What if Enterprise had taken place +/- 50 years prior to TOS

[Paradise City]

What they gave us an interior of a ship that was just a cramped looking Voyager without any real imagination or interest and difficult to pin down as a TOS prequel.

Really? They went to a lot of trouble to show us pressure doors, zero-gee grips and prominently bolted-on "metallic" vanity covers instead of soft carpeting and plastic surfaces. It's difficult to see what more could have been done. Or how the interior could have looked more like a submarine's...

We'd have the doctor chasing the health issues of some of the engineers much like sailors of old suffered from scurvy.

Now that I might have paid to see. (But no, I won't be paying for the 2017 show!)

Timo Saloniemi

When I saw the show, I saw USS Voyager with the walls pulled in. That's what struck me without knowing how they developed the aesthetic. The metallic aesthetic can be seen in the TOS films.

I would've had an aesthetic similar to the Hunt for Red October or Crimson Tide. A focus on flashing lights and buttons with a scarcity in monitors. Everyone in headsets. That kind of thing. Does the captain even need a chair? I would be thinking along these lines. The BSG CIC is where I would've gone in terms of lighting with the Enterprise bridge.

 

[Timo]

I thought it was dark enough already... Why would people in the future want to hurt their eyes?

But "five minutes in the future" is problematic as well, because Trek already has plenty of eras that are supposed to be that. We've seen what spaceflight looks like in the 1990s, the early 21st century, the 2030s and the 2060s, and at some point you have to show us "advances", things that look futuristic, which means unrecognizable in form and function until we see the heroes operate the stuff.

That the 2030s Mars spacecraft are recognizably NASA was already a big boo-boo when the 1990s were shown to be significantly more ergonomic (artificial gravity, anyone?). Perhaps ENT could have given us virtual reality gloves for control interfaces, with the heroes constantly complaining how they are stuck with this decades-old bargain basement stuff and waiting for the new push-button interfaces to arrive...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[T'Girl]

That the 2030s Mars spacecraft are recognizably NASA was already a big boo-boo when the 1990s were shown to be significantly more ergonomic

Just because the leader of a quarter of the planet had a DY-100 with artificial gravity, doesn't mean NASA would 35 years later. Maybe the DY-100 was made in India and the US was playing catch up decades later.

 

[Timo]

The problem with that is that nothing connected the DY-100 or ships of that standard with rulers, let alone superman rulers, in the minds of our heroes initially. They recognized the ship type, but proceeded on the assumption that this would be a "routine" colonization expedition (for which it was "typical" that the team leader would be awakened first, say), just somehow encountered in an unexpected location.

If India had a monopoly on these ships, there would be more comment when the contents of the cryoshelves are revealed. If these ships were "luxury items" available for certain special purposes but not for surveying of Mars, that, too, would warrant comment. Instead, we get the "this piece of junk was antiquated in the 1990s already" approach, suggesting nothing could be more commonplace than artificial gravity aboard interplanetary (?) colonization ships.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[dswynne1]

I guess the fact that there was a "Temporal Cold War" is not a good enough reason for while the NX-class technology seems more advance than in TOS. Then again, the fact that the control panel did have a light bright panel with no discernible markings should be enough of a clue to indicate that the TOS tech is sufficently advance.

 

[Dukhat]

However, ENT doesn't exactly contradict the idea of "fleets of ships exploring", as it does make mention of all sorts of ship activity, including fleets of tramps exploring business opportunities.

I'm pretty sure your usage of the word "exploring" here is being taken completely out of context from its implied meaning.

 

[T'Girl]

^ Don't know about that, historically a lot of discoveries and exploring was done by people who were looking for new trade routes and new business opportunities.




.

 

[Timo]

Indeed, it doesn't seem as if Boomer business could work without the physical exploration angle: abstractions such as price quotations, maps and tall tales don't seem to travel without starships to carry them. Or at least the poor humans can't tap into such abstractions.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Dukhat]

^ Don't know about that, historically a lot of discoveries and exploring was done by people who were looking for new trade routes and new business opportunities.

The problem is that Geordi was the one who made that comment. Geordi is a late 24th century individual who lives in a society where the accumulation of wealth and business opportunities mean very little. His context for the word "exploring" was obviously meant to be about actual exploring.

 

[Timo]

Why is that a "problem"? Whatever the motivations of the Boomers, what they factually did was exploring new worlds - being the first humans to go there and tell the story. Their science labs might not have been too well equipped, but neither were Kirk's, from LaForge's point of view.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Dukhat]

^Because Geordi's context of the word "exploring" would have nothing to do with people on freighters conducting business runs in the 22nd century. The context of his statement clearly indicates he's talking about the exploring currently going on in his own time.

