TOS Chronology

I started this thread on TOS chronology. This thread is for the purpose of deducing facts about the chronology of TOS that could be deduced by a sufficiently intelligent and observant person without watching any other Star Trek productions and without using any outside reference materials such as the writer's guide, or the Star Trek Chronology: The History of the Future, etc..

A list of assumptions which are mostly not, repeat not, made,:

1) The official dates from Star Trek Chronology: The History of the Future are not used. They are official, but they are not canonical and thus they might not be correct. Since hundreds of productions have been made using the Star Trek Chronology: The History of the Future as a basis for chronology, as a general rule Star Trek productions should probably not happen too long before or after the dates that the official chronology gives, but those dates are not considered to be canon evidence or the last word. Since TOS was written decades before the official chronology was decided on, there is no reason to follow the official chronology in deciding how TOS should be dated from its own internal evidence.

2) All dates given are considered to be probably, but not certainly, dates in various Earth dating systems. It is possible that assigning dates to an extraterrestrial dating system may be necessary to solve some dating problems, so that is not arbitrarily ruled out.

3) Earth dates are not assumed to be dates in the Anno Domini dating system. Dozens or hundreds of systems of counting the years from various calendar eras have been used, and are still used, on Earth, and others might be invented in the future before the time of TOS. If someone specifies a date is AD (Anno Domini) or CE (Common Era) the dating system is thus specified. If someone doesn't specify the dating system it remains an unidentified dating system.

I believe that from time to time various pressure groups on Earth persuade the United Earth government to change the United Earth flag, and anthem, and other symbols, including changing the official calendar era of the United Earth. Thus not all Star Trek dates are given in the same calendar. Evidence for that can be seen as early as in TOS.

4) Time periods are assumed to probably, but not certainly, be Earth time periods. The possibility that characters might sometimes use other, non terrestrial, time periods should not be arbitrarily ruled out as a solution to chronological problems. For example Admiral Morrow might have been using years longer than Earth years when he said that the Enterprise was 20 years old in Star Trek III: The Search For Spock.

Note that in informal English the word day has two meanings. One is a period of light, following and followed by a period of dark called night. The other is the period of time between two immediately successive midnights at the same place on Earth, a time period which contains both a day and a night. Furthermore, a day could be the length of time that someone works at job during a single day, their work shift. In scientific English there is the distinction between a sidereal day and a synodic day.

5) Stardates. No assumptions are made about stardates. If episodes happen in stardate order, it is possible that there is a fixed relationship between the passage of stardates and time on planets, so that there could be X stardates in one Earth year, for example. But if episodes happen in production order or airdate order stardates would increase and decrease over time, and thus calculating the relationship between stardates and planetary time would be much more complex.

[Added May 4, 2020. I note that it is possible that stardates go from 0000.0 to 9999.9 and then turn back to 0000.0. It is also possible that in TOS stardates have more digits than are ever actually mentioned on screen. So that stardate 429999.9 would be followed by stardate 430000.0 and the stardates would go up to stardate 439999.9 and then to 440000.0,and so on. But only the last four digits before the decimal point and the ones after the decimal point would be mentioned. Thus it might not always be true that an episode with a higher stardate if after an episode with a lower stardate.]

6) Order of episodes. No assumptions are made about the order of episodes. If episodes happen in stardate order there can be a simple relationship between stardates and the passage of time on planets. But if episodes happen in production order, or airdate order, or in no specified order, stardates will go up and down over time.

[Added May 4, 2020. I note that a fourth possible order which I have suggested sometimes is by order of seasons, and by order of stardates for episodes within a season. That eliminates different seasons having overlapping stardate ranges, but requires that stardates be rolled back between seasons for some reason.

And of course there are the possible viewing orders of from "best" to "worst" according to some ranking, or from "worset" to Best", or aphabetical order, or reverse alphabetical order.

