DTI: Why is Kirk considered the worst violator?

[RPJOB]

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Except that the slingshot effect is relatively easy to pull off. It happened to the Enterprise once by accident and then they used it 5 times, once to get back the first time and twice for two way travel. Spock computed it so well in his mind that not only did they end up right when they needed but they crashed right outside Starfleet's front door. No mention was made of excessive radiation. Attempting to say that Trek actually worked out a divergent stress-energy tensor before a physicist did is just retconning. They just needed a way for the ship and crew to get into the past. It's about as realistic as the method the Planet Express ship used in Roswell that Ends Well. It comes down to "We need to get to the past. Start your calculations for time travel. <poof>. We're there." Welding the fictional requirements of treknology onto theoretical physics is trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. If they need to travel in time for the story then they'll travel in time.

My point of listing the time travel episodes was simply to show that it's not a rare occurrence regardless of how it's accomplished. If the Enterprise-D/E crew travelled through time a dozen times (more counting the novels) is it unlikely that other ships haven't as well? Perhaps more, perhaps less but it's likely that a large percentage of Starfleet have travelled at least once in their careers. There's more going on in the galaxy than just the episodes we see. Claiming that time travel MUST be difficult and we're only seeing the times that the crew aren't killed off by radiation makes no sense. If Picard can do it so can another captain. Trek has shown us multiple times that time travel is not unusual and at times it's even relatively simple to pull off.

I read the first DTI novel. I haven't read the second one yet but I don't feel handicapped in the least either way. Your "rules" on time travel will last exactly as long as we don't get another time travel episode or movie or novel (assuming the writer of the novel doesn't feel constrained by your time travel rules.) It seems to me that you're putting a lot of effort into explaining something that doesn't need to be explained. Strictly my opinion of course. Many other people here disagree. After all, it's ALL make believe.

 

[Christopher]

Except that the slingshot effect is relatively easy to pull off. It happened to the Enterprise once by accident and then they used it 5 times, once to get back the first time and twice for two way travel.

You just keep repeating the same arguments that I've already responded to in depth. If you're not interested in listening, why are you even participating in a conversation?

In addition to the arguments I've thoroughly spelled out already, you are incorrect to claim that it was "easy" in the cases you cite. "Tomorrow is Yesterday" showed quite clearly that the slingshot effect was extremely dangerous and almost tore apart the ship, as well as blacking out the crew. In The Voyage Home, it was portrayed as similarly difficult, requiring the ship's engines and shields to be pushed to their limits, and again blacking out the crew. On their return trip, the Bounty suffered so much damage that it was out of control and had to make a crash landing. "Assignment: Earth" did not portray the actual time travel so we don't know how difficult it actually was; but it would be logical to assume it was just as turbulent as in the other two canonical cases. So no, it was hardly easy.

Claiming that time travel MUST be difficult and we're only seeing the times that the crew aren't killed off by radiation makes no sense. If Picard can do it so can another captain. Trek has shown us multiple times that time travel is not unusual and at times it's even relatively simple to pull off.

Again, I've already explained why it does make sense, in the context of the overwhelming majority of ST episodes that are not about time travel.

 

[RPJOB]

I guess you missed the part in TVH where Kirk asked "Where are we?" We then heard the sound of the Probe, the probe that knocked out power to ships, spacedock, Earth. They weren't damaged, their power was turned off by the probe.

The first time was an accident and the ship wasn't prepared for it. The other times was mych less traumatic for ship and crew. Perhaps the hallucinations from TVH are a normal part of travelling backwards in time. We do hear snippets of conversation before they happen. Just because the crew is disoriented doesn't mean they were in danger. Nobody fell out of their seats. The ride was a little rough. Sulu's jacket didn't even fall off his chair. We saw something vibrate off a console and a panel break by Uhura. The ship wasn't falling apart. The splashdown probably did more physical damage to it.

Of course the BoP was pushed to it's limit, it was a much smaller, much less powerful ship and yet, somehow, it managed to travel in time twice. If the Probe hadn't knocked out it's power they probably could have beamed down the whales and landed safely.

Are you saying that time travel must be difficult because not all the episodes feature it? It's not like catching a bus but it's not something that requires a huge amount of preparation. Fly a shuttle into an atomic explosion and voila! They didn't even have a science officer aboard Quark's ship.

