Thanks for the double posts, Warped9. they need reading more carefully.
Ahead Warp Factor One....
- Thread starter Warped9
- Start date
Well, for me, even TMP gets shunted to the wayside but those are my own personal issues.
Yes, TOS did have a full galactic view and range of motion and not like TNG+ where they were forlornly looking out the bedroom window; trapped in their wheelchairs as an invalid.
I never liked the "forced" and obviously incorrect (aka long fanon held) notion of warp cubing.
I agree with this in that I do think the original was purposely steered away from its roots and only with reluctance had to acknowledge them due to fan resistance of the abandonment. How much this is from Gerrold's views and Roddenberry's desire to sideline any credit involvement of the previous series and writers is another matter. I swear, the man would have claimed credit for the invention of fire if he thought any would believe him.
No, I don't subscribe to that idea. However, I'm not hostile to the idea put forth by some many years ago that interstellar space has difficult to detect variables that can affect warp values. It's a similar concept that the speed of sound on Earth depends on altitude and atmospheric density.
As I said at the beginning it's impossible to reconcile everything, hence the ideas of variables in intersteller space to help nudge things along, but my approach was to bring some measure of consistency to the issue.
We must also appreciate that as writers for a televison show and considering the consequent pressures it's best for them not to be too specific and acknowledge lapses in consistency.
I think the only place where you could have more consistency would be in a feature film or a novel. Speaking for myself in my own original writing I planned out the speed of my ship, its acceleration and deceleration times and estimated transit times. I can do that as a one off work, but even then I fudge just enough to make it work credibly and try not to get too specific.
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Agreed, especially with so many scales and such.
I've since been thinking about the references to the Valiant and Bonaventure.
The Bonaventure is mentioned by Scotty in "Time Trap" as the first ship with warp drive and its disappearance is around the same time as Zefram Cochrane's disappearance. That would be about fifty years after Cochrane developed his space warp.
The Valiant is mentioned as disappearing about two hundred years ago and about fifty years before the missing Bonaventure.
This raises the questions: was the Valiant a warp drive ship? And how did it end up at such an extreme distance?
The second question doesn't really need to be answered if we assume some sort of anomaly threw the Valiant that far out whether it was a warp drive ship or not. But if it was a warp drive ship then how can that be reconciled with the Bonaventure supposedly being the first ship with warp drive?
Two possibilities occur to me. The Bonaventure could have been built just before the Valiant and yet didn't disappear until some decades later on its third major voyage. Or it was the first ship designed with warp drive in mind from its inception.
This could mean the Valiant was a pre-existing ship that had warp drive retrofitted to it. So technically it was a ship with warp drive predating the Bonaventure, but it had not been originally designed that way. The Valiant could have been one of those "new" ships that came along after sleeper craft were superceded in 2018 (re: "Space Seed). Then along comes Cochrane's space warp and the Valiant is given a new lease on life refitted as a warp drive ship.
Recall also that the Valiant was specifically designated as a "galactic space cruiser" and so it had to be something more than just a transport upgraded.
The Bonaventure is mentioned by Scotty in "Time Trap" as the first ship with warp drive and its disappearance is around the same time as Zefram Cochrane's disappearance. That would be about fifty years after Cochrane developed his space warp.
The Valiant is mentioned as disappearing about two hundred years ago and about fifty years before the missing Bonaventure.
This raises the questions: was the Valiant a warp drive ship? And how did it end up at such an extreme distance?
The second question doesn't really need to be answered if we assume some sort of anomaly threw the Valiant that far out whether it was a warp drive ship or not. But if it was a warp drive ship then how can that be reconciled with the Bonaventure supposedly being the first ship with warp drive?
Two possibilities occur to me. The Bonaventure could have been built just before the Valiant and yet didn't disappear until some decades later on its third major voyage. Or it was the first ship designed with warp drive in mind from its inception.
This could mean the Valiant was a pre-existing ship that had warp drive retrofitted to it. So technically it was a ship with warp drive predating the Bonaventure, but it had not been originally designed that way. The Valiant could have been one of those "new" ships that came along after sleeper craft were superceded in 2018 (re: "Space Seed). Then along comes Cochrane's space warp and the Valiant is given a new lease on life refitted as a warp drive ship.
Recall also that the Valiant was specifically designated as a "galactic space cruiser" and so it had to be something more than just a transport upgraded.
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Umm, just out of curiosity, where would the designation for the Valiant come from?
I'm all for the idea that Valiant didn't quite have a warp drive; none was ever mentioned, while the "old impulse engines" of the vessel were discussed as if they were the best she could offer. And certainly Kirk found it "impossible" that any Earth ship other than his own could have reached the distant location, so any warp drive of earlier make should have been too weak to explain the journey anyway, leaving the burden of propulsion to this "magnetic storm" thing no matter what.
