when did TOS take place, 23rd century or 22nd century

It was an uncrewed probe, so it probably didn't stop anywhere, just soared straight ahead through space. Also, with no need to use energy for life support, it could probably go faster than a crewed ship of the same vintage.

It said stable, controllable wormholes were rare. The kind of wormhole we're talking about is the kind seen in ST:TMP, the result of an unbalanced warp field going unstable and out of control.

No more so than the previous series were with each other, or with themselves. TOS said the Third World War was in the 1990s, TNG said it was mid-21st century. TNG showed the Federation conducting genetic engineering openly in "Unnatural Selection," then DS9 retroactively claimed it had been illegal since Khan's time. TNG claimed that holodecks were a novelty, then VGR said that Janeway had played in them as a child. And so on. Trek history has been constantly retconned over the decades, and the "correct" version is always the most recent one, because that's how fiction works.

Credulity is broken when you start pretending the information from later series doesn't exist. By that logic, you might as well talk about James R. Kirk and lithium crystals.

 

The Conestoga took about nine years to travel from Earth to Terra Nova, not arriving until about 2078. Its warp engines were presumably no better than those of, say, the Valiant since both were human-crewed deep space vessels constructed and launched between 2065 and 2069. Clearly the Conestoga didn't encounter any wormhole or magnetic storm that sped up its journey because - surprise - the story didn't require the ship to get from Earth to another world in mere weeks or even days.

 

Indeed, this is the satisfactory model. Early crewed warp travel ought to be slow, be it because of poorly performing tech or conservative and cautious application of said. The less possible the Valiant trip, the better! After all, Kirk doesn't exclaim "Impossible!" every day...

The early warp probes might do better thanks to power allocation, since for some reason life support even in the 24th century is a significant resource, the shunting of which into propulsion can make a difference. Another possibility is that intense warp fields would be a danger to humans, or perceived as such, meaning that an automated probe would be the only type of starship allowed to go full throttle on the best tech of the day.

Yet further option is that small is fast - the entire Friendship One was supposed to fit aboard the Delta Flyer! And eventually did fit aboard the Voyager, and was never seen crowding the shuttlebay, say. Perhaps a two-meter craft can cross galaxies but anything large enough to accommodate a crew must putter along at much lower speeds? This would also be coincidentally consistent with "The Emissary" and the superfast torpedo taxi there.

Out of these options, the first two would help explain the Valiant while the third would not. If top speed is a mere matter of choice, the vessel might have jumped to high and seriously crew-endangering speed by accident. Indeed, Kirk's ship jumped to much-higher-than-maximum speed often enough, when commandeered by hostiles; Picard's did that once or twice, too. These vessels never traveled quite that fast by choice, not even when a lot was at stake. Perhaps warp coils are like that, a fairly basic coil theoretically already catering for infinite speed and not even requiring a great deal of power for attaining that? This in turn would be consistent with "Threshold"... And indeed whenever frighteningly high speeds are attained, some other part of the starship is the failure point, while the propulsion system happily drives the ship towards the impending doom.

So the "jammed engine" theory is fine for explaining the Valiant. It's just that so many other options exist. And we know that spacecraft operating in the vicinity of Earth in the 20th-21st centuries frequently faced abduction or other propelling to distant parts of the galaxy, even if our heroes before the 24th century may not have fully appreciated that.

In a nutshell, an unlikely premise in "Where No Man" is not a faulty one - unlikely is actually in the specs and highly desirable, both from the perspective of the premise itself (the heroes agree that the Valiant "should" not have happened), and in the greater Trek context (weird is the well-established norm).

Timo Saloniemi

 

While wnmgb may have flaws on the bright side it did create the background for the book valiant, which takes about picards first time in command and going thru the galactic barrier. If you haven’t read the book I highly recommend. They even have it on audiobook.

 

One should not be too hard on Peeples for not knowing the current known nature of the Milky Way. We've learned a lot in the last 50 years. This description from Asimov's Second Foundation was published only a decade earlier and should serve as a data point in gauging the misconceptions about the MW even among knowledgeable SF writers.

