Earth ship Valiant

[T'Girl]

Ronald Held wrote:

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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?

It's possible that America had little or no involvement in the third world war.

While there was a sighted example of Lily having trouble obtain a certain material (titanium), the missile complex in Montana was still there, and Cochrane was able to travel by train. Rail tends to pass through population centers.

[BK613]

Perhaps the "magnetic storm" had the same effect on the Valiant as Murasaki 312 had on the Galileo:

Boma: I'd say that, the magnetic potential of the effect was ... [w]as such that, as we gathered speed, it was multiplied geometrically. And we were simply shot into the center of the effect. Like a projectile.

[publiusr]

T'Girl wrote:

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It's possible that America had little or no involvement in the third world war.

India vs Pakistan

It would also help explain Khan...

[Wingsley]

Yes, but all it really says is that the lingering effects of WW III (the "post-atomic horror") carried on through the 2070's. That doesn't mean the war was fought then.

That would contradict what was said in FIRST CONTACT about how the world straightened itself out and poverty and war were eliminated in the years that followed the flight of the Phoenix.

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I agree that we really have no idea who fought in WW III. We know that there was the Eastern Coalition, i.e. China (according to the commentary for ST:FC), but as for the other powers, it could be anybody. There's no indication that the US would have been blitzed to smithereens or anything like that.

Indeed, we know the USA survived WW III basically intact, as the war took place in 2053 but (in TNG's "The Royale") a 52-star flag is said to date back anywhere from 2033 to 2079...and also there were U.S. addresses given from time to time in Enterprise. Plus, we've seen major U.S. cities like San Francisco several times in Trek. And Trip Tucker has been to New York City. (We all know what kind of war WW III must have been...a total nuke war, it would wipe out everything. And it would take several centuries to rebuild a city completely from scratch, so if we see a city anywhere in Trek, we can realistically assume it survived the war, because otherwise there would be nowhere near enough time to totally rebuild it.)

[Timo]

Replicators would allow near-instant rebuilding of a city if there was political will. But the "survivor" cities we see are a mixture of old and new architecture, something that probably would not be allowed if cities were being rebuilt for "historical reenactment" reasons - if there are historical-looking buildings there, they are probably the original stuff, and WWIII survivors.

Riker made it clear that the death toll of WWIII was high, and that major cities were destroyed. But perhaps the two are one and the same thing: weapons were aimed at really large cities, none of which would be found in North America in the mid-21st century (or even today), and/or these cities did not enjoy the advanced defenses available to First World nations.

OTOH, that a flag survives tells little about the nation that survives under the flag. And that the name of a city survives is no guarantee that the city itself retains anything physical of its past and origin.

Random points: In "WNMHDB", the magnetic storm is blamed for throwing the starship across the fearsome-looking Barrier thing, and the return journey is possible with impulse even though escaping from the storm is not (while Kirk goes there and back at warp). But the way it's presented does not actually contradict the idea that the storm took the ship across at least hundreds of lightyears. Yet to say that the storm (or whatever the crew and our heroes mistook for a storm) took care of all the travel from Earth to the Barrier goes somewhat against the spirit of things.

That is, it seems as if the Valiant was on course to some sort of a destination when the storm changed that course. But we know that these "storms" can be found deep inside the Sol system (VOY "One Little Step" and perhaps ST:TMP), and we know that sublight ships probed outside that system in the early 21st century already - so theoretically the Valiant could have disappeared at Sol, the same way Ares IV did, possibly even before Ares IV. But it doesn't necessarily fit the drama all that well.

Whether "finding a 200-yr-old Earthship marker" or "finding an Earthship marker at the edge of the galaxy" was the thing Kirk considered impossible remains debatable. But what would be impossible about finding old markers? These things are meant to be found, and apparently are technologically capable of remaining active for centuries. Surely the latter capability wasn't an accident unintended by the designers?

Timo Saloniemi

[EliyahuQeoni]

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.

My take is that prior to 2018 sleeper ships were required for travel to any interplanetary travel within the Solar System (Similar to what we see in 2001: A Space Odyssey). In 2018 there was a propulsion breakthrough (impulse, perhaps) that--while still sub-light in nature--made sleeper ships for interplanetary travel. They would still be needed for any attempted interstellar travel until the development of the Warp Engine...

