Needs of the plot, all those methods are still in the Indiana Jones warehouse on Ceta Alpha V
How to explain Starfleet forgetting alternatives to warp drive
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Beverly took the Pasteur to Warp 13 in All Good Things….
I know, Q and all that. Still…
Someone liked the FASA warp scale, obviously.
By then, they were probably capable of routinely reaching speeds in the 5000-10,000c range, which translates to Warp 9.975 to 9.994, and maybe reaching 20,000c (9.998) in a pinch. Instead of messing around with all those 9's, they just redid the warp scale to include numbers above 10.
Exactly what I thought
Edited to add: Here's the full AGT scale I worked out.
AGT scale . . . . . TNG scale . . . . . ×c
10 . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.68 . . . . . . . . . . 2154
11 . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.89 . . . . . . . . . . 2960
12 . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.95 . . . . . . . . . . 3956
13 . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.975* . . . . . . . . 5166
14 . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.985** . . . . . . . 6613
15 . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.99 . . . . . . . . . . 8323
16 . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.994 . . . . . . . . . 10321
17 . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.996 . . . . . . . . . 12633
18 . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.997. . . . . . . . . .15284
19 . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.998 . . . . . . . . . 18304
20 . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 . . . . . . . . . . . <infinite>
* maximum speed of USS Voyager, given in VOY: "Caretaker"
** maximum speed of USS Enterprise-E, according to some sources
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"How to explain Starfleet forgetting alternatives to warp drive"
The same reason why fossil fuel is still the standard for automobiles even though there were always alternatives and the original cars didn't run on gasoline. It was the easiest to go with and changing was more effort than they were willing to put in. Even if no new cars ran on gasoline by the mid-2030s, with the number of used cars on the road, it would take time for gasoline powered cars to become completely phased out. We're looking at the 2050s at the earliest.
Back to Star Trek: I think warp drive was the "easiest" thing to go with for centuries and centuries. By the time the Galaxy had to change, 100 years before The Burn, it was too late. Given how much larger the Federation was in the 31st Century, I gather that the government was much larger and everyone wants to have a say. And if no one agrees on anything, no one can get anything done.
Politics. Politics is why they stuck with Warp Drive. It slows down everything in our world and it slows everything down in the Star Trek Universe.
The same reason why fossil fuel is still the standard for automobiles even though there were always alternatives and the original cars didn't run on gasoline. It was the easiest to go with and changing was more effort than they were willing to put in. Even if no new cars ran on gasoline by the mid-2030s, with the number of used cars on the road, it would take time for gasoline powered cars to become completely phased out. We're looking at the 2050s at the earliest.
Back to Star Trek: I think warp drive was the "easiest" thing to go with for centuries and centuries. By the time the Galaxy had to change, 100 years before The Burn, it was too late. Given how much larger the Federation was in the 31st Century, I gather that the government was much larger and everyone wants to have a say. And if no one agrees on anything, no one can get anything done.
Politics. Politics is why they stuck with Warp Drive. It slows down everything in our world and it slows everything down in the Star Trek Universe.
I find that analogy flawed. Gasoline/petroleum is the fuel, not the engine. That's less "why are they still using warp drive" and more "why are they still using matter/antimatter annihilation". Trains and aeroplanes use fossil fuels too, but they are capable of substantially higher speeds and ranges than cars.
And under the most impressive conditions and in ways that nobody on Romulus could begin to notice, despite ships and sensor arrays that can pinpoint any questionable activity. (All NEM need do is ditch the Reman/clone contrived nonsense and have Shinzon be the old standby trope of a new Romulan leader wanting to take over the galaxy, and so many plot holes and issues would go away faster than Samantha Stevens wiggling her nose. )
Indeed.
Discovery takes place in an alternate timeline, where rather than acting like Starfleet, all humans became like those gravity-impaired folk in the movie Wall-E. Dilithium (which is NOT a 'power source') goes BOOM and they all get sad and invent NOTHING for almost a millennia? Using what someone said above about gasoline - if oil ran out tomorrow, you don't think we'd have a brand-new infrastructure fully operational within a decade? We already have the tech for that - we'd just have to implement it. The human culture in Discovery went from being Starfleet "the engineer needs to invent NEW technology in the next half hour or we are all dead!", to "aww, gee, guys... all our kewl stuff blew up so now I'm going to be emo for about 900 years..."
Discovery is it's own thing, and is unreconcilable to real Star Trek. Just consider it in an alternate universe - one so vile even the mirror-verse people avoid it. Its painfully obvious the writers watched a few episodes and said, "Hey! This dilithium stuff seems REALLY important! lets blow it up!" They didn't even know what it was used for. Whoever mentioned the Omega-molecule... that would have worked MUCH better. It would have also fried communications which would have also made things worse - THAT would have been worth watching. Not this "we just gave up for centuries" approach which is nothing like what Rodenberry created.
P.S. - Zefram Cochraine did 'Warp' without dilithium, thus proving cruder methods WERE KNOWN and available (assume those primitive drives probably maxed-out before warp 2 even). There were also several alternatives to dilithium itself, like trilithium and paralithium, which didn't even need new engines to use.