The Short Treks episode "Ephraim and Dot" involves glimpses of events from several TOS episodes. Those scenes are not seen in airdate order, production order, or stardate order, and so in any fictional universe in which "Ephraim and Dot" is canon, either those scenes are show in a different order from when they really happened, or else TOS episodes do not happen in airdate, production order, or stardate order, and possibly they don't happen in any logical or predictable order and can be arranged anyway a chronologist wants. I discuss tha tin post number 69 at: https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/whi...e-alternate-universes-as-others.298962/page-4]

7) When a span of years is given by someone other than Spock or a computer, it is assumed that they are speaking vaguely. If they mention X centuries or X hundred years, it is assumed that they would do so if the actual time span was anywhere between X-1 hundred years and X+1 hundred years. It is hoped that by interpreting each such statement as broadly as possible, combining several such time ranges to find the time ot TOS will produce a time span where all those time spans overlap, instead of finding that the time spans do not overlap at all.

8) Alternate universe. It is assumed that, as should be the case with most highly episodic shows with many episodes, most TOS episodes happen in separate alternate universes of their own, except for the few episodes which have evidence of being sequels to other episodes which thus happen in the same alternate universe. It is also assumed that Star Trek, like most works of fiction, happens in an alternate universe. And to be more precise, the alternate universe of Star Trek diverged from our time line and universe some time before, and not after, the first TOS episodes were made.

There is a thread about which Star Trek producitions are in the same alternate universe as others. https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/whi...he-same-alternate-universes-as-others.298962/

See for example, post number 44 and post number 69 there.

I think that is a complete list of the assumptions that I mostly do not make in my Star Trek chronological work.

I guess that I will discuss the chronological evidence in the episodes in the chronological order that episodes were broadcast, to show what could be deduced by an observer as more and more episodes were shown, but without assuming that the episodes happen in broadcast order.

[Added May 4, 2020. I think that any good attempt at Star Trek chronology should have three parts. In one part the episodes are arranged in airdate order, and in another part the episodes are arranged in production order, and in another part the episodes are arranged in stardate order.}

 

Why make this assumption? True, the 1968 of "Assignment: Earth" is not our own, but "the first episodes" could have had a historical 1964 that was identical to our own. On the other hand: Khan and his colleagues would have had to be genetically enhanced before the early 1960s to be able to take power in the early 1990s, unless (i) they were all younger than 30 when they took power, or (ii) their enhancement took place as adults. Both of these seem unlikely, so I guess the divergence took place when you say.

I hope you succeed in creating this ab initio dating scheme, but if you're going to work your way up to the movies - as seems possible, given your example of The Search for Spock - please give credence to the idea that The Wrath of Khan is a sequel only to "Space Seed" and not to anything else. The tendency to fit the first two feature films into an antecedent/consequent mindset is heavily dependent on the Chronology, whose influence you're explicitly trying to avoid.

 

As regards alternate universes, Spock in "Bread and Circuses" rattles off figures on the first World Wars that are at odds with what would have been known in 1964, say.

But instead of alternate universes, one can always plead incomplete, innovative or otherwise intriguing interpretation of the past by our heroes - possibly the more interesting route whenever one is creating a future model of the past, be it real or fictional. That is, one can do the timeline as perceived by Kirk and Spock, rather than the timeline as possibly perceived by us down here in the 21st century...

Timo Saloniemi

 

Any divergence between Star Trek and real life occurred thousands of years ago when Earth was visited by aliens such as Apollo and his fellow "gods," the Preservers, etc., which never happened in our reality.

Kor

 

And outside TOS, Trek had Janeway and her crew present at Big Bang, which in all probability does not hold true for our universe...

But we can't readily tell, not for certain. Possibly Apollo and the Platonians and Kukulkan all were here. It's in sharp contrast with this that we can pretty definitely tell that Khan Singh didn't take over a quarter of the world's population, nor depart in an interplanetary spacecraft, in the nineties. Or that the death toll from WWI was quite a bit bigger than Spock claimed.

Timo Saloniemi

 

This is a shorter version of my post # 8.

I note that I made some additions to my post number one on May 4, 2020.

In my original post I wrote:

In "Bread and Circuses" Spock gives the fatalities in Earth's world wars.

And the death tolls for Word War One and World War Two are much smaller than the actual death figures for those wars. Therefore it is logical to deduce that the fatality rates in the first and second would wars were lower by millions of deaths in the alternate universe of TOS than in our universe.

