TOS likes to emphasize its futuristic ''utopia'' at times, but for younger fans born between WWs two and three, this still can give a bit of a chill.
What is your personal head canon?
- Thread starter AmandaSmith
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This is my head canon as well! They pushed the genome back a little too far..
Looks like that's largely drawn from the Okuda Chronology.Someone behind the scenes at Enterprise also put this into writing, further tying WWIII with the Eugenics Wars.
Cochrane's actual warp flight was in April 2063, but I suppose the final engine design could have been completed and installed sometime in 2061. "Demonstrated" in simulation.
Yeah, in the first edition of the Oduka Chronology, which came out in 1993, the date of Cochrane's initial warp flight was 2061. It was adjusted to 2063 in the movie First Contact. Like they said in their intro, all the stuff in their timeline was subject to change if live-action Trek did something different.
I like to add the idea that the Klingon Antaak from Enterprise really did start a fashionable trend in cranial reconstruction that was suggested by Phlox. In effect, a metaphor for the modern-day excesses of cosmetic enhancement.
Genetic manipulation being the standard treatment, naturally, as Klingons don't appear to be shy about augmentation in the slightest.
This is also my favorite explanation for it, kind of trying in all of these.
I like to think the Disco Klingorcs were something of an attempt to cure the Augment virus, but ALSO in a very Klingon way of still trying to preserve the genetic enhancements. They ended up a new strain of the virus that did something of the opposite of Phlox's work... it didn't cure them but give them human features, it mutated and exaggerated Klingon features.
In the grand scheme, the non-infected Klingons saw both outcomes being horribly disfigured.
Right about the time of the start of DSC, the Klingons are already developing some genetic therapies and cosmetic surgeries to fix the deformities. By the late 2250's, it's already being deployed and by the end of the 2260's, there's very few if any deformed Klingons left, be they smooth head or exaggerated.
Upon his return to the Alpha Quadrant, Harry got the Doctor to (truthfully) attest to Starfleet Command that he was under alien influence during the events of "The Disease". In light of that, the reprimand was stricken from his record.
EDIT: Also, regarding Janeway and Chakotay... what happened on New Earth STAYED on New Earth.
EDIT: Also, regarding Janeway and Chakotay... what happened on New Earth STAYED on New Earth.
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Given his human adoptive parents, played by Theodore Bikel and Georgia Brown, Worf absolutely also speaks Yiddish — and it would’ve been great to hear him occasionally use an appropriate Yiddish word or phrase, completely unironically, still in full “Worf mode”. Russian, too.
I do actually think that should have happened— culturally, he should be Russian as well as Klingon. But onscreen we never get a sign of that.
(I admit, and this is tangential, another reason I like the idea of an occasional completely serious Worf Yiddishism would be to counter the way Yiddish or Yiddish-coded stuff in pop culture usually defaults to “funny”. Like any other language, Yiddish was the language of everything perfectly serious too, from political journalism to love songs to literary manifestos to — and I’m certainly not proud of this — some stone-cold killers in the 1920s. There was always plenty of Yiddish humor, but it isn’t inherently funny, and these days it’s usually sort of portrayed that way.
Okay, tangent over. Sorry about that!)
I fully admit that the Yiddish I know has been played for humor. Thanks for calling that to my attention.
(Yeah, sometimes with klezmer music playing in the background. There’s a place for that, but do it a lot and it becomes the equivalent of the old thing with “deetee-dootoo-deetee-doo” movie Italians and other such stereotypes: it gets annoying and belittling, even where it’s probably meant well. Anyway, of course I don’t want to derail the thread.)
Headcanoned.
