StillPaisleyCat

Some of the criticisms fall in another category of beating on SNW’s alleged canon ‘violations’.

These include assertions that Chapel ‘isn’t the same person’ as she doesn’t have the same temperament/personality as in TOS, Uhura not having met or known of T’Pring before Amok Time, etc., Spock would have been ashamed to have eaten animal products (bacon), T’Pring’s ears have the wrong shape

While I can be quite critical of incoherence in plot threads or characters within a single show, especially in a single season (say in Discovery season two or every season of Picard), to me that’s a problem in how a set of writers are telling a specific story.

I’ve come to realize that the fans who just can’t get past continuity changes they can’t resolve immediately across the entire history of the franchise just aren’t going to enjoy SNW as much as I am.

I classify these inflexibilities as:

— not being open to the possibility that the characters may grow and change,

— not being open to the possibility of characters being unreliable narrators or saying things ironically in later shows (e.g., in TOS Uhura might tweak Spock about T’Pring to press him to identify who she is, even if she personally knew exactly who she was),

— refusing to accept that minor changes in timing, visual design, technology and characters are possible due to intertemporal interference as long as the Prime continuity maintains key/essential events.

In the end, hanging out here to have conversations with folks who are a bit more flexible is a better choice for me.

I’ve seen a great amount of curmudgeonly criticism of this episode in other places.

Can’t understand it really. There really seems to be a contingent of fans that just don’t want to have fun.

I dearly love the TNG Tech Manual.

I’m not sure why we would give it primacy over science advisor Dr Erin MacDonald’s current explanation of how warp works, especially as she frequently takes examples from Voyager to demonstrate it.

I also have the original edition of the TNG Technical Manual and it’s very well worn. I saw Rick Sternbach present at cons in the 90s and have seen more sketches and schematics beyond the Tech Manual which he put on screen (TNG, DS9, space stations etc.)

I can’t consider these supporting publications and insights into the minds of the designers to be canon though, at least not alpha canon, any more than I would give that status can tonthr the ‘official’ posters and books with schematics with the insides of the ships - from the TOS era through to the Shipyards books.

As you note in your own critique in the OP, what the designers and EPs had in mind doesn’t necessarily get validated or consistently brought on screen. Not to mention Okuda had and has his own firm ideas about ships that he put into graphics that don’t necessarily align.

One of the biggest examples of this is interior schematics.

Many fans love and cling to their charts of interior schematics of the hero’s ships. This includes some of the EPs and writers. (Michal Chabon talks about the one of the 1701 he had on his bedroom wall as a child.)

The TNG Tech Manual however validates the modular concept of the interior of ships where modules for different labs, sickbay, quarters etc are hung within the volume of the slacked frame. These line up as decks but aren’t a stacked structure like an office tower or a cruise ship. The turbolifts wind around these modules. I’ve heard this called the ‘habittrail’ ship interior model after the old environments for small pets. The concept dates back to the plans and scematics for TMP.

Anyway modular ship interiors are described in the Tech Manual and were confirmed in presentations by Sternbach at the time. In fact, when asked why he didn’t provide deck charts for the D, Sternbach would reply that the ship interior was modular and adaptable to the different needs of crews and missions. Turbolifts and Jeffries Tubes would wind between these suspended modules and deck sections.

I would argue however that, despite Sternbach’s statements and the manual, the modular interior structure has only recently been confirmed in the 23rd century was only onscreen (Discovery and Short Treks) in the wills vfx scenes of the turbolifts travelling within the ship, and the fight in the turbolift in a Discovery episode. Whether or not one believes that the interior volumes shown in those vfx shots were too large, it’s indisputable that a modular interior with interior spaces hanging in a space frame has been established for that era (or at least as it’s been overwritten).

For the 24th and early 25th century, we have have conflicting onscreen evidence from Okuda’s graphics. On LCARS panels, we are shown distinct vertical cutaway elevations with an office-tower or cruise ship rigid/fixed deck structure. Lower Decks doubled down on this in the episode where Boimler crawled through Jeffries tubes to reach the bridge to meet Tom Paris.

Anyway, I’ve dove down another rabbit hole with this, and I expect that the issue of the interiors has been previously well-canvassed at the Daystrom Institute’s old location, but it’s another key example of some very different ideas having floated around in the background of production having influenced what gets established onscreen as canon.

As I noted in my response to another post, I view all of this as a kind of creative dialogue that ranges from the writers and technical and production staff to the licensed tie-in publications through to fan thinking and back.

Albucierre is a fan who is also a physicist. He’s feeding back and inputting into the dialogue. Just because the production had played around with something like but unlike warp, doesn’t mean he doesn’t have what’s canonical warp.

His fandom led to his finding a very significant workaround the limits of General Relativity. His doctoral thesis proof used, necessarily, the most extreme corner solution to make the math tractable because that’s how one establishes that there is a way around a theory that has hasn’t been previously recognized.

I do find your claim that people understand Alcubierre’s warp to be just the specific extreme case a bit puzzling, as I see the concept being picked up and extended in a wide swath of recent sci-fi literature outside the Trek franchise.

More useful and practical applications of his warp concept can only come from adding in those other variables, likely by massive computational estimates where the neat closed form math solutions aren’t possible. It seems other writers appreciate this and are looking to speculations about the theory can be expect to advance, rather than freezing it in the PhD thesis version.

In the end, I can only agree that we’ll need to seen onscreen confirmations, even if what we have from behind the scenes thinking is strongly suggestive one way or another.

