TOS/TMP set during the **23rd** century?

[Timo]

A thousand stardates seem to be more or less a year, so it might have taken six years to ferment. Or then sixteen. Or twenty-six. Or one hundred and fifty-six. Note the absence of the "decade digit" in this 1000 SD = 1 y assumption, meaning that a 8300 stardate can very well be about fifteen years after "Space Seed"...

Were there a Romulan label on the bottle, Kirk couldn't read it, not even the date on it. The TOS heroes don't read alien languages all that fluently - Scotty and Chekov couldn't read Klingon in the following movie. No doubt the label is there for (illegal) export purposes.

http://cdn2-b.examiner.com/sites/de...sh/ce/2d/ce2d3083dc25800e454c346d7b2d0e81.jpg

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

Is this the only basic difference in the "prime universe" timeline? Just 60 years between some of the suggestions mentioned by characters in TOS, and the "official" timeline?

No, the 60-year discrepancy is between the two fan theories that existed prior to TNG -- the Spaceflight Chronology timeline that put TOS in 2207-10, and the alternative fan theory, later made official, that put TOS in 2266-69. Those were both outside interpretations based on evidence from TOS, but neither of them came from TOS itself. TOS was intentionally vague about the setting. Even the two big "200 years" references are vague as to the actual decade -- is it 200-ish years after the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s or 200-ish years after "Tomorrow is Yesterday" in the late 1960s? And of course those clash with the "Squire of Gothos" reference and the TMP reference, and the "Metamorphosis" reference doesn't make things any clearer.

 

[Duncan MacLeod]

All of which begs the question: do you think they would have been better off with the 27th century time period indicated by SoG, rather the the 23rd century that they ultimately went with?

In hindsight I think it might have worked out better. But then again, at the time we all assumed the lunar missions would immediately lead to a Mars expedition by the late 70s/ early 80s, then on to the asteriod belt by the 90s and so on. No one expected us to turn away from manned space exploration so quickly and so completely. It's kinda sad when you think about it.

 

[st.barthgirl]

"No one expected us to turn away from manned space exploration so quickly and so completely. It's kinda sad when you think about it."

Without having developed too strong of an opinion on the matter, i think i'm thinking that it's sad that the Idea of Mining the moon is what might bring us back there... and it's also sad that we know comparatively Nothing about the 70% of Earth that lies Under Water.

Except that i'm glad we're not Further disturbing Critters and Polluting the Oceans before we can develop a plan that will be as UnIntrusive as possible...

 

[T'Girl]

do you think they would have been better off with the 27th century time period

Unqualified yes.

It would have allowed for a more expansive back story. A more realistic spread of Humanity outward to the stars, room for multiple wars, slow incremental technological improvements. Especially with Humanity barely inching outward for the first century after discovering warp drive. The canon history of Trek has a lot happening in the hundred years between Archer and Kirk.

Cochrane: "What's it like out there in the galaxy?
Kirk: "We're on a thousand planets and spreading out."

 

[Christopher]

All of which begs the question: do you think they would have been better off with the 27th century time period indicated by SoG, rather the the 23rd century that they ultimately went with?

In hindsight I think it might have worked out better. But them again, at the time we all assumed the lunar missions would immediately lead to a Mars expedition by the late 70s/ early 80s, then on to the asteriod belt by the 90s and so on. No one expected us to turn away from manned space exploration so quickly and so completely. It's kinda sad when you think about it.

Don't be so pessimistic. The proposals that are coming along now for private space travel and mining are the sort of thing that could start a new space age far more successful than the one of the NASA era. Historically, frontier exploration/settlement hasn't really taken off until it came into the hands of private enterprise with government backing -- like the East India Companies, or the prospectors and fur traders who spearheaded European expansion into the Americas. Some of the proposals on the table now could get us to a Mars colony by the 2040s. Heck, in my novel Only Superhuman I have a heavily settled Asteroid Belt by the 2080s and '90s, and while that's an optimistic timeline, I do believe it's in the realm of possibility.

