How far did the starship Titan get?

[BrotherBenny]

I don't remember reading it, but is there a reason Titan didn't return to it's previous position? Is it going to get back there via a roundabout route through a different part of the Gum Nebula?

Well, here's the thing... When I wrote Orion's Hounds, I set up the Gum Nebula as a vast volume that could conceivably keep the ship busy for decades, and introduced some species and political entities that I thought later writers might be willing to build on. But instead, Marco and subsequent writers decided to take a different approach..

i really wish they hadnt .
i really loved the utter oddness and complexity of the nebula.

QFT. IMO the pure exploration of Titan is what makes the series so good. Obviously with Synthesis there will also be that exploration aspect, but their entry in the Typhon Pact arc seems to indicate that the Titan will yet again be recalled to local space.

 

[Christopher]

Which in my opinion makes not much sense. Wouldn't it be more logical to let the "slow" standard-warp drive ships do the near and intermediate surveys (In much more detail), while the faster slipstream-drive ships are doing the real longe-range exploration and quick, rough surveys of vast areas as a preparation for a second wave?

I agree. Though I took it to mean the slip stream ships wouldnt be ready any time soon, so the Luna class will go on exploring and seeing whats out there now, and when circumstances, time and resources permit a fleet of slipstream equipped exploration ships to be built and spared for the mission, they'll go out and follow up on what the Luna class ships found.

Exactly. In the long run, once there are plenty of slipstream ships available, naturally what Kopernikus proposes would be the way to go. But that's later. This is now. Slipstream is a brand-new technology, still experimental. It's complex and difficult to use. It's dependent on a very rare type of crystal called benamite. And Starfleet and the Federation have limited resources since they're busy rebuilding pretty much the whole of civilization.

So it will be years before slipstream vessels are common enough to be used on routine, non-urgent exploration missions. But Titan and the Luna-class explorers are out there now, already doing that mission. So it's only natural to use them as the advance scouts. No, they're not faster, but they're first.

It's quite common for the first explorers to be slower than the ones that follow. The earliest European explorers of the Americas went on foot, horseback, and wagon before trains came along. Ocean explorers used rafts and sailing ships before steamships surpassed them. Human space explorers first used sublight sleeper ships, then the "Boomers" went out in ships capable of no more than warp 2, and finally NX-01 came along and outpaced them. This is just the next iteration of that familiar pattern.

 

[Wes-Cutting]

^Interesting interpretation of this

 

[JD]

Well, here's the thing... When I wrote Orion's Hounds, I set up the Gum Nebula as a vast volume that could conceivably keep the ship busy for decades, and introduced some species and political entities that I thought later writers might be willing to build on. But instead, Marco and subsequent writers decided to take a different approach..

i really wish they hadnt .
i really loved the utter oddness and complexity of the nebula.

QFT. IMO the pure exploration of Titan is what makes the series so good. Obviously with Synthesis there will also be that exploration aspect, but their entry in the Typhon Pact arc seems to indicate that the Titan will yet again be recalled to local space.

I've read at least two different things saying that they will not be going back. Apparently they will be running into the Gorn while they are still out in uncharted space.

 

[DimesDan]

i really wish they hadnt .
i really loved the utter oddness and complexity of the nebula.

QFT. IMO the pure exploration of Titan is what makes the series so good. Obviously with Synthesis there will also be that exploration aspect, but their entry in the Typhon Pact arc seems to indicate that the Titan will yet again be recalled to local space.

I've read at least two different things saying that they will not be going back. Apparently they will be running into the Gorn while they are still out in uncharted space.

Yeah, my monies on the fact the Gorn are out there trying to cause trouble for Titan and trying to acquire new members for the Pact.

 

[Christopher]

^Why assume the Gorn want to cause trouble? Of all the Pact signatories, they're the ones who have historically had the friendliest (or at least most neutral) relations with the Federation, aside from two anomalous incidents. Besides, the Federation is not the center of the universe. The Gorn could be out there for reasons that have nothing to do with the UFP. Maybe they're explorers too.

 

[DimesDan]

^Why assume the Gorn want to cause trouble? Of all the Pact signatories, they're the ones who have historically had the friendliest (or at least most neutral) relations with the Federation, aside from two anomalous incidents. Besides, the Federation is not the center of the universe. The Gorn could be out there for reasons that have nothing to do with the UFP. Maybe they're explorers too.

But then there would be no conflict in the story and by your own admission, conflict makes a good story.

 

[Deranged Nasat]

^Why assume the Gorn want to cause trouble? Of all the Pact signatories, they're the ones who have historically had the friendliest (or at least most neutral) relations with the Federation, aside from two anomalous incidents. Besides, the Federation is not the center of the universe. The Gorn could be out there for reasons that have nothing to do with the UFP. Maybe they're explorers too.

But then there would be no conflict in the story and by your own admission, conflict makes a good story.

There doesn't have to be hostility between Titan and the Gorn for there to be conflict. The conflict could take the form of the Federation and Gorn meeting up randomly, and then being in the position of having to work together towards a shared goal but having to integrate and balance their distinct means of relating to the problem, or their different philosophies and ideas on how it shoulld be approached. Which is more or less the basic theme of the "Titan" series as a whole, anyway.

