I know from Memory Alpha that sleeper ships were used as late as 2210, when a vessel of this type was sent on a deep space exploration mission to Beta Capricus. ("11:59") So, it's possible that the Valiant was a sleeper ship. It's not possible to know for certain if the Valiant had a crewman who was awake to monitor the ship and its crews, like the deep space explorer mentioned previously, or that the leader was sleeping like the rest of his crew and the ship's computer automatically monitored the ship and its crew, ex. Botany Bay.
The funny thing is, cryosleep ceased to be used in insystem, sublight applications in the early 21st century, a valid reason for Kirk to remain fairly ignorant of them. But apparently they were still used regularly enough in outsystem, FTL applications in the early 23rd century. Why is Kirk ignorant of such a recent practice? He would probably have encountered examples of it in his training: if colonists were using it as late as 2210, Starfleet would still have to be capable of handling a colony ship emergency involving cryosleep around that time, and would probably retain the skill for at least half a century afterwards. We can naturally assume that Kirk wasn't ignorant, and that McGivers merely assumed that he would be, hence her lecture. But why would McGivers in turn be assuming such a thing if cryosleep (or other techniques for suspended animation, regardless of the specifics) were a recent thing? And McCoy did seem to be slow in coming to the conclusion that the "alien", low heart rates heard aboard might come from humans in suspended animation... Although this might have to do with differences between Khan's suspended animation techniques and the possibly more modern ones involved in, say, the 2210 mission. Timo Saloniemi
...As opposed to a TOS source with erroneous retconning? Whatever little continuity TOS ever had, all of it was of the "ret" type - writers thinking they remember an interesting tidbit from an earlier episode, but completely misremembering it (General Order 7 involves death penalty - or was it General Order 4?) or choosing to twist it till it's unrecognizable (one of Spock's ancestors once married a human - Spock's dad lives with Spock's human mother). Most often, there just wasn't any effort (TOS takes place 200 years in the future, except when it's 900 years, save for when it's 300 years or more than 1000 years). That in mind, the Voyager references (this "11:59" one included) were almost too reverential to the crappy "original" material... Timo Saloniemi
If a wormhole was responsible for the Horizon's journey to the galactic edge, then she might then have been a pre-warp spacecraft, this would have made the "over two centuries" remark more plausible. The Valiant could have disappeared on a interplanetary mission in the 2030's or 2040's.
The huge problem with that is Kirk's opening log entry. He says he has picked up "the call letters of a vessel that has been missing for over two centuries". This necessarily means he knows exactly what sort of a ship the Valiant is - he must have looked it up in order to connect the call letters to the missing-for-200-years information. If he has thus learned that the Valiant is an insystem vessel limited to sublight speeds, he is not permitted to continue with his next remark: "Did another Earth ship once probe out of the galaxy as we intend to do?" No way, no can do, makes no sense. He could say "Did another Earth ship end up here on the galactic rim before us?" safely enough. But the act of "probing" poses specific requirements on the performance of the Valiant. If she lacked that performance, Kirk could not say the words. Sure, getting the Valiant from Earth to the Barrier might be a feat a hundred times greater than sailing a seven-meter launch across the Pacific. But there'd be nothing theoretically impossible about that - it would just call for more favorable winds and currents, slightly better luck fishing, slightly more rain for fresh water and so forth. But if the Valiant lacked the vital basics, if Captain Bligh only had cork jackets for his heroic band of eighteen rather than a launch, then the feat would be truly and blatantly impossible. Kirk would be speaking of divine intervention (or wormholes) rather than of "probing". Timo Saloniemi
Whatever. Lets just say it's easy to see why I ignore a lot of what came later as getting it wrong rather than going on about how TOS was wrong.
And where's the fun in that? Really - a bunch of assholes wrote poor stories for money, and we're supposed to "accept" it and "ignore" other stuff, rather than have fun actively dissecting it and gluing it together in other, prettier shapes? Whatever indeed. Timo Saloniemi
Well if you think so little of the show then why bother trying to explain it as opposed to accepting that a bunch of assholes in the '80s and '90s wrote shitty stories and couldn't be bothered to do any homework? Hmm?
