If you knew where the people who launch the attack were, then guns and/or bombs would work quite well at preventing further attacks from that group. And maybe serve as a deterrant to similar attacks from others.
Who actually fought in the Xindi War?
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i get it. and i made a similar point about discovery's status in the prime universe in another thread (while still struggling to reconcile it ugh).
but it was roberto orci, alex kurtzman, JJ abrams, et al who went down the alternate timeline road first. yes it was a bone thrown to fans who would've been upset by a hard reboot (not me), but also a way to give themselves a clean slate narratively and yes to justify discrepancies. so no i don't think it's inappropriate to view these films and parse what is and is not a result of nero's incursion. especially in light of pegg's comments (pegg being someone who actually guided the narrative, rather than the okudas who simply documented it).
As I've said, Beyond is the film that has the fewest discrepancies with pre-2233 continuity, so I profoundly doubt it represents Pegg's philosophy. It was surely something the Okudas came up with -- as I said, quite possibly before Pegg was even hired to write the film -- to account for the continuity glitches in the first two films, and to pre-emptively accommodate any future such glitches that might arise. Pegg must've come across it at some point and pulled it out of his pocket when a reporter asked him about the Sulu gay-marriage controversy. That's the only thing about Beyond that Pegg is on record applying it to, and it isn't even really relevant to that point, because contrary to what Pegg erroneously believed, Sulu was probably born after the timeline split. The fact that he didn't remember the Okudas' conjectural date for Sulu's birth suggests to me that he was just imperfectly repeating something he remembered reading.
Honestly, I don't see the big deal about the passing details regarding the Franklin. Okay, so there was a Warp 4 prototype before the Warp 5 ship NX-01. Well, Enterprise never said there was one, but it never said there wasn't one either. Okay, its transporter wasn't rated for human use a decade after ENT. Well, the adoption of new technology can proceed inconsistently, and maybe only the top-of-the-line ships got human-rated transporters. (In my ENT novels, Starfleet has stopped using transporters except in emergencies due to long-term health risks that were discovered after years of use.) Okay, Edison said "the Xindi and Romulan Wars," but as we've discussed, he could've misremembered, or there could've been Xindi encounters we didn't hear about. It actually meshes pretty darn well with ENT continuity, and any inconsistencies of detail are downright trivial compared to, say, the continuity clashes between "Space Seed" and The Wrath of Khan. It's just an absurd overreaction to think any of these minimal glitches are so insoluble that they require severing the timelines back to the Big Bang. Hell, I'd already concocted ways to reconcile them with Prime canon before I even left the theater.
...Probably not. Frightening three kids to death with the invasion of the 13th Army into their suburb would just embolden the rest of their ilk into humiliating said army (always making sure the army had the wrong certain knowledge of whodunnit). Heck, getting invaded would be a further propaganda victory for the hackers. And invading, say, China would be utterly futile.
But Starfleet only knew the name Xindi, which is about as helpful as knowing that your missile base was hacked into nuking your own citizens by a group named the Knights of Ni. Domestic? Foreign? Which country? Ally or enemy (apart from said group)? Here they could only rule out the "domestic" bit.
Starfleet would probably wish to lie low while Archer sorted out the mess. Deploying more forces on wild goose chases would make Earth more vulnerable, not less.
Timo Saloniemo
i'm sort of baffled by the insistence that pegg got this concept from the okudas, their book came out four months after pegg wrote this blog post articulating his thoughts on the kelvin timeline. and it's really not that novel a concept.
but it doesn't matter where he got it from, what matters is he did articulate it and he did write star trek beyond. even better, it's more consistent on screen than what was originally stated about the timeline before star trek beyond. it simply makes sense.
So after being attacked by a barely-known alien power, the fledgling civilization put on the defensive decides NOT to deploy their fleet defensively (which we know, actually, they did) to stop further incursions if possible, trying to protect those ships from boarding parties with MACOS who are trained for the job, and instead twiddles its thumbs while it hopes Archer and Crew do ok out there.
