DTI: Why is Kirk considered the worst violator?

In DTI, Kirk is considered the worst starfleet violator of temporal rules in the agency's history. Yet a cursory example of Trek canon suggests that that distinction probably belongs to Picard and the crew of the Enterprise-D (at least until Voyager comes home).

I know that the books focus on this because of the throw away line from DS9. However, even by that episode, Picard and his crew had already passed Kirk in terms of numbers of temporal and transdimensional incursions. So is the description of Kirk even fair given that the captains that cam after him were far worse?

Question: In Watching the Clock, we learn that the DTI has chrono shielded records that allows them to determine if the timeline has been tampered with. Do these records include the records of altered timelines? For instance, in "Yesterday's Enterprise" history is drastically altered yet is restored by the end of the episode. Would DTI records include both the regular history plus data about the altered history?

One wonders how those shielded records work anyway. If those records are constantly monitored for discontinuities with outside history, unexplainable errors have to show up all the time given the ease of time travel by the 24th century. One wonders if DTI was aware of the crazy timeline involved in first contact with the Borg. Indeed, you'd think that with all the meddling in time that Voyager engaged in, DTI alarms must have been going off all the time without any real knowledge of the cause. (The events of Future's End probably resulted in quite a bit of head scratching...especially if they found the footage of the unidentified Intrepid Class starship). Of course, the may also have their records periodically reviewed by uptime agencies to at least let them know that a discontinuity problem can/will be explained at some point.

 

unknown... since the series has only just started really, with one book published and a second due soon, they could simply have more to add to the records later on with Picard's temporal transgressions not being on record yet...

This is one set i've actually been meaning to get but haven't had the chance yet... is it worth it?

M

 

This is touched upon in DTI: Forgotten History. In fact, it's a major point of the book.

If it doesn't explicitly say that the chronologically-shielded records include records from alternate timelines, I would presume not. Though we do know from DTI: Forgotten History that the DTI has records made from early attempts to study history through the Guardian of Forever, before the Department itself was actually founded.

Not necessarily. Very early on, DTI: Watching the Clock establishes that often, alternate timelines are created and then collapse back into the main timeline.

You haven't finished reading Watching the Clock, have you?

 

I have actually...but freely admit that I probably have forgotten that point of discussion.

 

They debriefed Captain Picard about the events of Star Trek: First Contact in Watching the Clock.

 

Picard surpassed Kirk in the number of violations depicted onscreen. But the majority of Kirk's years in command of the Enterprise were not depicted onscreen. Lucsly said in "Trials and Tribble-ations" that Kirk was credited with "eventeen separate temporal violations. The biggest file on record." Lucsly is not a man prone to imprecision. Since the number of Kirk's time-travel adventures onscreen is significantly below seventeen, it follows that there are multiple instances still unaccounted for. (Two of which have been filled in by the literature within the past few months.)

Credit where it's due: The shielded records were established in "Gods, Fate, and Fractals" by William Leisner in Strange New Worlds II. Presumably they contain whatever was entered into them by DTI agents and staff, which then remains unaltered when the timeline changes. Whether information from an altered timeline is entered depends, I suppose, on whether the DTI continues to exist within that altered timeline, but it would probably only include new information entered following the moment of alteration and would not be retroactive (since the records are shielded from the kind of merger of overlapping pasts that would affect the rest of the universe).

Well, that's the whole reason the records exist: to notify the DTI when history has been altered so that they can investigate it and try to determine the source so that the alteration can be repaired. Sometimes it may be unexplainable, but it's still their job to try to explain it.

Unlikely, since all the time travel there happened between the 2170s and the distant past, and the shielded records didn't come into use until the 24th century. They're a temporally secure storage medium for the Department's records and files. Once information is entered into them, that information is safe from erasure due to subsequent alterations of the timeline. But they reveal nothing about past alterations.

Not necessarily, since the events in the Delta Quadrant would've usually had little effect on events in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants. Again, this isn't something like Bogg's pocketwatch from the old show Voyagers, a magic sensor that goes bleep whenever history goes off course; it's just a secure file server. It preserves records and documentation and scans for inconsistencies between those shielded records and the records stored in other Federation computers. So it can't reveal alterations in events the Federation has no documentation about.

See above -- it's not retroactive.

