I always loved the corollary "any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced"
What is your personal head canon?
- Thread starter AmandaSmith
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I've theorized that galactic magnetic fields (in the form of ribbons) and constructed magnetic corridors are the superhighways for super fast warp travel. I have no explanation for the difference between TOS and TNG travel times except maybe during TNG, the naturally occurring magnetic ribbons have weakened/moved or are in a galactic period of less activity.
The low speeds of warp bother me so much that I'm starting to think that, in addition to these highways, I'll take a concept from Outsider (the webcomic) that travel between two stars at their closest point makes a 'natural' highway, to help with the speed of plot and just to make any interstellar polity work in a manageable manner - having lulls of weeks or months from one end of the Federation, Klingon Empire, or so, really puts a sort of soft cap on their growth as eventually the frontier will chip or be lost away....
Why though? It would take weeks if not months to cross oceans in old sailing ships, and multiple countries built vast empires around such time delays.
Consider how long it took to cross the US by foot or horse before the invention of the railway. When California became a state in 1850 it took two to four months to get there from the East coast even under ideal circumstances.
It took twelve days for Europe to learn about Lincoln's assassination in 1865. The idea that every journey should only take hours or days at most and communication should be more-or-less instantaneous is a very modern conceit, and not necessarily how things have been for most of history, and not necessarily how they'll be again when we become a truly spacefaring species. At its closest approach to Earth Mars is four light-minutes away.
As Michael Okuda and Rick Sternbach have commented, the problem with warp speeds is it's easy to make them too fast. If you can cross the galaxy realtively quickly then so much for the final frontier, so much for exploration, so much for the unknown. Just send out a load of automated fast warp-capable probes and map everything. There's a reason why Americans came up with the pejorative "flyover country" once fast air travel came along... if warp is too fast then so much of the galaxy would be relegated to "warpby worlds".
But there's ALREADY such systems. There's a TNG episode where they only drop by a system BECAUSE a warp probe explorer was like, hey there's something neat here, follow up, will ya? And it seems that those probes are more common than starships themselves. Most stars are just low activity M class stars, and there's thousands of them in the Federation's reach.
The American example only works because there was no big developed power that could challenge the United States for the pacific. The British in Canada were too small and too far east. The Mexican core was across three deserts to the south. Ditto the Russians into, say, Siberia once they dealt with the Khanates and the Qing.
The Federation meanwhile has expanded into all the empty space between the powers, now they're basically surrounded by the Cardassians, Romulans, Klingons, Gorn, Tholians, Talarians, and Breen, and nearly all of those powers are hostile in some way or the other and SPEED is the name of the game to at least keep your frontiers intact, respond to incursions, pick and choose places to attack raiders, send out help, et al. No wonder why the Federation keeps looking into transwarp, and I don't blame them.
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I'd say it is more massive amounts of resources to keep your frontier intact. The more ships, the less you have trying to go from one region to another.
So much more like the European colonial empires of the 17th through 19th centuries then.
This sounds like the premise of TOS. In addition to be an explorer, the TOS Enterprise is one of a few fast and powerful responders out there. She's very special.
At the very least it occurred in an altered timeline (probably the Disco one), cause there was definitely no time for those events to have occurred."TATV...(ENT)" is best treated as an historically-incorrect holoprogram written by people who didn't know the whole story. And also with about 40 minutes of the episode skipped over.
I like that head cannon. I can't use it though cause it doesn't explain the change later in Kor, Kang, and Kolos.My head canon for the different Klingon appearances is a lot simpler than canon canon:
It's an empire! Made up of a lot of different planets! With different-looking people on each planet! Each different-looking type of Klingon is from a different planet!
Didn't some of the novels use this idea?
Why make it more complicated than that?
But NNOOOoooo.
There's maybe like 12 or something like her.This sounds like the premise of TOS. In addition to be an explorer, the TOS Enterprise is one of a few fast and powerful responders out there. She's very special.
I don't really keep track. The others don't really matter.
Yeah, they really screwed me up with that.
Phlox must have been spot-on about the cosmetic surgery boom that was going to hit the Klingon Empire.
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I guess that explains the latter changes in Kor, Kang and Koloth !!Phlox must have been spot-on about the cosmetic surgery boom that was going to hit the Klingon Empire.
I always figured they were what happens when creating a slave race goes wrong.
The Pakleds may look dumb to us, but they weren't stupid enough to cripple the evacuation fleet for their own planet. They don't repress all emotion, even the positive ones. And most humans probably can't tell the Enterprise apart from other Starfleet ships either. All Trek races are pretty ridiculous in their own ways (and that's a good thing), it's just easier to spot from the outside.
Then again, per LD, the Pakleds did cripple their planet… and they couldn’t repress their emotions if they tried.
How many packs would a Pakled pack if a Pakled could pack packs?
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