How long before "The Man Trap" did McCoy know Kirk?

They said Kirk hadn't "logged star hours" for 2.5 years.

In any realistic context, there would be zero reason to think the only way to log star hours is to command the Enterprise in a five-year mission of exploration. Or that a Captain would only ever command one ship, and would at least need to make public mention of being unfaithful with another.

There isn't much reason to think time has passed between TMP and TWoK. In both, we see the old man who is bitter about no longer having a shipboard job. In both, he gets his Peter Pan moment at the conclusion, and in both, we have little reason to think it would last. His life is a tragedy where success is defined as failure and vice versa, and the only way out is on a purple magic carpet through space and time. With TMP, we are at liberty to decide how soon Kirk ended up in that jam: right after his TOS/TAS days, or half a decade after, or perhaps a full decade after? All options work, even though the writer intent appears to have been a full decade later (it shows in the "300 years after filming sharp" thinking).

The fun thing here is that, before LDS at least, nobody ever mentions TMP again. May be it never happened, and the TMP uniforms never existed, say. May be it was unremarkable for our heroes and their compatriots, not particularly distinct from the average Earth-threatening calamity or career moment. May be it becomes one of those "goes without saying" moments of history. But the end result is that we get no in-universe relative dating cues, only the absolute ones within the writing of TMP (such as the "over three centuries after 1977" thing) plus the relative minimum estimates for time elapsed after TOS/TAS.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I don't know I can't see Kirk logging star hours as an ensign on some Freighter.
Also just how long would it take to refurbish the Enterprise. 15 years or so?
And then straight after TWOK they retire her. Well another 15 years out of action I suppose I would.

But if TMP never happened.
Then the Enterprise went out on 2 or 3 5-year missions after TOS.
I assume with Kirk and co or otherwise I really don't think Kirk would be lamenting his command from 15 years ago when he gets in the seat and Decker would have said the last time you sat in that chair was 15 years ago blah blah blah.
So Kirk could have been a Commodore in that time. Or a vice-Admiral. Or an Admiral.

 

I can relate to "Commodore" Kirk, don't you think so, "Commodore" Commishsleer?

Firstly, the 5YM is not a Captain mission, rather it is a ship mission. There's no requirement that Kirk or another crewman has to finish a 5YM, only that the ship is outfitted for a 5YM. There's no reason to think that Kirk couldn't have been promoted from Captain (or Commodore) to Admiral at the four year mark and yanked off the ship. Since Spock had left, then they could have brought in Captain Smith or Jones to finish out the 5YM.

 

Commissioner Sleer has previously occupied positions far above mere Admiral positions.
But how come I never heard of Captain Smith or Jones then?
TMP was all about Kirk and what he gave up. If Smith or Jones had been there in between it would have taken away from the TMP Kirk-Decker dynamic. Not saying it couldn't have happened but it was unlikely.
Just as say unlikely that Spock had a sister that we never heard about...

 

Why do you talk about Kirk logging a star hour as an ensign on some freighter? Decker is saying that Admiral and former Captain KIrk hasn't logged a single star hour in the last 2.5 years, a time period which must be sometime after the end of Kirk's "five years out there". Those star hours would have been logged while Kirk had the rank of captain, admiral or some in between rank.

They said how long it took to rebuild the Enterprise - 18 months. 18 months that thus began about a year after Kirk's last star hour.

And there is no statement about how much time elapsed since Kirk's "five years out there" except that those 5 years ended at least 2.5 years before the movie.

Star Trek II thorugh V all happen within a few months of fictional time, as far as can be told.

Both Khan and Kirk separately say that they haven't seen each other for 15 years before Star Trek II, thus making it probably 15 years after "Space Seed".

And Caitlin Dar in Star Trek V says that Nimbus III was founded 20 years earlier, which should have been after "Balance of Terror".

But Star Trek V should be just a few months after Star Trek II.

And in Star Trek III, Admiral Morrow says that the Enterprise is too old to be repaired, saying it is twenty years old, anther problem with twenty years in the movies, since the ship should be a lot older than 20 years by then.

 

That's pretty difficult to believe, though. All the known x-year missions so far have been described in terms of the man doing the commanding. And none have been given any excuses for a "starting point" or an "ending point" from the ship's point of view: the ship sails out, sails back in, sails back out, does a bit of this, a bit of that, perhaps gets a bit of a refit, sails back out again. And there's no perceivable mission, other than "this ship is operational and available for every errand".

it would be easier to believe in a ship mission if it started with the ship being fitted and launched, and ended with the ship returning and being docked for a post-mission teardown and refurbishing, or something. But we never see Kirk's or Pike's or Picard's ships get such things at such points of the supposed mission. Do they happen off screen? And why don't they stop the clock when Kirk or Picard does return to Earth during the supposed years, or Pike gets his ship rebuilt?

In the regular universe, we never get a reference to anybody suggesting that "our mission is nearing the end", either: even Sulu ends his three-year assignment not at a specific date, but at the handing over of a PADD that establishes that the mission goals have been met.

