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Orions & the Federation

If we go back to the dialogue on "The Cage" it could be interpreted the "green animal women" are not Orions but are traded by Orions as slaves.

PIKE: I said that's one place I might go. I might go into business on Regulus or on the Orion colony.
BOYCE: You, an Orion trader, dealing in green animal women, slaves?
 
If we go back to the dialogue on "The Cage" it could be interpreted the "green animal women" are not Orions but are traded by Orions as slaves.

PIKE: I said that's one place I might go. I might go into business on Regulus or on the Orion colony.
BOYCE: You, an Orion trader, dealing in green animal women, slaves?
Plenty of subsequent episodes have squashed that. Boyce was just your typical TOS era bigot.
 
What's that got to do with connecting Orions with the green skinned women?

I'm not arguing they aren't Orions. Clearly that's what they are. When did that get firmly established?

I was just saying, especially in early TOS there was room for interpretation
 
I think the first time after "The Cage" that we get any establishing on the species would be "Pirates of Orion" where we learn Orions are actually blue. :vulcan:

It's then lots of movies and three spinoffs that totally fail to connect anybody with Orions the species, and instead bring to prominence the Syndicate in a way that distances it from any particular species.

And then along comes ENT, where we finally get the "firmly established" part in "Borderland". Really, that's the first-ever onscreen connection between the name Orion and a specific makeup, and the first-ever sight of a green male! And indeed there's a specific line about "Orion females" to suggest that the species identity really goes with the name.

Of course, with a gap that long, and with the Syndicate stuff in between, the effect is rather diluted, and we don't really get a strong incentive to think in the intended terms of "Oh, all Orions are green!" or "This is the actual Orion species!" or anything. "Bound" of course has further dialogue on 'em green folks being "Orions" to our heroes, but they wouldn't know better.

Timo Saloniemi
 
One thing to remember about the Prions is, no matter how much they want a treaty they are always positioning themselves to take something.

Orioms are always pirates.
 
I think the first time after "The Cage" that we get any establishing on the species would be "Pirates of Orion" where we learn Orions are actually blue. :vulcan:

And that was TAS and TAS had a lot of weird colour choices, so I'm not sure we should take that into account. Wasn't one of the creators colour-blind?
 
What about this oddity... we see an Orion cadet, played by Rachel Nichols, at Starfleet Academy in the Kelvin film. We never hear of Orions in Starfleet at this time, or the 24th century until LOWER DECKS.

Granted, it's an alternate universe, but it does beg the question.

Also, if the rules are the same as prime universe Starfleet, all members of non-Federation member species need to join is a letter of recommendation from a command level officer (Nog, Icheb, Calhoun, Saru)...in fact we see Jaylah join at the end of Beyond; presumably with a recommendation from Kirk.
 
And that was TAS and TAS had a lot of weird colour choices, so I'm not sure we should take that into account. Wasn't one of the creators colour-blind?

That reasoning might be more valid except for the fact they did depict a green skinned character that looked just like what we've come to know as the Orion slave girl. https://tas.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/blu-ray/112-BR/thetimetraphd0186.jpg

We hadn't seen any males in live action at that point. Maybe the idea was the males were blue?
 
That reasoning might be more valid except for the fact they did depict a green skinned character that looked just like what we've come to know as the Orion slave girl. https://tas.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/blu-ray/112-BR/thetimetraphd0186.jpg

We hadn't seen any males in live action at that point. Maybe the idea was the males were blue?

TAS is from an era of animation that was so cheap and hasty that I find it perfectly possible that they got it right in one episode and messed up in the other.
 
Do you know what Orion is? A constellation is a sort of long, narrow, pyramidal shaped slice of outer space.

The celestal sphere is an imaginary concept, a sphere with everything in outer space attached to the inner surface. So astronomers draw rectangles on that imaginary suface to form constellations. .Some constellations are simple rectangles with four sides, and other constellations are complex shapes formed by several different rectangles with different proportions and sizes.

Here is a link to a two dimensional image of the constellation Orion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(constellation)#/media/File:Orion_IAU.svg

Each of the smaller rectangles in it's complex shape can be considered to be the cross section of a long, narrow pyramid of space. The Constellation Orion is a volume of space contianng several long, narrow pyramids of space attached to each other and coming to a point at the solar system at expanding out into space getting farther and father from Earth and wider and wider.

The constellation of Orion extends to infinity and the farthest astronomical objects detected in it should be a billion times farther away than the closest.

Pi 3 Orionis is a star 26.32 light years from Earth. Pi 1 Orionis iooks right beside it as seen from Earth but is 116 light years from Earth. Pi 2 Orionis lioks right beside it as seen from Earth but is 224 light years from Earth. Pi 6 Orionis iooks right beside it as seen from Earth but is about 950 light years from Earth. Pi 4 Orionis iooks right beside it as seen from Earth but is about 1.050 light years from Earth. Pi 5 Orionis iooks right beside it as seen from Earth but is about 1,300 light years from Earth.

