Difference Between Earth Starfleet and the UESPA?

[Timo]

We could basically use the Spaceflight Chronology mission as is for a Clarke/Kubrick lookalike story, with 2008 construction, 2009 launch, 2014 first stop at Jupiter, and 2020 stop at Saturn. As the book lists 3 officers and 12 crew, but the flight patch only gives three names, we could say the three were the (mostly) awake guys and the 12 were the sleeping payload...

Moreover, as the book story speaks of Christopher finding signs of alien mining on Saturn's moons, but "One Small Step" claims there was no evidence of extraterrestrials before the 2030s, we could claim that the news were kept secret until the ship had physically returned to Earth - another decade by that timetable.

The hop from that sort of propulsive performance to the "One Small Step" rescue mission of Earth-to-Mars-in-a-week would indeed make cryogenics outdated and fully support the "Space Seed" claims!

Timo Saloniemi

[rfmcdpei]

On the other, other hand, the fact that Kirk & Company can have a "Vulcan exile" in the first place, that they have to volunteer to return to Earth rather than simply being arrested and/or extradited, and that Sarek is Ambassador to the Federation (rather than, say, a member of the Galactic Senate ) implies that Vulcan is a sovereign state in this situation, which can harbour fugitives if it so chooses.

Indeed. In the modern-day European Union, all of the member-states have Permanent Representations which are all headed up by ambassadors.

[Nerys Myk]

Dayton Ward wrote:

---

^ Yeah, I've wondered about the cryo-sleep option, myself. After all, it worked well enough for the crew of the Discovery (well, right up until the end, there ).

I hope that wasn't a mission he was on.

[Timo]

Well, we have no evidence that Col. Christopher would have returned from his Saturn mission (in corporeal form anyway)... Or that the mission would have been considered a success. All Spock tells us is that the mission originally took place, although it is implied that it would be a good thing if the mission again took place in the amended timeline.

Really, we have to account for one additional oddity here: how come neither Kirk nor Spock originally remembers Col. Christopher's contribution to the history of Earth spaceflight? Granted that they never discuss the first man, woman or dog to have flown to space, to the Moon, or to Mars, either. But both do know an awful lot about the early DY vessels, enough to engage in one-upping banter about the finer points of that technology in the "Space Seed" teaser.

Is it just that space exploration became ho-hum after the Moon shot, and the people involved ceased to be deserving of historical immortality, until Cochrane discovered warp? Or was Christopher's contribution somehow lesser than the contributions of Gagarin, Armstrong, Carter, Hawke, Gordon, Dare, or whoever spearheaded mankind's conquest of the Sol system?

Perhaps Christopher would have been less noticeable if his mission turned out to be a failure. Then again, he could at least gain notoriety that way.

Or perhaps Christopher launched on the first Saturn probe, but more advanced ships flew past him to Saturn and back four and a half times before he actually arrived?

Timo Saloniemi

[Nerys Myk]

Timo wrote:

---

Well, we have no evidence that Col. Christopher would have returned from his Saturn mission (in corporeal form anyway)... Or that the mission would have been considered a success. All Spock tells us is that the mission originally took place, although it is implied that it would be a good thing if the mission again took place in the amended timeline.

Really, we have to account for one additional oddity here: how come neither Kirk nor Spock originally remembers Col. Christopher's contribution to the history of Earth spaceflight? Granted that they never discuss the first man, woman or dog to have flown to space, to the Moon, or to Mars, either. But both do know an awful lot about the early DY vessels, enough to engage in one-upping banter about the finer points of that technology in the "Space Seed" teaser.

Is it just that space exploration became ho-hum after the Moon shot, and the people involved ceased to be deserving of historical immortality, until Cochrane discovered warp? Or was Christopher's contribution somehow lesser than the contributions of Gagarin, Armstrong, Carter, Hawke, Gordon, Dare, or whoever spearheaded mankind's conquest of the Sol system?

Perhaps Christopher would have been less noticeable if his mission turned out to be a failure. Then again, he could at least gain notoriety that way.

Or perhaps Christopher launched on the first Saturn probe, but more advanced ships flew past him to Saturn and back four and a half times before he actually arrived?

Timo Saloniemi

I sometimes get the impression that History (Especially recent history) is optional at Starfleet Academy.

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Christopher wrote:

---

Given that it was called Ares IV, I think it was pretty clearly implied that it was the fourth manned Mars mission at least. Okay, the first manned vessel to orbit the Moon was Apollo 8 and the first to land was Apollo 11, granted, but I doubt the same model would apply to something like a Mars mission.

There's also the little fact that the first unmanned probe to Saturn was Pioneer 11, which did a flyby in September 1979. Followed by the two Voyager probes in 1980-81 and the Cassini probe from 2004-present. So the idea that Col. Christopher led the first successful unmanned probe in 2009 is a nonstarter, since we've had several very successful unmanned probes to Saturn, with Cassini in particular being amazingly successful.

There's also Spock's specific line from "Tomorrow is Yesterday": "Unless we return Captain Christopher to Earth, There will be no Colonel Shaun Geoffrey Christopher to go to Saturn." That settles it -- it wasn't an unmanned mission, he actually went. (Note, though, that the 2009 date is an Okuda conjecture; the actual date of the mission was never canonically established.)

I just thought of something else: Didn't Spock and Kirk have this discussion *while John Christopher was listening*? Maybe they were just making it up, to make it seem even more urgent that John be returned to Earth immediately and so that he wouldn't be tempted to remain on the ship.

[Dayton Ward]

^ That doesn't work with the episode as presented. Christopher made no bones about the fact that he wanted to get off the ship -- not just back to his family but also to report what he'd seen. He tried to escape the ship once, and then escape from Kirk and the rest of the landing party later in the episode.

