Robert April and Christopher Pike

[Terok Nor]

Assuming both are alive at the time of Star Trek III I'd love to see their reactions to the destruction of "their" ship.

We can just assume Pike blinked once for "Oh well" and twice for "That god damned space jockey blew up my ship!"

April might have died of old age already but as he claimed the Enterprise always felt like home I'm sure he'd be sad if he knew about its destruction.

 

[2takesfrakes]

Yeah, it's like when the Roman Catholic Church started closing parochial schools, all over Philadelphia -- including the High School I went to! Can't say it pissed me off, or upset me too much, but I had a lot of great memories, there. The friends I made, dances and rallies I went to ... now, there's no way I can go revisit those old haunts, ever. Like, what if I wanted to take my kid to go see where daddy went to school? ... DENIED!!! So, I can definitely see there being some of that with the former Captains of The Good Ship Enterprise.

 

[MAGolding]

Yeah, it's like when the Roman Catholic Church started closing parochial schools, all over Philadelphia -- including the High School I went to! Can't say it pissed me off, or upset me too much, but I had a lot of great memories, there. The friends I made, dances and rallies I went to ... now, there's no way I can go revisit those old haunts, ever. Like, what if I wanted to take my kid to go see where daddy went to school? ... DENIED!!! So, I can definitely see there being some of that with the former Captains of The Good Ship Enterprise.

Has your old school building been demolished yet? If not, you could still show your kid the outside, or even the inside if it has a public use or you don't mind the risks of trespassing. And you could dream of someday becoming super rich and buying the old school building.

I have sort of the opposite problem with my former public high school. In the town where I lived for almost seven years from the ages of 11 to 18, our house was conveniently next door to the grade school playground and a block from the high school. One time the school system bought an old church near the high school and demolished it to make tennis courts, I think. Well, the school board bought our house for expansion and we moved about 15 to 20 miles away. The next time I was in the old town, I walked by and found that the important purpose for which the school board had acquired our house and the house next door was - a parking lot!

And so I sort of have the ambition to someday buy the high school and turn it into my palace as a sort of revenge.

Fortunately the public library, my home away from home in those days, is still standing and in use.

I'm not certain how many other buildings in that town might face demolition as the school system expands. According to Google Maps, the grade school and the high school have now expanded so much they are connected to each other in one giant building that closes off the street that used to separate them.

In the time of Nero's Golden House, the ancient Romans joked that they should leave Rome before that one house expanded to cover all of Rome.

I kind of wonder if the present natives of my old town make the same sort of joke about the school eventually expanding to cover the whole town.

 

[TrickyDickie]

Here, the elementary school and high school were on adjacent property since the high school was built in 1967. When that was built, the old high school from 1929, several blocks away, became the middle school. Well, after the millennium they added a new athletic field house and middle school to have the entire school complex on one site. The old high school-middle school is now 'school apartments'....they made apartments for those over 60 and disabled, but kept the look of a school. The weird thing is that they took the old 1929 cornerstone out of that building, blanked that cut in the building with concrete, and moved the cornerstone over to the complex with the others....damaging it in the process.

 

[F. King Daniel]

"This is an almost totally new Enterprise!" said Decker in TMP. April and Pike's Enterprise was long gone by STIII.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

"This is an almost totally new Enterprise!" said Decker in TMP. April and Pike's Enterprise was long gone by STIII.

Decker could have been prone to hyperbole.

Though what we saw on screen in TMP bore little resemblance to the original original, but since the updated original is now more like what we saw in TMP......

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

April's appearance in TAS had him well into his 70s (don't think his exact age was mentioned), though was still fit and healthy. There is also the fact that living past 100 is common for humans, so by 2286 he'd be wouldn't be far off a century so would may have likely heard the news of his previous command. Given that she was fresh off the assembly line he probably had a special place in his heart for the Enterprise, so would be sad to hear of her demise though probably proud that she was lost in pursuit of a cause--even a highly personal one. Pike probably doesn't know what happened to his ship. Either way, both men would know that she might never get to retire, with all the mysteries and dangers space hold.

