Cause and Effect (??)

[Dale Sams]

So..since the Enterprise lost some 16 days before figuring out how to avoid the collision....are we meant to believe that the Bozeman lost some 100 years because they never figured out how to avoid the collision?

Which means from their perspective, a starship from the future was entering their time period?

So if that's true, then had the Enterprise reversed course (which they should have done. "For all we know, reversing course leads to the accident" is illogical since there would have been no reason to reverse course the first time) the Bozeman never would have entered the anomaly.

My head hurts.

 

[od0_ital]

The Bozeman was there for decades, no tellin' how their loop was workin'.

There's no way for them to know that the Enterprise-D was from their future in the short amount of time between the ship appearin' and their mutual destruction.

That may be why Captain Bateson was kinda aloof - 'til the E-D showed up, there was no definin' event that reset the loop, so maybe they were just livin' the same few days over and over like it was new to them, Groundhog Day style, but without the crazy antics.

 

[Hober Mallow]

It's best not to even try to make sense of this episode.

 

[Trekker4747]

I'm guessing the Bozeman encountered some kind of phenomenon and entered it (either accidentally or on purpose) that teleported them forward the 70-80 years and into the Enterprise-D.

If they had been stuck in a "time loop" like the Enterprise was during the intervening time I'm sure they would have realized and started trying to put things together/correcting them much the same way the Enterprise crew did.

 

[F. King Daniel]

As I understood, the Bozeman jumped forward in time and crashed into the Enterprise, but only the Enterprise was having the deja vu loops.

Either that, or they're all complete idiots not to have figured it out in 70+ years.

 

[JT Perfecthair]

The only thing they had to do to implement Rikers idea of opening the shuttle bay and letting the air push the ship out of the way was to completely ignore elementary physics.

 

[Trekker4747]

Yeah, I really, really doubt (and I think I've done the math on this before) there would be near enough air in the shuttlebay to push the ship out of the way.

 

[The Librarian]

Not to mention that if they had just hit the tractor beam immediately, or done both solutions, they could have avoided the collision. Instead they wasted thirty or forty seconds debating what to do.

 

[Prologic9]

The Narrative is meant to infer the Bozeman was stuck in the loop for some 100 years.

Reasonably, their loop wouldn't have reset with the collision because ultimately the events still unfolded in real time, and the Ent-D would have had to have also been in the loop for 100 years.

We can speculate that the stability of their loop was much stronger before crossing paths with the Ent-D, explaining why they never realized their predicament. Or perhaps their loop was extremely short, lasting only seconds, and they never had the time to fully process everything.

 

[Tom Riley]

The wording of the episode to me seemed to imply that it was the destruction of the Enterprise that caused the loop. If that were the case, it would only make sense for the Bozeman to have encountered this temporal anomaly, been sent to the future, hit the Enterprise and then been looped themselves.

Perhaps their loop starts upon entering the anomaly and ends with the collision. That makes the most sense to me because that would provide the same number of times through the loop for them as the Enterprise which keeps everything balanced. If the ships' destruction is what caused them to enter the loop, then it would require both of them for the loops to even start. The interaction between the ships has to be there. If it is indeed the destruction of the ships that started the loops as it suggests, how could the Bozeman be looping if they hadn't yet hit the Enterprise? It would have to all start with the first collision, necessitating the Bozeman to be pulled forward in time to start their loops concurrently with the Enterprise.

At least that's what I took away from the episode. That, yes, the Bozeman was now displaced 70+ years in time, but not that they had 70+ solid years worth of looping.

 

[T'Girl]

If tyhe Enterprise had changed course, the Boseman would have emerge, hit nothing, and found themselves in the future.

The Boseman "looped" exactly as many times as the Enterprise did. When the Enterprise exploded and reset (how many hours?) the Boseman still being in the area of the explosion also reset the same time period.

I did the math years ago, given the main shuttle bay door size, the general size of the flight deck and assuming the bay was initially at sea level pressure, there would have been enough thrust from the escaping air (combined with the tractor beam) to push the Enterprise out of the immediate path of the Boseman, it was a glancing blow.

Move the Enterprise as fast as seen on screen? That's a different question, but that could have been a matter of camera perspective.

(go seahawks)

 

[Trekker4747]

If tyhe Enterprise had changed course, the Boseman would have emerge, hit nothing, and found themselves in the future.

The Boseman "looped" exactly as many times as the Enterprise did. When the Enterprise exploded and reset (how many hours?) the Boseman still being in the area of the explosion also reset the same time period.

I did the math years ago, given the main shuttle bay door size, the general size of the flight deck and assuming the bay was initially at sea level pressure, there would have been enough thrust from the escaping air (combined with the tractor beam) to push the Enterprise out of the immediate path of the Boseman, it was a glancing blow.

The "combined with the tractor beam" is the unknown variable you get toss in there in order to make the process work, though. The thing is the tractor beam was not used decompressing the shuttle bay was done instead of using the tractor beam. And there's not enough air in the main shuttle bay to move the mass of the Enterprise out of the way and certainly not in any meaningful rate to push the ship out of the way in time.

