BOT Canon in Relation to Star Trek: Enterprise

[VulcanMindBlown]

One of the things that concerned me about Enterprise was the fact that they already had Phase(r) technology and Photon(ic) torpedoes. Spock clearly said...

"Referring to the map on your screens, you will note beyond the moving position of our vessel, a line of Earth outpost stations. Constructed on asteroids, they monitor the Neutral Zone established by treaty after the Earth-Romulan conflict a century ago. As you may recall from your histories, this conflict was fought, by our standards today, with primitive atomic weapons and in primitive space vessels which allowed no quarter, no captives. Nor was there even ship-to-ship visual communication. Therefore, no human, Romulan, or ally has ever seen the other. Earth believes the Romulans to be warlike, cruel, treacherous, and only the Romulans know what they think of Earth. The treaty, set by sub-space radio, established this Neutral Zone, entry into which by either side, would constitute an act of war. The treaty has been unbroken since that time."

For both the Phase and Photonic torpedoes, it would have been better that they spelled out the differences between the future series (but that would have assumed that they would know what the future was like, which they can't??!! )

However, I will defend the fact that we, in reality, are progressing to have laser/heat beam weapons in our militaries now. It is reasonable that, in one or two centuries, we have something! But what? On an earlier thread, I remember that the Phasers picked up by the mirror counter parts of the show could disintegrate sentient beings like a disruptor. It should also be mentioned that a Phaser could shoot a spread, while a Phase Pistol couldn't (or at least that we now of.)

Photonics weapons were more likely a continuity problem, but it is likely that EVENTUALLY Vulcans and other species were able to share what they had that more resembled what you see on The Original Series. They HAVE to have had some kind of anti-matter weapon despite what Spock said, because they had warp capabilities almost a century before. It is reasonable that only the NX-class ships had them, and the rest had rockets (or spatial torpedoes) and nuclear torpedoes.

I have read the two relaunch novels of the series that deal with the Romulan Wars in two books. It was really satisfying to finally incorporate the show into established canon and experience the war that started it all (so to speak.) The Romulan ship from Minefield obviously had only a blast of a disruptor (not to mention that they were prototypes that had a failed cloaking device) and the disruptors used by the drone ships in Season 4 were prototypes. It is not to far-fetched that they did have disruptors on most ships by then, but some TOS fans are hard core canon addicts and won't put in anything that wasn't there.

Thank you Michael A. Martin for making those novels!!! They were great and satisfying!!! (P.S. is he on here?)

In Enterprise's defense, in the canon-heavy website Star Fleet Museum, did have some ships with lasers, disruptors, rockets, and other weapons, but not nearly as many people would cry foul unless you were a complete TOS fanatic. Ships of the Earth-Romulan War

Onto the fact that the ships didn't allow captives, it isn't too unreasonable that some ships could carry captives, that were probably the top and front of the line, but it was most ships that couldn't carry prisoners. Did the Intrepid and Daedalus-class ships not allow this?

What does visual ship to ship communication mean? Does that mean that they never saw each other's ship? That doesn't seem like you could start a war on that.

No one is really against the fact that when the Federation was formed outside of the war, that they were more TOS-like in there capabilities, like tractor beams, transporters, phasers, and anti-matter torpedoes. Thank you Christopher Bennet for explaining the transition in your Rise of the Federation novels!!

No flame wars, I want to understand for intellectual stimulation and knowledge.

Flame wars are illogical.

 

[topcat]

visual communications is just that, visual communications. Sub space radio is all they had as far as both sides communicating.

Basically in the romulan war federation and romulan ships traded taunts and threats over a sub space ham radio. never seeing each other. just hearing each other.

Then in TOS when the romulan war ship with new plasma weapon destroys outposts... we finally see the moment for the first time that Starfleet sees romulans face to face over ship to ship visual communication.

you misconstrue no prisoners as meaning, either side had no facilities for that. In theory a shuttle bay can be used as a simple prison. But the problems come from how the war is supposed to have been fought.
Bare bones, shoot, kill, move to a new target. No one TOOK prisoners because they were to focused on a war of survival. Meaning, if a romulan ship blew a federation ship in half, they would simply leave it drifting in space to die a slow death. Or simply fire another spread of torpedoes and finish it off.