As for the Bonaventure, why assume that she would be built after the Valiant? Just because she disappeared after the Valiant tells us nothing. The Bonaventure might simply have been the luckier ship, enjoying something like fifty years of safe sailing before disappearing on her third decades-long voyage.
And in any case, the episode itself gives no timepoint for the Bonaventure loss whatsoever. Does that "150 years ago" thing come from a novelization?
If anything, spinoff shows like ENT would assist us in accepting the Valiant and Bonaventure missions: they show that mankind's first bumbling attempts at warp introduced us to the more advanced species of the galaxy, allowing us to make great leaps in warp development rapidly. And they postulate a saucer aesthetic for Earth starship construction from the very beginning, allowing us to treat the Bonaventure as a plausible early example of human craftmanship in that field.
Timo Saloniemi
I'm all for the idea that Valiant didn't quite have a warp drive; none was ever mentioned, while the "old impulse engines" of the vessel were discussed as if they were the best she could offer. And certainly Kirk found it "impossible" that any Earth ship other than his own could have reached the distant location, so any warp drive of earlier make should have been too weak to explain the journey anyway, leaving the burden of propulsion to this "magnetic storm" thing no matter what.
As for the Bonaventure, why assume that she would be built after the Valiant? Just because she disappeared after the Valiant tells us nothing. The Bonaventure might simply have been the luckier ship, enjoying something like fifty years of safe sailing before disappearing on her third decades-long voyage.
And in any case, the episode itself gives no timepoint for the Bonaventure loss whatsoever. Does that "150 years ago" thing come from a novelization?
If anything, spinoff shows like ENT would assist us in accepting the Valiant and Bonaventure missions: they show that mankind's first bumbling attempts at warp introduced us to the more advanced species of the galaxy, allowing us to make great leaps in warp development rapidly. And they postulate a saucer aesthetic for Earth starship construction from the very beginning, allowing us to treat the Bonaventure as a plausible early example of human craftmanship in that field.
Timo Saloniemi
Umm, I can't find any such reference in the episode. All we learn is that the ship is "old" and that the "descendants" of the crew might still be living, suggesting some antiquity - but we never meet those descendants, and the issue is never discussed further.
I think you shouldn't limit yourself to thinking in terms of a disappearance 150 years ago when it's not backed up by onscreen evidence, although OTOH I have nothing against using the 150 year figure if it better fits the intended backstory or is supported by offscreen references.
Given the lack of solid data, I often prefer to think of the Bonaventure as having been built and lost only some 50 years before Kirk's time, explaining the nearly identical aesthetics - and "warp drive" in this context would refer to the new drive that in "The Cage" allowed "our new ships" to outperform the ships in existence during the departure of the Columbia. Later generations would cease to worry about separating the minor early changes in technology, and would consider everything from Cochrane's first drive to the latest developments "warp drive", much as we think of the internal combustion engine as having been invented at least 150 years ago even though the current model is very distinct technologically from the one we had twenty-five years ago!
Timo Saloniemi
^^ Well actually in my little post at the beginning of the thread I think I addressed that. The "150 years" needn't be taken literally (same with the Valiant really) because the situation could be blurred by history and the passage of time and also be dependent on when the ship went missing and was accepted as overdue.
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There is also the problem of the Bonaventure being larger and seemingly more advanced than the Enterprise to a certain degree, and bears not only Starfleet registry, a construction ethic very similar to the Constitution class, but a 5 digit NCC, well above the 1701 registry of the Enterprise.
And I thought the Valiant was lost "200 years" prior to "Where No Man Has Gone Before" circa 2264 making its loss around 2064 and therefore matching the UESPA date of the Friendship One probe, which had (albiet much more primitive) Warp drive, meaning the Valiant could have had Warp 1.2/3 drive. I haven't seen this episode in ages though so I could be wrong.
And I thought the Valiant was lost "200 years" prior to "Where No Man Has Gone Before" circa 2264 making its loss around 2064 and therefore matching the UESPA date of the Friendship One probe, which had (albiet much more primitive) Warp drive, meaning the Valiant could have had Warp 1.2/3 drive. I haven't seen this episode in ages though so I could be wrong.
^^ I have come to accept that not everything in TAS can be taken literally. I see it as something of a storyboard of a live-action episode. The actual Bonaventure could not look like what we saw in TAS.
There are a lot of things I like about TAS, but some of the ideas were not well thought through.
There are a lot of things I like about TAS, but some of the ideas were not well thought through.
I think people are digging unnecessary pits for themselves on this issue. For the record, the "150 years ago" bit is not to be found anywhere in the TAS episode, so it doesn't have to be "reconciled" or anything. Nor is there any real indication of scale for the vessel we see, so we don't have to worry whether she´s larger or smaller than Kirk´s ship (although FWIW, many a warship of today happens to be quite a bit smaller than her counterpart from two centuries prior). Nor is there a NCC registry on the Bonaventure - there is a string of numbers followed by the letters NCC, without the usual hyphen or anything.
