Background detail, not plot spoiler: So apparently, per 1x14, Starbase 1 orbits a visibly terrestrial planet 100 astronomical units from Earth. This would put it about twice as far out from the Sun as the Kuiper Belt, very close to where the solar wind starts to interact with the interstellar medium. That's a rather major addition to our knowledge of Trek's Solar System!
100 AU from Earth
- Thread starter FredH
- Start date
More like a writers room error where they mixed up light years and AU.
I'd attribute the error to the effects designers, not the writers. It's not the first time the FX artists have failed to do their astronomy homework -- there was that episode where they portrayed an O-type star as orange instead of blue. And it's not the first time they've failed to represent what the writers clearly had in mind; in episode 9, when Discovery was doing its series of hundreds of jumps to break the cloak of the Klingon flagship, the FX showed the flagship just sitting there in one place, which entirely defeats the purpose of being cloaked.
A hundred AU is within Sol System's scattered disk, home to an assortment of cometary objects and dwarf planets, and possibly the suspected Planet Nine, although that would be several times farther out. The verbal description reminded me of the version of Starbase One in the DS9 novel Time's Enemy, where it was an antique space station in Sol System's Oort cloud. It's conceivable that the writers may have been thinking of that, and there was a miscommunication with the FX team.
Except for the bit where nobody from ToS to VoY references the Klingons breaking all the way through to the Sol system and almost wiping out Earth.
No, the writers just fucked up.
How so? It's audibly said in dialogue - which would be attributed to the writer's screwing up.
The dialogue says nothing about a planet, just a starbase. The planet is seen in the viewscreen image behind the starbase, but is never spoken about. So my assumption is that the writers intended Starbase One to be a space station on the fringes of Sol System (which would fit the dialogue reference to its being in Earth's backyard), and the FX team misunderstood that intention and put the station in orbit of a planet.
In fact, Martok says the exact opposite of what is shown, that the Klingons have never ever attempted to attack Earth or the core Federation worlds and wouldn't dream of it.
But thanks to Worf in "Unification, Part 1," we know that Klingon leaders sometimes rewrite history to suit their preferred narratives. (At least, Worf said that Gowron was doing it, and his tone suggested he considered it a fairly routine thing for a chancellor to do.) So Martok's interpretation of Klingon history is not necessarily accurate. He may be honestly reporting what he learned in school, but what he was taught may have been false.
The have now. It's canon.
Starbase 1 being twice the distance from the Delphic Expanse does not make sense. It doesn't make sense for it to be lightyears.
The only thing that makes sense is that some species petitioned the Federation to change it from Earth to Sun distances to something much bigger, and then they changed to something much smaller in TMP
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Not in the Prime timeline it's not.
Sure it is. I just saw a Star Trek series which establishes that fact.
That's how canon works
This is the Prime timeline as stated by the people making the show. The fans don't get to decide what's set where. So it's canon now.
Kinda like when Simon Pegg, the movie’s writer, said that Nero’s temporal incursion send ripples to time and changed everything both towards and backwards through time.
But the same fans that accept the DSC producers intentions as canon don’t accept Pegg’s statements as true because "we didn’t see/hear it onscreen".
I'd chalk the planet up to a mistake on the effects part, as @Christopher suggested. The writers wrote 'starbase' and the effects team interpreted it as 'planet'
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Amusingly enough, Planet Nine is in fact Earth. You can see Florida.
The VFX being "wrong" doesn't help us much here. It's dramatically implausible for Earth/SB1 to be "one lightyear" away from the point of our heroes re-entry to the Regular Universe, regardless of visuals, because if this area (more specifically "this quadrant", in the more compact and more TOS-era-appropriate sense of that word) is teeming with Klingons, then Earth is close to disaster anyway and even the loss of SB1 should not really alter things one way or another.
OTOH, a tiny bunch of Klingons (just 247 survivors of an invasion force necessarily much, much larger since they defeated 80,000 people) painting graffiti on the side of a devastated base at outer Sol isn't a grave threat to Earth as such. That part of writing is fine: if this place is 100 AU from Earth, and Earth still has those mighty orbital fortresses we never see but which are likely to be as formidable as the stuff we see in "Tears of the Prophets", then the Klingon threat level is not really up all that much. After all, they were roaming the quadrant anyway...
But 247 Klingons in control of a starbase, even if a partially wrecked one, means the Federation already lost the war for good if the base indeed orbits Earth. Raining death on the billions down below is now an option to the Klingons, and the evident lack of counterattack should mean Earth is in fact already destroyed/conquered!
Timo Saloniemi
The VFX being "wrong" doesn't help us much here. It's dramatically implausible for Earth/SB1 to be "one lightyear" away from the point of our heroes re-entry to the Regular Universe, regardless of visuals, because if this area (more specifically "this quadrant", in the more compact and more TOS-era-appropriate sense of that word) is teeming with Klingons, then Earth is close to disaster anyway and even the loss of SB1 should not really alter things one way or another.
OTOH, a tiny bunch of Klingons (just 247 survivors of an invasion force necessarily much, much larger since they defeated 80,000 people) painting graffiti on the side of a devastated base at outer Sol isn't a grave threat to Earth as such. That part of writing is fine: if this place is 100 AU from Earth, and Earth still has those mighty orbital fortresses we never see but which are likely to be as formidable as the stuff we see in "Tears of the Prophets", then the Klingon threat level is not really up all that much. After all, they were roaming the quadrant anyway...
But 247 Klingons in control of a starbase, even if a partially wrecked one, means the Federation already lost the war for good if the base indeed orbits Earth. Raining death on the billions down below is now an option to the Klingons, and the evident lack of counterattack should mean Earth is in fact already destroyed/conquered!
Timo Saloniemi
Would those same species also petition to change the distance of a light-year, that being based on a Earth year?