According to "City on the Edge of Forever", Kirk is familiar with the literature of a colony or alien cuture, on a planet orbiting the left star of Orion's Belt, Which is Alnitak, Zeta Orionis, a star believed to be at least 1.200 light years from Earth..

"Who Watches The Watchers" happens at the inhabited Planet Mintaka III. The star Mintaka, Delta Orionis, seems to be over a thousand light years from Earth.

You may have heard of the satar Rigel, and planets of Rigel, and intelligent Rigelians in various Star Trek productions. Rigel is Beta Orionis, a star about 860 light years from Earth.

According to costume designer Robert Fletcher, there are Betelguesians in Star tTek: The Motion Picture.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Betelgeuse

Betelguese is the star Alpha Orionis, about 550 light years from Earth.

I think that there are probably many millions of stars in our galaxy which are in the arbitrary volume of space called teh Constellation Orion. The Federation may have knowledge of hundreds or thousands of intelligent species living on planets that can be said to be "in" orion, and some of those planets may be hundreds or thousands of light years from others.

And the natives of any or all of those planets could be called Orions if more specific names are not avaiable.

There is no reason to believe that the builders of the Orion ruins, the Orion traders (if not humans), the Orion slave girls, the nasty Orions of "Balance of Terror", "The Pirates of Orion", and the namesakes of the Orion Syndicate all must belong to the samet species or are ruled by the same government.

They could all be separate species with separate governments or some of them might be the sames species and/or have the same government.
 
And the natives of any or all of those planets could be called Orions if more specific names are not available.

I'm not sure this conclusion makes sense. "Calling people" would appear to serve the purpose of describing a grouping, and if the assorted people called "Orion" are only grouped together in the sense of a constellation... It would be like referring to a group as "the Kims" based on their given names. The only purpose that would serve would be to obfuscate, as the listener would jump to the conclusion that something reasonable such as the ruling clans of Korea were the topic, even when the speaker wanted to discuss Kim Basinger and/or Kim Philby, and not even from the angle of them sharing a given name.

I very much feel that anything called "Orion" in Trek is related by more than just the name, just like referring to "American" actually carries practical connotations even if it's a bit of an umbrella term. The listener is supposed to take something home from the appellation, at a relevant level: if one wants to discuss different baseball teams at state level, "American" wouldn't crop up in the discussion much.

If anything, two different governments or two different crime organizations for one and the same green species would get called by different names, because that's what names are for.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Here's Orion in 3-D http://om-blog.orbitalmaneuvers.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Orion-3D-update-final.png

The closest star to Earth in the Orion constellation is Bellatrix at 252 light years. The farthest is Alnilam at 1,976 light years.

No wonder they have an Orion Syndicate. These Orions could control a vast area of space if they control all the stars in the constellation (which would be odd since the constellation is rather arbitrary from a galactic frame of reference). Pike mentions the Rigel colonies and Star Trek has indicated there are 16 planets in the Rigel system, with most of them having colonies.

Maybe the Orion Syndicate, the Orion pirates, etc.. all come from just Rigel.
 
I see no reason to assume the Orions control all the stars in the Orion constellation. There's no reason that the constellation would have any meaning to them and their empire would be way too huge.
There's also no reason to assume all aliens who come from planets in the Orion constellation would be Orions or called Orions. In fact, that's a pretty silly idea. we met the inhabitants of Rigel in Enterprise and they weren't Orions.Same with the Mintakans.

Also the "arm" of the Mikly Way which contains the sol system is called the "Orion Arm". Are we now Orions too?Or do the Orions own the whole arm of the galaxy?

IF the name of the Orions has even anything to do with the Orion constellation (and isn't a translation error or early misconception, or just a case where the name of an alien species just happens to sound like something from Earth mythology), then I'd say they come from ONE of the systems in the Orion constellations.
 
Logic is the beginning of wisdom, Valeris, not the end...

Chronologically, ENT "Borderland" is our first mention of Orions, and unsurprisingly the mention is made by T'Pol, with the human heroes just meekly listening and learning. Might be it's a Vulcan name for the culture. Might be it's an Orion name directly adopted by Vulcans. Might be the Universal Translator fouls up whatever T'Pol is saying, and Orion in fact is a fundamentally human name for the bunch.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Yeah TOS was a bit loose with continuity or lore building because they weren't trying to build a greater universe. They just wanted to make a show that was "the wagon train to the stars", So as a result TOS is a bit more departed from the TNG and later eras making some confusing continuity gaps
 
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