Final cover for Raise the Dawn

[toughlittleship]

Now with Typhon Pact titling! The author also comments that "173" can be seen on the structure.

http://8of5.blogspot.com.br/2012/03/updated-raise-dawn-cover.html

 

[Admiral_Young]

Very cool indeed. I really like the Starbase design.

 

[Sci]

Hmm. I was kind of hoping that the new starbase (assuming it's being built on the Gamma Quadrant side of the Wormhole) would be called Deep Space 10, on my old hypothesis that starbases get the "Deep Space #" designation if they're built outside of Federation space, but only get the standard "Starbase ###" designation if they're built inside Federation space. Minor thing, though -- I'm very excited for these two!

 

[F. King Daniel]

It's okay.

And, while an Excelsior is better than a gigantic shuttlepod, I do wish more interesting/less overexposed ships would be used. Like the weirdo kitbashes from "Best of Both Worlds" and Deep Space Nine's fleet scenes, before they went all CG.

 

[Patrick O'Brien]

I like it. I'm a hugh Excelsior fan and the Station looks awesome. I was under the same impression as SCI that stations outside of Federation Space got the Deep Space designation?

 

[toughlittleship]

Hmm. I was kind of hoping that the new starbase (assuming it's being built on the Gamma Quadrant side of the Wormhole) would be called Deep Space 10, on my old hypothesis that starbases get the "Deep Space #" designation if they're built outside of Federation space, but only get the standard "Starbase ###" designation if they're built inside Federation space. Minor thing, though -- I'm very excited for these two!

A SCE eBook established Deep Space 10 as being constructed after the Dominion War near Cardassian space.

 

[Sci]

It's okay.

And, while an Excelsior is better than a gigantic shuttlepod, I do wish more interesting/less overexposed ships would be used. Like the weirdo kitbashes from "Best of Both Worlds" and Deep Space Nine's fleet scenes, before they went all CG.

Erm, DS9's fleet scenes (I assume you mean Dominion War?) were a mix of CGI and models. More CGI than models towards the end.

 

[JD]

I love that cover. I can't wait for these books.

 

[The Wormhole]

It's okay.

And, while an Excelsior is better than a gigantic shuttlepod, I do wish more interesting/less overexposed ships would be used. Like the weirdo kitbashes from "Best of Both Worlds" and Deep Space Nine's fleet scenes, before they went all CG.

Marketing. An Excelsior is more recognizable than those kitbashes.

Mind you, it is suprprising to see one of those Sphinx-style Work Bees so prominent on the cover. It's more noticeable than the standard Work Bee.

 

[Sci]

It's okay.

And, while an Excelsior is better than a gigantic shuttlepod, I do wish more interesting/less overexposed ships would be used. Like the weirdo kitbashes from "Best of Both Worlds" and Deep Space Nine's fleet scenes, before they went all CG.

Marketing. An Excelsior is more recognizable than those kitbashes.

On the other hand -- it's been a very long time since we've seen an Excelsior-class starship given any position of prominence in the Trekverse. By the last few seasons of DS9, they'd essentially been demoted to filler ships -- they weren't even the main supporting ships in most fleets. (That role fell to the Galaxy- and Akira-class ships.) And outside of the Excelsior and Enterprise-B novels (all three or four of them), I can't think of a single prominent Excelsior-class ship featured in TrekLit since the "Modern Age" began. Most supporting ships have been either Prometheus, Galaxy, one of the designs introduced in First Contact, or an original TrekLit design.

 

[The Wormhole]

It's okay.

And, while an Excelsior is better than a gigantic shuttlepod, I do wish more interesting/less overexposed ships would be used. Like the weirdo kitbashes from "Best of Both Worlds" and Deep Space Nine's fleet scenes, before they went all CG.

Marketing. An Excelsior is more recognizable than those kitbashes.

On the other hand -- it's been a very long time since we've seen an Excelsior-class starship given any position of prominence in the Trekverse. By the last few seasons of DS9, they'd essentially been demoted to filler ships -- they weren't even the main supporting ships in most fleets. (That role fell to the Galaxy- and Akira-class ships.) And outside of the Excelsior and Enterprise-B novels (all three or four of them), I can't think of a single prominent Excelsior-class ship featured in TrekLit since the "Modern Age" began. Most supporting ships have been either Prometheus, Galaxy, one of the designs introduced in First Contact, or an original TrekLit design.

Eh, the Excelsior was introduced nearly thirty years ago, and it's prominent enough to be regularly featured in Ships of the Line calendars, even on the cover of one a few years ago. Therefore it's no mystery to me why it's on a novel cover as opposed to the USS Raging Queen.

 

[Thestral]

Ooh, shiny! When do these come out again?!

Hmm. I was kind of hoping that the new starbase (assuming it's being built on the Gamma Quadrant side of the Wormhole) would be called Deep Space 10, on my old hypothesis that starbases get the "Deep Space #" designation if they're built outside of Federation space, but only get the standard "Starbase ###" designation if they're built inside Federation space. Minor thing, though -- I'm very excited for these two!

Maybe (if it's being built on the Gamma side) Bajoran territory post-war expanded to include the space around the Gamma terminus? Although, wait... didn't the whole star-systems-realigning-thing move the Eav'oq system to the Gamma terminus? Hmm...

Probably easier just to just assume that's not how the Deep Space station system works I guess. Or DS9 gets disassembled for scrap/blowed up real good.

