What happened to 'time travel at will'/slingshotting?

[Retu]

Why the fuck would you want the mechanics of successful time-travel to be widely known? It makes sense that the Federation would want to keep a lid on something that could be used to wipe it out before it ever began.

That's the problem with time travel. You can't really keep it a secret. The mechanics are based on the laws of nature in theTrek universe and because of that, will be eventually discovered by other races. Or enemy spies will manage to steal that information. It's like the atom bomb: once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't put it back in.

It also raises an interesting question. Why there hasn't been any more attempts to mess up with Federation's history? Those temporal agents must really have their work cut out for them. I would think that sort of stuff would be an everyday occurance.

 

[Timo]

It might of course be that there are repeated, successful time-tampering attacks against the UFP, and the timeline we witness is the aftermath of those attacks plus the inevitable counterattacks. To keep things manageable, the stalwart defenders of the UFP do most of their operations through supporting a single starship and crew so that these become ridiculously invincible against all odds...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

That's the problem with time travel. You can't really keep it a secret. The mechanics are based on the laws of nature in theTrek universe and because of that, will be eventually discovered by other races. Or enemy spies will manage to steal that information. It's like the atom bomb: once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't put it back in.

It is eventually discovered by other races - and leads to the Temporal Cold War which covered multiple eras, timelines and dimensions, and dozens of species and was ultimately about how the technology should or shouldn't be used.

 

[Christopher]

That's the problem with time travel. You can't really keep it a secret. The mechanics are based on the laws of nature in theTrek universe and because of that, will be eventually discovered by other races. Or enemy spies will manage to steal that information. It's like the atom bomb: once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't put it back in.

That's sort of the analogy I had in mind in my DTI novels. You can't make it illegal in the US to study nuclear physics or to publish the instructions for making a bomb, but it's illegal to possess nuclear material -- or any kind of explosives -- without a license. So they can't stop you from knowing how to do it in theory, but they can stop you from gathering the means to do it in practice.

Granted, it's a trickier issue when dealing with other governments, but that comes down to diplomacy and treaties. I think most rational governments would agree to mutual bans on time travel, due to the risk to their own histories -- and the risk of a temporal arms race. Although as we've seen, in the long run that doesn't prevent the development of time travel so much as keeping it covert, a cold war using proxies.

 

[Saul]

I always get the impression when watching 'Assignment Earth' that more episodes with the Enterprise going to different periods of Earth's past might have been made.

I imagine Bateson's ears pricked up when he heard the Enterprise-E had traveled back into the past following the Borg attack. "A way back to my own time? Tell me more!" Remember, the Bozeman was right there at the scene.

Whether Starfleet would let him do it is another question, of course.

No kidding. There really isn't any difference being shot forward in time like Enterprise-C or getting stuck in a time loop and coming out of it in the future. Imagine what TNG could be like if the Bozeman went back to when it left.

Why stop there. What about poor Scotty or Kirk if he had survived.

 

[Christopher]

I always get the impression when watching 'Assignment Earth' that more episodes with the Enterprise going to different periods of Earth's past might have been made.

That doesn't seem likely. The time travel in A:E was just an excuse to set up the backdoor pilot for a Gary Seven series of the same name which would be set in the present day. It wasn't meant to set up a new story element within ST itself.

 

[publiusr]

I just finished your DTI novels Quite impressed. Good to see the Vedala given some love.

 

[Christopher]

Thanks!