Early Phoenix Designs

[Timo]

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.

Or even the midpoint of an already highly profitable business. But the timeline also allows it all to come crashing down well before WWIII. Perhaps the Eugenics Wars themselves resulted in near-total loss of space assets; perhaps subsequent international squabbling did (it being simpler to evict the United States or China from Mars than from Earth, say, and certainly tempting strategically and symbolically).

Mankind's presence in the solar system might be dictated less by advances in technology and more by the ebb and flow of politics and economics, just like seaborne exploration and exploitation was in the 1500s. There could be more colonies in 1990 than in 2010, say, and a better connectivity to Mars in 2000 than in 2030. But the underlying fact would be that the (re-)establishing of presence would have been possible since the 1990s already, and might happen at the drop of a hat at any later date.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Go-Captain]

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).

There is an episode where Voyager goes back to 1996, and one of the contemporary characters has a model or poster of the DY-100 in her room, but with solid rocket boosters on a launch pad. So, post-TNG they maintained the idea that Khan did escape by some sort of slower than light space freighter, and having such a ship implies a significant space presence.

The fact is, Star Trek's Earth is more advanced than ours in the 20th and 21st centuries.

That being said, I think they wouldn't have outright space fleets doing combat around the solar system, but it is possible the Star Wars program bore fruit. They might have had space based railguns, lasers, and brilliant pebbles. That in turn would drive MIRV technology harder.

 

[Timo]

I'm not sure why they wouldn't have "1950s style" space battles between crewed ships. After all, this whole DY-100 business is not just anachronistic to our space exploration timeline - it's conceptually different, with a heavy emphasis on "classic" space conquest with large crews and extraterrestrial colonies, no doubt with domes and dish antennas and whatnot... In such an environment, we probably developed space vessels and weapons similar to Bonestell's artwork, rather than the Reaganesque arsenal of Star Wars. We did start earlier!

Another influence there might have been Henry Starling's reverse engineering of future weaponry, including the handheld and timeship-mounted death rays. We know he didn't get anything working yet, but he might have sold something partial yet useful to people who boosted their own research with it.

It might also be considered that while the "Future's End" 1990s did have DY-100 in evidence, there was no evidence of orbital fortresses. The Voyager protected herself against Earth-based radars and "surveillance satellites". Yet Cochrane in 2063 drives an ICBM (or perhaps IPBM?) that suggests a mode of warfare where Star Wars might have been quite useful, and conversely hints at a lack of alternatives...

Thankfully, though, evidence from the era is really fragmentary, and all sorts of ideas are possible.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Go-Captain]

Gary Seven actively sabotaged orbital weapons. But he is thwarted or disappears at some point considering nuclear war did end up happening.

 

[Patrin-Zero]

Maybe Gary Seven was taken off the playing field by one of the precursor models of the android from the Questor Tapes ?

Seems there were more than just one 'benevolent' presence on pre-TOS Earth.

 

[T'Girl]

Gary Seven actively sabotaged orbital weapons. But he is thwarted or disappears at some point considering nuclear war did end up happening.

Perhaps Gary Seven's aim wasn't to stop nuclear war from happening at all, but rather to exercise control over when it did start. The late 1960's was too soon, and not in keeping with the over all plan.

Not Seven personally of course, but Seven's masters on that far away world.

 

[Ithekro]

One wonders about that these days. Were they actually from a far away place, or a far away time. Or both. Could Gary Seven, who's job was actually a supervisor for other agents that had gone missing in action around the time USS Enterprise was doing Historical Observations using Starfleet's new understanding of time travel, have been a player in the Temporal Cold War?

 

[Avro Arrow]

^ Probably not Gary himself... he explicitly stated he was from that time period, whereas Kirk was not. But his bosses might have some ability to travel, scan or communicate through time, because Gary somehow knew that the planet he was sent from would still be unknown to Earth even in Kirk's time.

 

[Timo]

Perhaps Gary Seven's aim wasn't to stop nuclear war from happening at all, but rather to exercise control over when it did start. The late 1960's was too soon, and not in keeping with the over all plan.

"Omega Glory" has Spock state outright that Earth avoided the sort of war that Omega IV had. But the rest of Trek establishes that Earth did have an Armageddon confrontation quite on par with what happened on Omega IV.

Yet there's one crucial difference there that means there's no contradiction: Spock in "Omega Glory" is speaking very specifically about communists in that sentence. So what Earth apparently avoided was a war between Commies and Yankees specifically (perhaps thanks solely to Gary Seven), even though it did have a nuclear showdown between some other parties later on (and specifically, none of those represented communism).

Since "Future's End" shows that the main timeline had communist-led superpowers collapse by the 1990s just like ours had, we're free to sigh from relief...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ithekro]

Omega IV managed to blow themselves back to the stone age or at least back a millennia or two.

Earth only managed to set the planet back a few decades at best. And that might have been localized given how quickly some parts of the planet bounced back while others continued to suffer from the post Atomic Horror for another few decades.

 

[T'Girl]

IIRC omega 4 (per McCoy) experience a bio-chemical war, and not a nuclear one. Maybe that what Spock was referring to by "the war you avoided."

 

[Go-Captain]

IIRC omega 4 (per McCoy) experience a bio-chemical war, and not a nuclear one. Maybe that what Spock was referring to by "the war you avoided."

I think you are right. A biological war is quite specific in the effects. It could also have easily been far more devastating than any conceivable nuclear war.

 

[Timo]

In the context, it would be nicer if the war that was avoided had some connection to the Communists/Americans division, the very issue being discussed there. But would Trek pseudohistory ever have featured the threat or the possibility of the USSR or Red China on one hand and the Yankees on the other engaging in biological warfare?

"Omega Glory" and The Omega Man weren't quite contemporaries, but the dystopic theme might have been part of the zeitgeist here on our Earth. Was it something more than that in the Trek 1960s-1970s?

Biological warfare in WWIII would explain why no city in the United States is known to have been damaged in the war, even though Riker says that all major cities were "destroyed": perhaps just the people died? Then again, only 600,000,000 people died overall... Biological warfare in the Eugenics Wars would correspond to the "whole populations bombed out of existence" thing while again preserving all the known cities intact to the 24th century, but we could just as well say that there was conventional bombing in areas controlled by the supermen - potentially, areas well outside the US.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JES]

IIRC omega 4 (per McCoy) experience a bio-chemical war, and not a nuclear one. Maybe that what Spock was referring to by "the war you avoided."

I think you are right. A biological war is quite specific in the effects. It could also have easily been far more devastating than any conceivable nuclear war.

That is a definite. Biological weapons are far less predictable, and they can be very efficient at spreading. If both sides fires off a biological attack, other than immunes, I don't think there will be many survivors. Even then, it only takes one person living long enough to travel to another country who is infected to spread the infection where it was never intended to go.

There is a good damned reason why I hate biological weapons, and think they should banned internationally. At least radiation, as horrible as it is, doesn't spread to infect more and more people. Not that I don't find the concept of full scale nuclear war abhorrent as well.