What's so special about Cochrane and his engine?

[Praetor]

I lean toward Spock's good mood espousing the 'significant for any species to actually do on its own' argument with a little 'crazy genius in garage' thrown in for good measure.

I'm still relatively certain that the original TOS intent was that Earth, for the sake of 'Metamorphosis' in the person of Cochrane, invented 'the space warp' and the Federation/Starfleet was just a benevolent Earth empire that spread through the galaxy, taking warp along with it. Tyler's line in 'The Cage' about the time barrier is, to me, almost certain proof that warp was meant to be an Earth-devised quantum leap of this nature.

In regard to other races, I also feel pretty sure that it was meant that the Romulans never had it (though I think the original draft for 'Balance of Terror' meant to suggest that they did now, but stole it from Earth - again, another victory for Cochrane's engine.) I also feel pretty certain that what the Klingons were meant to use, while similar, was not meant to be 'warp drive.' And, I also believe that the writers didn't put a lot of thought into how everyone else achieved interstellar flight, but it stands to reason that there were probably other ways besides warp drive that didn't bear lengthy examination or explanation.

The sheriff doesn't explain how his pistol fires, remember?

 

[Anwar]

The whole Romulan thing is easily explainable: They always had FTL capacity, but their power source was/is inferior to Earths'. "Impulse" wasn't supposed to mean "No FTL" but "FTL less powerful than ours".

 

[Timo]

Or perhaps, instead of being the output of a massive scientific research project, what's impressive is that its the "loner in the garage" type of thing.

But is it? The rocket still has "USAF" on the sides. For all we know, this was a massive government project that simply went on back burner when WWIII rearranged the government priorities - and Cochrane made use of the confusion by personally taking over the project and reaping the monetary benefits.

I also assumed that the Vulcans that landed on Earth at the end of FC arrived in a sleeper ship or something.

Or simply were very long-lived and didn't mind sitting in the same tin can for decades upon decades.

Yet if we look at this part of ST:FC from the practical viewpoint, there's no way a sublight Vulcan ship could have been "passing through". At sublight speeds, one makes a beeline from starting point to endpoint, and that beeline cannot "pass through" any other star systems - the odds are literally astronomically against it. Also, such a ship could never afford to stop and have a look.

It also sounds unlikely that Vulcans could recognize a warp signature if they didn't have the secrets of warp drive down pat already.

(remember, it's implied that Klingons didn't invent most of their tech but stole it from the Hurq)

OTOH, it's suggested in legend that Kahless more or less started the Klingon iron (steel?) age, by forging the first sword. The timeline is vague, but it seems the Hur'q captured the object only about 400 or 500 years later. Would the Klingons at that time be capable of understanding Hur'q technology enough to steal their warp drive?

Of course, legend might compress Klingon history a lot - not just crediting Kahless with the achievements of his contemporaries, but of his predecessors and successors as well. Perhaps Klingons went industrial soon after Kahless, or were that in his time already. They'd then have a shot not only at understanding what the Hur'q left behind, but perhaps actually actively driving the Hur'q away in the first place.

Even if the Hur'q just left on their own volition, Klingon legend would naturally have it otherwise...

...that Spock was genuinely impressed.

I don't think Spock looks "impressed" at any point of "Metamorphosis". He just quotes the dry fact that humans are impressed about Cochrane and are worshipping him everywhere...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Search4]

But is it? The rocket still has "USAF" on the sides. For all we know, this was a massive government project that simply went on back burner when WWIII rearranged the government priorities - and Cochrane made use of the confusion by personally taking over the project and reaping the monetary benefits.

The missile was clearly repurposed, but Lilly had to spend significant time (two years, i believe) to scrounge the titanium. So i'm in the "loner" camp myself.

 

[Timo]

Doesn't mean the crew pod wouldn't have been designed decades in advance, as part of a government project. The war just prevented Lily from purchasing the titanium from the government or from amazon.com, both of which could have provided it in a matter of weeks in the original plan.

Perhaps the warp engine was already completed when the war began, and the only thing holding back the great experiment was the seemingly mundane task of building the crew pod...

The older (and IMHO clearly inferior) concept for ST:FC can still be read at TrekCore, under the link that for other movies holds the shooting script or at least a late version. There, Cochrane had hordes of support personnel and a big organization - omitted in the final version both for dramatic effect / plot clarity and for affordability. The final version also provides a mechanism of omission, namely the Borg bombardment...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Anwar]

I think that when the Hurq took Kahless' sword, the sword had already been around for hundreds of years. It was already a sacred and ancient object, not some newly made thing otherwise there'd be legends of Kahless fighting the Hurq.