Though I’ve agreed elsewhere that Section 31 needs to be taken down, being Starfleet’s war crimes department, here I’m going to take a different tack:
Both Section 31 and the Klingon equivalent — what I’ll here arbitrarily call the Klingon Time Masters — have access to technology that can access both time travel and galactic-distance instant travel. Yet through all the back-and-forth between the Federation and the Klingons over the centuries, neither wiped out the other…
That’s because both organizations, while horribly ruthless, are also quite smart — and are willing to go beyond their originating cultures’ own values for what they see as the greater good, which both see more as long-term survival rather than overt conquest. They both involve themselves in quietly manipulating their civilizations toward this — which ultimately brings them together, as their views are actually closer to each other’s, rather than those professed by either Federation or Empire. By the time of the Temporal Wars — and possibly much earlier — what had been Section 31 and the Klingon Time Masters have in fact merged into a single faction on the galactic playboard.
Both Section 31 and the Klingon equivalent — what I’ll here arbitrarily call the Klingon Time Masters — have access to technology that can access both time travel and galactic-distance instant travel. Yet through all the back-and-forth between the Federation and the Klingons over the centuries, neither wiped out the other…
That’s because both organizations, while horribly ruthless, are also quite smart — and are willing to go beyond their originating cultures’ own values for what they see as the greater good, which both see more as long-term survival rather than overt conquest. They both involve themselves in quietly manipulating their civilizations toward this — which ultimately brings them together, as their views are actually closer to each other’s, rather than those professed by either Federation or Empire. By the time of the Temporal Wars — and possibly much earlier — what had been Section 31 and the Klingon Time Masters have in fact merged into a single faction on the galactic playboard.
In the VOY episode "Flashback" Janeway says:
So she claims that TNG era ships are twice as fast as as TOS era ships. And yet some long voyages seem to take many times as long in the TNG era as in the TOS era.
Some factor seems to have enabled slower TOS ships to reach destinations faster than TNG generation ships.
Sometimes in TOS travel times seemed as slow as the TOS warp formula indicated - "By Any Other Name" for example - and sometimes they seems ten, hundreds, or thousands of times faster than TOS warp formula.
One possible explanation is that there are many natural or artificial space warps - maybe wormholes, though DS9 indicates the Bajoran wormhole was the first known stable wormhole - and a starship can enter the mouth of a natural or artificial space warps and more or less instantly emerge in another star system.
(I always thought that since such a system of space warps between star systems was a very obvious way to explain many obvious Star Trek inconsistencies, claiming that there were no known stable wormholes was obviously a silly idea. Maybe the commonly used space warps are non wormhole type space warps.)
So if there is a known route between two star systems through the space warps using it can get a starship from one to the other much faster than by traveling through all the distance between them even at the highest available warp factor.
And while watching and considering "The Gailleo 7" a decade or two ago I decided that theory needed modification. Possibly the system of space warps periodically switches on and off, so it can't be used part of the time. Or possibly the system is always on, but periodically switches its line up. So part of the time a space warp from star system A might lead to Star system B, and sometimes to star system C, and maybe sometimes to star system D, etc.
And the thought occurred to me that possibly a stardate unit had some relation to the period of time that the network of space warps would have a particular configuration before changing to a different configuration. Possibly the "year" 1,000 stardate units long used in TNG era was not an Earth year, but a "stardate year" defined as being 1,000 stardate units long and with an unspecified length compared to an Earth years.
Even though TOS was officially limited to the Milky Way Galaxy there is some evidence for travel beyond the Milky Way in TOS.
There are examples of subspace conversations between Kirk and his Starfleet Command superiors in TOS. "The Alternative Factor", "Amok Time", "The Trouble with Tribbles", "For the World is Hollow and I have touched the sky", "Mark of Gideon". And those are real time conversations with no noticeable time lags due to subspace radio speed. Even if in all cases those Starfleet leaders happened to be in the next solar system to where Kirk was that would be a distance of about 4 to 6 light years. With 31,557,600 light seconds in a light year, there would be 126,230,400 light seconds between the Admiral and Kirk. Assuming it took less than 1 second for a message to travel that distance, the speed of the subspace radio would have to be at least 126,230,400 times the speed of light.