An event that was initially alluded to in Section 31: Rogue by Andy Mangels & Mike Martin. I included it to be consistent with what they had already established.

 

I suspect that, if one counts events from novels too, Kirk still has a great many more temporal incidents (though not necessarily violations) to his name or command than Picard or Janeway. Entropy Effect, Killing Time, Crossroad, Home is the Hunter, First Frontier, Assignment: Eternity, The Janus Gate, Ishmael, Yesterday's Son, Return to Yesterday, Federation, Engines of Destiny.... although I suspect the DTI are blissfully unaware of most of those. Kirk himself too, for that matter!

And about the shielded records, didn't Voyager's "Year of Hell" establish in a roundabout way (i.e. with a gigantic death ray) that a big enough change in the timeline can overwhelm temporal shields, if they're not strong enough? Those shielded records may not be as accurate as everyone at DTI thinks.

 

One more thing in reply to Gotham Central:

This is an overstatement. We did see a lot of time travel episodes in the 24th-century series, but unlike TOS, we never saw anyone just give an order to slingshot around a star and pop into the past, or use a time machine created by their own civilization. Time travel was pretty much always the result of cosmic anomalies ("Time Squared," "Yesterday's Enterprise," Generations, "Children of Time," "Eye of the Needle," "Shattered"), freak accidents or circumstances ("Past Tense," "Visionary," "Little Green Men," "Time and Again," "Before and After"), the intervention of groups or individuals from the future ("Captain's Holiday," "A Matter of Time," "Firstborn," "Future's End," "Relativity," "Endgame"), the intervention of advanced aliens (any Q time-travel episode, "Time's Arrow," "Accession," "Year of Hell," "Fury"), or the use of ancient alien artifacts ("Trials and Tribble-ations," "Wrongs Darker than Death or Night," "Time's Orphan"). There's no canonical evidence that anyone in the 24th century has controllable, repeatable time-travel technology except the Devidians (whose time machine was destroyed) and Anorrax (ditto). Unless you count the Bajoran Orb of Time, which presumably is impossible to duplicate.

So controllable time travel is not actually easy to achieve in the 24th century -- although you could make a case that it's easy to stumble into by accident. But part of what I tried to do in Forgotten History was to explain why time travel seemed so much more "easy" for Kirk and his ship(s) than it was for later generations.

Well, not all those books still "happened" in the modern continuity. A lot of them have inconsistencies with subsequent canon or with one another. It's the usual TOS problem: there are far too many books and comics to fit into a 5-year mission, and deciding which ones "count" is subjective.

Different kind of shielding. "Gods, Fate, and Fractals" established that the records were protected by phase discriminators (a variant of the tech used to cross between temporal domains in "Time's Arrow" and "Timescape").

 

^you did mention "the Clan Ru incident" in WTC though, so apparently that counts...

 

The Enterprise didn't seem to have any problem returning to the present in First Contact. It didn't even seem to be a big deal. We may not hear about time travel as much because it's commonplace.

In Past Tense the Defiant is able to duplicate the time travel transporter accident that first sent Sisko, Dax and Bashir to the past. Why bother sending a whole ship around the sun when you can time travel from the comfort of your own office?

 

Yes, there's nothing in First Frontier that's been overtly contradicted by canon, as far as I can discern, so it "counts" as far as I'm concerned. Plus it's just an awesome book. Star Trek and dinosaurs? What's not to love?

I also referenced Crossover and the Gary Seven novels in WTC and The Rings of Time in FH.

If it were commonplace, the timeline would be in utter chaos. Therefore, it's very unlikely that it's commonplace.

I prefer to believe that the Borg's time travel simply left some lingering connection that the Enterprise was able to access. To use the parlance that was introduced in the Millennium trilogy and that I alluded to in WTC, they simply returned along the pre-existing Feynman curve, which is easier than creating a new one.

Only to a limited extent, as we were explicitly told in dialogue.

The chroniton accumulation on the ship was what made the time travel possible, but it was a freak circumstance. Just because they were able to take advantage of the effect while it lingered, that doesn't mean they could recreate it at will.