"This is an almost totally new Enterprise!" said Decker in TMP. April and Pike's Enterprise was long gone by STIII.

Same ship, just with a facelift, otherwise April and Pike would've lost her when Kirk took command and she went through some major refurbishments (e.g. crew jumping from 207 to 430, losing the gooseneck viewers, the paint job, etc.).

 

[2takesfrakes]

Has your old school building been demolished yet? If not, you could still show your kid the outside, or even the inside if it has a public use or you don't mind the risks of trespassing. And you could dream of someday becoming super rich and buying the old school building.

I have sort of the opposite problem with my former public high school. In the town where I lived for almost seven years from the ages of 11 to 18, our house was conveniently next door to the grade school playground and a block from the high school. One time the school system bought an old church near the high school and demolished it to make tennis courts, I think. Well, the school board bought our house for expansion and we moved about 15 to 20 miles away. The next time I was in the old town, I walked by and found that the important purpose for which the school board had acquired our house and the house next door was - a parking lot!

And so I sort of have the ambition to someday buy the high school and turn it into my palace as a sort of revenge.

Fortunately the public library, my home away from home in those days, is still standing and in use.

I'm not certain how many other buildings in that town might face demolition as the school system expands. According to Google Maps, the grade school and the high school have now expanded so much they are connected to each other in one giant building that closes off the street that used to separate them.

In the time of Nero's Golden House, the ancient Romans joked that they should leave Rome before that one house expanded to cover all of Rome.

I kind of wonder if the present natives of my old town make the same sort of joke about the school eventually expanding to cover the whole town.

Sorry to hear about your house getting demolished. That's pretty dramatic! My High School still stands, but that's not by accident. The structure was from back in the day and adds value, I guess, to the property, so the price goes up. It's all overgrown and shit like that, with ivy and weeds and the whole bit. What really irks me, though, is when the old churches were getting sold off, these were ones built from like the 1800s. The Church has no qualms ... and I mean NO qualms, whatever ... in selling these things and they're just like medieval castles, some of them. But ... Philadelphia's going downhill, as it has been for decades, now.

Even if it weren't, Catholicism isn't the city's religion of choice, anymore. Nobody goes to these churches, so it's just a tax burden, anyway. And it wouldn't be SO bad, if the Church continued making new churches as beautiful as they did, but they don't. It's like an austere warehouse with pews and a small alter and a podium and that's kind of it. No paintings, no sculptures, no nothing. I know that's not what Jesus would've wanted us to focus on, but it appeals to me, having all that stuff. It makes me feel like I'm somewhere holy and it's gone, now. I mean those Churches weren't knocked down, but they were sold off and you see this big, beautiful "castle" being used as a YMCA, or some shite.

 

[F. King Daniel]

April's appearance in TAS had him well into his 70s (don't think his exact age was mentioned),

The whole point of his visit was that he'd reached Starfleet's mandatory retirement age, 75.

 

[MAGolding]

The whole point of his visit was that he'd reached Starfleet's mandatory retirement age, 75.

And if April lived for 25 more years after "The Counter-Clock Incident" he should have lived a few years after the Enterprise was destroyed.

 

[Commishsleer]

How old is the Enterprise anyway if say Pike captained 20 years prior to TOS then April would have at the latest been captaining the Enterprise 25 years ago when he was 50.
I just got the impression from TOS that the Constellation class ships weren't that old.

 

[Timo]

Nobody ever says anything definite on screen, and we need to hit pause or do a screencap to find out from an obscure computer readout that the ship was in fact launched in 2245, which is about 20 years before TOS, give or take.

However, I don't think we need to assume it to be standard or even common for skippers to do five years on a stretch aboard a single ship. This sounded like unique credentials for Kirk in ST:TMP, after all. April might have sat on the center seat for all of eight months for all we know; Pike may have done eleven years straight, or then he wandered from ship to ship a lot (see a certain recent trailer), just taking Spock with him.

