Impulse speed and physics

[blssdwlf]

Then what got the Valiant out to the edge of the galaxy in the first place?

Kirk thinks it impossible that this could have happened at all, meaning we get no data on the propulsive capabilities of the Valiant from this act. So it doesn't count as evidence of "old impulse engines" getting them there - according to Kirk, that's impossible.

That doesn't sound right. If Kirk believed that it would have been impossible for impulse engines to get the Valiant there he would've stated it to be impossible to get back to an Earth base. Instead he says:

Captain's log, Star date 1312.9. Ship's condition, heading back on impulse power only. Main engines burned out. The ship's space warp ability gone. Earth bases which were only days away are now years in the distance.
​

From Kirk's original comment we can rule out the impulse engines unable to get the Valiant out there simply because they can get the impulse-only Enterprise back home.

As to Kirk's "impossible" log statement, he doesn't express specifically that the Valiant could not have made it out that far.

Captain's log, Star date 1312.4. The impossible has happened. From directly ahead, we're picking up a recorded distress signal, the call letters of a vessel which has been missing for over two centuries. Did another Earth ship once probe out of the galaxy as we intend to do? What happened to it out there? Is this some warning they've left behind?
​

Yes it was swept out by a "magnetic space storm", as the "old Impulse Engines" weren't strong enough to resist. If the Impulse Engines are not superluminal, they're never going to be able to compete against a FTL energy wave, ever!!!

Why not? You can hop out of a train going 80 mph even if you can barely run at 3 mph. You could jump out of a plane doing 2,000 mph if you could get the door open, too.

All we need to assume is that warp engines won't help you when you're caught in a magnetic storm. We know from "Court Martial" that they do work when you are caught in an ion storm, but since the names are different, the phenomena may be, too. Clearly Kirk knows what a magnetic storm is, and apparently the crew of the Valiant did, too, unless Spock is correcting/perverting what he is reading from the log tapes.

According to "Mirror, Mirror", "ion storm" is a type of "magnetic storm" and in a later log, Kirk calls the magnetic storm an "ion storm" which suggests interchangeability:

KIRK: Report on magnetic storm, Mister Spock.
SPOCK: Standard ion type, Captain, but quite violent.
​

As to warp engines not helping in a magnetic or ion storm, we've seen no evidence of this in TOS. On the contrary, "Court Martial" shows that they can warp through such a storm.

Half a light year without FTL capability is a long time in space, and that's just to get back into the galaxy!

The ship had two centuries to do it. And at high impulse, this would have taken them no time at all, even if for everybody else it took those two centuries.

"Just to get back into the galaxy" is all they needed, anyway, since that's where Kirk found the recorder marker.

That's assuming that impulse-only travel generates time-dilation effects which again is not something seen in TOS (or, IIRC, TNG and later incarnations.)

I'd also argue that if the impulse engines were only capable of STL, then the time to travel half a light year back to the point where the ship self-destructed would likely have resulted in the complete take-over of the Valiant by the ESP-powered crewman. The Valiant crew would have been unable destroy the ship, IMHO.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I'd also argue that if the impulse engines were only capable of STL, then the time to travel half a light year back to the point where the ship self-destructed would likely have resulted in the complete take-over of the Valiant by the ESP-powered crewman. The Valiant crew would have been unable destroy the ship, IMHO.

Valiant passed through the barrier on the way back INTO the galaxy (having been swept out of it by the magnetic storm). Spock's recording doesn't describe how long it took to make the trip, but it could have been anywhere from six days to three years.

OTOH, we've got to consider what starships were like two hundred years earlier. There's been no suggestion that Valiant wasn't equipped with warp drive, but that time frame would have put it well before NX-01, and the Valiant's top speed would be something like warp two (though probably only able to sustain just a hair past warp one). Such a vessel wouldn't be designed or equipped for interplanetary voyages, much less interplanetary exploration, which is probably Kirk's point about the "old impulse engines": Valiant's impulse stack was probably some sort of hydrazine-fueled rocket thruster used for orbit changes around the Kuiper-belt dwarf planets it was intended to research/explore.

Newer starships like Enterprise would, of course, have more advanced impulse engines capable of all kinds of interesting tricks, up to and including a hard-burn acceleration to superluminal speeds. That, or Delta-Vega is sitting on some kind of six-dimensional pocket so that no matter where you are in the universe it's always just a couple of days away.

 

[blssdwlf]

Valiant passed through the barrier on the way back INTO the galaxy (having been swept out of it by the magnetic storm). Spock's recording doesn't describe how long it took to make the trip, but it could have been anywhere from six days to three years.

I don't deny that it passed the barrier on the way back into the galaxy. I just point out that it had to also pass through the barrier when it was swept out.

 

[Timo]

That doesn't sound right. If Kirk believed that it would have been impossible for impulse engines to get the Valiant there he would've stated it to be impossible to get back to an Earth base. Instead he says:

Captain's log, Star date 1312.9. Ship's condition, heading back on impulse power only. Main engines burned out. The ship's space warp ability gone. Earth bases which were only days away are now years in the distance.
​

From Kirk's original comment we can rule out the impulse engines unable to get the Valiant out there simply because they can get the impulse-only Enterprise back home.

I'm not sure I follow. Kirk is saying he can't get to those Earth bases, because they are years away now. And the Valiant couldn't have gotten to those anyway, because in all likelihood they didn't even exist 200 years prior.

Impulse is not a viable means of traveling between stars in either case.

As to Kirk's "impossible" log statement, he doesn't express specifically that the Valiant could not have made it out that far.

Then what is impossible? The picking up of a signal from a recorder marker? Does Kirk not trust his communications equipment to perform or what?

As to warp engines not helping in a magnetic or ion storm, we've seen no evidence of this in TOS. On the contrary, "Court Martial" shows that they can warp through such a storm.

Agreed (and originally stated, too). I just completely missed the bit of dialogue establishing an ion storm as a magnetic one; this more or less negates the argument of warp perhaps not working in a magnetic storm. Unless warp fails in some types of magnetic storm and only works in the "standard ion" type - but the dialogue in "WNMHGB" isn't specific enough to allow Kirk to speculate on such things.

That's assuming that impulse-only travel generates time-dilation effects which again is not something seen in TOS (or, IIRC, TNG and later incarnations.)

Not unseen, either, as there are no instances of high impulse movement for any significant lengths of time or distance.

Interestingly, our heroes usually don't know what the time is. In "Clues" and "Cause and Effect", they have to ask an external source, a "Federation timebase" broadcasting through beacons. This sort of suggests that unreliability of onboard clocks is an acknowledged issue (and I don't think our heroes would settle for clocks that are unreliable technologically). Also, time travel doesn't raise eyebrows even in earliest TOS, even though the specific means of achieving it in "The Naked Time" is suggested to be unique and pathfinding.

I'd also argue that if the impulse engines were only capable of STL, then the time to travel half a light year back to the point where the ship self-destructed would likely have resulted in the complete take-over of the Valiant by the ESP-powered crewman. The Valiant crew would have been unable destroy the ship, IMHO.

A complete takeover would not involve converting the rest of the crew into fellow Gods. One might well speculate on several months of desperate resistance to near-absolute slavery, culminating in successful self-destruct.

In turn, a rapid self-destruct soon after the initial events sounds unlikely. What would the mortals hope to achieve with it? There's no Federation yet to be endangered by this dangerous superentity, no particular reason to practice "hygiene" here in the depths of empty space. Only great desperation would drive these people to take their own lives, and such desperation could take time to evolve.

Kirk never got around to thinking about blowing up his own ship, either!

Such a vessel wouldn't be designed or equipped for interplanetary voyages, much less interplanetary exploration

I'm not quite sure about that. Earth had mastered rapid and routine interplanetary flight for apparent commercial exploitation purposes in the 1990s already. A ship built in the 2060s would quite possibly be a competent interplanetary tramp, only now equipped with interstellar propulsion to boot.