Discovery is it's own thing, and is unreconcilable to real Star Trek. Just consider it in an alternate universe - one so vile even the mirror-verse people avoid it. Its painfully obvious the writers watched a few episodes and said, "Hey! This dilithium stuff seems REALLY important! lets blow it up!" They didn't even know what it was used for. Whoever mentioned the Omega-molecule... that would have worked MUCH better. It would have also fried communications which would have also made things worse - THAT would have been worth watching. Not this "we just gave up for centuries" approach which is nothing like what Rodenberry created.
P.S. - Zefram Cochraine did 'Warp' without dilithium, thus proving cruder methods WERE KNOWN and available (assume those primitive drives probably maxed-out before warp 2 even). There were also several alternatives to dilithium itself, like trilithium and paralithium, which didn't even need new engines to use.
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Nice chart - I worked out my own awhile back. I'll need to compare them. At the risk of sounding very stupid, what does AGT stand for?Exactly what I thought
Edited to add: Here's the full AGT scale I worked out.
[blue][snip][/blue]
* maximum speed of USS Voyager, given in VOY: "Caretaker"
** maximum speed of USS Enterprise-E, according to some sources
Also, I came to the same conclusion - that "Warp 10 = Infinity" thing was just BAD (in-universe), and that it only lasted one or two decades before they brought back the old (TNG-era) scale. We (UFP) met way too many aliens that could go far above Federation-level Warp speeds, so it makes no sense to purposely nerf an already existing scale that worked (just to do one episode where they ship Janeway with Paris... EWWW).
"All Good Things." TNG episode.
Too much to unpack, too little time. We had someone who complainined non-stop during the first two years that DSC had too much fanwank. The only way you get fanwank is if people writing Star Trek had seen the fucking show.
Bryan Fuller created DSC, he was a staff-writer on VOY. Pike, Spock, Section 31, the Mirror Universe, Harry Mudd, Sarek, Amanda, the Talosians, the Orions, the Andorians, Trill. References to Archer. If someone doesn't know shit about Star Trek, those wouldn't have been in the show.
I get that you hate DSC, but the people who make it have seen Star Trek, you just don't like what they did. There's a difference.
120, not 900. The Burn occurs 120 years before DSC's third season.
If they lose warp drive, they can't move around. Geordi said in "Force of Nature" (TNG) that the galaxy depends on Warp Drive. We got to see what happens if they don't have it.
And, by the way, they do develop alternative ways of travelling. They use slip-streams and whatever Book's ship has. It's just that resources are more finite than dilithium, so power to travel through space is at a premium.
Did it ever occur to you that the parts are probably imported from planet to planet and if everything blows up there's nothing to import and then they run out of resources to create what they used to be able to create? They lose access to resources they once had access to before.
Everyone takes things for granted. They don't realize how much they depend on those things and depend on others until they no longer have them and are no longer within reach.
EDITED TO ADD: If you remember "The Omega Directive" at all, you'll remember that any type of travel beyond the speed of light would've been impossible if one of those Omega particles went off. The writers of DSC weren't going for NO travel above the speed of light, they were going for LIMITED travel above the speed of light. So, no, the Omega Particle wouldn't have worked.
That someone was me.
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Point of fact, the Federation was in the process of moving away from using dilithium, due to a shortage, when "The Burn" happened. With so much death and destruction, R&D took a back seat. Most likely, the producers wanted to have an allegory to fossil fuel usage. I mean, what if every tank of gas blew up at the same time, when in use? How would society and the government respond to such a disaster? Don't think that the "spore drive" wasn't a backdoor commentary on green tech versus old tech debate...
Indeed. A bit tongue in cheek example is in "Spy Kids 2" (it's Trek related. Ricardo Montalban is in it!) and the titular characters have no power in their vehicle and one keeps using voice commands for equipment, and the other has to remind them "No, power, remember." And the first feels very put out by having to do things "manually." Again, comedy, obviously but the fact is that something becomes a mainstay of a production, from gasoline, to plastic, to dilithium, it is very difficult to build a whole new infrastructure whole cloth. Couple that on par with the fact that the Burn had no known cause, and there was a lot of fear around it happening again and the freezing up for a century strikes me as more reasonable, based upon the Federation's past behaviors.
Voyager had translocational tech from Sikaria. YES, the devise did get fused/whatever because Voyager's power didn't match their tech (first time in ST? lol), but they still would have made schematics to work with it and also the people who hooked it up would have learned something. With THAT tech, you can move stuff around the entirety of Federation space without ships. There were also a few other transporter techs that had far longer ranges than the UFP's, that the Federation was aware of. It just seems like they simply gave up.