Spoiler: Contains the location of the 2nd Foundation

The First Speaker laughed shortly, "In a sense, it is the irony of it all that is most amazing. For
four hundred years, so many men have been blinded by Seldon's words 'the other end of the
Galaxy.' They have brought their own peculiar, physical-science thought to the problem,
measuring off the other end with protractors and rulers, ending up eventually either at a point in
the periphery one hundred eighty degrees around the rim of the Galaxy, or back at the original
point.

"Yet our very greatest danger lay in the fact that there was a possible solution based on
physical modes of thought. The Galaxy, you know, is not simply a flat ovoid of any sort; nor is
the periphery a closed curve. Actually, it is a double spiral, with at least eighty percent of the
inhabited planets on the Main Arm. Terminus is the extreme outer end of the spiral arm, and we
are at the other - since, what is the opposite end of a spiral? Why, the center.

We now know that the stellar density in the arms is only about 5% greater than the rest of the disk and because supernovae occur in the arms (it's where star formation happens in the disk, therefore that's where you find young massive stars that go BOOM), it would be the last place you'd want to put your Galactic Empire.

 

So I'm sure it's been asked a million times, but... couldn't a ship just go above or below the galactic plane and navigate around the barrier along the outer rim of the Milky Way? That way, they could go *ahem* "beyond the rim of the star-light." Is that addressed in any of the novels?

Kor

 

Looks like Khan is not the only one with two-dimensional thinking...

 

Why assume it was at the rim? The nearest point on the rim of the galactic disk is at least 25,000 light-years away, which would be a journey of decades by the parameters established in TNG, DS9, and VGR. Conversely, the nearest face of the galactic disk is only about 600 - 1,000 light-years away, which is more reasonably accessible within the time frame shown in TOS. So clearly when they were talking about traveling to "the edge of the galaxy," they meant the face of the disk, not the rim. They must have traveled perpendicular to the galactic plane rather than in the plane. This is actually depicted on p. 10 of Star Trek Star Charts. (Although it makes an assumption I dislike, that the barrier surrounds the entire galactic stellar disk like a shrink wrap, which really can't be validly concluded from the evidence we have, which is merely that it's present along the portion of the edge in the general vicinity of the Federation.)

 

Just taking Rojan's statement at face value.

Kor

 

He also said he was from the Andromeda galaxy, which is definitely NOT reached by flying out through the rim of the galaxy! It's more like "up and to the side a bit" which coincidentally matches the notion of the barrier being in the closer "edge" of the galaxy described upthread.

 

Rojan said "rim," Kirk said "edge." They clearly just meant the boundary between the stars of the galactic disk and the (relative) void beyond. The word "rim" can mean the perimeter of a disk as opposed to its faces, and it's useful for us in this conversation to use it that way for clarity, but it doesn't exclusively mean that; it can just as validly be used to mean any edge or boundary.

And "Where No Man" only used "edge," so that's two "edge"s to one "rim." Rojan wasn't a native English speaker anyway...

 

I've always seen it as a 360 degree coccoon around the Galaxy, with the part we saw as the barrier just the only part that is showing in the visible light section. I'm thinking like a galaxy scale em bubble or magnetosphere extending outward just like planetary ones.

 

Except it doesn't make sense that the barrier surrounds the whole galactic disk, because outside of "Where No Man" and "By Any Other Name" (and maybe "Is There in Truth No Beauty" depending on how you interpret its dialogue and visuals), we've never seen any extragalactic travelers face any kind of difficulty entering or leaving the galaxy -- the Mudd androids, the Doomsday Machine, the space amoeba, the cosmic cloud from "One of Our Planets is Missing," the E-D in "Where No One Has Gone Before." Even Samuel Peeples didn't seem to consider the barrier a pervasive or permanent feature, because he didn't mention it when he had the Enterprise probe "Beyond the Farthest Star" in the first TAS episode. So the assumption that it's some permanent cosmic shrink wrap that quarantines our galaxy is incompatible with the majority of canon evidence. It's most logical to conclude it merely spans a portion of the galactic edge in the vicinity of the Federation, and maybe even that it was an ephemeral feature that had dissipated by TNG.

