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Okay, this is not about Wesley in any way, but here's the nitpick I have: The E-D could have gotten rid of that barge a lot easier had they remembered that there are 3 dimensions in space.

Let us assume that the planet the barge was around is in the plane of orbits of the other planets, and let us assume that the asteroid belt in question is also in the plane of orbit. Now I'm going to assume that the asteroid belt is close to the sun, considering at 1/2 impulse (c/8) it took them at least an hour to get there.

Now, let's call the distance from the star to the "Planet in Peril of the Week" to be 1 "Local AU" (LAU). Even if the asteroid belt is less than 1/4 LAU from the star (Closer than Mercury), wouldn't it be much easier and much less hassle to drag the barge up in the Z direction a bit (with the XY plane being the orbital plane), then after a little while launching it into the star? That would seem to take much less time than guiding it through the Asteroid belt itself.

Also, barring that, couldn't they have let it coast a good chunk of the way to the belt, reducing the overall radiation exposure to the crew?

I hate how, to make things fill up an hour long episode, they have the crew make mistakes, and sometimes deadly mistakes.

Does this make any sense, or am I just ranting?

It makes sense but trek often drags problems out that could be solved faster than they are.

I'm glad to see someone watches Spike too =) Yeah, we actually viewed this episode in my AP physics class, discussing the lack of Z-direction in most sci-fi, as well as the whole idea of gravity/momentum. Once they got the tug moving, it should have floated into the sun due to gravity, based on the whole idea of momentum. There's nothing stopping it, so it should have gone.

Actually, that was an interesting set of lectures, about the wrong things in sci-fi. Realistically, it would take just as much energy to deccelerate from Warp 9 as it would to get there... or any speed, lacking gravity.

Considering that asteroid fields/belts in reality are very sparse, they could have just launched it from beyond the asteroid field, without bothering to pull it 'up' along the Z axis first. The chances of it hitting something even in the asteroid field would be ridiculously low.

After all, whenever we humans send probes beyond our asteroid belt, we never hear stories on AP about how a probe got smacked with an asteroid on its way through, and that's not because we avoid it.

Sci-fi asteroid fields/belts are always ludicrously dense for the sake of drama.

Well, similar situation occurred in Redemption, Part 2. The Federation fleet set up a "tachyon detection grid" that could track any starship, even one that was cloaked, which passed through it... why not just fly around it?

They were in a hurry to help the Duras family.

Apparently not in too big of a hurry... Sela gave Picard 11 hours to leave!

Given that tachyons are (by definition) FTL, the fleet could have been spread over several square light years (although this brings up the questio of how they avoided leaving gaping holes in the net). The Romulans may simply not have been fast enough to go around and still reach the Duras in a timely manner.

Point taken. But I would think 11 hours at high warp would be enough to circumvent the Federation fleet. Oh well, common sense shouldn't stand in the way of good drama.

Well, from "The Enemy", Romulan ships can cover about 1/2 ly per hour at maximum warp (uncloaked, under cloak they're probably slower), so an 11ly wide tachyon grid would only allow them to reach the edge of the grid in those 11 hours. That, plus the extra distance once they'd got round the grid, may well have made the difference between victory and defeat for the Duras.

I suppose it would depend on how far apart the Federation fleet was stationed; and it was never firmly established in the episode. If they were as far apart as you say, then your theory would be correct.

The Z-direction has never existed within Trek. This could be due to the shape of the Trek Universe, or a lack of imagination on the Trek writers behalf. But just looking at the four quadrants will tell you enough. If they actually used the third dimension, there would be eight octants, to explore. Its a shame no sci-fi show actually cares about things like that. All of them just map space to a limited 2-d plane.

The four quadrants isn't really a problem - after all, the Galaxy's only a thousand ly thick compared with a hundred thousand across, so why bother with octants that are only going to have a thickness 1% of their distance across

Wait, if the Galaxy is only a thousand ly thick, what happens if you just go up a thousand ly? Is it a torus? Or do you fall off the edge of space? I didn't know trek actually covered the shape of their universe.

Leave the Galactic disk and you enter the halo, where there are still stars, but it's a lot more sparsly populated - about 1% of the Galaxy's stars IIRC. The halo is roughly spherical, but evn at warp it would take weeks or months to get from one to the next, whereas it takes hours or days to move between stars in the disk.