I don't deny that it passed the barrier on the way back into the galaxy. I just point out that it had to also pass through the barrier when it was swept out.

And that's debatable as well. Kirk sailed into the barrier because he felt it was his mission to find out whether that's safe or not. But nothing establishes he couldn't have flown around it just as well. And certainly the barrier looks like it could be avoided if need be.

In "WNMHGB", Kirk goes into and out of the barrier because it's his duty. In "Is There In Truth No Beauty?", the ship is deliberately taken there (or beyond?) by a madman. It is only in "By Any Other Name" where the Kelvans first stumble on the barrier by accident but also feel they have to brave it on their way back out. But perhaps they are just stupid? Our heroes certainly aren't motivated to tell them about potential other ways out of the galaxy.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ronald Held]

Someone can explain how you can keep a speed close to c without compensating for the drag caused by interstellar gas and dust. How long before you run out of deuterium, or are you expect to collect what you use as you travel on? BTW Bussard collectors have it own drag which would limit the speeds to far under c.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Valiant passed through the barrier on the way back INTO the galaxy (having been swept out of it by the magnetic storm). Spock's recording doesn't describe how long it took to make the trip, but it could have been anywhere from six days to three years.

I don't deny that it passed the barrier on the way back into the galaxy. I just point out that it had to also pass through the barrier when it was swept out.

Records don't record contact with the barrier except for the return trip (which was where they had their casualties, plus one crewman seemed to recover, and THEN the frantic requests for information about ESP).

Such a vessel wouldn't be designed or equipped for interplanetary voyages, much less interplanetary exploration

I'm not quite sure about that. Earth had mastered rapid and routine interplanetary flight for apparent commercial exploitation purposes in the 1990s already. A ship built in the 2060s would quite possibly be a competent interplanetary tramp, only now equipped with interstellar propulsion to boot.

I know I wasn't being very clear on this, but I'm thinking that the Valiant was probably some sort of deep space craft designed to chart space just beyond the solar system (Kuiper belt, Oort Cloud, etc) on short three-month expeditions before warping back to Earth -- a return trip that would have taken several days or weeks at warp one.

IOW, unless Valiant is a converted Boomer or something, it probably isn't a practical interstellar exploration ship, more of a "littoral waters" type vessel. In this older paradigm, their low-power warp drive is still mostly an interplanetary drive, NOT an interstellar one (it's not quite powerful enough to get them to Alpha Centauri in a reasonable amount of time) and as such they wouldn't have an impulse drive capable of rapid interplanetary transit, only minor orbit changes.

 

[Timo]

On the other hand, we know that 21st century warp drive was capable of spanning significant intragalactic distances (at least when crew health was not a concern, as with Friendship 1). I'm not sure that Earth would choose to play safe; I could very well see them sending out a ship that was as good as they could make her to do something really breathtaking - in addition to having a few dozen "littoral exploration" vessels, too.

Earth vessels were doing out-of-system runs with the Charybdis and her ilk already, before warp became an option. As far as we can tell, warp drive is something you can slap onto a ship of arbitrary shape, as long as it's big enough for the arbitrary size. Something like the Charybdis would be a prime recipient for warp drive, then: not just all eggs in one basket, but a couple of chickens and a rooster as well, just to be on the safe side.

There'd no doubt be a competing school of exploration or three: people who build cheap ships with expensive fast warp drives, people who build super-survivable ships that crawl along, people who maximize cargo space so that they can best exploit what lies out there. Since Cochrane clearly didn't keep warp drive a personal or national secret, everybody would be trying out the endless possibilities. But the ship voted most likely to end up at the galactic rim would come from the ace-of-all-trades school of shipbuilding...

FWIW, we never learned how Earth originally viewed the loss of the Valiant. But we hear Earth was able to keep in contact with Friendship 1 across great distances (although not necessarily in anything approaching real time). Even if the Valiant had the ability to travel across great distances, Earth might still have a pretty good idea of where she was lost, then, resulting in the history books not believing that she would end up anywhere near the galactic borders - hence Kirk's disbelief. But add the magnetic storm, and perhaps a ship sent 400-500 lightyears out ended up 1,000 ly from Earth at the upper or lower edge of the galaxy...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[blssdwlf]

That doesn't sound right. If Kirk believed that it would have been impossible for impulse engines to get the Valiant there he would've stated it to be impossible to get back to an Earth base. Instead he says:

Captain's log, Star date 1312.9. Ship's condition, heading back on impulse power only. Main engines burned out. The ship's space warp ability gone. Earth bases which were only days away are now years in the distance.
​

From Kirk's original comment we can rule out the impulse engines unable to get the Valiant out there simply because they can get the impulse-only Enterprise back home.

I'm not sure I follow. Kirk is saying he can't get to those Earth bases, because they are years away now. And the Valiant couldn't have gotten to those anyway, because in all likelihood they didn't even exist 200 years prior.

Kirk only says it will take alot longer to get back to an Earth base. He says they "are now years in the distance" but does not say "are now impossible to reach in our lifetime, or at all."

If we were to look at the Valiant 200 years prior who got out there in the first place and were on their way back I doubt they even had a warp drive to burn out

Impulse is not a viable means of traveling between stars in either case.

Well, not as fast as a high speed warp driven ship but it might be viable:

Stardate 9521.6, Captain's log, U.S.S. Excelsior. Hikaru Sulu commanding. After three years I've concluded my first assignment as master of this vessel, cataloging gaseous planetary anomalies in the Beta Quadrant. We're heading home under full impulse power. I am pleased to report that ship and crew have functioned well.
​

After all, how viable was it for freighters to scoot between stars at a lowly Warp 2 back in TOS?

As to Kirk's "impossible" log statement, he doesn't express specifically that the Valiant could not have made it out that far.

Then what is impossible? The picking up of a signal from a recorder marker? Does Kirk not trust his communications equipment to perform or what?

Other "impossible" possibilities:

Impossible odds of finding a ship that has been missing 200 years?
Impossible that 200 years ago Earth would have sent a ship to leave the galaxy?

Not unseen, either, as there are no instances of high impulse movement for any significant lengths of time or distance.

Does Excelsior "heading home" on "full impulse power" count?

Although technically, we've not seen any instances of high sub-light speed travel with impulse engines for significant lengths or distance.

We do have instances of high impulse power at either SL or FTL speeds in "The Doomsday Machine". Should we have seen some time dilation issues crop up between conversations between the Enterprise and Constellation?

Interestingly, our heroes usually don't know what the time is. In "Clues" and "Cause and Effect", they have to ask an external source, a "Federation timebase" broadcasting through beacons. This sort of suggests that unreliability of onboard clocks is an acknowledged issue (and I don't think our heroes would settle for clocks that are unreliable technologically). Also, time travel doesn't raise eyebrows even in earliest TOS, even though the specific means of achieving it in "The Naked Time" is suggested to be unique and pathfinding.

Although the unreliability of clocks can happen at warp speed as witnessed from the wormhole effect in TMP. The time beacons could be to synchronize these variances caused by warp or impulse travel and/or act as navigation aids for calculating star movement...

A complete takeover would not involve converting the rest of the crew into fellow Gods. One might well speculate on several months of desperate resistance to near-absolute slavery, culminating in successful self-destruct.

True. Although at the rate specified for Mitchell, he would've been completely unstoppable after a month. Perhaps even a self-destruct might not have stopped him (or he could've seen it coming even more early on.) That's why I figure for the crew of the Valiant they would've been powerless after a month.

Kirk never got around to thinking about blowing up his own ship, either!

