Should novels set in the JJVerse rectify the film's plot holes?

[F. King Daniel]

Define "stupidly huge".

457m according to the Bluray vs the 285m TOS Enterprise.

If these people can build the STIII spacedock, I think they can build spaceships any damn size they want to.

Personally I see the TOS Enterprise as a 23rd century Intrepid-class equivelent, and Kelvin, Newton, and nuEnterprise as 23c versions of bigger classes like the Nebula, Soverign and Galaxy. We just "never saw the others until now"* (excepting nuEnterprise which was, erm, nu)

As far as I can tell, there's not a single thing Enterprise-D can do that Voyager can't.

*standard Trekkie rationalization since the Klingons grew bumpy heads in 1979.

 

[Christopher]

As far as I can tell, there's not a single thing Enterprise-D can do that Voyager can't.

That's because the people who ended up writing and producing most of TNG didn't take advantage of the potential intended by the original developers of the show and designers of the ship. The E-D was supposed to be a university village in space, a travelling research institution with a large civilian complement, designed to function in deep space for years without needing to call at a Federation port. Ironically, it was the ideal design for the mission Voyager ended up doing, but instead mostly got kept in known space doing diplomatic or political missions.

 

[EJA]

And another thing: If Starfleet had behemoth-sized vessels such as the Kelvin and the ships that accompany the NuEnterprise to Vulcan (I think some of them were around 600+ meters in length) in the 2230s-2250s of the prime timeline, then wouldn't rival powers like the Klingon Empire have produced ships approaching that size in order to compete in terms of battle strength? The D7-class battlecruiser seemed to be at the forefront of the Klingon fleet in the time of TOS, and that was only around 250m long, much smaller than the 450/457m Kelvin.

 

[ProwlAlpha]

Just because something is bigger doesn't mean its more powerful and more advanced. Thats something Trek has shown to be true on many occasions.

 

[Christopher]

And who says the big ships were designed for battle anyway? Starfleet's primary missions are exploration and colony support, not combat. Maybe the Kelvin's so big and has so many shuttles because its main function is ferrying colonists or something. Consider the Constellation Class. Dang things have seven shuttlebays, and "The Battle" established they have enough shuttles to evacuate the entire crew. Fan extrapolations have explained it in terms of that class being designed for extensive planetary survey missions.

 

[F. King Daniel]

The half-saucered, double-hulled Newton certainly looked like a battleship to me. The minute I saw it I was reminded of old Trek videogames (like Klingon Academy) that had huge Federation uberships with two secondary hulls (but whole saucers) that looked very similar. I'm sure they inspired the design.
I can't remember the name, though. Yorktown or Ulysses or something like that.

EDIT: I had a look online, and it's a Yamato-class experimental battleship. "Battleship" in this game was, like, two steps above "Dreadnought". Almost 800m long!

 

[Turtletrekker]

Compare this to the Comic Books; to DC & (especially) Marvel and the knots they get themselves into by continually reinventing their universes to make everything coherent. Please don't bring that mess to Trek.

Off topic, but, huh? "Especially Marvel"? Marvel has done it's fair share of ret-conning sure, but it's DC that resorts to re-setting timelines and universes and using mulitiple Earths in order "to make everything coherent".

 

[kkozoriz1]

Compare this to the Comic Books; to DC & (especially) Marvel and the knots they get themselves into by continually reinventing their universes to make everything coherent. Please don't bring that mess to Trek.

Off topic, but, huh? "Especially Marvel"? Marvel has done it's fair share of ret-conning sure, but it's DC that resorts to re-setting timelines and universes and using mulitiple Earths in order "to make everything coherent".

What war did Nick Fury fight in?
Marvel uses a sliding timescale. DC has another way. They both reinvent their universes.

 

[EJA]

The half-saucered, double-hulled Newton certainly looked like a battleship to me.

Exactly. And I've seen charts showing all those ships, and they seem to resemble the Kelvin somewhat in terms of style and design, suggesting they've been in service for quite a while.

 

[kkozoriz1]

And who says the big ships were designed for battle anyway? Starfleet's primary missions are exploration and colony support, not combat. Maybe the Kelvin's so big and has so many shuttles because its main function is ferrying colonists or something. Consider the Constellation Class. Dang things have seven shuttlebays, and "The Battle" established they have enough shuttles to evacuate the entire crew. Fan extrapolations have explained it in terms of that class being designed for extensive planetary survey missions.

That is true for the Kelvin but we don't know what effect Nero's arrival had on the Federation as a whole. It could be a lot more proactive in responding to threats, real or perceived. Something caused them to make the NuEnterprise approximately 13 times the volume of the TMP ship. (this is a rough approximation taken by cubing the ratio of the two ships. Take with a grain of salt if you want exact figures).