 

[Christopher]

Besides, the Federation is not the center of the universe. The Gorn could be out there for reasons that have nothing to do with the UFP. Maybe they're explorers too.

But then there would be no conflict in the story and by your own admission, conflict makes a good story.

Not necessarily. Just because the Gorn aren't there with the specific prior intent of messing with the Federation doesn't mean that the Federation and Gorn explorers couldn't come into conflict because of their differing priorities, value systems, and loyalties. Just to pick an example of such a story, consider Orion's Hounds. The Pa'haquel have no agenda against Starfleet or the Federation, they aren't trying to make trouble for them, but when Riker feels a moral obligation to interfere in what they consider their own business, it leads to conflict. Conflict can arise in many ways; it doesn't have to be premeditated or based on a desire for confrontation.

 

[timothy1701]

Well, here's the thing... When I wrote Orion's Hounds, I set up the Gum Nebula as a vast volume that could conceivably keep the ship busy for decades, and introduced some species and political entities that I thought later writers might be willing to build on. But instead, Marco and subsequent writers decided to take a different approach..

I always wondered if when you wrote a novel, tried to establish certain things, if later writers can just come along and change it all. Sounds like they can. Like when chewbacca died. What if other writers still wanted to use him? Now they can't? You, Christopher, wanted them to explore the gum nebula, but other writers just went and changed it. does it ever get frustrating?

 

[Christopher]

^Nothing was changed. I planted some seeds, thinking that later writers might choose to follow up on the possibilities I provided, but that was entirely at their discretion. It's like writing a bible for a TV series -- it's not about dictating what will happen, but about providing the writers with story seeds, with potentials and possibilities. Whether they do anything with those potentials depends on whether something strikes their fancy. Except in this case, it wasn't even as official as a series bible, since I wasn't the editor, just a freelancer. The possibilities I introduced were nothing more than suggestions. And it's not a change in continuity if later writers chose not to build on those suggestions. It's totally different from the Chewbacca situation.

 

[BrotherBenny]

Would still like to see the Titan return to the Gum Nebula, some cool stuff there.

I wanted the Enterprise-E to go to what you coined as the Cygnus Reach too.

And Christopher, has anyone explored the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex? Is there likely to be planetary life there or just cosmozoan life?

 

[Christopher]

It's largely unexplored by the Federation, and there probably wouldn't be too many habitable planets in the thick of it.

 

[timothy1701]

What was the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex? What book is it from?

 

[Christopher]

The Orion Molecular Cloud Complex is a real place. There's a gorgeous composite/enhanced image of it here:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap090929.html

It was alluded to in Orion's Hounds as one of the star formation regions where cosmozoans (spacegoing life forms) are most commonly found.

 

[BrotherBenny]

The Orion Molecular Cloud Complex is a real place. There's a gorgeous composite/enhanced image of it here:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap090929.html

It was alluded to in Orion's Hounds as one of the star formation regions where cosmozoans (spacegoing life forms) are most commonly found.

I assume it was explored by the Enterprise-D around early 2366 when they were at Mintaka in "Who Watches the Watchers" but there's no canonical evidence of that, just an educated guess on my part.

 

[Christopher]

^It's way too huge for the Enterprise to have done more than a cursory survey of its nearest edge. We're talking about a volume comparable to the size of the entire Federation, and it took whole fleets of ships centuries to explore that.

 

[Deranged Nasat]

I know Trek- and science fiction in general- does this a lot, but isn't it somewhat unrealistic that Mintaka would have M-class planets? Isn't it too young and hot for that? It's O-class, isn't it?

 

[Christopher]

^As you say, Trek does that a lot, with stars such as Rigel and Deneb. The problem is that the stars that have given names are the brightest ones, which are the biggest, hottest, and shortest-lived. So when sci-fi writers pick star names based only on familiarity (or, you know, actually having names rather than catalog numbers), they're likely to pick ones that are poor candidates for life.

My rationalization is that some ancient race, maybe Sargon's people, put terraformed planets in orbit of these young supergiants for some reason, perhaps because of their wide habitable zones. Since Spock suggested in "Return to Tomorrow" that Sargon's people could account for some irregularities in Vulcan's prehistory, it's possible that they were actually the ancestral Vulcanoids, which could be why Mintakans resemble Vulcans so strongly.

 

[BrotherBenny]

^It's way too huge for the Enterprise to have done more than a cursory survey of its nearest edge. We're talking about a volume comparable to the size of the entire Federation, and it took whole fleets of ships centuries to explore that.

Mintaka is 900ly from Earth and other than the fact I don't believe for a minute that the Enterprise could get there and back between episodes unless there was a well-travelled space-lane or something (which there might be considering there was a duck-blind mission in place), that's plenty of time to do a cursory exploration and send a few dozen long-range probes into the Complex.

I know Trek- and science fiction in general- does this a lot, but isn't it somewhat unrealistic that Mintaka would have M-class planets? Isn't it too young and hot for that? It's O-class, isn't it?

You're right, Mintaka is actually a binary system with a faint Class-O and class-B giant. Probably unlikely to have an M-class planet, let alone anything other than gas giants I would have thought, but Christopher could say better.