But he did get quickly around to thinking about rigging the fuel bins on Delta Vega to explode which would've killed him and everyone in the station to stop Mitchell. Imagine if they were still stuck in space past those "few days" instead of going to Delta Vega...

I don't deny that it passed the barrier on the way back into the galaxy. I just point out that it had to also pass through the barrier when it was swept out.

And that's debatable as well. Kirk sailed into the barrier because he felt it was his mission to find out whether that's safe or not. But nothing establishes he couldn't have flown around it just as well. And certainly the barrier looks like it could be avoided if need be.

In "WNMHGB", Kirk goes into and out of the barrier because it's his duty. In "Is There In Truth No Beauty?", the ship is deliberately taken there (or beyond?) by a madman. It is only in "By Any Other Name" where the Kelvans first stumble on the barrier by accident but also feel they have to brave it on their way back out. But perhaps they are just stupid? Our heroes certainly aren't motivated to tell them about potential other ways out of the galaxy.

In "Is There In Truth No Beauty?", Spock says that they crossed it on the way out:

SPOCK: Unfortunately, we lack reference points on which to plot a return course. We experienced extreme sensory distortion, and we shall do so again if we attempt to use warp speed. And we cannot re-cross the barrier using sub light speed.
​

But notice this little nugget:

"And we cannot re-cross the barrier using sub light speed."

Valiant's impulse engines had to have been capable of FTL speed.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

On the other hand, we know that 21st century warp drive was capable of spanning significant intragalactic distances (at least when crew health was not a concern, as with Friendship 1).

So are NORMAL spacecraft with no warp drive at all. But doing so in a reasonable amount of time -- that is, fast enough for the crew not to starve to death before they get anywhere -- is another matter entirely.

With 21st century technology, we're basically talking about sticking something like this on top of Zephram Cochrane's (or for that matter, Friendship 1's) propulsion stack. At warp one, this spacecraft would be able to reach neptune in about four hours (probably a bit longer) or could conduct a whole grand tour of the solar system -- warping between points of interest at regular intervals -- in about two months. If there's anything really special for them to look at in the outer Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud (some long period comets need surveying?) they could manage that too. But there's just no way a craft like this is going to be setup for interstellar voyages, unless of course the Valiant had a crew of robots.

I'm not sure that Earth would choose to play safe; I could very well see them sending out a ship that was as good as they could make her to do something really breathtaking - in addition to having a few dozen "littoral exploration" vessels, too.

This is the same Earth that was depicted in Enterprise, whose Starfleet service was seen asking the Vulcans for permission to continue operating one of their own ships. If they had the kind of ambition to pull off some kind of "Alpha Centauri or bust!" mission, I'd be VERY surprised.

Earth vessels were doing out-of-system runs with the Charybdis and her ilk already, before warp became an option.

Truly, but not with a destination for other star systems. By all accounts, Charybdis grew out of the DY-100 class sleeper ships that solved the travel time problem by freeze-drying the crew. Its arrival in the far reaches of space is somewhat harder to explain than the Valiant's, but not quite as hard as the Botany Bay, though it stands to reason all three ships were ejected from the solar system under similar circumstances.

FWIW, we never learned how Earth originally viewed the loss of the Valiant. But we hear Earth was able to keep in contact with Friendship 1 across great distances (although not necessarily in anything approaching real time). Even if the Valiant had the ability to travel across great distances, Earth might still have a pretty good idea of where she was lost, then, resulting in the history books not believing that she would end up anywhere near the galactic borders - hence Kirk's disbelief. But add the magnetic storm, and perhaps a ship sent 400-500 lightyears out...

You were making sense right up until this point. Since Valiant would not have been equipped with subspace radio, AND since the ship's top speed would be pretty limited at that point, there's NO possibility that the ship could have traveled that far -- or even a tenth that distance -- in the time allotted. What we're really debating here is how far the ship could have traveled when it encountered that magnetic storm, whether it was at the edge of the solar system or slightly beyond; there isn't a lot of room for interpretation of the fact that, like the various other 21st century relics (Botany Bay, Charybdis, Voyager 6, Ares IV, etc) it could not have gotten to its final destination under its own power.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

But notice this little nugget:

"And we cannot re-cross the barrier using sub light speed."

Valiant's impulse engines had to have been capable of FTL speed.

Not necessarily. We're overlooking the fact that crossing the barrier ceases to produce psychotic god-men on all subsequent crossing events, as it clearly did for both Enterprise and Valiant on their first encounter. No explanation for this is ever given, UNLESS you assume that crossing the barrier at high warp allows you to slip through it before your crew/instruments/drive gets baked by the funky radiation in the field. IOW, the only way to cross the barrier -- and not accidentally nerf your navigator into a demigod -- is to maintain a minimal warp factor as you push through it.

Enterprise' first voyage into the barrier, IIRC, reduced to sublight speed so as to be cautious. Valiant probably didn't have a choice; it either lacked the ability to reach sufficient barrier-crossing speed, or lacked warp drive altogether.

 

[Timo]

We're heading home under full impulse power.

Well, of course they are, because they have just finished their mission not two seconds ago. Sulu's science officer is telling his CO that the mission has been completed in the very same scene; hitting warp at that point would be deserting one's post!

That Sulu even need specify that he is heading home under impulse power is already good indication that things are gonna change soon...

After all, how viable was it for freighters to scoot between stars at a lowly Warp 2 back in TOS?

How is that related to anything? And we have no evidence that warp 2 is "lowly". For all we know, it's five hundred times lightspeed or something like that.

Impossible odds of finding a ship that has been missing 200 years?
Impossible that 200 years ago Earth would have sent a ship to leave the galaxy?

The first is an option. The second... There's no indication that Kirk would lack access to information on what sort of ships were launched two centuries prior and what not. Certainly a mission at that early stage would be a celebrated one (and a possible failure would probably be followed by further attempts, in light of all later evidence about the timeline).

Does Excelsior "heading home" on "full impulse power" count?

Very definitely not, because no long distances or durations are involved.

We do have instances of high impulse power at either SL or FTL speeds in "The Doomsday Machine". Should we have seen some time dilation issues crop up between conversations between the Enterprise and Constellation?

Good question. The choreography of that battle is subject to some debate, so the evidence could go either way. Also "helpful" is the relative lack of communications: contact is only made intermittently, and when the two ships are at relative standstill due to damage or a hiatus in action.

Perhaps even a self-destruct might not have stopped him (or he could've seen it coming even more early on.)

One wonders if he or she was stopped... The Valiant records couldn't tell, as they end with the self-destruct.

But he did get quickly around to thinking about rigging the fuel bins on Delta Vega to explode which would've killed him and everyone in the station to stop Mitchell.

Hmh? Is there any reason Kirk and everyone else could not have evacuated before the explosion?

But notice this little nugget:

"And we cannot re-cross the barrier using sub light speed."

Valiant's impulse engines had to have been capable of FTL speed.

Does not follow. We still lack any and all evidence that the Valiant would have used impulse engines for crossing the barrier. All we know she used impulse engines for, as per Kirk's speculation at least, was an attempt to get out of the magnetic storm. Warp could have gotten the ship out into deep interstellar space, into the storm, and finally back through the barrier.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Timo]

But there's just no way a craft like this is going to be setup for interstellar voyages, unless of course the Valiant had a crew of robots.

That's a moot point, because "a craft like that" explicitly crossed a quadrant in a few decades. We can only speculate that the craft would have been unable to carry a crew, for whatever reason; equally possible is that the craft was flown unmanned solely because it was not expected to return.

This is the same Earth that was depicted in Enterprise, whose Starfleet service was seen asking the Vulcans for permission to continue operating one of their own ships. If they had the kind of ambition to pull off some kind of "Alpha Centauri or bust!" mission, I'd be VERY surprised.