I would say that the vast majority of time travel attempts are of the "not part of history" type and therefore the people simply transfer to a new universe and don't come back. If they travel to the future then they're travelling back to the future of THAT universe. To our eyes they simply disappear near the sun or in an atomic explosion or whatever handwave method they choose. In any case, to us, they are gone, never to return. However, given Starfleet has thousands of ships I would imagine that there's a hundred or more trips through time each year, accidental or otherwise. There's no reason to restrict the trips to time to the adventures that we've seen. Do these other ships have nothing to do? Are they nothing but boring missions until they meet the Enterprise (or Defiant or Voyager) and then they're destroyed? Surely some of them, if not the vast majority, have adventures just as exciting as the broadcast episodes.

I would imagine that every time a ship travels through time the SCE is on the scene shortly thereafter, going over the ship and any alien technology or phenomenon or whatever with a fine toothed comb. Starfleet must have a huge amount of data on how time travel works. (Very well, thank you </Okuda>)

 

[BillJ]

I know your background Christopher and I appreciate the work you put into explaining it. But thus far, I've found your explanation on not being able to duplicate it dramatically unsatisfying.

 

[Sci]

I know your background Christopher and I appreciate the work you put into explaining it. But thus far, I've found your explanation on not being able to duplicate it dramatically unsatisfying.

I, on the other hand, have found it very dramatically satisfying, and far more persuasive than "oh, it's actually really easy."

 

[Christopher]

I know your background Christopher and I appreciate the work you put into explaining it. But thus far, I've found your explanation on not being able to duplicate it dramatically unsatisfying.

Well, that's understandable. We're talking about a "universe" that's an agglomeration of different works of fiction by different people with different goals -- and in particular, works of fiction from a series produced in an era when continuity was not considered particularly important in series television. We're also dealing with time travel, a topic whose treatment in fiction is usually quite fanciful and rarely consistent. Sometimes there's only so much I can do to rationalize an inconsistency (like, for instance, Kirk using slingshots repeatedly but nobody else ever using them a century later). Sometimes the best I can come up with is an imperfect handwave. The goal is to sell the handwave well enough that the reader is willing to suspend disbelief. But it's called willing suspension for a reason, and not every reader will be convinced.

 

[Gotham Central]

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Except that the slingshot effect is relatively easy to pull off. It happened to the Enterprise once by accident and then they used it 5 times, once to get back the first time and twice for two way travel. Spock computed it so well in his mind that not only did they end up right when they needed but they crashed right outside Starfleet's front door. No mention was made of excessive radiation. Attempting to say that Trek actually worked out a divergent stress-energy tensor before a physicist did is just retconning. They just needed a way for the ship and crew to get into the past. It's about as realistic as the method the Planet Express ship used in Roswell that Ends Well. It comes down to "We need to get to the past. Start your calculations for time travel. <poof>. We're there." Welding the fictional requirements of treknology onto theoretical physics is trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. If they need to travel in time for the story then they'll travel in time.

My point of listing the time travel episodes was simply to show that it's not a rare occurrence regardless of how it's accomplished. If the Enterprise-D/E crew travelled through time a dozen times (more counting the novels) is it unlikely that other ships haven't as well? Perhaps more, perhaps less but it's likely that a large percentage of Starfleet have travelled at least once in their careers. There's more going on in the galaxy than just the episodes we see. Claiming that time travel MUST be difficult and we're only seeing the times that the crew aren't killed off by radiation makes no sense. If Picard can do it so can another captain. Trek has shown us multiple times that time travel is not unusual and at times it's even relatively simple to pull off.

I read the first DTI novel. I haven't read the second one yet but I don't feel handicapped in the least either way. Your "rules" on time travel will last exactly as long as we don't get another time travel episode or movie or novel (assuming the writer of the novel doesn't feel constrained by your time travel rules.) It seems to me that you're putting a lot of effort into explaining something that doesn't need to be explained. Strictly my opinion of course. Many other people here disagree. After all, it's ALL make believe.