And us happy Starfleet folks did the same thing. You see a romulan war ship, you fill it with weapons fire until its a radioactive hulk with no life signs, or just soak torpedoes into it until it explodes.

 

[eyeresist]

I think Spock's little talk from Balance Of Terror has been problematic since day one. A ship-to-ship battle using atomic weapons seems impractical. The "no visual communications" thing was in there so that the revelation of a Vulcan-like Romulan would have shock value. This was subsequently retconned by making Romulans very insular and secretive, so we could guess that visual communication did exist during the war, but the Romulans refused to use it.

How did the novels deal with the matter of atomic weapons?

 

[Willow]

I'm just sitting here thinking how difficult it must've been to create a prequel series to a series that was filmed half a century ago . Technology has advanced so much since TOS was filmed. Heck..even since Enterprise ended a decade ago! As a result, I personally don't get too wrapped up in the technology of any of the series.

The Romulans had that drone ship in Season 4 that was really cool. But since the ending of ENT, drones have become more commonplace. Not just for covert operations either - people can apparently buy little drones at the electronics stores. Makes one wonder what technology will really be like in 2154.

And like VulcanMindBlown, I am a big fan of the novels! I'm not sure if Michael A. Martin is on the boards, but Christopher Bennett is. They are my two favorite relaunch authors.

And IIRC, there was no mention of atomic weapons in the novels.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I don't think the writers of Enterprise ever planned to reconcile BoT with ENT. They just chose to ignore a few lines of dialogue here and there, and do their own thing. Every Trek does it (for example, Kirk's Enterprise could have made Voyager's journey in a month according to "That Which Survivies" or less going by STV: TFF), so I don't see why it's such a point of contention among the fanbase.

That said, the unmade Romulan War movie Star Trek: The Beginning would have justified Spock's line about atomic weapons by having the hero character steal one from a Terra Prime-esque group and set course for Romulus. Script review here: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/34635

 

[Timo]

Agreed that "Balance of Terror" is a problematic episode in that it sets up a universe that isn't particularly easy to swallow. Unseen enemies is good scifi, but it's darn difficult to see how that could ever work. And it is darn difficult to take our heroes seriously if they are awed by simple invisibility at this point of space exploration history!

Assuming that Paul Schneider meant Romulan ships of yore did not have videophones does not sound plausible in the slightest, though. Everybody from Jules Verne's more clever heroes on has flaunted videophone technology, and it was a (barely) working part of the real world even when the episode was written. Reading "there was no visual communication" as "there was no visual communication technology" is a silly and anachronistic thing to do...

...Quite comparable to thinking that "no quarter" would mean there was no space for prisoners. That's simply a failure to understand the English language, in which "no quarter" unambiguously is synonymous to "no mercy".

Also, "fought, by our standards today, with primitive atomic weapons and in primitive space vessels" takes Herculean effort to read as anything else than "fought with atomic weapons more primitive than ours and in space vessels more primitive than ours". That is, Kirk and Spock must still be using atomic weapons, just like they are still using space vessels - theirs are just less primitive. It's merely left as an exercise to the reader to figure out which of Kirk and Spock's weapons are supposed to be atomic. All of them? Just the phasers? Just the photon torpedoes?

What Schneider wrote can be grossly misunderstood, it seems. But it should be appreciated that it can be misunderstood, without any penalty. New meanings can be inserted in place of Schneider's if that better matches our sensibilities. It just eludes me why turning "no visual communications" into "they didn't know how to build videophones", let alone "no quarter" to "no quarters", would be preferable.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Dukhat]

...Quite comparable to thinking that "no quarter" would mean there was no space for prisoners. That's simply a failure to understand the English language, in which "no quarter" unambiguously is synonymous to "no mercy".

I'm pretty sure the "no quarter" thing was indeed meant to imply there was no space for prisoners, since the whole point was that no one had seen a Romulan in the flesh, and if they had captured Romulan prisoners they would have known what they looked like.