And in "The city on the Edge of Forever":

In our history, the first atomic bombs weighed several tons each. The V-2 had a payload capacity of only one ton. The V-2 had a range of only 200 miles, not the intercontinental range necessary to conquer or destroy the world. So I deduce that in the alternate universe of TOS, time travelers and/or aliens went back in time to Nazi Germany in the early 1930s and taught the Nazis that they needed atomic bombs carried by ICBMs to conquer the world, and started a program to design light enough atomic bombs, and powerful enough rockets, to create ICBMs with nuclear warheads. But fortunately the USA entered the war early enough without Keeler's peace movement to defeat Nazi Germany in time, and with many millions fewer deaths than in our timeline.

As for TMP, as far as I can tell there is no evidence whether it happens in the same alternate universe as the movies from WOK to TUC.

There are a lot more reasons than that for considering star Trek to be in an alternate universe.

This is a shorter version of my post # 8.

 

As far as you know . . . .

 

This is a longer version of my post # 6.

I note that I made some additions to my post number one on May 4, 2020.

In my original post I wrote:

In "Bread and Circuses" Spock gives the fatalities in Earth's world wars.

And the death tolls for Word War One and World War Two are much smaller than the actual death figures for those wars. Therefore it is logical to deduce that the fatality rates in the first and second would wars were lower by millions of deaths in the alternate universe of TOS than in our universe.

And in "The city on the Edge of Forever":

In our history, the first atomic bombs weighed several tons each. The V-2 had a payload capacity of only one ton. The V-2 had a range of only 200 miles, not the intercontinental range necessary to conquer or destroy the world. So I deduce that in the alternate universe of TOS, time travelers and/or aliens went back in time to Nazi Germany in the early 1930s and taught the Nazis that they needed atomic bombs carried by ICBMs to conquer the world, and started a program to design light enough atomic bombs, and powerful enough rockets, to create ICBMs with nuclear warheads. But fortunately the USA entered the war early enough without Keeler's peace movement to defeat Nazi Germany in time, and with many millions fewer deaths than in our timeline.

As for TMP, as far as I can tell there is no evidence whether it happens in the same alternate universe as the movies from WOK to TUC.

There are a lot more reasons than that for considering Star Trek to be in an alternate universe.

As far as I remember at the moment, Earth was visited in ancient times by Apollo and the Greek Gods, and Kulkulkan, who influenced history by being worshiped as gods, and by the Platonians who apparently intermingled with ancient Athenians without being noticed and affecting history, and others I probably forget.

Which famous persons was Flint/Akharin from "Requiem for Methuselah"?

He said that he knew a number of famous persons:

And he said that he had been:

And of course Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) lived in a rather literate and bureaucratic age and it is hard to imagine when an immortal could have taken Brahms's identity. Could Fling/Akharin have become a baby adopted by Johann Jakob Brahms and Joanna Nissen, growing up in their household, and if so why wasn't the adoption recorded?

Or did Flint/Akharin survive an accident where the adult Johannes Brahms was killed and somehow change his appearance to look like Johannes Brahms and take his place?

And of course King Solomon of the United Kingdom of Israel (c. 990-931 BC) and King Alexander III the Great of Macedon (356-323 BC) would have been born as babies in the royal courts of their fathers and many members of those courts would have watched them grow to adulthood. So even if Flint/Akharin had the power to turn himself into a baby, how could that baby be accepted as a royal child, possibly taking the place of a real royal baby?

Instead it seems more likely that Flink/Akharin could change his appearance but not his body size by very much and so couldn't make himself look like a baby or a child. So presumably Flint/Akharin found a way to get Solomon and Alexander alone when they were adults (perhaps by posing as a beautiful woman) and kill them, dispose of their bodies somehow, and change his appearance to match theirs to impersonate them.

Alexander the Great defeated the Persians in three big battles, enabling him to conquer the mighty Persian Empire, the Battle of the Granicus in 334 BC, the Battle of Issus in 333 BC, and the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC..

I guess that Flint/Akharin replaced the real Alexander sometime after the Battle of the Granicus in 334 BC, in order for Alexander to be very famous in the alternate universe of Star Trek, but probably before the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC..

If Flint/Akharin was not as competent a general as Alexander, he might might have been assassinated or killed in a minor skirmish or in the big battle of Gaugamela. If the Greeks and Macedonians started quarreling over leadership after the "death" of "Alexander" the Persians might have attacked and defeated them, and possibly massacred the entire army as it tried to retreat to Europe. And when Flint/Akharin came back to life it may have been too late for him to claim to be Alexander who had somehow survived.

