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What was "The Burn" and what caused it?

Some people are after Instant Gratification. They want to do know everything about everything "Now! Now! Now!"

It isn’t about instant gratification, it is about knowing the rules of the story they are telling.
 
We didn't learn Future Guy's identity and that was after 77 episodes. I know what Braga said years later but...screw that explanation. It was stupid and doesn't work in-universe.
 
Did anyone here already see the obvious connection between The Burn and Michael Burnham? I mean, for some peculiar reason, the DSC producer decided that Michael Burnham is the most important person in the universe, so even this dopey link wouldn't surprise me anymore...

I've seen at least one theory that it's going to turn out that The Burn was caused by Burnham's Angel suit triggering it's self-destruct protocol, as ordered by Michael before it flew off. Not sure why it was in the wrong temporal coordinates in that case, since it flew back through the time distortion to the 23rd century, but as conspiracy theories it's not bad.

Not sure even the most cynical of creatives have it in them to have Burnham save all life in the galaxy just to turn around and have her doom them to a dystopian hellscape because of a technical malfunction. (Obviously, I'm exaggerating the condition of the 32nd century.)

The more I think about things, the more I'm hoping there is some kind of naturally occurring cause. I suspect it will end up being deliberate, with some kind of villain responsible (odds on that villain being part of the Federation run amok?) but, obviously pending whatever they actually do with it, I feel like I'd be happier if this was just some kind of unforeseeable natural disaster.
 
One possible explanation for The Burn...

Lorca! (The Burn as an catalyst for bringing down the Federation, seems like It could be very Lorca-Esque move?)
 
Not sure what you mean by "rules".
We don't need to know everything about The Burn in episode one. We'll learn about it it's history, it's scope and impact as the story develops.
Indeed. It would be rather odd for all answers to be delivered in the first episode in a serialized formatted show.
 
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One possible explanation for The Burn...

Lorca! (The Burn as an catalyst for bringing down the Federation, seems like It could be very Lorca-Esque move?)

Lorca wanted to rule, not destroy.

Honestly I have no idea where they’re going with this except I think the crew will have to stop a second Burn.

But, it could be so many things. Beings living in subspace who are having their environment destroyed, experiment gone wrong, predestination paradox, Blink of an Eye aliens turned evil, Q, Borg revenge, consequence of sentient AI. Forgotten failsafe from TCW. Deadlock style duplication on galactic scale ( Two galaxies out of phase and the other won the dilithium tug of war). Someone saw the future and decided the only way to stop full on cataclysmic war was to fracture the Galaxy from itself. We just don’t have much to go on.
 
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We also don’t know for a fact what other means of transportation are in use. We only know shady merchants don’t have them.

Suppose the Federation does know how to build trans warp corridors. It took the Borg centuries with far more resources. If their FTL infrastructure was still largely dependent on warp it’d still cause major disruptions to their ability to build them quickly.

Imagine if all the gasoline on Earth vanished tomorrow. We know other ways to get around, but it’s still take us decades to rebuild our infrastructure for them.
 
Dilithium is a supposedly rare crystal, only located on a few planets. How did first time warp capable worlds control the M/AM reactions before learning of it?
Cochran's Phoenix was able to achieve a little over Warp One without it.
It seems that the crystals are needed to achieve anything over Warp Two or Three.
We did se a couple of ships during ENTERPRISE, that didn't seem to have Dilithium types of warp engines.

I'm thinking that The Burn has something more to do with the way in which Dilithium Crystals are used in a Warp Core, not that they just suddenly explode on their own.

Whatever the actual process is, it's that, which causes them to ignite.
Perhaps it's the process of "Recrystallization" that is to blame.
Maybe after a time the crystals develop minute cracks that are only detectable by examining each crystal individually at the microscopic level.

By the time of TNG, they were doing it automatically within the Warp Core itself, that may be why it wasn't detected till it was too late.

Also, even though the Romulans use a "Singularity" for their power source, it doesn't mean that they don't use Dilithium also to control and/or focus the flow of said energy.
:vulcan:
 
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I can't recall precisely - did Zee's Phoenix actually use a M/AM reaction or something more conventional to produce the power required to activate the warp coils? Did they even have the means to mass-produce antimatter that soon after WWIII?
 
I can't recall precisely - did Zee's Phoenix actually use a M/AM reaction or something more conventional to produce the power required to activate the warp coils? Did they even have the means to mass-produce antimatter that soon after WWIII?
I don't believe it has ever been actually stated in any of the movies/shows what exactly he used.

The best we get as an indicator is that there was Theta Radiation leaking from the ship and both the warp plasma conduit as well as the primary intercooler system were damaged after the Borg attacked while it was still in the silo.

It seems like an Antimatter/Matter plasma was involved, but at that simplistic of a level that Dilithium wasn't necessary.
 
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It never made it into the movie, but the writers came up with the idea that it used a fission reaction from the nuclear warhead.

This sucker's (theoretically) Nuclear.
 
We also don’t know for a fact what other means of transportation are in use. We only know shady merchants don’t have them.

Suppose the Federation does know how to build trans warp corridors. It took the Borg centuries with far more resources. If their FTL infrastructure was still largely dependent on warp it’d still cause major disruptions to their ability to build them quickly.

Imagine if all the gasoline on Earth vanished tomorrow. We know other ways to get around, but it’s still take us decades to rebuild our infrastructure for them.
The 23rd century Federation was able to build Transwarp Corridors with just the scans/tech they grabbed from the Narada.
 
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