The Xindi War and the Kelvin Timeline

Could be, but it was all in the millions, that has a strong impact on people. Edison evidently was moved to strong xenophobic reactions over it.

 

If he was really was that xenophobic why didn't he retire or refuse the Starfleet commission after the Romulan war.

 

Because his ship still had guns, and Starfleet still had the mission to seek out and destroy alien scum? It's not as if there would have been anything more attractive to him available back on Earth.

The Xindi beam killed seven million, in a strange scenario where casualty estimates were revised upward as more information came in (ITRW, the media and the rescue services always assume the worst case scenario first, with everybody out of contact considered a potential casualty, so estimates only get revised down).

Whether the Xindi killed more Earthlings later on, or were discovered to have been behind earlier killings, we don't know, as we myopically stare at the adventures of NX-01 far away from the realm of humans. There might well have been a number of local "wars" while Archer was trying to prevent the big one.

Timo Saloniemi

 

He seemed to think it was still his mission statement to protect the Federation. I suppose he was glad to be on a ship, waiting to be "proved right" about their new allies being just as bad as the Romulans, spoiling for a new fight.

 

In the Romulan war novels being as bloody as they are, that could lead to bigger ships like Kelvin.

The way I watched Balance, I thought Earth and Romulus were primative enough that they couldn't rerally get to each other's homeworlds, and that most of the damage was to ships.

 

According to lead picture editor Dylan Highsmith, "Warp Four" was not a slip up:

If you want the official explanation on the Franklin and it’s warp factor: it was a M.A.C.O. ship (or a United Earth Starfleet ship that housed M.A.C.O. personnel at times) that predates the NX-01.

When the UFP Starfleet is formed, M.A.C.O. was disbanded and the ship was reclassified as a Starfleet ship [with the USS identifier]. The ship is then “lost” in the early 2160’s.

It was important to everyone that the ship, like Edison, predate the Federation; that thematically, the ship mirrored an earlier time in history and served as a bridge in design between then and the NX-01.

Doug [Jung] and Simon [Pegg] may have worked up something [on an official launch date], but if they did it never made it to script or screen.

Either way it predates the NX-01, and was reclassified after the UFP is formed.

 

It's quite possible that the Franklin, as she predated NX-01, had an engine capable of warp three at best. She just happened to achieve warp four, and was famous for that.

I mean, it's not as if the warp eight engine of Kirk's TOS ship would have been limited by its design speed much...

Timo Saloniemi

 

Yeah I see warp 4 as the fastest possibly speed she can do, or warp 4.2 or something, but cruises at warp 3 normally like the Intrepid class (a class she would have served with in the day). The NV Class Intrepid, not the 24th century ones.

 

Archer seemed to cruise at warp 3 normally. Perhaps the older ships didn't have the luxury of cruising as such, but tried to maintain their dash speed for weeks at an end in order to get anywhere at all? Perhaps that's how you get Franklins - via strained engines failing and creating wormholes?

What I hope we get from the exact dialogue (which I lamentably don't recall, because I wasn't expecting it and was simultaneously taking in the gorgeous visuals, sets and characters and the Finnish subtitles anyway - darn the movie magic to heck!) is ambiguity on whether the ship was supposed to reach warp 4, or just happened to reach it.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Scotty just said she was the first to "achieve" warp 4. That could have been from pushing her engines, as the NX-01 can travel up to 5.4 but only by nearly burning out the engines after a few minutes.

She probably did coast along at a slower speed most of the time. Warp 2 and 3 were the standard from the start of Starfleet to the launch of the NX-01.

 

I think I remember him saying "first ship capable of..." but have only seen it once thus far, so can't be positive yet.

 

I might be a little slow, but I see the entire problem hingeing on an overreaction to Scotty "first of its type" comments. Has anyone ever thought maybe Scotty was talking out of his butt, and got his facts wrong?

 

Any other subject, I would agree. But I imagine Scotty is pretty read up on the evolution of starships.

 

Probably right - then it's time to use the Magic Section 31 Canon Mistake™ eraser.

 

Meh. Nothing that can't be finessed to fit. Like we've been doing for decades with everything else.

 

Yep.
Basically we are Gul Madred. Five lights, folks... there are five lights.

 

Her being the first Warp 4 ship is not a mistake per se, though. I can't recall anything in ENT to suggest there couldn't have been an Earth ship that reached Warp 4 before NX-01, as long as it post-dates NX-Delta being the first to break Warp 3 in 2144 as per "First Flight." If anything, the mistake is more in giving the ship a registry of NX-326, but that is largely obviated if this was not her original Earth registry but rather one given to her after the founding of the UFP when the fleet was being restructured, which seems to be implied by the dedication plaque mentioning the UFP. Other mistakes might be that she should probably have been upgraded with phase cannons and photonic torpedoes by the time she disappeared as NX-01 had been, and that the Romulan War(s) shouldn't still have been going on after the founding of the Federation, so having "surrendered to the Romulans" shouldn't have been a putative explanation for her disappearance. Of course, all of this is entirely moot if Pegg was going by the assumption that the pre-2233 history of the Kelvin Timeline can be different from the Prime Timeline, as he's explained.

 

My head hurts from all the beatz and shouting.

 

...No, the episode said nothing about NX-Delta being the first to break Warp 3.

The episode only mentioned one record being broken, and that was Robinson being the first person to deploy an escape pod at warp speed. Since this neatly negates the idea that "breaking the warp two barrier" would have led to a speed record (Robinson did not break any speed records despite reaching warp 2.2, or else that would have been mentioned along with his escape pod feat), then the warp 3 achievement has even lower odds of being any sort of a record because nothing about a "barrier" is mentioned in that context.

Apparently, the Warp Five Engine program hit some sort of a barrier (or simply reached some sort of a milestone) at warp 2, and then later achieved warp 3. But that doesn't mean other engines weren't already doing warp 4; the Warp Five Engine would have to go through those milestones first anyway.

She supposedly did have phase guns. What she didn't have was photon torpedoes - but even NX-01 retained those "spatial" torpedoes even after receiving the photonic ones, suggesting the old tech wasn't utterly outdated yet.

Why not? It shouldn't take a declared war for the Romulans to fight and defeat UFP ships - it never did in TOS or TNG.

The Romulans were a big mystery at the conclusion of the war. Surely they could and would have been suspected of everything, including global cooling and the disappearance of the ladybirds.

Timo Saloniemi