Okay, then, here is my point:
- I do not believe that the TAS Bonaventure could really be the first ship that ever had warp drive. There's simply too much evidence against it. Claiming that Starfleet used to use a different form of FTL travel is, IMHO, needlessly complicating things, and there's no evidence for it. (Way back in the time of ENT, 'warp drive' was used. I know that's not a popular series around here, but I do accept it as canon and official.)
That's entirely fair... you can accept whatever you like, and anyone else can accept whatever they like. This is, after all, FICTION, right?
As for me, I treat "Enterprise" as being semi-canon... ie, on the same level as TAS. Basically, I view it as history, but history told through a not-quite-perfect method. Basically, it's like when you see a modern film like "300" where the ancient Greeks seem so much like modern people, or a Revolutionary War film where you see lots of modern stuff sneak in... playing HISTORY but with a bit of a "modern slant."
That allows me to accept that "it all happened" but to filter out bits and pieces as being slightly inaccurate tellings... which is how I look at ALL of the contradictory or inconsistent things in Trek. I pretend that there's a REAL "Star Trek" reality out there someplace, and they've repeated tried to "retell" stories that actually happened. Some stories get told very accurately, and other have flaws in the retelling.
Since the 24th-century has pretty much established that people in the Federation associate the wordss "warp drive" and "FTL drive," I have no trouble imagining that they'd just use those terms in their own "contemporary-ized" retellings.
I get it that you think it "needlessly complicates things" but since we've established that there ARE "contradictory" elements in Trek lore, you have three choices:
1) You can throw out the stuff that you don't care about as much and keep the parts you do care about. This will piss off everyone who thinks differently, of course.
2) The other guys can throw out all the stuff that you care about and keep the stuff that you don't care about. This will piss off you, and everyone who feels like you.
OR...
3) You can try to come up with a way of making it all fit together.
Now, you seem to be accusing me of wanting to "throw out Enterprise" (which, if you re-read, you'll notice I never said). Meanwhile, you seem to be perfectly willing to throw out "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and "The Cage/The Menagerie" and "Balance of Terror" and "The Galileo Seven" and so forth.
I say that because each of those episodes, plus a number of other episodes, showed craft which were established as not having warp drive (the BOT Romulan craft, the damaged 1701, the shuttlecraft). There's actual dialog in those episodes confirming that they were operating using impulse.
There's also the bit with Jose Tyler in "The Cage" which CLEARLY indicates a major FTL propulsion breakthrough during the past couple of decades prior to the Talos event.
And there are also the bits in TNG and in DS9 (dunno if they ever did it in Voyager, I seldom watched that show) where they used "static subspace fields" to do EXACTLY what I describe.
In other words... sure, it's "complicated," but it FITS. I've yet to hear of ANY other solution that doesn't involve throwing out large elements of the original Star Trek TV series.
I don't want to throw out "Enterprise." But where it is in overt contradiction with "Star Trek," the original show will always win in my book. You can choose to feel otherwise... that's your business.
- My earlier point, that the Bonnie was the first ship which could travel at a sufficiently *high* warp factor (say, Warp 7), is the best thing I could come up with, and had a minimum of guessing involved. Certainly it's just as easy to retcon that TAS line that way, as it would be to claim that there are other FTL methods besides warp drive?
"Easier?" If we were ONLY talking about that one episode of TAS, sure... but we're not. The entire Earth/Romulan War was fought, according to "Balance of Terror" with ships without warp drive. Now, imagine for just a moment how ridiculous that statement is... unless there's some other form of FTL travel.
So, again... do we drop something from "Star Trek" or do we drop something from "Enterprise?"
If it comes down to "the new" OVERWRITING "the old," I choose the old every time.
I want my "Balance of Terror" to stand as it was aired. (I also don't want goofy bumpy-foreheaded Romulans... )
- When I said I didn't like the Bonnie as TAS showed it, I wasn't talking about the revisions to its design as posted in this thread. Those are actually rather nice. TAS, on the other hand...as I said, the Bonnie just looks too much like the Enterprise. There's really no excuse for that, since even though TAS was the very epitome of early 70's cheese as far as animation goes, it's still animation, and therefore models are irrelevant; they could have come up with something just a *wee* bit more different. (Such as the Ships of the Line version, which would be perfect for the full-out CGI remake of TAS that I have long dreamed of.)