Remember that this is after almost a century of Vulcan "oppression", during which our valiant mankind has discovered that all the real estate at a certain practicable radius around Earth has already been taken or is useless and uninteresting, and the real estate beyond this radius keeps swallowing ships. The NX project is the way out, the propulsive breakthrough needed to tame the space beyond that limiting radius combined with the evolved armaments needed to survive. It's a natural culmination of ambition-fueled gaining of experiences; had there not been preceding ambition, there would now be just a shot in the dark rather than a mature design on par with the threats.

By all accounts, Charybdis grew out of the DY-100 class sleeper ships that solved the travel time problem by freeze-drying the crew.

...And she did that by making cryosleep unnecessary thanks to improved propulsion, as we specifically learn in "Space Seed". If ships could zip between Earth and Mars in a week in "One Small Step", and DY-100 technology was considered outdated in the late 1990s and completely antiquated in 2018, it seems Earth had honed sublight propulsion to perfection. Why leave that on the pier when embarking in interstellar space with warp drive?

Its arrival in the far reaches of space is somewhat harder to explain than the Valiant's, but not quite as hard as the Botany Bay, though it stands to reason all three ships were ejected from the solar system under similar circumstances.

I see nothing in common between the three cases. The Botany Bay was assumed to have sailed out under her own power, the Charybdis was assumed to have been abducted by alien means, and the Valiant was said to have been swept off course by a magnetic storm. Moreover, all three represented discrete eras of space propulsion capabilities: pre-2018, post-2018 but pre-2063, and post-2063, respectively.

Since Valiant would not have been equipped with subspace radio, AND since the ship's top speed would be pretty limited at that point, there's NO possibility that the ship could have traveled that far

Subspace radio or not, Friendship 1 was able to maintain contact across at least thousands and probably tens of thousands of lightyears, thus necessarily at significant FTL speeds. Naturally, Valiant should enjoy comparable capabilities.

How to explain the apparent contradiction?

Hmm. In both cases, it would suffice for plot purposes to have a FTL locator signal rather than actual transfer of information. Perhaps it is possible to monitor the warp signature of a vessel, especially a primitive one struggling at the limits of her engine capabilities, across considerable distances if one carefully keeps her crosshaired from start to finish? Or perhaps some sort of a quantum-coupling device can relay location information FTL (possibly instantaneously), but in a manner that makes transfer of information (coherent modulation of signal) either fundamentally impossible, or technologically demanding enough to reduce the value of the device in communications?

Although it should also be noted that there is no evidence for the lack of subspace radio in the 21st century. To the contrary, we see subspace radio in regular use in the mid-22nd, well before the only ambiguous reference to lack of subspace communications in "A Piece of the Action" - making it necessary to dismiss that reference as a limitation in the coverage of the system, not as an indication of the absence of the system.

Really, everything we have seen seems to speak against a gradual expansion of mankind's starflight capabilities. Rather, it all seems to have been poured on our platter in one or two ginormous helpings - which is only natural when we realize that the initial acquisition of this capability opens the heavens to interstellar exchange of knowledge and technology.

We are needlessly shooting ourselves in the foot if we insist that ships before Kirk's were markedly inferior. "In a Mirror, Darkly" establishes what "markedly inferior" means in practice: our villains are in awe of the capabilities of the 2260s starship while themselves operating a vessel whose capabilities we can observe to be almost identical. If this is a giant leap, then it becomes all the more likely that preceding developments have been minor, and Earth starships really were very capable from the very start.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[yenny]

Here something about NASA working on a Impulse engine. It dated back in April.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/04/possible-breakthroughs-to-over-250000.html

 

[blssdwlf]

But notice this little nugget:

"And we cannot re-cross the barrier using sub light speed."

Valiant's impulse engines had to have been capable of FTL speed.

Not necessarily. We're overlooking the fact that crossing the barrier ceases to produce psychotic god-men on all subsequent crossing events, as it clearly did for both Enterprise and Valiant on their first encounter.

Actually, it was only after the Enterprise reported back what happened that we noticed the ESP problem disappear on subsequent crossings. Valiant never had a chance to warn the Enterprise of exactly what happened and thus it was impacted with the god-men problem. A simple explanation could be with the Federation, let's say Galaxy warned, precautions had been taken to prevent this. ESP crew could be stuck on shore duty, deflectors modified to automatically block the negative energy, etc.

Enterprise' first voyage into the barrier, IIRC, reduced to sublight speed so as to be cautious. Valiant probably didn't have a choice; it either lacked the ability to reach sufficient barrier-crossing speed, or lacked warp drive altogether.

The Enterprise was at warp when Mitchell and Dehner got zapped.

"Where No Man Has Gone Before":

KIRK: That's probably the best argument to continue the probe. Other vessels will be heading out here someday and they'll have to know what they'll be facing. We're leaving the galaxy, Mister Mitchell. Ahead, warp factor one.
​

We're heading home under full impulse power.

Well, of course they are, because they have just finished their mission not two seconds ago. Sulu's science officer is telling his CO that the mission has been completed in the very same scene; hitting warp at that point would be deserting one's post!

Then Sulu would have said, "We're on station at full impulse power" instead of "We're heading home under full impulse power."

That Sulu even need specify that he is heading home under impulse power is already good indication that things are gonna change soon...

Why? Is he going to go, "Helmsman, I meant we should be heading home under warp power. Take us to Warp! Computer, revise last log entry..."

After all, how viable was it for freighters to scoot between stars at a lowly Warp 2 back in TOS?

How is that related to anything? And we have no evidence that warp 2 is "lowly". For all we know, it's five hundred times lightspeed or something like that.

You asked how viable impulse engines would have been to scoot between stars. I believe from a TOS-perspective that impulse engines could move at a slow FTL speed and Warp 2 would be a decent comparison or upper range since Kirk's log suggest a ~400x-1000x difference between Warp and Impulse which is not alot considering that TOS Warp between stars was in the +100,000c range.

The first is an option. The second... There's no indication that Kirk would lack access to information on what sort of ships were launched two centuries prior and what not. Certainly a mission at that early stage would be a celebrated one (and a possible failure would probably be followed by further attempts, in light of all later evidence about the timeline).

True. But to build on your comment, the failure might have been relegated as a footnote missed on the first database search. Spock's first run about Captain Christopher didn't connect the dots on the first pass...

Very definitely not, because no long distances or durations are involved.

Going home from the Beta Quadrant seems like a long distance. They might have been cruising at impulse for a while already since Sulu notes:

SULU: According to this we've completed our exploration of the entire sector.
​

Good question. The choreography of that battle is subject to some debate, so the evidence could go either way. Also "helpful" is the relative lack of communications: contact is only made intermittently, and when the two ships are at relative standstill due to damage or a hiatus in action.

I'll give you that although I highly doubt that anyship was at a "relative standstill" since the Enterprise was running away from the DM at impulse and the Constellation was moving to rendezvous with the Enterprise at impulse.

But he did get quickly around to thinking about rigging the fuel bins on Delta Vega to explode which would've killed him and everyone in the station to stop Mitchell.

Hmh? Is there any reason Kirk and everyone else could not have evacuated before the explosion?

Well, Kelso would've been killed at the minimum...

KIRK: If Mitchell gets out, at your discretion, Lee, if sitting here, you think you're the last chance, I want you to hit that button.
​

But notice this little nugget:

"And we cannot re-cross the barrier using sub light speed."

Valiant's impulse engines had to have been capable of FTL speed.

Does not follow. We still lack any and all evidence that the Valiant would have used impulse engines for crossing the barrier. All we know she used impulse engines for, as per Kirk's speculation at least, was an attempt to get out of the magnetic storm. Warp could have gotten the ship out into deep interstellar space, into the storm, and finally back through the barrier.

