How far did the starship Titan get?

[Deranged Nasat]

^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.

Thanks. I like that theory about Sargon's people; I think I remember you placing it briefly in "Ex Machina".

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.

I thought so. Thank you, both of you, for confirming it. I didn't know Mintaka was a binary, though.

 

[timothy1701]

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.

Thanks! It looks awsome, and I recognized the horse head nebula. Oh, and I just wanted to say, Orion's Hounds was one of my favorite Titan books. And I never realized it untill just a little bit ago, but you also wrote The Buried Age, another one of my favorite books. Over a Torrent Sea was great too.I hope you write some more.

 

[JD]

He already is. He's writing one of next years Abramsverse books.