Fair enough. I also like the SotL ship, though not as the Bonaventure (I see it as being an immediate predecessor to the Constitution-type ships... but I'd LOVE to see that design used!)
I don't think anyone would argue that the ship as shown in TAS was "perfect." Your criticisms of the design as seen on-screen are certainly valid. Hell, that's a bit part of why I started this thread... I also didn't care for it, but instead of the "toss it out" mentality I kept seeing over and over, I wanted to try to treat it according to my above-stated philosophy on these things... that what we were seeing was an "imperfect representation" of some "real" ship that exists in that "real" universe.
- Yes, I am well aware now that Zefram Cochrane's
Bonaventure (the one shown in the Encyclopedia and Keiko's class) is not the same one as from TAS. I almost wish it was, though. It would sure solve a lot of continuity problems: because if we do take that TAS line literally, then the Bonnie must have predated the SS
Valiant from WNMHGB, and the TAS version did not look like a ship that would be over 200 years old. I find it hard to believe that Starfleet ship design wasn't supposed to have changed that much, if at all, in two centuries.
Agreed. I think that the "200 years" bit is the first portion that we'd have to "retcon" out. Why? Well, because that means that we'd need to be launching that ship in about 50 years!
When they did the original series, and the later animated series, they had INTENTIONALLY avoided any mention of when, in time, the show was set. It could have been the 30th century for all we knew (and honestly, given the real pace of progress we're making in those fields... yes, we've got niftier computer technology, but we haven't even gone back to the MOON since the early 1970s... I think that's probably more likely than the 23rd century!)
I'm not sure who first decided that this was in the 23rd century. Was it Franz Joseph??? Was it in some speech Roddenberry gave at a convention? (He was originally very much in favor of NOT pinning it down, but changed his mind over time, so that's not an unreasonable assumption!)
The point is...at the time this episode was written and aired, the timing hadn't been established. So this might have meant that the Bonaventure was launched in the 28th century and TOS was set in the 30th.
Further... the bits with Cochrane make it almost impossible to reconcile the idea of a fully-realized, long-term habitable ship being launched within a couple of years of his first "test flight."
SO... again, we face a matter where we have to CHOOSE which part to keep... because various aspects of Trek lore are contradictory.
In MY case, I've chosen to keep the general timing and to "compress" things a bit. In other words, this ship was developed not centuries but DECADES earlier... and the folks seen on there are first-generation descendents of the original crew, alongside, I'm sure, many of the original crew as well. Say the the Bonaventure was lost 40 years prior to "The Time Trap." The surviving original crewmembers would be between 60 and 90 years old, and you'd have one generation of their ADULT children, plus another generation just entering adulthood... say, between 15 and 19?
Why 40 years? Well... the knowledge of a new technology wherein the "time barrier" was broken became public, and begain to be integrated into functional ship designs, between the time that Vina's ship crashed on Talos and the time that the 1701 found the "survivor's encampment" there. Vina would have been an "adult crewman" and by the time of "the cage" she was in her 50s. So the ship crashed approximately 30 years prior to "The Cage." Assume that the knowledge that "The time barrier" was broken was kept classified for a while (typical for this sort of thing... look at the F-117 "stealth fighter" ... actually a bomber, but hey... in operation for HOW long before it was made "public?")
So, the "time barrier would have been broken at some point between 30 and 50 years prior to "The Cage" and remember that "The Cage" was set thirteen years prior to the first season of "Star Trek." The SHORTEST time between the breakthrough in propulsion to the time that Spock returned Pike to Talos would have been 43 years, and could be as much as 63 years, putting it almost exactly at the turn of the century.
It works, and it requires the loss of none of the "live action" Trek material. You just have to alter one line, and otherwise everything else works.
Far less difficult than retconning every case throughout any series (granted, MAINLY TOS) which showed "impulse-only" craft doing things that would be utterly impossible for a ship operating only at sublight speeds.
That last rendering almost reminds me of an Oberth sort-of look (I know the config is different) like a smaller, earlier TOS science/research vessel. Maybe it's the shape of the primary hull...
