DS9 - Explorers

The premise of this episode makes for a great Star Trek episode, at least at the outset.
Sisko’s building an exact replica of a Bajoran solar sail ship, in an attempt to prove, among other things, that the design could work. However, towards the end of the episode that ship gets launched into what must have been very, very high warp speed, taking it all the way to Cardassia in the space of about one minute. We get to see a rare Trek moment – Cardassians admitting they were wrong! This high speed, of course, could not be possible. What keeps most starships and their crews in one piece while accelerating and traveling at warp are the structural integrity field, main deflector, and the inertial dampeners. The Bajoran solar sail vessel had none of these systems, so, it should have been torn into a million peaces, but not before Jake and his father were turned into grease spots on the rear wall! While it may be possible that Sisko installed a gravity net that included a inertial dampening system, or that the tachyon particles accelerated the ship into warp very slowly, there is absolutely no reasonable explanation for why the shearing stresses and dust particles didn’t rip the ship to pieces, once it went into warp. Aside from the treknological difficulties, the main story is enjoyable but not outstanding. There is also a stupid sub-plot involving Dr. Bashir worrying about having to meet with the one person who was better than he was in medical school- this is interesting for all of two minutes. While the general premise of this episode sounded great, the specifics of it definitely bought it down in quality.