It's only in the ST:ID and ST:B universe where Kirk explicitly knows in advance that he will be gone for five years. Can we extrapolate across the universe barrier?

Well, that's the one thing that can give: we can insert years within Star Trek IV if we wish to. That is, years between the final courtroom scene and the scene where our heroes return to active duty and get a starship. All the references to time passed are internal to 1) TMP, 2) the "ST2 through ST4 courtroom scene" timespan, and 3) the "ST4 E-A launch scene through ST6" timespan, with no cross-referencing. And so, when both timespan 2 and timespan 3 make references to TOS events, and #2 says fifteen years ago and #3 says twenty, there's no contradiction involved.

Timo Saloniemi

 

So, three or four years into Kirk's (or the ship's) 5YM, Kirk says there is food for five years. I guess the ship just got resupplied recently at Starbase 4. Don't know what to make of it, but the Captain/Ship goes on 5YM's, and the food storage capacity on the ship is 5 years, too. Sounds like a design plan...

 

I have to believe it would be both. "You're in charge of this ship, doing this, for this length of time. You're allowed to replace dead redshirts as needed and possible."

Indeed, visually it appears that Enterprise gets a refit sometime fairly shortly after Kirk takes command.

 

If Kirk had really been on the Enterprise with Odona in Mark of Gideon then the food synthesizers would have had enough food to last the two of them forever!
JB

 

430 crew X 5 years = 2150 crew-years of food. Divided by two (Kirk and Odona) = 1075 years of food. If the scenario was true (Kirk and Odona living forever on a starship), it sounds like there is enough food "forever", but Odona (and her people) apparently only die at some unknown "very old" age where "death became almost unknown", so, maybe not. Kirk may die of old age, but she won't for a long time. Say Kirk dies in 75 years, then 150 years of food is eaten, then she would run out of food in 2000 years. Maybe less if she pigs out and gets fat.

 

Sounds good to me, Henny!!!!
JB

 

^ This.

 

My memory is that, even though McCoy is older, he enlisted in Star Fleet later in life, after his divorce, possibly facilitated by him being a medical doctor, so it's possible they would have known each other.

That said, I still don't think it's true.

 

McCoy previously married and divorced (and has a kid) is not on-screen (TOS/TOS-movies) canon. Even projecting the Kelvin-Trek events may not be canon for the thread question. McCoy would have been already born and possibly about 10 years old when the alternate timeline occurred. His personal life could have been drastically different due to the alternate events, like getting married and divorced with the Nero attack on Starfleet, and never married with the original timeline. All we know is that he becomes a medical doctor in Starfleet in both timelines.

 

The kid is "on screen" in TAS, though.

 

Mystery solved. Thanks, @Nerys Myk

That puts McCoy's daughter at about 20 plus or minus (sorry that I can't do the three point decimals ) tens years ago, which makes her about 30 plus or minus during the TAS episode. This puts her birth when McCoy was about 20 years old and if married, his marriage around 19 years old (plus or minus).

 

Actually it is not necessary that Joanna was going to a college level school on the planet Ceberus 10 years before "The Survivor". You may have heard of a little series called Harry Potter where kids go to a boarding school far from home starting at age 11. That is following a common practice in the UK to send kids to boarding schools starting when they are young children, which has produced a whole genre of boarding school stories. in fact, Harry Potter is not even the first story where the boarding school teaches magic to children.

And the practice of sending young children to boarding schools is not unknown in the USA and other countries also. So I always imagined that Joanna McCoy was a child when the famine struck Ceberus, living with relatives or family friends or boarding at her school.

I note that the episode "The Consicence of King" as broadcast doesn't explain what Kirk was doing on the planet Tarsus IV at the time that famine struck it, even though Kirk should have been about thirteen years old at that time.

 

Or Joanna and her mother lived on Ceberus

 

We have a pretty poor idea of how exactly McCoy is related to places like Mississippi or Georgia, or Kirk to Iowa. They mention such places, or get mentioned in connection with them, but there's no clear-cut "I was born there" line, surprisingly enough. Might be these cosmopolites roam the Federation at will, little minding a "birthplace" (indeed, might be Jim Kirk always was born in space!). Might be the reason Kirk speaks of being "from" Iowa despite living in San Francisco is the obvious one of him having been born there, though.

But McCoy seems to hate space with a passion. How this relates to him being a starship surgeon is again unclear, but we might speculate his family life did not involve the outer space. And since so many of his references are of Earth and the southern US, we might consider a family on Cerberus something of an outlier, considering it's separated from Georgia by swaths of outer space.

Then again, since McCoy does travel in space a lot, perhaps his family indeed was on Cerberus to begin with.

Timo Saloniemi

 

McCoy isn't much older than Kirk. Kirk's birth is 2233, McCoy's (working backward from "Farpoint") is 2227. Six years isn't a big deal now, let alone in 200 years.