Botany Bay
- Thread starter Photon
- Start date
Why?
I mean, everybody and his idiot cousin has mastered gravity control and warp drive in the Trek universe. It apparently isn't difficult to do at all. That humans would fail to gain the abilities would mean we're galactic idiots. That Khan has gravity control (in a ship considered old and outdated by 1996) thus means he's only half a retard...
On the other hand, aliens do frequent Earth in the Trek universe. Quark's ship spent very little time in USAF hands, and nobody seems to have opened any panels or anything. But no doubt hundreds of other ugly aliens had their ships available for inspection by folks starting with the grandfather of the girl who invented fire. At some point, humans would start getting something out of all the alien junk falling in their back yards. Would this be at the time of Aristotle, Galen, Watt or Edison?
By the 1960s, we know Henry Starling had little trouble commercializing bits of his captured spacecraft. He'd have thirty years to get DY-100 tech perfected before moving on to more demanding things.
Timo Saloniemi
I mean, everybody and his idiot cousin has mastered gravity control and warp drive in the Trek universe. It apparently isn't difficult to do at all. That humans would fail to gain the abilities would mean we're galactic idiots. That Khan has gravity control (in a ship considered old and outdated by 1996) thus means he's only half a retard...
On the other hand, aliens do frequent Earth in the Trek universe. Quark's ship spent very little time in USAF hands, and nobody seems to have opened any panels or anything. But no doubt hundreds of other ugly aliens had their ships available for inspection by folks starting with the grandfather of the girl who invented fire. At some point, humans would start getting something out of all the alien junk falling in their back yards. Would this be at the time of Aristotle, Galen, Watt or Edison?
By the 1960s, we know Henry Starling had little trouble commercializing bits of his captured spacecraft. He'd have thirty years to get DY-100 tech perfected before moving on to more demanding things.
Timo Saloniemi
I wouldn't say that humans were that backward just because other races had perfected warp drive before them! More so that other races like the Klingons had stolen other races technology during their earlier years as hinted at in later Treks!
JB
JB
Botany Bay? Botany Bay! Oh no! 
Spock: "A group of criminals could have been dealt with far more efficiently than wasting one of their most advanced spaceships."
I'm not sure why we would need to connect one with the other, as they have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
That was never hinted at in later Treks. That idea came from John M. Ford's The Final Reflection, which was an old non-canon novel.
Ahem. You might want to check out my novel, The Eugenics Wars: Volume Two.
That's pretty much the route I took . . .
What tech? Sleeper ships? Gravity? We don't need to assume that the Botany Bay had any more advanced artificial gravity technology that we do today. I think it's safe to assume that the artificial gravity we see in "Space Seed" came from the Enterprise through some method or another.
Not really. Khan resting safely on his mattress depends on constant gravity - there are no safety belts in there. If Kirk's ship projected gravity in there just before the heroes entered, Khan would be resting on his nose and his cool ponytail would be all tangled up.
Also, the interiors have no handles or footrests that would allow weightless operators to push the buttons or turn the knobs. There's not enough room there to have centrifugal gravity (and in any case nothing is spinning). And the ship isn't getting gravity out of acceleration, because our heroes confirm the engines are off and the ship is just coasting.
Why would it be out of place for Earth to have magical gravity in the 1980s? Earth will have magical warp in the 2060s, and magical phasers in the 2150s, etc. We better hurry if we want to keep up with the timetable - this meaning the other "us", the ones on the other side of the screen.
Timo Saloniemi
Also, the interiors have no handles or footrests that would allow weightless operators to push the buttons or turn the knobs. There's not enough room there to have centrifugal gravity (and in any case nothing is spinning). And the ship isn't getting gravity out of acceleration, because our heroes confirm the engines are off and the ship is just coasting.
Why would it be out of place for Earth to have magical gravity in the 1980s? Earth will have magical warp in the 2060s, and magical phasers in the 2150s, etc. We better hurry if we want to keep up with the timetable - this meaning the other "us", the ones on the other side of the screen.
Timo Saloniemi
According to "Space Seed" this is the year that we're supposed to be able to travel long distance in space without putting ourselves in suspended animation
KIRK: Suspended animation.
MARLA: I've seen old photographs of this. Necessary because of the time involved in space travel until about the year 2018. It took years just to travel from one planet to another.
KIRK: Suspended animation.
MARLA: I've seen old photographs of this. Necessary because of the time involved in space travel until about the year 2018. It took years just to travel from one planet to another.
Then obviously Trek is set in another universe! 
JB
JB
Space Seed was produced during the height of the American space program, if we had continued at that pace for the last half century we'd probably have people all over the solar system by now.
In so far as it's a fiction universe, sure.
Also lacking ladder access to the second tier of sleep chambers, free fall would make that access pretty easy.
The fact that the Botany Bay existed at all - far ahead of normal Earth technology of the time - is enough. Artificial gravity would just be one more of the many things that ship had that no other spacecraft had.
Nothing about the Botany Bay was considered unusual for a run-of-the-mill 1990s spacecraft by our heroes, including the history expert. This was normal Earth technology, not something proprietary to Khan or other Augments, or else the heroes would have been tipped off immediately as to who the ponytailed man was.
Timo Saloniemi
Timo Saloniemi
By the time of the Botany Bay's construction (about 1990), Humanity had already found that flying belt that belonged to the Slavers.
It was found on one of the moons of Saturn, by that expedition headed by Captain Christopher's son.
This was the key to artificial gravity.
Maybe it was Chronowerx tech from Henry Starling's crashed 29th century ship (VOY: "Future's End")
But I like to think that in TOS' world, technology evolved differently and much faster than in ours. I once read a fan-made timeline that suggested a Slaver stasis box (TAS:"The Slaver Weapon") was found on the moon sometime between the 60's and 90's. As Spock said in that episode, what was found within was a basis of the artificial gravity field used aboard Starships.
If not for the Dark Ages, with hundreds of years where science was heresy, we'd have 24th century level technology by now.
Hell, look how far we've come in just the last 25 years.
Hell, look how far we've come in just the last 25 years.
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