At no point does the "impossible" include "how in the galaxy did the Valiant get out this far."
This is the only thing it includes.
If it were theoretically possible for older ships to travel the distance in the time allotted, nothing here would be impossible in the slightest. Recorder markers are clearly supposed to be found centuries after their deployment, in the depths of space, considering Kirk did find this one. But if going to the edge were possible, somebody would no doubt have done it, or attempted it and failed, and Kirk would find nothing remarkable there.
It's not Peary going "I found this scroll from this Jones guy here a mile from the pole, did somebody reach it twelve years ago?". It is Armstrong going "I found this scroll from this Aruhayadha guy here twenty feet from the LM, did somebody reach the Moon 2,000 years ago?".
That's the problem of your argument if you try to jam TOS into TNG-continuity. I'm just pointing it out.
I'm just making the true statement that TOS writers already were told to treat impulse as STL. You are trying to pretend they were not.
If they fucked this up once or twice, it's not your business to pretend they meant it to be. Nor to use ambiguous cases as evidence one way or another, considering it is all just part of the "were told to write X, did not always succeed" phenomenon.
Now, if there were an actual pressing reason to say that the Trek universe is different from intent, saying this out loud would be fine and well, especially if this did not require contradiction of what was actually shown. Many a writer has decided that earlier intent was wrong and e.g. Spock's human "ancestor" was in fact his mother, or the Klingon Empire has no emperor. Few have needed to contradict anything but our expectations in doing so.
But our only real case of interstellar impulse is the scenario where "Balance of Terror" was interstellar. And that episode is fucked up anyway and won't get any better by assuming FTL impulse.
For "Balance of Terror" to be true
... Everything else would have to be false, including all the other Romulan episodes of TOS. So ignoring the episode is no great crime, and if anything, our efforts should be aimed at negating the episode with minimal contradiction.
Say, Romulans who can be outrun by the hero ship so categorically cannot have fought the established past war or be a threat in the upcoming one, regardless of the other specs or designations of their inferior drive. The discussion about Romulan propulsive prowess cannot apply to the Romulan species, and must only apply to this Romulan vessel. Which is what explicitly happens - the heroes study the evidence at hand, without preconceptions.
TOS has never said "impulse engine" is specifically a STL-only drive.
Nor has TNG or ENT. But in all cases, the writers were told this is the case, and they wrote it so, without a need to insert explicit dialogue to the effect.
If "BoT" stands out there, we just step on it and grind. The other TOS episodes do not stand out, and are at very best ambiguous, just like most TNG or ENT stuff.
Not only that, TOS had very un-exotic engines operate at FTL such as their own "ion engine" shuttlecraft from "The Menagerie" and ships with "ion propulsion".
No. The latter engine was explicitly exotic. And the former never existed - the actual term is ion engine
power, which is not a real-world thing at all. Drawing connections to a late 20th century technology of a similar name is like saying that warp must refer to the way the Wright brothers controlled their aircraft.
Was the Enterprise able to outrun the Romulan? Yes, but was it significant as in a large measurable amount? No, not really.
Yes, yes really. How can we tell? Because the heroes never failed in it. Flying rings around the enemy was a feature till the very last.
Do I want this to be watertight evidence? Of course not - I want Romulans to be able to match the hero ship in speed, just as they do in all the later episodes. But I have nothing riding on the speed gap in the first episode. If the Romulans moved slowly, it may be due to them only having impulse, or them having warp as well but not being able to use it in this sub-underwater scenario. Neither take forces me to believe in FTL impulse.
Annnddd... that's not how it happens in the episode. Enterprise returns to where it was originally as the reflection that moves as the Romulan moves.
No, it does not. In the earlier shadowing, there was no issue of extreme weapons range. In this shadowing, there is. The distances are different, and obviously this is because maximum warp cancels out emergency warp when and only when we see those orders issued. Adding a third, off-camera action through pure speculation would contradict the events.
Heck, had Kirk hit maximum warp before he was shown doing it, what Romulan would consider him a sensor echo? Stealth is important in the episode, and difficult to achieve. Mad dashes don't work there.
As for "DDM", the movements of the crippled
Constellation across the battlefield are the decisive ones, and establish the extreme tardiness of the DDM. None of the close action would take place if the DDM could outpace 1/3 impulse.
And even in TNG-continuity, how is that different from when Voyager is attacked at warp (in the same frame) by a Kazon raider in "Basics" and you can clearly see the Kazon isn't pointing the same direction as Voyager?
You have it backwards here. Two players who have warp drives running can fly rings around each other. This does not apply to the scenario at hand where you claim the same is true even when one party is at impulse.
Many shows emphasize the risks of merging or penetrating warp fields. Combat should not feature such delicate cooperation. And why would Kirk wish to rendezvous Khan at warp in this delicate fashion when Khan is said to be slowing and OTOH is moving in the
opposite direction and thus clearly has no wish to travel to Regula with Kirk?
When two ships meet, there is no good reason to assume dissimilar drive modes unless somebody says so. Heck, nobody says so even in TMP! We just assume Kirk isn't warping like mad all the time. Which is a good assumption, one that the VFX choices sometimes manage to support and not without intent. But a pretty exceptional event, and certainly not related to TOS in any way (the whole point back then being to make people forget TOS ever happened the way it did)
.
The Reliant's blue dome is blown up in TWOK yet their impulse drive is fine while the warp drive and photon controls are knocked out.
Which is why I previously reminded folks that Khan had two, negating the value of this evidence.
No where is it said in TOS that Impulse is exclusively STL.
Except in the written instructions for the TOS writers.
So any attempt to see FTL impulse in TOS must be aimed at contradicting writer intent for greater good. And any attempt to pretend that such an attempt describes TOS is futile.
Beyond that, FTL impulse is a question of consistency within the boundless fictional context. Is Spock's human ancestor his mother or his great-great-grandfather? Now we know. Does Spock have a sister? We still don't know. Is impulse FTL? We now know it is not.
Timo Saĺoniemi
