And had access to Vulcan star charts. Without them the trip probably is about a year!
The Final Reflection.
- Thread starter Mirren Audax
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And had access to Vulcan star charts. Without them the trip probably is about a year!
Oddly enough, this very point -- the distance from Earth to Qo'noS -- came up on a mailing list devoted to Larry Niven a few days ago. If you take "Broken Bow" at face value, then Qo'noS must orbit Sol's unseen brown dwarf companion. Which would explain why it's always so dark and gloomy there, I guess.
The thing is, distances and speeds in Star Trek are what the narrative requires, not what physics requires. For instance, "The Battle," which introduced the Picard Maneuver, indicates that the speed of light is significantly slower in the Star Trek universe than it is in our universe. The science of Star Trek is malleable.
Only if you take the visual effects shots literally, which is always a bad idea.
Thus my caveat about adapting or reinterpreting, especially in regard to technical issues. Neither of those conflicts are central to the novel. The travel time issue could be ignored entirely, and workarounds can be made for the serreptitious use of the Klingons' transporter in the third part of the book.
That's one of the things that would need to be reinterperted in light of ENT's pushing first contact with the Klingons several decades earler than previously thought.
But it's still possible: One could easily posit that for some 50-60 years following ENT the Federation and Empire expanded in different directions and really didn't have much to do with each other. Later on, the areas of expansion start overlapping, and conflict starts to rise...
Point taken. "invalidated" was not technically accurate, although given Pocket Books' directive to authors to use the Okudachron dates makes its "ripple effects" among secondary sources larger than most.
Can you elaborate? By my reckoning the "yelling" is for a late 2220's visit for Fencer's mission to Earth and an early 2230's date for the Dissolution Babel part:
-- most of the events were supposed to have taken place before Kirk was born, when the Enterprise and ships like her weren't even on the drawing boards.
-- in its original context (the Spaceflight Chronology dating) the Dissolution Babel conference takes place 11 years before the first missions of Constitution class ships, 5 years before design and construction began.
The main point arguing for a late 2230s date is an 8-year-old Spock assumed to be born in 2230.
Just as easily we can call Spock's appearance a literary anachronism of the in-universe novel.
Well, the span is 79 years in the Spaceflight Chronology timeline vs. ~84 years in the standard timeline, so I think a little "stretching" is in order rather than a blanket "just add 52", but that's getting into subjective nitpicking territory. The dates of the Devisor/Sentry encounter and Flying Fortress highjacking might need some tweaking, depending on if you use the adapted dates for the D/S encounter (marking the start of hostilities with the Klingons) or 2218 date marking the onset of hostilities given in the Okudachron. But uncertain sourcing and ENT's rewriting the first encounter date leave plenty of room for handwaving there.
That date is ok, but the conditions are so radically different from those portrayed or implied by ENT. There's a lot that wouldn't "port over" nearly as neatly. Some things could be adapted, but it's something better done on a case-by-case basis.
Agreed
For TFR, Agreed. For SFC, the key word is adaptability. It works for some periods, others need some folding, spindling, and mutilating to work them together, and it doesn't work at all for others. Same goes for individual items in the book, maybe doubly so.
Agreed now - I seem to have been thinking in terms of a different Constitution history, one not so nicely in line of modern Okudaic views as the SFC one is.
But we can disregard the 2218 date, since as you imply, it's not really based on anything. There is no reference to "50 years of hostilities" in "Day of the Dove", contrary to what the Okudas claim.
We could easily say that the first contact between Klingons and humans took place in 2151 as currently told, but that half a century later there was a shift in the Klingon society that led to greater aggression and caused the 2209 incident, which soon escalated into the "unremitting" decades of hostility that Spock refers to in TUC.
SFC refers to a "first confrontation", not to a first encounter, in the main body of the text. If we ignore certain turns of phrase in the special entry for the D/S encounter, this plays out rather nicely. What transpires in D/S is not that different from what happened in ENT "Bounty"... Hell, we can even read the special entry as saying that it was only Captain Benoit's first encounter with the Klingons, not Starfleet's or the Federation's! And we can even read it as saying that Benoit had heard of the Klingon species, but never heard of the particular Klingons confronting him.
TFR in turn says D/S happened 25 years before Krenns second visit, and makes explicit reference to humans thinking that this was their first encounter with the species, and Klingons knowing it was almost but not quite that. That's more difficult to wriggle out of...
Timo Saloniemi
But how long did Picard manage to create a "ghost" image of the 'gazer by outrunning its photons, Christopher?
If it's a second, roughly, then what idiot is going to be confused by seeing one 'gazer 500 feet above New York City, while the other 'gazer you need a high-powered telescope to see at the moon's distance?
For the Picard Maneuver to work, you have to take the f/x literally.
c in the Star Trek universe is both infinite (see Star Trek Generations) and about 10 meters per second ("The Battle").
The Picard Maneuver doesn't require the enemy to see two images and think about them both. It requires them to be fooled by lightspeed time lag so that they fire on the distant image of the ship after it's already left that position. That's entirely plausible, because lightspeed latency is a realistic problem in long-range interstellar combat. Since the light takes time to reach your sensors, the ship's real position will be different from the position of the image you're seeing (just as the sound you hear from a passing airliner is behind the airliner's actual position due to the finite speed of sound).
So if you have FTL drive, the ability to outrace the light itself, then you have the opportunity not only to make the enemy miss you by firing at where you were instead of where you are, but to jump to a position where you can hit them at point-blank range while they're still preoccupied with your latent image from the old location.
