Did The Original Nomad Have Warp Drive?

[T'Girl]

Or some other type of FTL propulsion? Nomad was a prototype probe launched in the early 2000s, it was the first Human interstellar probe to seek new life-forms. Could it truly be considered a "interstellar probe" if it was restricted to sublight speeds? True every few thousand years it could examine a new star system, but that might take a while.

When it comes to first warp flight, most think of Cochrane's, but perhaps Nomad was a unmanned warp flight? When people think of the first lunar landing, usually they think of Apollo 11, and not the first unmanned landing of Luna 9 (a Russian probe). People tend to remember the first crewed things.

Magnetohydrodynamics (I believe magnetohydodynamic is a misspelling) is the study of the dynamics of electrically conducting fluids. Examples of such fluids would include plasma, plasma is usually seen as how power is transferred from the reactor/core to the warp coils.

 

[BK613]

Magnetohydrodynamic vernier pulse...M Pulse?

 

[Timo]

If 20th century science could build these crewed spacecraft that supposedly got to more than a hundred lightyears away from Earth in a couple of centuries, 21st century science probably could build a probe that got to a range of interesting nearby stars in 50-100 years. Practicable enough IMHO, comparable to Project Daedalus that the BIS dreamed up without access to gravity manipulation technology.

I'd personally leave warp out of NOMAD - but it's possible that what it (and the Botany Bay and the Ares) had was closely related to the eventual warp breakthrough. It's certainly much better than anything we could imagine having in the next century or two.

People tend to remember the first crewed things.

Publicity counts, too: many think Lindbergh was the first to fly across the Atlantic.

While "Metamorphosis" makes no suggestion that Cochrane's original achievement would be surrounded by myth and mystery, our TNG heroes appear surprised enough by several of the ST:FC revelations. It's possible, then, that much of the work on FTL drives in the 21st century has been forgotten and Cochrane's "man-rating" is considered such a big milestone that "the creation of warp drive" is personified in him even in the minds of educated people.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Nebusj]

I'd personally leave warp out of NOMAD - but it's possible that what it (and the Botany Bay and the Ares) had was closely related to the eventual warp breakthrough. It's certainly much better than anything we could imagine having in the next century or two.

Well, I note that Voyager 6 --- which presumably launched in the late 70s or early 80s --- disappeared into what they ``used to call'' a black hole, and that it appeared in another star system was not by itself surprising. Could it be that after experiences like Voyager 6's, small black-hole-like anomalies linking Earth to other star systems were found and Nomad was designed to travel along those?

 

[F. King Daniel]

Probably fell through the same black hole as V'ger, and like in ST'09 emerged elsewhere and elsewhen.

 

[Timo]

Well, NOMAD was supposed to report back, a feat unlikely to be accomplished through the putative black hole method. And when it was considered lost, this was blamed on a meteoroid storm, rather than a black hole; how could there be data suggesting a meteoroid storm after the first black hole entry (if black holes are to be our explanation for the interstellar distance the probe traveled)?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[BK613]

I wouldn't mind seeing some kind of technological linkage between Nomad's propulsion and the end of sleeper ship usage in 2018.

Then again, I would have preferred a ST history where Cochrane is Einstein instead of Oppenheimer, i.e, a discoverer of a physics that led to a host of revolutionary technologies (antigrav, inertia suppression, warp drive) rather than the FC character.

 

[Timo]

The ST:FC character is quite a bit like the Wright brothers - they didn't need to invent anything, but their effort definitely was needed to put together the existing knowledge in physical form, after which it was also quite practical for them personally to test it out.

In the 2050s, there supposedly would be enough technology around that anybody with the time and other resources to spare could combine it into things like teleporters, warp drives, shields, phasers or time machines. Then WWIII would intervene, with only some percentage of this potential tapped, and the rest sort of left floating around.

There would be a hundred inventors for the separate underlying technologies, but quite possibly only one inventor per actual application, due to the circumstances:

1) so much goodies around that various lone welding-gunmen can at least on occasion outrun big corporations in the race to get specific items completed, even if the corporations complete 90% of the items
2) WWIII isolates inventors
3) the aftermath allows all the lawyers to finally be killed

Timo Saloniemi

 

[BK613]

The Wright's innovation wasn't in flying but in the way to control the flight, an approach that flew in the face conventional wisdom with its goal of stable flight. So there was more than just putting it all together. They experimented and reasoned it out.

They do resemble the FC character in one regard: I can easily imagine that Cochrane defending any patent/IP rights as vigorously as the Wrights. Very Apple-like, they were.