The problem with Valiant having warp drive is the lack of evidence. Instead, the only evidence we have is that her old impulse engines were also able to go FTL.

1. Lack of warp engine use mentioned - Her old impulse engines were not strong enough to fight the magnetic storm. We know warp engines can. Since they didn't use warp engines to fight the storm, that is one against having warp drive on the Valiant.
2. Barrier can only be crossed at FTL speed - "Is There In Truth No Beauty" flat out tells us that the barrier cannot be re-crossed at sub light speed. Notice Spock doesn't say cannot be re-crossed at impulse speed. Valiant would have to be able to re-cross at FTL speeds.
3. Enterprise could make it back to an Earth base on impulse power - "WNMHGB" has the Enterprise's ETA for reaching an Earth base in the years which was doable. For comparison, "days away" at interstellar warp speed would be like traveling 1000's of LY from a TOS perspective.

 

[Timo]

Why? Is he going to go, "Helmsman, I meant we should be heading home under warp power. Take us to Warp! Computer, revise last log entry..."

Since "going home" clearly isn't sufficient for Sulu's entry, then "under impulse power" must be a special event literally worth writing home about.

You asked how viable impulse engines would have been to scoot between stars. I believe from a TOS-perspective that impulse engines could move at a slow FTL speed and Warp 2 would be a decent comparison or upper range since Kirk's log suggest a ~400x-1000x difference between Warp and Impulse which is not alot considering that TOS Warp between stars was in the +100,000c range.

I don't think we can derive any speed estimate from "bases are years away", as we have no idea where the bases are. In fact, one happens to be right next to our heroes, making the entire propulsion issue moot! Nor is there much reason to think that a base "years away" would be reachable at all - it's pretty much the same as saying "a chasm a few meters across is now kilometers wide", i.e. cannot be crossed no matter what.

Going home from the Beta Quadrant seems like a long distance.

But it does not happen. The movie does not feature an impulse run of long duration or long distance, any more than ST4:TVH features a warp run of long duration or long distance. It just happens to feature an impulse run which doesn't take long.

Well, Kelso would've been killed at the minimum...

...Unless Kirk had him evacuated before Mitchell broke out, which was the actual plan.

The problem with Valiant having warp drive is the lack of evidence. Instead, the only evidence we have is that her old impulse engines were also able to go FTL.

We have no reason to doubt the presence of warp drive on a ship that is run by folks who ran warp drives before and after the specified period, onboard comparable vessels.

OTOH, lack of warp engine use is specific and temporary in this episode, only applying to a magnetic storm and not discussed in connection with the barrier phenomenon at all.

Of course, writers of this introductory episode most certainly thought in terms of impulse being the older version of warp, or perhaps just an older name for warp - a futuristic way of flying to the stars in any case. But it's in the greater Trek context that the idea of the Valiant lacking warp drive becomes near-impossible to accept, negating all the arguments for impulse being capable of FTL or interstellar travel.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

But there's just no way a craft like this is going to be setup for interstellar voyages, unless of course the Valiant had a crew of robots.

That's a moot point, because "a craft like that" explicitly crossed a quadrant in a few decades. We can only speculate that the craft would have been unable to carry a crew, for whatever reason; equally possible is that the craft was flown unmanned solely because it was not expected to return.

If you're referring to Friendship 1, this wouldn't follow logically; you could replace the instrument package with a crew module easily enough, but unless you also plan to install some replicators and a holographic doctor there's simply no way you can fit a few decades worth of supplies on that same module. Your alternative solution is to cryogenically preserve two astronauts in a space capsule and send them into the heavens, which is 1) kind of a shitty thing to do two a couple of astronauts and 2) definitely NOT what the Valiant was.

Indications are Valiant was a larger vessel with a somewhat sizeable crew. Not as large as Enterprise, of course, but at least a dozen on board -- almost certainly more -- with an onboard library computer that was likely to have records on things like ESP. Given that the TYPE of vessel is at least vaguely established, the one thing we can be sure of is that Valiant could not have possessed the technology -- propulsive OR logistical -- to make an interstellar voyage feasible. IOW, if it hadn't been for the sparkly-eyed demigod, they probably would have starved to death in the wastes of space.

Of course, the demigod crewman probably could have kept them alive indefinitely. You know, repeatedly eviscerating them and then putting them back together, just to be funny.

Remember that this is after almost a century of Vulcan "oppression", during which our valiant mankind has discovered that all the real estate at a certain practicable radius around Earth has already been taken or is useless and uninteresting

That's just it, "Vulcan oppression" is a strictly Starfleet point of view. The kinds of ambitious pioneers pushing into deep space for the first time had names like "Mayweather" and took to the stars in ships that took years just to get anywhere interesting; this seventy years AFTER the invention of warp drive.

Valiant is about 50 years too early to be a Boomer, or even one of their predecessors.

...And she did that by making cryosleep unnecessary thanks to improved propulsion, as we specifically learn in "Space Seed". If ships could zip between Earth and Mars in a week in "One Small Step", and DY-100 technology was considered outdated in the late 1990s and completely antiquated in 2018, it seems Earth had honed sublight propulsion to perfection. Why leave that on the pier when embarking in interstellar space with warp drive?

For the same reason the space shuttle wasn't equipped with a turboramjet: it wasn't feasible or necessary for its mission profile.

I see nothing in common between the three cases. The Botany Bay was assumed to have sailed out under her own power

No such assumption is made; when they first encountered the ship, they had NO IDEA how it got there and, in the end, didn't really care (Spock even theorized that it was an old Earth vessel being used by aliens). The cryogenically preserved crew was considerably more interesting, by which point the Botany Bay was utterly irrelevant.

It's a Trekism. Kinda like how nobody ever asks how Miri's planet could possibly exist, they just kind of think "This planet is an EXACT duplicate of Earth... that's kinda weird."

Subspace radio or not, Friendship 1 was able to maintain contact across at least thousands and probably tens of thousands of lightyears, thus necessarily at significant FTL speeds.

Which once again highlights the fundamental problems we encounter whenever we decide to take Voyager seriously.

We are needlessly shooting ourselves in the foot if we insist that ships before Kirk's were markedly inferior. "In a Mirror, Darkly" establishes what "markedly inferior" means in practice: our villains are in awe of the capabilities of the 2260s starship while themselves operating a vessel whose capabilities we can observe to be almost identical. If this is a giant leap, then it becomes all the more likely that preceding developments have been minor, and Earth starships really were very capable from the very start.

Except the difference between NX-01 and the Constitution class is almost as great as the difference between NX-01 and the Valiant. As it stands, Archer's Enterprise is implied to be the first ship capable of practical interstellar exploration (all other vessels don't have the range to explore, they can only travel between well-defined destinations and have little if any margin for detour). Thus we could assume Valiant purposefully launched itself into deep space if and only if the ship was going someplace very specific -- like a newly discovered Earthlike planet -- and then if it was assumed to be a one-way trip like the Terra Nova mission.

Otherwise, Valiant's timeframe fits as a logical predecessor to NX-01, at which time humans haven't even finished exploring -- let alone colonizing -- their own solar system. Basically, an intrepid-type starship with a warp one engine for whose "strange new worlds" would be places like Ceres, Vesta, Callisto, Triton, Pluto, Eris, etc.

Of course, this being the Trekiverse I DO concede that some human mission could have slapped a warp engine onto a submarine and shot it into space with the intention of aimlessly blundering around until they found something interesting. THAT would certainly be consistent with Starfleet's slightly more refined mission parameters in the Warp Five program.

 

[blssdwlf]

Why? Is he going to go, "Helmsman, I meant we should be heading home under warp power. Take us to Warp! Computer, revise last log entry..."

Since "going home" clearly isn't sufficient for Sulu's entry, then "under impulse power" must be a special event literally worth writing home about.

