Early Phoenix Designs

[Dukhat]

The planet is not dead. And it seems clear that the world was not totally gone give the quick recovery post First Contact where they have warp probes and ships within a decade. That cannot have all been the Vulcans.

Well, why not? The Vulcans have vastly superior technology, and based on what we saw and heard in FC, humans basically have nothing. There's no reason why the Vulcans couldn't have given them all sorts of things to get them back on their feet. As a matter of fact, that's probably why they were so restrictive 100 years later: They might have felt they gave humanity too much and were afraid they might develop too quickly.

Cochrane was going to make the flight before the Borg shot the place up, therefore there was some goal that suited his purposes. There must be people with money and the ability to use a warp drive should one be made practical. It has been ten years since the end of the war after all.

The problem with that theory is that if some organization or country wanted warp drive, then they should have logically helped to fund Cochrane, who for all intents and purposes was just building this thing in his spare time for his own reasons. He needs to use some antiquated missile in some dilapidated town as his launch vehicle, and wouldn't even have had a command module if Lily hadn't been able to scrounge up enough metal to build one (see below). And what happens if the thing blows up or some other disaster because Cochrane was using cannibalized parts? Wouldn't it have made more sense for Cochrane to just have sold his engines instead of making this incredibly dangerous flight?

I bolded the above because this is what irks me about FC many years after the fact: that Star Trek yet again went the route of having a life-changing piece of treknology created by only one guy with serious personal problems (Daystrom, Emory Ericson, etc.) instead of a whole staff of scientists & engineers contracted by a government or nation. The fact that the guy is a complete fraud, alcoholic and womanizer doesn't help.

All of this just supports my theory that the warp ship was actually LILY'S idea and Cochrane was just a test pilot who got conned into flying it with her....

Very interesting theory...which gets more interesting when we learn that it was Lily who supplied the command module. She claims that she had to scrounge around to find enough metal to build it, but I wonder how true that was. Perhaps her secret government suppliers had a hand in that...

 

[Ithekro]

Star Trek has been using the late 19th and early 20th century model for inventing things. That that doesn't work or happen anymore is not the writer's concern as having the warp drive be built like shown has more appeal to the audience that would rather like to have built it themselves, rather than some impersonal labworks project come up with it and have a government testing program launch it into history. While it can be good drama ("From Earth to the Moon"), it isn't Star Trek.

 

[Timo]

Hmm. The reasons why I feel the "Spock errs" model triumphs over the "Spock gets it right" one, both as an interpretation of what's going on in-universe, and as an analysis of what the writer and the director intended:

1) Spock thinks the 1990s are where "your last world war" falls. McCoy counters with a plural: "The Eugenics WarS". The two aren't conceptually easily compatible.

2) The first segment of the episode has a running theme of everybody being mistaken, and immediately being found out, with the fellow heroes never going "nyah nyah" but nevertheless treating this all as nice banter rather than grievous mission-endangering failure.

2) No, McCoy doesn't nod (unless an edit shaved off crucial milliseconds from my copy). What he does is his version of Spock's eyebrow thing, a knowing smile indicating mild amusement.

The problem with that theory is that if some organization or country wanted warp drive, then they should have logically helped to fund Cochrane, who for all intents and purposes was just building this thing in his spare time for his own reasons.

I'd think that's how governments or corporations today would treat a startup who makes promises not of this Earth. Let him do his thing, with this bit of funding we provide, but let's not start an ad campaign just yet, or build a lab for him from ground up.

OTOH, in the postwar confusion, Cochrane might well have sold exclusive rights to a dozen partners, and it would be in his interests to keep them from meeting each other, which meant keeping them off the site, too.

having a life-changing piece of treknology created by only one guy with serious personal problems

Isn't that true of the real world, too? History credits great inventions to single popular figures, in good and bad, and the audience generally acknowledges that this is a simplification. Von Braun didn't invent the Moon rocket, Einstein or Oppenheimer didn't invent the A-bomb, Martin Luther King didn't invent civil rights, Martin Luther the Somewhat Older didn't invent Protestantism. And yet they did.

