Buck Rogers beat Interstellar to it.
Where does the Bonaventure fit within continuity?
- Thread starter FederationHistorian
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Registry numbers aren't proof of anything.
The ships of any given class can have wildly diverse registries. Just look at the Excelsior class...
I agree, though, that the appearance of the Bonaventure in TAS doesn't mean anything either. It's a cartoon, for crying out loud. Nothing in it can really be taken at face value. Just because the ship from TAS looks just like a Constitution doesn't mean sweet diddly squat.
The real Bonnie could pop up in SNW or a Short Trek and look completely different from that one, and it wouldn't violate a stitch of continuity. Hell, back in TAS' day, nobody really gave a shit about continuity anyway. On a kids' cartoon show?
Well, that's worse than I remembered...
This particular “Bonnie” is just not important enough to be redesigned. Scotty was giving a history lesson in an obscure technical development where you took an existing vessel and gave it warp drive.
People are trying to preserve “the myth of the old Bonaventure” rather than let it slide into post-Phoenix obscurity along with its clunky ship design, which just so happened to appear in a cartoon that went to a lot of trouble to make the Enterprise and the Klingon ships look as close as they did. TAS also introduced the cargo vessels that would be referenced by TOS-SE, so there is minimal room for that kind of handwave.
People are trying to preserve “the myth of the old Bonaventure” rather than let it slide into post-Phoenix obscurity along with its clunky ship design, which just so happened to appear in a cartoon that went to a lot of trouble to make the Enterprise and the Klingon ships look as close as they did. TAS also introduced the cargo vessels that would be referenced by TOS-SE, so there is minimal room for that kind of handwave.
Also of note, the Bonaventure crew wore TOS-style uniforms with a unique insignia but with the department colour on the human council member was white.
By that logic, NX-01 being first of the NX-class and not an experimental prototype as was previously established with Excelsior is a mistake to be ignored too. In those early days, registry numbers were all over the place and had different meanings to 23rd century Starfleet ones.
Or it's a greeble on both sides, and it actually reads " | 028 | NCC", which would place it within the first few dozen NCC starships, a predecessor to the Constellation era of starships, and possibly one of the first ships of the Federation in the 2160s.
R
RichT
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But what about... ?
No offense intended, but looking at that is making me feel like I've survived a horrible transporter accident.But what about... ?
Or the 81 on the bevel are the greebles and the number is 102 NCC...
But what about... ?
Replaced the Bonaventure lost in the Delta Triangle. Well, replaced might be the wrong word.
But what’s wrong with the Bonaventure originally being an impulse saucer (local registry number 102 81), designed for interplanetary journeys before it had stardrive appended and NCC added as a suffix, in order to distinguish it from ships that began as NCCs?
I have, do and will continue to consider TAS canon, but some details - including a lot of the dates - need tweaking to fit.
If I've asked this before, apologies in advance.
In TAS, Scotty refers to the Bonaventure as the first vessel to have warp drive installed. However, if that were the case, then that puts it around the time of the Earth-Kzin Wars.
The Earth-Kzin Wars were established to have taken place 200 years before TAS, placing the conflicts between the mid-2050s and late-2060s, and possibly as early as the mid-2040s. And while the first of the wars was fought with sublight vessels, the wars ended when Earth produced warp capable vessels. These conflicts might not have been very long, if there were four of them within that timeframe. And does imply that the Bonaventure did ward off the Kzinti.
The timeline for Earth expeditions into space, and warp capacity is precise. Warp drive is attained in 2063 by Zefram Cochrane, bringing about first contact with Vulcans. SS Valiant is launched in 2065, Friendship One launched in 2067, and the SS Conestoga – a warp capable vessel- was launched in 2069. New Berlin on Luna, Utopia Planitia on Mars, and various colonies on asteroids were established prior to 2069. And Terra Nova, the first colony outside the solar system, is colonized in 2078 nine lightyears from Earth. And warp drive at warp two doesn’t begin until 2119 at the earliest.
