Cytherian or Not

[F. King Daniel]

^Also the question of how the classic Enterprise reached the galactic rim in WNMHGB, or how the Romulan Neutral Zone went from being so far flung that communications to HQ took days to go back and forth in "Balance of Terror" and "The Neutral Zone" to a quick warp jump away in Star Trek: First Contact with a live play-by-play of the battle in Sector 001.

The Speed of Plot drive is a miraculous thing

 

[sonak]

he could just as easily be a wrong member of a lot of other super-powered groups that we saw, like the Thasians or the Metrons or the Organians.

since that movie wasn't exactly the best received of the films, it hasn't gotten a lot of speculation.

 

[R. Star]

Cytherian or not having a giant head is never good for an episode/movie.

 

[Luminus]

^Also the question of how the classic Enterprise reached the galactic rim in WNMHGB, or how the Romulan Neutral Zone went from being so far flung that communications to HQ took days to go back and forth in "Balance of Terror" and "The Neutral Zone" to a quick warp jump away in Star Trek: First Contact with a live play-by-play of the battle in Sector 001.

The Speed of Plot drive is a miraculous thing

Actually, regarding TNZ, that's conceivable since the episodes in question are literally separated by nearly a century.

 

[F. King Daniel]

^Just 8 years from "The Neutral Zone" to ST:FC.

 

[Luminus]

^Just 8 years from "The Neutral Zone" to ST:FC.

No. I'm talking about in-universe years. It's over 70 years passed between episodes. Technology obviously changed.

 

[The Old Mixer]

It's the first I've heard of it, and sounds to me like an attempt of fannish retconning, trying to position TNG as "real" Star Trek at the expense of anything else.

More likely an attempt to make STV seem like "real" Trek....

 

[Crazyewok]

^Also the question of how the classic Enterprise reached the galactic rim in WNMHGB, or how the Romulan Neutral Zone went from being so far flung that communications to HQ took days to go back and forth in "Balance of Terror" and "The Neutral Zone" to a quick warp jump away in Star Trek: First Contact with a live play-by-play of the battle in Sector 001.

The Speed of Plot drive is a miraculous thing

It might depend what part of the neutral zone they are at.

I always thought the closest part was just beyond Alpha centuri but the neutral zone extends dozens of light years so another part could be a hundred odd light years away.

 

[F. King Daniel]

^It looked like a big red wireframe jellybean in Wrath of Khan

^Just 8 years from "The Neutral Zone" to ST:FC.

No. I'm talking about in-universe years. It's over 70 years passed between episodes. Technology obviously changed.

I think you're confusing the TOS episode "Balance of Terror" with the TNG episode "The Neutral Zone". It's 8 years in-universe between that episode and the movie Star Trek: First Contact.

 

[F. King Daniel]

It's the first I've heard of it, and sounds to me like an attempt of fannish retconning, trying to position TNG as "real" Star Trek at the expense of anything else.

More likely an attempt to make STV seem like "real" Trek....

And how exactly does one differentiate this "real" and "unreal" Trek...?

 

[Luminus]

^It looked like a big red wireframe jellybean in Wrath of Khan

^Just 8 years from "The Neutral Zone" to ST:FC.

No. I'm talking about in-universe years. It's over 70 years passed between episodes. Technology obviously changed.

I think you're confusing the TOS episode "Balance of Terror" with the TNG episode "The Neutral Zone". It's 8 years in-universe between that episode and the movie Star Trek: First Contact.

Yes, you're right. However, what I said still holds. 8 years is a long time for technology to change. Microsoft Windows doesn't even stay the same after 2 or 3 years.

 

[Timo]

In eight years, automobiles haven't really changed much. Essentially, the only thing that has changed in the past fifty years is the piling up of electronic trinkets; if a war or a border shape were to depend on automobiles, then one from the sixties would be identical to one from today.

Why should technology change rapidly in the TNG universe? The Federation is a couple of centuries old already, and unlikely to be in lots of internal turmoil any more, so that wouldn't be a driving force for exceptional innovation. Most of the member species were old and established even when joining; would there be anything left to invent? Apparently, there's no market for anything, no profit from the introduction of novelties, so why invent anything new? The only incentives seem to be "for the heck of it" and "in response to an external threat"... And the threats haven't really evolved in the period we have witnessed. Save for the coming of the Borg, and that threat seems to be so far out of the league of our heroes that it's not producing anything.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Luminus]

In eight years, automobiles haven't really changed much. Essentially, the only thing that has changed in the past fifty years is the piling up of electronic trinkets; if a war or a border shape were to depend on automobiles, then one from the sixties would be identical to one from today.

Why should technology change rapidly in the TNG universe? The Federation is a couple of centuries old already, and unlikely to be in lots of internal turmoil any more, so that wouldn't be a driving force for exceptional innovation. Most of the member species were old and established even when joining; would there be anything left to invent? Apparently, there's no market for anything, no profit from the introduction of novelties, so why invent anything new? The only incentives seem to be "for the heck of it" and "in response to an external threat"... And the threats haven't really evolved in the period we have witnessed. Save for the coming of the Borg, and that threat seems to be so far out of the league of our heroes that it's not producing anything.

