Children of Kings (SPOILERS)

[Deranged Nasat]

The Orions could have invaded the Klingon system, just like a group did Vulcan around the same time (Spock's World, the catalyst for the Surak/S'Task schism)

Oooh, that's a nice idea (and I do accept the Orion attack on Vulcan, etc, as part of my personal, non-canonical Trek-verse continuity). However, I'll have to check my copy of the novel, but I think the battle with the Klingons took place in interstellar space or in another star system, and so suggested the Klingons were a space-faring power already.

Still, I like your angle on it - if I can make that work, I will.

I quite like the novel anyway as it is (so none of this really matters), but you know me- I like the continuity above all

 

[Christopher]

There's some precedent (due to inconsistent historical references) for the idea of a species that had warp drive in some past civilization and then lost it and reacquired it in a later civilization. Bajor is the prime example. TNG: "Ensign Ro" said that Bajorans had been a spacefaring civilization spreading art and architecture to other worlds "before humans walked upright" (which is generally taken in Trek references to be half a million years ago, although hominids have walked erect for closer to 4 million years), but DS9 established that Bajor only had "primitive" solar sail craft a mere 800 years before the series. The only way to reconcile what we've been told about Bajor is to assume that the current "ancient" Bajoran civilization dating back some 30,000 years is not the first technological civilization in the species' history, that there was a separate, earlier starfaring civilization that fell and regressed to primitivism.

Now, I don't feel any particular need to reconcile The Children of Kings with any other continuity, but if one desired, one could postulate that maybe there was a spacegoing Klingon civilization that preceded Kahless, one that later regressed.

 

[kkozoriz1]

Bajor may not have had warp drive necessarily. Impulse driven ships could have contacted a number of neighboring races although it would have taken much longer. I don't recall any mention of warp drive driven Bajoran ships either in the present or past.

 

[Timo]

...one could postulate that maybe there was a spacegoing Klingon civilization that preceded Kahless, one that later regressed.

Or one could say that Klingons were quite starfaring before Kahless - but only when star-transported by their Hur'Q/Karsid masters.

These pre-Kahless Klingons might not count as people from the Klingon Empire yet, but the distinction wouldn't matter for the purposes of the Children of Kings line. (What was that line, anyway?)

I don't recall any mention of warp drive driven Bajoran ships either in the present or past.

Several Bajoran-operated ships went interstellar in DS9 - the first to explicitly do so was the "scout" in "Past Prologue", its model later reused as a military and civilian transport that also performed interstellar journeys. We never actually saw these ships to go warp, but we did see them sport what looked like conventional warp nacelles... So, some sort of conventional-looking FTL tech was available to Bajor immediately after the Occupation. What they had before it remains speculative.

In fact,

TNG: "Ensign Ro" said that Bajorans had been a spacefaring civilization .. [..] DS9 established that Bajor only had "primitive" solar sail craft a mere 800 years before the series.

That's not quite accurate. The TNG episode did not make any mention of spacefaring let alone starfaring, merely of advanced architecture and society.

DS9 "Explorers" in turn said that the sailships existed 800 years prior to the episode and were used for exploring the Bajoran system, but it doesn't establish that they would have been the only thing that existed. Many people enjoyed exploring the Earth's bodies of water in sailing craft in the 1960s; this in no way precludes the existence of supertankers, nuclear submarines, hovercraft or hydrofoils at the time, nor negates the expeditions of Cook or Zheng He long before that date.

"Explorers" also discusses the concept of ancient Bajorans visiting Cardassia in such craft. We get no clear timeframe for that, though. Perhaps it happened 20,800 years earlier, rather than 800? Lightsails (of all sorts of designs) might have remained fashionable for the intervening years, only going extinct on that significant day 800 years before the episode.

That's the gist of Sisko's interest, after all: not that the lightsail design is an amazing 800 years old, but that these ships have not sailed for the past 800 years and have been largely forgotten. The history of Bajoran lightsails might extend back several thousand additional years.

Timo Saloniemi