In “The Time Trap” the Bonaventure is noted as being trapped in the Delta Triangle for centuries, meaning it disappeared around 2069, give or take several years (non-canon sources place its disappearance in 2079). And it was supposed to be on its third voyage, meaning it likely left Earth a couple of time prior. This places the Delta Triangle at its furthest distance at 15 lightyears away from Earth, although it is likely much closer, and at least 5 lightyears away. For reference, Vulcan is 17 years from Earth, and Andoria is 11 light years from Earth.
Bonaventure was also originally, and semi-canonically, the first warp capable ship before FC retconned it as the Phoenix. And there were two different designs of the Bonaventure, the 10281NCC version featured in TAS, and the C1-21 version featured in DS9 in the classroom of Keiko O’Brien.
TAS Bonaventure
DS9 Bonaventure
This leaves several unanswered questions.
Was there a space race involving the Bonaventure and the Phoenix that revolved around warp drive?
Was the Bonaventure the first vessel given warp technology after the success of the Phoenix? Or was the Bonaventure technically the first to be warp capable, but failed to launch first for undetermined reasons?
Were the Earth-Kzin Wars a series event kept from the public for a long time, like the Eugenics Wars? And possibly a secondary reason the ECON weaponized space to begin with? Or just a series of skirmishes inflated as a war?
What do you think were the reasons that the stardrive section of the Bonaventure was dropped and not revived until around the mid-22nd century?
What the difference between Bonaventure (C1-21) and Bonaventure (10281NCC)? Was the 10281NCC version just a refit of the C1-21? Or do they just share a name?
A better question would be whether or not the so-called "Temporal Cold War" erased the Bonaventure inclusion in the main timeline. It could still exist in a parallel timeline. However, I think ENT may preclude its existence altogether. Heck, STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT might have erased the Bonaventure from the main timeline.
And just to be clear, I'm saying that a Bonaventure type ship didn't exist, or that there was or wasn't an Earth-Kzin War. Again, both the ship and the event can still exist, but not in the same timeline. Certainly, you can say that the Bonaventure was the first ship to have an advanced Warp Drive installed at the time of its christening, followed by the Constitution-class having an even more advanced Warp Drive system when that class rolled out. That's easy enough to explain things. But something like the Earth-Kzin War would imply a pre-Federation event, making it much more difficult to reconcile temporally with established dates.
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Using the Temporal Cold War that way is antithetical to Occam’s Razor; you can just as easily say that Q did it, or a random time traveler we’ve never heard of. The idea is to carefully analyze the evidence and put the pieces together just as carefully, by relying on specific word choice or design elements.
But what about... ?
I freakin' love this ship. It bridges Archer's and Kirk's era beautifully. It probably lacks frills like the NX-01, but can get her crew in deeper space in a fraction of the time.
TAS Bonaventure is bloated like a whale carcass. It's like Starfleet was going through a dirigible phase when it designed her.
I like the design. Much like the Daedalus craft it has the look of a rough, simpler design to construct, either from the Romulan War, or after it via lessons learned: be able to make a lot of ships in a hurry.
I do not prefer the TAS design of Bonaventure. It was just more lazy artwork from Filmation, a study that seemed to thrive on low expectations. I tend to just ignore TAS, visually. I know some are attached to it. Everyone has their likes and dislikes. But considering how much the Federation reuses ship names, it's not unlikely to imagine they had an ugly duckling Bonaventure sometime after the C1-21 named after the original. It's not like NX-01 is the original Starship Enterprise, either, ahem.
Sure they can. It just depends on what you choose to tweak. If you remove the line or implication that the Bonaventure was the first ship to have warp drive, then they can all coexist just fine.
It wasn’t actually mentioned in TAS that the wars were fought at sublight. We can’t argue that if the Kzinti appearances in TAS are canon, then so is everything Larry Niven ever wrote about them. If the wars occurred at all, obviously it was after the first contact with Vulcans.
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