A different sort of series, and a ship in space. The period between Cochran and the birth of the federation. A series about a ship from Earth, with all an human crew. No teleporters, not much in the way of shields or energy weapons, and out classed by the races they might encounter, not that there are many in the near systems. Exploring local star systems, reaching out to neighbouring civilisations, discovering the real reason for Earth's isolation. How did earth go untouched by extra terrestrial for so long? A few mythological connections here and there, but nothing concrete, a pyramid on a dead world, coincidence maybe? A mystery. Deliver a team to explore it and move on. A small crew in cramped conditions. Eating rationed supplies. Every move a calculated risk. Unchartered territory, no chance of rescue if they look under the wrong stone. No Klingons, or Romulans, just the nearby races jostling for dominance and finding their place in their own way. A series as much about current theories on what exoplanets and exobiology might be like, as exploring the human condition. Further than any human has ever been, but not so far that they can't pick out the sun if they know where to look. A series that strives for realism in its portrayal of space and its hardships. The vast distances between anything and everything. A show that explores what would it really be like to have warp drive, to reach the stars, find other civilisations doing the same, to find life not as we know it. Fill the ship with interesting characters. Conflict probably, camaraderie, absofragginlutely! Rivalry, tension, animosity. Who gets their name on the big discovery, who is using all the toilet paper... If 2001/2010 were a TV series, basically, but in the trekverse. That's where trek should go next.
Sounds interesting, but I think it would become kind of hard to fit such a premise within the established Trek canon. For example, take warp speeds. We know that the warp 2 barrier was broken not too many years before the time of Enterprise- 15 years or so at the most. The nearest star system is more than a half year away at warp 2. So to keep plausibility you would have to do a significant number of episodes in the same solar system before they slo-warp to the next one, and effectively skip the travel time (or you'd have to find sufficient material for scripts while they're in transit). Those 'nearby races' you would have to introduce -- who are they? And why don't they show up in later Trek incarnations? (or are you thinking the likes of Vulcans, Tellarites, Andorites etc?) Perhaps it would be smarter to set this premise in a universe that somewhat resembles our Trek universe, but in which such inconvenient problems as established in other series can be thrown overboard. Then again, every trek series after TOS (and sometimes even TOS itself) has already done that on occasion I think there would certainly be enough material for a limited number of episodes, but I'm not sure it could fuel a multi-year series, because of the constraints you would have to impose on yourself -almost no aliens, very long travel times --- unless you manage to get unusually creative writers, that is.
You've totally read my mind. See the links in my signature. This solution I've had for the past 16 years is simply eject Enterprise as it currently exists. While I'm not saying it should be followed as an example, the show Defying Gravity had stories mainly set in between traveling between the planets in our solar system. There's plenty of traveling-at-warp stories you could do. I think it could totally pull off Vulcanians, Tellarites, etc. How much do we actually know about these cultures? We've barely seen anything about them.
Naw. Not enough "meat" there for a full series bearing the Trek title - like, this could easily be another (smaller budgeted) sci-fi series, but bearing the "Star Trek" name in it's title, people do expect some real Star Trekking. Great concept for a tv event movie or a mini-series though! Trek should do more one-offs. If one of them hits the mark, it's a lot easier to turn that into a full grown series. That being said, I really would like to see the ringship in canon somewhere. But the premise has to be a lot different than ENT's, not just the execution. What type of ship is this, why is it so different than everything that preceded and followed it? And when did it even lift-off? Like, I can easily see this thing as a one-purpose vehicle for a singular special science mission, like traveling through a wormhole or something. Naw. ENT is, and should by all means remain canon. We can't just decide for every latest installment isn't "canon". In the end we will have nothing left of our franchise. (Kelvin-universe stuff excluded, because they deliberately set their movies outside of canon). Like, I have massive problems with DIS, ad don't think it fits into the rest of the Trek universe very well, let alone 10 years before Kirk! That's insane. Nevertheless, it's canon in it's entirety, and if we ever got another new Trek series, they have to take it into consideration the same way the DIS' writers take ENT into their considerations. Damn straight!
My personal walk-around on that is Starfleet was pushing toward designing and producing their own in-house warp engine. And that other engines existed and were availible, but Starfleet didn't want to use them. Another Human warp drive design could be seen in the ringship. This idea might necessitate that the ship in your series not be Starfleet. Your ship could be attached to a academic exploration effort, or some private venture. Or Starfleet could have a rival organization. Macy's doesn't talk to Gimbels. You could even show some of the rivalry. As to why your ship doesn't encounter the same old tried short list of species, consider this possibility. Archers ship went directly from Earth to a Klingon world, it then generally worked its way back towards Earth. So Archer spent most of his time in a fairly narrow slice of sky during the first two seasons. The third season was occupid by the Xindi expedition. The forth interacting with the species Archer previously contacted. Simple have your ship's exploration voyages be in a different section of space. Enterprise does seem to be at odds with at least some of the information from the four previous series. One thing off was during TOS Earth seem to have a lot of high population colonies for only really have gotten high speed warp drive a century before. Well, what if Human high speed warp drive dates back almost two centuries before TOS? I don't think it's a rejection of prequels as a concept, more the fans aren't happy with the prequels we're being given. Huh?
