Why no USS Kelvin novel yet?

[F. King Daniel]

FWIW, according to the dossiers on www.startrekmovie.com the Kelvin is "used primarily as a survey ship".

I could see an intense, months-long survey of a world requiring the dozens of shuttles and 800 crew (assuming they weren't all passengers) we know the Kelvin's got.
The sort of mission that would ascertain if a class-M world is suitable for a Federation colony, or perhaps a longer-term follow-up mission after a freindly first contact.


Something else that I liked about the Kelvin that could be explored in a novel: The weapons. Kelvin didn't have photon torpedoes (surely they would have used them?), and instead had those pop-up turret things as well as standard TOS-style phasers. Were the turrets pulse-phasers? Physical ammunition (space bullets)? Some sort of plasma weapon?
It reminded me of the old Final Frontier novel, which had the 1701 armed with lasers and some sort of plasma canon (I don't have the book handy, I might be way off) instead of photon torpedoes. Fed weapon variety = good.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Could the Kelvin have existed in the TOS universe though? It seems a bit big to precede the Constitutions.

The USS Voyager can do everything the Enterprise-D can, yet is a fraction of the size.

Likewise the TOS Enterprise may have similar abilities to the Kelvin, while being much smaller.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Slide the divergence point further back, with the focal point being Archer resovling (or, in the case of the JJVerse, failing to resolve) the Temporal Cold War, and then all kinds of havoc can be wreaked on the timeline and the technological development.

Notice how after Archer hit the reset button on that lingering plot error, things started to move back in line with the previously established continuity? Imagine something going wrong and the TCW going on for another couple of seasons, forcing Starfleet to build bigger and badder starships a lot earlier, until by the the 23rd Century, a typical starship more closely resembles a stardestroyer with grotesquely oversized warp nacelles.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Could the Kelvin have existed in the TOS universe though? It seems a bit big to precede the Constitutions.

The USS Voyager can do everything the Enterprise-D can, yet is a fraction of the size.

Likewise the TOS Enterprise may have similar abilities to the Kelvin, while being much smaller.

I think a Galaxy class starship probably has more than a few tricks that an Intrepid class could only dream of, if only because of the amount of available power.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Well, I can imagine various possible answers. Part of it is the sense of history. This isn't just some random ship, it's the ship that Jim Kirk's mother and father served aboard. More broadly, it's our first glimpse at the 2230s, an era hitherto untouched in Trek canon and barely addressed in the literature. So it's opening up a whole new era, with its own characteristic tech, uniforms, and so on. You know how much Trek fans like to fill in the unexplored gaps. Plus the Kelvin is a whole new class of starship, and a lot of people are excited by such things.

Then there's the fact that it's the common ground between the Prime and New continuities. Stories about the Kelvin before the events of the movie grow out of the movie continuity but are still valid for the Prime timeline, because the divergence hasn't happened yet. So in a way, it bridges the two. It could also be seen as bridging ENT and TOS to an extent.

These are the major appeals for me, so far as Kelvin tales are concerned. For me, Robau isn't the hook; it's the link to Kirk and that era of Trek history.

It's also a badass looking ship, inside and out.

 

[Dayton Ward]

^ I wouldn't mind having a prop replica of their phaser and communicator.

 

[BrotherBenny]

I think a Galaxy class starship probably has more than a few tricks that an Intrepid class could only dream of, if only because of the amount of available power.

Well, the Intrepid has a higher rated maximum speed as compared to the Galaxy, variable geometry nacelles, bioneural gelpacks allowing for faster computations, and the most impressive of all, the ability to land on a planetary surface. The Intrepid is a more advanced class of starship, and probably runs rings around the Galaxy at impulse speeds too.

 

[Christopher]

Well, they aren't really meant for the same purpose, exactly. The Galaxy class was meant to be a sort of university town in space, a roving research institution (though the post-season-one producers of TNG largely forgot about that, to my regret). It was a product of a peacetime Federation (mostly). The Intrepid class always struck me as part of the post-BOBW push to develop more combat-capable vessels. The Intrepid was light, fast, maneuverable, more stripped down and made for action, as opposed to the luxury liner-cum-research platform that was the Galaxy class.

