How many American cities have we seen in (non-time-travel) Star Trek, though?
Not merely many, but a range of those. If we know the old buildings of cities as diverse in importance as San Francisco, New Orleans and Boston all still stand, and indeed no Earth skyline in Star Trek
ever fails to show prewar buildings, then it appears that all cities were equally protected or perhaps equally untargeted. But the US didn't stay out of the war - Sloan thinks there's a renewed ECON attack. So apparently the US shot down all enemy missiles or whatever, not just over the best-protected cities but also over targets of tertiary importance at best.
"Future's End" states that Los Angeles was completely destroyed by an earthquake shortly before World War III.
Well, all of "southern California"...
Dr. Crusher studied dance in St. Louis, and DSC mentioned Ash Tyler (ostensibly) grew up in a suburb of Seattle.
But those don't mean the cities survived. Might be everybody died, and a new city by the same name was built fifty miles from the smoking pit. The visual evidence is more compelling. Why rebuild "landmarks" like the dump in which Barclay lives? And if you rebuild, why do you then ruin the effect with modern construction?
I agree that it's odd and so perhaps the assumption that they had artificial gravity is a false one. In both cases the ships were close to our hero ship. Perhaps they "beamed" over gravity somehow.
Well, both spacecraft were built with onboard gravity in mind - no handholds or footholds, thus consoles you couldn't operate unless you had gravity. Or magnetic boots, but those wouldn't help Khan and his cohorts stay on their mattresses, or their bodily fluids flowing as required.
Since 90's era artificial gravity is such an outlier and There are alternative explanations I think we can dismiss it.
But 2060s warp drive is an outlier, too. As are pointy-eared aliens. Trek is one big outlier, resting on assumptions such as humans cleverly inventing stuff.
I'd like to think there is considerable space infrastructure at this time. The fact that we didn't observe anything in the vastness of space doesn't mean it can be dismissed as a possibility.
Well, superfast, supercapacious interplanetary travel was such old news in the 1990s already that they were retiring ancient junk like the
Botany Bay. And then it got markedly better in 2018 somehow. I'd very much think there'd be something up there to show for all that.
But there weren't colonies on Mars, for some reason. Possibly because with the superships, humans could reach to places that were actually interesting, such as the moons of the gas giants?
Well, Troi's. She claimed the Vulcans were "passing through", which is astronomically impossible: you don't get into a star system unless you mean to go there and do something with it. Vulcans might have been studying Martians or mining Ganymede or pursuing a Tellarite burglar trying to hide in the clouds of Venus, but we already know they were in the habit of spying on Earth a century prior, and they seem obsessed about humans in the 22nd century...
Unless the Phoenix was on a million kilometer long parabolic trajectory, any sort of orbital maneuvering is going to require that large engine. Also landing all of that dead weight is going to be a huge waste of fuel.
I doubt fuel or propellant would be an issue - if the lower half of a Titan-sized rocket can lift the upper half to Earth escape trajectory, then there's supertech involved, quite possibly enough to allow the rocket to go to Mars and back if needed. I mean, what does USAF have missiles for, at that time and age? If state of the art spacecraft are swift interplanetary, then the missiles might need to be, too, to strike at space targets. And conversely, if that Titan was merely intended to be intercontinental, why waste the supertech on its lower stage?
Yes, but hovercar doesn't necessarily mean anti-gravity.
It more or less means the ability to float the
Phoenix, though.
Well, Riker says that MOST major cities are destroyed so I guess it depends on you definition of "major city." and at the same time it doesn't take a nuclear blast to destroy a major city. Just cut power and cities will tear themselves apart in no time, leaving most buildings intact.
Certainly it would be difficult to find a "major city" in North America today, and probably harder still in the real 2050s (and possibly in the Trek ones).
But the idea of folks just abandoning cities is a very nice way to reconcile with minor property damage, the as such minor 600,000,000 death toll, and the global scale and crippling nature of the war.
Timo Saloniemi