That makes no sense whatsoever.
I already explained that. It typically takes a year to a year and a half to get a book written and published. A book as complex as the Star Trek Encyclopedia probably took even longer. So the Okudas must have written the passage in the STE long before Pegg's blog post. And since Pegg was actually working on the film, he could've easily gotten advance access to the manuscript well before it was published.
Context. He articulated it in response to the issue of Sulu's gay marriage. It wasn't about the damn Franklin, it was about shutting down homophobe's continuity-based objections.
I never said it doesn't. The question is merely one of whose idea it was, which has nothing to do with its validity as an idea. Presuming that the Okudas got the idea from Pegg instead of the other way around is ludicrous, because it assumes that an entire reference book can be whipped together in a matter of weeks. This is merely about establishing the chain of events and which reference was the original.
ah, well then, i don't know what i'm arguing about.
but i ask you this: where did the okudas get the idea?
I dunno, that sounds pretty risky! I'll try:
Keep in mind that the Xindi wars were MUCH more expensive than shown on screen with Enterprise. Different units of the ship were involved, additional ships were part of it, different teams all would have participated. For example, the entire Xindi side of the conflict...lots there to refer to.
...yeah, not happy with that at all, WAY too serious. Much more fun to critique it under the tenants of Johnny:
They've been in the creative industry for decades. It surprises you that they're creative?
As I've said, it's obviously an attempt both to rationalize some of the larger differences of interpretation in the first two films and a way of offering future filmmakers leeway to alter pre-2233 continuity if it suits the story. As for where they got the idea, maybe they've read some of the scientific theories about retrocausality. Or maybe they just have enough experience concocting technobabble fixes for plot contrivances that it's second nature.
i jest because it's such an obvious concept.
Obvious that a time travel event could somehow cause changes rippling backward in time from the moment of the change as well as forward? No, that's not obvious at all, and I don't recall anyone ever suggesting it anywhere before last year. It defies the usual logic of how time travel stories work, that a change only effects things after it. It's obvious that, say, going back to 1963 and saving JFK in Dallas would make the 1964 election happen differently, but nobody would expect it to change the outcome of the 1948 election. Or, since we're talking about subtle variations in detail (because that is what the Okudas and Pegg were talking about), nobody would expect saving JFK in 1963 would cause Ronald Reagan to have starred in Casablanca in 1942 instead of Bogie. The idea of a change to history changing events before it happened is entirely counterintuitive. I think the only time travel story I've ever seen that in was "Storm Front," the space Nazi 2-parter on Enterprise.
And I distinctly remember many people on this BBS finding the proposal very confusing and not understanding how it could happen, although we came up with about three different hypotheses that might account for it. One, that changing the future could undo certain other time travels that affected the past, thereby changing the earlier past. (Similar to the "Storm Front" explanation.) Two -- my theory -- that Nero's wormhole opened in multiple past times, not just 2233 for Nero and 2258 for Spock Prime, and its energy and gravitational effects could've caused subtle changes in earlier history. Three -- also mine -- that it could involve the "advanced waves" that some versions of quantum theory posit to travel backward in time, usually being cancelled out by "retarded waves" moving forward, but perhaps occasionally not cancelling entirely. Some theorists believe the future does routinely affect the past when it comes to quantum interactions.
so what you’re saying is... it did occur to you prior to the okudas divining this theory that in fact nero’s incursion did affect the past as well as the future. and you postulated not less than two theories to explain it. just like it occurred to me and (arguably) simon pegg and presumably countless others.
i wasn’t really an active BBS participant in those days so i can’t speak to the reaction here in 2016 when pegg and the okudas brought attention to this notion (i.e. publishing it), but it surprises me to hear trek fans would have difficulty understanding the concept (though it would not surprise me if they simply shouted “not canon” over and over again). time travel shenanigans are well documented in trek, janeway herself talked about the future being the past and the past being the future nearly ten years before this discussion. or is it two hundred years after?
anyway, i love the okudas, i’m not dissing the okudas. what i’m saying is give other people credit from some deductive reasoning when it comes to the intricacies of the theoretical quantum physics of a fictional world.