Timo Saloniemi

Some automobiles can park and/or drive themselves now. They also have GPS devices and they are faster than the ones from the 60's. The fastest car of the 60's was the Jaguar E-Type coupé clocking in at 150 mph. And just to give you an idea of what's actually changed in not 8 but 10 years (it's only a 2 year difference), read this.

My point is, you have no idea what discoveries or innovation could have happened in those 8 years. It can't be predicted, regardless of political climate.

 

[INACTIVEUSS Einstein]

Why can't "God" simply be an alien species never before seen or afterwards? Why does everything have to be connected?

Yeah this tendency is really annoying and destructive.

 

[publiusr]

I call the ST V entity a mad(but weakened) dowd or Q that the rest of the continuum locked away near the galactic center somehow.

There were two barriers placed up eons ago. One in the inner galaxy near the big black hole but this side of Borg space. The other, an outer trip-line. The key is to keep it away from Dark Matter energy outside the Milky way, allowing it to grow perhaps.

 

[Timo]

Some automobiles can park and/or drive themselves now. They also have GPS devices and they are faster than the ones from the 60's.

And that's just the point - nothing has changed! Despite these meaningless tinkerings, the automobiles do not behave in any way differently from how they behaved in the 1960s. The higher speed doesn't manifest in any way, the auto-parking feature doesn't change anybody's lives; the problems and strengths of automobile traffic are the exact same regardless of this so-called "development", because even when the "development" attempts to tackle problems (and this is extremely rarely), it amounts to treading water.

Economy isn't better because individual cars have better economy - the improvement is meaninglessly small and automatically compensated for by higher fuel prices, largely brought on exactly because cars spend less. Accident rates don't go down because of safer cars, because there are more of them, being driven more recklessly. It doesn't make any difference whether your entertainment comes from the local FM channel or from a USB library. And so forth.

My point is, you have no idea what discoveries or innovation could have happened in those 8 years. It can't be predicted, regardless of political climate.

True enough. But we hear of none that would make starships faster, and that was the point being brought forth: that the Romulan Neutral Zone went from being far away to being not so far away in those eight years, without anything explaining the change. No other parts of the galaxy suddenly moved closer to Earth, so a change in starship speed doesn't serve as an explanation here.

On the other hand, there's no particular need to worry about this. Even if the RNZ is behind a long commlag in "The Defector", and it only takes days at most to fly from there to Earth in ST:FC, these things are not in inherent conflict. It might just be that this area of space enjoys poor communications (Romulan jamming?); it doesn't follow that it should be far away in starship-hours!

As for ST5:TFF, if we explain the travel to Sha Ka Ree with Cytherian technology, then it's easy to argue that going to the center of the galaxy takes decades. It's not as if "Magicks of Megas-Tu" would have featured our heroes actually going there. They just observed the center, for which it should suffice that they get a good vantage point - quite possibly tens of thousands of lightyears distant from their target.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

^It looked like a big red wireframe jellybean in Wrath of Khan

No. I'm talking about in-universe years. It's over 70 years passed between episodes. Technology obviously changed.

I think you're confusing the TOS episode "Balance of Terror" with the TNG episode "The Neutral Zone". It's 8 years in-universe between that episode and the movie Star Trek: First Contact.

Yes, you're right. However, what I said still holds. 8 years is a long time for technology to change. Microsoft Windows doesn't even stay the same after 2 or 3 years.

That is true. I could imagine a communications breakthough, or perhaps an expansion of a Federation-wide instant communications network to encompass the Romulan border between TNG S1 and FC. But the superquick warp jump to Earth (I find it hard to believe that days passed in that scene break) is a little harder to reconcile, unless the Enterprise-E is significantly faster than the -D.

 

[USS Excelsior]

It's also the centre of the galaxy connection.

 

[Timo]

I could imagine a communications breakthough, or perhaps an expansion of a Federation-wide instant communications network to encompass the Romulan border between TNG S1 and FC. But the superquick warp jump to Earth (I find it hard to believe that days passed in that scene break) is a little harder to reconcile, unless the Enterprise-E is significantly faster than the -D.

Umm, that's more an eye-of-the-beholder thing, really. We get no instant communications between Earth and the RNZ, or any other location and the RNZ, in ST:FC. We merely get messages that reach the RNZ after spending an unknown amount of time in transit.

And the time it takes the E-E to get from the RNZ to Earth is never stated. It may be minutes, it may be hours, it may be weeks. All we know is that the same people are at the bridge stations at departure from RNZ and arrival to Earth, but we could say the same about just about any departure and arrival in TOS... The Alpha Shift might have gone to get some sleep a couple of times between those.

Timo Saloniemi