 

[F. King Daniel]

How is it any different from, say, giving the name "Voyager" to a Galaxy-class ship rather than an Intrepid-class one?

 

[Turtletrekker]

Compare this to the Comic Books; to DC & (especially) Marvel and the knots they get themselves into by continually reinventing their universes to make everything coherent. Please don't bring that mess to Trek.

Off topic, but, huh? "Especially Marvel"? Marvel has done it's fair share of ret-conning sure, but it's DC that resorts to re-setting timelines and universes and using mulitiple Earths in order "to make everything coherent".

What war did Nick Fury fight in?
Marvel uses a sliding timescale. DC has another way. They both reinvent their universes.

The sliding timescale doesn't equate to "re-inventing" their universe. It's still all the same continuity, despite the time issues.

Besides, that wasn't even the point I was trying to make. In the post I quoted, kkozoriz1 implied that Marvel jumped through bigger hoops than DC to keep their continuities straight. However, the sliding timescale that Marvel uses is a much more elegant and less convoluted way to keep a comic-book timeline coherent than DC's various convoluted "Crisis" series that literally re-write their histories. A lot more "knots to untie" there, by a longshot.

 

[Christopher]

However, the sliding timescale that Marvel uses is a much more elegant and less convoluted way to keep a comic-book timeline coherent than DC's various convoluted "Crisis" series that literally re-write their histories. A lot more "knots to untie" there, by a longshot.

Whereas I see it the opposite way. A sliding timescale is a nightmare to make sense of. How do you justify a character who went to see the 1979 premiere of Star Trek: The Motion Picture with his college buddies still being in his early 20s after 9/11? Whereas if you reinvent your continuity every decade or two, each version of the continuity can be internally consistent with regard to chronology. At least in theory.

 

[kkozoriz1]

Where did I say that Marvel jumped through bigger hoops? Both companies have ways of dealing with continuity pile-up. They just do it in different ways. Some prefer one way, some prefer the other and some have no problems with both.

 

[Nerys Myk]

However, the sliding timescale that Marvel uses is a much more elegant and less convoluted way to keep a comic-book timeline coherent than DC's various convoluted "Crisis" series that literally re-write their histories. A lot more "knots to untie" there, by a longshot.

Whereas I see it the opposite way. A sliding timescale is a nightmare to make sense of. How do you justify a character who went to see the 1979 premiere of Star Trek: The Motion Picture with his college buddies still being in his early 20s after 9/11? Whereas if you reinvent your continuity every decade or two, each version of the continuity can be internally consistent with regard to chronology. At least in theory.

Movies and fashion are what John Byrne likes to call "window dressing". It's just there to give the story a feeling it happened "today". If for some reason you have to revisit that scene the movie becomes "Star Trek (2009)" or "Avatar" or what ever fits the character's current "age". The title of the movie isn't and shouldn't be important.

BTW kkozoriz1, Nick Fury is still a WWII vet. Reed, Ben and Stark's wars have slid forward though.

 

[Turtletrekker]

Where did I say that Marvel jumped through bigger hoops? Both companies have ways of dealing with continuity pile-up. They just do it in different ways. Some prefer one way, some prefer the other and some have no problems with both.

Sorry. It was tau136 who said "especially Marvel". My bad.

 

[Turtletrekker]

How do you justify a character who went to see the 1979 premiere of Star Trek: The Motion Picture with his college buddies still being in his early 20s after 9/11?

I don't even try. It's called "suspension of disbelief". An absolute must for both trekkies and super-hero fans.

 

[Christopher]

That's just not the sort of disbelief I can suspend. I'm too detail-oriented. If a character was 15 years old in stories that were explicitly established as being in 1963, the same character in the same continuity should not be in his mid-20s in stories explicitly established as being in 2010. Those are totally different realities and they shouldn't pretend otherwise. I'd rather have a series of successive continuities that are each chronologically consistent within themselves -- though I doubt DC has ever really achieved that anyway.

Back when I had hopes of becoming a comic-book creator, I decided I'd always set my series in the future so I wouldn't have to worry about a sliding time scale -- or if I did set something in the present, I'd keep it strictly in real time or else just let it fall behind.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Very few superheroes have aged in real time. Superman is not 90 and Spider-Man is not 60. And they probably never will be. No real reason to age them either. As drawings they don't age like flesh and blood people do. I'm glad that when I got into comic I was reading about Clark (Superman) Kent and not Clark (Superman II) Kent, jr.

 

[Captain Robert April]

How can you even attempt to try and maintain a realistic timeline in a comicbook universe when a storyline that only takes the better part of a day within the confines of the story can take six or seven issues to resolve, i.e., take six or seven months for the reader to get through? And within the confines of that eighth issue, a couple of years can pass for the characters?

That's one genre where you either learn to roll with it or find something else to do with your time.