When Kirk, Scotty, Sulu, Chekov, and Dr. McCoy are trapped in a crippled shuttlecraft, they pass the time waiting to be rescued by telling each other about their experiences with Starfleet's infamous "No Win Scenario" for command students, except for Dr. McCoy, who never attended command school.
Each man took a different approach to the Kobayashi Maru, each for different reasons. And of course, the audience learns (one version) of how Captain Kirk became the only man to ever beat the "No-Win Scenario".
Kirk reprogrammed the simulation to make it possible to rescue the ship. His is the first scenario that they are told about.
Chekov relates his strategy, as well as another command exercise he had to undergo.
Sulu cautions that his story isn't funny, and it ties into his relationship with his terminally ill great-grandfather.
Scotty explains that he used a theoretical approach that looks good on paper, but doesn't work in real life.
And through it all they're trying to figure out how to survive in a crippled shuttle with life support failing all around them.
This novel provides examples of:
- Adaptation Expansion: All viewers were told in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was that Kirk "changed the conditions of the test". Here, the author offers up a version of the story that explains how. Star Trek (2009) would take a vastly different approach.
- A Day in the Limelight: Chekov gets to play a major role in the book.
- Better to Die than Be Killed: Chekov's solution to the second command challenge aboard an abandoned space station. Surrounded by hostile fellow students, he trips a trap he left behind, getting himself and everyone else "killed".
- Call-Forward: When an admiral is questioning Kirk on what he did, Kirk firmly declares, "I don't believe in a No-win scenario."
- The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: The Kobayashi Maru test is specifically designed so that the computer will win, and it will do whatever it takes to do so, such as throwing increasing numbers of Klingon ships at the the Federation vessel to making their weapons more powerful than they should be and crippling the effectiveness of the Federation ship's weapons.
- Corpsing: In-Universe. One of the cadets in Kirk's most famous take on the test was "killed" early on. He begins laughing when he realizes that Kirk has altered the programming.
- Easily Forgiven: While many of Chekov's classmates are furious with him after the Aslan scenario test, his friend Robert Cecil takes it in stride, and even points out that the challenges at the Academy are designed to teach them to learn through failure so that they know what not to do when they get into space for real.
- The Engineer: Scotty, naturally. This story tells how he went from command school to being the finest engineer in the fleet.
- Framing Device: The story about the crew trying to survive in the crippled shuttle is used to set up the tales of the individual men's experience with the "No Win Scenario".
- Heroic BSoD: After his failure during the Aslan scenario, Chekov is convinced that he'll be booted from the Academy.
- The Hero's Idol: Kirk is Chekov's idol throughout his time in the Academy, and he pridefully believes himself worthy of serving on Enterprise. When he fails the Aslan scenario (and is told that Kirk did it completely differently), Chekov is devastated, believing he'll never be able to live up to his hero.
- Logic Bomb: For once in a Star Trek work, it's Scotty, not Kirk, who does this. Scotty effectively caused the computer running the simulation to crash by employing a scenario that looked good on paper note but didn't work in reality. The computer could only recreate the mathematical theory, though, so it treated the solution as legitimate. However, it was also programmed to win at any cost, so it kept sending ever growing waves of Klingon ships until the computer itself couldn't hold up. The reason Scotty knew it didn't work in real life? He disproved it himself at age 16 with a practical test.
- Long-Lived: Sulu's great-grandfather Tetsuo is still healthy enough to go sailing by the time he reaches the age of 103. Sadly, a brain tumor means he doesn't have much longer to live by the time Sulu leaves for the Academy.
- The Medic: Dr. McCoy spends the time listening to the stories of the Kobayashi Maru test while tending injuries that the others sustained when the shuttle hit a gravitic mine. Kirk had a badly wrenched right knee that he couldn't put any weight on, and Sulu had a dislocated shoulder. With the limited supplies aboard the shuttle, all Bones can really do is try and numb the pain, and he's worried about overdosing his patients.
- The Needs of the Many: Sulu's rationale for abandoning the Kobayashi Maru; she's either a trap to make it look as though the Federation violated the Neutral Zone as a pretext for war, or she's a genuinely crippled freighter whose small number of passengers and crew must be sacrificed to keep the Federation from engaging the Klingons in war by violating the Neutral Zone, no matter how noble the cause.
- Perfect Play A.I.: Lieutenant Commander Constrev uses this reasoning to explain why the Kobayashi Maru test is unbeatable.Computers cannot be indecisive. Computers can think faster than any biological organism currently known. Computers take their knowledge base from the knowledge of all species, not just one. They are smarter than you, faster than you, more patient than you.
- Political Strategy Game: Sulu's class of cadets has to simulate galactic politics, with each of them assigned to represent a different planet or galactic entity. Sulu is stuck with Menak III, a low-tech, resource-poor planet facing political turmoil, which relies on another unfriendly planet for communication with the Federation.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
- Commodore Kramer tells the class that they all failed, and that while Chekov was the most creative "killer" in the group, he wasn't the first or only one, and that none of them had understood the difference between survival and command.
- Commodore Rachael Coan gives students an exercise in representing different worlds. Sulu is assigned a low-tech world with primitive communication capabilities, which he simulates by sending paper cranes with messages written on them. The group devolves into a name-calling shouting match, with two students about to come to blows. Coan says they're the most childish, petulant cadets she's ever had the misfortune of training, that Sulu was the only one trying to be creative, and the rest of them had mocked him for it.
- Refuge in Audacity:
- Kirk programmed the simulation to have the Klingons recognize him as "The" Captain Kirk, and be honored to assist him in the recue of the Kobayashi Maru.
- Chekov's solution to the situation was to order all hands to abandon ship, then kamikaze the Klingon ships. His instructor calls him on this, pointing out he just destroyed four warp speed-capable ships with antimatter drives, to say nothing of all the antimatter warheads in the photon torpedoes they carried as ordinance, meaning the area would be too dangerous to travel for at least a century.
- Shaming the Mob: Sulu decides that the Kobayashi Maru is probably a trap to lure a Federation ship into the Neutral Zone to spring a trap as a pretext for war, and deigns to abandon it. His fellow cadets start to mutiny, until one of his classmates actually calls them out, saying that they are mutinying, and disobeying the right and lawful orders of their captain.
- Unwinnable Training Simulation:
- There is, of course, the Trope Codifier, the Kobayashi Maru, a "no-win scenario" designed to test the character of potential commanders.
- Chekov relates a second test: the Aslan scenario, where Starfleet puts cadets in an abandoned facility, tells them one of them is an assassin, gives each of them a phaser permanently set on stun, with a hit being registered as a "kill", and told they must survive to the end of the simulation. Chekov ends up in a solution that causes the whole class to fail. Then he's told only one cadet, James T. Kirk, actually passed the scenario. Kirk had figured it was a test of command, not survival, and so gathered a group of trusted cadets to serve as guards, had them stand at the entryway to the food replicators, and then told every cadet who came to get necessary food that they were free to enter, provided they surrendered their phaser.
- Whole Episode Flashback: Four different flashbacks for the four men who participated in the Kobayashi Maru scenario.
