Thoughts on "deep canon"

[trekkist]

From shortly before the animated series until just after Wrath of Khan, a friend and I turned our debates about TOS technologies into a manuscript entitled Scotty's Book, which I submitted to Pocket Books--who sadly responded that they didn't think our work would appeal to a large enough audience.

Our "tech manual" was presented in the form of chapters organized alphabetically on subjects from artificial gravity to warp drive. In each case, we'd applied what amounted to the scientific method to what we called "aired data" (with material from The Making of ST being referenced only where it did not violate that, with actual scientific laws coming in a distant third).

Back then, a number of what we found maddening "violations" were common in novels, one such being that shuttlecraft (despite having recognizable warp nacelles) were sublight vehicles. That view is only rarely to be found online today...but a number of other ideas persist.

Every so often, I've posted one or another of our "Star Trek heresies," to responses from "That was a mistake" to "Too long a post...didn't read." Being, perhaps, a glutton for punishment, I thought I'd put the whole lot into context before beginning discussion of a few.

To begin with artificial gravity: as Spock says in "The Slaver Weapon," "In one (Slaver stasis box) was found a flying belt which was the key to the artificial gravity field used by starships." From this line, and the limited attitudes at which Starship decks seemed to tilt, we derived the concept of gravitational prisms. A number of these could "reverse" the force of gravity. Arranged differently, such prisms could "focus" (i.e., amplify) the gravitational pull of matter lying "beneath" a Starship.

Picture a vessel "on its side" relative to the galactic disc, with tens of thousands of light years' volume of matter "underlying" it. Pitching the nose up or down will reduce this volume minimally unless the angle is quite severe. Turning right or left will leave the "focal mass" unchanged. Go nose "up" or "down," though--or bank like an airplane while turning--and the total focal mass will change quite abruptly--showing just what we see.

Encountering turbulence on first entering the galactic barrier, Kirk gives an order he never gives again: "Gravitation on automatic!" This we interpreted as meaning, "Put the gravitational prisms into 'rapid response' mode, which we don't generally due to the resulting high power requirements."

Bear in mind that each chapter was a carefully-developed and highly-referenced argument, not an "in universe" technical presentation.

This document was typed, and does not exist digitally. For the most part, I've seen few of the ideas we "derived from observation" and put on paper circa 1983 raised or discussed in this or any other forum.

Obviously, this was the work of two people. More minds make for better analysis, which is actually the real reason I'm sticking my proverbial neck out on this, the most analytic and argumentative (in a good way) of message boards. As much as I'd love feedback and critique, though, "That's not canon!" isn't what I'd consider a pertinent or useful response.

For all that Sternbach and Okuda applied "consistent" tech to TNG and after, they had to answer to higher authorities even as to Starship registry numbers (per Sternbach's comment elsewhere on this board). "Retcons" -- no matter how deeply [deep] canon based would not have been accepted, had they offered them.

We had no such limits. Fermians before our time, we took what was aired as gospel (save for "suspension of disbelief" matters like a shuttlecraft's size rivaling the Constellation's on entering the planet killer). Not only did our ideas stand up into the Voyager era...well, never mind. Suffice to say, if we'd changed the technological terminology to avoid lawsuit, "our" ships' characteristics would have been unrecognizable to the average fan (or lawyer). Nonetheless, that's how things worked, on air...stated "canon" notwithstanding.

So...anyone interested in reading a few proofs of Kirk's Enterprise being far faster than Picard's? Or what "standard orbit" really was, or why the transporter was demonstrably not simply a "matter/energy scrambler"?

 

[BillJ]

So...anyone interested in reading a few proofs of Kirk's Enterprise being far faster than Picard's?

Blow your mind... the NX-01 is faster than Voyager.

 

[trekkist]

Okay, blow my mind. Per the pilot,

TUCKER: And fast. Warp four point five next Thursday.
ARCHER: Neptune and back in six minutes.