 

[Thrawn]

^ I dunno. Voyager was pretty luxurious.

 

[Timo]

...But so was Kirk's first Enterprise. And Scotty in "Relics" still thought the E-D came from a whole different plane of luxury.

It reminded me of the old Final Frontier novel, which had the 1701 armed with lasers and some sort of plasma canon

Lasers and particle cannon - a favorite combo in some Trek RPGs which assumed that photon torpedoes must have been invented halfway into the first season of TOS because Kirk didn't use them before that. A somewhat senseless assumption IMHO: nothing used by Starfleet in TOS was ever indicated to be even remotely new technology, except for the M-5 computer.

Since those old sources also assumed that phasers would be new in TOS, they also often assumed that phasers would evolve from lasers or particle beams or both. One might even say that "particle beam" was the old generic name for phasers in some of those books. Anyway... The white pulse-spitters of the Kelvin look so much like the plasma guns of ENT that it wouldn't be too far-fetched to say they're exactly that: an older technology still in use as secondary weaponry in the early 23rd century. Note how George Kirk only brings those guns to play during the second attack, not yet during the first, and how they seem to achieve next to nothing (the red beams are responsible for shooting down most of Nero's missiles).

Speaking of which,

Kelvin didn't have photon torpedoes (surely they would have used them?)

Torps would have done little good as a defensive system against Nero's missiles. So it would stand to reason that Robau would never order them fired; and while George Kirk might start thinking in terms of revenge or offense-is-best-defense, torpedo launchers might be knocked out at that point already.

However, if this were true, one would expect Robau or Kirk to give the command not to fire torpedoes, as everything else was apparently used when the generic command to fire was issued. And the ship doesn't have anything that'd look like a torpedo launcher, not even in fine resolution that might reveal gunports or cover plates (similar resolution on the TOS ship would no doubt have shown us exactly where the covering hatches of the torpedo tubes were!).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[TGTheodore]

I'd write one for free if it could be about the USS Kelvin and the USS Hobbes.



--Ted

 

[F. King Daniel]

"Particle cannon" - thanks, Timo

I think Photon Torpedoes would have been a great defence against Nero's missiles: Just set them to detonate in the vacinity of the missiles and hopefully set a cluster of them off before they reach Kelvin.

I thought the reason the turrets weren't used at the start of the attack is because the first hit disabled them ("weapons offline!"), and it took a few minutes to get them running. Or it was just a dialogue/vfx goof.

I personally like the idea that there are Federation ships with more varied weapons than the standard phasers/photons, even if those are the weapons of choice on front-line starships.

Even if we never get a Kelvin book, the Federation loves using old ships, like the 100+ year old Mirandas, Excelsiors and Oberths. Maybe there are still worn out Kelvins in use either by Starfleet or some civilian group (not unlike when the Ent -A was sold to Chal in The Ashes of Eden). Post-Destiny I'm sure every available ship is in use, especially ones that fit 800.

 

[Timo]

Maybe there are still worn out Kelvins in use either by Starfleet or some civilian group

If not, then it's a bit funny Nero didn't immediately realize he had jumped into the past when he spotted the Kelvin...

The "Weapons offline" thing must have been something Robau's engineer was able to fix even while the first battle was still raging. Not a major goof, I guess. But I'd still argue that the ship had a crew of "ah hundred" (not counting those killed by Nero or left aboard when Kirk rammed the ship up Nero's shaft), not "eight hundred", since packing the latter number into the twenty shuttles we saw would have been more or less impossible.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

Nah, I'll stick with a giant ship (clearly the intent of the writers and CG artists), a crew of 800+ (800 survivors, how many died in the attack? The areas of the ship we saw hardly appeared crowded), and around 50 shuttles (Winona's shuttle was number 47, and there could easily have been another group of shuttles ahead of the cluster we saw after the Nerada was hit). Also if the Kelvin was small, it screws up the size of the Enterprise relative to the Kelvin Kitbash fleet later on.

But each to their own.

If a Kelvin novel were to need (for whatever unlikely reason) to state how big the vessel was, surely they'd have to use the offical number - 457m, from the bluray?

