Franz Joseph Blueprints Revisited

[aridas sofia]

BTW, the real kicker on theis "five year mission" stuff was Roddenberry's characterization of it in the TMP novelization. He says Enterprise was the only one to come back intact IIRC. To me, that infers a mission of some specificity and duration assigned to a specific number of ships.

 

[scotpens]

Is the prologue considered "in-universe"? Including the theme song?

Yes, but without Gene Roddenberry's crappy lyrics.

 

[Timo]

Trying to fit the opening credit speech into the universe takes some doing an sich. Who is this clown spraying the words as if he were trying to sell something? Who's his customer supposed to be? At least it retroactively seems he's paraphrasing some famous utterance of Zephram Cochrane there, thus if not quite taking the cheesiness out of the words, then at least shifting the blame...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Timo]

Not to me. If you're going on a five-year mission, you wouldn't just take what you think you'll need for five years. You plan for the unexpected and take as much as you can practically carry with you, and still meet all your other mission/logistical requirements.

Which removes all the evidence value of this "five years' worth of food aboard" anyway. If at any arbitrary point you are stocked for X more years, then X can't be used to infer your mission length.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mysterion]

Not to me. If you're going on a five-year mission, you wouldn't just take what you think you'll need for five years. You plan for the unexpected and take as much as you can practically carry with you, and still meet all your other mission/logistical requirements.

Which removes all the evidence value of this "five years' worth of food aboard" anyway. If at any arbitrary point you are stocked for X more years, then X can't be used to infer your mission length.

Timo Saloniemi

True enough, but it makes sense. To me at least.

Look what happened to the SS Minnow. They left for a three-hour tour, only took supplies for three housrs and ended up eating cocnuts for the rest of their lives.

If I'm the Supply Officer for the Enterprise, I am going to have crammed as much as possible into those cargo holds on day one, and am going to be topping-off whatever I can every time that ship got within range of a Starbase or supply depot. I am not going to be eating cocnuts exclusively at any point in that "five year" mission.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

As I have said before, the line that specifies Enterprise's gross tonnage as nearly a million versus its stated mass of 180,000 is likely referring to denenerate matter held for conversion to consumibles for crew and ship. 800,000 tons of it. Enough for the mission and more if needed. So yeah. Maybe.

As for ignoring the "five year" part, sure, whatever. It's there. It's stated. You can finesse it with the deft touch of a fan trying to make 800,000 tons fit in a 180,000 ton ship, but Occam and all. Do we assume he says it but that he really didn't have a "five year mission" or that he said it and did have a "five year mission"? To each his own.

Is that "degenerate" matter?

 

[Timo]

True enough, but it makes sense. To me at least.

I fully agree. Kirk wasn't stranded in the far frontier during the later seasons; he regularly visited civilization, including planet Earth, and would surely have been keeping his supplies fresh.

Which makes it all the more difficult to see any "five-year mission" in the adventures, as Kirk just sort of comes and goes.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mysterion]

It's a syndrome of Trek, I'm afraid.

Example: the Galaxy class Ent-D. Suppossed to be this big exploration ship. And we're gonna be out for so long, we're bringing the kids with us. Look how often those guys were hanging around at Earth.

DS9 was suppossed to be out on the edge of the frontier, but getting back and forth from Earth was pretty damned easy, or so it seemed.

Even Voyager, which got tossed to the far side of the galaxy, managed to have contact with Earth.

 

[aridas sofia]

I am having a brain lapse. When did Enterprise return to Earth during the course of TOS? I mean real, 23rd century Earth. Not Guardian of Forever Earth or black star slingshot 1967 Earth but good ol' 2265 Starfleet Earth?

As for taking extra supplies... I climb mountains. If I go on a three day mountain climb I take three days provisions plus two days light rations in case of emergency plus the gear to help find and process consumibles if the emergency goes longer. I think the very idea of "beyond the frontier" and "unknown" demands preparation for catastrophic failure. Roddenberry must have agreed as he said twelve out of thirteen ships experienced such failure or something similar.

Look, within the context of TOS, TAS and TMP it is a five year mission into the unknown that nobody else pulled off. Add in the other series and movies and it might muddy the picture but hey, that is always the case. That is, after all, what this thread really started out being about, right? A fan whose dad fleshed out the TOS universe for her and her friends whose work was universally accepted by fans the world over and formed, literally, a cornerstone of fandom to the point it came to piss off DC Fontana, Matt Jefferies and Roddenberry himself, and continued to be accepted as such until strenuously and deliberately undone by the very studio (and its employees) that had so benefitted from its act of resuccitation. And the coda - resuccitated and reborn as a dumbed down product (the TOS movies) for an expanded, unquestioning fan base that made Gulf and Western stockholders a profit but hardly did much to make that TOS world "real". Real in the way Franz Joseph had done and for which TOS fans had seemed to hunger. But hey, a hungry fan doesn't demand steak when tossed hamburger.

 

[blssdwlf]

If the ship has five years of food left as of SD 5423, doesn't that sort of suggest a ten-year mission?

That's assuming she never resupplied between the first episode and "Mark of Gideon". Since we know that she takes on supplies and such in the intervening episodes, the most we can assume is that she's carrying either her normal supply or max capacity of foods as of "Mark of Gideon".

 

[Warped9]

I am having a brain lapse. When did Enterprise return to Earth during the course of TOS? I mean real, 23rd century Earth. Not Guardian of Forever Earth or black star slingshot 1967 Earth but good ol' 2265 Starfleet Earth?