4.5 cubed is 91.125 cee. Earth/Neptune is 5.7414 billion miles or 513.681 light minutes. Divided by 91.125 is 5.637 minutes, close enough for rock & roll to Archer's claim.
Per V'ger's pilot,

KIM: Captain, if these sensors are working, we're over seventy thousand light years from where we were.
...
JANEWAY: Even at maximum speeds, it would take seventy five years to reach the Federation, but I'm not willing to settle for that.

70,000 divided by 75 is 933 light years per year "at maximum speeds."

Troll much?

 

[Dukhat]

Troll much?

Before you start bandying about insults, perhaps you should actually ask @BillJ what he meant. If I had to guess, I'd think he meant that the NX-01 could get to the Klingon homeworld (in the Beta Quadrant) and back to Earth in four days.

 

[BillJ]

JANEWAY: Even at maximum speeds, it would take seventy five years to reach the Federation, but I'm not willing to settle for that.

70,000 divided by 75 is 933 light years per year "at maximum speeds."

Earth to Kronos is 16 light years (per Star Charts which has been used in official productions) and takes four days to get there, at warp five (per "Broken Bow"), which equals roughly four light years per day, four light years per day times 365 days in a year equals about 1,460 light years in a year.

 

[blssdwlf]

It looks like ST:Enterprise doesn't adhere to any warp formulas (which is a good thing).

ARCHER: Bring us to [Warp] four [point] four, Ensign.
...
ARCHER: It's easy to get a little jumpy when you're traveling at thirty million kilometers a second. Should be old hat in a week's time.​

A 4 day trip at Warp 4.4 (30,000,0000 km/s or 100c) will cover just slightly over a light year in distance. That puts Kronos ridiculously too close to Earth Even 16 LY to Kronos is still too close ("The Undiscovered Country" had the 1701-A Enterprise meet Gorkon like 900 LY away). Also, NX-01 Enterprise takes a 15 LY detour to Rigel. Dialogue doesn't mention whether they arrived at Kronos in the declared 4 day time but at 30,000,000 km/s that 15 LY detour would be nearly 2 months travel time just to get to Rigel.

I personally think the speed is dependent on local space terrain and the 30,000,000 km/s is just the speed of Warp 4.4 in that location. The Vulcan star charts probably allowed for faster travel by avoiding a majority of the slow spaces. All IMHO

 

[BillJ]

I personally think the speed is dependent on local space terrain and the 30,000,000 km/s is just the speed of Warp 4.4 in that location. The Vulcan star charts probably allowed for faster travel by avoiding a majority of the slow spaces. All IMHO

Just a band-aid trying to cover up that they didn't take these things all that seriously when writing the shows.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Just a band-aid trying to cover up that they didn't take these things all that seriously when writing the shows.

And neither should we.

 

[BillJ]

And neither should we.

Why I treat it all as a multi-verse, easier that way. Broad strokes are the same, details are different between series.

 

[blssdwlf]

Just a band-aid trying to cover up that they didn't take these things all that seriously when writing the shows.

Sure. I was just giving a Trek Tech response instead of the production team didn't care

 

[trekkist]

>Before you start bandying about insults, perhaps you should actually ask @BillJ what he meant.

You're right; I'm hypersensitive. I'd also suppressed from memory the show's ludicrous travel time to Kronos (which if one takes Warp 5 to be 5 cubed would lie 1.37 light years from Earth). By the same formula, a ship at Warp 4.4, 85 cee, would travel...let's see...just over 25 million km per second (guess Archer rounded up).

(attempting abjectly to return to original point): any comments on prism gravity theory?

 

[blssdwlf]

>
(attempting abjectly to return to original point): any comments on prism gravity theory?

I don't quite understand the prism gravity theory as described. Does it account for the Romulan BOP at a near 70 degree angle?

 

[Jedi Marso]

These discussions always crack me up because everything in Trek has only one speed setting: plot.

It is irritating, however, when the writing is so egregiously bad that even suspension of milieu-disbelief falls on its face.

