Warp drive obsolete?

[F. King Daniel]

Nimoy's Spock is supposed to be the same guy, from the same timeline, that we saw from "The Cage" through to STVI and "Unification". Otherwise his cameo and the whole time travel plot is utterly pointless. Therefore his ship and Nero's Narada are from that universe too - and they had warp drive in 2387, long after Voyager returned from the Delta Quadrant.

Just because the Federation had new technology doesn't mean they share it with everyone else. Also just because there's new technology doesn't mean everyone's going to chuck away their old, perfectly functional warp drives, especially hick miners from the boondocks. Secondly, nobody really knows what Spock's ship was capable of. There's no reason why it couldn't have had a whole bag of tricks including multiple drives.

I see your point about the Federation not sharing their tech with the Romulans. And I guess we didn't get a good look at what Spock's ship can do, either. Damn stoned Trekkie logic

Nimoy's Spock is supposed to be the same guy, from the same timeline, that we saw from "The Cage" through to STVI and "Unification".

Well, not really. Remember he died and was regenerated. It's splitting hairs, but a potentially relevant point. Probably not, though.

It is a good point, though. How old was he in STVI? 4??

 

[Sean Aaron]

I like your rank Sean. Scottish understatement at its best.

And modest, don't forget modest!

I think we'll continue to see warp drive used in film/tv-land - it's ingrained in the popular consciousness about Trek. Whilst the fans who followed Voyager may know what Quantum Slipstream is, nobody else will and it's probably not even worth a few throwaway lines of dialogue to reference it.

I do find it interesting that the novels are using it, but after the abrupt jump forward for the Typhon Pact I stopped following them I'm afraid.

 

[Timo]

I wonder how they get a metal so dense that even phasers and torpedoes has not effect on it.

Phasers have the curious habit of vaporizing a thing and then stopping before vaporizing the next thing - say, redshirts but not the floors beneath them or the walls behind them. Perhaps any physical armor in the Trek universe is based on observance of this phaser behavior? That is, the way to stop a phaser from penetrating is to use layers of materials (or pseudomaterials, forcefields, whatnot) so that the phaser effect has to deal with the maximum number of those difficult "phase crossings"...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Paradon]

Kindda like the modern tank armor on the U.S. Abram and the British Challenger... What do they call it...charbrum?

 

[Timo]

Chobham. There are some analogies to what I was thinking, yeah. Chobham is supposed to cause a penetrating jet of molten metal (be it from a shaped charge or a not-yet-completely-molted tungsten slug) to lose its penetrating power by hitting "easy" (metal) and "difficult" (ceramic) layers in turn, so that the jet spreads out and spends more time inside armor; this essentially makes the armor "thicker". Simple honeycombing or other insertion of "easy" layers will do much the same.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[jgalley]

If you're picking and choosing your own canon, than this discussion is pointless. Decide whatever you want.

*sigh* Let's try this again, shall we? No one picks and chooses their own "canon" because canon only means what is, according to the studio, an official part of the Star Trek universe and therefore must be adhered to by future writers and producers when making a new Trek production. That's it.

I should have said "fanon"

However, as a fan, I'm free to choose my own personal continuity. Why? Because the whole thing is fictional. There's no "right" or "wrong." None of it really did or didn't happen. So if I choose to say that Trek 09 is craptastic and that I don't want to think about it when I'm exploring the Star Trek universe, I can.

That's good for you, but useless when discussing the future of warp drive in the TV/film Trek continuity. Like trying to discuss how way Janeway got home while ignoring "Endgame", or the Enterprise-B while disregarding Generations.

This. Sure you can have your own "personal fanon" but that renders any contribution to a Star Trek subject, regardless of what it is, unless EVERYONE you're talking too also only regards YOUR "personal fanon" as the "right" one, completely useless and utterly false.

So ignore what you want, good for you. But quite frankly doing so renders any contribution you have to this (and any future ST thread) not just pointless but meaningless.

It's like me coming in and saying "warp drive is obsolete because they now use hyperdrives after discovering a crashed Delta-shaped city-sized ship on the previously undiscovered moon of Endor"

As has been said, you can argue this point all you want, it doesn't change FACTS...if you're going to disregard certain things and not others, thus forming your own "personal" version of "canon/fanon" (or whatever you want to call it) then you're useless to any Trek discussion..because NOTHING you have to contribute matters except to anyone that may also ONLY believe in YOUR "canon/fanon"

 

[Deckerd]

I didn't understand any of that. It looked like you were just saying what Daniel said but giving him a row for saying it first.

 

[Lindley]

This argument has whirled round small pockets of the board for ever. The books have nothing to say about the screen productions. They are a separate entity in their own right. The question in the OP is did warp drive become obsolete at the end of Voyager and unless someone makes a show post-Voyager's timeline we will never know. Whatever happens in the books is irrelevant.

Certainly, the books are on a different level. From a certain perspective, though, a story is a story is a story. Whether a story happens to be entertaining or not is a far better metric of worth than what medium it happens to be told in.

That said, an additional metric is will the story be continued? Even the best-told tale can be considered "irrelevant" in some sense if it stands apart, like the Crucible trilogy or the Shatnerverse. But when discussing the central, ongoing continuity which is highly likely to be extended by additional works, there is a certain boost in "relevance" to the events depicted because they shape what is to come.

Even so, quality trumps all. Even though it's part of the central continuity, people tolerate entries like Resistance and Before Dishonor only reluctantly because they were shitty.