 

[Timo]

But that's not even English. And it's nonsense anyway: if capturing of prisoners were possible, the valiant Earthlings would simply space Ablespaceman Adams and give his bunk to the valuable captive. Or if the point was just to find out what the enemy looked, then his severed head could be stowed in place of a week's worth of space cabbage rations. Or a photograph of that head slipped in place of the week's menu card. "Lack of space" just plain cannot be an issue there.

The point about "no quarter" is that if ships on just one side of the fight had their red flags hoisted, then taking prisoners would have been impossible in practice. You can't take prisoners if the enemy doesn't give you any: there's no boarding an enemy ship if the known rate of them self-destructing is 100%, say. And if the enemy is that unwilling to give you prisoners, he'll expect you to be similar or worse.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

I think the thing to understand about a canon is that it's a work in progress and is subject to change. A lot of fans want to believe that every single detail in every single episode or movie must be taken as strictly factual, but a canon is a story that's being refined as it goes, and sometimes the ideas in the early installments don't quite work and get reconsidered later on.

So a lot of the details from "Balance of Terror" have to be taken with a grain of salt, understood as the first-season weirdness of a series that was still making up its universe and its rules as it went, like "James R. Kirk" and "lithium crystals." At the time of "Balance of Terror," they hadn't even conceived of the Federation yet. And a lot of the technical details in BoT don't make a lot of sense, like the implication that the Romulans only had impulse engines -- which would've made it impossible for them to wage an interstellar war against a warp-capable power. Not to mention how backward it is in a lot of its technological assumptions -- there's that scene where Kirk asks Spock for information about the comet and hands him a hardcover book called Table of Comets so he can look up the answers. The stuff about visual communication and advanced weapons not existing a century before is consistent with that backwardness.

Heck, the episode isn't even entirely consistent within itself. The dialogue asserts that the Neutral Zone surrounds only the twin planets Romulus and Remus, suggesting a spherical exclusion zone around a single star system, but the onscreen map shows a wobbly line dividing two regions with multiple stars, as well as positing the existence of a "Romulan Star Empire" that's never mentioned in dialogue. Then there are the FX shots showing "phaser" shots that look more like torpedo detonations. It's really a weird and inconsistent episode, and subsequent stories that have touched on its ideas have had to be flexible in their interpretation. Certainly the story and the character work is terrific and memorable, but it's best not to be too attached to the technicalities.

For what it's worth, though, the developers of Enterprise initially wanted it to show a less advanced technological level, including a lack of transporters and phaser-type weapons, but the network and/or studio insisted on something more recognizably Trekkish. So maybe, given total freedom, they would've shown a tech level more consistent with "Balance of Terror"'s suggestions up to a point -- although I doubt they would've willing to do a whole TV series where there was no visual communication, because that would've been dull to look at and unbelievable to the modern audience.


One thing a lot of people have complained about was ENT using cloaking technology a century before BoT, wherein Spock said it was only a theoretical possibility. But there are a lot of such inconsistencies in the portrayal of cloaking in Trek -- for instance, Starfleet penetrates Klingon cloaking technology in TUC, but cloaks are still impenetrable in the TNG era. And in DS9's Mirror Universe, the Klingons have cloaks in "Crossover" but don't have them in "The Emperor's New Cloak." But I think this is easy to explain, since logically there'd be a constant arms race between stealth and detection. Each time a new cloaking tech was invented, it would eventually be penetrated by some new detection method and thus rendered useless, and then cloaking would be considered "impossible" again until someone invented a new type of cloak that could fool all known detection methods.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ Also, the Romulan ship in "Minefield" keeps uncloaking and cloaking at random moments, so it seems obvious something is wrong with it. So the line from TOS is easily explainable: it took them that long to develop a cloak that works.

 

[Timo]

Invisibility in "BoT" is in conflict with precedent from TOS itself, for that matter. In "Charlie X", an adversary ship appears out of nowhere, essentially "choosing to suddenly become visible". Such behavior, by whichever means, should not surprise our heroes in the slightest, then - and never mind that lifeforms and objects other than starships quite regularly are invisible, until they are not, all across TOS.

But as made clear above, that's not much of an issue, as "TOS itself" did not strive to be particularly consistent internally - indeed, the spinoffs probably did much more work there, and had much more success, including with respect to TOS factoids.