 

[Mage]

I certainly hope it's NOT in the Gamma Quadrant. That would mean that, as if this moment, the Federation has a permanent presence in all of the Milky Way Galaxy. I find that a bit to much. With the Federation being in the Alpha and Beta Quadrant (we know there have been regular missions into Beta), Project Full Circle in the Delta Quadrant, with the ability to send more ships, it seems that this huge and wonderfull unexplored region of space beyond the Federation is now basicly a run around the block. And all that in what, three years time? Seems a bit to much all of a sudden.

It would be nice if one Quadrant of the galaxy remain a mystery a bit longer.

 

[Christopher]

I certainly hope it's NOT in the Gamma Quadrant. That would mean that, as if this moment, the Federation has a permanent presence in all of the Milky Way Galaxy. I find that a bit to much. With the Federation being in the Alpha and Beta Quadrant (we know there have been regular missions into Beta), Project Full Circle in the Delta Quadrant, with the ability to send more ships, it seems that this huge and wonderfull unexplored region of space beyond the Federation is now basicly a run around the block. And all that in what, three years time? Seems a bit to much all of a sudden.

Well, just because the Federation has a presence in all four quadrants doesn't mean the galaxy is fully explored. I mean, we live in a very large galaxy, and even 1/4 of that is still an unimaginably immense volume. I mean, if you look at the galaxy map on pp. 12-13 of Star Charts, you'll see that each quadrant occupies roughly 20 squares' worth of the map grid, and the area marked "Approximate Limit of Explored Space" takes up less than one square in each quadrant. So going by that, both the Alpha and Beta Quadrants are still more than 95% unexplored. And the Federation has only explored a tiny speck of the Gamma Quadrant and a few very narrow line segments in four or five widely separated regions of the Delta Quadrant -- so both those quadrants are still much more than 99% unexplored. All told, the total UFP presence in the Milky Way encompasses no more than 2 percent of the whole -- and that's just what they've explored. What they actually control politically or militarily is far less than 1 percent of the whole.

So no, they aren't even close to having a presence in "all of the Milky Way Galaxy." They just have a presence in small fractions of all four ridiculously large segments that they've arbitrarily divided the galaxy into. If you owned a company that had an office in New York and an office in New Delhi, you'd have a presence in both hemispheres of the Earth, but that wouldn't mean you had a presence across the entire Earth. Those are two fundamentally different things.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Even with quantum slipsteam drives, the galaxy is made up of 100 billion stars, with a vague estimate of around 10 billion inhabitable planets within. No way is all of that being explored any time soon!

 

[Deranged Nasat]

That's why I don't see the Quantum Slipstream Drive as quite the game-changer that some readers do. Besides the rarity of the fuel materials, the ability to travel vast distances in short amounts of time doesn't mean you can explore in greater quantity. You can jump from point A to point I instead of just A to B, but there's still the same amount of unexplored space. The Federation can realistically travel anywhere in the galaxy now, but that doesn't actually shrink the galaxy to any real extent. Which I like - it gives us the satisfaction of technological advancement and change without sacrificing the appealing idea of vast unexplored stretches.

 

[Christopher]

^Right. And one thing I think people (including SFTV writers) too often overlook is that a planet isn't just one town or one neighborhood. You can't explore the whole thing in a single episode. We've been exploring the Earth for centuries and there are still parts of it we know very little about. And that's not even counting the rest of our own star system. We used to think we'd discovered everything of note in the Solar System, but in the past 20 years we've discovered a whole cometary belt beyond Neptune and now we know there may still be further planets out there.

So even the settled colony planets and systems in Federation space still probably have a lot of mysteries that haven't yet been discovered after more than 200 years of human deep-space exploration. It would probably take many more centuries to explore them exhaustively. And as you say, just because you can travel from place to place faster, that doesn't mean you can explore or colonize a single place any faster. The places you explore or colonize just become more widely spaced, and the amount of unknown territory between them grows even greater.

 

[Mage]

Ofcourse there is so much more to explore. I don't recall ever saying otherwise. What I ment was, the galaxy is becoming a lot smaller very quickly in the ST EU universe.

I mean, look at Vanguard. There are examples there where it took months to just reach one planet inside the Taurus Reach. And yes, according to fandom the warpcharts were altered between TOS and TNG because we could now go faster at warp 4 in TNG then we could during TOS.

Even then, in TNG and DS9 it seemed to take a few days to basicly cut across the Federation, with DS9 somehow being incredibly remote and far away. Then, the crew only needs a few days in a runabout or the Defiant to get from the station to Earth. That alone got me kinda going. Picard himself stated in FC that the Federation is cut across 8.000 lightyears. If it takes 75 years to get from where Voyager was stranded to Earth (70.000 lightyears) how the hell are all these starships hopping around the Federation in a matter of days?

So yes, ofcourse it's going to take millenia (at the least) to explore it all. But personally, it feels as if the Milky Way is a lot less smaller in the books then it actually should be.

Oh, and that's an opinion, not a fact. YMMV.

 

[Christopher]

Well, remember, Voyager introduced quantum slipstream, and that show did more than anything (other than Star Trek V) to make the galaxy seem small and easy to traverse. The books are just trying to extrapolate logically from that premise rather than just ignoring a technological breakthrough as Trek has so often done in the past.

 

[Sci]

That's why I don't see the Quantum Slipstream Drive as quite the game-changer that some readers do.

I mean, it's a game-changer in terms of the Federation's relationship with its neighbors and in terms of its ability to learn just the basics about the rest of the galaxy and to project force. But, no, it's not a magic wand that makes the Federation omnipotent and omnipresent -- the limitations you cite are quite valid. But it does represent a fundamental change in how the Federation relates to the rest of the galaxy, as much so as the airplane fundamentally changed how nations interacted with one-another even though they'd already explored most of the planet by that point.