Actually I think that there is ample on screen evidence that time travel is not exactly uncommon especially for people in Starfleet. Voyager gets caught in a temporal anomaly in the second episode of the series. We learn that its so common that not only does Starfleet have protocols for dealing with it, classes are taught on the subject at Starfleet Academy. That implies that this is something that officers in Starfleet a likely to experience. Its a good bet that if it were truly rare, the mere fact of the possibility would be classified. Yet, with the exception of the NX-01 crew, no one is ever really shocked about time travel.

 

[Christopher]

^In Starfleet, yes. But as Janeway said, in Starfleet, "weird is part of the job." It entails encountering things that most people never come across. And for the fifty zillionth time, it should be self-evident that if everyone could time-travel, the timeline would be in chaos. Despite the franchise's overuse of time travel as a plot device, it is infinitely preferable to treat it as rare and difficult, because it makes no damn sense if it isn't. I do not understand why that is so unclear.

 

[F. King Daniel]

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?

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.

I remember that scene - but in that instance, the galaxy was eventually doomed had the events of "Endgame" not taken place - and it still devastated poor Lucsly.

What if records indicated a far better present to the UFP we know? Not just a universe without a Borg invasion, but something orders of magnitude better than the 24th century paradise at it's best? Lucsly would probably have a stroke.

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

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

I know. But the novel is about time travel

 

[Therin of Andor]

But it's never seemed very difficult when our heroes do it, going all the way back to The Original Series.

They certainly seemed very relieved that the slingshot effect worked in ST IV. The Klingon ship looked like it was tearing itself apart.

 

[Krupp]

I think we're pulling apart a lot of strings here. From everything I've read about relativity, it doesn't seem a big stretch that time "travel" might be a common problem when travelling through space - As time and distance are such weird concepts when you get out of the atmosphere.

As to Trek continuity, I think that Christopher has done a great job in both DTI novels to create plausible explanations for past adventures. He has turned time travel from a tired plot device into a fun concept again, for me at least.

And when all is said and done Star Trek is a big, multi-faceted fictional universe that's nearly 50 years old. There's bound to be problems in the lore of it all, but I think that we can suspend our disbelief a little longer and make the assumption - as Christopher argues - that time travel is rare.

We can also presume, for example, that the ships and stories we see are the tip of an iceberg. I remember in the Dominion War books they had the story of tender ships, that resupply and repair other starships in the field. It was a nice nod, I think, to the idea that maybe 95% of Starfleet is a 'Hurry up and wait' organisation, and the crews we see represents the action compressed.

After all, it'd be a bit dull if week in, week out the stories were "Enterprise patrolling the neutral zone. Umm. Anyone know any good jokes?"

 

[RPJOB]

Most of the time travel we've seen has involved Starfleet because that's who the shows focus on. However, if a Ferengi bartender with his engineer brother can travel to the past and back again using nothing more than a load of kemacite and some beta radiation (basically electrons) then it's fairly obvious that there's nothing specific to time travel that requires Starfleet (special equipment, specific engine design, etc.) We know from TVH that Klingon ships are also capable of time travel with no special preparation beyond some calculations and perhaps a tweak of the engines.

Even using the Orb of Time simply consisted of opening the ark, looking at it for a few seconds and closing the ark again. Of course that's the TV shorthand version but it's obviously meant to be fairly straightforward.

Little Green Men is the point where I decided that time travel, while not commonplace, isn't as rare as some people say it is. It's just that a lot of people who time travel disappear into a new universe and aren't seen again. The prime universe is simply the one that people don't appear in when they travel to the past, it's the one that the alternate universes branch off of. If your time trip is "meant to be" then you stay in the same universe. Easy.

 

[captcalhoun]

the kemacite thing was also to do with sabotage of the ship's engines wasn't it?

 

[RPJOB]

No, Galia had sabotaged the engines so they couldn't drop out of warp. Rom vented the plasma into the cargo hold that just happened to be full of kemacite and that's what created the time warp. It obviously didn't destroy it all since the needed some to get back home. They needed the atomic bomb just for it's beta radiation. I would assume that you also need a warp field to actually make it work but a warp shuttle is enough.

Should time travel be difficult? Yes. It is difficult? No, not really. If the conditions for time travel can be created by accident then it should be relatively common. Not everyone is going to encounter it but it wouldn't be uncommon to know someone who's travelled through time. In one of the Shatnerverse novels there's even a convention for people who have travelled to the future.