Nothing forces us to think that Cochrane did everything necessary for warp flight, starting with inventing the Titan V rocket and the player for his Steppenwolf recording. And nothing forces us to think that he did nothing but fly the readymade thing. He can still be our Albert Oppenheimer or Otto von Wright, a slightly larger-than-life figure with a tad more real claim to a major invention than some of his predecessors.

That the figurehead should be "troubled" is just a nice reversal of the real-world phenomenon where an average guy or gal has dirt dug up by the media after the emergence to engineering or research fame, to make the story more interesting.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Nebusj]

1) Spock thinks the 1990s are where "your last world war" falls. McCoy counters with a plural: "The Eugenics WarS". The two aren't conceptually easily compatible.

Oh, come on. We call it (in English anyway) ``World War II'', even though the only substantial link between the European and the Pacific wars is they share the United States as primary belligerent, 1941-45 (with the British Empire as secondary partner). Heck, we call the European war a war even though it's more practically a German/Anglo-Saxon War and a German/Russian war sharing a primary belligerent. With sidelines like the Soviets versus Finland, a couple rounds of Soviets versus Japan, and many other related conflicts, stretching from the early 30s through the 50s. And that's a simple case, compared to such things as the Thirty Years War, or the Hundred Years War.

To say the Eugenics Wars can't be the last world war because how could ``wars'' be ``war'' requires assuming a doctrinal organization that neither humans nor history possess.

 

[Timo]

Yet at the very least, McCoy establishing it as "wars" probably stretches it out timelinewise, which is a relevant distinction in itself when Spock is trying to define a specific time period.

And really, it's McCoy who would go for something simple like WWIII, which is an established human piece of terminology later on and follows the precedent of WWI and WWII, the known distributed conflicts. Spock should be the one to offer the Eugenics Wars (a term that could cover all of WWI through III, really, considering the real and fictional evidence).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ithekro]

Unless it was one of those of a specific area and mentality call the war by another name ("War Between the States", or the "War of Northern Aggression", as oppose to the usual name of the "American Civil War".)

 

[Go-Captain]

Earth wasn't so bad off as is commonly believed. Not long after Cochran makes warp drive a reality, just a year or so later the first warp colony ships leave Earth. Cochran speaks at a college just a few years later in Enterprise.

I'm pretty sure the reason why Earth bounced back so fast after FC was because of the Vulcans' help, not because the rest of the planet was in better shape than what we saw.

That's insufficient explanation for such a rapid turn around, and why bother help people abandon Earth, rather than keep them there to help?

Even TNG supports the idea that the real damage was concentrated in the East. The Post Atomic Horror court room has very strong Chinese influences, but the audience is Caucasian, making it seem more like China conquered Russia and took the government as a puppet.

 

[Mage]

There is definatly something odd about how fast Earth recovered if all of the planet was in the state of disarray as we some in Bozeman, Montana.

I mean, look at how devastated some areas in the Middle East are, compared to other areas in the same part of the world? Even with a nuclear strike, some areas in the USA are probably more habitable and easier to reach than others. So yes, Earth probably wasn't in such a horrible condition as we are led to believe from FC.

But I also found it hard to believe that, even with the help of the Vulcans, Earth could launch its first colony ship a year after FC, and warp-powered probes like Friendship One. It seems weird that they could reshape an infrastructure to achieve all that in under a year, even with outside help.

 

[Ithekro]

Maybe Cochrane was just a weird eccentric that was into the mid-20th century. His taste in music seems to cover that, as does the symbolism of using a converted ICMB as a launcher.

The rest of the country might still be having problems, but it might not be quite as bad as Cochrane's little camp makes it out to be.

 

[Mytran]

To me it says that most of the infrastructure was already in place. Also, that the FTL tech must have been pretty "plug and play"

Cochrane may have been one of several inventors/companies working on the FTL issue, he just (with Riker and Geordie's help) got there first!

