It was 2063 when Zefram Cochrane first designed a warp capable ship, but not until 2151 when the first warp capable starship was built and sent out to explore. Unless I am mistaken, but I haven't found any reference to starships being built before Enterprise. What were Earth scientists doing for those 88 years? What was the highest warp drive speed of ship Starfleet operated between 2063 and 2151? Why weren't they used to explore parts of the galaxy, at least nearer to the Earth? Were the Vulcans really that influential in slowing down Earth's progress in space exploration? It may be that some colonies were established near Earth and transport ships were sent to trade in some places, but the series implies that only Vulcans and other aliens that visited Earth were known to humans.
Why was Starfleet so slow to build starships?
- Thread starter jimoinj
- Start date
From the very beginning it was said that it simply took awhile for Humans to develop faster warp engines. The Vulcans could have sped things along, but chose not to because they felt Humans weren't ready for that yet. In the meantime, Earth sent Warp 1+ ships into local space, perhaps through the Earth Cargo Service.
And Starfleet was still a relatively new organization by 2151--Tucker said it hadn't been around very long. The NX Program (not to be confused with the NX Class Project) represented Humans finally making the breakthrough to Warp 2 and beyond.
Incidentally, I believe it took the Vulcans much longer than Humans did to go from Warp 1 to Warp 2, IIRC, so Humans actually moved along very quickly in that regards to getting out into deep space, IMO...
And Starfleet was still a relatively new organization by 2151--Tucker said it hadn't been around very long. The NX Program (not to be confused with the NX Class Project) represented Humans finally making the breakthrough to Warp 2 and beyond.
Incidentally, I believe it took the Vulcans much longer than Humans did to go from Warp 1 to Warp 2, IIRC, so Humans actually moved along very quickly in that regards to getting out into deep space, IMO...
Flashover
Lieutenant Commander
Internal political pressure most likely. Remember, just because a government presents a UNITED front to the outside doesn't mean it's united internally.
Earth was still recovering from a devastating war and no doubt things like making sure people got medical treatment, rebuilding infrastructure and re-establishing economic patterns took higher priority.
Then there is the whole research and development cycle. Unlike a turn-based game where you can simply throw more money into the pot REAL WORLD RESEARCH TAKES TIME. And there isn't always neat orderly progress from tech A to tech B to tech C.
I'm sure research was ongoing, and there were many dead ends along the way... along with setbacks, accidents, and political infighting. Add to that scarcity of resources and the general political climate I can see it taking 75+ years to go from a prototype warp-engine to the NX class.
A real world example would be the project I am working on now. We've made this product out of a certain type of material for the better part of 15 years. I'm doing research into various other types of materials to "replace" our existing materials. So far I've been roadblocked due to internal politics, twice I've had my funding cut, and the latest setback is the price of our current material actually DROPPED by a substantial amount. This has reduced the "sexyness" of my project and I suspect further budget cuts are forthcoming.
Earth was still recovering from a devastating war and no doubt things like making sure people got medical treatment, rebuilding infrastructure and re-establishing economic patterns took higher priority.
Then there is the whole research and development cycle. Unlike a turn-based game where you can simply throw more money into the pot REAL WORLD RESEARCH TAKES TIME. And there isn't always neat orderly progress from tech A to tech B to tech C.
I'm sure research was ongoing, and there were many dead ends along the way... along with setbacks, accidents, and political infighting. Add to that scarcity of resources and the general political climate I can see it taking 75+ years to go from a prototype warp-engine to the NX class.
A real world example would be the project I am working on now. We've made this product out of a certain type of material for the better part of 15 years. I'm doing research into various other types of materials to "replace" our existing materials. So far I've been roadblocked due to internal politics, twice I've had my funding cut, and the latest setback is the price of our current material actually DROPPED by a substantial amount. This has reduced the "sexyness" of my project and I suspect further budget cuts are forthcoming.
Then there would be the time it would take to put infrastructure in place. Orbital platforms would be needed to construct the ships, industrial fabrication plants to build the parts (this is pre-replicator) and you would have to have enough raw materials to even get the process started.