In "Balance of Terror" it took hours, but less than 12 hours for a subspace radio message from the Enterprise at the Romulan Neutral Zone to reach the nearest command base. Unless the speed of subspace radio is variable due to various factors, that should make that part of the Romulan Neutral Zone at least 3,600 times as far from the nearest command base as the Enterprise was in the episodes with real time conversations, and thus at least 14,400 light years from the nearest command base.
In "The Enterprise Incident" in a different section of the Romulan Neutral Zone:
Three weeks is about 1,814,400 times as long as 1 second, so that section of the Romulan Neutral Zone
should be at least 1,814,400 times as far away from Starfleet Command as the Enterprise was in episodes when Kirk had real time conversations with Starfleet, and thus at least 7,257,600 light years from Earth. The disc of the Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000 light years in diameter, and even the halo of the Milky Way Galaxy is only a few hundred thousand light years in diameter. So that portion of the Romulan Neutral Zone should be in another galaxy.
In "The Alternative Factor" Commodore Barstow discuses the strange effect:
So Barstow has received reports that the strange effect extended far beyond the galaxy in less than one hour. But possibly Barstow was talking about "the local galactic region" and the writers of the episode carelessly wrote "the galaxy" instead, being unfamiliar with the technical terms used by Starfleet.
If Barstow's office was outside that 100 parsecs or 326.156 light years radius they were having a real time conversation at distance about 81 times as far as the minimum calculated above, thus making the distance to the Romulan Neutral Zone in "Balance of Terror" at least 1,174,161.6 light years, and the distance to the Romulan Neutral Zone in "The Enterprise Incident" at least 591,777,446.4 light years.
In "A Taste of Armageddon" the Enteprise traveled to:
And the real object designated NGC 321 is not a star cluster in our galaxy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_321
In "All Our Yesterdays" the Enterprise is at the planet Sarpedion of star Beta Niobe. KIrk, Spock,
and McCoy are sent into the past of the planet Sarpedion by the atavachron machine.
http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/78.htm
Thus it is possible that there is travel to the farthest parts of the Milky Way Galaxy tens of thousands and maybe hundreds of thousands of light years away, and to other galaxies, millions, tens of millions, and maybe hundreds of millions of light years away, in TOS.
And of course that hypothetical system of space warps between stars might have some which connect stars tens of light years apart, and some which connect stars hundreds of light years apart. And there may be rare space warps which connect stars thousands, tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of light years apart.
And maybe there are some very, very, very rare space warps which connect stars millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, or even billions of light years apart, and thus connect different galaxies.
If so, they are so rare that in the time of TOS none were known which connected to the Andromeda Galaxy.
In "By Any Other Name":
I suspect that Starfleet knew of space warps which enabled more or less instant travel to at least one other galaxy but Spock was amazed by the idea of using warp drive to travel the entire distance to Andromeda Galaxy in only 300 years.
And I guess there could have been a great disaster to the system of space warps between the time of TOS and TNG. Maybe some of the space warps can still be used to cut down travel time between stars, and so explain various problems of inconsistent time, speed and distance which might be found in the era of TNG. But the comparatively rare long range space warps, especially the ones leading thousands, tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands of light years within our galaxy, and even more so the even rarer ones leading millions of light years to other galaxies, are no longer available in the era of TNG.
Maybe the system of space warps (or only the long range ones) periodically shuts down for centuries to regeneration or recharge or something.
Maybe one or more of the vital links in the network of natural or artificial space warps has been destroyed somehow, and thus it is no longer possible to reach the nearer entrances of any long range space warp.
Or maybe a very powerful realm has taken over one or more of the star systems with vital links in the network of space warps, and forbidden other people to use that vital link. That might break up the network of space warps into two or more smaller disconnected networks. And maybe the space warps really good for long distance travel are cut off by that powerful space realm.
This is one possible explanation for interstellar travel seemingly becoming much slower in the era of TNG than earlier in the era of TOS.
And I have another possible explanation.
People did do that type of analyzing in the 1980s and even the 1970s.
My post number 1,378 is based a lot on such analyzing beginning long before VHS was available.
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