The Enterprise That Wasn't
- Thread starter Arpy
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No, I mean the time when he flew Ares Delivery Services Inc. DY-790s before the war, in the scenario where he was a space pilot. Or traveled on the Pan Sol shuttles to the gravitic observatories at Phobos, in the scenario where he was a research scientist.
He'd only cut back on space travel after WWIII removed most spacecraft from the equation, resulting in pilot unemployment or making the price of passenger tickets exorbitant.
Timo Saloniemi
He'd only cut back on space travel after WWIII removed most spacecraft from the equation, resulting in pilot unemployment or making the price of passenger tickets exorbitant.
Timo Saloniemi
What relevance would that have to anything? Least of all in a thread titled like this one.
It is merely a highly likely pair of scenarios. The Cochrane we see dabbles in spaceflight. There would be plenty of career options in that field before WWIII. Conversely, if Cochrane prewar didn't do those things, it becomes less likely that he'd do them postwar.
Timo Saloniemi
It is merely a highly likely pair of scenarios. The Cochrane we see dabbles in spaceflight. There would be plenty of career options in that field before WWIII. Conversely, if Cochrane prewar didn't do those things, it becomes less likely that he'd do them postwar.
Timo Saloniemi
You do know that in real life they do discuss theories in science, right? We discussed wormholes in my astronomy 101 class ages ago as I’m sure anyone would with even the slightest peripheral interest in space travel, whether in the sciences or in the general population, whether they came across them themselves or their existence was brought up by others. You might as well be talking about tornadoes, and what’s the likelihood of someone interested in meteorology never hearing of the concept?
Does anyone know of a good timeline of this period? I’m curious what canon has said about government at this time without the influence of ENT. I’d like to decide whether I prefer nation-states, mega corporations, or unified government for this period.
The relevance is that the answer to my question is no; therefore any speculation about Cochrane's previous space experience can be neither proven nor disproven. You're welcome to believe he did all those things, and I'm welcome to believe he didn't.
Yep. But unless those theories are proven to be correct, there's no point in basing your engineering expertise around them.
Well, he had to have some piloting experience in order to launch the Phoenix. Perhaps he was an astronaut on a SpaceX Crew Dragon to the ISS (Elon Musk being canon to the Star Trek universe now.)
I don't know that he would have HAD to have experience. He probably had other people on his team that had such experience.
But I could believe that he had a space flight experience that ended tragically and he barely escaped alive. That could have scarred him and given him aviophobia.
Actually, one plot idea I had was the Cochrane was actually born on a colonization mission to Alpha Centauri. He then came back to earth and his landing pod crashed. That was he could technically be from Alpha Centauri.
But the point against that is that he's amazed at how the earth looks from space:
"Is that earth?"
So now he has heard of them but the goal post is moved to they’re not real. Well, the science behind them, yet proven or not, would be of interest to a scientist. And the point the poster was making upthread is that his discovery of them near us would further inform his work.
I didn't say they wouldn't be of interest. But unless he knew there was a wormhole in Earth orbit that there was a possibility that he would collide with, it's not going to be part of his launch plans or his warp engine design.
No what you did say struck me as disingenuous and needlessly argumentative, probably due to lingering feeling from previous discussions we’ve had, but I indulged you anyway.
The point the poster was making above was that regardless how and why he discovered them, he did. And the study of them yielded further insight to FTL technology.
Personally, I don’t like the idea of wormholes hear Earth. I’d rather ignore the distances those Earth objects managed to traverse — there are certainly many more and greater facepalm aspects of Trek — but there’s no reason not to take the plunge here and follow this idea through as best we can.
What was the political situation like during this time period? And do you think we could make it to Alpha Centauri at sublight speeds? That is, is it a colony when we really start to head out, or is episode 1 (or the midseason finale) about arrival there, then the second half of season one about exploring the system? Ships used to go out for a long time; would Weyland-Yutani set up a multi-year (or generation) expedition there before FTL was discovered? Would there be a multi-episode arc about the ringship’s arrival at Earth’s Alpha Centauri Colony?
In our solar system, would there be factions? In The Expanse, there’s Earth, Mars, and the Asteroid Belt. (I miss that show. Can’t wait for next season.) I could see that. (Maybe before Cochrane, deep space exploration meant getting to Neptune?) Or would it be mega corporations running the show? (I still like the idea of a baddie being a rival private industry ship.) Or international alliances stretching into space like old European colonization of the New World? (Do we have fun with it being the Soviets vs the West? Or the E-Con vs the W-Side () vs the Australian States of the Moon?)
I'm really into the 60s' sort of timeline. DYs by the 90s. Bigger travel by '18. Interplanetary misisons and colonies. I say yes- there would be factions. Stuff like ww3 would just encourage that (especially as it was around 20 years of warfare). I really dislike how in 'canon' Mars was only really settled by the late 21st, early 22nd century. And on that note, yea, Mars is sometimes shown as its own federation member or a member of the UNE; the Moon, too. But since so little actually takes place in the solar system, Mars eventually just turned into 'dead shipyard planet' that is now on fire, not the terraformed colony world that was easier to write about.