So the Persians may have moved a lot of troops to garrison the northwestern part part of their empire against further Greek attacks. In our history barbarian Gaulish tribes from the northern Balkans began invading the southern Balkans by about 310 BC. A great Celtic invasion began in about 280 BC. The Gauls under Brennius invaded Greece in 279 BC and attacked Delphi. A groups of Gauls crossed into Asia Minor and settled the region called Galatia.

And if the Persians had powerful armed forces in Asia Minor and Thrace, and a lot of gold to bribe the Gauls to stay away from Persian territory, the Gauls might have invaded Greece harder and might have conquered and settled Greece, enslaving the Greeks and destroying Greek civilization.

Or if Alexander the Great impersonated by Flint/Akharin did conquer the Persian Empire in the Star Trek alternate universe, a Greco-Macedonian ruler might have ruled most of the former Persian empire with a capital in Asia. They might have defended Asia from the Gauls and diverted them to invade Greece, leading to the downfall of civilization in Greece.

I discuss these possible collapses of civilization in ancient Greece, because in "Plato's Stepchildren" Kirk says:

In our alternate Universe, there have been ethnic Greeks for thousands of years without interruption, and at least some of them have been constantly civilized since before the time of Socrates and Plato. Though Greek civilization changed, there have always been at least a few civilized Greeks somewhere.

The closest to a fall of Green civilization was around the year AD 600, when Slavic tribes invaded the Balkans and settled, ending classical civilization everyone except in a few coastal fortresses and cities, even in Greece, and of course in Constantinople. It took centuries for the Roman Empire to reconquer and re hellenize Greece. But since the Platonians settled Platonius 2,500 years before "Plato's stepchildren", leaving Earth about AD 600 would put "Plato's Stepchildren" about the year 3100 or later depending on how long it took them to settle on Platonius .

Assuming that Greeks converting from Greek paganism to Christianity seemed like the death of ancient Greek civilization to the Platonains as much as it did to Apollo and the Greek gods, that was a very long and gradual process from about AD 1 to about AD 600, which would thus put "Plato's stepchildren about AD 2600 to 3100, or later depending on how long it took the Platonians to settle on Platonius .

But if the Gauls invaded Greece and caused the collapse of Greek civilization as early as the 3rd Century BC, "Plato's Stepchildren could happen as early as other episodes. Socrates died in 399 BC in our timeline and Plato died as recently as 348/347 BC in our timeline. If the Gauls destroyed Greek civilization by about 340 BC, the Platonians might have left Earth then, and "Plato's Stepchildren" could be as early as AD 2160, or later depending on how long it took the Platonians to settle on Platonius..

Thus there is considerable evidence that our universe and the alternate universe of Star Trek must have diverged at least as early as about 300 BC, quite possibly caused by Flint/Akharin killing and impersonating Alexander the Great.

But in an alternate universe that diverged from ours as early as by 300 BC, how could later historical characters like Leonardo da Vinci, Brahms, or Hitler be born and live lives similar to those which they led in our history? History should have become more and more different in the alternate Universe of Star Trek.

Because the historical references in various Star Trek producitions are mostly accurate but have a bunch of inaccurate references mixed in with them, there isn't any period where all the earlier references are the same as in our history and all the later references are different. Instead.the accurate and the inaccurate historical references are mixed together, thus showing that the alternate universe of our timeline and the alternate universe of Star Trek have been drifting apart quite naturally and then been forced to be more similar, drifting apart and being forced together, over and over again for thousands of years, probably by deliberate intervention of some intelligence, whose goal may be to make all alternate universes more like the Star Trek universe.

This is a longer version of my post # 6.

 

So here is my first stab at TOS chronology in order of airdate.

"The Man Trap", September 8, 1966, creating a "Nancy Crater" timeline.

Year 1 NC. Nancy Crater born.

Year 25 NC. Nancy Crater and Leonard "Plum" McCoy meet.

Year 27 NC. Nancy Crater and Leonard McCoy break up.

Year 33 NC. Professor Crater and Nancy, now his wife, arrive on Planet M-113 for archaelogical research.

Year 25 or 36 NC: The salt vampire kills Nancy Crater, and becomes the companion of Professor Crater.

Year 36 NC. Professor Crater and the Salt Vampire decrease archaeological activity.

