Technology level on the Kelvin timeline

[F. King Daniel]

I always thought the in-universe technology of the Kelvin timeline was essentially the same as that of the Original Series and movies, but they showed stuff they never could in the 1960's. But this from the recent Star Trek Online expansion...

A closer examination of this timeline reveals that it is a divergent reality that split from our own as a result of a confrontation in the 23rd Century, between an unknown Romulan vessel that had been displaced from the time stream, and a Federation starship - the U.S.S. Kelvin. As a result of this temporal incursion, the entire timeline that followed those events has come to be called the "Kelvin Timeline."

Examination of the time-lost salvage taken from the Kelvin Timeline reveals that the Federation of that reality had a decidedly higher investment in advanced military technology, likely as a direct result of their overwhelming defeat at the hands of the alien vessel that invaded their space in the 23rd Century. The same has shown to be true of the Klingon and Romulan ships of that time. This emphasis allows their technology - though technically hundreds of years old - to be comparable with our own in the early 25th Century.

...as well as Scotty's comments about the USS Franklin and other ships being built in space being less advanced in Beyond has me wondering if the Kelvin timeline's much bigger starhips which fly in atmosphere, funky magic brig portals and amazing Yorktown space stations are in fact indicative of the technology of that universe being ahead of even The Next Generation's.

I've not read it yet, but the recent TOS/Kelvin crossover comic has Kirk note the technological disparity between universes too.

What do you all think?

 

[Smellmet]

I don't see the technology as more advanced per se, more the design aesthetic is different to reflect the period these new movies have been made in. Yes the ships are bigger but that seems to be more a creative decision made by the production than anything else. Certainly shield technology doesn't seem up to scratch in the kelvin timeline, weapons just seem to rip through hulls instead of being deflected/absorbed like in the prime timeline. There's no sign of any holodeck or replicator technology yet either. I think, bar the transwarp beaming nonsense and the ludicrous USS vengeance they got it about right in my view.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

What do you all think?

I think that Star Trek we've seen over the years was extrapolated to be advancing from a 1960s vision of what the 23rd century looked like. When that original vision became (SERIOUSLY) outdated, the extrapolations ceased to be relevant. As an example: in the mid 80s and early 90s, the idea of being able to ask a computer to play a specific song from a digital library seemed really highly technologically advanced; in the 21st century this technology not only exists already but is actually far more portable than anything TNG projected.

For this and other reasons one is better off assuming that the Kelvin verse is actually a soft reboot and any comparisons to the prime timeline are basically invalid; you'd have to modify both universes dramatically for them to even BEGIN to be comparable.

 

[publiusr]

Their shields are pretty weak--but construction, materials research, etc., all seem rather advanced.

 

[Ovation]

Maybe offensive weapons tech progressed more rapidly than defensive weapons tech in the alternate timeline?

 

[drt]

I think I'd take the STO tech level thing with a grain of salt, they're trying to sell people Kelvinverse stuff for a game taking place in the early 25th century, the only way people will buy it is if it's comparable to everything else in the game.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Maybe offensive weapons tech progressed more rapidly than defensive weapons tech in the alternate timeline?

Makes sense. You can be sure the Kelvin crew took VERY detailed scans of the Narada, and it's likely that this is the base of the more advanced technology of this timeline. Since the Narada was bristling with weapons like no other ship in existence, it makes sense that technology plundered from it would be more offensive-based.

 

[Kemaiku]

^It had asteroid smashing missiles and a plasma drill.

 

[gerbil]

I'm gonna quote myself from another thread because I think it's still relevant:

I like to think that ships like the Kelvin were an experiment in larger ships or even an anachronism. In then Prime universe, the larger size never quite made the grade and smaller ships prevailed. In the Kelvin universe the Narada incident, the new Klingon threat, accelerated technological advancement, and an implied earlier relationship with the Romulans pushed for larger ships.

In the Kelvin timeline, it seems like aesthetic and peacetime technology (transportators for example) have languished at the expense of military and structural technology (HUDs, phasers, torpedos, advanced warp drive).

I feel like Into Darkness effectively rebutted that militarism and Beyond showed an enhanced focus on exploration.

 

[F. King Daniel]

^It had asteroid smashing missiles and a plasma drill.

