S.S. Bonaventure - Exploring the ship from TAS

ENT says warp engines remained slow. But the other shows speak of great range, which is a different thing. The warp two-minus Boomers could well have covered the reputed distances in the time allotted, save for the ones deemed "impossible" (to the edge of the galaxy, least of all in just the few years between "over 200 years ago" and "200 years ago").

The Bonaventure isn't credited with either aspect: we don't know how fast she was or where she went. Heck, the Delta Triangle is so (in)famous that it might just as well sit right next to Earth, perhaps being a remnant of that other next-door mystery region, the Delphic Expanse (T'Pol's demolition team may have missed exactly three Spheres...).

The Okudagrams suggest the non-NCC regos from the 22nd century began with three letters and concluded with a string of numbers... The UE Starfleet of course had no registries in evidence other than NX-01 and NX-02, outside concept art and whatnot, but those two already set quite a precedent before Earth accepts the concept of alien allies.

As far as we can tell, "Starfleet vessel". It's not as if we'd have to believe in other interpretations based on current evidence. Although we can decide to believe NCC on this particular ship meant something else. Or that it meant something else on USS Arbitrary and USS Pickacard but not on others.

Heck, perhaps it meant absolutely nothing on the Bonaventure, but the UFP Starfleet chose to honor this little pathfinder ship by perpetuating its nonsense call letters? They've done stranger things...

Timo Saloniemi

 

At the time of TAS, the Delta Triangle was three weeks communications time from the nearest starbase.

The Bonnie was far away, even by the TOS standards.

 

Then again, Kirk was also three weeks away from HQ when facing the Romulans in "The Enterprise Incident", but just hours away when previously facing them in "Balance of Terror".

If the Triangle is an, ahem, expansive phenomenon, it probably has near and far parts. Just like Archer's perfect storm.

(The Triangle is vast, sensor-disrupting and blamed for ship losses going back to ancient times, thus a good match to the Expanse. Then again, it's also said to be uninhabited, which the Expanse certainly was not.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

We're just speculating - maybe there was an argument over wether NCC went first or not. Basically we were just speculating that early Federation cooperation on the administration level was bound to be a bit of a mess :-)

 

Who knows maybe it's an artifact of the expanse. You could even bring that into a non-temporal cold war historical past. Maybe the Expanse 'bled' into a timeline where there was no temporal cold war (or NX type ships etc) and created the Delta Triangle.