 

[Timo]

True: the likely age of the sword at the time of theft would be 400-500 years.

But what could our best scientists or engineers have made of, say, this computer here 500 years after the forging of our first steel sword? Not a whole lot. That's the problem here. Either Klingons reached technological maturity real fast (perhaps thanks to being trusted slaves to a high-tech species for sufficiently long), or then the Klingon iron age was already (dozens of?) millennia old when Kahless was born. Or then Klingon warp was not obtained when the Hur'q left, but some time later.

Or then I'm taking the Kahless stories too literally. Legends about Kahless do not refer to space travel IIRC, but there's nothing there to say that Kahless didn't drive a hovercar. Klingons do have other kinds of sword besides the one Kahless supposedly first made; perhaps Kahless hung it on the wall next to his plasma TV after teaching his brother the bitter lesson?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Longinus]

Well, the first description of a steam engine is by Hero of Alexandria, from first century AD. Had things gone little differently, the industrial revolution would have taken place during the height of Roman Empire. Going from iron age to industrial society in five centuries is not that implausible.

 

[Ronald Held]

If the Greeks had implemented technical ideas that might have advanced us maybe 500 years?

 

[Anticitizen]

If the Greeks had implemented technical ideas that might have advanced us maybe 500 years?

Why not? The Greeks/Romans arguably enjoyed as great a level of civilization as, say, early American colonization. They had science, physics, medicine, mathematics, irrigation, etc etc. The Dark Ages set us waaay back.

 

[Search4]

Roman engineering survives and is in use in some places to this day. They were -great- engineers. So yes, a shorter timeframe is quite possible.

 

[Anwar]

Or maybe the Hurq decided to just educate the Klingons in the basics of the technology, which led to them driving them away and stealing their tech. But knowing only the basics explains why they hardly advanced from ENT's time period to TNG+.

 

[Timo]

...Of course, I'm projecting a bit of Barbara Hambly's Ishmael into the Hur'q, imaging them as a culture that actually enslaved and exploited the (to them) primitive Klingons. The actual backstory from "Sword of Kahless" and "Affliction" describes some sort of spatial Vikings instead, a culture that came to pillage the Klingon homeworld among others and then left. No mention is made of any length of stay, nor of enslaving or exploiting, let alone educating, the Klingons.

Admittedly, abduction and exploitation of groups of primitives is a standard technique for Trek villain cultures, as in "Paradise Syndrome", "The 37s", "Indiscretion" and "North Star". But we've never really had the classic interstellar overlords theme where an entire planet is taken prisoner and pressed to slave labor.

Except in novels, that is... Ishmael mentions the Karsids, a culture that sounds almost exactly like the Hur'q except for the exploitation angle (financial-technological takeover and enslavement instead of pillaging), but that might simply be a nuance lost to the Klingons! Left Hand of Destiny was the first one to claim the Hur'Q tried to settle on the Klingon planet but were driven out by the natives; Art of the Impossible expanded on this, and was the first to claim the Klingons got their warp drives from the Hur'q.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Anwar]

I assumed it was like the Narn and Centauri in Babylon 5, with the Narns acquiring most of their tech from Centauri stuff they stole during the resistance.

 

[USS Jack Riley]

Perhaps it is less subtle than what we are making the whole thing out to be. It isn't so much that Cochrane developed the warp drive (clearly he didn't if you consider ST: Enterprise canon). Instead, he developed a more efficient version of warp drive that had not worked or had not been tried by the other warp powers until he came along.

YMMV

 

[Timo]

Sounds a bit unlikely - because Cochrane-style engines weren't better than preexisting ones in ENT. Vulcan and Klingon ships already regularly sailed at warp six, a speed that remained something of a limit even in Kirk's time.

True, warp engines got better after ENT, and especially after TOS. But at that point, all sorts of Federation cultures were giving input, and the role of Cochrane is difficult to establish there. And in any case, it doesn't seem as if Cochrane's achievements would have expanded the horizons of the UFP in any particular way by the time of TOS yet; ENT-style Vulcan ships should have been capable of the same feats we saw Kirk's ship perform.

OTOH, Cochrane's role in allowing Earth to partake in this galactic adventure is significant: if not for his invention, it's unlikely that Earthlings would have been able to acquire decent warp drives by the 23rd century yet. They'd have to settle for buying secondhand stuff and obeying the rules and limitations of their betters.

Timo Saloniemi