 

[Timo]

How so? He's explicitly talking about exploring in the past. He most certainly is not speaking about exploration in the 2370s when saying that mankind "starts" exploring the galaxy. And there is no good basis for arguing for or against any specific pre-2370s date for that "start": the 2060s, the 2150s or the 2240s all work equally well.

The obvious historical scope of his speech must necessarily account for the fact that exploration at different times has taken different forms. He'd be a weirdo for excluding da Gama or Amundsen on the basis that they followed the wrong ideology of exploration.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Dukhat]

I will quote user Iamnotspock:

No, Troi says that poverty, disease and war would all be gone "within the next 50 years." Geordi says that Cochrane's theories on warp drive "allow fleets of starships to built, and mankind to start exploring the galaxy," but doesn't specify how quickly this would happen. In his time, there are fleets of starships exploring the galaxy.

Obviously he's talking about the future, because as I mentioned before, during ENT mankind wasn't doing much exploring at all, much less with any real "fleets" of ships. Now contrast that with Picard's comment in EaF:

Captain's log, stardate 42353.7. Our destination is planet Deneb IV, beyond which lies the great unexplored mass of the galaxy.

So Geordi seems to be referring to his own time, or at the least a time much later than ENT.

 

[Timo]

No, he isn't referring to his own time. There's no way to twist his words to mean that. Cochrane's warp engine is ancient news in TOS already; it could not have "started" anything in the TNG era.

And "much later than ENT" is completely subjective. Vasco da Gama went nowhere near the Antarctic or even North America, but it would be inane to say he didn't start to explore the globe. The post-Cochrane beginnings may have been humble, but LaForge would have no reason to insist that this disqualifies them from being the beginnings.

In short, not seeing a "fleet" in ENT is a choice that can be made independently of the (lacking) onscreen facts. There's no need to make that choice.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Dukhat]

No, he isn't referring to his own time. There's no way to twist his words to mean that.

There's no word-twisting happening here. I'm logically extrapolating Geordi's statement based on what I saw on screen. He's talking about how Cochrane will influence the future, but he's not necessarily referring to the 22nd century, as ENT showed. He's more likely referring to the 23rd century of TOS and/or the 24th century of TNG.

In short, not seeing a "fleet" in ENT is a choice that can be made independently of the (lacking) onscreen facts. There's no need to make that choice.

ENT established that the Vulcans largely held Earth back for 100 years from producing technology that would allow them to advance enough to actually "explore" anything. We only saw a few Earth ships during the series' four years, and almost all of those could only go warp 2 or thereabouts. The NX project was a big deal because humans could now produce a ship fast enough to actually get to other star systems quickly, but the pace of production for those said ships seemed to be only one per every few years. Hardly the definition of a "fleet" in my book. Heck, it even seemed like none of the crew of the NX-01 had even had past assignments on other ships before "Broken Bow."

 

[T'Girl]

ENT established that the Vulcans largely held Earth back for 100 years from producing technology that would allow them to advance enough to actually "explore" anything.

And TOS, TNG, DS9 and VOY establish that Humanity wasn't "held back" in any way and basically exploded out into the galaxy almost immediately after warp drive was discovered.

A warp ship launch soon after Cochrane's fight eventually reach the edge of the galaxy (TOS), a warp probe from the same time period reached the other side of the galaxy (VOY), and long before the time of Archer colonies were being created far away from Earth (TNG).

 

[Dukhat]

A warp ship launch soon after Cochrane's fight eventually reach the edge of the galaxy (TOS)

It was never established that the Valiant had warp drive, when it was launched, or when exactly it disappeared.

a warp probe from the same time period reached the other side of the galaxy (VOY)

Launching an unmanned probe is not the same thing as humans going out and doing the exploring.

and long before the time of Archer colonies were being created far away from Earth (TNG).

The only "far away" colonies established between Cochrane's flight and Archer's time are the Terra Nova colony (2076, ENT) and the Mariposans and the Bringloidis (launched 2123, TNG), and we don't know how far away they actually were. Since the colony ship schematic showed that it didn't have warp drive, Bringloid probably wasn't all that far away.

 

[eyeresist]

There was also Vega Colony:

The Vega colony was an Earth colony in the Vega system located less than ninety light years from Sol. It was one of the earliest Earth colonies established, along with Alpha Centauri and Terra Nova. Established as an outpost, Vega colony was, for many decades, located on the frontier of known space. By the time it became an important trading partner of Earth and other worlds, it was referred to as a colony.

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Vega_colony

 

[Nyotarules]

A show 50 plus years before TOS they could explain the pyjamas and the short skirts the female crew had to wear lol

 

[Seven of Five]

I don't think setting the show 50 years before or after its original time would make any difference. It would have been better to plan the show better from the start, probably with different producers at the helm to freshen things up a bit.