I'm not seeing it in your examples. "Turnabout Intruder" doesn't appear to have a retcon to the information presented in "The Menagerie". The only thing we can tell is that between "The Menagerie" and "Turnabout Intruder" that Starfleet added an exception to General Order 4 to include a death penalty. Spock's dad is one of his ancestors. Now if it was revealed in "Journey to Babel" that it was Spock's cousin who married a human you would have a point. The 900 years is from "Squire of Gothos" right? That's the one where the architecture could be correct as originating from the gothic era while the furniture and statues like the Salt Vampire are from a scattering of time periods not limited to just 900 years from Earth... The 300 and 1000 years references I'm not sure about. Which episodes are those? The "11:59" episode doesn't really contradict anything from TOS. The ship in 2210 made an interstellar journey that lasted 6 months and the pilot opted to stay awake for the journey there and back (totaling 1 year.) It isn't like the technology wasn't there since it existed as early as the 1990s in TOS
I just did a rewatch today of WNMHGB, something that I haven't done in years. It was good to shake loose all the thoughts I had about the episode years ago. Here's some dialog pertinent to the discussion [from http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/2.htm] interspersed with some of CorporalCaptain's (CC's) commentary: Captain's log, Star date 1312.4. The impossible has happened. From directly ahead, we're picking up a recorded distress signal, the call letters of a vessel which has been missing for over two centuries. Did another Earth ship once probe out of the galaxy as we intend to do? What happened to it out there? Is this some warning they've left behind? CC: The Enterprise crew don't know what the Valiant is doing out this far. I submit that the Valiant's original mission did not necessarily involve probing outside the galaxy; more below. Something happened to the Valiant on her mission—whatever that was—and she was never heard from again, until now; more below on that, too. [...] MITCHELL: Yore relieved, Mister Alden. ALDEN: Acknowledged, Mister Mitchell. KIRK: Screen on. KELSO: Screen on, sir. Approaching galaxy edge, sir. KIRK: Neutralise warp, Mister Mitchell. Hold this position. MITCHELL: Neutralise warp, sir. CC: At this moment, given the pacing, we can be sure that the Enterprise is at most only minutes from the edge of the galaxy, at her previous warp speed. KIRK: Address intercraft. MITCHELL: Intercraft open. KIRK: This is the Captain speaking. The object we encountered is a ship's disaster recorder, apparently ejected from the S.S. Valiant two hundred years ago. CC: Of course, this would mean that the Valiant left on her mission even earlier. This was also established in the first captain's log of the episode. SPOCK: The tapes are burnt out. Trying the memory banks. KIRK: We hope to learn from the recorder what the Valiant was doing here and what destroyed the vessel. We'll move out into our probe as soon as we have those answers. All decks, stand by. CC: Again, they have no idea what the Valiant was doing out this far. MITCHELL: Department heads, sir. You wanted everybody on the Bridge before we left the galaxy. Jones. CC: More confirmation, delivered economically, that we are not only about to witness the Enterprise heading for the galaxy edge but also about to witness her actually leaving the galaxy. SMITH: The name's Smith, sir. [...] SPOCK: Decoding memory banks. I'll try to interpolate. The Valiant had encountered a magnetic space storm and was being swept in this direction. CC: Ah, so this is [probably] why the Valiant went missing and how she got out this far. I'm willing to assume that the magnetic space storm swept the Valiant at superluminal speeds. KIRK: The old impulse engines weren't strong enough. SPOCK: Swept past this point, about a half light year out of the galaxy, they were thrown clear, turned, and headed back into the galaxy here. CC: Yep, the Enterprise is at the edge of the galaxy right now. The Valiant was forced out of the galaxy by the magnetic space storm. Further, there is no direct evidence in this episode supporting the idea of the Valiant being sent on a mission to probe outside the galaxy. There is only direct evidence of the Valiant being sent off on a mission that she could complete at sublight speeds. I'm not getting it all. The tapes are pretty badly burned. Sounds like the ship had encountered some unknown force. Now, orders, counter orders, repeated urgent requests for information from the ship's computer records for anything concerning ESP in human beings. [...] KIRK: Comments? PIPER: The only fact we have for sure is that the S.S. Valiant was destroyed. KIRK: That's probably the best argument to continue the probe. Other vessels will be heading out here someday and they'll have to know what they'll be facing. We're leaving the galaxy, Mister Mitchell. Ahead, warp factor one. CC: And now the Enterprise actually leaves the galaxy. SPOCK: Force field of some kind. MITCHELL: We're coming up on it fast. SPOCK: Sensor beam on. KELSO: Sensor beam on, sir. SPOCK: Deflectors full intensity. KELSO: Deflectors full intensity. SPOCK: Deflectors say there's something there, sensors say there isn't. Density negative. Radiation negative. Energy negative. KELSO: Whatever it is, contact in twelve seconds. CC: Nothing really on point about the discussion there, but these are just some really cool lines from Shouting Spock. [...] MITCHELL: My love has wings. Slender, feathered things with grace in upswept curve and tapered tip. The Nightingale Woman, written by Phineas Tarbolde on the Canopius planet back in 1996. It's funny you picked that one, Doctor. CC: Yeah, so it's supposed to be Canopus Planet, first of all, and second of all, Canopus, Alpha Carinae, is 310 ± 20 light years from Earth [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canopus]. So what's going on here? Is this more of the ancient-times-fuzzy-date-mythology trope, if the poem was originally written in English? Or, is this a poem translated into English, acquired into human knowledge after the Federation was formed? A puzzle! Though, I always assumed the former, and a human poet, writing in English.