Year 37 NC. "The Man Trap".

But as far as I know there is no statement of how long ago the civilization fell on planet M-113, wich presumably would have been before Earth people arrived, since the Enterprise crew don't seem to have any prior knowledge of hypnotic salt vampires on planet M113..

.

This log was obviously not made by Captain Kirk while they were unaware that they each saw a different Nancy Crater, but sometime after they realized that.

Darnell is found dead on the planet.

Kirk, McCoy, sturgeon & Green beam down to question the Craters, presumably before they would have beamed down "tomorrow" for the postponed physical examinations.

On the planet Nancy kills Sturgeon and Green and assumes the Image of Green. Kirk McCoy & "Green" beam up to the Enterprise. Yeoman Rand takes a meal to Sulu in the Botany department. The Salt Vampire almost kills Uhura.

Sulu and Rand find crewman Barnhart dead on deck nine.

One the planet's surface Kirk & Spock find Green dead,and capture Crater.

.

There is no mention of any time span between any of the stardates.

Buffalo on Earth are mentioned three times, but there is no mention of how long ago they were common.

Added June 11, 2020. Since Kirk told Crater they would be back "tomorrow" to finished the examinations, and then later beamed down to ask crater questions, there was obvious less than 48 hours between those two beam downs.

Some time after stardate 1513.1, Kirk said they would be back "tomorrow" Then came stardate 1513.4, and after that Kirk decided to beam down and question Crater ahead of the scheduled visit. After that visit Kirk made a log on stardate 1513.8. So there are less than 48 hours in the up to 0.7 stardate units between Stardates 1513.1 and 1513.8. Thus there are fewer than 68.6 hours in a stardate unit.

 

"Charlie X", September 15, 1966, chronological information. Charles X timeline.

Year 1 CX: Charles Evens born. Since Yeoman Tina Lawton is said to be Charle's age, she might be born about that time as well.

Year 3 CX: An Earth/Federation ship crashes on Thasus: Charles Evans is the only survivor, age 3. He is cared for by the Thasians..

Year 17 CX: When the Antares visits Thasus, Charlie Evans is found by the crew and taken off the planet. When the Thasians find out that he left, they send a space ship to get him back, since his Thasian given powers may cause trouble with humans.

It may be noted that between stardate 1533.7:

And stardate 1535.8:

Captain Kirk says:

Kirk might be referring to Canadian Thanksgiving, which has been celebrated on the second Monday in October since 1957. But Kirk is more likely referring to the US Thanksgiving, which has been celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November since 1942.

Unless the dates of Thanksgiving are changed again in the future of Star Trek, Canadian Thanksgiving would be
sometime between October 10 and October 16, and USA Thanksgiving would be sometime between November 21 and November 28 of the year when "Charlie X" happens..

Note that humans know that Thasians once existed, but most scoff at stories that there are still more or less living Thasians on Thasus.

The Thasian said:

Centuries ago would probably bet between 100.000 and 999.999 years, presumably but not certainly, Earth years.

if that Thasian took on a form that look lie a giant, ghostly, green floating human head centuries ago in order to communicate with humans, apparently it has not been as successful in communicating during those attempts as during this one. Possibly dealing with Charlie for 14 years improved the Thasian's skill in communicating with humans. Of course it is possible that the only thing the Thasian wanted to say during previous meetings with humans was "Go away! don't bother us!"

So did the Thasian say it took its human looking form centuries ago, or that it used to have that form centuries ago when it was a biological being, and resumed that form just now to talk to the humans? Is there the word "from" between "form" and "centuries", as in the transcript, or is that a typographical error in the transcript?

It it meant the former, humans would have been visiting Thasus occasionally for between 100 and 1,000 years, presumably Earth years. Or possibly human looking aliens, like the natives of Eminiar VII, visited Thasus, and the Thasian took that form to communicate with them. Did travelers from other worlds visit Thasus and tell legends of Thasians for centuries before the first humans explorers did?

I watched "Charlie X" on Heroes & Icons on May 10, 2020 and the Thasian at the end says: " I have taken my form centuries ago, so that I may communicate with you." That is different from what he transcript says:

Thus the Thasian has been in roughly human form for about 100 to 1,000 years in order to communicate with humans - communicate with humans badly it would seem if humans still don't believe there are Thasians active on Thasus.

