• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

First Flight and the Franklin

reed talks about how long refitting the tubes for photonic torpedos would need - spatial and photonic torpedos are not combatible tube-wise [..] no way they are launched through the same tubes

They go in through different holes when loaded. They come out from the same holes, though (except for the aft ones - we never see a photonic torpedo come from the aft-facing saucer tubes for spatial torpedoes, only from a dedicated torpedo tube hidden behind a hatch in the aft pod).

Apparently, the launch tubes themselves are big enough to accommodate all sorts of things, probably also things bigger than the photonic torpedoes. Similarly, later ships fire those fancy probes that have big cylindrar "wings", much like Vulcan warp engines, from the same tubes the flat photon torpedoes come out from.

There was no warp 4 barrier. There was a warp 2 barrier. All the ships they had could go warp 2, except the NX, which could go warp 4.

Odd and baseless speculation. Why should we think Scotty would be mistaken about anything relating to the Franklin?

It's likelier that he falsely thought Chekov took part in the mission when in fact it was Chirpov all along. He knows his spacecraft, this is a stated Star Trek fact. People? Probably not so much, as this is not a stated Star Trek fact. :p

Timo Saloniemi
 
Warp 1 is c therefore the lightbarrier is it.
Warp 2 barrier broken by the NX Beta
Warp 3 barrier broken by the NX Delta (possibly the NX-Gamma simulator in theory first)
Warp 4 barrier broken by the Franklin between 2149 and launch of the NX-01
Warp 5 barrier broken by the NX-01 during season 1
Warp 6 and 7 barriers broken by the warp 7 arms race test ships during the Romulan War

Most of those are confirmed by First Flight, Beyond and the RW novels.

Each warp factor has a critical threshold over energy to overcome to travel at that speed, which determines the factors themselves. The ship that finally manages not only to go over that energy hill and stay there is said to have broken a barrier that previously represented the maximum speed possible.

The NX program was being operated out of the Warp 5 Complex by the Henry Archer/Cochrane flight team. Starfleet had various departments, services, offices etc all operating at once. Competing designs being drawn up and operated by other development teams could well have been possible.

Telemetry from the NX prototypes could have been sent to other test vessels being built too. The Franklin is a stripped down ship that is practically the smallest full starship we've ever seen. Massive nacelles for it's size with one habitable module, with the reactor assembly taking up a lof of the back of the ship. Propulsion prototype? certainly fits.
 
Warp 1 is c therefore the lightbarrier is it.

Or then not - this is the common assumption, but it's not an onscreen pseudo-fact yet.

Warp 2 barrier broken by the NX Beta
Warp 3 barrier broken by the NX Delta (possibly the NX-Gamma simulator in theory first)
Warp 4 barrier broken by the Franklin between 2149 and launch of the NX-01

Apparently so.

Warp 5 barrier broken by the NX-01 during season 1

Possibly. In "Broken Bow", they don't go that fast yet, and by the time of "Fight or Flight", going warp five is no longer newsworthy. The other possibility is that NX-01 broke warp five quite some time before the show began (but after 2149), and the third possibility is that NX-Kappa or some other testbed broke warp five and possibly also warp six some time before the show began (but after 2149).

Warp 6 and 7 barriers broken by the warp 7 arms race test ships during the Romulan War

It's a bit irrelevant to speak of barriers past the point of forming the Coalition of Planets, because Earth ceases to matter at that point. The heroes now have access to ships that broke warp six potentially centuries before Cochrane was born!

Most of those are confirmed by First Flight, Beyond and the RW novels.

Indeed. But not everything is confirmed, and the RW novel takes on warp six and warp seven make no sense considering anything below warp seven was underachieving from the Vulcan point of view.

Each warp factor has a critical threshold over energy to overcome to travel at that speed, which determines the factors themselves. The ship that finally manages not only to go over that energy hill and stay there is said to have broken a barrier that previously represented the maximum speed possible.

On the other hand, the backstage assumption is that the ENT/TOS warp four isn't the same as the TNG/DS9/VOY warp four. Quite possibly the early scientists got it wrong somehow, and the true barrier is at its TNG value but the crude early engines didn't notice whether they were over the hill or just close to the top. One would assume that the difference would be slight at low warp factors, and the ENT heroes did not reach the high ones and the TOS ones had other things to worry about when their ship careened off at accidental warp ten.

The Franklin is a stripped down ship that is practically the smallest full starship we've ever seen.

