Earth ship Valiant

[T'Girl]

^ Occam's Razor.

*************

Another possibility. Zephram Cochrane's flight was the first known successful warp flight, but there had been previous attempts. Either nothing happen, the ship was destroyed, or (in the case of the Valiant) the ship simply disappeared and not was heard of again.

Picard certainly regarded Cochrane as the first Human warp traveler, but the 24th century as full of important missing snippets of information from history. When Kirk met Cochrane, he refer to him as the discoverer of the space warp, not as the first man to travel faster than light.

Perhaps Kirk knew something Picard didn't.

[Wingsley]

While it's true that STAR TREK is full of contradictions and discontinuity (and specific history about the Valiant does seem vague), we can establish that nobody (from Earth) ever launched or travelled in an FTL vehicle prior to Zephrem Cochrane in April of 2063. While "Metamorphosis" and STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT don't match up very well, they are close enough to make it clear that Cochrane did what nobody from Earth had ever done before: he discovered the space-warp and built and piloted the first warp-propelled Earth spacecraft.

The 2018 reference in "Space Seed" does dangle there, since it seems obvious that any early-21st century Earth vessel predating Cochrane's Phoenix flight would have to be sublight in nature. Of course, FIRST CONTACT seems to have "moved the goalposts" by shifting the third world war from the 1990s to the 2050s, so it seems logical that Bermanian revisionism/retconning in FIRST CONTACT re-establishes Lt. MacGyvers' "2018" sleeper ship reference down the road 55 years to 2063.

Since the S.S. Valiant was obviously one of the first Earth warp-propelled spacecraft to be launched into deep space, and since it should be obvious that Earth did not have FTL capability until Cochrane's Phoenix flew in April of 2063, it should be pretty safe to say that the Valiant was built and launched some time in the 2063-2065 time range, definitely after the Phoenix. We could give ourselves a little wiggle room since mentions of the Valiant in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" seem to be wishy-washy on the exact number of years; Kirk's log entry seems to place the Valiant as being from "over two centuries" but subsequent mentions in the story aren't quite as clear. Didn't Kirk say subsequently that the recorder-marker had been ejected "almost two hundred years ago"? That would leave a little bit of wiggle room there. Not much, but a little.

[aridas sofia]

The whole story of Cochrane from Metamorphosis was confused. "Discoverer of the space warp" sounds more like Ernst Mach than Chuck Yeager. And yet Cochrane comes bounding over the landscape in what appears to be a flight suit. He was a competent enough space pilot to be out on his own in interstellar space at the age of 87. He could canibalize a spacecraft to build a shelter. And he didn't appear -in 150 years- to get very far figuring out the nature of the energy based life form with whom he was stuck. In other words, he didn't come off as much the man of supernatural scientific curiosity as the man that liked to tinker. Just as he was portrayed in First Contact. And yet, the notion of somebody building the first warpship in what amounted to his garage is so romantic and 1903 that it goes down hard. I guess we have to accept the governments of the world had collapsed and some powerful AI and robotic help were being employed up in the Montana woods.

And yet, a few years later, everything is so together as to enable the rejuvenated human race post-first contact to carry off the Valiant mission.

You really have to wonder if it wouldn't fit all the pieces better to have Valiant be a Vulcan ship, given to Earth and renamed. And that its loss might have been the source of some of the friction that was shown to prevail later.

[Mr. Laser Beam]

aridas sofia wrote:

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I guess we have to accept the governments of the world had collapsed and some powerful AI and robotic help were being employed up in the Montana woods.

Well, Cochrane himself (in ST:FC) admitted he did it for the money. The USA still existed, and was able to pay him for it, and so...profit can be a powerful motivator.

As for the SS Valiant: I accept the explanation that the only way it got to the edge of the galaxy was via an unstable wormhole. At sublight speeds, there's really no other way it could have done so. And I totally love the image of that ship as posted in the Drexler files.

[Wingsley]

This is just me, but I have no problem with Cochrane being Earth's first warpship pioneer, both as a "tinkerer" who somehow cobbled together a crude warpship for testing purposes (the Phoenix's first warp-flight) and as starting a whole new career as a result of all of the fallout from FIRST CONTACT. Cochrane founded the Warp Five Complex which apparently spearheaded Earth's technical strides in designing and developing new warp engines and starships. Perhaps the Valiant was one of those early international efforts to revive Earth's space program which eventually led to the Warp Five Complex being established. I prefer to assume that Earth built more than one of these early starships; perhaps in the 2060s-2070s, Earth began to experiment in building warp-propelled deep space vessels, probes (Friendship One) and test vehicles. No doubt some succeeded, some failed, and some "blew up on the launch pad". You can just hear either James Cromwell or Glenn Corbett's version of the character saying "Well, back to the drawing board we go, folks!" Either one works for me.

