There IS the fact that Trilaine is talking about Napoleon as if he's a current Earth figure.
Elements of TOS which contradict later series
- Thread starter Voth commando1
- Start date
The Klingon culture also produced powerful houses like the House of Duras, so, who's to say that a similar or the very same house wasn't the scheming/duplicity "norm" during TOS.
Over the next century, political forces change and we see Klingon's as in TNG. This idea could make a good story for further investigation.
I still think it's a changed premise. Even in TNG Season 1, in "Where No One Has Gone Before" they talk about passing Warp 10. They just made stuff up as they went, and that's fine.
I was joking about the Borg one.
That could have happened with the Excelsior's new transwarp drive. I think I saw some diagrams of the 1701-A drive systems somewhere, and they said it had transwarp drive. Once that became the new norm, a new scale was applied. Then the new transwarp became something even faster, cause no one wants to say transtranswarp, and since the new scale went up to infinity, that became the new transwarp speed.
That would be a cool find, if true.
It isn't. The displays say this in the Mr Scott's Guide to the Enterprise reference book, which perhaps purports to "reproduce" the movie art, but they are different in the actual movie. No, they can't actually be read from the screencaps, but we can spot the differences in line lengths and the like.
The "Where No One" bit is sort of the point: the heroes there establish that passing Warp 10 is an issue, a discussion topic because of the utter impossibility of the thing. The other almost-explicit reference to Warp 10 being an absolute limit is the "Time Squared" one where Riker says, perhaps flippantly, that passing Warp 10 results in time travel (which is a "D'oh" proposition, you obviously arriving before you left if you go faster than infinitely fast). After this, though, we have to wait until VOY "Threshold" to hear more about this. And we get the TNG "All Good Things..." references to Warp 13 in between, clearly done to suggest that something changed again in the future.
Timo Saloniemi
The "Where No One" bit is sort of the point: the heroes there establish that passing Warp 10 is an issue, a discussion topic because of the utter impossibility of the thing. The other almost-explicit reference to Warp 10 being an absolute limit is the "Time Squared" one where Riker says, perhaps flippantly, that passing Warp 10 results in time travel (which is a "D'oh" proposition, you obviously arriving before you left if you go faster than infinitely fast). After this, though, we have to wait until VOY "Threshold" to hear more about this. And we get the TNG "All Good Things..." references to Warp 13 in between, clearly done to suggest that something changed again in the future.
Timo Saloniemi
Yeah, it took them a while to settle on what "Warp 10" meant. IIRC, Roddenberry initially wanted it to be some absolute, impassable top speed limit, I guess to keep interstellar travel times from being too absurdly fast, but then that was dropped and so it was arbitrarily redefined as infinite speed, which created all sorts of confusion among fans. It would've been simpler just to drop the idea of a Warp 10 limit altogether, since infinite speed is, by definition, not a "limit" at all.
Some of the reasoning behind resetting the scale came from ideas about traveling at fractions of c, the speed of light. Some imagined propulsion systems, like a Bussard ramjet, might get to 0.9c, or 0.99c, or 0.999c, which is all lumped under "piling on the nines." Never getting to or passing actual c.
- Rick
Some of the reasoning behind resetting the scale came from ideas about traveling at fractions of c, the speed of light. Some imagined propulsion systems, like a Bussard ramjet, might get to 0.9c, or 0.99c, or 0.999c, which is all lumped under "piling on the nines." Never getting to or passing actual c.
Yeah, and that would make sense if Warp 10 represented an actual finite limit that you could approach and not surpass. Instead it was just plain infinity, which made it pointless and confusing to cram everything from 1516c to infinity within a single-integer jump in the scale. If you can go to infinite speed, then there is no actual limit you can't surpass and numbering it that way is just arbitrary stylization.
I never got this sense from TOS Klingons at all. Kor speaks of Klingon soldiers collectively being a cohesive unit, always under surveillance to keep them all in line.
I think the only time the word "honor" was spoken by a TOS Klingon was when Kang says the Klingons have honored the peace treaty with the Federation. And then in STIII, Kruge told Valkris that she would be remembered with honor right before blasting her to smithereens.
The Romulans in BoT speak of duty a number of times, though the commander is clearly weary of all of it.
Kor
Right. The Making of Star Trek said outright that the Klingons despised honor and celebrated treachery, while the Romulans were the noble and honorable ones. That started to get switched in TSFS when they wrote the script for Romulans and then basically crossed it out and wrote "Klingons" in its place, so suddenly Klingons had cloaked Birds-of-Prey and talked about honor. Then TNG picked up on it big time because they wanted to make the Klingons good guys, and the tried-and-true way to make a fictional warrior culture seem non-evil is to make them Honorable.