...Indeed, perhaps that's what "STARSHIP CLASS" in her dedication plaque means?

Massive nacelles for it's size with one habitable module, with the reactor assembly taking up a lof of the back of the ship. Propulsion prototype? certainly fits.

OTOH, if she isn't a Franklin class ship, it's a bit odd that she'd get to break the records, rather than the class ship. Perhaps a generic starship considered outdated (or damaged and unfit for general duty) and turned into a propulsion testbed at a later stage of her career?

Indeed, one might think she would be continuing testbed duties in the 2160s, as her all-new Federation Starfleet registry has the NX prefix indicating experimental status even though she's clearly old. Which may mean that the engines bolted onto her in the movie are new ones, rather than the ones that broke warp four. Perhaps these new engines caused the wormhole, TMP style, that buried her in that Altamid mountaintop?

Timo Saloniemi
 
Yeah, the barrier term was more important early in Earths warp flight program because it was such big news to get past warp 2 and finally leave the core area of space they'd been stuck in. How the factors change with the scales and power levels have never been very clear, but there is some resistance to achieveing certain speeds.

Not all of it is canon, and appears years apart in very different ranges of books and information being given. It's still weird that Starfleet could build NX class ships in only two years, Enterprise only began construction in 2149 and was just finshed when she launched in 2151, well, a few weeks early. The constant delays in Columbia put her way behind schedule, but she was meant to launch in 2153, two years after Enterprise. The books continue this time span.

The Franklin then, could have been an unnamed 'ship' meant to be a bigger reusable platform not much above the NX prototypes. Using incremental upgrades from the program by another group to make sure the warp factors obtained were repeatible on a regular basis.

We don't get a good idea of the ships history pre-MACO. All the markings are post Federation and fleet intergration, painting over (literally) the earlier 2140's aesthetic of the ship.

If she was meant to have engine parts swapped out for tests then post 2161 technology from the Andorians etc would mean new nacelles and in the books, the Pioneer ends up creating the wormhole incident too, so we don't know how many early Federation ships disappeared that way, or how many made it back.
 
So the "Warp 4 barrier" was broken by the Franklin within the space of a single year, but after the NX had already done it?

Henry archer's engine was the only one to go beyond warp 2. The NX-01 is the only ship to use this engine. This is made abundantly clear throughout the series. There's no need to shove in the Franklin, which was used after the NX, has a later registry, and is also using Archer's warp engine.

Just put it after, and all continuity gaffs are solved, save one remark from Scotty. Just stick his remark in the "slightly mistaken witness" bin.

Work smarter, not harder.
 
The NX-326 was part of the post war effort to create a proper fleet, outlined in the second Romulan War novel, which Pegg read prior to writing the script. Most of them had other designations before 2161.

The ship works just fine in canon.
 
Pegg also said that Star Trek Beyond takes place in an alternate universe. Maybe he wasn't trying to stick the Franklin into 2149? Maybe he was giving his own spin on the events of the 22nd century.

Btw, I never said the ship didn't work "in canon" I simply said it works better after the NX-01.
 
Last edited:
I don't remember hearing that. A different universe from what? ENT? Or the first two NuTrek movies? :confused:

Kor
 
Apparently, Pegg thinks that Nero's interference (caused by his arrival in 2233) somehow caused changes to ripple into the past as well as the future. Which does not make a ton of sense, logically and causally speaking.

Oh well. Since ST4 (if it ever makes it to the screen) is not being written by Pegg, we are free to ignore this theory if we so choose. :)
 
Isn't it called the Kelvinverse?
I guess so.

And I like the Franklin design better than the NX-01.

Hypothetically, the 22nd century should be the same, since the new timeline hadn't split off.

Kor
 
It's still weird that Starfleet could build NX class ships in only two years, Enterprise only began construction in 2149 and was just finshed when she launched in 2151, well, a few weeks early.

Might be she began construction earlier. Where would the 2149 date come from? Starfleet need not wait until the Franklin is finished, say.

We don't get a good idea of the ships history pre-MACO. All the markings are post Federation and fleet intergration, painting over (literally) the earlier 2140's aesthetic of the ship.

Quite. But "pre-MACO"? What does the ship have to do with the MACO? ST:B suggests the organization was disbanded before the Franklin got her new life as a Federation frontier-pusher.

So the "Warp 4 barrier" was broken by the Franklin within the space of a single year, but after the NX had already done it?