 

[XCV330]

There's no appreciable Zenith-Nadir gravity axis to the galaxy, at least not in any practicable term unless you plan on revolving around the core for a few hundred thousand years or more.

It is true that spiral galaxies do align to something like an equatorial plane, but you're not going to feel that, anymore than you feel the gravitational pull of galactic super-clusters. It is a strong action but working over vast scales. For instance the sun affects earth tides but not nearly as much as the moon. The Moon is much smaller then that sun but it is much closer. I can't see the gravity prism thing having any more meaning than any other magic gravity conceit on the show. It's all just an excuse for being unable to film actors floating around, and for that matter, dealing with the problem of inertia, one of the main properties of matter. The only thing that seems consistent is that the deck plates affect you stop down, but only attract in one direction. In other words that low handing ceiling isn't trying to pull you like taffy from overhead. That, and it seems to work at extremely low power or without power at all. Extremely for those extremely are moments where the writers suddenly want it not to work.

The problem with this idea of alignment is that any object with some kind of gravitational crystal-prism thingy is going to be affected by whatever the largest gravitational wave generator is, which is usually going to be the largest amount of mass near it. If you're standing on Europa, you'll be affected by Jupiter's tidal pull (edit I wrote Pool and I kind of want to leave it like that. Now I wish Jupiter had a tidal pool) . but you'll be walking on Europa (if you wore a nice warm spacesuit) by the effect of Europa's gravity. So alignment to the galactic plane would be kind of meaningless.

I would go one better, not only was Kirk's ship faster than ENT-D, so was the SS Valiant.

Spoiler

both of them got to the galactic barrier in remarkable time, beaten there presumably only by Discovery and Book's ship, both of which has 32nd century upgraded DASH drives

.

Ships move at the speed of plot, but it is also possible that there are subspace corridors and shortcuts within it that make certain paths faster than others, making some parts of the galaxy more suitable for trade and commerce than others. Maybe the Valiant, which should not have been capable of even Warp 2, being built around the same time as the Conestoga, made it to the Barrier that way. No idea how 1701-A made it to the core as fast as it did, but same mechanism. Shortcuts. It's about the only thing that works beyond "the writers messed up and the directors let them).

Subspace is its own "reality" with its own rules, its own ecosystems, etc. It does not follow the rules of relativity or Newtonian physics. If you want to send a message faster through it, you pump up the dial, for instance. So its possible to write in whatever you need for the plot to work.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

I would go one better, not only was Kirk's ship faster than ENT-D, so was the SS Valiant.

I'd argue that Kirk's Ship or the SS Valiant found "Subspace Corridors" to achieve their short-cuts to their destination but kept the knowledge about them secret for Strategic/Tactical reasons.

In the Delta Quadrant, the locals called these "Subspace Corridors" by another name. "UnderSpace".

Given how large/vast reaching "UnderSpace" was in the Delta Quadrant, I wouldn't be surprised if "UnderSpace" existed in other "Quadrants" and were just hard to find along with the coordinates to their entrances were kept incredibly secret/guarded.

Other species in the Delta Quadrant fought over this knowledge and made efforts to delete it from enemies computers.

The Vaadwaur kept no written records of the Underspace, rather keeping the information committed to memory.

Eventually, the Turei and a dozen other species formed a coalition and eliminated the Vaadwaur threat, rendering the Vaadwaur homeworld uninhabitable. They then claimed the Underspace for themselves, though they lacked the Vaadwaur's knowledge of how to maintain it, resulting in the gathering of debris in the corridors and the possibility of ships falling into the Underspace by accident.

In 2376, the starship USS Voyager was accidentally pulled into Underspace. They were subsequently forced out by the Turei, a species who had appropriated the corridors, who targeted Voyager's shields with a resonance pulse, altering Voyager's shield harmonics and returning them to normal space. In five minutes, Voyager traveled two hundred light years.

Who's to say that such a HUGE "Tactical/Strategic" advantage wouldn't be kept a highly guarded secret by StarFleet.