I did kinda notice that the Into Darkness/Beyond photon torpedoes do kinda resemble Nero's cluster-missiles. Beyond's even resembled them in-use, with the missile itself visible and the traditional bright ball of blue being the engine exhaust.

Of course, that's far more to do with aesthetic choices than anything else, and it's a reach, but I kinda like it.

 

[Kemaiku]

So ease of use in rendering for the staff and nothing else, got it.

 

[gerbil]

^It had asteroid smashing missiles and a plasma drill.

It's worth noting that in the retconned, quasicanon Countdown comic series the Narada's appearance, size, and capabilities are the result of being merged with Borg technology. I kind of like that explanation quite a bit.

 

[Kemaiku]

Yeah but that's not canon so, out that one goes.

 

[Cyke101]

I think I'd take the STO tech level thing with a grain of salt, they're trying to sell people Kelvinverse stuff for a game taking place in the early 25th century, the only way people will buy it is if it's comparable to everything else in the game.

I play the game virtually every day, but this is one of the things that takes me out of the immersion. Whether a ship is from the 22nd century or the 31st century, they're still going to compete in the same ballpark. You can hold your own if you time-travel to the far future. That's just game mechanics and the limitation of of current STO design. Pick the right setup and you can easily have a Constitution -- or even the NX-01 -- solo a Borg Cube.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I play the game virtually every day, but this is one of the things that takes me out of the immersion. Whether a ship is from the 22nd century or the 31st century, they're still going to compete in the same ballpark. You can hold your own if you time-travel to the far future. That's just game mechanics and the limitation of of current STO design. Pick the right setup and you can easily have a Constitution -- or even the NX-01 -- solo a Borg Cube.

It may interest you to know that the two of the highest scoring ace pilots of the Vietnam War scored six or more kills against F-4 Phantoms while flying Mig-17s, aircraft that are, by all accounts, hilariously mismatched in every possible respect. Also interesting that three of Chuck Yeager's kills in World War-II were against Me-262 jet fighters, which were considerably faster and better armed than the P51D he was flying at the time.

In video games they try to represent this factor with "balance" in game development: two players with about the same XP level should be on rough parity no matter what equipment they're using, while a player with less expensive hardware is liable to get curb stomped. In the real world, there's a lot of randomization in combat; the person with the superior weapon misses his chance, or the person with the weaker one is just a little bit faster or smarter or luckier and strikes before his opponent can get off a shot. Real world battles are decided by actions, not by stats, so it shouldn't actually raise hackles if a ship from the 22nd century manages to punch out a technologically superior opponent, especially if the latter isn't prepared for that attack.

 

[Cyke101]

It may interest you to know that the two of the highest scoring ace pilots of the Vietnam War scored six or more kills against F-4 Phantoms while flying Mig-17s, aircraft that are, by all accounts, hilariously mismatched in every possible respect. Also interesting that three of Chuck Yeager's kills in World War-II were against Me-262 jet fighters, which were considerably faster and better armed than the P51D he was flying at the time.

In video games they try to represent this factor with "balance" in game development: two players with about the same XP level should be on rough parity no matter what equipment they're using, while a player with less expensive hardware is liable to get curb stomped. In the real world, there's a lot of randomization in combat; the person with the superior weapon misses his chance, or the person with the weaker one is just a little bit faster or smarter or luckier and strikes before his opponent can get off a shot. Real world battles are decided by actions, not by stats, so it shouldn't actually raise hackles if a ship from the 22nd century manages to punch out a technologically superior opponent, especially if the latter isn't prepared for that attack.

The tech gap between the NX-01 and a Borg Cube or a 31st century Federation starship is going to be a *bit* wider than two jets made within a couple decades of each other, though (and, let's remember that a partially assimilated freighter was more than a match for the NX-01, never mind a full-blown Cube that can wipe out 40 ships from the 24th century). At that point, it's akin to putting up a modern day battleship against a chariot rider with a spear. Real world battles are decided by actions, not stats, but the stats *really, really* help.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The tech gap between the NX-01 and a Borg Cube or a 31st century Federation starship is going to be a *bit* wider than two jets made within a couple decades of each other

Why, though? The balance of galactic technology ON THE WHOLE tends to rise at a pretty slow rate; it's enough to know that most of the principle technologies of the 24th century were already in pretty widespread use in the mid 22nd, so one could easily say that everyone but Earth had already reached the technological plateau, beyond which further development is a game of diminishing returns.

