The Sound of Her Voice glossed over a huge tactical advantage

Would that planet truly be that remarkable or precious, given that they have already been stumbling over "guardian of forever"-like planets (which would probably be far more useful from a tactical point of view) since at least Kirk's time ?

 

The planet is remarkable in that the time effect is apparent natural and not the product of a technological device.

 

Well, the Guardian was problematic since you couldn't lock down the period of your jump extremely carefully. I also don't know whether the Guardian would let one simply throw a note through it.

 

In TOS Assignment Earth, the Enterprise used the Lightspeed Doubletalk Factor to go back in time, with pretty good control over where they would end up and the ability to return to their own time when they were done. It does indicate that if Starfleet felt it was worth the risk of communicating to their past, they could have done so without having to use Lisa Cusak's planet in its out of the way location.

 

With time travel episodes, it's by default difficult to tell whether a given case of more or less accidental success boosts Starfleet's confidence in time travel, or comes as the result of boosted confidence but makes Starfleet wary of further attempts. Was "Assignment: Earth" #11 in Starfleet's fact-finding trips to the past, or #2 or even #1? Did it follow established practice; establish a practice; or make Starfleet ban time travel forever?

Traveling to Earth's own tender past at a crux moment seems foolhardy if the purpose is to test the concept of time travel. Why not first find out how Asteroid 4629567 in the Nowhar system looked like 500 years ago, and compare to present? Kirk did seem to have great confidence in his mission. But it ended up achieving exactly nothing: the heroes weren't even going to beam down before Gary Seven messed up their plans, and when they did, they only studied a blatantly altered timeline and witnessed a disaster almost unfold. Might be, then, that this was attempt #11 but also the very last time Starfleet did this on purpose.

Reviving the practice might be even easier done than said, of course. But what does it take? Here, and in ST4:TVH, Sol is the star that allows for the time travel. Half of the time travel in the original "Tomorrow is Yesterday" explicitly involves Sol, too; whether Sol plays a role in the other half depends chiefly on where exactly Starbase 9 is located...

If Sol is the one star in the Milky Way where this trick works, going to Cusak's planet during a crisis would be double insanity with mustard.

Timo Saloniemi

 

That's a good point. It might well have been how badly things went in Assignment Earth that made Starfleet decide not to mess around with time travel. And account for Temporal Investigations attitude toward Kirk seen in Trials and Tribbleations.