What is frustrating here isn't minor technicalities, but the very concept that invisibility should surprise seasoned space adventurers. We could pretend that "BoT" comes before any other TOS episode featuring invisibility if we wanted, considering how irrelevant stardates, let alone airdates, are in-universe. But that invisibility still remains theoretical in the 2260s... Human or even Vulcan attempts at invisibility may have flopped, but both cultures should have had plenty of exposure to alien invisibility by that time. Which is what ENT enjoyably shows happening.

Then again, ENT also provides a sly excuse for Spock's ignorance in "BoT", establishing that Vulcans just plain refuse to believe in certain things regardless of whether they are observed to exist or not...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Dukhat]

But that's not even English. And it's nonsense anyway: if capturing of prisoners were possible, the valiant Earthlings would simply space Ablespaceman Adams and give his bunk to the valuable captive.

I'm not arguing the logic of the statement. I'm pointing out the use of the term in Spock's quote:

"...and in primitive space vessels which allowed no quarter, no captives..."

Obviously he's using the term "no quarter" specifically to denote that no prisoners were taken because there was no room on those primitive ships to keep them, implying that ships of that era were as cramped as a Soyuz capsule is IRL.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Just another of the hoops the script forces us through to preserve the OMG! They look like Vulcans! reveal.

 

[Christopher]

One of the things the Romulan War novels by Michael A. Martin did was to posit that Starfleet mostly halted construction of more NX-class vessels and instead favored mass production of the older, more easily constructed Daedalus-class ships. Now that I think about it, that may have been meant to address Spock's line about primitive, cramped ships.

 

[Timo]

Obviously he's using the term "no quarter" specifically to denote that no prisoners were taken because there was no room on those primitive ships to keep them, implying that ships of that era were as cramped as a Soyuz capsule is IRL.

Obviously not. After all, as pointed out, that's not how the English language works - "no quarter" is unrelated to volumes of space, in Schneider's text as well as in his mind (unless we make exceptional assumptions about his mind). And primitive and lacking in space are not logically related in any fashion, either. (Not to mention that "cramped" specifically is nowhere to be found among the factoids Spock gives!)

A Soyuz capsule could not take prisoners even if it were the size of SS United States, as there is no prisoner-taking technology aboard. A rowboat the size of a Soyuz capsule could take prisoners at sea easily enough, though. Or recover corpses, a duty indeed bestowed upon rowboats often enough. Relative or absolute level of primitiveness may affect how prisoners are taken. But it cannot affect whether prisoners can be held - if a spacecraft is crewed, it is by default capable of holding prisoners.

Paul Schneider wrote plain English. Some people insist he wrote gibberish. But supporting the latter assertion takes a lot of effort, even if it only consists of saying the same thing over and over again.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Dukhat]

^Believe whatever you like. I will take Spock's statements at face value, considering he uses the term "no captives" immediately after "no quarter," linking one with the other. It's pretty cut-and-dried, really, with no need for extreme over-analysis of how the English language works.

 

[Timo]

So you really can't speak English? It's not a matter of interpretation, it's a matter of error vs. no error. Everything built on thinking that outright terminological error is acceptable is built on sand.

Nothing to say those primitive ships might not have been cramped, of course... It's just not a thing that would be mentioned in "BoT".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Nerys Myk]

A victor gives no quarter when the victor shows no clemency or mercy and refuses to spare the life in return for the surrender at discretion (unconditional surrender) of a vanquished opponent.

It's not that they don't have the room, its that they don't want to.

 

[Timo]

...AFAIK, there is only one other acceptable interpretation for the phrase "no quarter". I doubt that's what Schneider meant, but perhaps prisoner-capturing systems in the 22nd century required the insertion of 25c for each prisoner?

Beyond this, there's no room for analysis or speculation on the terminology. No quarter, either.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

It's not that they don't have the room, its that they don't want to.

Sure, that's what it means in general, but in this specific case, Spock said "primitive space vessels which allowed no quarter." He doesn't say the crews allowed no quarter, he says the vessels allowed no quarter. That has to mean that showing mercy wasn't physically possible because there just wasn't room on the ships. Because the only other interpretation is that the ships were sentient and were just complete jerks.