This is how Diane Duane portrayed it in her novel The Wounded Sky, where she explained it as some kind of radiation wavefront from a hypernova in a globular cluster outside the galactic disk, or something like that. I've always found that far more sensible than the "shrink wrap" model.

 

planets and stars both have invisible electromagnetic fields surrounding them, some more highly charged and energetic than others....sometimes crossing into visible spectrums (our northern lights and what not..).... why not the galaxy? Our astronauts had to get through the Van Allen radiation belts, and they were just fine, but they also charted a path and timetable that was less dangerous. With less planning it could have been very dangerous. There are probably areas that are much more passable and accessible than others in regards to the galactic version; androids can't get psychic powers anyways, and shielding tech by TNG should render most of this moot.

 

The galaxy certainly does have a magnetosphere, but its outer edge is many thousands of light-years further out than the edge of the stellar disk. The "galactopause," where the galaxy's magnetic field would give way to the intergalactic medium, would have a radius of at least 200,000 light years, or four times the radius of the galactic disk.

This subject was discussed in an earlier TrekBBS thread: https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/probe-outside-the-galaxy-what-did-they-expect.142482/

 

The idea is correct but that illustration is not. It would be closer if it were mirrored vertically and the sun placed on the other side of the bulge. The galactic coordinates of M31 is 121.17, -21.57. Should be along the 120 line shown here (and down a bit)
wikipedia galactic coodinates

-----------------------
Re: galactic magnetic fields (more than just a 'pause)
https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/the-milky-way-s-magnetic-field
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Galactic_magnetic_fields
https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~reid/bfield.html

 

You know I wonder what R stood for in James r Kirk. and I will say this it does bother me a little bit whenever people like to say that they don’t price originally use lithium. Always promised me to say well then I guess the Federation was found found during TOS because at one point enterprise was the united earth ship. That Starfleet command was once called space fleet command and so on and so on. I don’t forget the 22nd century. Oh something I never did realize about that whole holo deck thing. It could be possible that they were amazed to have holo decks on board starships but then again that would explain how Wesley crusher was so excited to see the holo deck. Oh yeah don’t forget and TNG apparently a snowball from the hall deck can get picard wet but In voyager ones that’s not possible. How something speaking of voyager I’m always amazed whenever people assume that the second warp core looking thing on the voyager MSD is a spare warp core. I mean and like the second episode they talked about the holo deck reactor and that the holo decks seem to have there own power that they were trying to tap Into. That would also explain the reason why even when the ship is having to run on low power and still uses holo decks. So I guess the point is is that sometimes it’s best to just ignore retcon and pretend it was always like that and just enjoy Star Trek.

 

Is everyone assuming the edge rim that Enterprise and Valiant flew through a natural phenomena?

I thought it was a protective barrier from "god like race x*" to protect they life forms they seeded around the galaxy/prison to keep the energy beings like the one that possessed Gary Mitchell trapped.


* there were many mentioned and could be one not ever mentioned previously.

 

First off, assumptions are what I'm warning against. People tend to assume the barrier surrounds the entire galaxy, but it's illogical to conclude that based on only two (three?) encounters with it in proximity to Federation space. That's like traveling north from Ohio, running into the Great Lakes, and assuming they surround the entire country. It's invalid to assume a local phenomenon is global.

Second, as I said, the majority of references in Trek to extragalactic entities or journeys make no mention of any difficulty entering or leaving the Milky Way, so the idea of some kind of quarantine field doesn't fit the preponderance of evidence. It seems more probable that it was a local or ephemeral phenomenon, regardless of its origin.

 

That was the idea behind the Q-Continuum trilogy of novels by Greg Cox. That it was designed by the Q to keep out a malevolent entity that was responsible for the destruction of the Tkon Empire for one. They also created the Great Barrier at the center of the galaxy to contain the entity seen in TFF.

I remember it was mentioned again in the novel "Valiant" where IIRC it was no longer an impediment to Starfleet ships.

I kind of looked at it as something that surrounded our galaxy that at one time caused issues for some ships, like Starfleet ships and the Kelvin ship, but not for others, and that as Starfleet technology advanced, it was no longer an impediment. I figure it's the simplest explanation.