Shatner's 'Trial Run'

[Procutus]

^would a re-release featuring new cover art (the STXI crew in their cadet gear) and a tiny note saying "this book is nothing to do with that film, even though they share a similar vibe" on the back page be considered false advertising?

I find it profoundly unlikely that William Shatner would allow a cover that depicted Kirk as anyone other than William Shatner. And I don't think Pocket would want to confuse things by putting Abramsverse covers on non-Abramsverse books.

Christopher, I have to agree with you on both counts there, especially the notion of Shatner allowing someone else's likeness as Kirk on a novel bearing his name.

What I would like to see in a second volume would be the inclusion of pre-Nero information from STXI, reconciling George Kirk Sr.'s time on the Kelvin, what Robau went on to do, and when and why George Sr. decided to go by his middle name.

 

[Christopher]

...and when and why George Sr. decided to go by his middle name.

He didn't. And if you mean George Jr., he didn't either. As established in "What Are Little Girls Made Of," only Jim Kirk called his brother Sam.

 

[Therin of Andor]

He didn't. And if you mean George Jr., he didn't either. As established in "What Are Little Girls Made Of," only Jim Kirk called his brother Sam.

I think the OP is referring to "Collision Course" using Joseph Kirk as Jim's Dad's name, a retrofit intended to give added meaning to Kirk's son, Joseph, from the Shatnerverse "Totality" trilogy.

 

[Dayton Ward]

^ How cavalier and lazy of the writers, screwing with the continuity for the sake of their own story. Tsk, tsk. Simply awful.

 

[Procutus]

He didn't. And if you mean George Jr., he didn't either. As established in "What Are Little Girls Made Of," only Jim Kirk called his brother Sam.

I think the OP is referring to "Collision Course" using Joseph Kirk as Jim's Dad's name, a retrofit intended to give added meaning to Kirk's son, Joseph, from the Shatnerverse "Totality" trilogy.

Yup, that's what I meant.

 

[Captain Robert April]

^Well, the second edition of the Concordance included non-TOS movies and episodes that featured guest appearances by TOS actors in their original roles (e.g. Generations, "Unification," "Relics," and "Blood Oath"). Since Leonard Nimoy reprised the role of Spock in the 2009 film, that makes it fair game for inclusion.

Treating the film's timeline equivalently to the Mirror Universe makes sense, since of course it's meant to be just as separate. However, it's incorrect to say that every listing should be separate, since the timelines only diverged in 2233, and anything that the film established about things that existed before that time -- such as the Kelvin, Captain Robau, George and Winona Kirk's service aboard that ship, the existence of a Laurentian system, etc. -- would be canonical for the Prime timeline, as would Spock Prime's experiences in 2387. Analogously, the Halkans in "Mirror, Mirror" exist in both the Prime and Mirror Universes, so they should be listed as part of the Prime universe.

It's still an open debate as to whether or not the Kelvin was the product of an alternate timeline; twenty years before "The Cage" and we've got a ship the size of a Galaxy class starship, and looking just about as advanced? I don't think so.

I'd push that divergence further back, to the Temporal Cold War.

 

[Captain Robert April]

^ How cavalier and lazy of the writers, screwing with the continuity for the sake of their own story. Tsk, tsk. Simply awful.

Yes, we shall have to get angry and post angry messages on the internet and stamp our feet and.....write more angry posts...or something....

 

[JD]

It's still an open debate as to whether or not the Kelvin was the product of an alternate timeline; twenty years before "The Cage" and we've got a ship the size of a Galaxy class starship, and looking just about as advanced? I don't think so.

I'd push that divergence further back, to the Temporal Cold War.

Except it's been made pretty clear by the people involved in the movie that everything before the Narada comes back takes place in the same universe as the rest of the franchise.

 

[Count Zero]

It's still an open debate as to whether or not the Kelvin was the product of an alternate timeline; twenty years before "The Cage" and we've got a ship the size of a Galaxy class starship, and looking just about as advanced? I don't think so.

I'd push that divergence further back, to the Temporal Cold War.

Except it's been made pretty clear by the people involved in the movie that everything before the Narada comes back takes place in the same universe as the rest of the franchise.

And also in the movie itself.

 

[Captain Robert April]

The alternate universe can o' worms has been opened. All we know from the movie is that, from the characters' perspective, things have been changed, and can roughly pinpoint where the divergence happened in their universe, but things didn't match up very well even at that point (Kelvin way too advanced, stardate system completely different, near TOS-style phasers and communicators at a pre-Cage point in the timeline, etc.) so who's to say what the reaction would be if, through some sort of movie magic, the original Enterprise were to fall through one of those wormholes and come face to face with his bloated namesake? And started going through their historical records to see where things went weird?