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Timo wrote:

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Replicators would allow near-instant rebuilding of a city if there was political will.

They didn't have replicators in 2053. Or 2153, for that matter.

[Timo]

They would still be needed for any attempted interstellar travel until the development of the Warp Engine...

...And it would be intriguing to know whether they actually were used for this before WWIII and Cochrane.

A ship that can go from Earth to Mars in a week (say, the Ares IV rescue mission) doesn't need cryosleep even for exploring the outer planets. Such a a ship could also explore the outer reaches of Sol - say, a thousand AU out - the way the Charybdis did, with a little help from suspended animation. And interstellar missions would be quite practical with extensive cryosleep, assuming the engines didn't suffer from endurance limitations.

Khan was able to go interstellar in a pre-2018 ship, possibly a design that takes a month to go to Mars but still outperforms current spacecraft, real or postulated. It appears he wasn't supposed to be capable of that, though. But we still lack solid knowledge of when and where humans first visited a world outside Sol. Before Cochrane, or after him? Or was it him, in another of those rickety experimental craft of his?

They didn't have replicators in 2053. Or 2153, for that matter.

But our actual evidence for the survival of American cities of note comes mainly from the later centuries, where resources for hobby projects such as re-erection of ancient cities would have been bountiful.

Timo Saloniemi

[Ronald Held]

Khan's ship is another matter with no warp drive at all.

[C.E. Evans]

I always thought that the Botany Bay was a sublight vessel and that the Enterprise found her in some rarely visited region a few dozen light-years or so from Earth (even with long-range sensors, the barely-powered Botany Bay might have been basically invisible against the backdrop of space--like a needle in a haystack).

[blssdwlf]

The Botany Bay if limited to sublight engines could've accelerated up to a moderate percent of light speed and by the time the Enterprise found them traveled 100 or more odd light years away from Earth.

[Dale Sams]

Sorry if this has been mentioned, but Valiant doesn't have to be warp capable to get to the edge of the galaxy. Maybe they had some sort of throttle accident and got there via time dilation (from the crews perspective natch).

[Timo]

The Botany Bay if limited to sublight engines could've accelerated up to a moderate percent of light speed and by the time the Enterprise found them traveled 100 or more odd light years away from Earth.

Amusingly, if you assume the ship could do 0.45 times lightspeed, the relativistic math would make the time differential between 1996 and "Space Seed" match Kirk's vague statement that 200 years had passed. For Khan, two centuries (that is, less than 250 years) would then have passed, even though the difference between 1996 and 2260-whatever is greater for Kirk.

That would indeed place the ship a bit more than a hundred lightyears from Earth - well matching the given facts of this being a region where Earthlings previously traveled but later abandoned, presumably because they moved on to more distant pursuits. And a hundred lightyears from Earth is just about believable for ST2:TWoK as well, for a location that Kirk could visit on his pleasure cruise, a location where Starfleet would hide a secret research facility, a location where two starships meeting would be unlikely, and so forth. It would even be well within the abilities of the ENT-era Earth to utilize as a final desperate hideout, "Twilight" style.

(Incidentally, it would also allow Ceti Alpha to be a star in the not-so-distant-on-the-average constellation Cetus, and thus conform to standard stellar naming: it might be something like Gamma Ceti A, shortened much like our heroes shorten basically all of their stellar names.)

Timo Saloniemi

[Timo]

Maybe they had some sort of throttle accident and got there via time dilation (from the crews perspective natch).

...But not from Kirk's, alas.

Regarding throttle accidents, an unused Okudagram describing what happened to the Charybdis mentions a "thrust anomaly" that gave the ship "12× solar escape velocity 2.56 hours earlier than planned". This tells us little about whether the Charybdis had rudimentary interstellar capabilities, as twelve times solar escape velocity somewhere in the outer Sol system would add up to only around a hundred km/s; even though it's a planned capability, it's not yet a practical interstellar speed, not even with the cryosleep systems the ship was indicated to have aboard (in this noncanonical, unused graphic, that is).

But it's indeed a "thrust anomaly" in that the Botany Bay and the Ares ships were apparently doing much better, somewhat earlier... Perhaps it's for the best that we never saw that graphic as part of the "real" Trek universe.

Timo Saloniemi