Headscratchers / The Core

• Why is the weapons compartment right at the back of the ship, and therefore the first component likely to be jettisoned, when it's the most important component next to the cockpit itself? Surely something like living quarters would be better - you could live in the rest of the ship, but you couldn't restart the core with it.
  • As they mentioned in the film itself, they had only a couple of months to design and build it. They had to get a working system operational as quickly as possible, so quality control went out the window.
    • Even so, it seems like a massive oversight when you consider that the weaponry was necessary for the original plan to restart the core.
• When Virgil is returning to the surface, Josh says "At this speed, we'll be home in a third of the time", yet he earlier states that their improvised geothermal power source might not be able to run the lasers. If they can push enough power into the impellers to triple their top speed, why not dial back the throttle from 300% to 100% and put the rest of that power into the lasers?
  • It's implied that the velocity during the escape is due to the wavefront from the nuclear blasts and being caught in the "current" created from that event, not just the impellers. As such, there isn't power to pull from the impellers.
  • Counterpoint: The "12 hours later" text and their progress on Mission Control's screen implies that they maintained that speed the entire time. In order for the explosive wavefront to propel them that fast that long, it would have to be powerful enough to vaporize Virgil when it first hit. Additionally, there's a noticeable increase in the pitch of the motors, implying a faster speed, which would result from an increased power reserve.