However, we know Pike was with the Enterprise at the beginning and the end of those eleven years. The ship may well mean more to him than it ever did to Kirk. Although not necessarily in any positive sense; he may be far happier thinking about horses and not listening to any news the Talosians might pipe into his current fantasies.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[PCz911]

I wonder....what's the average life expectancy for a naval ship today? Did the enterprise make it to "old age"?

I also imagine how a plank holder must feel when their ship is mothballed or struck from the records.

 

[XCV330]

Assuming both are alive at the time of Star Trek III I'd love to see their reactions to the destruction of "their" ship.

We can just assume Pike blinked once for "Oh well" and twice for "That god damned space jockey blew up my ship!"

April might have died of old age already but as he claimed the Enterprise always felt like home I'm sure he'd be sad if he knew about its destruction.

Pike would either blink his bulb a few more times, or order up latest "Pike Wins the olympics with his totally hot wife, she really is" fantasy from the Talosians.
Archer, no clue.
Honestly Enterprise might not have been the favorite ship of either of them. Maybe April's first command had been an old Daedalus and he had fonder memories of that, old first love type thing. But either of them as seasoned captains know that old metal goes to the scrapyard eventually. I don't think they could let themselves get too nostalgic.

I wonder....what's the average life expectancy for a naval ship today? Did the enterprise make it to "old age"?


I also imagine how a plank holder must feel when their ship is mothballed or struck from the records.

It's not always that a ship is worn out, but that new technology is not a good match to the point that refitting would be more time intensive and more expensive than just building a new one (reason that despite multiple owners and initial surveys, the SS United States, the fasted ocean liner ever built and one of the prettiest ships ever on the ocean, languishes and rusts decade after decade) . A good example is judging the age of US Coast Guard cutters vs USN Destroyers. Some of those USCG cutters are really old, funding issues yes, but also their missions at least according to the politicians that determine such things, don't justify the kind of upgrades that would require entire placements.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

However, I don't think we need to assume it to be standard or even common for skippers to do five years on a stretch aboard a single ship. This sounded like unique credentials for Kirk in ST:TMP, after all. April might have sat on the center seat for all of eight months for all we know; Pike may have done eleven years straight, or then he wandered from ship to ship a lot (see a certain recent trailer), just taking Spock with him.

You can be the captain of a ship for a long time without having a five year mission. You go out on short, directed missions (as opposed to long, open-ended ones) and keep returning to a home harbor, such as a station or other planet than Earth. So April's command of the ship might have lasted ten years total, with several short-term missions, stopping at Mars or Titan or Delta Creatinus III for a month of refits/shore leave/transfers, as well as personal business to attend to, diplomatic functions to attend in rapid succession on the same planet.

Kirk did return to Earth often (Guardian of Forever doesn't count - the Enterprise didn't fly him back), but he didn't stay there longer than a few days at a time, I imagine.

 

[Timo]

That's the thing, though - Kirk always got back home, to Earth, to starbases. And then sailed out again. Nothing marked the beginning of a mission, or the end of it, except for individual missions that lasted for 45 minutes each. It's difficult to see April or Pike doing any differently, qualitatively speaking. Do we draw the line at 3 days of rest and recuperation, or 30 days? At an overhaul where engineering gains a new doodad or one where the bridge dome is reshaped? At a transition from exploration to border guarding, or from border guarding to ferrying of spare parts?

Luckily, we don't have to believe in a "five year mission" for exploring strange new worlds in the TOS context. Or in any Prime context at that. It's exclusively a phenomenon of ST:ID and ST:B, an exciting new concept Starfleet is trying out with nuKirk and the nuShip. Within Prime, "5YM" is a term coined for Kirk's memoirs, apparently...

Doesn't mean April couldn't have spent "five years out there, dealing with unknowns like <insert space menace>". But not too many skippers can have done that, or else Earth would have a steady supply and Kirk would lose his competitive edge in TMP. And Pike's 11 years should IMHO be "downplayed" somehow, too, to keep Kirk more special. Pike is special for other reasons anyway, having made it to the Great Skippers List during his first few years already.

Timo Saloniemi