.....how can The Federation nor the crew of the Reliant NOT HAVE KNOWN that Cetialpha 6 had exploded and that the Planet they were investigating was actually Cetialoha 5?
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If I recall the movie correctly
(it's been many years since I've seen it)
they mention that the planets had changed orbits since their last visit.
Apparently
the destruction of Cet 6
had caused Cet 5 to alter its orbit
in such a way that its orbit was nearer to Cet 6's former orbit than it was to Cet 5's former orbit.
They didn't know Cet 6 had exploded
simply because they weren't there when it happened
and, after all, there was a planet in (very roughly) the location that they expected Cet 6 to be.
Mike W
Khan did mention that Kirk just dropped him and his people off, and never came back to check up on them.
Old Man Dirt
One mistake- Chekov was part of the Enterprise crew in "Space Seed". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series_(season_1)
If you notice Khan could not believe Chekov did not know which planet he was on.
So it seems plausible that when they up-dated the star charts the nova (I think that was what Khan said caused the change) and its affects were not noticed. He also did not have a perfect memory of all the incidents the intervening years.
I never have figured out how they would have kept track of systems that were several light years away from the nearest observatory.
I'm wrong, Chekov did not join Star trek till the second season. But is still listed as an original cast member. Sorry.
Anonymous
Here is a REAL plot twist...planets don't have the potential to EXPLODE...if there was a ROUGE collision with an object of some heft (large mass) and it HIT the other planet and made it crash towards the SUN...then MAYBE.
Anonymous
lol wut? do you have Autism?