Anyway, I was expressing a personal preference.

 

[Wingsley]

I guess part of this discussion depends on how one interprets the use of "early 2000's" to describe NOMAD's launch from Earth. Does that mean it was launched in the decade from 2000 to 2010? or does it mean the first half of the 21st century?

Also: why would NOMAD need warp drive? If NOMAD had an early impulse drive, or some other advanced sub-light propulsion, it could travel at velocities that would allow Jackson Roykirk's probe to reach nearby stars in years or decades, not millennia.

 

[Ithekro]

Or it had a basic prototype Alcubierre-White style warp drive.

 

[T'Girl]

I guess part of this discussion depends on how one interprets the use of "early 2000's" to describe NOMAD's launch from Earth. Does that mean it was launched in the decade from 2000 to 2010? or does it mean the first half of the 21st century?

The Nomad schematic shown in the episode included "Probe 2002 -45b Nomad MK - 15c" the 2002 could refer to the manufacture or launch year. I tend to think early 2000's meant shortly after the year 2000.

Also: why would NOMAD need warp drive? If NOMAD had an early impulse drive, or some other advanced sub-light propulsion ...

Lt. McGivers said in Space Seed that sleeper ships were necessary until about the year 2018, because prior to that it took years just to travel from one planet to another. Now a probe and a larger ship aren't the same thing , but it doesn't sound like the early 2000's spacecraft possessed unusually fast sublight propulsion.

 

[Timo]

The Nomad schematic shown in the episode included "Probe 2002 -45b Nomad MK - 15c" the 2002 could refer to the manufacture or launch year. I tend to think early 2000's meant shortly after the year 2000.

The Mk number, especially with the letter specifier, suggests a long series of probes having been designed (if not actually launched); who knows, perhaps the -45 in turn means the 45th probe launched in the year 2002? We know the space program in that universe was a busy one, and if interplanetary crewed missions were zipping back and forth already in some quantity, annual probe launches in the hundreds would also appear likely.

NOMAD was uniquely identified by name, suggesting (but not confirming) that other probes of similar design carried different proper names. Alternately, NOMAD might have been a long series, and the one that was lost and ended the series got individually identified with the project name.

The particular NOMAD our heroes deal with is also famous for being the first to search for extraterrestrial life - apparently by virtue of being the first with an onboard AI dedicated to that task. Earlier probes in the NOMAD series might have operated with pretty much the same equipment but without the AI, hence being incapable of conducting a practical SETI mission.

Why all the semantic wrangling? Well, if NOMAD is a series, then 2002 need not be the launch year of this particular probe, but might rather be the year the series got started (designwise or launchwise). It would still probably mean that the advanced drive got introduced in 2002 already, though.

Lt. McGivers said in Space Seed that sleeper ships were necessary until about the year 2018, because prior to that it took years just to travel from one planet to another. Now a probe and a larger ship aren't the same thing , but it doesn't sound like the early 2000's spacecraft possessed unusually fast sublight propulsion.

The issue with this is the amazing performance of the Botany Bay. In just a couple of hundred years, she got so far into deep space that modern 23rd century warp traffic doesn't reach her any more (yes, yes, it has moved to even deeper space, but the inevitable busy swarming near Earth clearly doesn't extend to the Mutara neighborhood, either).

The 1990s or more probably 1980s vintage DY-100 thus does possess something of a superdrive. Perhaps not one of high acceleration, but of constant and sustainable acceleration? That would give slow interplanetary but high interstellar speed...

Superdrives would appear inevitable anyway for a civilization that has learned how to manipulate gravity aboard its spacecraft, as seen on the DY-100 design. Unless we insist that the Botany Bay was highly customized by Khan and his genius cohorts, and our heroes don't realize this because McGivers isn't keen to point it out to them.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[T'Girl]

The 1990s or more probably 1980s vintage DY-100 thus does possess something of a superdrive.

Unless the Enterprise encountered the Botany Bay somewhere in our own solar system's Oort Cloud, the Enterprise then towed the Botany Bay for some distance at warp speed toward the command base Kirk mentioned.

When all is said and done the ship is back in Starfleet hands and in the general area of Ceti Alpha.

Or not, YMMV.

If it was located in the inner reaches of the Oort Cloud, then the ship moved about five hundred billion miles in two and a half centuries. Call it a average 65 miles per second , Khan would want enough fuel to bring it to a halt at what ever destination he eventually choose.

 

[Dukhat]

Or perhaps it was Tan Ru that possessed warp capability and merged with Nomad near Earth's solar system, since Nomad in TOS looks nothing like that schematic the OP posted.