The statement by the Thasian is the first clue as to how long Humans have been exploring the stars by the era of TOS, at least as the audience experienced it in broadcast order, but it is rather ambiguous.

Added June 11, 2020. Stardates in "Charlie X":

Later Charlie talks to Rand who says:

Charlie butt slaps her, and she tells him to ask Kirk or McCoy why that's wrong.

Later, Spock, Uhura, and Rand are among those in the recreation room when Charlie comes in. Clearly Rand is now off duty for at least a short break.

Kirk tells the Cook it is Thanksgiving on Earth, talks to Charlie about the swat, and the Antares calls and then explodes. Uhura is on duty in the Bridge.

Kirk and Spock are playing 3-D chess in the recreation room, obviously off duty. Charlie melts some of the chess pieces.

On the Bridge, Kirk tells Rand he talked to Charlie about the swat, and Rand says that Charlie is too interested in her.

Later Charlie enters Kirk's quarters:

Kirk talks to Charlie about Rand and Uhura, on duty, calls from the bridge. Kirk takes Charlie to the gym and Charlie makes Sam disappear, as well as all phasers on the ship.

A meeting in the Briefing room follows And Kirk says they can't take Charlie to Colony Five. Charlie admits he destroyed the Antares.

On the bridge, probably soon after this, Kirk tells Uhura to call Colony Five. Charlie stops her and takes control of the ship's course.

Probably soon after this Charlie turns Tina Lawton into a lizard. Charlie enters Rand's quarters, where she is in her nightgown, so apparently she doesn't have exactly the same work hours as Uhura. When Kirk and Spock enter, Charlie makes Rand disappear and threatens them.

Sometime later Kirk & Spock try to trap Charlie in a room with a force field. Charles breaks out. Probably soon after Charlie turns a young woman old and silences laughing crew persons.

And then the final scene or scenes on the bridge happen. As far as I can tell the episode could take a day or a week. The itntrval between the three stardates given, 1533.6, 1533.7, and 1535.8, or 2.2 stardate units, could be less than one Earth day, thus making fewer than 10 or 11 hours per stardate unit, but the time elapsed is not certain.

 

As regards the Okuda's books, Star Trek Chronology etc, they them selves said in a forward to the book that it isn't intended to be 'definitive' in terms of its timeline, and although certain things hypothesized in it did subsequently get confirmed on screen and became official, anything with the word 'Conjecture' beside it was simply them speculating. It should not escape our notice that in terms of TOS and pre-TOS, up to and including biographical details on the characters in some cases, a large amount of it bares this word, conjecture. It's become a kind of shared guideline for each of us to use as a common reference point, but large parts of it even today have never been confirmed on screen and remain speculation by the authors, while other parts have been debunked by series and movies made subsequently to it's publication. The authors themselves were very clear that what they wrote was, in part, largely for fun, and that much of it was still intended to be matters of debate and further speculation. Some writers on staff chose to follow it, others sometimes ignored it, others still (such as John Eaves when designing the Phoenix for the eighth movie) took vague inspiration from it, but developed further in a different direction. Nothing in those books that says 'conjecture' is immutable, anything not expressly confirmed on screen is still up for interpretation.

Enjoying reading your posts, @MAGolding. Keep 'em coming

 

This makes it sound like Japan never attacked Pearl Harbor. The USA entered the war because of this attack and not anything the Germans did. If Japan never attacked, then I can see a peace movement keep the USA out of the European War. But we know Japan did attack the USA because Esteban and Angela get strafed by a Zero.

 

The fact that Japan and the USA were at war during part of Star Trek''s version of WWII doesn't mean that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in that version. In our history the US government under Roosevelt was ant-axis and straining the limits of neutrality to assist Britain against Germany, while cutting off trade with Japan to try to stop them invading China. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and the Dutch East Indies that started war with the USA and Hitler, sor tof an ally of Jpan, declared war on the USA a few days later, bringing the USA into the war against Germany.

