the Klingons do?
They. Shoot. At. It.
Maybe it's not obvious why this is an act of utter idiocy because the magnitude of this cloud is difficult for a human mind to grasp. It’s basically impossible to convey the scale here, but let’s give it try anyway.
The V’ger cloud is stated to be 82 AUs (Astronomical Units) in diameter, which would cover our entire solar system out to Pluto. A Klingon battlecruiser is about 350 meters long. If you scaled both down so the V’ger cloud was as big around as the Earth then the Klingon ships would be— drumroll please—25% the width of a single red blood cell.
Even if we accept the Director’s Edition edit which makes the cloud 41x smaller in diameter, for an Earth sized cloud those Klingon ships would still be invisible to the human eye. Which wins in a fight? Even the newly bone-headed Klingons should have seen that coming. And anything that could generate a powerfield of that magnitude is NOT anything you would want to shoot at, because if it even notices your puny weapons, you don’t want to find out what it might shoot back at you.
And, hey, the damned thing is making a beeline for the heart of your big enemy: Earth. Instead of shooting at it, the Klingons should have just stayed waaaaay back and waved as it went by.
Dumb dead Klingons.
Special thanks to Michael Kmet & Ryan Thomas Riddle for their input!