 

[JD]

I think it's also worth pointing out that all of these time travel incidents we've seen are spread out over a period of 233 years, so even if there are more incidents we haven't heard of that's still only a relative handful of times over a very large period of time. You have to remember that what we've gotten is a very compressed version of a very long timeline, so things that seem to happen all the time in shows, tend to be much more spread out in universe. As for the 58 time travel episodes, if you look at the franchise as a whole, which consists of 727 film releases, not to mention hundreds of comics, novels, and audio stories that's less that 10% of the stories, so it's still not that common.

 

[BillJ]

I think it's also worth pointing out that all of these time travel incidents we've seen are spread out over a period of 233 years, so even if there are more incidents we haven't heard of that's still only a relative handful of times over a very large period of time. You have to remember that what we've gotten is a very compressed version of a very long timeline, so things that seem to happen all the time in shows, tend to be much more spread out in universe. As for the 58 time travel episodes, if you look at the franchise as a whole, which consists of 727 film releases, not to mention hundreds of comics, novels, and audio stories that's less that 10% of the stories, so it's still not that common.

But with thousands of Starfleet ships floating around, if every ship has 10% of it's missions dealing with some type of temporal event... you're talking about alot of people mucking about the timeline.

 

[Christopher]

But with thousands of Starfleet ships floating around, if every ship has 10% of it's missions dealing with some type of temporal event... you're talking about alot of people mucking about the timeline.

But it wouldn't necessarily be uniformly distributed. The crews that the shows have focused on sometimes have distinctive things about them that predispose them to get involved with time travel. All the time-travel episodes of Enterprise involved the Temporal Cold War, with Archer, the Suliban, the Xindi, et al. being used as pawns by factions from the future. Two of TNG's time-travel episodes were the result of Q's intervention. At least half of DS9's time-travel episodes were due to the influence of the wormhole or its creators. And Voyager seemed to be in a quadrant of the galaxy where exotic and bizarre phenomena were unusually thick on the ground (something I offered a passing explanation for in The Buried Age). And as for TOS, I made a point in Forgotten History of justifying why the same ship happened to be involved in so many temporal events, and why it was anything but a typical situation.

 

[RPJOB]

I don't think that we're seeing crews that are that far out of the ordinary among Starfleet. The Enterprise may have saved Earth a number of times but for all we know the Lexington has done something similar to Andor. The Excelsior may have prevented Trill from being conquered/destroyed/sterilized half a dozen times or more. The galaxy is a big place. The Federation is as well. Just because we don't see these other ships "saving the world" doesn't mean that they haven't.

The larger ships (Constitution, Galaxy, Nebula, etc) may have the lions share of temporal adventures but the smaller ones could have some as well. The Bozeman had at least one that we saw. Who's to say that they hadn't had others?

Making the broadcast crews something extraordinary takes the shine off the scope of the franchise. There's enough first contacts and time travels and alien killbots for everyone.

Kirk may have had the most time related files with DTI but that doesn't mean that there aren't a dozen or more nipping at his heels. He's just the top dog at the time. And let's not forget, we haven't even seen all of his temporal adventures.

 

[RPJOB]

I think it's also worth pointing out that all of these time travel incidents we've seen are spread out over a period of 233 years, so even if there are more incidents we haven't heard of that's still only a relative handful of times over a very large period of time. You have to remember that what we've gotten is a very compressed version of a very long timeline, so things that seem to happen all the time in shows, tend to be much more spread out in universe. As for the 58 time travel episodes, if you look at the franchise as a whole, which consists of 727 film releases, not to mention hundreds of comics, novels, and audio stories that's less that 10% of the stories, so it's still not that common.

But the incidents aren't scattered even;y over that time span. There's vast swaths where we haven't had any stories. TOS had 5 over a 3 year span. 6 over 4 years if you count TAS (and that could be 8 over 4 years if you count The Counter Clock Incident and Jihad). That averages out to pretty much once every six months.

TNG had 12 over 7 years, again pretty close to two a year.
there were 37 incidents involving time travel from the start of TNG to the end of VOY, a span of 14 years. Why assume that nobody encounters time travel in the years between TUC and Encounter at Farpoint?

 

[JD]

I'm done. I haven't read the book yet, and I believe you've said you haven't either, so I'm not going to bother arguing about something I don't know about.