Paging Captain Archer...

 

[Christopher]

The Kelvin isn't the size of a Galaxy-Class ship, the Enterprise is. And "looking more advanced" is a spurious argument; it looks more advanced because it was made in 2009 rather than 1964. If Desilu had had the technology then that we have today, they would've made the ships look more advanced then.

Nobody claims that TWOK and TSFS are in alternate timelines because Saavik has green eyes in one and brown eyes in the other, or that TNG's first season is in a different timeline from the rest because Worf had a different forehead. It's just accepted that the visuals we're shown are subject to revision because it's a dramatization rather than a documentary, because the things we're seeing are artistic interpretations of ideas rather than absolutely literal reality. This is no different.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Where would you put a stardate of 2233.4? Because the original timeline would put that somewhere around the middle of the first season.

Eight hundred people got off the Kelvin, after taking heavy damage and casualties. A crew complement that high certainly puts the Kelvin up in the range of a Galaxy class ship.

And I think between the Defiant sets in "In A Mirror, Darkly" and the Phase II sets, that whole "it was made now so of course it looks more advanced" has been exposed for the empty sophistry that it is.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Where would you put a stardate of 2233.4? Because the original timeline would put that somewhere around the middle of the first season.

And many of TOS - and especially TAS - stardates where quite random.

I would say that, in Robau's day, the stardates had not yet been reset to whatever they became in TOS. Maybe they were more of an extension of the dates used in Archer's time?

 

[Captain Robert April]

That doesn't explain the rest of the laundry list.

 

[Therin of Andor]

That doesn't explain the rest of the laundry list.

Well pardon me. I answered the one I thought I could do well.

I see no problem with there being large UFP ships before the NCC-1701. The Kelvin was probably transporting colonists to and fro, seeing how Winona should have been heading home for an Iowa birth before it got waylaid by the lightning storm.

Bev Crusher's medical ship in "All Good Things..." was based on a very early pre-TOS ship design and it seemed pretty big.

 

[F. King Daniel]

A thought about Stardates: TOS and TAS dates were random 4-digit numbers (remember that poor guy's story about stardates and Chekov in Voyages of Imagination?).
In STXI they are supposedly earth years, point 1-365. But, unless you have the Star Trek Chronology next to you or read interviews with the writers, they still very much are random 4-digit numbers, albiet ones us nerds can (finally) make sense of.

Or you could come up with some BS about the UT's in our TV's being updated.

That might be going a little far...

 

[TheAlmanac]

I see no problem with there being large UFP ships before the NCC-1701.

As we all know, once the aircraft carrier was invented, no naval vessel smaller than that was ever built again.

 

[Rosalind]

Eight hundred people got off the Kelvin, after taking heavy damage and casualties. A crew complement that high certainly puts the Kelvin up in the range of a Galaxy class ship.

Just because Kelvin has more people, it doesn't mean it was the size of the Galaxy class. The aircraft carrier Enterprise is 342m long, with a crew compliment of 5000; the original Enterprise in ST is 288m long, with a crew compliment of 400. I think the 800+ crew of Kelvin shows that it's a much more primitive ship than the original Enterprise, it needs more people to operate it.

 

[Christopher]

As I've said elsewhere, you can make similar "laundry lists" of contradictions within prior works of Trek fiction; The Wrath of Khan in particular is loaded with continuity and logic errors. The truth is, Star Trek has never been a cohesive whole. It's a bunch of separate interpretations of a fictional world created by a bunch of different people, and those different interpretations vary from one another in many ways, yet the creators and the audience choose to accept the conceit that they represent a single cohesive universe, so that the contradictions are rationalized or glossed over. So it's a double standard to accept the pretense that what's come before represents a cohesive whole, yet claim the new movie has to be a separate reality because of a few nitpicks. If you're going to insist that ST2009 must be in a separate reality because of its differences of interpretation, then you should also postulate that prior ST productions are in multiple incompatible realities. That's the only way to be logically consistent in your position.

 

[F. King Daniel]

FWIW, the USS Kelvin is 457m long according to the BluRay, and 665m according to the Art Of book. Someone on STXI board, came up with 665 just going by screen evidence, so that may be what the CG was in the actual film.
IMO the Kelvin is a TOS-style ship (seen though modern eyes), not a predecesdor to the TOS-style design. For the TOS ship to be upgraded so radically in TMP, the stuff in it had to be somewhat old hat.

I agree with everyone who says there's no reason the TOS Enterprise has to be the biggest ship type "possible" for the era (especially if you include ships from old novels like the Defender-class, or Franz Joseph's Dreadnoughts)