Of course, going interstellar is another matter. But NASA's already doing proof-of-concept experiments for a warp field generator of a sort, since recent theoretical work suggests that space warping could potentially be viable with far less energy than was previously assumed. Realistically, there's probably a very long journey from such proof of concept (if it works) to a functioning warp drive, but if such experiments are happening now in 2012, it makes it a little more credible that Zefram Cochrane could be building his warp engine just 50 years later.

Oh, and "Squire" pegged it as 28th century, not 27th. Trelane was familiar with the death of Alexander Hamilton, which took place in 1804. His cry of "Vive Napoleon!" suggests he was familiar with Napoleon's Hundred Days in 1815. And the episode featured a Strauss waltz from 1880. So it was 900 years after the 19th century, making it the 28th.

 

[Captrek]

They probably should have looped the 2283 line about the ale to 2243 to make it fit better with the after-the-fact continuity.

I always took that to be a stardate, so it wouldn't sync up to Earth dates, anyway.

In the script it is punctuated, “Twenty-two, eighty-three...” That suggests a stardate, FWIW.

 

[Timo]

Why?

If anything, the use of "twenty-two" rather than "two-two" suggests this is a case of centuries-and-years, the way we today say "Khan left Earth in nineteen, ninety-six". Stardates are sometimes spelled that way, but not always, especially when they go five-digit...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

In the script it is punctuated, “Twenty-two, eighty-three...” That suggests a stardate, FWIW.

I don't see why you'd think that. Stardates use periods (or rather, decimal points), not commas. And scripts are written for the benefit of cast and crew, not the viewers. Any punctuation in a script would be either a line-reading suggestion for the actor or a typo. Typos are quite common in scripts, since they aren't really meant to be seen. As long as the actor and the filmmakers understand what you meant, it doesn't matter if you spell or punctuate it correctly. So you really can't read anything into a stray comma in a script, even if commas did have anything to do with stardates, which they don't.

 

[Harvey]

One of the jobs de Forest Research did on this film was check for typos in the screenplay. One would hope, then, that few slipped through in the shooting script.

In this case, though, the comma looks line a line reading suggestion, not a star date. (Especially since the other star dates in the script are punctuated with periods, not commas).

 

[sbk1234]

A thousand stardates seem to be more or less a year, so it might have taken six years to ferment. Or then sixteen. Or twenty-six. Or one hundred and fifty-six. Note the absence of the "decade digit" in this 1000 SD = 1 y assumption, meaning that a 8300 stardate can very well be about fifteen years after "Space Seed"...

Were there a Romulan label on the bottle, Kirk couldn't read it, not even the date on it. The TOS heroes don't read alien languages all that fluently - Scotty and Chekov couldn't read Klingon in the following movie. No doubt the label is there for (illegal) export purposes.

http://cdn2-b.examiner.com/sites/de...sh/ce/2d/ce2d3083dc25800e454c346d7b2d0e81.jpg

Timo Saloniemi

As evidenced on the original series, the Stardates progressed without what seemed to be any consistancy. The earliest stardates on the series started with a 1, while by the end of the show, three years later, they started with a 6.

 

[BillJ]

A thousand stardates seem to be more or less a year, so it might have taken six years to ferment. Or then sixteen. Or twenty-six. Or one hundred and fifty-six. Note the absence of the "decade digit" in this 1000 SD = 1 y assumption, meaning that a 8300 stardate can very well be about fifteen years after "Space Seed"...

Were there a Romulan label on the bottle, Kirk couldn't read it, not even the date on it. The TOS heroes don't read alien languages all that fluently - Scotty and Chekov couldn't read Klingon in the following movie. No doubt the label is there for (illegal) export purposes.

http://cdn2-b.examiner.com/sites/de...sh/ce/2d/ce2d3083dc25800e454c346d7b2d0e81.jpg

Timo Saloniemi

As evidenced on the original series, the Stardates progressed without what seemed to be any consistancy. The earliest stardates on the series started with a 1, while by the end of the show, three years later, they started with a 6.

I thought the latest star date we saw was 5943.7 from All Our Yesterdays?