(Indeed, there isn't any rock-solid evidence that the ship we see on screen would be the Bonaventure. Scotty could be talking about another design that had already drifted out of focus by the time camera moved to the viewscreen.)
Plenty of freedom of interpretation there, then, without deliberately stating that something that was evident on screen would "in fact" have been different.
Timo Saloniemi
I love the work you put in here Warped9, but I have to think that your inclusion of the TAS series has only made your task more difficult. Disregarding modern TREK I get, makes sense to me too.
However, to me, the writing and therefore the details and 'facts' presented in TAS is not as carefully crafted as with an ep of TOS. I don;t know if it is my anti-animation bias, but to me it seems that this was a cartoon and whatever detail was needed to fit the story, it was added and well if it fit TREK-lore or canon, so be it if it didn't , oh well.
That plus there is the back and forth as to whether or not TAS is canon.
Regarding the 'time barrier' mentioned in 'The Cage'. I personally feel it can reference several things.
The first, similar to our present day interpretation of the sound barrier, that ships can now travel beyond the control of time. Possibly the hint at being able to remove the relativity effects and near light speed travel.
Second, it could be a reference to "Hey we broke the time barrier. We can now travel around the galaxy so fast and it not take the HUGE amount of time it used to take. Time is no longer a travel concern in that sleeper or multi-generational ships are now useless."
Lastly, it could mean that all rules of relativity apply, but we found a way to bypass it by warping space and creating of traveling from place to place outside the conventional means of travel.
Just some thoughts.
...Such as an efficacy barrier in the Tyme converters, broken by the introduction of dilithium. Or the milestone of warp 8, named after the unfortunate Kahonak Taim whose spectacular failure to break that speed record is remembered by an entire generation.
As said, we can take everything literally and accurately yet still not get stuck with the original, possibly misguided or outdated intention of the writers.
Timo Saloniemi
Timo, your ingenuity in retconning is always a source of great pleasure to me!
In "The Cage" its possible GR meant the "time barrier" to imply that FTL travel had been acheived after the Columbia disappeared. Even WNMHGB's reference to the old impulse engines of the Valiant doesn't contradict that idea. But later in the series the reference to Zefram Cochrane's space warp development 150 years earlier pretty much blows that out of the water.
But the "time barrier" reference strongly suggest to me that some significant advancement had been made.
I'm not concerned with officialdom's judgment of whether TAS is canon or not. I just know that for me it fits more with TOS than most of anything from the '80s onward. Hell, officialdom deems ENT canon which I most certainly do not at least in regards to TOS.
Basically I think the Valiant was one of the "new" ships post 2018, fitted with the "new" ion-mass pulse drive (impulse) that allowed it to reach speeds of 90% light or so and thus exploit the benefits of time dilation for interstellar travel, at least to nearer stars. Then Cochrane comes along and after a couple of successful voyages the Valiant is refit with one of the first space warp drives. She may even have one or two successful voyages before she vanishes. Meanwhile the Bonaventure is designed from scratch as a warp capable ship, is launched and lasts some 30-50 years successfully until it, too, disappears. Oddly this gives the Valiant something of the best of both worlds to an extent: if her warp drive goes down she could still resort to her relativistic drive to get home. And because of the nature of fast relativistic starflight before warp development she would have been more streamlined in design than the early ships design with warp drive in mind (high percentages of light clearly illustrate that interstellar space is definitely not an empty vacuum). The era of the Valiant could also have begun the development of deflector technology. Of course, once the Valiant is thrown to such an extreme distance as where the Enterprise finds her recorder marker than neither warp nor relativistic drive can get them home. That said relativistic drive wouldn't necessarily negate the use of a form of sleeper ship or more accurately human hibernation. Even with time dilation having your crew asleep during a significant part of the trip saves on power and resources. Spock (or McGiver's?) reference that they'd never heard of a sleeper ship actually being used for interstellar travel may have meant that there was no record of a very early '90s era DY being used in such a way. But a Valiant era ship could have been something else. Indeed considering how rudimentary space warp flight is at first you might not have to totally rule out human hibernation for that either if the projected flight could still be several months long.
Space warp propulsion advances slowly (for various reasons) until the early 23rd century when they're doing no better than about Warp 2 or 3. Then along comes Daystrom's advanced and much faster computer systems to help stabilize warp fields for higher speeds as well as facilitating navigation at higher warp velocities--this in concert with the implementation of dilithium sets the stage for the newer and faster ships like the Constitution-class. Perhaps a ship like Vektor's Vanguard is the first proof-of-concept for the new tech.
Or you could also define the change as a move from the old warp scale of WF cubed to my scale of WF cubed x .02.
During much of the 21st century I think most warp ships would have been pre-existing spaceframes with the warp components retrofitted to them. This would tend to support the existence of ship's like early TNG's Mariposa.
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