Earth was probably several decades away from being able to mass produce starships. The Earth's ability to construct starships probably got a shot in the arm post-formation of the Federation as they probably gained access to ship building facilities on Andor and Vulcan.
Earth was probably several decades away from being able to mass produce starships. The Earth's ability to construct starships probably got a shot in the arm post-formation of the Federation as they probably gained access to ship building facilities on Andor and Vulcan.
Earth apparently did mass-build certain types of starship - the indigenous tramps that allowed it to create all-important commercial connections. But it might not have been worthwhile to produce substandard, warp three explorers that could not hope to explore anything beyond the already Vulcan-controlled volume of space within a reasonable time, nor to construct warships that couldn't put even a small dent in the enemy armor. Those had to wait for technological breakthroughs, or for the obtaining of tech secrets by other means such as trade or espionage.
Nevertheless, there's no indication Earth would have hesitated from building starships in general. The Valiant ventured to very deep space just a couple of years after Cochrane's invention, and there was no indication that she would have been a unique vessel - had she been the only explorer from that era, she'd have been far more famous and more immediately identifiable in "Where No Man Has Gone Before".
TAS offers other examples of starships built early on. And ENT adds the early colonization efforts, beginning with the Conestoga. If anything, Earth adopted warp drive ridiculously fast, basically flying 747s across the Atlantic within a decade of the first hop at Kitty Hawk...
On the issue of the NX Project being the first to break warp two for mankind, this wasn't really established. All we learned was that the NX Project broke warp two for the NX Project; many a rocket project today starts with a breakthrough in achieving liftoff, then proceeds through the further breakthrough of achieving a certain height or a certain payload weight, all despite the Apollo program already having broken all the records a long time ago. Earth might well have had plenty of starships capable of warp three when the NX Project was started; it's just that none of those could evolve into warp five starships, not without the help of the NX Project.
Timo Saloniemi
Nevertheless, there's no indication Earth would have hesitated from building starships in general. The Valiant ventured to very deep space just a couple of years after Cochrane's invention, and there was no indication that she would have been a unique vessel - had she been the only explorer from that era, she'd have been far more famous and more immediately identifiable in "Where No Man Has Gone Before".
TAS offers other examples of starships built early on. And ENT adds the early colonization efforts, beginning with the Conestoga. If anything, Earth adopted warp drive ridiculously fast, basically flying 747s across the Atlantic within a decade of the first hop at Kitty Hawk...
On the issue of the NX Project being the first to break warp two for mankind, this wasn't really established. All we learned was that the NX Project broke warp two for the NX Project; many a rocket project today starts with a breakthrough in achieving liftoff, then proceeds through the further breakthrough of achieving a certain height or a certain payload weight, all despite the Apollo program already having broken all the records a long time ago. Earth might well have had plenty of starships capable of warp three when the NX Project was started; it's just that none of those could evolve into warp five starships, not without the help of the NX Project.
Timo Saloniemi
Actually, it was.
In "First Flight:
ARCHER: We were in the NX test program, trying to break the warp two barrier. There was just a few of us. Gardner, Duvall, AG and me. We all wanted the first flight.
And a bit later after A.G. Robinson broke the warp two barrier, Archer told him afterwards:
ARCHER: You just went faster than any human being ever has...
Pretty much. The NX Program seemed to be what kicked the initial door down, IMO. It may have been that the NX Program and Warp Five Engine were developed in tandem, with the NX-Class Starship as the end result for both.
May not be thinking outside the box here, but: Wouldn't you need to get to warp 2 prior to developing a warp 5 engine?
This is from Broken Bow:
This is from First Flight:
So what I get from First Flight, is that the warp two engine was a step towards the warp five engine, not an independent development.
The writers just flubbed this really badly.
Not necessarily, because a Warp Five starship may have been the ultimate goal for the NX Program from the start, and early vehicles like the NX-Alpha were the steps towards proving that Henry Archer's engine could actually do that.