Especially if it easily explains how more primitive ships like Kirk's Enterprise or the SS Valiant got to the edge of the Galaxy in short order.

 

[blssdwlf]

the SS Valiant.

The SS Valiant made it out to and past the Galactic Barrier with the help of a magnetic space storm. I also subscribe to Warp Engines are just faster Impulse Engines

SPOCK: Decoding memory banks. I'll try to interpolate. The Valiant had encountered a magnetic space storm and was being swept in this direction.
KIRK: The old impulse engines weren't strong enough.
SPOCK: Swept past this point, about a half light year out of the galaxy, they were thrown clear, turned, and headed back into the galaxy here.​

 

[publiusr]

I’ve always liked the idea of space lanes….stationary warp boost points…something.

 

[trekkist]

>I don't quite understand the prism gravity theory as described. Does it account for the Romulan BOP at a near 70 degree angle?

It accounts for that and the derelict Reliant as well, given the "gravitation on automatic" line. The "gravitation on automatic" line implies there's some reason prism gravitation isn't always on automatic, permitting any ship to assume any attitude at any time without a "tilting deck" effect.

Our interpretation was that it takes time and energy for the prisms (as complex an array of mechanisms as a holodeck's projectors) to readjust to differing amounts of mass "underlying" a particular ship. Default setting is therefore one in which pitch maneuvers are adjusted for without being noticed, given that factor-of-magnitude reduction of underlying mass is only reached at some 90 degrees pitch up or down (keep in mind a tiny Starship lying on its side on a record album).

Roll maneuvers rapidly change underlying mass figures, with sometimes savage effect (as in E's reaction to the Romulan's nuke, the Romulan's and Reliant's to E's last shots). But even on default setting, compensation occurs...it just takes a bit longer than on "automatic," when the application of more power makes compensation faster.

>There's no appreciable Zenith-Nadir gravity axis to the galaxy, at least not in any practicable term unless you plan on revolving around the core for a few hundred thousand years or more.

Prisms don't act on the galaxy's nonexistent gravity axis. They focus the total gravitational force being "emitted" by all objects underlying the ship--stars, planets, hydrogen gas, dark matter. The word "focus" is best understood as an analogy. A better analogy might be "reverse gravitational laser," with the ship's decks as targets.

Ridiculously complex system, wherein each deck has its own array of "gravity (focusing) plates." And yes, I know the "sweet spot of zero gee" scene in Enterprise contradicts this...but bear in mind we were rationalizing TOS during the 1970s and '80s. By purest accident, the TOS-cast films, TNG, and Voyager included "aired data" consistent with our interpretations (while also contradicting some). Enterprise may have done both; I'm not sure. Memories written by dozens of viewings of every TOS episode are stronger than those built by a handful of viewings of individual sequel series and film episodes (viewing frequency of latter driven not so much by how "good" we found them, but simply that they never aired 6 times a week for a decade or so).

Pet peeve: Romulan warbird, not BOP. Bear in mind the latter term was invented for what was originally meant to be a stolen Romulan ship, and since applied to Klingon ships, on air (or am I mistaken? did TNG ever say "Romulan BOP decloaking"?).

Yeah, I know:

KIRK: After a whole century, what will a Romulan ship look like, Mister Stiles? I doubt they'll radio and identify themselves.
STILES: You'll know, sir. They're painted like a giant bird-of-prey.

But
1)warbird was the original fannish and novel term
and
2)"bird-of-prey" isn't exactly the same as "bird of prey" (not that I know which format was used in the actual script

That, however, I do NOT claim to be "deep canon"--just head canon (or is that one word?)

>I'd argue that Kirk's Ship or the SS Valiant found "Subspace Corridors" to achieve their short-cuts to their destination but kept the knowledge about them secret for Strategic/Tactical reasons.

We explored and rejected that idea for a number of reasons.

