The Motion Picture era in literature

I wonder if placing TWOK in 2285 has something to do with the Romulan Ale McCoy gave Kirk, which was a 2283 vintage. Could Okuda wanted to place it sometime after that?

It'd probably make more sense to fudge TFF timeline. I mean, they could say they were just rounding the age of the settlement at Nimbus IIII to 20 years since it was close to that anyway. And Khan being a superman he would probably remember the exact years a little more clearly.

At the end of the day someone didn't do their homework when they were checking their timelines . If TWOK was meant to take place in 2283 then Nimbus III should have been 18 years old. Though to be completely fair there was no Memory Alpha back then to check this stuff and we weren't firmly settled yet on the timeline of the original series (I think it was settled to the late 2260s by then, just not exact years yet since Q2 was still years from airing).

 

I've never figured out whether "It takes this stuff a while to ferment" was meant to be literal or a joke. It always felt to me like the latter, like the implication was that it was very young, low-quality hooch and McCoy was being sarcastic. How long does fermenting ale normally take?

As I mentioned, the Chrono just adopted the already long-standing fan theory that TOS took place exactly 300 years after it aired. That goes back to Geoffrey Mandel's fan reference books published in the '70s and '80s. Before TNG: "The Neutral Zone" locked in an exact calendar date for the first time, there were two competing theories in fandom of when TOS took place. The other was the scheme featured in the Spaceflight Chronology, which put TOS in the first decade of the 2200s -- a compromise between the "200 years" lines in "Tomorrow is Yesterday" and "Space Seed" and the "23rd century" references in The Making of Star Trek, the Blish adaptations, and the movies. That would've put TWOK in the early 2220s sometime, but the Romulan ale's "2283" could've been a stardate or a Romulan calendar date.

But "The Neutral Zone" put TNG season 1 in 2364, and we knew it was supposed to be 78 years after the TOS movie era, also that McCoy was 137 in that year. So that conclusively ruled out the SFC scheme and narrowed TOS down to around the 2260s. (I was using the SFC scheme in my personal chronology, so as soon as "The Neutral Zone" aired, I had to redo the whole thing, in pencil and paper.)

Hmm, maybe that's the reason for the Okudas' movie dates. The most recent movie when "The Neutral Zone" came out was TVH, and 2364 - 78 = 2286. Although the 78-year thing was never spoken onscreen (until GEN, which was 78 years after the Enterprise-B prologue), so it's not like it was canonically binding. It would be weird if that were the reason.

 

That's basically what I went by to figure out the years. I don't remember where I read it but I always remember reading that TNG was exactly 78 years after TVH (the article I read specifically cited TVH I recall). Which would make sense. If they're saying it's 78 years later it's probably reasonable to assume 78 years after the last time we saw the original crew. Of course way back then I never gave any thought to what was canon or not. Then "The Neutral Zone" once and for all gave us a year and it was easier to figure out the rest at that point. I know Roddenberry wanted to keep it nebulous, and that was fine for a while, though The Making of Star Trek did say something about the original series taking place sometime in the 23rd century. "Miri" also gave us a bit of a clue saying that it looked like Earth 300 years before, in the mid 20th century. I always assumed the Miri planet paralleled Earth's in everything including the time frame so that gave us some clues too that the original series might be in the 2260s.

Thinking about that, though I wonder if that is how Okuda came up with the year for TWOK. Assuming TVH is 78 years prior to the start of TNG (give or take a year since "The Neutral Zone" was at the end of the first year) that takes us back to 2286, and we know there's at least 3 months between TWOK and TVH (if not perhaps a bit longer) then 2285 would make more sense then.

Admiral Kirk did say in TVH that he came from the late 23rd century. I always assumed 2283 was meant to be taken as a year. It's possible it could be a stardate of course. That would place the vintage several years prior, but they usually preceded saying a stardate with the word Stardate so I figured if that was the case Kirk would have probably said "Stardate 2283." But I can see the merit of both sides of the argument on that one.

And then the Generation's citing of it being 78 years later seems to pin that down even more, since you now have 2 dates specified, and of course "Q2" is another piece of the puzzle.

 

Maybe if it's a well-established smuggling operation, the Romulan distillers bottle it specifically with Federation distribution in mind? I don't know enough about such things to know how they work. Romulan ale seems to be an analogy to Cuban cigars, in that they're technically illegal due to politics but nobody cares in practice because they're a much-desired luxury item.