No, obviously before anybody else had done it. And what does "within a single year" mean? It only takes a split second.

Henry archer's engine was the only one to go beyond warp 2.

Total nonsense.

The NX-01 is the only ship to use this engine.

It doesn't use that engine. Although we may speculate it uses an engine based on the one that broke warp 2. Unless Henry Archer decided the warp 2 test proved that particular design a dead end, say.

This is made abundantly clear throughout the series.

Where?

There's no need to shove in the Franklin, which was used after the NX, has a later registry, and is also using Archer's warp engine.

We have zero reason to think it's using Archer's engine, as opposed to, say, Bercher's or Chercher's engine.

Just put it after, and all continuity gaffs are solved

What gaffs? You haven't mentioned any.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Might be she began construction earlier. Where would the 2149 date come from? Starfleet need not wait until the Franklin is finished, say.i

Archer mentions in First Flight that they waited for the NX Delta to successfully break the warp 3 barrier, then a year later the keel was laid beginning the NX-01's construction. That works out at early 2149, making 2151 a two year build window. The NX-02 was started after Enterprise vacated the shipyard and meant to launch 2 years later in 2153 (then gets delayed for over a year).

Malcolm then says in early season 1 that 3 more are planned, one is the Coumbia, then in season 3 when Enterprise returns home we find out Starfleet has built a second shipyard for the NX-01 to dock in. So it looks like when Columbia was finished, the NX-03 and NX-04 were supposed to start construction together. And lunch in 2156.

I guess they were going to keep building the yards as well as they were filling up so fast. Those wouldn't be as bad to build, skeletal design and minimal bulk.
 
Might be she began construction earlier. Where would the 2149 date come from? Starfleet need not wait until the Franklin is finished, say.



Quite. But "pre-MACO"? What does the ship have to do with the MACO? ST:B suggests the organization was disbanded before the Franklin got her new life as a Federation frontier-pusher.



No, obviously before anybody else had done it. And what does "within a single year" mean? It only takes a split second.



Total nonsense.



It doesn't use that engine. Although we may speculate it uses an engine based on the one that broke warp 2. Unless Henry Archer decided the warp 2 test proved that particular design a dead end, say.



Where?



We have zero reason to think it's using Archer's engine, as opposed to, say, Bercher's or Chercher's engine.



What gaffs? You haven't mentioned any.

Timo Saloniemi
The Gaff of taking away the NX's primacy of achieving warp 4 before any others. Starfleet has a fleet of warp 2 ships in service. The NX-01 is the ONLY ship that has an engine capable of getting out to the Expanse. This is only a gaff if you try to stick this separate ship into the NX timeline that was never mentioned. Put it after the NX and problem solved. I mean, why didn't they just send the Franklin out with the NX? They didn't want to only send one ship, it was all that they had.

The achievement of Archer's engine was also going to put those freighters out of business if they kept using their old ships. The show was all about this breakthrough, about how Henry Archer never got to see his great invention to fruition, but his son saw it through.
 
Does the next generation happen the same way in the Kelvin world?

Unlikely. The 'butterfly effect' would pretty much dictate that the Kelvin 24th century would be completely different. Probably none of the TNG characters would even be born.
 
I don't remember hearing that. A different universe from what? ENT? Or the first two NuTrek movies? :confused:
http://simonpegg.net/2016/07/11/a-word-about-canon/
Simon Pegg said:
With the Kelvin timeline, we are not entirely beholden to existing canon, this is an alternate reality and, as such is full of new and alternate possibilities. “BUT WAIT!” I hear you brilliant and beautiful super Trekkies cry, “Canon tells us, Hikaru Sulu was born before the Kelvin incident, so how could his fundamental humanity be altered? Well, the explanation comes down to something very Star Treky; theoretical, quantum physics and the less than simple fact that time is not linear. Sure, we experience time as a contiguous series of cascading events but perception and reality aren’t always the same thing. Spock’s incursion from the Prime Universe created a multidimensional reality shift. The rift in space/time created an entirely new reality in all directions, top to bottom, from the Big Bang to the end of everything. As such this reality was, is and always will be subtly different from the Prime Universe. I don’t believe for one second that Gene Roddenberry wouldn’t have loved the idea of an alternate reality (Mirror, Mirror anyone?). This means, and this is absolutely key, the Kelvin universe can evolve and change in ways that don’t necessarily have to follow the Prime Universe at any point in history, before or after the events of Star Trek ‘09, it can mutate and subvert, it is a playground for the new and the progressive and I know in my heart, that Gene Roddenberry would be proud of us for keeping his ideals alive. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations, this was his dream, that is our dream, it should be everybody’s.