This is Sulu's way of making an excuse for being late to the annual SFHQ bowling tournament Still doesn't change the fact that he's going home on impulse power.

I don't think we can derive any speed estimate from "bases are years away", as we have no idea where the bases are. In fact, one happens to be right next to our heroes, making the entire propulsion issue moot!

Delta Vega isn't considered an Earth base, well at least not from any dialog from the episode. Was there such a line that said so?

Nor is there much reason to think that a base "years away" would be reachable at all - it's pretty much the same as saying "a chasm a few meters across is now kilometers wide", i.e. cannot be crossed no matter what.

That's a leap. If there were no reachable Earth bases, it would have been mentioned how dire their circumstances were. Kirk's example is a problem of time not distance, which from the dialog does not appear insurmountable. From the dialog, being trapped in orbit around Delta Vega sounded worse than taking the slow journey back to an Earth base.

But it does not happen. The movie does not feature an impulse run of long duration or long distance, any more than ST4:TVH features a warp run of long duration or long distance. It just happens to feature an impulse run which doesn't take long.

Well, do we know that Sulu did or did not complete his voyage home on impulse power?

Well, Kelso would've been killed at the minimum...

...Unless Kirk had him evacuated before Mitchell broke out, which was the actual plan.

Of course. The question was how long before Kirk thought about needing to setup a fail safe to kill everyone to prevent Mitchell from escaping/reaching Earth. It happened pretty quickly from the time Mitchell was zapped to their arrival on Delta Vega.

The problem with Valiant having warp drive is the lack of evidence. Instead, the only evidence we have is that her old impulse engines were also able to go FTL.

We have no reason to doubt the presence of warp drive on a ship that is run by folks who ran warp drives before and after the specified period, onboard comparable vessels.

But we have no reason to assume that warp engines would be present on a starship even if the starfaring race had warp drive to begin with. Especially from a TOS-perspective:

1. Starfleet ion-engine shuttlecraft could keep up with the Enterprise (for a while) as she warped away from a Starbase in "The Menagerie".
2. Ion propulsion ship from "Spock's Brain" made a Warp 6 equivalent journey back to their home planet.
3. Impulse powered Enterprise, Romulan Bird of Prey and even Excelsior were to undertake a journey home on Impulse power only. ("WNHMGB", "Balance of Terror", "ST6")

OTOH, lack of warp engine use is specific and temporary in this episode, only applying to a magnetic storm and not discussed in connection with the barrier phenomenon at all.

On the other hand, the episode makes zero mention of the Valiant using warp drive at all.

Of course, writers of this introductory episode most certainly thought in terms of impulse being the older version of warp, or perhaps just an older name for warp - a futuristic way of flying to the stars in any case. But it's in the greater Trek context that the idea of the Valiant lacking warp drive becomes near-impossible to accept, negating all the arguments for impulse being capable of FTL or interstellar travel.

Yet to call in "the greater Trek context" in such a broad stroke already negates itself. Which Trek context do you mean?

• The one where Kirk dies on Enterprise-B with Scotty as witness or the one where he lives past Scotty's disappearance on the Jenolan?
• The context where Cochrane discovers the space warp and is revered across the galaxy or the one where he merely helps Earth make first contact with every other alien race that came up with warp drive before him?
• The context where cloaking devices were first encountered by the Enterprise in TOS or the one where cloaking devices were prevalent even in an earlier timeframe in the TNG-ENT continuity?

In the TOS-continuity, and even up till Star Trek 6 in the TOS movie-continuity, having FTL-impulse would not be unusual. Plus if you include "The Best of Both Worlds" and "Conspiracy" in TNG there would be enough evidence to suggest even early-TNG thinking had that possibility as well.

 

[Timo]

Alpha:

If you're referring to Friendship 1, this wouldn't follow logically; you could replace the instrument package with a crew module easily enough, but unless you also plan to install some replicators and a holographic doctor there's simply no way you can fit a few decades worth of supplies on that same module.

Friendship 1 defies that in several ways. For one, an engine capable of galactic-scale transit in mere decades would make supplies almost irrelevant: the Valiant could undertake missions to the depth of hundreds of lightyears with the knowledge that they could go back for more ham sandwiches or fresh air on a timescale of mere months. For another, the technologies that preceded the introduction of warp would already have resulted in mastery of long term life support; since mere years rather than decades of endurance would be required on a "medium" trip to stars, 1990s technology could already answer all the challenges involved.

Indications are Valiant was a larger vessel with a somewhat sizeable crew.

Actually, we have zero indication on how large Friendship 1 was. Its considerable range and speed could well imply a vessel larger than Kirk's. The Valiant could achieve a lot with significantly less, then.

The kinds of ambitious pioneers pushing into deep space for the first time had names like "Mayweather" and took to the stars in ships that took years just to get anywhere interesting; this seventy years AFTER the invention of warp drive.

OTOH, immediately after the discovery of warp, a ship sailed in less than a decade to a location 20 ly away to establish a colony. With just a slight change of balance between propulsion, cargo capacity and endurance, the Valiant could have done so much more.

Essentially, it very much seems that Earth had every element needed for interstellar exploration in place but a FTL drive system. And when that became available, it could simply be slapped on to existing vessels to immediately turn them into capable deep space explorers. If anything was casualty to the postwar chaos, it could have been optimization: mankind would have sailed to the stars in suboptimally overcapable vessels because there was no time or money to trim down the capabilities.

For the same reason the space shuttle wasn't equipped with a turboramjet: it wasn't feasible or necessary for its mission profile.

The shuttle was built; the Valiant might just have been reassigned. And the people building the shuttle were cheapskates, while the people creating the Valiant would have been scavenging from the rich droppings of a global war. Going interstellar had apparently been long on the agenda, as evidenced by the Charybdis or the NOMAD probe; warp just made it easier.

No such assumption is made; when they first encountered the ship, they had NO IDEA how it got there

No such lack of idea is indicated. Our heroes just make a series of bad guesses - and the one that comes anywhere close to indicating that an Earth vessel should not have gotten here is "It could hardly be an Earth ship. There have been no flights into this sector for years[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]".[/FONT] So the phrase essentially confirms that Earth vessels of bygone years did come here, and easily enough not to warrant any comment!

When the type of vessel is identified, our heroes do not launch into speculation on how such a type could have gotten here despite its design specs. Rather, it apparently is considered natural for this type to be found in deep space (only not in this specific location)! It is only when cryogenically stored occupants are observed that our heroes begin to consider this ship unusual again.

Except the difference between NX-01 and the Constitution class is almost as great as the difference between NX-01 and the Valiant.

That is, almost nil.

Oh, the villains talk a lot about how impressed they are. But the two ships in the episode still perform alike, the only observable differences being in the relative punching power of the weapons and the ability of the shields to deal with that.

As it stands, Archer's Enterprise is implied to be the first ship capable of practical interstellar exploration (all other vessels don't have the range to explore, they can only travel between well-defined destinations and have little if any margin for detour).

Naah. Boomer ships of the time detour easily enough - they're tramps, after all. Archer's ship just has the threshold range to go beyond that which is known to be uninteresting or unavailable: it adds to the selection of available worlds by increasing the radius.

The Valiant could have been in the exact same position in the 2060s, with a specific volume of space around Earth known to be uninteresting thanks to STL probing, but with a vast universe outside open to exploration that would be spearheaded by these manned vessels because nobody had any patience for warp-powered probes.

humans haven't even finished exploring -- let alone colonizing -- their own solar system.

