Hopeship is fascinating! I'd never heard of that before, the only planned 60's TOS spin-off I knew of was Assignment: Earth (although that was more of a totally seperate show shoehorned into the Trekverse as a backdoor pilot)
Starship, the proposed 1970s Series
- Thread starter Doctor Jeffrey
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It looks like the only source for this Hopeship claim is Cushman's These Are the Voyages books, which are notoriously inaccurate. The claim seems highly unlikely to me -- not only that Roddenberry would propose a show with an African-American lead actor in the 1960s, but that he would pick some unknown scriptwriter to collaborate with on it. Darlene Hartman has no screenwriting credits on IMDb; Memory Alpha says that Gene Coon "saw a potential talent" in Hartman, which sounds like she was a novice, not someone who'd be pegged to co-create a new TV series. She eventually became a pseudonymous novelist in the '70s, with her novels being criticized as rather blatant Star Trek knockoffs. Perhaps Cushman interviewed her and misunderstood something she said (or her memories were distorted with age).
Well, The Martian is one of my favorite movies, so to me you don't need the "Military" Pew Pew Pew to drive the storyline. Much like SeaQuest DSV did in the 90's..
Alot of Tng didn't have anything to do with Starship combat, military stuff, but some did..
To me, a ship going out into the universe WithOut weapons is the dumbest thing.. Even if your not fighting or protecting yourself, you still have the universe to deal with in asteroids, other anomalies that a weapon could be useful
Alot of Tng didn't have anything to do with Starship combat, military stuff, but some did..
To me, a ship going out into the universe WithOut weapons is the dumbest thing.. Even if your not fighting or protecting yourself, you still have the universe to deal with in asteroids, other anomalies that a weapon could be useful
Yup. To be forewarned is to be fore-armed, Of course to be four-armed is to be a Hindu god.
Here's the thing, though -- any powerful space drive is potentially a weapon of mass destruction, given the sheer energies involved. Not to mention that a science ship would probably have lasers, explosives, etc. for sampling, excavation, and the like. So having additional, dedicated weaponry systems would be fairly redundant. A ship could be theoretically unarmed yet still be capable of repurposing its "peaceful" systems for defense or aggression.
Heck, my very first published story, "Aggravated Vehicular Genocide" -- and my upcoming novel Arachne's Crime which expands, revises, and continues from it -- is about a human interstellar colony ship accidentally destroying an entire alien space habitat with its automatic defenses for deflecting space debris. The energies involved at those speeds are so immense that even the equivalent of a navigational deflector is a WMD if something gets in its way, which makes additional weapons systems kind of redundant.
@Christopher
I remember an Enterprise Era book, Spoilers etc.
About how a romulan ship impacting the surface of the world of Coridan at warp speed, this set off the Dilithium and made a Yuuuge boom..
And there's many a book where a "Torch Ship" uses its like Kilometer long exhaust ploom as a weapon..
So yep! the ship itself can be a WMD.. just a ship in orbit throwing Tungsten rods to the surface is a bad thing!
I remember an Enterprise Era book, Spoilers etc.
About how a romulan ship impacting the surface of the world of Coridan at warp speed, this set off the Dilithium and made a Yuuuge boom..
And there's many a book where a "Torch Ship" uses its like Kilometer long exhaust ploom as a weapon..
So yep! the ship itself can be a WMD.. just a ship in orbit throwing Tungsten rods to the surface is a bad thing!
Yeah, for example, Larry Niven had several stories involving this sort of idea.
Hello, thanks for the welcome. It was never my intention to post anything more than once, and I think I only tried posting twice in a row once. There seemed to have been some kind of trouble with the system one evening and 2 of my replies posted multiple times and not when and where I wanted them to post. I have no idea what happened.
Thanks, again, for all the responses. As for HOPESHIP, I was in the 60s and remember articles about Roddenberry wanted to create a hospital ship series with Dr. M'Benga and lots of aliens. Roddenberry also wanted a spin-off with Harry Mud, and that was discussed in articles, too.
As for the use of bubble drive in STARSHIP as a weapon: bubble drive as defined by Albert Einstein, could NOT be used as a weapon. The bubble is created by the rings and is a bubble within what Einstein defined as the fabric of space. The spaceship exists within its own relative space, but not within normal space. From the perspective of asteroids or anything else that might cause a collision, the starship does not exist. From the perspective of the starship, the asteroid seems to flow around the bubble (although the asteroid, and anybody on it, would notice nothing). Not only could the bubble drive NOT be used as a weapon, but the use of a deflector would not be necessary. The starship with bubble drive would have no need for weapons to blow things up to get them out of the way because in bubble drive nothing is IN the way. Since the starship would have its own bubble and nothing could get inside the bubble with the ship, if, while the Starship is in orbit in normal space, a physical danger were to arise, the bubble ship simply creates a bubble and is in a different place than the danger, and one into which the danger can not follow.
