TOS/TMP set during the **23rd** century?

[T'Girl]

SchwEnt wrote:

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The SFC handled it by placing the five-year mission around 2207, with TMP in 2215.

If you're willing to dump ENT's whole "we were held back a century by the Vulcans," then most everything else in the Trek-verse would work nicely with TOS being in the year 2207.

I liked SFC take on the first meeting with the Vulcans much better than what we got in First Contact.

[BillJ]

T'Girl wrote:

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If you're willing to dump ENT's whole "we were held back a century by the Vulcans," then most everything else in the Trek-verse would work nicely with TOS being in the year 2207.

I liked SFC take on the first meeting with the Vulcans much better than what we got in First Contact.

Except The Neutral Zone (2364) and Generations (78 years after Kirk was lost) wouldn't work with 2207 dating.

[Wingsley]

Is this the only basic difference in the "prime universe" timeline? Just 60 years between some of the suggestions mentioned by characters in TOS, and the "official" timeline?

[Mytran]

sbk1234 wrote:

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I always took that to be a stardate, so it wouldn't sync up to Earth dates, anyway.

Why an earth date or a Star Date? This is Romulan ale after all - very likely there would be a Romulan date on the bottle!

[trevanian]

Mytran wrote:

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Why an earth date or a Star Date? This is Romulan ale after all - very likely there would be a Romulan date on the bottle!

don't wait for the translation, uncork me NOW!

(uh, maybe it was on the import stamp?)

stardate for the movie is in the 8300s so this would have been taking centuries to ferment.

[Timo]

A thousand stardates seem to be more or less a year, so it might have taken six years to ferment. Or then sixteen. Or twenty-six. Or one hundred and fifty-six. Note the absence of the "decade digit" in this 1000 SD = 1 y assumption, meaning that a 8300 stardate can very well be about fifteen years after "Space Seed"...

Were there a Romulan label on the bottle, Kirk couldn't read it, not even the date on it. The TOS heroes don't read alien languages all that fluently - Scotty and Chekov couldn't read Klingon in the following movie. No doubt the label is there for (illegal) export purposes.

http://cdn2-b.examiner.com/sites/def...6d7b2d0e81.jpg

Timo Saloniemi

[Christopher]

Wingsley wrote:

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Is this the only basic difference in the "prime universe" timeline? Just 60 years between some of the suggestions mentioned by characters in TOS, and the "official" timeline?

No, the 60-year discrepancy is between the two fan theories that existed prior to TNG -- the Spaceflight Chronology timeline that put TOS in 2207-10, and the alternative fan theory, later made official, that put TOS in 2266-69. Those were both outside interpretations based on evidence from TOS, but neither of them came from TOS itself. TOS was intentionally vague about the setting. Even the two big "200 years" references are vague as to the actual decade -- is it 200-ish years after the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s or 200-ish years after "Tomorrow is Yesterday" in the late 1960s? And of course those clash with the "Squire of Gothos" reference and the TMP reference, and the "Metamorphosis" reference doesn't make things any clearer.

[Duncan MacLeod]

All of which begs the question: do you think they would have been better off with the 27th century time period indicated by SoG, rather the the 23rd century that they ultimately went with?

In hindsight I think it might have worked out better. But then again, at the time we all assumed the lunar missions would immediately lead to a Mars expedition by the late 70s/ early 80s, then on to the asteriod belt by the 90s and so on. No one expected us to turn away from manned space exploration so quickly and so completely. It's kinda sad when you think about it.

[st.barthgirl]

"No one expected us to turn away from manned space exploration so quickly and so completely. It's kinda sad when you think about it."

Without having developed too strong of an opinion on the matter, i think i'm thinking that it's sad that the Idea of Mining the moon is what might bring us back there... and it's also sad that we know comparatively Nothing about the 70% of Earth that lies Under Water.

Except that i'm glad we're not Further disturbing Critters and Polluting the Oceans before we can develop a plan that will be as UnIntrusive as possible...

[T'Girl]

Duncan MacLeod wrote:

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do you think they would have been better off with the 27th century time period

Unqualified yes.

It would have allowed for a more expansive back story. A more realistic spread of Humanity outward to the stars, room for multiple wars, slow incremental technological improvements. Especially with Humanity barely inching outward for the first century after discovering warp drive. The canon history of Trek has a lot happening in the hundred years between Archer and Kirk.

Cochrane: "What's it like out there in the galaxy?
Kirk: "We're on a thousand planets and spreading out."

[Christopher]

Duncan MacLeod wrote:

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All of which begs the question: do you think they would have been better off with the 27th century time period indicated by SoG, rather the the 23rd century that they ultimately went with?

In hindsight I think it might have worked out better. But them again, at the time we all assumed the lunar missions would immediately lead to a Mars expedition by the late 70s/ early 80s, then on to the asteriod belt by the 90s and so on. No one expected us to turn away from manned space exploration so quickly and so completely. It's kinda sad when you think about it.

Don't be so pessimistic. The proposals that are coming along now for private space travel and mining are the sort of thing that could start a new space age far more successful than the one of the NASA era. Historically, frontier exploration/settlement hasn't really taken off until it came into the hands of private enterprise with government backing -- like the East India Companies, or the prospectors and fur traders who spearheaded European expansion into the Americas. Some of the proposals on the table now could get us to a Mars colony by the 2040s. Heck, in my novel Only Superhuman I have a heavily settled Asteroid Belt by the 2080s and '90s, and while that's an optimistic timeline, I do believe it's in the realm of possibility.

Of course, going interstellar is another matter. But NASA's already doing proof-of-concept experiments for a warp field generator of a sort, since recent theoretical work suggests that space warping could potentially be viable with far less energy than was previously assumed. Realistically, there's probably a very long journey from such proof of concept (if it works) to a functioning warp drive, but if such experiments are happening now in 2012, it makes it a little more credible that Zefram Cochrane could be building his warp engine just 50 years later.

Oh, and "Squire" pegged it as 28th century, not 27th. Trelane was familiar with the death of Alexander Hamilton, which took place in 1804. His cry of "Vive Napoleon!" suggests he was familiar with Napoleon's Hundred Days in 1815. And the episode featured a Strauss waltz from 1880. So it was 900 years after the 19th century, making it the 28th.

[Captrek]

sbk1234 wrote:

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I always took that to be a stardate, so it wouldn't sync up to Earth dates, anyway.

In the script it is punctuated, “Twenty-two, eighty-three...” That suggests a stardate, FWIW.

[Timo]

Why?

If anything, the use of "twenty-two" rather than "two-two" suggests this is a case of centuries-and-years, the way we today say "Khan left Earth in nineteen, ninety-six". Stardates are sometimes spelled that way, but not always, especially when they go five-digit...

Timo Saloniemi

[Christopher]

captrek wrote:

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In the script it is punctuated, “Twenty-two, eighty-three...” That suggests a stardate, FWIW.

I don't see why you'd think that. Stardates use periods (or rather, decimal points), not commas. And scripts are written for the benefit of cast and crew, not the viewers. Any punctuation in a script would be either a line-reading suggestion for the actor or a typo. Typos are quite common in scripts, since they aren't really meant to be seen. As long as the actor and the filmmakers understand what you meant, it doesn't matter if you spell or punctuate it correctly. So you really can't read anything into a stray comma in a script, even if commas did have anything to do with stardates, which they don't.

[Harvey]

One of the jobs de Forest Research did on this film was check for typos in the screenplay. One would hope, then, that few slipped through in the shooting script.

In this case, though, the comma looks line a line reading suggestion, not a star date. (Especially since the other star dates in the script are punctuated with periods, not commas).