when did TOS take place, 23rd century or 22nd century

[Timo]

Well, "Beauty" comes up with all-new terminology for the limbo, the space-time continuum thing (I'm sure Eddie is in there somewhere). This in addition to there being the Barrier there. So I don't really see continuity problems as such.

Or distance problems for that matter. Once again our heroes brave the purple mists that somehow surround our galaxy and block their way, and once again they are successful in penetrating them multiple times. These mists need not be particularly far away from the places our heroes frequent - they weren't in "By Any Other Name", after all. Only now they happen to visit Eddie in the continuum and get lost, justifying having a Medusan as the guest star.

...Might be that's not a cosmic coincidence, either. Perhaps it's the presence of a Medusan that made the ship enter the continuum, a realm in which Kollos seems to be at home?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Silvercrest]

Well, "Beauty" comes up with all-new terminology for the limbo, the space-time continuum thing (I'm sure Eddie is in there somewhere).

And this is his sofa, is it?

 

[johnnybear]

The old Star Trek quiz book claimed the Enterprise crossed the barrier in three distinct episodes!
JB

 

[Timo]

...For a certain value of "crossed". In the pilot, they apparently never manage to get to the outside, merely dipping in and then popping out from the inner surface again. In "By Any Other Name", they definitely get out and then implicitly get back in, the Barrier being explicitly mentioned on the way out. In "Is There In Truth No Beauty?", they definitely get both out and in, the Barrier being explicitly mentioned on the way in.

What other crossings are there? The heroes often mention the extragalactic origin of threat forces, as brought up by Christopher. They really should have no way of telling, based on trajectory analysis alone. Perhaps they can tell because all the visitors from the outside must pass through the Barrier and this leaves a mark?

No TOS hero adventure involves travel outside the galaxy without at least some sort of a reference to the Barrier. The first TAS adventure has them "on outward course beyond the fringe of our galaxy" with the intent to visit Questar M-17, and apparently the episode then describes this very visit - so the "course beyond" must be interpreted as already having taken them beyond said fringe, rather than stopping short of their target and thus possibly also of the fringe. That's the one adventure without explicit mention of Barrier crossing. OTOH, nothing precludes a crossing, as those generally aren't all that destructive and AFAWK only ever inconvenience telepathically sensitive folks (but not Spock or Miranda Jones!). Quite possibly there's no trick to braving this Galactic Barrier, just like there was no trick to flying through the Great Barrier later on... And all the perceived risk and failure to return and whatnot is due to incidental factors rather than the fault of the Barriers themselves.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Marsden]

Voyager makes no sense

Fixed that for you.

 

[Discofan]

Fixed that for you.

Don't do that.

About the question of speed and travel time, Voyager makes more sense than TFF which seems to imply that in a couple of days a ship from back in the days of Kirk could travel from one end of the galaxy to the other. That's not consistent with most of the episodes of TOS.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Don't do that.

About the question of speed and travel time, Voyager makes more sense than TFF which seems to imply that in a couple of days a ship from back in the days of Kirk could travel from one end of the galaxy to the other. That's not consistent with most of the episodes of TOS.

Are you sure? TOS seems to skip around the galaxy like it's nothing.

 

[Discofan]

Are you sure? TOS seems to skip around the galaxy like it's nothing.

Well, maybe Kirk did have a spore drive, after all, they just never told us. It must have been in a secret room of Enterprise with breath ID access.

 

[Christopher]

That map makes the same mistake many people make about "Where No Man" -- thinking 2-dimensionally and assuming they went 25,000 light-years to the edge of the galactic disk rather than the much shorter 600-1000 ly to the nearest face of the disk. How hard is it for people to understand that space is not flat?????

 

[F. King Daniel]

That map makes the same mistake many people make about "Where No Man" -- thinking 2-dimensionally and assuming they went 25,000 light-years to the edge of the galactic disk rather than the much shorter 600-1000 ly to the nearest face of the disk. How hard is it for people to understand that space is not flat?????

The dialogue disagrees with you. They mention the "rim of your galaxy" in "By Any Other Name".

 

[Christopher]

The dialogue disagrees with you. They mention the "rim of your galaxy" in "By Any Other Name".

Oh, for Pete's sake -- we went through this already just nine days ago in this very thread.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Oh, for Pete's sake -- we went through this already just nine days ago in this very thread.

I didn't buy it then, and I don't buy it now

 

[Christopher]

I didn't buy it then, and I don't buy it now

It is bizarre to favor prescriptivist semantics over real-world physical logic. Words' definitions are arbitrary, mutable, and frequently misunderstood by their speakers anyway. But it is utterly unambiguous that 1000 light-years is closer than 25,000. If Starfleet wanted to probe outside the galaxy, then obviously, obviously they would pick the shortest route to get outside the galaxy. It makes no damn sense to weigh Rojan's single, isolated use of the ambiguous word "rim" over that screamingly self-evident common-sense logic, especially since Rojan isn't even a native English speaker and had no say in the planning of the "Where No Man" mission, so his opinion of the issue is utterly beside the point.

 

[Mytran]

Not to mention that flying out of the lateral edge of the galaxy won't send you in the direction of Andromeda - you need to fly "up" and out!