He's not weary of duty per se, but of the fact that his duty forces him to follow the orders of a dishonorable, warmongering Praetor.
I like the idea of integer warp factors as plateaus of local efficiency that's given in the TNG tech manual. The idea of warp ten as infinite speed implies that there are only nine such plateaus. "Piling on the nines" above warp nine means that you won't find any more such plateaus, and to go faster you'll just have to keep dumping more energy in.
It probably doesn't have any interesting story implications, but it's kind of interesting from a fantasy tech perspective.
Some of the reasoning behind resetting the scale came from ideas about traveling at fractions of c, the speed of light. Some imagined propulsion systems, like a Bussard ramjet, might get to 0.9c, or 0.99c, or 0.999c, which is all lumped under "piling on the nines." Never getting to or passing actual c.
And that makes sense and is even relatable in a way. But you're still stuck with either having big numbers in front of the decimal or big numbers behind the decimal. So, I guess you have to pick your poison as far as warp scales go.
Maybe we need to have warp scales in hexadecimal. "Ahead, warp factor F."
I don't remember that from the book and I think it's great.
It's the second ingredient that makes the TNG warp scale "necessary."
I guess that's where I saw it then
Head-banging, loud, over-drinking warriors who sing of battles using
But that's revisionist nonsense. TOS/TAS had five episodes with Romulans at least theoretically in them. In all of those, the Romulans despised honor and celebrated treachery.
1) "Balance of Terror" has subordinates working behind the backs of superiors, and superiors conspiring to defeat the aims of their leaders, all as part of a surprise first strike with an invisible ship so that a war can be launched against a party that has not lifted a finger for a century.
2) "Deadly Years" has Romulans ambushing a mission of mercy in the RNZ, a region they have no business being in, and refusing to grant as much as a cease-fire for a victim that apparently never fires back.
3) "Enterprise Incident" has a Romulan maneuvering for personal glory and thus jeopardizing a mission; drinking with the enemy, and trying to make the enemy defect; and then basically defecting herself.
4) "Survivor" has Romulans ambushing a starship they lured into the RNZ, by blackmailing a bystander into being an operative.
5) "Practical Joker" has Romulans ambushing a starship outside not just their own territory but outside the RNZ as well, under disingenuous claims to the contrary.
On the other hand, the Romulans gain no honor in later writing, either. They simply happen to be generic villains who have evil in their blood, and are written as such across the board - even if they belatedly gain the nuance of being cousins to Vulcans, a factoid that went dramatically unused for decades originally.
...Orders he then cleverly subverts, by committing suicide where there is no need for one, thus turning a mission of great success into a deliberate disaster. But that's high treason, and the "high" part doesn't indicate exalted ideals, either, except from the viewpoint of the enemy of the Romulans, the one this guy supposedly swore to defend the realm against.
It's downhill for the Romulans after that, with no redeeming aspects to their conduct. So I can't accept that anything ever "flipped". What happened instead was that the Klingons were utilized more, thus necessarily gaining in features, one of which happened to be obsession with personal glory. And that's about as generic as you can get with a villain: "I'm baaaaad, badder than anybody else!"...
Timo Saloniemi
Head-banging, loud, over-drinking warriors who sing of battles usingaxesbat'leths = Vikings. Don't overthink it.
All you're doing is changing the subject. I'm talking about the "honorable warrior" trope that's existed in entertainment since long before TNG. The usual media stereotype of Vikings (at least in the past, before things like that Vikings cable series and the Thor movies) is of brutish berserkers and thugs -- not noble warriors, just pirates and plunderers, the maritime equivalent of biker gangs. The "honorable," disciplined and noble side of TNG Klingon culture owes more to samurai tropes, and probably a bit to progressive '60s and '70s Westerns that painted Native Americans as "noble savages" to be admired and sympathized with, attempting to redeem them from the negative, dehumanizing stereotypes of the past in much the same way that TNG was trying to redeem the Klingons from their negative portrayal in TOS/TAS. (Although you see a bit of that same thing happening in "Day of the Dove.")
Samurai's are not known for their bragging and drinking en mass, nor the acceptance of women warriors. Vikings meet all these warrior traits including shield maidens, etc. Individual Klingon ships do act like pirates. Also, samurai ask to commit suicide if they dishonor themselves or their clan, but we never see a Klingon commit suicide, ever. They just sulk, sometimes into alcoholism, and plot revenge. You can't ignore their personal traits.
Similar threads