[Christopher]

^^Right. Capt. Christopher was the one who wanted to go back; Spock was initially insisting that he had to stay on the ship, that he could never go back. So there's no possible reason why Spock would fabricate a story requiring Christopher to go back.

[Timo]

...Although it is perfectly possible that our heroes fabricate the part where Christopher is supposed to survive his return to his home. That one they all would have a reason to lie about. They have to do time travel to get to their own home, and they have to get rid of the two ancient Earthlings, so making up a story about how they can be beamed home during time travel would allow them to be executed with minimum fuss (while their other selves on Earth would of course go on living, easing the consciences of our heroic murderers a lot).

Timo Saloniemi

[Dayton Ward]

^ It might be "possible," but does that honestly sound like a course of action you'd expect any Trek "hero" character to take? Is that something for which we, the viewers, are supposed to forgive our "heroes?" Killing a couple of innocents as a matter of convenience?



Edit: After posting, it occurs to me that "City on the Edge of Forever" could be a comparison, but I don't think so. In that instance, Kirk was forced to allow Edith Keeler to die in order to preserve the timeline. Still, it's worth pointing out.

[Timo]

Well, our heroes do go to all the trouble of returning to the immediate past - something they wouldn't have to do if their aim was merely to get home. They apparently want to do something to prevent Christopher's jet from breaking apart - and I can see two ways of doing that.

1) Contact their past selves and tell them to hold the tractor beam. Not likely to work, due to poor communications and so forth. (But their past selves should by all accounts have been there in the sky somewhere, with two starships messing around. We could assume the ship that was deliberately timetraveling did not dip into the atmosphere, though.)

2) Distract Christopher long enough that he won't enter into the situation that makes the past Kirk order the tractor beam. The silly transporter-superimposition thing they did would have been perfect, I guess... But it would still result in the death of the originally captured Christopher, in cessation of all of his thought processes and memories and replacement thereof by this uncaptured one's thought processes and memories.

There would have been no reason to do anything to the uncaptured sergeant, but they needed to get rid of the captured one - so again this silly trickery might be a nice way to do what they had to do.

I'm sure it wasn't an easy decision for them. It may even be that not all of them realized what they were doing. But it does seem as if they are giving some sort of a performance for the two ancient Earthlings when they start babbling about this transporter superimposition stuff - they "catch on" one by one, and add convincing-sounding detail, until it sounds as if everything will be fine.

Timo Saloniemi

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Getting back to the earlier topic...I think I like the idea that Shaun Christopher's flight was at such relativistic speeds that he and his crew took years to complete it, and the Ares project could have been initiated in the intervening years (i.e. if the Ares 'third generation ion drive' was invented after Christopher's flight left).

It's about the only way I can reconcile the two, really. Strictly speaking, manned missions to farther planets (Saturn) should come after those to closer planets (Mars). But if the Colonel's flight was using much cruder technology, with cryogenics for the crew, relativistic time dilation, and all that, it would explain quite a bit.

[Christopher]

Babaganoosh wrote:

---

Getting back to the earlier topic...I think I like the idea that Shaun Christopher's flight was at such relativistic speeds that he and his crew took years to complete it, and the Ares project could have been initiated in the intervening years (i.e. if the Ares 'third generation ion drive' was invented after Christopher's flight left).

Err, at relativistic speeds, it would take less than 90 minutes to get to Saturn, and that's as seen by an Earthbound observer. A journey of years is more the sort of thing you'd get with today's technology. The Voyager probes took 3-4 years to get to Saturn because they had a favorable planetary configuration to give them gravity assists. Cassini-Huygens followed a more roundabout path, looping past Venus and Earth a couple of times to get onto the right trajectory, so it took nearly 7 years.

But there's no way a manned mission taking that long would ever be approved, even with cryogenic technology, because of the risk of cumulative radiation exposure. A manned mission to Saturn would have to wait for faster propulsion methods or a highly propitious planetary alignment.

[Shawnster]

Dayton Ward wrote:

---

^ We also have no real idea when Shaun Christopher was born (wasn't it also an Okuda conjecture?). For all we know, it was ten years after the events of the episode.

Not sure if this was addressed or not but it's obvious from Capt. Christopher's reaction that he'd not fathered a son when captured by the Enterprise.

Back to the topic of the Federation. I would like to suggest that it's possible the organization, structure and responsibilities of the Federation grew and adjusted from ENT (where we saw the founding) to TOS to TNG and beyond. After all the United States government founded in 1776 was different from the one that ratified the Constitution in in 1787. While the government in 1776 was called the UNITED States (originally the United Colonies) the supreme law of the land was called the Articles of CONFEDERATION. The US even had a different president who preceeded George Washington.

The English/British government has evolved from a full monarchy to a constitutional monarchy.

The League of Nations was superceeded by the United Nations. NATO probably operates much differently than the Warsaw Pact nations did. Sometimes what the organization is called does not reflect how it operates.

In regards to Patriotisim - I'm sure there are ways people display Patriotism that does not involve militism. Some feel they're being patriotic simply by wearing a lapel pin or sticking a "We support the Troops" sign in the yard. If you ask them, I'm sure they will answer that they are patriotic.

Conversely a person can be militant, fight for a country and yet NOT be patriotic. These people are mercenaries, soldiers of fortune, etc...

[Dayton Ward]

Shawnster wrote:

---

Not sure if this was addressed or not but it's obvious from Capt. Christopher's reaction that he'd not fathered a son when captured by the Enterprise.

Well, it was also obvious when Christopher says he doesn't have a son, and McCoy says "Yet." After all, the whole point of having to return him is so that he can go on to eventually father that son.