Put that another way: the difference in capability between a warship from the 1840s and a warship in the mid 1940s has the latter vessel with almost god-tier invincibility. But 1840s vs. 1740s... not so much. Once you achieve a certain level of technological development it's VERY difficult and increasingly expensive to improve performance on those same technologies, so meaningful progress can't really be made until you shift paradigms to a totally new technology base. That's the difference between the 19th and 20th centuries: the shift from wind and sail to steam and diesel, from ships of the line to ironclads, from broadsides to turrets, etc. In the modern age we are already close to reaching that point: there are only so many ways you can build a fighter jet, and we're at the point now where it costs about $10 billion to produce a marginal (if notoriously sketchy) performance increase over cheaper competing designs. And when you consider the technical hurdles the F-22 and the F-35 had to jump just to justify their own existence, their eventual SUCCESSORS don't have a chance in hell. They're either going to have to do something COMPLETELY different (a UCAV, an armed space shuttle, or fighter planes that transform into giant robots) or we learn to accept a cheaper and more efficient design that does the exact same things its predecessors did only does them for one tenth the price.

Star Trek shows us a technological paradigm that, for at least the Federation and its neighbors, hasn't changed much in 300 years and doesn't really have much room to grow. 24th century Federation finds itself in a place that, industrial and technologically, some of its founding members had already reached a century earlier and despite many improvements they keep running into ancient machines from thousands of years ago that use the same basic technology but still outperform them in crucial ways.

The Borg are another matter entirely: they apparently operate at a totally different plateau of technology -- and are thoroughly stuck there for the most part -- to the point that a ship from the 29th century and the 22nd are basically in the same (outmatched) weight class while fighting them. Which, if you think about it, makes total sense: NONE of the Federation's victories against the Borg were accomplished purely by their having superior technology, but by catching the Borg by surprise and exploiting their weaknesses. So NX-01 would fare no better against a Borg cube than the Enterprise-D... but probably it would fare no worse either.

At that point, it's akin to putting up a modern day battleship against a chariot rider with a spear.

More like 14th century cavalry against a chariot rider with a spear. The "modern day battleship" is what happens when you introduce, say, the Borg or the Undine. That's not to say the spearmen wouldn't be able to figure out a way to incapacitate the battleship if they really put their minds to it (sneak aboard the ship and find the switch that activates its scuttling charges), it's to say that if two different combatants are using approximately the same basic technologies, then the difference in their stats is infinitely less important than the skill of the people wielding those technologies.

Put fifty professional soldiers with tommy guns into a battle against fifty amateurs with Ak-47s and body armor. The superior soldiers will win every time, even if their weapons are less advanced.

Real world battles are decided by actions, not stats, but the stats *really, really* help.

Not NEARLY as much as anyone likes to think. Especially in a universe where a primitive society can simply BUY more advanced versions of his own technology from someone who has already developed it (as the Japanese basically did during the Meiji Restoration, going from "medieval/feudal society" to "World Class Military" in just a couple of decades).

 

[Ralphis]

I always thought the in-universe technology of the Kelvin timeline was essentially the same as that of the Original Series and movies, but they showed stuff they never could in the 1960's. But this from the recent Star Trek Online expansion...

A closer examination of this timeline reveals that it is a divergent reality that split from our own as a result of a confrontation in the 23rd Century, between an unknown Romulan vessel that had been displaced from the time stream, and a Federation starship - the U.S.S. Kelvin. As a result of this temporal incursion, the entire timeline that followed those events has come to be called the "Kelvin Timeline."

Examination of the time-lost salvage taken from the Kelvin Timeline reveals that the Federation of that reality had a decidedly higher investment in advanced military technology, likely as a direct result of their overwhelming defeat at the hands of the alien vessel that invaded their space in the 23rd Century. The same has shown to be true of the Klingon and Romulan ships of that time. This emphasis allows their technology - though technically hundreds of years old - to be comparable with our own in the early 25th Century.