And, didn't Mitchell suggest that this poem was written within two centuries of his year? So, if Phineas Tarbolde was a human, and if that human was living on a planet outside the Sol System, could it be argued that there were active warp ships at the time? Phineas is a human name, with its origins in the Bible.
I probably should have gone on to include that bit of dialog, too, in my previous post. http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/2.htm is down at the moment, but listening to my disk, what Gary says is: "That's one of the most passionate love sonnets of the past couple of centuries." Now, that might suggest two centuries, but as native English speakers know, not everyone who says "couple" always literally means "two"; "few" can also be meant, and dictionaries concur [e.g. 4 in 1 of http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/couple and 3 and usage note 2 in http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/couple#Noun]. Where to draw the line is a little fuzzy, but I'd agree with the words in the Book of Armaments, Chapter 2, verses 9-21, that, "Five is right out." It's also worth noting that I don't hear Lockwood say "Phineas"; it's something like "Ply". http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Tarbolde credits the Star Trek Concordance for establishing Tarbolde's first name as Phineas. It's not clear to me why Bjo assigned it. She usually has a reason, whether it's from background notes, scripts, or something else with some sort of authority. I don't have a script to check what's in there; perhaps someone else can chime in on this point. I think it's possible that chakoteya.net inserted "Phineas" into their WNMHGB transcript, in order to be in accordance with Memory Alpha's data; perhaps they couldn't tell what it was supposed to be otherwise. Lockwood also flubbed the pronunciation of Canopus. The delivery is excellent, so perhaps the director didn't think it was worth re-shooting; or maybe that is the way the script reads, too. Anyway, "couple of centuries" isn't hard enough to pin down to precisely two centuries. But yeah, the episode did indeed suggest that sort of time-frame.
He says "by" twice. You can also check the subtitles/captions track. If "past couple of centuries" is 2-4 hundred years then that would suggest interstellar travel as early as 1996 if Tarbolde was from Earth. The old DY-100's were supposedly interplanetary only. Perhaps there were other ship types that were sent to Canopus/Canopius and by 2018 faster impulse engines came into being? MITCHELL: My love has wings. Slender, feathered things with grace in upswept curve and tapered tip. The Nightingale Woman, written by... by Tarbolde on the Canopius planet back in 1996. It's funny you picked that one, Doctor. ... MITCHELL: That's one of the most passionate love sonnets of the past couple of centuries.
Lockwood and/or the cript wroter might well have flubbed the pronunciation of Canopus, but the fact is Mitchell does say Canopius so it could well be something different in TOS' fictional universe. And since we don't actually hear Tarbolde's first name Mitchell could be repeating the name of someone not of Earth. And finally the Earth dating system (referencing 1996) is directly aimed at viewers so we can have a reference we can understand rather than Mitchell using a stardate. In universe Mitchell could say 1996 because he wants Dehner to understand exactly what he's saying and seeing she's from Earth than using an Earth date just facilitates things. Episodes to follow in first season do tend to support the idea that FTL doesn't happen until at least mid 21st century and maybe a bit later. Indeed even in "The Cage" the idea is put across that the Enterprise is of a breed of ships significantly faster than what existed before. We don't know the specifics, but the idea is put across. The 2018 date from "Space Seed" suggests a new form of propulsion made the use of sleeper ships obsolete. My conjecture would be a fast relativistic drive that allowed crews to take advantage of time dilation. It might have been the development of impulse as we know it. That with artificial gravity (as referenced in TAS' "Slaver Weapon") means ships could accelerate more quickly to cruising speed and decelerate more quickly, too. Now you can get to other nearby star systems within a few years (objective time) while it's much shorter for the crews. If Cochrane develops the space warp in the 2060s and they have fast STL ships since 2018 then thats an easy forty some years to get to other planets where either a human named Tarbolde travels to the Canopius planet or an alien with a name sounding like Tarbolde is encountered there and the traveling humans hear his poem translated and recited in English.
Yeah, this fits, I think. Now, is the date for the discovery of the flying belt in the stasis box ever given? I rather liked that contribution from The Slaver Weapon, since the artificial gravity was always awfully magical. Obviously, they had artificial gravity by the time of ENT. Having discovered that stasis box in the early 21st century would solve a lot of problems in the Trek universe.
I'm not sure if the date is referenced in the TAS episode. I seem to recall a date reference in Bjp Trimble's Star Trek Concordance which set the discovery of the stasis box within the Sol system in the late 20th or early 21st century. And remember in TOS' continuity humans had been out into the solar system by the 1990s. In that continuity the space programs didn't pull back after Apollo or else DY class ships would never have been developed by the 1990s.
Wouldn't Botany Bay qualify as an example of artificial gravity already present in the 1990's on the DY-100 ships?