And yeah the "we can't turn back it might be what gets us in trouble" argument doesn't hold up. Considering the first time through the loop they'd have no reason to change course and staying on course is what got them into the predicament. Changing course is the right thing to do.

 

[USS Excelsior]

I think the Bozeman was in a closed few minute loop for 90 years, which was short enough for them not to realize that they had been there before, and then the ENT-D gets caught into the loop and breaks it.

Although one can speculate as to why the ENT-D contact Starfleet when they realized they were in a loop, and how much time had passed.

 

[Dukhat]

The Bozeman was caught in a time loop for 80 years. The crew didn't know they were in a time loop all that time because they were doing the exact same thing each time before the reset. The variable was the Enterprise, which wandered into the area of space where the Bozeman's time loop was happening. The Enterprise was then part of the time loop as well, but unlike the Bozeman's crew, experiences for them each time were different, and they were able to figure out the problem. However, I'm not quite sure why avoiding the collision would have brought the Bozeman out of its time loop.

 

[Finn]

I decided to rewatch this episode after reading the thread. One thing I always wondered...what if for each loop, someone made it to an escape pod. Given the short period of time between the order and the destruction, it would have to be right there.

Would that mean people would seem to disappear in the newer loops? It wouldn't have been the senior staff as they all were on the bridge since they were in the conference room right before the encounter with the anomaly.

However, they were in the conference room due to the oddities that popped up as result of the loops. That may mean they weren't in the conference room the first time around. I suspect the problems or the changes certain departments mentioned in the first loop we saw were related to the loops.

Beverly wasn't called to sickbay during the poker game. Beverly didn't break the glass since there wouldn't be any voices to spook her. Or was the voices always there?

 

[Jerikka Dawn]

If tyhe Enterprise had changed course, the Boseman would have emerge, hit nothing, and found themselves in the future.

The Boseman "looped" exactly as many times as the Enterprise did. When the Enterprise exploded and reset (how many hours?) the Boseman still being in the area of the explosion also reset the same time period.

This is pretty much exactly what I got out of this episode. The Bozeman was flying around in 2278 then flew into a temporal anomaly leading them 90 years into the future. They collided with the Enterprise and the resulting warp core explosion interacted with the temporal distortion in some way as to create a temporal loop of some arbitrary length, resetting both ships back a few hours in their respective timeframes. Bozeman wasn't trapped in the loop for 90 years, they were trapped for the same amount of subjective time as the Enterprise. They just happened to travel 90 years into the future during the loop.

The Enterprise seems to be a lightning rod for Starfleet ships falling out of temporal anomalies from the past.

 

[T'Girl]

combined with the tractor beam

The thing is the tractor beam was not used

You are correct sir, the tractor beam wasn't used in the successful avoidance of the Boseman, my mistake.

And there's not enough air in the main shuttle bay to move the mass of the Enterprise out of the way and certainly not in any meaningful rate to push the ship out of the way in time.

Given the dimensions of the main shuttle bay door and assuming that there is sea level pressure in the flight deck, initially there would be over six thousand tonnes of force.

Newton's third law of motion. The Enterprise is expelling matter aft, generating propulsion force forward.

The bottom of the Boseman's starboard warp nacelle raked the top of the Enterprise's starboard nacelle, the Enterprise would not have had to of moved very far to avoid the collision.

 

[Trekker4747]

And there's not enough air in the main shuttle bay to move the mass of the Enterprise out of the way and certainly not in any meaningful rate to push the ship out of the way in time.

Given the dimensions of the main shuttle bay door and assuming that there is sea level pressure in the flight deck, initially there would be over six thousand tonnes of force.

Newton's third law of motion. The Enterprise is expelling matter aft, generating propulsion force forward.

Six Thousand tonnes of force being expelled pretty much instantly isn't going to be nearly enough to move the Enterprise at any meaningful rate. Yes there's going to be "some" counter force under Newton's Third law, but under the same principle doing a jump technically pushes the earth slightly downward; even though it weighs around 6 septillion kilograms and I weigh around 100.

The mass of the air in the shuttlebay may be 6,000 tonnes but the mass of the Enterprise is around 4.5 million tonnes.

The air in the shuttlebay is going to be expelled pretty much instantly when the doors are opened, so that's 6,000 tonnes of force all at once in a single instant. That's not going to be enough to move something 750 times as massive in any meaningful way.

 

[E-DUB]

Not weighing in on the question at hand but just to say that this was the best opening sequence of any TNG episode, maybe any Trek period.

And while we're talking time loops, anybody ever see a movie called "Triangle"?

 

[Green Shirt]

The Enterprise seems to be a lightning rod for Starfleet ships falling out of temporal anomalies from the past.

The various Enterprises were lightning rods for every kind of trouble that came up, since she was always the "only ship in the quadrant".