It would mean that Henry Archer was a civilian working for Starfleet, which would be akin to civilian scientists working for NASA at the time, IMO...
I look at it like the early American space program. The Apollo mission was the end goal. That was the one that was going to land men on the moon. The Mercury and Gemini programs existed to test things for Apollo. Anything from rocketry tech, to human space-worthiness testing, to space navigation techniques. They were always meant to be a means to some other program's end. And all along, Apollo was being worked on right along side Mercury and Gemini. I figure that's the same relationship between the NX Program and the Warp Five Program.
^^^
That's a really good analogy.
That's a really good analogy.
While it's possible that Archer was referring to "aboard a Human spacecraft," it really sounds like in addition to holding back Human star flight technology, the Vulcan might not have been permitting Humans aboard other races starships. If Humans were riding aboard other races starships as passagers, by the time of Archer's words, surely Humans would have traveled at faster than warp two.
Terra Prime makes it sound like a fair number of different alien races are visiting Earth, Phlox must have gotten there somehow.
Yep, I think Archer wouldn't have said that if other Humans had traveled faster. That's a pretty big oversight for one of the key pilots in the NX Program, IMO.
By that same token, it's conceivable that (A) no Human has ever traveled on a faster non-Earth vessel or (B) there was no official record of any Human having done so.
I think in regards to the Warp 5 complex along these lines:
They knew they would need warp 5 to be able to, as Timo previously stated, really branch out and explore unknown space. Of course they did not have this capability but had to start somewhere. I'm sure doing all their scientific type things, and projections, they could begin to design ships (and engines), in theory, on paper and go from there. Chaos Descending pretty much summed it up with comparisons to the space race / program. They did a 22nd Century version of the X planes, but for warp ships, while they were planning for the future as well. For all we know, humans could have had limited contact with other aliens, aside from Vulcans, shortly after beginning short jaunts into space. Some trade of goods for technology may have occurred and helped to boost some advancements.
They knew they would need warp 5 to be able to, as Timo previously stated, really branch out and explore unknown space. Of course they did not have this capability but had to start somewhere. I'm sure doing all their scientific type things, and projections, they could begin to design ships (and engines), in theory, on paper and go from there. Chaos Descending pretty much summed it up with comparisons to the space race / program. They did a 22nd Century version of the X planes, but for warp ships, while they were planning for the future as well. For all we know, humans could have had limited contact with other aliens, aside from Vulcans, shortly after beginning short jaunts into space. Some trade of goods for technology may have occurred and helped to boost some advancements.
Maybe it's more a shades-of-meaning thing. For example, if I tell you I flew to LA on Southwest Air, that's a lot different from saying I flew a bomber over Macho Grande during the war. So it could be that Archer means "went' in the sense of "piloted" rather than "traveled."
Or the writers didn't think out the full implications.
Who says they didn't? The Boomers sailed out and had firsthand, secondhand and thirdhand encounters with exotically endowed space women, that much is established by the pilot episode of ENT already. The space these traders explored just wasn't much of a wilderness; it was essentially rated PG-8, and featured no empty worlds humans could colonize, nor primitive and willing ones they could turn into a Dominion of Earth.
Sailing for years to "explore" something the annoying Tellarite businessman from the neighboring office booth could visit on his weekend leave... Nope. Most people and governments just plain wouldn't be interested. At most, certain intelligence agencies might want to check Vulcan travel guides for maliciously inserted errors (cf. David Brin's Startide Rising concept of the Library), but that would be really painstaking work - and might come up blank anyway, since Vulcans really weren't all that evil even in ENT.
Timo Saloniemi
Or the writers meant exactly what they wrote and no Human had ever gone past warp two before until A.G. Robinson did.
I think they wanted to give a sense that Humans were still new to the greater galactic community (perhaps even unheard of by all but a few local races like Vulcans, Denobulans, etc.,) and that the pilots of the NX Program were pioneers breaking down barriers like Chuck Yeager and others did before them.
Similar threads
- Poll