As for 'not watching the show', there are a couple of ST shows I haven't watched. None of the cartoons, and I barely watched DS9. However, I can tell people a lot about stuff that happened in those shows without ever watching them, because I spend most of my spare time reading Wiki entries on Scify franchises. I would imagine that writers read the Wikis as well. Take LD (never watched a single episode) - it seems the sheer amount of 'fan-service' they throw in there (memba-berries) is like they took a dart board with Wiki entries and just pick stuff at random to include. Like seriously, WHY did they have one of those slimy fish-babies from Threshold? Anyhow, as someone who watched the TOS when it aired live for the first time, yes, I do get a little bent out of shape when something I love and grew up with gets 'corrupted' because someone new comes along, and rather than build-upon everything that came before, they just nuke everything in sight to turn it into a setting they DO want to write in. You see, I've seen it before. I used to work for a company that did just this to a beloved and popular setting - it was literally erased so the new writers could have a clean-slate to write their stories. Problem is, they also erased the fans, sadly.
That's called 'subtractive design', BTW, and used to be frowned on in creative circles (ESPECIALLY in 'shared world' franchises). Nowadays, its the go-to for these new crop of writers. All IMO, of course. Cheers
As for 'not watching the show', there are a couple of ST shows I haven't watched. None of the cartoons, and I barely watched DS9. However, I can tell people a lot about stuff that happened in those shows without ever watching them, because I spend most of my spare time reading Wiki entries on Scify franchises. I would imagine that writers read the Wikis as well. Take LD (never watched a single episode) - it seems the sheer amount of 'fan-service' they throw in there (memba-berries) is like they took a dart board with Wiki entries and just pick stuff at random to include. Like seriously, WHY did they have one of those slimy fish-babies from Threshold? Anyhow, as someone who watched the TOS when it aired live for the first time, yes, I do get a little bent out of shape when something I love and grew up with gets 'corrupted' because someone new comes along, and rather than build-upon everything that came before, they just nuke everything in sight to turn it into a setting they DO want to write in. You see, I've seen it before. I used to work for a company that did just this to a beloved and popular setting - it was literally erased so the new writers could have a clean-slate to write their stories. Problem is, they also erased the fans, sadly.
That's called 'subtractive design', BTW, and used to be frowned on in creative circles (ESPECIALLY in 'shared world' franchises). Nowadays, its the go-to for these new crop of writers. All IMO, of course. Cheers
What was erased in Star Trek? People use this argument but it holds no weight with me because TOS still exists. Star Trek, in all its various incarnations still exist. To expand further, Rings of Power doesn't anger me because Tolkien's writings still exist. There is nothing "subtracted" because it is all still present. If writers want to go in and hit the big old reset button and they are charged with the current IP holders to do it go for it. The parts I enjoy still exist.
I get bent out of shape because people are not allowed to be creative within the shared worldspace, even if it means undoing something. The something I am passionate about in Trek may be the something someone else loathes. To me, the franchise that espouses IDIC has the best place for giving as much variety as humanly possible.
I get bent out of shape because people are not allowed to be creative within the shared worldspace, even if it means undoing something. The something I am passionate about in Trek may be the something someone else loathes. To me, the franchise that espouses IDIC has the best place for giving as much variety as humanly possible.
Unless you can prove how much the writers of DSC have or haven't seen of Star Trek, all you're doing is speculating and projecting based on your biased views. Cheers to you too.
Okay, I don't really want to argue this point, but let me just add this...
Someone else in this thread mentioned using the Omega-Molecule to disrupt/destroy subspace in the region of the Federation. That accomplishes what Discovery attempts to do. It would have also wreaked havoc with subspace communications. That would have been very cool, and well within the lore of the franchise.
I don't detest change, I detest poorly implemented changes just for change's sake. Plenty of franchises have done 'time skips', and sometimes it works, and other times it falls flat. I get that they want a level playing field for their new stories, but don't go calling something a 'power source' when every fan worth their salt knows dilithium is NOT that. Also, the flipside of that, which you seem to ignore, is that once you 'reimagine' the franchise to your liking, the old one is GONE. Why bother reading/watching it, when it is no longer relevant? Remember the Black Widow movie? Yeah... neither does anyone else. Why make a movie about someone who is already dead? This would be like me reading about the Black Plague and crying over all those dead people. Its the PAST, and its now irrelevant. Partaking in it is just pointless - you loose all investment in the characters and setting. Once again, IMO
P.S. Prequels don't count, for some reason. LOL
Someone else in this thread mentioned using the Omega-Molecule to disrupt/destroy subspace in the region of the Federation. That accomplishes what Discovery attempts to do. It would have also wreaked havoc with subspace communications. That would have been very cool, and well within the lore of the franchise.
I don't detest change, I detest poorly implemented changes just for change's sake. Plenty of franchises have done 'time skips', and sometimes it works, and other times it falls flat. I get that they want a level playing field for their new stories, but don't go calling something a 'power source' when every fan worth their salt knows dilithium is NOT that. Also, the flipside of that, which you seem to ignore, is that once you 'reimagine' the franchise to your liking, the old one is GONE. Why bother reading/watching it, when it is no longer relevant? Remember the Black Widow movie? Yeah... neither does anyone else. Why make a movie about someone who is already dead? This would be like me reading about the Black Plague and crying over all those dead people. Its the PAST, and its now irrelevant. Partaking in it is just pointless - you loose all investment in the characters and setting. Once again, IMO
P.S. Prequels don't count, for some reason. LOL