1)Every travel time / distance citation in TOS yielded (relatively) consistent velocities far faster than Warp factor cubed (which I'll cite if asked; this post's long enough already)

2)The Alternative Factor's

KIRK; Aye, aye, sir. Can you assign me other starships as a reserve?
BARSTOW [on viewscreen]: Negative. I'm evacuating all Starfleet units and personnel within a hundred parsecs of your position. It's going to be tough on you and the Enterprise, but that's the job you've drawn. You're on your own.

implies Starfleet's operational capabilities (may) rest upon the typical / general / universally applicable use of far faster velocities.

We believed warp factors to be defined by the equation "Factor cubed times 'X,' " in which X was a variable related to the average mass density of the space through which a ship was traveling, viz. Squire of Gothos:

DESALLE: All clear ahead, Captain. The sensors indicate zero register.
KIRK: Forward readings, Mister Spock.
SPOCK: Gravimetric readings, no significant change, zero space density.
KIRK: Ahead warp factor three, Mister Sulu. Colony Beta Six wants their supplies. Let's get across this void in a hurry.

(although admittedly, "zero" space density would seem to have demanded a faster speed than Warp 3)

This serves to explain how Apollo's Pollox IV was too distant to expect help (it lay in a "star desert," crossing of which was slow, therefore rare), and--best of all--explains why a ship able to cross 990.7 light years in 11.337 hours at warp 8.4 (That Which Survives) would take 3 centuries to reach Andromeda.

Mind you, "mass density" may NOT be taken literally (today we might say "dark matter and/or energy density," or play it REALLY safe and say "B.S. particle density").

I've a funny story about Geoffrey Mandel et al in re: "WF cubed times X," incidentally. Short version: he heard about it from us (I have letters documenting this...somewhere).

Is it small of me to allude to that? That's why I never have (and no, I'm not claiming "I coulda been a contender"--I'd NEVER move to California, for fear of the Big One)

 

[DEWLine]

Earth to Kronos is 16 light years (per Star Charts which has been used in official productions) and takes four days to get there, at warp five (per "Broken Bow"), which equals roughly four light years per day, four light years per day times 365 days in a year equals about 1,460 light years in a year.

No.

Qo'noS is suspected - by Jed Whitten, based on Star Charts - to orbit HD 69076, roughly 109 light-years from Sol. There are subspace shortcuts between the two systems that the Vulcans, Klingons and others charted before Archer and company got involved.

http://hygmap.space/index.php?trek_names=1&select_center=1&select_star=40304[/SIZE]

 

[trekkist]

I've always been dubious of the "subspace shortcuts" idea. As I cited above, TOS starships and Starfleet maneuvers typically displayed "Factor cubed time 'X'," velocities, with time/distance (and in one case the warp factor) citations yielding velocities in the tens to hundreds of thousands of lightspeed.

One might well say "That's TOO fast!" -- but that was what "aired data" showed, repeatedly. TOS was preproduced very well, and monitored during production by Kellam de Forest:

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Kellam_de_Forest
and
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-science-sticklers-who-kept-star-trek-in-line/

...but it does not seem to have been worked out in a "hard SF" way by its creators or scriptwriters.

Thus...by purest accident...numerous and (semi) consistent violations of the TOS Bible's canon appeared again and again. TNG, blessed by on-staff technical advisors, kept that show consistent with "official" TOS canon...but not with what I dub "deep canon."

To take just one example: impulse, per "canon," is a fusion engine...but Kirk fled Balok's cube on reverse impulse, ere going to (reverse) warp. Exactly how does one reverse a rocket motor? Did the impulse stack deploy huge force-field thrust diverters?

Not to mention, how much slush hydrogen would a fusion motor need to burn to do this, in a few seconds, at the end of "Court Martial"?

SPOCK: Activate port impulse engines. One third power.
(Uhura takes navigation)
HANSON: One third power.
UHURA: Variance fading.
HANSON: Orbit stabilising.

(yeah, I know: "inertial dampening"--but I'm unaware of ANY episode of any series that mentions magic technologies which reduce a vessel's effective mass)