Anyway, it's best not to take any of this too literally. This is fiction, after all. Time travel is a plot device. If the story calls for it to be easy to time travel, then it will be easy -- for the duration of the story. After that, it will be conveniently impractical again, until the next time-travel story comes along. After all, if time travel were easy and casual, any problem or mistake or tragedy could be fixed effortlessly, and there'd be no drama or suspense. So dramatically, time travel needs to be an unavailable option, except in those specific instances where the story needs time travel.

So if one wants to reconcile those different takes on time travel as a plot device, to pretend there's a consistent reality underlying it all, it's most feasible to assume that time travel is actually quite difficult or rare, and that the appearance of ease in certain episodes is misleading or situational. The premise that time travel is easy and routine is a bad fit to the preponderance of evidence and to the overall dramatic requirements of the franchise.

 

I notice you did not mention Endsha...I mean Endgame. Admiral Jane way had no problem stealing a time machine and attaching it to a shuttle...and that's the late 24th century.

 

Something else that occurred to me: These shielded records, surely many timelines will have their own versions, recorded fron their version of history and shielded? I mean, it's not like the so-called Prime timeline is in any way free of interference from the future. Where is the line drawn as to what gets left and what gets fixed? If someone came across shielded records from a pre-TCW or even pre-Guardian version of history, would they be obliged to undo the entirety of Trek in order to restore it?

Of course, this may be answered in "Forgotten History", which I'm still waiting on.

 

Actually, it's the early 25th century, 2404 to be precise. And as I acknowledged in Watching the Clock, Korath's chrono-deflector is the first practical time machine known to be invented by any of the major Alpha/Beta Quadrant powers, i.e. the first device specifically intended as a means of temporal travel (rather than an alteration of a warp engine under the influence of some cosmic phenomenon). At least, it's the first since the Devidians' time technology was destroyed.

That question has already been addressed in Watching the Clock with regard to how the uptime agencies dealt with Admiral Janeway's temporal intervention. That alteration of history led to the existence of the version of the Federation that they belong to, therefore they acted to preserve that alteration rather than correcting it.

The DTI is basically the same way. Remember, they're a department of the government of the UFP. That means their job is to serve the interests of the UFP and preserve its existence and integrity. They have no hope of discovering or erasing every temporal alteration ever introduced, and indeed they arguably shouldn't, because at least some degree of retrocausality (events from the future shaping events in the past) may well be an intrinsic part of the workings of the universe. The only goal they can practically serve is the preservation of their own civilization, and specifically their own version thereof. As government employees, their responsibility is to the government that employs them, i.e. the UFP of the Prime timeline.

Remember -- the shielded records don't come into use until the latter half of the 24th century.

 

And recall that the Enterprise's return to the 24th century after First Contact wasn't easy at all. Kang the Conqueror, anyone? :P

 

The chroniton accumulation was a normal effect of the cloaking device.

So they know how to produce chronitons (cloaking device) and they know how to capture them (ablative armor). One small ship managed to send people into the past a number of times by design and once by accident. What could Starfleet accomplish with a bit of R&D?

There's basically two types of time travel, if it's "meant to be" then you travel to the past and return to your "proper" time afterwards. If it's "not meant to be" then you travel to a new universe and are stuck there (Trek09). All the rest is just window dressing. Putting too much thought into time travel just causes the flaws to show. I just accept that they travel in time as needed and that it's fairly commonplace. If it's "meant to be" then the universe doesn't change permanently and there's nothing for DTI to do except do some interviews fill out some forms. If it's of the Trek09 variety then the people just disappear and you fill out a missing person report. It's not like Trek has ever worked out the actual physics of time travel.

 

But obviously they didn't, so it must've been more difficult than the episode made it sound. Why are you trying to argue in favor of a notion -- that time travel is easy and routine -- that is obviously not true within the Trek universe as depicted?

Unless you can think of ways to remedy them. When I researched real quantum physics for DTI: Watching the Clock, I found that a lot of the seeming absurdities of Trek time travel aren't nearly as absurd as I thought.

Which is exactly why I wrote a book that did.

 

But it's never seemed very difficult when our heroes do it, going all the way back to The Original Series. In First Contact, it was a simple matter of re-calibrating the warp field and the Enterprise was able to recreate a Borg time vortex.

Spoiler: Forgotten History

I'm about halfway through Forgotten History, but I'm just having an incredibly hard time buying all these Starfleet warp specialists can't recreate the conditions that allowed the Enterprise to slingshot around the sun. It seems unlikely the Spock or Scott would be able to hide some key component of the procedure for long based on the telemetry from the Enterprise computers.