In that vein, I would caution that it would be more fair to say that it remains to be confirmed as Alcubierre’s warp concept rather than that it is not.

You may be able to have both.

The key point is that the fundamental concept of space warping around the ship doesn’t necessarily mean that the ship cannot have velocity (and therefore inertia) going into warp.

That is, the idea that a ship would have to be at a full stop prior to engaging warp, rather than taking the speed from the impulse (or whatever sublight) engines, isn’t inconsistent with the basic concept of Albucierre’s drive, just the specific extreme solution he worked out the proof for.

As for thing like light stretching around the ship, it not obvious what the light outside the warp bubble or field would appear like to those inside the field. I haven’t seen a worked example to show why the light of stars in space exterior to the field would appear normally. One would rather think the opposite even if it’s the space and not the ship that’s pulled superluminally.

It seems to me that your proof that Star Trek warp is not the same as Alcubierre’s warp relies excessively on the specific results of the corner solution that Alcubierre used in his own proof.

For example, the lack of velocity going into warp and inertia within the warp bubble are specific to that corner solution, as is the lack mechanism to change direction.

But Albucierre’s corner solution would require unrealistic amounts of exotic matter even as compared to the antimatter engines in Star Trek.

So, we should expect that the advances to any kind of usable Albucierre drive will go beyond that specific closed-form solution. The last reported works to advance his finding did start to get beyond the limited case of one direction and inertia.

It’s pretty much a given that when someone is trying to find a solution around a theory as robust as general relativity, the starting point is going to be some kind of corner solution.

Others may extend the work, but it would go to far to say that the practical solutions with the additional variables allowed to have nonzero values are not Albucierre’s warp.

Thanks for the encouragement.

I will do that. I might wish to add another example or two.

Agreed that it’s public now - in the case of up/downvoting publication is instance-dependent — and can be scraped, but as a federated instance Meta can just load it directly.

Sharing user data with a an instance with a firm that exists to monetize data seems a fundamental violation of what the fediverse is.

I think that you could consider everything from fanzines and fanfic through licensing to what gets onscreen as a large ongoing dialogue.

Some cool things drift around for a long time, so it’s not even clear if they originated in specific tie-in fiction unless the authors themselves identify who came up with a name - as we can do with Number One being given the name Una.

The preponderance of EPs at this point are fans who bring their own longstanding ideas of canon, but they’re to some extent influenced by the ongoing fan and licensing dialogue.

In some cases, especially with Goldsman who was deep in the fanzine debates of the 70s, I get the idea that he’s intentionally working to counter longstanding fan headcanon or interpretations that he sees as a barrier for new generations to accept TOS.

When we get to tie-in fiction, the writers of licenced products are in most cases also fans, and, like Goldsman, have been immersed in and speculating on past canon for decades themselves. And then the younger television writers have clearly been reading some of the tie-in fiction or playing the games. Or they themselves have been written them, or at least their consultants.

As a Treklit fan, I am seeing that the new shows increasingly draw on the licenced tie-in writing, both books and comics as well as STO.

Discovery season two pulled in the S31 Control AI concept. Picard season three brought STO ships to television, but also paralleled and wove in elements of the the TNG characters from the Relaunch books.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to attribute it simply to Beyer’s influence as a tie-in author who’s now an in-house canon anchor and writer on all the live-action shows. That’s part of it, as are David Mack’s contributions on Lower Decks and Prodigy.

Prodigy has brought the Brikars (originally created by Peter David for the YA Academy books) into onscreen canon. That’s probably my favourite ‘canonization.’ But Mack has also encouraged a restoration of noncommissioned officer roles and several other subtle ‘solutions’ out of Treklit.

Anyway, its an interesting thing to trace.

Having Dr Erin MacDonald a Voyager fan and astrophysicist as the franchise’s science consultant is locking in the Alcubierre-like warp theory as a backdrop across the franchise at this point.

I find it interesting, going back to the warp-like FTL of MGM’s Forbidden Planet, that each of the crew had to stand in a columnar a suspension device to survive the transit. Given how much Roddenberry pulled from Forbidden Planet for TOS, it’s interesting that he decided that we had to be able to see the crew functional during FTL travel. George Lucas, who also drew heavily on Forbidden Planet for Star Wars, went the opposite direction and just had the hyperdrive act as a kind of jump.

I understand your position.

One of the things I’ve been considering in relation to the Defiant’s database is whether we should consider the dates in there artifacts or translations.

When I was younger, I thought the reason for the existence of stardates was to account for relativistic effects when ships were travelling at sublight. Not exactly what they are supposed to be but the point is that Starfleet is aware that relativistic effects occur and adjusts for them in recording times and dates.

An artifact date in the Defiant’s historical database would be a record that has a fixed date that wouldn’t be adjusted by the computer or the universal translator. I think that’s what most of us assume it would have been when we see the graphics onscreen.

However, there’s a possibility that it was something else, a date that may have been translated or adjusted for some reason, either in relation to the war or in relation to the Defiant’s own continuity. That’s to say the ship may in itself not be a reliable narrator in its own continuity.

I agree however that we shouldn’t assume a shift in specific dates until and unless we get it onscreen - just that we should equally avoid going so far as to break the sequence of causality in order to respect a given date.

There are certainly cases like that.

The Guardian of Forever has also corrected the timeline in two cases we know.

But there have been causality loops such as in First Contact where time arguably pushed back on its own, with the Enterprise working to correct the incursion of the Borg.