What was "The Burn" and what caused it?

One night with K'Ehleyr makes a Klingon stumble...

 

FTFY:

 

The basics don't appear to be withheld.

 

You do know what a bilateral kelilactiral is, right?

 

I love turbo encabulators.. They give you turbo

 

But they could be.

Anything that is given, can be taken away.

 

Seems to defeat the whole purpose of this supposed utopia then...

"we've eliminated hunger, thirst, want, the need for possessions." Except for those few assholes who piss us off.

 

It's interesting how the stakes were way too high in previous seasons (end of all life in the multiverse, end of all sentient life in the galaxy), and now they came up with a similarly disastrous disaster (all warp ships explode), but put it in the past, it has already happened, and we're dealing with the fallout.

 

We know from Stamets that all dilithium going inert are once was impossible. Hence that hints at some sort of attack/sabotage. Still, the question remains of what happened to other powers in the Galaxy and I hope they will address that. If a Romulan Star Empire still existed, I doubt they wouldn’t have taken advantage of the situation if they could have.

 

Didn’t someone (Book or the other Starfleet guy) mention that the dilithium problem affected multiple galaxies?

 

I know that they were powered by singularities, but it's still entirely possible that Romulan vessels still used dilthium to "channel" the power to their warp core or whatever technobabble you need. It's the same with Starfleet and Klingon vessels, they used AM/M reactions, right? But the dIlithium "channeled" it into useable power? That's my memory of it, thinking back to TNG anyway.

Also, would they really take advantage? It seems to me that such an incident would be perfect for Romulans since they're isolationists, they'd no longer have Starfleet or the Klingons to worry about. But after hundreds of years, I really doubt the Romulans are the Romulans that we know from the TNG era. I think stuff like the Romulans give the writers a lot of freedom, it'd be severely disappointing if we see the Romulans and they're still flying around in big green warships and being assholes, despite what we saw of the citizenry in TNG and Picard. We're also not entirely sure about The Borg's status, however with the way the Borg were written in Voyager, that's probably for the best. I mean The Borg aren't hard to think about, maybe with The Burn they're no longer interested in AQ technology, at least not assimilating the entire quadrant like they were before. Or that the Borg were effectively countered by AQ powers to the point that it wasn't efficient for them to continue trying to assimilate them due to losses.

I just think there are too many variables, but there is a lot the writers can do with it and I hope they do so, I'd be bitterly disappointed if we meet the Cardassian Union, Bajor, Romulans etc and they're still the same as they were. Klingons, less so, as they've always been fairly one dimensional.

 

Discovery takes inspiration from Trek novels, and an old J. Mike Ford novel may have the answer to the Burn. In How Much For Just the Planet? we learn that dilithium is 4 dimensional, existing partly in the future. This fan film short was based on an infodump in the novel:

What if The Burn is the present catching up to that moment in the future? All dilithium everywhere becomes a regular 3 dimensional crystal, every matter/antimatter reaction in the galaxy immediately goes out of control and explodes?

 

I'd love that one - but what we have is only some of the dilithium undergoing the change, while some remains to be used for warp travel and barter. Somehow, this has to be worked into the explanation, assuming we ever get any. (We never got an exhaustive one into the Red Signs phenomenon, say, and are none the worse off for that.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

In the Countdown comics, Nero mined decalithium before the nova, and decalithium was then used to create the red matter Spock used to stop the nova.
A connection there might be interesting...

 

I guess it depends WHERE in time a particular piece of dilithium is then?

 

The Red Signals were one of the worst plot schemes in Star Trek history. You can clearly tell the season was going in one direction at first and then a change of showrunners changed it all. Messy.

 

I think it still works. All the Dilithium everywhere is momentarily just 3 dimentions. If it's in the ground on sitting on a table, this doesn't present a problem. But if matter and antimatter are currently being channeled through it the reactor explodes. Then a moment later 4th dimentionality returns. Too late for the reactor, but the stuff sitting around goes back to normal.

 

I've heard a few people say this, but I really don't see it. Is there any confirmation of a huge change in direction, or is it just the plot not following expectations?