Star Trek Ongoing IDW After Darkness Question

[Noddy]

^Look, obviously it's an ill-conceived scene that doesn't make sense. I'm trying to salvage it in my own mind. Of course my solution isn't perfect, but shooting it down just makes things worse. Unless either of you can actually propose a better solution.

I understand, Christopher, I really do. But in this instance, I just feel that the best solution would be to treat the final sequence of STID similar to how we treat ENT "These Are the Voyages", and rationalize it as a dodgy holo-recording. The Vengeance did cripple the Enterprise, the Vengeance did crash on a planet, and Spock did beat the crap out of Khan.......but none of that happened on Earth, despite what the holographic dramatization of the events may show.

Or seeing as they could get from Earth to Kronos in four days at warp 4.5 a century ago and their doing at least warp 7 as of the 23rd century and it maybe faster since there is no telling what tech advances Nero's little rampage may have led them to its not that far fetched that they got to Earth so quick.

It seems to me that it takes the Enterprise at least several hours to get to Qo'noS from Earth.

Besides, the danger here is that, if warp drive is as fast as you seem to imply it is, then far-off regions like the Delta Quadrant would probably only be....what, a month or two away for the Enterprise? The galaxy gets way too small that way.

 

[Noddy]

Next time get the cinema to stop the film and have the audience to go on a pub crawl, then rendezvous a few days later for the climactic battle.

If the Vengeance's attack came a while after the Enterprise left Klingon space, it wouldn't be so bad. But that is clearly not what occurs. There's no way it could have taken Marcus that long to catch up with Kirk.

 

[F. King Daniel]

And we can't just say that the alternate reality has much faster warp drive than Trek Prime why?

 

[Noddy]

And we can't just say that the alternate reality has much faster warp drive than Trek Prime why?

Because, as I've pointed out, the Enterprise appears to take considerably longer getting to Qo'noS (and also getting to Vulcan in ST XI), and if such speeds are so easily available to Starfleet, the galaxy becomes much smaller, leaving less to explore.

Why can't we say the Vengeance's advanced (untested?) warp field catapulted both ships much further than conventional warp drive? It could have been a side-effect of their close proximity within warp space.

 

[Stevil2001]

According to the Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive VCR Board Game: "A Klingon Challenge," Qo'noS is exactly 60 minutes away from Starbase 74 at Warp 9. (What this tells us about travel times in into Darkness is dependent on where Starbase 74 is relative to Earth, of course.)

 

[Christopher]

If the Vengeance's attack came a while after the Enterprise left Klingon space, it wouldn't be so bad. But that is clearly not what occurs. There's no way it could have taken Marcus that long to catch up with Kirk.

Of course there's a way. You're willing to rewrite the story by changing the location of the climax (and thereby eliminating a major point of character motivation), so why would you be unwilling to rewrite the story by changing some minor details of how the chase unfolds?

From your earlier post:

It's a matter of logic: It would only have taken the Vengeance a few minutes to catch up to the Enterprise at warp, and to have knocked Enterprise out of warp via a barrage from its weapons. The Vengeance was only about a minute behind them when they went to warp.

So that's the detail you change: put it more than a minute behind them. Assume the Enterprise took evasive action at Carol's warning and it took the Vengeance a while to locate and intercept them. After all, the film did claim that the ability for ships to engage each other at warp was new, so just because it was possible for the Vengeance to intercept and attack the Enterprise at warp, that doesn't necessarily mean it was as easy as shown.

And as I've already suggested, there's no need to assume that the weapons absolutely had to knock out the ship on the first shot. How often does that happen in a Trek space battle? Sure, it's what we were shown, but we've already agreed that it's permissible to rewrite the details, so why not rewrite that one? Allow the Enterprise to make a better showing of itself in the initial battle. Let it fire back, do enough damage to slow the Vengeance down or blind its sensors so it can elude pursuit and gain more ground. My assumption is that what we saw was "edited down" from a longer running battle.