As for taking extra supplies... I climb mountains. If I go on a three day mountain climb I take three days provisions plus two days light rations in case of emergency plus the gear to help find and process consumibles if the emergency goes longer. I think the very idea of "beyond the frontier" and "unknown" demands preparation for catastrophic failure. Roddenberry must have agreed as he said twelve out of thirteen ships experienced such failure or something similar.

Look, within the context of TOS, TAS and TMP it is a five year mission into the unknown that nobody else pulled off. Add in the other series and movies and it might muddy the picture but hey, that is always the case. That is, after all, what this thread really started out being about, right? A fan whose dad fleshed out the TOS universe for her and her friends whose work was universally accepted by fans the world over and formed, literally, a cornerstone of fandom to the point it came to piss off DC Fontana, Matt Jefferies and Roddenberry himself, and continued to be accepted as such until strenuously and deliberately undone by the very studio (and its employees) that had so benefitted from its act of resuccitation. And the coda - resuccitated and reborn as a dumbed down product (the TOS movies) for an expanded, unquestioning fan base that made Gulf and Western stockholders a profit but hardly did much to make that TOS world "real". Real in the way Franz Joseph had done and for which TOS fans had seemed to hunger. But hey, a hungry fan doesn't demand steak when tossed hamburger.

This reminds me of how TNG reinvented the Klingons and Romulans to make them different than what fandom and previous writers had established.

 

[blssdwlf]

This is an interesting question. Did Kirk follow this "five year mission" that he narrates at the beginning of the episodes?

Space: the final frontier.

I guess it is in TOS.

These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise.

Well we do follow them around each episode.

Its five-year mission:

Kirk indirectly confirms that he was out there for five years dealing with unknowns like V'ger in TMP. Were his previous years on other ships then not as a captain or dealing with unknowns like V'ger?

to explore strange new worlds,

They do this in various episodes on planets that they appear first to discover.

to seek out new life

Yes, they discover new life (and live to tell about it).

and new civilizations,

I would suppose the First Federation, the Metrons, etc count.

to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Kirk did ignore the First Federation's warning beacon and went where they were suppose to stay out of. And past the furthest charted information in "Arena", although it was Angrily Going...

I'd say for the most part they were doing what their narrated mission statement said they would do AND doing the mundane stuff like escorting diplomats, fighting wars, policing space lanes, etc.

 

[Masao]

I think the true meaning of "5-year mission" is "Please don't cancel our TV show after only 3 seasons!"

 

[Nerys Myk]

I think the true meaning of "5-year mission" is "Please don't cancel our TV show after only 3 seasons!"

If only it had worked.

OTOH, it might have meant two more years of Season Three quality.

 

[Mysterion]

^^^
I think you're right. TOS ended at the right time, maybe for the wrong reasons, but at the right time.

 

[Timo]

I am having a brain lapse. When did Enterprise return to Earth during the course of TOS? I mean real, 23rd century Earth. Not Guardian of Forever Earth or black star slingshot 1967 Earth but good ol' 2265 Starfleet Earth?

Well, those two times, obviously. The only rational way to get to this "slingshot Earth" to do historical research there is to go to the "real" 23rd century Earth first and then slingshot. Although clearly you can also cast all rationality aside, slingshot around some black star somewhere (perhaps within the Sol system, though, since the region has its share of such anomalies and has been suspected of harboring at least two lack holes, in ST:TMP and "Past Tense"), and still end up in Earth's atmosphere somehow during the brief time you are unconscious - but when you return from that predicament, you return by slingshotting around Sol, and thus meet the "real" 23rd century Earth anyway.

Kirk basically stayed right next to Earth when visiting Pollux, too. Or Vulcan. Which happened to be almost en route between his previous assignment and the also-next-to-Earth Altair. None of which meets Kirk's own criteria for the final frontier, because he routinely quoted distances in the high hundreds of lightyears and visited stars located even farther our.

I'd say for the most part they were doing what their narrated mission statement said they would do AND doing the mundane stuff like escorting diplomats, fighting wars, policing space lanes, etc.

Yup. It's just that the mundane stuff appears to account for way more than half of what he was doing during those supposed five years... Either he stayed close to home, or interacted with peoples already quite familiar to the UFP, or both.

Of course, there's no harm in mislabeling the product in promotional material, which this "opening speech" would probably represent if it were somehow part of the Trek universe.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[blssdwlf]

Either he stayed close to home, or interacted with peoples already quite familiar to the UFP, or both.

Or his ship was fast enough to easily go between Earth and out beyond explored space at anytime during the five year mission.

 

[aridas sofia]

Or you buy into Geoffrey Mandel's concept of "high chi" regions where the distribution of dust and gas impact effective warp speed, yielding something like Earth's air and ocean currents.

 

[Timo]

Which again makes this five-year thing sort of nonsensical, because the missions of exploration are two weeks long only - either thanks to technology, or thanks to the fundamental nature of warp propulsion. Why tie down Kirk and his starship for years at an end when anybody can hop to the final frontier at a moment's notice and be back before the commercial break ends?

We could say the Enterprise was one of those ships that were part of an exploration pool - in a policy decision, they could be summoned from their more important duties to exploration errands, while other ships could not. For the Enterprise, this exploration alert status was to last for five years, and several sorties were indeed made.

But that is completely at odds with Kirk actually having been five years out there, or with the ship having five years' worth of supplies, or whatever other arguments have been made here...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CorporalCaptain]

When Shatner reads "Space: the final frontier...", he's reading those words as an omniscient narrator; it's gospel.

We know the Enterprise was on a five-year mission. The narrator said so, end of story.