Roddenberry's big point for STARSHIP, however, was that there can be an interesting science fiction series without putting weapons on the space ship and military personnel in the space ship.
As for the use of bubble drive in STARSHIP as a weapon: bubble drive as defined by Albert Einstein, could NOT be used as a weapon. The bubble is created by the rings and is a bubble within what Einstein defined as the fabric of space. The spaceship exists within its own relative space, but not within normal space. From the perspective of asteroids or anything else that might cause a collision, the starship does not exist. From the perspective of the starship, the asteroid seems to flow around the bubble (although the asteroid, and anybody on it, would notice nothing). Not only could the bubble drive NOT be used as a weapon, but the use of a deflector would not be necessary. The starship with bubble drive would have no need for weapons to blow things up to get them out of the way because in bubble drive nothing is IN the way. Since the starship would have its own bubble and nothing could get inside the bubble with the ship, if, while the Starship is in orbit in normal space, a physical danger were to arise, the bubble ship simply creates a bubble and is in a different place than the danger, and one into which the danger can not follow.
Roddenberry's big point for STARSHIP, however, was that there can be an interesting science fiction series without putting weapons on the space ship and military personnel in the space ship.
Unless you can cite those articles specifically, that's not enough. Hearsay is not proof. I've been reading behind-the-scenes Trek stuff for decades and I've never heard anything about a hospital ship spinoff.
On the contrary, the severe tidal gradients on the edges of the warp bubble would be quite destructive to any matter they impinged upon, akin to being struck by a black hole.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0207109.pdf
Also, just turning off a warp drive could be lethal to anything directly in its path:
https://www.universetoday.com/93882/warp-drives-may-come-with-a-killer-downside/#ixzz2FaZsXDuM
Also, I'm still pretty sure that Einstein himself never proposed a warp bubble specifically. The sources I've checked (including this one and this one, among others) agree that the earliest mathematically rigorous "warp bubble" solution of Einstein's equations was worked out by Miguel Alcubierre in 1994. Einstein did originate the idea of space being warped, i.e. distorted by gravitation, but he used it to explain the nature of gravity and its effect on masses, to predict things like the precession of Mercury, and to hypothesize extreme gravitational warps like what we now call black holes and wormholes. The idea of using space warps as a faster-than-light spaceship drive emerged in science fiction starting with John W. Campbell's Islands of Space in 1930, but it wasn't taken seriously in the physics community until Alcubierre's solution.
There was a thing on Another Life, (spoilers to follow, but its already spoiled like a dead camel in the sahara.. ugh.. crappy show)
There "warp Bubble" uses the partlicles that accumulate at warp as a weapon, according to that series, it could destroy a planet, but they used it at 3% to destroy a thingy on the planet. if focused forward instead of disapated into space.
There "warp Bubble" uses the partlicles that accumulate at warp as a weapon, according to that series, it could destroy a planet, but they used it at 3% to destroy a thingy on the planet. if focused forward instead of disapated into space.
Not only did I read the articles about the hospital ship back in the 60s, but Trek fans in the early and mid 70s were still talking about it. Roddenberry spoke at Ohio State when I was there in the early 80s and he talked about the hospital ship series and Dr. M'Benga. I have not saved every newspaper or magazine article I've ever found interesting, nor could we store digitally back then. However, I have nothing personally invested in that proposed series, other than I wish it had gone into production, so I have no reason to lie about it. Do you think Roddenberry was lying in the 80s when he spoke at Ohio State?
I discussed bubble drive with Gerard K. O'Neill, one of Einstein's successors at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, and he said what I wrote above about how it works (theoretically). I also discussed this with Freeman Dyson, and he said the same thing. Both gentlemen concurred that it would have no effect on normal space. I'm not talking about what other science fiction authors have devised, but what was explained to me my two top physicists, and their understanding of Einstein's fabric of space. I will say, however, that in the design for ring ship in STARSHIP, the rings are in the wrong place, so I'm not sure how well that series would have depicted bubble drive, but it was a step in the right direction.
I discussed bubble drive with Gerard K. O'Neill, one of Einstein's successors at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, and he said what I wrote above about how it works (theoretically). I also discussed this with Freeman Dyson, and he said the same thing. Both gentlemen concurred that it would have no effect on normal space. I'm not talking about what other science fiction authors have devised, but what was explained to me my two top physicists, and their understanding of Einstein's fabric of space. I will say, however, that in the design for ring ship in STARSHIP, the rings are in the wrong place, so I'm not sure how well that series would have depicted bubble drive, but it was a step in the right direction.