 

[Timo]

Khan broadcast a beacon signal, perhaps to lure in ships he could hijack. It would stretch credibility that Kirk's would be the only ship in Sol's Oort cloud to come close enough to the siren song, when thousands if not millions of warp sorties must have zoomed through that region in whichever direction. No, this region of space "abandoned by Earth/Federation traffic" must be sized by warp criteria, thus necessarily situated far away from Earth.

Plus, the later events show that our heroes and villains are outside the immediate influence of Starfleet proper. Granted, Starfleet always seems to be underrepresented near Earth, but I don't see any merit to forcing the "Space Seed" events into the immediate neighborhood of Earth... If it all took place that close, why didn't Khan sail directly to Earth to take it over? Why didn't Kirk hop to Earth? Why didn't he phone Starfleet Command with his handset?

As for NOMAD being intercepted within the Sol system... Quite possibly so. But NOMAD would still supposedly be fast enough to get out of Sol on her own and reach other star systems fairly quickly, or else its mission of finding eetees would have been somewhat futile. What organization would wait for millennia to get results, when delaying the launch by mere decades would no doubt result in a much faster probe?

Incidentally, those curved panels found on NOMAD and some TNG era probes look suspiciously like components of a Vulcan warp drive... Perhaps early Terran research was onto something important already.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[drt]

I recall some fandom (or perhaps novel) based hypothesis for all of the sublight objects that ended up hundreds of light years from earth. Starships exiting the Sol system occasionally snagged other objects in their warp fields and inadvertently dragged them away from Earth for some period at superluminal speeds. (I'd assume this was inspired by the asteroid being pulled into the wormhole created by Enterprise's malfunctioning warp drive in TMP.)

 

[BK613]

On the 2002-045b, that follows the format of and can be presumed to be a NSSDC ID number (sometimes called COSPAR number), a catalog of which can be found here.

Rosetta, for example, has COSPAR number 2004-006A.

 

[Ithekro]

Older star charts tend to place the Mutara Nebula on the far side of the Federation. But this begs a question, where would one normally operate cadets on a training cruise and a highly valuable research station? That it seems can be reached within a day or so from Earth judging by Enterprise's trips to the region. Especially the short trip in Star Trek III when it didn't even seem like it was a full day between leaving Earth and arriving at Genesis, or even Vulcan for that matter.

Alpha Ceti (an actual star) is only about 250 light years from Sol.

 

[Timo]

Let's remember that we are not witnessing a normal cadet training cruise in ST2 - we're witnessing Sulu taking Kirk on a birthday ride...

Sulu was told to indulge himself, and we don't know why this prompted him to take the ship to a location where she was the closest ship to the secretive Regula I laboratory in the seldom-visited Mutara Sector (save for the Reliant whose Genesis-related whereabouts apparently were not part of open Starfleet records, as the ship's presence took Kirk by complete surprise). Probably it was sheer chance, rather than a deliberate attempt by Sulu to take Kirk to see his old flame or revisit Khan or anything like that. But these factors have to be taken to account when speculating on the location of the Mutara Sector.

As for ST3, the speeds involved would have been very different - not a birthday cruise but an emergency dash. With warp drive, the latter might be thousands of times faster than the former. ST2 poses no real limits on how long it took for the Enterprise to go from Earth to being practically next to Regula I, but we can speculate on several days and perhaps even a week or more. Certainly Kirk would enjoy as prolonged a cruise as possible.

As for Alpha Ceti, there's no star of that name in Star Trek. What we have there is Ceti Alpha, which we might well take to be the phonetic alphabet expression for Ceti A, a standard way to designate the dominant partner in a multi-star tryst. All we have to speculate, then, is that whenever our Trek heroes mention unrealistically short star names, they're truncating: Ceti A is shorthand for something like Sigma Ceti A.

This makes sense: constellations such as Cetus are vast things, seldom closely clustered in three dimensions. Even a fast starship would always find herself in spatial context that would make it redundant to say Sigma Ceti A - say, when all the other stars of Cetus are more distant from the ship than the nearest stars from other constellations, a likely situation in reality.

Sure, Ceti Alpha may well be Alpha Ceti A (even though Alpha Ceti to current knowledge isn't a binary, our heroes may know better). But a less prominent or even completely fictional star from the constellation might fit the bill better.

COSPAR number

Fascinating. (And does this mean NOMAD was the payload of a separate, shuttle-like delivery system? As per the b?)

Timo Saloniemi