As others have mentioned this would be an interesting concept if you dropped all Trek references, it would also give you more flexibility with just what you could do with the show, otherwise you'll have a lot of canon to adhere to and keep straight--last thing we need in another series that violates it. The set up sounds interesting (though getting a little fed up with prequels) and I would love to see the ring ship on screen--it could be explained as reverse engineering Vulcan tech to human, hence the ring-shaped warp drive. But what this is lacking is the characters, the men, women and non-binary officers and crew that we will get behind and root for as they venture out into the unknown.
Sometimes I think modern Trek skips a phase. The stars are within reach practically immediately after the invention of warp drive. The Friendship one probe, launched only 4 years after Cochrane made his first warp flight, manages to reach a location that is 30k LY out within 180 years or so (300 at the very most). So barring a wormhole, it must have traveled at least at warp 4.5 for all that time. However, there could have been an entire era in which warp drive still is so slow, or gobbles up so much fuel, that it makes flight over interstellar distances just about barely possible for ships that consist mostly of fuel storage tanks, so not really within reach for any practical purpose yet, though it does make fast and efficient travel within our own solar system possible. For those of you that know the computer game, the 'warp bubble generator' era of Distant Worlds in which you get to build an extended industrial base within your own solar system before swarming out to other stars. Although I don't think it would necessarily have made for an exciting star trek series ...
In my series idea it's humans who invented warp drive, which had been a lost/undiscovered technology for local systems. Vulcanians had warp drive a thousand years ago or so, but it was lost. Though they are exploring nearby systems in relativistic space craft. Other species never developed it. This put humanity light years ahead, metaphorically and literally. It also lays the groundwork for the thousands of human colonies, "homosapiens only club" federation, and the cultural "conquering" of many societies. for example Vulcanians were named after the human mythical god Vulcan. Like how native American tribes are named after what immigrants called them, not what their original names for themselves were. While Vulcanians might not be interested in species that are "too primitive;" I can totally see humans doing the equivalent of landing on the white house lawn and not caring about the cultural contamination (see European colonialism and the Friendship 1 probe).
Yes. Like this. Don't like the situation presented in ENT that humans are just the cosmic Johnny Come Lately to the interstellar party, and space faring races are whizzing about with no interest in Earth. That doesn't tally with abundance of virgin, primitive and abandoned worlds encountered by kirk, and if you extrapolate that across the other star ships out there in TOS, it makes even less sense. TOS felt like a renaissance of space flight after a long galactic dark age, ENT diminished that, and pedestrianised the cosmos. My series idea wouldn't rewrite ENT, but by necessity, it would employee some narrative distance to avoid continuity issues. I probably wouldn't even call it star trek. You could argue, what is the point of it even being in the trekverse, if it not like the other series, but Trek has an interest setting to explore. Voyager was meant to be different, ENT was meant to be different, that they even dropped the Trek name to appeal to a new audience, but it turned out to be the same old same old. A different series that would do very well as a separate thing, but set in the trek universe, with warp drive and Vulcans. Just no contrivances or clichés.
It would be interesting to set a show in the Star trek universe, but just avoid all of the trademarked stuff so that it could be profitable as its own thing.
That's sort of what I'd like to see. Shared universe. So we have the world building stuff. FTL with subspace, warp fields and millicochrans, graviton particles help you stick to the floor, computer storage in the megaquads. Sonic showers even, maybe. I like a bit of slow burn drama, where tension builds over several weeks/months/years. Its not what we expect from star trek, but it works on other shows, it wouldn't be star trek, as we know it, but it would work. Dr Who had Torchwood for the adult audience, Sarah Jane for kids, and Class for God knows who, but they all shared a universe. Trek could do something similar, appeal to other audiences.
The canon in the century prior to ENT is fairly sparse, taking those canon facts into account shouldn't be too difficult, either employ them or maneuver around them Other than referring generically to the native as "Indians" (based initially on the false belief they landed in "the Indies") for the most part Europeans called native people by their own indigenous names. The pronunciations and resulting spellings were occasionally off. It can be true to the first four series, just not like the latest two. If going with the ringship, make the center structure the warp drive, and the two rings the inhabitable part. Now rotate.
Hmm. I know that at least in the case of the Shoshone that "Shoshone" is not what they called themselves prior to Europeans arriving. If I remember correctly they called themselves Newe.
Copy and paste from wikipedia The name "Shoshone" comes from Sosoni, a Shoshone word for high-growing grasses. Some neighboring tribes call the Shoshone "Grass House People," based on their traditional homes made from soshoni. Shoshones call themselves Newe, meaning "People." So, while Shoshone is a name that came from outside the tribe, it didn't come from Europeans.
Ok. But it was derived from a contemporary term used by neighboring tribes. Eh, I got it halfway right. At least I remembered something from my Shoshone language class.
I've kind of envisioned the ringship era as being "Solar Trek" that takes place in the late 21st-Century. With Earth ships still unable to get much past Warp 1 at this time, it still takes months if not years just to reach the nearest star systems (going to Vulcan would probably take over a decade). So I imagined that most of the action takes place around Earth colonies in the outer Sol System, with the S.S. Enterprise the fastest & most advanced ship of the era and playing a key role in establishing Humanity's presence in Sector 001.
^It would ask for a very different kind of storystelling, though. Probably just very small and cramped outposts /hubs/stations (and ships) as far as human construction goes. No aliens, save for some Vulcans perhaps. Not much habitable places to explore, so everything "outside" will have to be done in spacesuits.