...as well as Scotty's comments about the USS Franklin and other ships being built in space being less advanced in Beyond has me wondering if the Kelvin timeline's much bigger starhips which fly in atmosphere, funky magic brig portals and amazing Yorktown space stations are in fact indicative of the technology of that universe being ahead of even The Next Generation's.

I've not read it yet, but the recent TOS/Kelvin crossover comic has Kirk note the technological disparity between universes too.

What do you all think?

While I do think that works fine as an explanation, I've always felt it works better just think of the Kelvin Timeline as an already existing parallel universe, even before Nero's incursion. I realize that wasn't the implication given in Star Trek '09, but I just think it works better this way. My 'head canon' has it that not only was the black hole created by Nero a portal through time, but also though parallel universes, or quantum realities - somewhat similar to what we say in the TOS episode The Tholian Web and ENT episode In A Mirror Darkly.

 

[Go-Captain]

I think the stuff we see in the new movies is not necessarily more advanced than what we see in the old shows and movies, just different and bigger. Even the transwarp aspect of the new movies fits how the Enterprise flies to the center of the universe in days to meet god. The rest just seems more like aesthetics and in some ways seems less advanced.

The example of the fancy brig wall is a good one, because it's a material, yet all of the rest of Star Trek uses force fields for everything. So, is the fancy brig wall really more advanced, less, or just indicative of different priorities so as robustness in case of power loss? There are also the hull shields which seem useless in the movies in every engagement, too bad we have never seen a peer battle. In comparison, the Trek 6 battle shows effectiveness of the Enterprise-A shields while up, resulting only in hull scorching from torpedo hits to the saucer, where as when down the hull gets pierced from top to bottom. The Excelsior's shields do a complete lol-nope to any penetrating damage while the shields are up. Unfortunately it is not a real comparison, because the original movie Enterprise never fought similar super ships and fleets as the nuEnterprise.

I used to apply to the idea that the Narada destroying the Kelvin resulted in backwards time effects which resulted in the Kelvin getting made. As in, the arrival alone caused cascading future-ward effects which altered future past-ward time travel events, which influenced the present. But that is highly convoluted and now I no longer agree with that any more than I agree with the new timeline having its origin in an alternate reality (though that is simpler). I go with the idea that the Kelvin was a battleship of sorts and an aborted design path, size wise, for Starfleet, something we don't see again until the Ambassador class (simpler still). Only the Kelvin's size is outlandish, nothing more, and not by that much in comparison to the Constitution class.

I figure the main point of difference is the original timeline went for the nearly 300 m long Constitution class in order to create a more flexible force. More ships mean more power can be spread in more places at once and smaller ships use few personnel per hull. In the alternate timeline the reverse happened.

The Kelvin gets swatted so Starfleet decides they have to pack as much power as possible in every ship if they are going to be on their own. The ship designs get larger, so the crews get larger. Starfleet faces the dilemma between power concentration and coverage and as a result they make a huge push to expand the personnel pool, thus the far greater diversity of aliens in the ranks in comparison to the old timeline. They also expand more aggressively for similar reasons, to acquire new members to fill out the fleet, to find new resources and technologies, and seek out mystery enemies before they come knocking.

There is another angle to this, Roddenberry considered TNG separate from TOS, or desired it at the very least. There are also loads of historical and technological inconsistencies between series and episodes. We could easily consider every series and movie, or episode, to be its own slightly different, but over all connected, universe. There is all or nothing thinking, but it seems to fit too.

 

[wayoung]

There has been so much time travel in these that you can branch off so many tech advances prior the kelvin incident to explain it.

The air force viewing the E in Tomorrow is Yesterday used the tech level in a timeline.
Spocks devices in COTEOF might have been glimpsed by someone, or butterfly effect causes more changes. God knows what changes the Assignment Earth incident (and then Gary Seven moving forward) changed to our tech. You have transparent aluminum, Ferengi ships in the 50's, Borg spheres, Sarah Silverman hanging out with the Voyager crew, and a temporal cold war that we never saw get resolved.

Assuming the Kelvinverse is exposed to most of all that stuff it would make sense that the tech they have is far more advanced than the tech in the prime universe of WNMHGB.