Logic matters, yes, but the mistake you're making is focusing on the logic of that single scene, and thus missing the forest for the trees. What matters to plotting a story is the logic of the overall story and character arcs. And that's about characters' goals, what they're trying to achieve. What drives this story is Khan's goal to avenge himself on Starfleet Command. Therefore, the logic of the story is that it should climax with Khan attacking Starfleet Headquarters -- just like TWOK climaxed with Khan trying to kill Kirk, because that was his goal in that movie. Technical details like the speed and performance of spaceships do not drive the story; they exist only to serve or impede the characters' pursuit of their goals, and thus can be adjusted as needed.

 

[The Wormhole]

...but it is a mistake to create an entire story just to explain away a mistake.

Unless it's genuinely a good story in its own right. KRAD wrote The Art of the Impossible in order to explain an inconsistency in a single line of dialogue -- namely, how a "minor incident" could last 18 years -- and that turned out pretty well.

I knew someone would find a counterexample I couldn't disagree with.

Still, I stand by my point, something like how the Enterprise could get from Qo'nos to Earth so quickly would be best handled as a throw-away line (if one felt compelled to explain it), not by having an entire novel or comic series devoted to it.

 

[Hartzilla2007]

Besides, the danger here is that, if warp drive is as fast as you seem to imply it is, then far-off regions like the Delta Quadrant would probably only be....what, a month or two away for the Enterprise? The galaxy gets way too small that way.

If I recall correctly, didn't somebody crunch the numbers and realize that under the TOS scale would the Enterprise could get back to the Alpha Quadrant from the Delta Quadrant in a month to a few months?

If so then that just means they went back to using the TOS speeds instead of the TNG era speeds, which makes sense seeing as this is a TOS reboot.

 

[Christopher]

Still, I stand by my point, something like how the Enterprise could get from Qo'nos to Earth so quickly would be best handled as a throw-away line (if one felt compelled to explain it), not by having an entire novel or comic series devoted to it.

I don't remember anyone saying it should have a story devoted to it. Me, I'm just talking about how I retcon it in my own mind, or how I would've hypothetically handled the scene if I'd been doing the novelization. I can't see any way, let alone any reason, to build a separate story around that specific scene.

If I recall correctly, didn't somebody crunch the numbers and realize that under the TOS scale would the Enterprise could get back to the Alpha Quadrant from the Delta Quadrant in a month to a few months?

If so then that just means they went back to using the TOS speeds instead of the TNG era speeds, which makes sense seeing as this is a TOS reboot.

That depends on what you mean by "the TOS scale." The "official" warp scale given in the reference books at the time was that the velocity was the warp factor cubed times the speed of light -- which is slower than the TNG scale, since that was the warp factor to the power of 10/3, at least up through warp 9. However, in both generations, the speeds actually depicted onscreen were usually much faster than those calculations would suggest, because when you're telling a story, you don't want it slowed down too much by a lot of travel time. So there's no really meaningful "official" scale for either generation.

What you're probably thinking of is "That Which Survives," where a specific distance, warp factor, and travel time were mentioned for the one and only time, allowing a calculation of the actual velocity, which turned out to be about a thousand times greater than what the warp-factor-cubed formula would produce. But that was only in that one episode, so it can't really be called "the TOS scale." At most it's the "That Which Survives" scale.

I've learned it's best not to take any numbers in Trek too literally, whether it's stardates or distances or travel times or ship registries. There are too many different people coming up with them based on different assumptions and needs, so there's really not much consistency to any of them.

 

[Pauln6]

I've learned it's best not to take any numbers in Trek too literally, whether it's stardates or distances or travel times or ship registries. There are too many different people coming up with them based on different assumptions and needs, so there's really not much consistency to any of them.

Yeah, in that which survives it's the time it takes to get back not the distance that is the issue so the number given in dialogue is a snaffoo. Inconsistencies tend to arise more when dealing with established locations like Qu'onos or Vulcan and the time frames in the movie are ridiculously brief.

Wow, how thinly does the fleet have to be spread now for the Enterprise to be the only ship in the Quadrant?

 

[Malaika]

back to the original question, in one of the last comics (28) they refer to vulcan getting destroyed four years ago...

but the second movie is an year after that, then the ending is one year later which makes two years, at best 3, after Nero..

from the same comic, Kirk's last captain's log is made in 2261.168
they should update this timeline here: http://www.idwpublishing.com/startrek/timelines.php

 

[Pauln6]

I think our best guess is 2 years from graduation in the first movie until the 5 year mission starts.