 

[Captrek]

A thousand stardates seem to be more or less a year, so it might have taken six years to ferment. Or then sixteen. Or twenty-six. Or one hundred and fifty-six. Note the absence of the "decade digit" in this 1000 SD = 1 y assumption, meaning that a 8300 stardate can very well be about fifteen years after "Space Seed"...

Were there a Romulan label on the bottle, Kirk couldn't read it, not even the date on it. The TOS heroes don't read alien languages all that fluently - Scotty and Chekov couldn't read Klingon in the following movie. No doubt the label is there for (illegal) export purposes.

http://cdn2-b.examiner.com/sites/de...sh/ce/2d/ce2d3083dc25800e454c346d7b2d0e81.jpg

Timo Saloniemi

As evidenced on the original series, the Stardates progressed without what seemed to be any consistancy. The earliest stardates on the series started with a 1, while by the end of the show, three years later, they started with a 6.

I thought the latest star date we saw was 5943.7 from All Our Yesterdays?

Early in Season One the stardates started with a 1. Three years later would be early Season Four, when the stardates started with a 6.

And technically, the last stardate we saw was 5943.9.

 

[Hartzilla2007]

do you think they would have been better off with the 27th century time period

Unqualified yes.

It would have allowed for a more expansive back story. A more realistic spread of Humanity outward to the stars, room for multiple wars, slow incremental technological improvements. Especially with Humanity barely inching outward for the first century after discovering warp drive. The canon history of Trek has a lot happening in the hundred years between Archer and Kirk.

Cochrane: "What's it like out there in the galaxy?
Kirk: "We're on a thousand planets and spreading out."

Yeah, I've been thinking this works better after reading some of the James Blish TOS adaptions which has the show taking place around that time. It makes so of the weirded things from TOS that never got explained make more sense.

Case in point the planet from Miri went from Earth duplicate to a long since cutoff Earth colony on the usual earth type planet humans tend to colonize.

 

[Timo]

The earliest stardates on the series started with a 1, while by the end of the show, three years later, they started with a 5.

Umm, why do you think it would be three years later? It was a five-year mission, after all!

It cannot be three years, that much is certain: in the early third-season "Day of the Dove" (SD unknown), the interval between the episode and the late-second-season "Errand of Mercy" (SD 3198) is given as three years by the character Kang. It's at least four years in three seasons, then - and the stardates would nicely suggest it's actually five years and we saw the entire adventure.

As for consistency, following the rule that higher stardates establish later date creates lots of it. Say, Chekov is definitely onboard in "Space Seed" already, and thus may be among the people who flocked to see, touch and hopefully have sex with Khan. Saying that a thousand of the units amount to a year creates further consistency regarding the time intervals discussed. And it's even within tolerances to think that we witness the resulting roughly three stardates per day...

It's pure coincidence, of course. But so what?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

Yeah, I've been thinking this works better after reading some of the James Blish TOS adaptions which has the show taking place around that time. It makes so of the weirded things from TOS that never got explained make more sense.

Case in point the planet from Miri went from Earth duplicate to a long since cutoff Earth colony on the usual earth type planet humans tend to colonize.

Right. In Blish's "Miri," the planet was 70 Ophiuchi IV (although he called it "70 Ophiucus" by mistake), it had been settled over 500 years before, and its architecture was "roughly like that of the early 2100s," which would put TOS in the 27th century. He says they're refugees from "the Cold Peace," a tyrannical era from his novel They Shall Have Stars, a prequel to the Cities in Flight series. One interesting thing about the Blish Trek adaptations was the way he worked in references to his own SF -- the Cold Peace, the Vegan Tyranny, Bonner the Stochastic, the Xixobrax jewelworm -- as if to imply that ST took place in his pre-existing universe.

 

[Hartzilla2007]

One interesting thing about the Blish Trek adaptations was the way he worked in references to his own SF -- the Cold Peace, the Vegan Tyranny, Bonner the Stochastic, the Xixobrax jewelworm -- as if to imply that ST took place in his pre-existing universe.

Oh, so thats where that stuff was from. I thought it added a nice interesting history to the universe.