Apparently, Pegg thinks that Nero's interference (caused by his arrival in 2233) somehow caused changes to ripple into the past as well as the future. Which does not make a ton of sense, logically and causally speaking.
Hypothetically, the 22nd century should be the same, since the new timeline hadn't split off.
On the contrary, it makes perfect sense logically and causally. Well, at least as much so as the idea of time travel from the future into the past altering things from that point forward does in the first place. If post-2233 events are different in the Kelvin Timeline, then of course pre-2233 events can potentially be as well, because we've seen any number of time travel events from the 23rd-31st centuries of the so-called Prime Timeline as previously depicted shape and influence (and sometimes directly cause, as with the Borg's First Contact pogo paradox) the 20th-22nd centuries to be as they were/are. You can't change that future without opening up the real possibility of changing the past as well, because they are inextricably locked in a loop. (Rather like discussions about the matter here, it seems.:borg:)

One person whose life has definitely been significantly changed is Kirk, whose Prime counterpart was explicitly one of the most meddlesome (or should that be influential) time-travel menaces ever known according to "Trials and Tribble-ations" (DS9)! And he is far from alone.

That's something I'd prefer to ignore.
Unlikely. The 'butterfly effect' would pretty much dictate that the Kelvin 24th century would be completely different. Probably none of the TNG characters would even be born.
So, how do you choose reconcile these two with each other? Just curious. It's all made up fun, of course, and not meant to be thought about too hard, after all. ;)

Odd and baseless speculation. Why should we think Scotty would be mistaken about anything relating to the Franklin?

It's likelier that he falsely thought Chekov took part in the mission when in fact it was Chirpov all along. He knows his spacecraft, this is a stated Star Trek fact. People? Probably not so much, as this is not a stated Star Trek fact. :p
Well, he did seem to think the Bonaventure was "the first ship to have warp drive installed" in "The Time Trap" (TAS)!:p

But of course, maybe he meant the first starship. Or first Starfleet ship. Or something else.

Might be she began construction earlier. Where would the 2149 date come from?
Archer mentions in First Flight that they waited for the NX Delta to successfully break the warp 3 barrier, then a year later the keel was laid beginning the NX-01's construction. That works out at early 2149, making 2151 a two year build window. The NX-02 was started after Enterprise vacated the shipyard and meant to launch 2 years later in 2153 (then gets delayed for over a year).
I make it out to be 2150, and no earlier, by the reference points:

ARCHER: We managed to avoid a court martial, but they grounded us for three months.
T'POL: Still, the NX program continued.
ARCHER: Eventually. The Vulcans had us run every simulation they could think of for over a year before they finally admitted the engine would probably work. Eight months after that, Duvall broke Warp Three in the NX-Delta. Five years later we laid the keel for Enterprise. You know the rest.

In "Unexpected" (ENT), which is mid-2151, somewhere between early May ("Fight or Flight" [ENT]) and late July ("Civilization" [ENT]), Archer mentions that he has known Tucker—to whom we see him introduced in "First Flight" (ENT)—"for eight years," placing the latter sometime in 2143. Following Robinson and Archer's unauthorized flight in the NX-Beta, they were "grounded for three months," and the Vulcans made them run simulations "for over a year" before the project continued. It was "eight months after that" when Duvall broke Warp Three. Depending on whether the three months of Archer and Robinson's grounding and the twelve-plus months of simulations ran concurrently or consecutively (which isn't clear), it's more than twenty months, or perhaps even more than twenty-three, before Duvall's flight. That places it in 2145. It's "five years later" that NX-01's keel was laid.

2143: Warp 2 barrier broken by Robinson
2145: Warp 3 barrier broken by Duvall ("over a year" plus 8-11 months after the above)
2150: NX-01 keel laid ("5 years" after Duvall's flight)

So, Franklin hails from sometime between 2145 (before which Warp Three was the absolute limit for Earth ships) and 2151 (when NX-01 was finally completed, and thus capable of reaching Warp Four and beyond). Again, that's if following the same timeline as ENT, which we can't say for certain is necessarily the case.