Why do that when there are Class M worlds ripe for the taking farther out? Only after the failure of Terra Nova would it make sense to try and eke out a living at Mars or Ceres. AFAWK, the asteroids were never settled or even exploited in the Trek universe, because it was faster and cheaper to haul in raw materials from other stars. Carol Marcus seems to even be saying that food is hauled across the interstellar gulf regularly enough, in a scale to make a difference in a famine.

this being the Trekiverse

A major aspect there being that space would not be "experimental" in the slightest. We would know that all sorts of weird spacemen traveled there regularly enough and, instead of exchanging secrets of the universe in exciting encounters between explorers, used their interstellar technology for the selling of beverages! Earth would quite probably feel the urge to skip a step or fifty in getting its slice of the pie.

Blssdwlf:

Still doesn't change the fact that he's going home on impulse power.

...Like Kirk or Picard did at the end of so many episodes? There's nothing indicating permanence when a hero decides to start a voyage at a specific speed. "Move out, warp one" or "Going home, impulse" are both simply plausible preludes to "All right, helm, now ease us to warp seven. Everybody, take five.".

Delta Vega isn't considered an Earth base, well at least not from any dialog from the episode. Was there such a line that said so?

Then what is it?

In any case, it's the answer to Kirk's prayers before he even voices them: the presence of this facility right next door does not come as a surprise to him or anything. Besides, there are still repairs ongoing with the main engines, and Kelso is yet to declare that these will not bear fruit.

Well, do we know that Sulu did or did not complete his voyage home on impulse power?

Based on everything we know about Star Trek, this would be an extremely odd thing to assume, akin to thinking that Kirk is going to spend the whole year in Sickbay if he tells Spock he's going there right now.

This single utterance simply doesn't carry any weight as "evidence" for impulse being an interstellar drive in Star Trek. The writers of the movie did not think it would be one, and did not use it as one in other scenes. For it to be one would mean inconsistency with the rest of Star Trek, all of it - just barely possibly the pilot episode excluded. And if the option exists for treating the pilot as consistent with the regular show, this option should be taken, rather than an attempt to emphasize the uniqueness of the pathfinding episode.

But we have no reason to assume that warp engines would be present on a starship even if the starfaring race had warp drive to begin with. Especially from a TOS-perspective:

We have no reason to assume that Kirk would possess a tricorder at the time, either. Or that Spock could do a mind meld. But only because of the extremely narrow perspective of this being a pilot episode. In the greater scheme of things, any hint that impulse can do FTL is ambiguous at best, and can be quite trivially dismissed in favor of the overarching assumption that when FTL takes place, humans do it with warp drive.

Starfleet ion-engine shuttlecraft could keep up with the Enterprise (for a while) as she warped away from a Starbase in "The Menagerie".

There's absolutely nothing to equate ion power with impulse propulsion, or the lack of warp drive.

Ion propulsion ship from "Spock's Brain" made a Warp 6 equivalent journey back to their home planet.

There's absolutely nothing to equate ion power with impulse propulsion, or the lack of warp drive.

Impulse powered Enterprise, Romulan Bird of Prey and even Excelsior were to undertake a journey home on Impulse power only.

The first and third didn't happen; the second was only Scotty's misguided assumption.

In the TOS-continuity, and even up till Star Trek 6 in the TOS movie-continuity, having FTL-impulse would not be unusual.

To the contrary, it never happened within those time brackets. Not unless one deliberately wants to pervert specific dialogue to support this idea, which goes contrary to the very spirit of the warp-impulse division in "Where No Man" already: warp gets you home, mere impulse dooms you.

Plus if you include "The Best of Both Worlds" and "Conspiracy" in TNG there would be enough evidence to suggest even early-TNG thinking had that possibility as well.

Never attribute to thinking what you can attribute to carelessness. It would be an immense stretch to think the writers did the math in "BoBW" at all, let alone that they did it to a specific end...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[blssdwlf]

...Like Kirk or Picard did at the end of so many episodes? There's nothing indicating permanence when a hero decides to start a voyage at a specific speed. "Move out, warp one" or "Going home, impulse" are both simply plausible preludes to "All right, helm, now ease us to warp seven. Everybody, take five.".

Sulu's log entry does indicate a plan of action over a specified course. Sulu tells us that they are heading home and what propulsion method he will do this with. Your examples of Kirk giving orders at the end of an episode to "move out, warp one" are only short term orders with no long term goal. Sulu's has that permanence you ask for, your examples do not.

Stardate 9521.6, Captain's log, U.S.S. Excelsior. Hikaru Sulu commanding. After three years I've concluded my first assignment as master of this vessel, cataloguing gaseous planetary anomalies in the Beta Quadrant. We're heading home under full impulse power. I am pleased to report that ship and crew have functioned well.
​

Then what is it?

In any case, it's the answer to Kirk's prayers before he even voices them: the presence of this facility right next door does not come as a surprise to him or anything. Besides, there are still repairs ongoing with the main engines, and Kelso is yet to declare that these will not bear fruit.

What is it? It's a planet that has an automated lithium cracking station. It is not an Earth base.

SPOCK: Recommendation one. There's a planet a few light days away from here. Delta Vega. It has a lithium cracking station. We may be able to adapt some of its power packs to our engines.
​

Why didn't Kirk consider it or not like the idea of it? Because he knows they will be stuck for 20 years if they can't take the parts to repair the engines.

KIRK: And if we can't? We'll be trapped in orbit there. We haven't enough power to blast back out.
...
KIRK: If you mean strand Mitchell there, I won't do it. That station is fully automated. There's not a soul on the whole planet. Even the ore ships call only once every twenty years.
​

This single utterance simply doesn't carry any weight as "evidence" for impulse being an interstellar drive in Star Trek.

If it was only a single utterance, I'd agree with you. However, there are still other instances as mentioned before in TOS.

The writers of the movie did not think it would be one, and did not use it as one in other scenes. For it to be one would mean inconsistency with the rest of Star Trek, all of it - just barely possibly the pilot episode excluded.

I noticed you didn't address from previous reply which continuity you consider as the "rest of Star Trek". Perhaps you didn't notice that the whole of TOS is not consistent with TNG and the later productions?

And if the option exists for treating the pilot as consistent with the regular show, this option should be taken, rather than an attempt to emphasize the uniqueness of the pathfinding episode.

I am treating WNMHGB as consistent with TOS and the differences between TOS and TNG+, as noted before

But only because of the extremely narrow perspective of this being a pilot episode. In the greater scheme of things, any hint that impulse can do FTL is ambiguous at best, and can be quite trivially dismissed in favor of the overarching assumption that when FTL takes place, humans do it with warp drive.

In the greater scheme of things in TNG, perhaps. In the greater scheme of things in TOS, no, warp drive wasn't the only FTL-capable drive available to them.

There's absolutely nothing to equate ion power with impulse propulsion, or the lack of warp drive.

Sure there is. A Federation shuttlecraft and an alien ship with no warp drive were able to move FTL speeds. That negates your argument that Warp drive is the only option for moving FTL.

The first and third didn't happen; the second was only Scotty's misguided assumption.

Saying a character whose an expert in starship propulsion is wrong because you don't like it doesn't mean his analysis is wrong. If Scotty said it was "simple impulse" then that points strongly that not everyone in the galaxy used warp drive for interstellar travel. You could even look at the Romulans in "Balance of Terror" as even a view back into TOS' past in interstellar propulsion. Or further evidence that TOS isn't part of the TNG+ continuity.

In the TOS-continuity, and even up till Star Trek 6 in the TOS movie-continuity, having FTL-impulse would not be unusual.

To the contrary, it never happened within those time brackets. Not unless one deliberately wants to pervert specific dialogue to support this idea, which goes contrary to the very spirit of the warp-impulse division in "Where No Man" already: warp gets you home, mere impulse dooms you.