No, not prior to. As I already said in the sentence you cut out of the quoted paragraph, we TrekBBSers came up with these explanations after Pegg's statements were publicized and the folks here were trying to make sense of how a timeline change could possibly affect events prior to it. Here's one of the original threads about it:
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/sim...is-essentially-a-reboot.282126/#post-11654929
And here's the thread where I offered my potential explanations:
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/jj-...d-discontinuities.281135/page-2#post-11655084
You are twisting this bizarrely into something unrecognizably removed from the original point. No matter who the idea came from, the intention was merely to provide a handwave for minor discrepancies that might arise between pre-2233 Kelvin and Prime continuities. It was not meant as absolute separation, merely as wiggle room for the occasional variation between two histories that were presumed to be mostly identical. I see that Pegg did say it went "back to the Big Bang," but I think that was an exaggeration; he merely meant that the effects could potentially propagate that far back. And the technicalities are irrelevant, because it's just an excuse for storytelling decisions, so what really matters is the creative intention -- namely that the timelines are mostly the same pre-2233, but with wiggle room for occasional exceptions when the story makes it necessary.
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Why would Starfleet or the Military do something that moves their resources away from stopping the Xindi?
The enemy never boarded or attacked any ships (other than NX-01 in their home space). There was no reason to suspect it ever would. And all of Starfleet as matters stood was unable to mount a point defense of Earth when it counted. Imagine how much worse this would have been with combat hips futilely deployed elsewhere, months away at the then available speeds...
None of this is relevant to Edison being a war veteran anyway, because the Xindi never deigned to do war. They just annihilated. Edison would never have gotten the chance to fire a shot in anger.
Which may well be what made him so angry in the first place.
Timo Saloniemi
War isn't generally fought with best-cast scenario suppositions. You stop an enemy by not letting it get within firing range in the first place.
Making the Kelvinverse a completely separate reality from the big bang onwards is a far better idea than just from Kirk's birth onwards. That means anything goes including Pike being too old, Chekov being born too soon and Khan being too white and British. It's a reboot sprung from the original franchise due to the actions of Prime Spock and the Romulans. Their offspring, if you will. And they are free to contradict anything they wish since it is not and never was running completely parallel to the events of the main franchise.
It's what they should've done, but they didn't. The intent was that it was essentially the same prior to 2233. That's clear enough from Beyond. Despite the way some people blow a few tiny inconsistencies with Enterprise out of all proportion, the fact that the movie builds so much on Enterprise concepts at all -- the MACOs, the Xindi, the Franklin's ship and uniform designs, etc. -- is proof that Pegg, Jung, and Lin wanted their movie to build on the existing pre-2233 continuity, not divorce themselves from it completely. As I keep stressing, the idea that things could change pre-2233 is just a handwave for minor discrepancies when needed. The storytelling intent is very clearly that the two timelines were essentially the same before Nero, even if a few minor glitches get through here and there.
After all, if they had done a from-scratch reboot, there would've been no need to build the first movie around a convoluted time-travel premise to justify its differences.
Yeah, but it's a complete waste of the potential of a full reboot if you just use it for minor, insignificant changes like that. What a gross failure of imagination that would be if it had been what they'd done. A full reboot is an opportunity to reinvent everything from the ground up. To give characters different genders and ethnicities (something the white male-dominated TOS cast would've benefitted from), to change the timeframe and history to something that builds off of the present rather than 50 years in the past, to amalgamate ideas from different series, etc.
I think we'll get the full reboot eventually, maybe another decade or two after the franchise gets its next long inevitable period of dormancy, and that's fine. But they will dip back into Trek literature and the movies to create a workable universe once more when they do, and I think the idea of a more developed Xindi war with crews like Edison's would be interesting. You know that the Franklin's end is tragic, but it's still interesting.
