"Explorers"- How did the ancient Bajorans get into space?

[Timo]

Re: "Explorers"- How did the ancient Bajorans get into space

...Then again, in "real-world" terms, this lightsail ship would only work if it used advanced antigravity technology to lower its inertial mass. Otherwise, it would need sails a hundred to a thousand times as large as shown.

Now that would be pretty interesting. Everybody and his idiot cousin seems to have invented gravity control in Trek, at an early stage of their respective histories of spaceflight. Perhaps Bajorans would from the very beginning build antigravity ships that float up into the space, then unfurl their sails, without any Newtonian rocketry being involved anywhere in the process?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Odon]

Re: "Explorers"- How did the ancient Bajorans get into space

They were flung into space by an enormous rubber band.

 

[exodus]

Re: "Explorers"- How did the ancient Bajorans get into space

Maybe we should ask Leonard Nemoy to do another "In Search of..." to explain it.

 

[Odon]

Re: "Explorers"- How did the ancient Bajorans get into space

exodus said:
Maybe we should ask Leonard Nimoy to do another "In Search of..." to explain it.

NIMOY: "Lost civilisations…extraterrestrials…out-of-focus photographs…vague predictions…publicity-seeking eyewitnesses…Swiss con artists. Tonight on "In Search Of" we ask: did ancient Bajoran astronauts once reach Cardassia Prime in a solar-sail spaceship? How did they get into orbit? Perhaps through this colossal Y-shaped monolith, built in the midst of Bajor's oldest rubber plantation."

GUL DUKAT: "Argh, that's just a load of Federation propaganda! I've seen that man on screen before, and he definitely had pointed ears!"

 

[exodus]

Re: "Explorers"- How did the ancient Bajorans get into space



I got as far as "Swiss Con Artists" and lost it! :thumbsup:

 

[Meredith]

Re: "Explorers"- How did the ancient Bajorans get into space

I think they used large Hydrogen filled Balloons like weather balloons to get them to the edge of space then a sorta thruster system.


I think they used the craft to go between all of the freekin moons of bajor, most of which seemed to have a class M atmosphere.




though for a civ that is around 500,000 years old they should have been more like the Vorlons from babylon 5, but they are very stagnant culture.

 

[Apogeal Alpha01]

Re: "Explorers"- How did the ancient Bajorans get into space

Solar sails are a fairly advanced idea, to us Earthlings anyway, and we can get into space. What's the beef?

 

[Tralis]

Re: "Explorers"- How did the ancient Bajorans get into space

^^
Well, see, the Vorlons entire thing was "We are sooo advanced. Look at how advanced we are. See that stuff you think is fancy? Its nothing compared to what we have. We are centuries beyond how advanced you are. And therefore, obviously, we are being of energy. Couldn't concievably be flesh and blood. Also, we give cryptic responses to everything and are very secretive. Fuck being open becuase we have nothing to fear, that's for wussies, we have to sit here and be all advanced and mysterious."
In the end, that was trite and boring. Not every culture is as discovery minded as the humans, and "advanced" cultures like the Vorlons are a dumb non-sensical sci-fi archetype.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Re: "Explorers"- How did the ancient Bajorans get into space

When have Bajoran ships ever been seen to use warp drive? They didn't have it in their first TNG appearance; the solar sailers were clearly not built to use it (Sisko's ship got kicked into warp, but that was accidental); and none of the Bajoran fighter craft we've seen, had warp drive either.

 

[Timo]

Re: "Explorers"- How did the ancient Bajorans get into space

They didn't have it in their first TNG appearance

Only because it had broken down. Clearly, the Cardassians and the evil Starfleet Admiral who were framing them for the terrorist bombing were fully convinced that the ship of this Bajora group was capable of interstellar flight at warp speeds - they just didn't realize the Bajora had run out of spares. The exact same type of ship is later seen in interstellar use in DS9, either operated or chartered by Bajor.

Certainly Bajor in the 2360s possesses a large number of warp-capable vessels, most of them transports of various kinds. While no Bajoran vessel is actually shown going to warp (okay, save for Kasidy Yates' ship which worked for the Bajorans), many are shown or stated to make interstellar journeys at FTL speeds.

The solar sails were a 800-yr-old design, last witnessed in use in the 22nd century in the "Accession" backstory. Doesn't mean that Bajorans wouldn't have been operating modern warpships alongside those pleasure sailboats... But doesn't tell us when those modern ships came to be, either.

As for the big Bajoran winged fightercraft, they have been witnessed in interstellar flight in various circumstances, such as the ambush in "Preemptive Strike" and the mirror universe flight by Smiley O'Brien. Nobody ever says these craft would be incapable of warp drive. Instead, Kira in "The Siege" merely says they are capable of impulse drive (against the sub-impulse capabilities of her own craft), which is not the same thing as "warp-incapable" at all.