Einstein's descriptions space being distorted by gravity (his rubber sheet analogy) were not the same as is bubble within the fabric of space. The former was a description of known phenomena. The latter was purely theoretical, but not purely guesswork. These are two different takes on warping by Einstein and bear only a few similarities.
An you recall the name of the magazines or fanzines you read these in? A huge amount of fan-published content is catalogued on sites like Fanlore.org.
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Claims require evidence. Objective fact is not a matter of interpersonal trust; the way to be objective is to remove personalities from the equation as much as possible by relying on verifiable and corroborating sources. That way, any individual's honesty or lack thereof isn't even part of the discussion, nor should it be.
I gave you links to actual research papers and science magazine articles, not science fiction authors. This is work that has been done in the past 25 years, so it goes beyond whatever theoretical thinking there may have been on the subject in earlier decades. Science is not about the appeal to authority, it's about testing and revising ideas.
And for what it's worth, my Uncle Harry's graduate advisor was Boris Podolsky, the P in the EPR paradox. So I can name-drop people close to Einstein too. But I would never try to pass off name-dropping as hard evidence of a claim. That's why I linked to actual sources.
You do realize that this was 50 years ago. I recall that Rodenberry came to Ohio State either during the 83-84 academic year or the 84-85 academic year. It was probably the former because I remember who was with me. Perhaps Mr. Roddenberry was lying when he told us about the hospital ship series, but I don't see why he would have. And, 50 years ago it never occurred to me to save any articles on television series or note them for future footnoting. I only mentioned the series and Dr. M'Benga because when I heard about it, and later when Roddenberry talked about it, I thought it might have been a good series. Somebody here mentioned that keeping the memory of STARSHIP alive was a good idea. I said that I wished that series and the hospital ship series had gone into production. My point was not to convince everybody that Roddenberry was telling the truth when discussing the hospital ship series.
2019 - 1984 = 35.
There's this thing called the Internet where you can look stuff up. I looked up the articles to cite in my replies above. You could do the same. Or, with luck, some of the other posters around here, like Harvey, could help out. Harvey's very good at researching stuff from Trek history -- I'd like to see him tackle this Hopeship thing.
if the articles from the 60s have not been posted on the net, then nobody can look them up. If Roddenberry's presentation at Ohio State is not on the internet, does that mean I was not really there to listen to him live? On another site I was going to mention a childhood memory about Expo 67, but since my family stayed with relatives (and I was 7), I don't have any hotel receipts to prove I was there. Does this mean that any memories are invalid?
The only reason that I mentioned O'Neill and Dyson was to say that their understanding of Einstein's fabric of space and bubble drive does not show a ringship as a weapon nor would it be in need of weapons to avoid collisions.
I now concede that for most people on Trek BBS weapons and military personnel and the pew pews are essential to Star Trek, and to science fiction in general. I believe this would have made Roddenberry and Clarke and Asimov sad, but that seems to be the consensus here.
The only reason that I mentioned O'Neill and Dyson was to say that their understanding of Einstein's fabric of space and bubble drive does not show a ringship as a weapon nor would it be in need of weapons to avoid collisions.
I now concede that for most people on Trek BBS weapons and military personnel and the pew pews are essential to Star Trek, and to science fiction in general. I believe this would have made Roddenberry and Clarke and Asimov sad, but that seems to be the consensus here.
As for 2019 - 1984 = 35, the articles you asked me to produce about the hospital ship were written in the late 60s, which I stipulated. The presentation that Roddenberry gave around 1985 was live. Which I stipulated. It not an article.
Some of us remain dubious about the whole "Hopeship" and "Mudd" ideas being genuine. They frankly reek of Roddenberry making up stuff to please people he was chatting up or for an audience. Star Trek was not a successful show on NBC, and the idea of making shows set in the same universe and time but featuring a non-action premise like a hospital ship or a space comedy with Carmel (who might've been persona non-grata after he left The Mothers In Law over a salary issue/dispute with Desi Arnaz). Also, money loving GR wasn't likely to want to split Created by credit and the $$$ that go with it with a novice writer like Darlene Hartman. @Harvey and I looked into this a while back via the Roddenberry papers at UCLA and who actually created Dr. M'Benga but I don't recall all the particulars without digging back through a bunch of correspondence. [EDIT: See next post]
I just did a site search on Fanlore for "hopeship" (no results), "M'Benga" with "hope" (click to see search results), then "hospital ship" (click to see search results) and the only reference to a hospital ship called Hope I see is to the actual hospital ship of that name (link: see Issue 4).
P.S. If you want to search the site yourself use the following syntax in your Google search:
site:fanlore.org searchterms or site:fanlore.org "searchterm"
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