 

[Christopher]

^ I dunno. Voyager was pretty luxurious.

Compared to the Defiant or a Klingon Bird of Prey, yes. Compared to the Galaxy class, not really.

Still, apparently the initial impression I'd gotten while the show had been in development -- that the ship was a stripped-down combat vessel ill-equipped for the situation it ended up in -- must've fallen by the wayside, since the writers' tech manual I got when I pitched to the show says it was designed primarily for exploration and research. I guess something was rethought there.

I think Photon Torpedoes would have been a great defence against Nero's missiles: Just set them to detonate in the vacinity of the missiles and hopefully set a cluster of them off before they reach Kelvin.

Except that realistically that wouldn't work in vacuum, since there's no medium to transmit a shock wave. Unless you were hit directly by shrapnel, you'd only be exposed to a brief burst of radiation. And I'd think that, logically, missiles would be designed to avoid being prematurely triggered by radiation bursts from other exploding missiles.

Of course, in Trek, like most onscreen SF, it's always assumed that explosions in space have shock waves, either because of research failure or because it's believed that audiences would be too confused or bored if it were depicted realistically.

If a Kelvin novel were to need (for whatever unlikely reason) to state how big the vessel was, surely they'd have to use the offical number - 457m, from the bluray?

Are you sure that's the official number? I'm not sure there even is an "official" number for any of the ship sizes in the '09 film. From what I've heard, it seems they were pretty much winging it. We've gotten used to the meticulous attention to technical detail that folks like Zimmerman, Sternbach, Okuda, Eaves, and Drexler put into their work (sometimes but not always -- recall the enduring uncertainty about the size of the Defiant and other ships from the DS9 Technical Manual), but apparently the new Trek creators take a looser approach to the technical side of things.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

The TOS movie bridge (aka TNG battle bridge) was tiny? 'Cos wasn't that the set being used for the "Stargazer" bridge in "The Battle"?

Only the back half of it.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I'd say the info on the disc that comes with the film is fairly definitive. Failing that the only other published number is 660m in the art book and both numbers point to a giant ship.

I'm aware the numbers jumped all over the place during development, but as far as I can tell the fuss over the ship sizes is because they were designed smaller in the concept art stage, but the CG's were made much bigger (in order to fit the breweries, power plants, shuttles and bridge decks etc). The CG models we saw in the film itself were huge, ergo the ships were huge, no matter what the early concept art says. I've seen concept art for the 1701-C that's very different to the ship we saw in "Yesterday's Enterprise", yet people don't insist the ship in the concept art is the "real" way it looks over the model in the episode.

I know the Enterprise is half-size in the shipyard, but much bigger later on. Since the innards fit in the bigger size and not the smaller, I choose to accept the larger.

YMMV

 

[Christopher]

^I'm not arguing that the ships have to be smaller. I have no problem with them being big. I just think that the word "official" doesn't necessarily apply to any of the reported sizes. Given the filmmakers' apparent lack of concern for numerical precision, and the fact that, as you yourself admit, there are conflicting numbers being offered, using the word "official" in that context seems like a false appeal to authority.

 

[BrotherBenny]

I believe the Intrepid class was always intended as a science vessel/explorer/scout, and the Nova was like a smaller version of the Intrepid.

The Kelvin, regardless of size, also seemed to be an explorer, otherwise why would you need a ship of 800? And if it was a colonization effort, the Kelvin would have been escorting several vessels.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Well, what would you consider an official number, Christopher? Info from a bluray extra is surely of the same worth as all the Okuda technical manuals - they're all licenced products that had to be approved by TPTB.

The Star Trek: Art of the Movie book was an official product too, which, like the bluray, gives 725m for the Enterprise's (final) size.

The only licenced products that state the size of the Enterprise quote the same number.

The only Kelvin size offered in the art book (665m) is from a size chart that the book itself says is obsolete. But since both licenced products agree that the Enterprise is 725m long, then since one of those says the Kelvin is 427m I'm inclined to believe it.

Surely the only "higher authority" than the official products is on-screen canon data, and I don't think a single Trek character or even display screen had ever said "our ship is so-and-so meters long".

Of course, if there are licenced products with different size numbers that I don't know about my argument fails