Remember than tens of millions fewer persons seem to have died in Star Trek''s version of WWII than in ours. So possibly a number of countries were not involved in the war, or at least not as much as they were in our history. Maybe the second Sino-Japanese war didn't happen in Star Trek''s version of World War Two or was much less bloody. Possibly the USA's reaction to the Japanese invasion cause the Japanese to back down and behave themselves for several years. Then war between the USA and Germany broke out some time after December 1941, and sometime when the USA seemed very distracted by the war in Europe, the Japanese attacked China again, and the USA got involved n the war against Japan, though either a Japanese attack on US territory such as Pearl Harbor, or attacking use forces in the far east, or possibly a US ultimatum or attack against Japan.

But I do remember some sort of a reference to Pearl Harbor somewhere in Star Trek, so possibly Japan attacked Pearl Harbor sometime in 1942 or 1943.

In TNG "The Defector":

And in Voyager "The 37s":

So in a fictional universe where "The 37s" is canon, Japan did attack Pearl Harbor sometime during the year 1941, for reasons similar to but possibly not identical to those in our timeline. But that is not necessarily true in all fictional universes which include TOS, since some of them may not include Voyager.i

 

True but that also assumes that the war in the Atlantic would not have escalated to the point that the US entered the war against Germany. That was what got the US into WW1; in 1916 Germany tried hard to scale back their submarine warfare for that very reason, but couldn't make it work. And this time, the US was providing massive aid to Britain and the US Navy was actively fighting U-boats. Two US destroyers were torpedoed by U-boats in October 1941, one seriously damaged, one sunk. The US had clearly picked a side; many thought that war was inevitable but of course Pearl Harbor changed everything.

An earlier discussion:
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/how-did-edith-delay-wwii.281565/page-2#post-11628275

 

"Where No Man Has Gone Before". It was the third episode broadcast, on September 22, 1968, but the second pilot produced.

It was originally produced without Kirk's opening narration about the five year mission of the starship Enterprise, though it had that narration when it was broadcast for the first time in 1966. So it is possible that "Where No Man Has Gone Before". happens before the beginning of the five year mission.

So at the beginning of the episode the S.S. Valiant has been missing for over two centuries. Kirk later address the crew:

http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/2.htm

But the transcript is incorrect. Kirk actually says: "...the S.S. Valiant almost two hundred years ago."

So the S.S. Valiant seems to have self destructed and ejected the disaster recorder almost two hundred years earlier. Thus there was a moment during the voyage of the S.S. Valiant that was a exactly two hundred years before the opening scenes of "Where No Man Has Gone Before", and the voyage began and ended some time before and after that moment, possibly years before and/or after that moment.

later, in the sickbay, Dehner and Mitchell talk about his speed reading and retention:

Since Gary Mitchell mentioned Tarbolde writing a sonnet on the Canopius planet in the year 1996, I call the calendar (or at least the calendar era used) the Tarbolde-Mitchell calendar.and abbreviate dates in it as TM.

So Tarbolde, who might have been an Earth person, especially if his first name was Phineas, wrote a poem on the Canopius planet, assumed to be a planet in the Canopius system, in the years 1996 TM.

However, Memory Alpha claims that Tarbolde was a native of the Canopius planet. It also says:

So Phineas might not have been Tarbolde's personal name.

I my first post I wrote that only dates stated to be dates AD would be counted as Anno Domini dates, because there is evidence for the Earth calendar era being changed sometimes. Thus I label the year when Tarbolde wrote as 1996 TM instead of AD 1996.

But if a fan uncritically assumed that all dates in TOS were Anno Domini dates they would assume that "1996" meant AD 1996. So it it is a good thing that Tarbolde might have been a native to the Canopius planet instead of an Earth man who presumably would have used an Earth space ship to reach the Canopius planet by AD 1996.

But Mitchell sad that 1996 TM was during" The past couple of centuries". Therefore 1996 TM should have been sometime between 0.000 and 200.00 years earlier, and probably between 100.000 and 200.000 years earlier. Thus the date of "where No Man Has Gone Before" should have been about 1996 TM to 2196 TM, and probably in the period of 2096 to 2196 TM.

And there are two possible objections to that deduction:

1) Mitchell might have miscalculated the time since 1996 TM. Real people are likely to make mistakes in what they say all the time. But fictional characters usually speak a lot more accurately than real people. A writer should try to avoid misleading the readers except where that is part of the plot, having characters lie or be wrong and for their lies or mistakes to be uncovered during the story. Samuel A. Peeples who wrote the script for "Where No Man Has Gone Before" had no way of knowing whether the pilot would be picked up for a series or whether he would ever again write anything set in the fictional universe of Star Trek. If Peeples had any plans for a plot point that might have been served by Mitchel making a dating mistake, he should have written the discovery of that mistake into the script. So I suppose that it is possible that someone cold find a version of the script in which such a mistake by Mitchel is revealed. But if no such revelation is in any version of the script, there is every reason to reject the idea that Peeples intended Mitchell's line to be an error.