When does Kirk say "impulse dooms you"? He said it would take longer to get home - that is an inconvenience. Getting trapped in orbit around Delta Vega - that is a major inconvenience, maybe even in the "dooming" territory. But really, in TOS, getting stuck on impulse does not doom you unless you pick the wrong planet to try and fly to. Or get attacked by a warp driven starship

Plus if you include "The Best of Both Worlds" and "Conspiracy" in TNG there would be enough evidence to suggest even early-TNG thinking had that possibility as well.

Never attribute to thinking what you can attribute to carelessness. It would be an immense stretch to think the writers did the math in "BoBW" at all, let alone that they did it to a specific end...

LOL. A good portion of Trek Tech is devoted to addressing this carelessness in-universe I guess you could argue that in those TNG episodes the Borg and the E-D caught an FTL current while in the Terran system.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Friendship 1 defies that in several ways. For one, an engine capable of galactic-scale transit in mere decades would make supplies almost irrelevant: the Valiant could undertake missions to the depth of hundreds of lightyears with the knowledge that they could go back for more ham sandwiches or fresh air on a timescale of mere months.

Yes, the "mere months" during which you have to survive on three weeks worth of supplies.

Good luck with that.

For another, the technologies that preceded the introduction of warp would already have resulted in mastery of long term life support

But wouldn't suffice for combining that technology with the relatively untested and poorly-understood warp drive. More importantly, the cryosleep system is not something that has ever been described as widely used; in "The Neutral Zone" it is described as a fad, and the way they talk about the DY-100 class it's probably that none of the sleeper ships they sent into space ever MADE IT anywhere with their crews intact. This is probably because cryonics in general is a really bad idea, so much so that the Earth Cargo Service refrains from using it even on years-long voyages and instead prefers to just pack up heavy and rough it along the way.

Indications are Valiant was a larger vessel with a somewhat sizeable crew.

Actually, we have zero indication on how large Friendship 1 was. Its considerable range and speed could well imply a vessel larger than Kirk's.

While its DESIGN implies a vessel no larger than the Phoenix, which is exactly what it was meant to imply.

OTOH, immediately after the discovery of warp, a ship sailed in less than a decade to a location 20 ly away to establish a colony. With just a slight change of balance between propulsion, cargo capacity and endurance...

... the Valiant could have accomplished NX-01's mission eighty years earlier.

Those slight changes took a long time to perfect, and if the Terra Nova mission is any indication, jumping the gun on that process would have almost certainly doomed the expedition to a slow grim death in interstellar space. Again, I DO concede that given what we know of the Warp Five program its totally plausible that somebody decided to do exactly that and it was only the alarming rate at which Earth explorers were vanishing into the void that prompted the Vulcans to step in and force them to stop killing themselves.

Essentially, it very much seems that Earth had every element needed for interstellar exploration in place but a FTL drive system.

Going by your descriptions, that's been true of Earth since the 1960s. But sticking a couple of warp nacelles on the Apollo service module wouldn't produce a feasible interstellar expedition unless that expedition had been planned in the first place by a bunch of retards.

And I just don't buy that. The kinds of people who would be smart enough to understand and implement a warp drive system on a practical spacecraft wouldn't be stupid enough to send that ship on an interstellar voyage when 1) there are thousands of places in the solar system that remain unexplored and are much easier to reach and 2) a 21st century warp drive won't reach a habitable planet in anything less than a generation. That would be like Robert Goddard strapping a lawn chair to his proof-of-concept rocket and saying "Alright! We're ready to land on the moon!"

To backtrack a bit, you're proceeding from the assumption that the Botany Bay would have been a highly ambitious and clever space mission that represented the forefront of human spaceflight technology, when it's much more likely that the Botany Bay was purely a product of the Supermen themselves and their voyage into deep space was a total crapshoot that none of them expected to work but was ultimately preferable to being hunted down and killed by anti-Eugenics forces. I don't see Valiant having anywhere NEAR as good a reason to try to reach other stars, not while humanity was still reeling from the Post Atomic Horror and no human being had ever visited the asteroid belt or the Moons of Jupiter yet.

The shuttle was built; the Valiant might just have been reassigned. And the people building the shuttle were cheapskates, while the people creating the Valiant would have been scavenging from the rich droppings of a global war.

I'd describe the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust as many things, but "rich" aint one of them.

When the type of vessel is identified, our heroes do not launch into speculation on how such a type could have gotten here despite its design specs.

Or irrelevant, much like the origin of Miri's planet. "That seems completely impossible, but there it is" is basically Kirk's catch phrase throughout Season 1. And after seeing an exact duplicate of Earth and a bunch of aliens on a devastated planet reading the Declaration of Independence, I think his "Deal with it" supply was fully maxed out.

That is, almost nil.

If by "Nil" you mean the Constitution's to speed is at least three warp factors higher, that its weapons are ten times as strong, that its hull can withstand the NX's weapons fire even with its shields down, and that a single Constitution class makes short work of aggressor vessels that totally outmatch the NX-class... then in that case, the difference is indeed nil.

Naah. Boomer ships of the time detour easily enough - they're tramps, after all. Archer's ship just has the threshold range to go beyond that which is known to be uninteresting or unavailable

The Boomers seemed to think their trade partners were pretty damned interesting considering they spent several years making those interstellar caravans. Significantly, the routes BETWEEN those stars were equally interesting if the Nausicans are any indication.

I'll note, however, that Starfleet's rather fuzzy definition of "interesting" is consistent with the possibility that a whole series of deep space expeditions was being planned and executed by retards.

The Valiant could have been in the exact same position in the 2060s, with a specific volume of space around Earth known to be uninteresting thanks to STL probing

You, knowing what you do about space exploration, are smoking something pretty odd if you think any serious space mission would be undertaken by someone who can use the words "space" and "uninteresting" in the same sentence.

Why do that when there are Class M worlds ripe for the taking farther out?

Because 99% of the shit that real scientists find interesting DOESN'T involve M-class worlds. More importantly, nobody on Earth knew where those worlds were; that was, in fact, the entire point of NX-01's mission.

Only after the failure of Terra Nova would it make sense to try and eke out a living at Mars or Ceres. AFAWK, the asteroids were never settled or even exploited in the Trek universe...

They were in Deneva, so it's safe to assume they were in the Sol system too.

More importantly, Jupiter Station had to be built by SOMEONE, so obviously there had to be something pretty interesting in the Jupiter system to warrant its exploration and eventual colonization.

In the TOS-continuity, and even up till Star Trek 6 in the TOS movie-continuity, having FTL-impulse would not be unusual.

To the contrary, it never happened within those time brackets.

It explicitly DID in "Balance of Terror."

which goes contrary to the very spirit of the warp-impulse division in "Where No Man" already: warp gets you home, mere impulse dooms you.

Impulse doesn't doom you. GARY MITCHELL dooms you. If it hadn't been for Gary, there wouldn't be a question of whether or not they could make it to an Earth base before things went south; they had enough food and supplies to last that long, and it wouldn't be the last time Enteprise was stranded without warp drive either (as in "Paradise Syndrome" where it took them several months just to crawl back to the planet and probably months more to get someone to tow them back to a starbase to have their engines repaired).

Basically, a five-year crawl at impulse power is perfectly doable for the Enterprise, it's just not something anyone's looking forward to for reasons that should be obvious. In much less time than that, though, Gary Mitchell would be sneezing whole solar systems out of his ass, so the years-long trip wasn't really an option.

Plus if you include "The Best of Both Worlds" and "Conspiracy" in TNG there would be enough evidence to suggest even early-TNG thinking had that possibility as well.

Never attribute to thinking what you can attribute to carelessness.[/QUOTE]

FWIW, the novelization of "Encounter at Farpoint" describes that the Saucer Section dropped out of warp a handful of seconds after it separated from the battle section; even under impulse power, it arrives at Deneb IV only fifty two minutes behind the Star Drive, which is waylaid by Q for a grand total of ten minutes before he sends them on their way.