This is why the Picard Maneuver only makes sense if you ignore the way the scene was depicted and timed onscreen. It needed to be a split-second thing, one where the enemy was already committed to firing at the Stargazer's old position at the moment it appeared in the new position, so that they didn't have time to correct their aim. It also requires the distance between ships to be immensely greater than what was shown onscreen, several light-seconds at least, so that the use of lightspeed latency is meaningful.
The one real problem with the idea in a Trek context is that Trek ships use FTL sensors. It's an idea that's solid where realistic, lightspeed-limited sensors are involved, but Trek ships should have ways around lightspeed latency. I had to do some creative thinking to resolve that in The Buried Age, but otherwise, I had little problem justifying the maneuver in terms of realistic physics.
The concept behind the Picard Maneuver is good science, the kind of good science that TNG was actually trying for in its early seasons, and often achieving thanks to the insight and imagination of Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda. The depiction of it onscreen, however, was extremely poor and fanciful.
So if you have FTL drive, the ability to outrace the light itself, then you have the opportunity not only to make the enemy miss you by firing at where you were instead of where you are, but to jump to a position where you can hit them at point-blank range while they're still preoccupied with your latent image from the old location.
This is why the Picard Maneuver only makes sense if you ignore the way the scene was depicted and timed onscreen. It needed to be a split-second thing, one where the enemy was already committed to firing at the Stargazer's old position at the moment it appeared in the new position, so that they didn't have time to correct their aim. It also requires the distance between ships to be immensely greater than what was shown onscreen, several light-seconds at least, so that the use of lightspeed latency is meaningful.
The one real problem with the idea in a Trek context is that Trek ships use FTL sensors. It's an idea that's solid where realistic, lightspeed-limited sensors are involved, but Trek ships should have ways around lightspeed latency. I had to do some creative thinking to resolve that in The Buried Age, but otherwise, I had little problem justifying the maneuver in terms of realistic physics.
The concept behind the Picard Maneuver is good science, the kind of good science that TNG was actually trying for in its early seasons, and often achieving thanks to the insight and imagination of Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda. The depiction of it onscreen, however, was extremely poor and fanciful.
...We have to consider, though, that it was a reenactment of the Picard maneuver, not the real thing. And reenactments often feature unrealism, especially in terms of timescales and distances.
In the original battle, there must have been some special circumstances at play, or otherwise a FTL starship could never have been fooled into firing at a STL ghost. The Ferengi must have been handicapped in some special way which Picard took clever advantage of. In the reenactment, Picard's opponent was not handicapped, but Picard was delusional and thought he was fighting his old enemy.
Riker in turn was apparently just taking advantage of the fact that Picard was being predictable, and of the fact that the E-D wasn't handicapped in the way Picard thought his opponent was... Keeping Picard delusional and predictable was the only way to get him out of it alive, even if it meant faking a response to the Picard maneuver.
Timo Saloniemi
In the original battle, there must have been some special circumstances at play, or otherwise a FTL starship could never have been fooled into firing at a STL ghost. The Ferengi must have been handicapped in some special way which Picard took clever advantage of. In the reenactment, Picard's opponent was not handicapped, but Picard was delusional and thought he was fighting his old enemy.
Riker in turn was apparently just taking advantage of the fact that Picard was being predictable, and of the fact that the E-D wasn't handicapped in the way Picard thought his opponent was... Keeping Picard delusional and predictable was the only way to get him out of it alive, even if it meant faking a response to the Picard maneuver.
Timo Saloniemi
Oddly enough, this very point -- the distance from Earth to Qo'noS -- came up on a mailing list devoted to Larry Niven a few days ago. If you take "Broken Bow" at face value, then Qo'noS must orbit Sol's unseen brown dwarf companion. Which would explain why it's always so dark and gloomy there, I guess.
The thing is, distances and speeds in Star Trek are what the narrative requires, not what physics requires. For instance, "The Battle," which introduced the Picard Maneuver, indicates that the speed of light is significantly slower in the Star Trek universe than it is in our universe. The science of Star Trek is malleable.
And they say that warp travel is shrinking the Federation with each passing year!
"The Time Barrier's been broken!" - again!
Technobabble. LOL
The Final Reflection is a good, stand alone novel that was written before most of the new Trek canon has taken affect.
It is one of my favorite novels and will continue to be.
And if people have a problem with the canon issues of this novel, just think of it as a Ford-Universe novel. Another timeline if you will.
The Final Reflection is a good, stand alone novel that was written before most of the new Trek canon has taken affect.
It is one of my favorite novels and will continue to be.
And if people have a problem with the canon issues of this novel, just think of it as a Ford-Universe novel. Another timeline if you will.
Something of note I found in the latest Ansible:
That wouldn't affect future reprints of The Final Reflection or How Much For Just the Planet. Still, it's interesting.
It means that Ford's estate wants his work buried. *shrug*
Well that's crap news about Ford but thanks for that link to a new site for me. I've been clicking around there for an hour catching up on obits of people I wasn't aware had passed, laughing at Margaret Atwood and laughing even more at this:
Now wait just a Comerica Park minute here. Isn't that exactly what they're trying to bury? Those *are* Ford works, after all.
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The Ford estate wouldn't have the rights to those books, since Paramount holds the copyright on them. The works copyrighted in Ford's name, however, the estate would have the power to bury.
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That's what watertight tie-in contracts are for. He also wrote "Star Trek: Voyage to Adventure", a YA CYOA-type title, under the name of Michael J. Dodge.
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