Quite. But "pre-MACO"? What does the ship have to do with the MACO? ST:B suggests the organization was disbanded before the Franklin got her new life as a Federation frontier-pusher.
Not established in the film, so non-binding of course, but lead picture editor Dylan Highsmith suggested that before being absorbed into Starfleet after the formation of the UFP and the disbanding of the MACO, the Franklin may have been a MACO ship:
Dylan Highsmith said:
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.

The MACOs weren't directly seen to have any of their own ships in ENT, and their expertise was said to be limited to "simulated combat, all conducted on Earth" according to Malcolm in "Harbinger" (ENT), but at least a few of them did seem to have also undergone some training around the Solar system, at Jupiter Station (Hayes says it's where they developed their improved holographic target practice system/program in the same episode; he also mentions "lunar survival training" but doesn't specify whether that was on an actual moon) and "on the Janus loop" ("The Council" [ENT], involving EV suits). So, since it was an apparent novelty to have MACOs being carried aboard a Starfleet ship in "The Expanse" (ENT), perhaps it's reasonable to think that they had at least this one ship to quickly ferry them around the immediate neighborhood. Archer did say in "Harbinger" that their tech was 2-3 years ahead of Starfleet's at that point.

Possibly. In "Broken Bow", they don't go that fast yet, and by the time of "Fight or Flight", going warp five is no longer newsworthy. The other possibility is that NX-01 broke warp five quite some time before the show began (but after 2149), and the third possibility is that NX-Kappa or some other testbed broke warp five and possibly also warp six some time before the show began (but after 2149).
Taken in context of planning out the course for the mission that lies ahead of them with T'Pol and her Vulcan star charts in "Fight Or Flight" (ENT), I interpret Archer's statement that "we're traveling at Warp Five" to be euphemistic rather than literal at that moment. Why? Because later in "Fallen Hero" (ENT) a big deal is made by Tucker about it only being a Warp Five engine "on paper" and it is only under dramatic duress that she can be gradually coaxed to that speed, all of it played as if this is new ground in practice for the ship.

As far as ENT is concerned, "breaking the barrier" seems to mean exceeding rather than simply reaching the upper limit. The Warp 2 barrier was broken when Robinson achieved Warp 2.1 in the NX-Alpha in 2143, but Starfleet already had "Warp 2 ships" in service by 2141, such as the Neptune-class surveyors, according to Tucker in "Singularity" (ENT). The E.C.S. Fortunate from "Fortunate Son" (ENT) topped out at Warp 1.8, but her captain was looking forward to receiving a "Warp Three engine" as his next step up.

Conversely, Franklin being the "first Earth ship capable of Warp Four" might not necessarily mean she had the first Warp Four engine, if there were such a thing. Maybe it was technically a specially-modified-and-juiced-up Warp Three engine, or a failed Warp Five engine test article (thus not counting against the NX-01's "first" and "only" one) that was nevertheless still good for speeds well below that threshold, or something else quirky like that. For all we know, since we never saw what it looked like, she could have originally been the NX-Delta herself, later donated to the MACOs as a training vehicle in anticipation of the next generation of faster ships bringing with it the unavoidable necessity of their eventual integration with Starfleet, since SF wasn't supposed to be the military at first, but sure found out in short order that one would unquestionably be needed out there. Though they could readily have acquired it aboard Enterprise during the series, or in any number of ways following it, remember that Edison's MACOs were said to have had lots of off-world combat experience, in contrast to Hayes' initial complement having ostensibly none at first.

-MMoM:D
 
Last edited:
If post-2233 events are different in the Kelvin Timeline, then of course pre-2233 events can potentially be as well, because we've seen any number of time travel events from the 23rd-31st centuries of the so-called Prime Timeline as previously depicted shape and influence (and sometimes directly cause, as with the Borg's First Contact pogo paradox) the 20th-22nd centuries to be as they were/are.

Those time travel events can still take place. They are still possible futures. Characters from EITHER timeline (Prime or Kelvin) can travel back to a point before the divergence occurred - and can even meet each other. That's because (as was pointed out in the film) Nero's interference did not alter the existing timeline - it just caused a new one to branch off at the point of 2233. So therefore, anything that happens in the future of the Prime timeline will still happen.

Remember, prior to 2233, there was only one timeline. It's like a road that diverges into two. People on either of those branches can walk backwards and interact with each other before the branch occurred. So it is with the Prime/Kelvin divergence.

For example, if somebody from the Kelvin timeline travels back to San Francisco of 1893, they can meet the prime TNG crew and see Data's head...
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top