The Yosemite scenes in TFF suggest a late Summer/early Fall placement. Accepting that TWOK begins in late March, and TSFS begins a week or two later, in early April, then TVH takes place around July. So the shakedown cruise couldn't have lasted six months, as that would place TFF around January, too early for the season portrayed in the film. I'd place TFF about two months after TVH.
Uhh, global warming! I have about 3 weeks between TWOK and TSFS. There had to be time for the damaged ship to limp home, for Carol to leave, for Saavik to formally graduate from the Academy (her department color went from cadet red to command white), for injuries to heal, and so forth. It's odd that Spock hasn't matured more in that time, but his growth did seem to be accelerating exponentially, so it would've started out slow. So that puts TSFS about halfway through April, and I assume it takes close to a week. TVH is three months later, which is late July; but we don't know how much time passed between their return with the whales, their trial, and their assignment to the E-A. Actually that could've taken months right there. Although in order to be consistent with The Genesis Wave, Book One Ch. 14 (the "Genesis Report" chapter Dave Mack wrote), I have it as about two weeks, putting the end of TVH in early August. The frame story of To Reign in Hell goes next, and says that the E-A is in spacedock being readied for final testing and flight. I figure that could add a few weeks before the shakedown starts, so I have the shakedown being September through February. Afterward, according to TFF, Kirk gave Scotty three weeks to repair the ship while the crew was on leave. So that moves the start of TFF into mid-March. Not sure if that fits the Yosemite scenes, but it's closer than January.
I didn't realize before this conversation there was that big of a gap between TVH & TFF, I had always assumed it was supposed to have been within a few days of each other.
^Well, from Kirk's line to Scotty in TFF, it's a bare minimum of three weeks in between them (since the frame of To Reign in Hell could fit in that period, I suppose -- though Ceti Alpha is far enough away that it's unlikely they could make a round trip in under three weeks and still have time for a vacation).
I think the novel Probe has an interval of several weeks between TVH and TFF (and it takes place shortly after the latter).
Yeah, there's mention in Probe of the San Francisco Bay area experiencing a lush resurgence in vegetation, thanks to the rainstorms during the Probe's visit "several weeks" earlier (as Kirk notes when traveling through the city). Voyages of Imagination sets this novel after the events of The Final Frontier, doesn't it? Trying to recall, and would have to look around for my copy.
The thing about Probe is that it reads like it was originally written to be after ST IV, but since it was delayed so much, it had some token references to ST V stuck in without really altering that post-ST IV flavor.
I haven't watched TFF in ages, so I forgot that there was a reference to that specific of a time frame. I always took Scotty's complaining about Kirk's "let's see what she's got" line implied that they started pretty much right after they left space dock and had to go right back. Although I guess they could have been out and about for a while before they problems got serious enough that they had to return to space dock, or they could have been in space dock for those three weeks.
^Kirk's line was: "You told me you could get this ship operational in two weeks. I gave you three." I take that to mean that after their initial time out in space, however long that was, they then returned to Spacedock and the crew went on leave while Scott spent three weeks trying to repair the ship.
Actually, Mike specifically asked me to change something in ATFW,ATFP to accommodate DIW. And I put the Enterprise going off to the Denab system because that's from the original Nemesis script, and I figured what the hell (especially since I already shitcanned the rest of the scene the Denab line was in by ignoring the Martin Madden character -- who I would later in Q & A relegate to an alternate universe).
I could've done without the "Denab" reference, since evidently the writers of Nemesis were probably trying to do some kind of full-circle "Encounter at Farpoint" homage but couldn't be bothered to look up the correct spelling of Deneb. Although I guess there could be some alien species that calls its star Denab, and maybe that's what you were thinking. Still, had it been me, I would've just ignored that bit from the script.
^ I assumed it was some system that was named Denab by someone other than humans, since Picard ended it by saying it was where no one had gone before, and the Enterprise already had been to Deneb.
^In-universe, that makes sense. Metatextually, it still feels like a hamfisted and misspelled attempt at a "Farpoint" homage. After all, Deneb in "Farpoint" was supposed to be the beginning of a mission beyond explored space, though that idea was almost immediately abandoned.
The Lost Years novel Traitor Winds has Starfleet first testing the cloaking device stolen from the Romulans in "The Enterprise Incident" after the end of Kirk's first five year mission, but Section 31: Cloak has it installed on the USS Sphinx shortly after TEI, before the end of the mission.
And doesn't the Enterprise Experiment show the cloaking.device being tested on the Enterprise itself during the five-year mission?
By now it's a safe bet that the Lost Years books are part of the older book continuity and don't fit the modern continuity. For that matter, due to all the delays and editorial shifts, the TLY books don't even mesh with each other -- Traitor Winds is earlier in the Enterprise refit process than A Flag Full of Stars, but the calendar dates given are a year later. For that matter, AFFoS is set on the 300th anniversary of the first lunar landing, July 2269, and yet it's more than a year after the end of the 5-year mission. Which doesn't fit with any other chronology I've seen about when the 5YM took place, and certainly doesn't mesh with the now-canonical information that it ended in 2270. And yet there's no way to retcon AFFOS with a different calendar date, given that its story is so closely tied to that specific anniversary. That always bothered me about it from the start.
In the timeline at the back of Voyages Of Imagination. didn't the timeline authors retcon A Flag Full Of Stars as taking place during the 300th Anniversary Celebrations of the Apollo missions (1968-1972), and not just the moon landing? Sure it's not in the novel, but that's one way to make it fit.
And the fact that Deneb was suppossed to be out where nobody had been didn't make sense either given the reference to "Denebian slime devils" in TOS (as well as non-canon references to various denebian spacies in novels (especially Diane Duane's)), which would seem to imply quite a bit of familiarity with the place 100 years before the events of of "Farpoint". Picard and Co. act like the place is a recent discovery or something.