 

[publiusr]

It was called the Bonaventure in one of the "history" books. Here's the page.



And here is the actual model - used in background here and there.

Shit! That is soo much nicer than what they used in FC.

I'd like to see a design based on the vehicles seen here:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/08/superconducting-magnetic-space.html

Other than the LEM, this is to be the first true non-landing spaceship:

http://www.researchgate.net/publica...re_Radiation_Shield_Presented_AIAA_Space_2011

 

[aridas sofia]

Also, how the heck, in a post WWIII world, is anyone gonna have the capabilities to quickly mount a search and retrieval mission to get those nacelles? We couldn't to something like that today.

Really? Blofeld was able to do it in the 1960s.

http://youtu.be/4FTB8TgvgUk

 

[Ithekro]

From a hidden volcano base at that.

 

[Mage]

Damn, forgot about that......

 

[Timo]

If anything, one might speculate that Earth has excess capabilities after the war: everybody would have been building capacity like crazy to win the war, and those who lost would have had to abandon their capacity for the enemy to use, while those who won (if there were any such entities) would have gained such capacity plus would have theirs idled by the victory.

After WWI, there were more automobiles in working condition lying around than before WWI. After WWII, despite the bombing of homefronts, more aircraft. After WWIII, more spacecraft?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JES]

Earlier on, before I questioned whether or not humanity would've developed so fast, I would've liked to imagine WW-III similar to that depicted in the Gundam franchise, with not only space fighters, but large sublight warships, even mobile suits, as well as colonies, which would've been started before the war, and might've survived untouched? Or some might've been destroyed in the chaos. Others might've had a hard time, cut off from a war-torn Earth. The ones started just before war broke out, and that weren't self-sufficient, would've been worse off.

But then, now I wonder if such a large space industry could exist in only several decades from now. Then again, Star Trek is clearly an alternate timeline, and the DY-100 could've only been the very beginning of a spanning space industrial development. Maybe existing development might be one factor that allowed the launch of a warpship a year after First Contact (either that, or the Vulcans helped).

 

[Mage]

Most often, the need for an infrastructure comes from the need for a certain something. There is talk of a shortage of helium, and appereantly also talk of mining helium-3 from the moon. I have no knowledge about the subject, and not sure if it's true, but even if fictional, it does work as an example. If we need to go to the moon, and fast, and be able to remain there for a bit, the infrastructure needed to build everything on Earth will be completed pretty damned fast.

Does anyone know how fast the infrastructures in the US and the then Soviet Union were set up because of the space race?

 

[Ithekro]

Pretty fast once there were testing missiles for longer and longer ranges and heavier payloads for the ICBMs.

 

[Nebusj]

Most often, the need for an infrastructure comes from the need for a certain something. There is talk of a shortage of helium, and appereantly also talk of mining helium-3 from the moon. I have no knowledge about the subject, and not sure if it's true, but even if fictional, it does work as an example.

For the record, it's not true. Helium-3 is thought to be useful for a kind of energy-producing fusion we aren't actually able to make, and even if we could make it, it would be more easily found on the Earth than on the Moon. It's a passable Macguffin for a science fiction story if you don't work out the numbers but that's all.

If we need to go to the moon, and fast, and be able to remain there for a bit, the infrastructure needed to build everything on Earth will be completed pretty damned fast.

Does anyone know how fast the infrastructures in the US and the then Soviet Union were set up because of the space race?

It's extremely difficult to answer a question like that precisely. But for an order-of-magnitude estimate, well, NASA acquired the land for the Launch Complex 39 --- from which Saturn V rockets would launch --- in 1962, and the first launch from it was in November 1967. Thus five years is a likely plausible timescale. Presumably the facilities for a warp-capable spacecraft launch would be more demanding, but the ability to build one will have grown also.

 

[Ithekro]

The early warp ships are probably cobbled onto existing designs, or else someone was betting on Cochrane or one of the other designers to have a working design by 2065.


The twin cylinder nacelle design beat out the ring design on Earth, while the Vulcans had gone with the ring style centuries earlier.