We’re any of the people outside Utopia Planitia on PIC human and not wearing environmental suits? Mars was still red, but was it terraformed at all?
One of the things I liked about...wait...was it PIC or DSC...well, in one of them, we saw the moon all lit up with the lights of human settlements. In my head canon, Luna, Mars, and Venus are terraformed to varying degrees (I don’t want to see them all blue marbles), and they’re all part of the Human Memberworld. I think the number of Federation memberworlds would have ballooned into the thousands if every independent colony was its own world, especially from the long space-faring Vulcans. I mean, could you imagine the Andorians allowing Earth 5 votes in the council to their 1?
Is terraforming a viable technology?
I wasn’t trying to be disingenuous or needlessly argumentative. I’m sorry if I came across that way. My point was that I do not see Cochrane as presented in FC to be any kind of great scientist or technological wizard that he would know about wormholes, much less incorporate that knowledge into his warp engine design. As presented in FC, he seemed to consider his flight to just be a one-and-done thing, nothing more than an amateur model rocket enthusiast scaled up to gigantic proportions. His only motivation was money and girls originally, and once that was off the table it was just something he was going to just basically do in his spare time.
IMHO, the real problem in FC is the way he was portrayed. In the non-canon novel Federation that came out before the film, Cochrane was indeed a brilliant scientist with a team working for a government. He was not a drunk frisky pervert who ran away at the first sign of trouble, who still wanted to launch his rocket for no real good reason other than that it was there.
As always. But I don't see the relevance of that, either. Nothing about Star Trek can be proven or disproven, neither the things blatantly stated on screen (because those can be lies or misunderstandings) nor the ones clearly shown (because that might have been a dream sequence or an illusion).
Odds still are that Cochrane flew that DY-790. And/or studied those quasars from Phobos. He got warp from somewhere, and cobbled together the engine, and then flew it; he had the help, but he still did it, and got the credit for it. So he quite probably was the sort of man with the right background.
Flight didn't come about that way. Like so many others, the Wrights built and tested, built and tested, until they personally had the correct theory of the airfoil (well, utterly incorrect but still workable) and the working machine.
A lot of spacey stuff also happens that way. Without first going to space, we wouldn't know enough to ask the right questions. And on occasion, it turns out that we really should have known beforehand, and we pay the price because we didn't. But more often, we just happen to discover stuff 5% of the time instead of 100% of the time.
You don't have to be garage level to do the build-and-test thing. But Cochrane apparently could be, just like the guys behind the PC were. And odds probably would be that a garage experimenter would be the one to work on this wacky idea he ran into on the way to work and/or Mars, rather than the soulless minion of some bigger outfit.
Not that Cochrane couldn't have been a soulless minion before the war, of course.
...So he knew how to press "start"? I'd rather hope he built one of those things. Or repaired them, or something.
[/quote](Elon Musk being canon to the Star Trek universe now.)[/QUOTE]
Although on what merit, we will probably never know. The 12,345th man to go to Mars? The inventor of the rocket that can fly chase to a DY-100 for the first fifty miles of the mission, in case the regular CNN shuttle isn't available? The creator of the electric car that made antigrav flitters unpopular for most of the naughties because everybody wanted to go retro?
Timo Saloniemi
We never saw a blue mars; it was always red from orbit. VOY/DS9/TNG showed it a bit like that. Dunno about anyone on the surface without a suit. Ent showed them terraforming it but I guess all they did was beef up the atmosphere a little (since it's now incredibly on fire?).
The Moon has been lit up a few times I believe, and I'm okay with that. Venus is probably untouched, sadly.
I'm thankful it was never blue. I've been playing the game TerraGenesis on my phone during quarantine, and so far I've done this to Mars:
And this to Venus:
I think I liked Mars more earlier in the process when it was a little ruddier:
Helps maintain its own individual identity instead of trying to copy Earth.
A scene I liked on DS9 was when the Defiant arrives at Earth and Bashir or Sisko is admiring the blue of its oceans, and Kira says they're not green enough and Jadzia that they're not purple enough. Ha! Yes.
I'm thankful it was never blue. I've been playing the game TerraGenesis on my phone during quarantine, and so far I've done this to Mars:
And this to Venus:
I think I liked Mars more earlier in the process when it was a little ruddier:
Helps maintain its own individual identity instead of trying to copy Earth.
A scene I liked on DS9 was when the Defiant arrives at Earth and Bashir or Sisko is admiring the blue of its oceans, and Kira says they're not green enough and Jadzia that they're not purple enough. Ha! Yes.
I think the first is too blue, aye. I've played around with terraforming Mars on my own and a lot of it would seemingly still be cold desert at best outside of the lakes, coasts, and very habitable river vallies such as Echus. But still, desert-bound or not, I don't think we ever saw any water on Mars in Star Trek beyond a few comets hitting it in ENT.
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