The embargo fleet in "Shadows and Symbols" is said to feature "impulse ships" but nobody quite specifies which of the multitude of designs in that fleet are limited to impulse speeds; there are several ship types there that most definitely are warp-capable. Perhaps once again, the ships we see have been rendered "impulse ships" merely because their warp drives are temporarily malfunctioning?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Thespeckledkiwi]

Re: "Explorers"- How did the ancient Bajorans get into space

Kegek Kringle said:

TeutonicNights said:
yeah, I thought of this, too (cardies being the cause for a major setback). But wouldn't someone of the older people remember they were once spacefaring after "only" 60 years of occupation, instead of it becoming a mere myth?

They must have abandoned their space program much earlier, maybe having something to do with visiting aliens providing superior technology, or taking over the interplanetary transportation altogether.

It could have just been a sudden onset of isolationism. China had one of the greatest navies of the 15th century, and under Zheng He they explored as far as Mozambique. Then they decided it was a bad idea and scrapped the whole fleet.

While you are naive and simplistic in why China scrapped it's navy, you did hit upon an issue that might be similar. Political change maybe?

 

[Timo]

Re: "Explorers"- How did the ancient Bajorans get into space

Just out of curiosity, are these suddenly Christmassy usernames your personal choice, or a seasonal joke played by the mods? (And what does my name look like to everybody else...?)

But wouldn't someone of the older people remember they were once spacefaring after "only" 60 years of occupation, instead of it becoming a mere myth?

I thought the only thing that was myth was the ability of Bajoran lightsails to travel to Cardassia by warp in the 16th century?

At least that's all we hear in "Explorers". The dialogue doesn't suggest that Bajorans would have been unable to travel to Cardassia ever or by any means, only that this was not historically verified to have happened 800 years before the episode by a lightsail.

For all we know, Bajor had conventional warpships long before it began building lightsails. Although admittedly this clearly wasn't the writer intention...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[stormturmoil]

Re: "Explorers"- How did the ancient Bajorans get into space

The embargo fleet in "Shadows and Symbols" is said to feature "impulse ships" but nobody quite specifies which of the multitude of designs in that fleet are limited to impulse speeds; there are several ship types there that most definitely are warp-capable. Perhaps once again, the ships we see have been rendered "impulse ships" merely because their warp drives are temporarily malfunctioning?

Since that fleet supposedly consisted of the equivalent of Custom's cutters and the like, they may simply never have had a warpdrive installed because they didn't (in their original job role) need one?

alternatively, in that situation, the Warpdrive may have been pulled on those ships to make room for more weapons/shield generators/magazine space

 

[TedShatner10]

Re: "Explorers"- How did the ancient Bajorans get into space

I'd say it is a good allegory to compare the Bajorans to the Chinese and the Cardassians to the Japanese - both were advanced for their time ancient civilizations that both regressed by the time other nascent cultures in the galaxy grew to become greater powers that were able to push around the more insular, and provincial Bajorans and Cardies. I'd say the Cardassian Union was a relatively recent star empire, with Cardassia Prime perhaps visited by the more advanced Romulans or Klingons - instead of directly conqering them, either of the two powers instead influnced them through trade and the Cardassians also adopted a warlike philosophy from both of them.

And much like the Empire of Japan, the Cardassian Union is really a strategic light weight in comparison to the real superpowers, and goes after weaker targets (China/Bajor. The Siberian Railroad/a Klingon convoy. Britain's Eastern colonies/some outer Federation territory).

 

[TeutonicNights]

Re: "Explorers"- How did the ancient Bajorans get into space

Timo said:

But wouldn't someone of the older people remember they were once spacefaring after "only" 60 years of occupation, instead of it becoming a mere myth?

I thought the only thing that was myth was the ability of Bajoran lightsails to travel to Cardassia by warp in the 16th century?

At least that's all we hear in "Explorers". The dialogue doesn't suggest that Bajorans would have been unable to travel to Cardassia ever or by any means, only that this was not historically verified to have happened 800 years before the episode by a lightsail.

Yeah, I also think the solar sailing era ended some time before the occupation, either due to a setback on Bajor or a (economic?)collapse of the space infrastructure. Maybe too many precious ships got lost, maybe it was kind of a secret technology not available to everyone, so it got forgotten.
You're right, we could speculate the Bajorans, at a point when their solar sailing tech had long been out of use, might have acquired ( from those "visitors from other worlds")or developed new spacefaring tech, but after most of their naighboring races.

However, I don't think Sisko or anyone else before the trip actually thought the Bajorans had used the Tachyon stream to go to Warp, for they were discussing how the ancient Bajorans could have stored or generated enough oxygen for the supposed years-long trip.
Sisko's main goal was "to prove the design is space-worthy" and never intended to make the full trip.
Also Sisko says According to legend, the ancient Bajorans used ships like these to explore their star system... eight hundred years ago...
So it at least seems no one remembers solar sail technology being used at all, although that is not really 100% clear from the dialogue.
Like if there was an old sketch of Leonardo showing a rocketship and legend said Leonardo had actually built and launched it, and some people even claim he went to the Moon.

BTW The Cardassians probably knew about the shortcut, or they wouldn't have gotten so jumpy about Sisko's project.