 

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Time_travel_episodes

TOS - 5
TAS - 1 (although I'd include The Counter Clock incident and Jihad)
TNG - 12
DS9 - 11
VOY - 12
ENT - 9
Movies - 4
-----------
Total - 58 (or 60 with the two TAS added)

And that's just for 5 ships/crews. What about the rest of Starfleet not to mention the Klingons, Romulans, Tholians, etc? Add the novels and people are popping through time fairly regularly.

Kirk & company did it in an old Klingon ship with Spock's faulty memory to guide them and a guess on the trip back. O'Brien didn't even need a specialized machine, just a handy cloaked Romulan ship. Spock and Nero did it with nothing more than a drop of Red Matter (and we don't know just how long the Vulcans have been sitting on that stuff. Perhaps they've been using it to travel for years or decades). Yesteryear showed casual use of the Guardian for not one trip but two. Quark even used a small warp shuttle and an atomic bomb, no Spock calculations needed. What would stop Quark from paying someone to build him a few primitive atomic devices, perhaps modified to make time travel easier, and poking around in the past?

Check out Timemaster by Robert L. Forward sometime. It's even got a technical appendix.

 

Asked and answered. Yes, in the context of the movie it was convenient to treat the return as easy, because a movie needs to be compact and the climax of the film had already happened, so it would've been dramatically inappropriate to waste time on explaining the difficulties of arranging a return journey. But it would undermine the drama of the entire franchise as a whole if time travel were that easy in every story, so we must assume that it wasn't actually as easy as it looked, or that it was only easy due to the particular unique circumstances that existed at that time (for instance, if the time vortex created by the Borg hadn't entirely dispersed yet and was fairly easy to reopen for a short period of time).

It's actually quite logical that the slingshot effect would be difficult to pull off. Not only is it dramatically and logically necessary if we don't want the timeline to degenerate into chaos (because if slingshotting were easy, any idiot with a warp shuttle could wipe out all recorded history on a drunken dare), but it's consistent with what actual physics says about the principle. The mechanism that Star Trek calls the slingshot effect was described by physicist Frank Tipler in a seminal 1974 paper (notably, ST got there first by seven years), and the physics behind it has been the subject of many research papers in the decades since. According to General Relativity, such a time warp (indeed, pretty much any time warp) would have a divergent stress-energy tensor -- effectively a runaway feedback effect that would cause it to emit ever-increasing radiation and vaporize anything that tried to pass through, or just collapse the warp itself the instant anything tried to pass through. (So when I mentioned this in the DTI novels, I wasn't making it up. It's the real deal.)

So the needs of storytelling and simple logic dictate that slingshots shouldn't be easy, and the laws of physics conveniently agree that they should be next to impossible. So I had plenty of very good reason to go with that assumption. TOS portrayed it as easy because that served the particular stories they were telling those weeks, but it better serves the continuity as a whole to assume it isn't easy. After all, we have never seen a 24th-century starship crew attempt a slingshot maneuver. There has to be a reason for that, and physics provides one. It makes sense to assume that the ability of Kirk's crew to compute a successful slingshot effect was rare. Yes, it's implausible that nobody else was able to replicate it, but the alternative is far more implausible for multiple reasons.

You know, you'd be a lot less handicapped in this conversation if you'd actually read my novels. For that matter, you'd be a lot less handicapped if you'd actually pay attention to the earlier posts I've already made in this thread. What you're ignoring, and what I've already pointed out, is that most of the time travels listed there were due to cosmic phenomena, alien intervention, future time travellers' intervention, and accidents rather than the controlled, replicable efforts of the Starfleet characters themselves. I've already spelled out the reasons why it's only sensible to treat time travel as rare and difficult, so most time-travel episodes are predicated on making the time travel result from circumstances that are not easily replicated. Stories that fail to do so, that make it seem easy, are thereby making a mistake or an oversight. It's nothing to be embraced.

I read that book over a decade ago, thank you very much. And if you were acquainted with Watching the Clock's appendix, you'd know how much other research I did, both in hard SF and real physics, in putting together the book. Many of my sources are also listed in my annotations for WTC.