The whole theme of FIRST CONTACT (and of "Metamorphosis", for that matter) was that Earth (and Cochrane in particular) were repeatedly rejuvenated by embarking on endeavors in space travel and technological "tinkering". The TOS/Corbett take on Cochrane left me with the impression that when he discovered "the space warp", it was like a “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.” moment. Maybe statues and schools being erected in Cochrane's name and likeness were indicative of how a battered post-war Earth unified around his efforts, and how, like the Apollo moon missions and other great strides, this "valiant" effort helped to "show the way" for the human race to restore and rebuild itself. Riker, Troi, LaForge and their landing party did seem to tell Cochrane that the arrival of the Vulcans resulted in a kind of 50-year planetwide revolution of sorts, becoming a permanent Renaissance for the human race.

[blssdwlf]

Wingsley wrote:

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The 2018 reference in "Space Seed" does dangle there, since it seems obvious that any early-21st century Earth vessel predating Cochrane's Phoenix flight would have to be sublight in nature. Of course, FIRST CONTACT seems to have "moved the goalposts" by shifting the third world war from the 1990s to the 2050s, so it seems logical that Bermanian revisionism/retconning in FIRST CONTACT re-establishes Lt. MacGyvers' "2018" sleeper ship reference down the road 55 years to 2063.

If you're willing to accept moving goal posts, why not also move the goal post for Kirk's remarks in "WNMHGB" and in the Berman version he'll say "lost more than a century ago" since the timeline is different...

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Wingsley wrote:

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Of course, FIRST CONTACT seems to have "moved the goalposts" by shifting the third world war from the 1990s to the 2050s

Actually TNG got there first - its pilot was the first mentioning (that I'm aware of) in which the Eugenics Wars were separated from WW III.

[Wingsley]

blssdwlf wrote:

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If you're willing to accept moving goal posts, why not also move the goal post for Kirk's remarks in "WNMHGB" and in the Berman version he'll say "lost more than a century ago" since the timeline is different...

It would definitely make more sense for the Valiant to have launched later, say, 2073-2113. Ir depends on how much you want to stick to the notion of "over two centuries" relating on the one hand to the notion of the assumed date of "Where No Man Has Gone Before" (2265 -> 2065) and the assumed date of World War III (1993 or 2053) as it related to what Marla McGyver was saying about sleeper-ships being abolished (2018 or 2063) upon encountering the Botany Bay.

Bermanian TREK definitely shifted things quite a bit in the 21st century.

[Wingsley]

Mr. Laser Beam wrote:

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Actually TNG got there first - its pilot was the first mentioning (that I'm aware of) in which the Eugenics Wars were separated from WW III.

When was this mentioned?

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ Q's line about "This is a court of the year 2079...by which time more 'rapid progress' had caused all United Earth nonsense to be abolished."

[Ronald Held]

I see no problem that Cochrane had a team build the first warp capable ship and had most of the work completed before WW III. Perhaps the war slowed but not completed stopped the project?

[Metryq]

Ronald Held wrote:

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Perhaps the war slowed but not completed stopped the project?

Amazing things can slip through the cracks in wartime. The following is from SPACE SHUTTLE: THE HISTORY OF DEVELOPING THE NATIONAL SPACE TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM by Dennis R. Jenkins, Walsworth Publishing, 1993, pg. 2:

Though much of the early work on reusable spacecraft followed the inspiration of the Sanger-Bredt Silverbird, several German rocket engineers brought to the United States under the auspices of Project Paperclip had already participated in an attempt to develop and fly a lifting-reentry vehicle. In the midst of the Second World War, engineers working on the development of the A-4 (V2) rocket at Peenemunde had examined a wide variety of concepts for multi-stage launch vehicles, some of which used winged upper stages.

One such effort was the A-9/A-10 combination of 1944, which was envisioned by its developers as a large booster (the A-10) topped by a winged second stage (A-9) capable of delivering a one ton warhead on a target 3,000 miles away. The A-10 would boost the second-stage A-9 into the upper atmosphere, and then fall away to its destruction. The A-9 would fire its engine, continue down-range in a ballistic arc, then transition to a terminal glide at Mach 3.5 towards its target. An alternate idea placed a single-seat cockpit in the A-9, along with a tricycle landing gear. The entire vehicle would be launched vertically and then glide to a conventional landing after a 400 mile Mach 2.0 flight. An orbital version of the A-9, launched by a two-stage A-11/A-12 booster capable of lifting 60,000 pounds to an orbiting space station, was under study at the war's end.

In a totally separate, but related, effort Ludwig Roth supervised the design and building of two swept-wing derivatives of the A-4. The first of these winged A-4b ('bastard') vehicles crashed and exploded shortly after launch on 8 January 1945. The second, launched 24 January, reportedly exited the Earth's atmosphere, completed a stable ballistic reentry and began a Mach 4.0 glide to Earth. During the glide one of the wings separated from the vehicle, probably from unexpectedly high flight loads, and the A-4b broke up. If this report is true, and all available sources confirm it is, this would have been the first man-made object placed into space. The German winged reentry research efforts were terminated as the war in Europe came to an end in 1945, and neither the United States, nor the Soviet Union, seemed particularly interested in continuing it.

[Wingsley]

I don't get it. Q created a perversion of 21st century history to harass Picard & company. Why should we accept his illusion as canon pre-TOS Earth history?

[King Daniel]

^Because Picard and co. recognized it.

[Mr. Laser Beam]

And while Q may be many things, he is not a liar.