Where does the Bonaventure fit within continuity?

It's a quantum multiverse and everything happened and didn't happen simultaneously.

 

Works for me.

 

in an RP I and a few others were involved in online, we had that scenario, where the Kzin wars were a series of brief incursions after First Contact, mostly fought in the outer solar system without help from the Vulcans, who more or less used it to observe their new neighbors. It cause United Earth to become strong, re-militarize and finally assert itself over the warlord states, as well as gave Earth a reason to have a new defensive presence in space, a Star Fleet, if you will.

 

Not true. The only things that are canon concerning the Kzinti in the Star Trek universe is what was shown on screen in a Star Trek production. Any other backstory Niven gave, including his entire Known Space universe, is not canon to the Trek universe.

 

Yes, and that’s exactly what I said. (I think you misread my “We can’t argue” as “We can argue”.)

 

My mistake.

 

I like it.

 

Well, you could say Bonnie was the first SHIP to have warp drive installed…the TAS was a refit and it lost not that long ago.

 

my thoughts:
the (DS9) Bonaventure was the first dedicated warp ship.. that is, one designed to sustain warp travel for a duration of several days, rather than the few seconds the Phoenix could do. to this end it has a built up drive section and a larger crew cabin area. but since it is still using the Phoenix's engine design it still closely resemble it. at warp 1ish it would be limited to travel within the earth solar system, but it would provide important data for the creation of larger vessels like the SS Conestoga.

the (TAS) Bonaventure is a testbed ship for the Warp 7 engines that would eventually develop into the standard for the 23rd century, the engines which 'broke the time barrier' reducing travel times to a point where humanity could start leaving their local area and start exploring the wider galaxy. (making scotty's statement to mean "the first ship with modern warp drive".) the ship was named after the earlier Bonaventure warp testbed.

 

If the Kzin Wars are a canon event in Star Trek, what's actually likely now that the species was mentioned in Star Trek Picard, i wonder how they correlate with the events on earth in 2079 mentioned in "Encounter at Farpoint", considering that the rise of military dictatorships and things like the tribunals often happen during times of strife.

Maybe these things weren't just after effects of WW3 but more connected to the conflict with the Kzin.

 

An old Gold Key comic had the Man/Kzin wars ongoing until the advert of warp drive won the war for humanity (as FTL did in the Known Space universe), with a scene depicting a fleet of Bonaventure-ish pre-Connies.

You can't really apply that to modern Trek without ruining the whole point of First Contact, though.

 

Yeah, but on the other side it would give some additional subtext and reason to Q's decission to use these events to make his point, as in this case the Kzin were one of the first alien species humanity had contact with (beside the Vulcans).

And they were exactly the kind of species Q accused mankind to be like...

 

That particular comic is very interesting. It depicts a very accurate space shuttle four years before its design was known in the public consciousness. It also predicts the International Space Station, although its depiction in the comic is based on the station from 2001 A Space Odyssey. They also depict the DY100 sleeper ships getting warp drive upgrades (with one ship having the registry of FWB-52) but without any nacelles. We see the Bonaventure’s bridge but not the exterior. And the fleet shot looks like regular Connies to me.

It’s also interesting that the writers and artists of the comics only had TOS and TAS to use to extrapolate the pre-TOS universe. While their envisioning looks dated, it still looks more realistic as a TOS prequel than ENT and DSC did.

 

That's not hard

 

Q's bit as the drug-controleld soldier was said by him to be "mid 21st century", so i'd interpret that as representing some of the soldiers that fought in WW3. which is the route memory Alpha presents it as. this is reinforced by the fact that the court scene, described as from the "post-atomic horror" by picard, said soldiers were being used as Guards and Bailiffs, suggesting that the court scene being depicted dates to the same period.
so it would seem likely that said soldiers and the court both date to WW3 or immediately after it. we don't know anything about the factions involved in ww3, other than the "eastern coalition" mentioned in first contact, and the fact that ENT establishes that Colonel Green and his movement of terrorists were active during and immediately after the war.
honestly given the description of Col.Green's faction and their actions during and after the war, and the uniform we see videos of him in in ENT, i would not be terribly surprised if the soldiers weren't from Green's faction, and the 'post atomic horror courtroom' wasn't based on kangaroo courts his faction ran in devastated areas.