 

[BK613]

Based on Andromeda's galactic coordinates and how they work (note: negative latitude is "into" the map):

Spoiler: To Andromeda

Of course, the real question: where is the closest point of the 'rim' to the Kelvins' point of view as they traveled from Andromeda? Wouldn't they have "come ashore" there?

 

[Marsden]

Don't do that.

Sorry, @Discofan It was meant to be a joke. A little joke. I should have stuck the smiley on there.

 

[MAGolding]

The dialogue disagrees with you. They mention the "rim of your galaxy" in "By Any Other Name".

Oh, for Pete's sake -- we went through this already just nine days ago in this very thread.

I didn't buy it then, and I don't buy it now

It is bizarre to favor prescriptivist semantics over real-world physical logic. Words' definitions are arbitrary, mutable, and frequently misunderstood by their speakers anyway. But it is utterly unambiguous that 1000 light-years is closer than 25,000. If Starfleet wanted to probe outside the galaxy, then obviously, obviously they would pick the shortest route to get outside the galaxy. It makes no damn sense to weigh Rojan's single, isolated use of the ambiguous word "rim" over that screamingly self-evident common-sense logic, especially since Rojan isn't even a native English speaker and had no say in the planning of the "Where No Man" mission, so his opinion of the issue is utterly beside the point.

According to Merriam Webster:

Definition of rim
(Entry 1 of 2)

1a: BRINK
b: the outer often curved or circular edge or border of something
2a: the outer part of a wheel joined to the hub usually by spokes
b: a removable outer metal band on an automobile wheel to which the tire is attached

and:

Synonyms for rim
Synonyms: Noun

border, borderline, bound, boundary, brim, circumference, compass, confines,edge, edging, end, frame, fringe, hem, margin, perimeter, periphery, skirt, skirting,verge

Most of those definitions and synonyms for rim tend to imply the outer edge of a two dimensional object. But none of them absolutely demand two dimensional thinking.

And since:

The galactic disc is about 100,000 light years in diameter,

and:

The galactic disc is about 1,000 to 2,000 light years thick near Earth,

and:

Stars are separated by an average of about 5 light years near Earth,

and:

Thus the galactic disc is about 200 to 400 star systems thick making the arrangement of stars very three dimensional on a scale of tens or hundreds of light years.

It seems very irrational to suppose that in Star Trek the rim of the galaxy means only the outermost edge of the galactic disc, instead of a sort of three dimensional outer "skin" that figuratively wraps around the "upper" and "lower" surfaces of the galactic disc as well as the far outer edge of the galactic disc.

Furthermore, I have suggested in my post number 16 in the thread here https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/we-made-the-cestus-iii-run-in-500-parsecs.299980/#post-12974247 that in Star Trek future English there are one or more terms for regions of the galaxy, and that sometimes the future term(s) is mistranslated into 20th century as "galaxy" creating a misconception about the size of the area covered. If the Kelvins sent hundreds of expeditions to explore hundreds of different regions of our Milky Way galaxy, Rojan might have spoken about a force field on the rim of one of those galactic regions instead of one around the entire Milky Way galaxy.

 

[Timo]

...Of course, as per the previous pages, the very concept that the Milky Way "ends" or "begins" at a specific location depends on there either being something measurable (and currently unknown) there to mark the spot, or then on folks arbitrarily deciding on the spot. And since folks generally never agree on anything, it would be rather odd for Rojan to agree with Kirk on this, with or without the Universal Translator confusing the issue.

Yet the one thing we can easily see is that there indeed is a physical marker there - this whole purple apparition thing. It's the perfect border marker, quite regardless of how many stars there are inside and outside. Surely it warrants not just one but many names, including Galactic Barrier, Rim and Edge, and probably not being limited to those. And it being a natural (or perhaps supernatural) phenomenon allows it to be complex, where a wholly arbitrarily decided "end" or "beginning" would be expected to be simple and elegant instead.

Is it trivial to visit this purple thing? Not so trivial that ships from 21st century Earth could plausibly have done it. But Kirk never has difficulty doing it, with the hardware in his possession (it is merely inadvisably redlined rather than modified when it reaches the Barrier in the two latter episodes - even the Kelvan mods supposedly only kick in after the penetration), and his presence close to it is no big deal in "By Any Other Name". Nothing links the three spots in the three episodes, so the purple thing might be expansive indeed. But two Earth vessels ended up at the exact same spot in "Where No Man" nevertheless, perhaps actually suggesting that the purple phenomenon is minuscule (and that these particular Kelvans either had phenomenally bad luck or were somehow funneled into the tiny spot).

...Or then the spot in "Where No Man" is in fact the one the very closest to Earth (perhaps even a narrow pseudopod reaching towards Earth from an otherwise distant surface), and for that reason chosen by both the ships involved, implying the Valiant went there by choice, too - and thus further implying that the distance was not particularly great after all, and well within the abilities of the old vessel, and Kirk just got excited for no good reason.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Lt. Tyler]

TOS takes places in the late 22nd century. The evidence for the 22nd century in TOS outweighs the evidence for it taking place in the 23rd century. Hence TOS takes place in its own separate universe apart from everything else that came after it.

 

[Nerys Myk]

TOS takes places in the late 22nd century. The evidence for the 22nd century in TOS outweighs the evidence for it taking place in the 23rd century. Hence TOS takes place in its own separate universe apart from everything else that came after it.

What evidence is that?