2) Mitchell might have been speaking casually and used "couple" in the sense of "a few" instead of the sense of "a pair". Real people may do that a lot, but it is a bad idea for fictional characters to do so, especially in science fiction or fantasy settings that are not not familiar to the viewer or reader, where the viewer or reader will try to deduce everything they can abut the setting from everything that the characters say. So I strongly suspect that Peeples intended the date of "Where No Man Has Gone Before" to be between 2096 TM and 2196 TM, and that Peeoples wold have changed the line to "the past two centuries" if he thought that anyone would interpret it as "few centuries" instead of "two centuries".

So my position is that the date of "Where No Man Has Gone Before' is between 2096 TM and 2196 TM.

And that means that the S.S. Valiant departed on its interstellar voyage over two hundred years earlier, and thus sometime between a bit before 1896 TM and a bit before 1996 TM.

I note that since Earth did not have rapid interstellar travel in AD 1965, and was not expected to invent it any time soon, warp drive should be expected to be invented sometime after AD 1965, and the S.S. Valiant should leave on its voyage sometime after that, and "Where No Man Has Gone Before" should be more than two hundred years after that, "Where No Man Has Gone Before" should happen some time after AD 2165, a dating also supported by "The Corbomite Maneuver:.

And back before I thought about the possibility of several different calendar eras being used to count the years in Star Trek I assumed that 1996 TM was the same as AD 1996, and thus that the S.S. Valiant departed between about AD 1896 and AD 1996, and that TOS happened between about AD 2096 and AD 2196.

Since I also believed that the dates in "Space Seed" were Anno Domini dates, that was a problem.

Since the distances to to even the nearest stars are tens of thousands of times as far as the distances to even the most distant planets in our solar system, at a time when mere interplanetary voyages took years, interstellar voyages owl take tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years.

So when I thought that Earth had interstellar travel before AD 1996, and yet also did not have interstellar travel until AD 2018 or later, I had to suppose that Earth developed the same or different methods of relatively rapid interstellar travel twice, and independently. Some group on Earth discovered warp drive or another method of rapid interstellar flight before 1996,and kept it secret from the rest of humanity, and explored the stars, and perhaps left Earth behind forever with no record on Earth of what they did. And later Earth rediscovered that method or another method. And those two groups of explorers and colonists from earth eventually met and merged before the time of TOS.

And when I believed that TOS had to happen sometime between AD 2096 and 2196, I decided it happened some time after 2156, the latest date mentioned in TOS. And in my opinion, everyone who thinks that all Earth dates in TOS are Anno Domini dates would have to think the same.

There is a lot more to discuss about the chronology of "Where No Man Has Gone Before" in my next post.

 

Makes more sense that it is 1996 in the Canopius time system which can be any year Earth time system, just about 200 years ago, be them Earth years or Canopius years.

 

Or then Tarbolde wrote a poem titled "The Canopius Planet". While sipping jippers on a beach somewhere in southern California.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Can you prove that? Plus there is something going on behind the scenes I'm pretty sure of!
JB

 

Enjoying the read. I'm curious, MAC, about the ultimate goal of your project? Do you want to establish a timeline that is consistent with everything seen and heard onscreen?

The other thing I'll ad is that when I first came here I asked about an old fan timeline which I have since come to believe was the one created by James Dixon, at least mostly. Dixon himself, I have learned in my subsequent reading, was an "out there" personality, but much of his timeline is very well thought out and much of his reasoning is incredibly valid. I've been marking up what I think is the "best" of his versions, trying to make it easier to eliminate from considerateness thinks that I consider distractions, such as trying to fit all of the novels into a consistent reality.

 

This is my favorite idea so far. But I'd also like to throw in the idea that maybe there were interstellar ships that can go nearly light speed, and maybe this Tarbolde was an astronaut who spent 10 years on a sleeper ship traveling to Canopius, and wrote a poem after he got there.