as far as the Kzinti go.. yeah it is a tricky thing to fit into the timeline. the dialog in the TAS episode has Sulu saying the last war with them was 200 years prior, which would put it in roughly 2069. the idea of multiple wars clashing with the statement that earth didn't know what threats existed in space (VOY "friendship one", talking about the probe's launch in 2067) my own personal interpretation would have the Kzinti being something of threats to Earth's early colonization efforts using warp 1 drives (most likely Conestoga type vessels) and Sulu's statement was inexact.. that he was rounding up by a few decades. so you'd get 4 conflicts between the Kzinti and earth in the 2070's and maybe 2080's, with them being raiders who attacked earth's colonies and harrassed Earth's nascent interstellar trading vessels. the 4 'wars' being waves of Kzinti invasions of certain larger colonies, which came with increased raids. Earth being targeted because their colonies and ships were not well defended, and the Kzinti themselves weren't much more advanced than earth and not really able to take on the ships of the vulcans, andorians, or tellarites. (Kzinti ships in my mind would have been maybe warp 3-4 and having armaments akin to the NX class. and they probably got their tech from someone else, rather than having invented it. they'd have relied on slaves to build and repair stuff, much like Niven's version)
and that the war ended when the raids started threatening Vulcan interests, which led to the Kzinti being easily defeated by the Vulcan high Command, who instituted the policy of restricting the Kzinti to their own homeworld. A policy which Starfleet would eventually pick up after the formation of the UFP.

 

And I think Vulcan did a similar reactionary move (albeit not as overbearing) to Earth. There seems to be a 2060s/2070s space race going on, with massive colonization efforts and both unmanned (Friendship) and manned probes (Valiant) to the deepest reaches of space, but then not much of anything seems to happen between circa 2090 and 2140.

Starfleet is formed. Some new ships are made. Trade routes are established. But the Enterprise NX is the first (recorded) ship to go out 90 light years. Why is this? Why the gap in exploration? Enterprise tells us it's because the Vulcans have been holding them back. I've speculated why before (Klingon-Vulcan Cold War), but the idea of humanity bringing its barbarism into space, albeit briefly and probably understandably, may have pushed the Vulcans to clamp down harder than they may have initially.

I think the Kzinti were probably on a similar level as Earth (Warp 1-2 ships), although an interesting idea could be if they received their first warp ships from some of the earliest human space traders.

 

Especially since the Vulcans almost certainly helped Earth clean up and rebuild after World War III (there's no other way Earth could have recovered so quickly).

 

In the case of "Enterprise", I don't think they did too bad a job. It's not perfect (i.e. the Romulan ships in "Minefield") but I think they did a good job of, say, creating a more primitive Klingon BOP, and "In a Mirror, Darkly" did a good job of making the 23rd century Connie look more advanced than the 22nd century NX class.

Discovery's a bit more problematic, because these uniforms and tech are supposed to be contemporary with TOS. And after seeing "Rogue One", you can't tell me that you couldn't make a modern-looking production that looks like it was set in that era.

Regarding the overall question, perhaps it;s a generational thing, but I came of age in the 90's when TAS was non-canon and reference books like the Chronology and Encyclopedia made a point to omit almost anything about it. I still haven't seen most of the episodes, so I never felt any urge to integrate it with the franchise as a whole.

In fact, for me, the name "Bonaventure" brings up images of the ship from the "Ship of the Line" calendar, which Eaglemoss made a wonderful model of a couple years ago. That one's a lot easier to fit into continuity.

 

Perhaps, rather than looking at the Earth-Kzinti War in the traditional sense, maybe look at the Kzinti more as bands of pirates/warlords? We know that IRL, both the American and the British navies had several skirmishes with pirates and warlords all the time, pre-Industrial Revolution. In the British case, it was to end the slave trade on open waters, by unilaterally banning the practice. Heck, the Americans had to deal with the warlords off the coast of Africa, in order to stop them from raiding their merchant vessels, by sending in the US Marines (i.e. "shores of Tripoli"?). Perhaps, early Starfleet, in order for Earth to make its stance known that it would not be picked on, had to deal with the Kzinti in the same manner?

 

I like the Gold Key timeline better. My idea of the first warp ship would have been DY-500s with nacelles on either side.