Impulse speed and physics

[Crazy Eddie]

^ First of all, they hadn't identified the name of the ship until after the pod was beamed aboard. Prior to that, it didn't seem to matter all that much.

Second of all, it wasn't a "drawing" at all. Greg Jein actually built a physical model of the ship for the Star Trek chronology. The original model did not include warp nacelles; those were added when the Okudas placed the launch and disappearance date of the Valiant at 2065, which would be EXACTLY two centuries prior to the TOS episode.

 

[Timo]

No they didn't.

So they did send sample-collecting probes to the Moon? Umm, no, they indeed skipped that part. Because while it was logical, logic had nothing to do with the Moon race.

they always precede a manned mission

..:Except that our "always" only covers the scant decades of space race, which need not even be a particularly good analogy for space exploration in the Trek era, let alone a model for it. Probes never preceded anything before the space race came along, and probes ceased to precede anything when the Moon race ended. Today, space probes just happen, and manned shots do not.

It's just as likely that most of the locations intentionally visited by the Enterprise were first DISCOVERED by unmanned probes which found enough interesting data for a starship to be dispatched for a closer look.

Which is what I'm saying: planets visited by probes may have been tagged as "interesting" but nothing worthwhile is known of them, whereas there are quite a few planets our heroes visit without preceding probes or other predecessor missions, accomplishing just as much as with probe assistance. So, probes really are worthless.

I'm not suggesting he couldn't look up the specs. I'm suggesting he DIDN'T, because he wasn't on the bridge when those call letters came through and hadn't needed or asked for a full report when he dictated the first log entry.

Whatever report he had received, full or otherwise, had told him the call letters of the ship and that the ship had gone missing at a specific date. So on one hand, we have technicalities, on the other we have history. It would be more than a tad odd if the report spanning these failed to also include the known name of the ship and at least a rudimentary description of what sort of a ship she was.

Of course, we also have to remember that the weight of evidence is on these logs being dictated well after the fact anyway.

If by "argue" you mean "not know what he's talking about" you have a point.

Kirk's DY-500 bet seemed to indicate interstellar colonization ability, in light of later TNG evidence. But when Spock insisted on DY-100, Kirk realized this ability was excluded and the ship had to be a "derelict". If anything, he seemed well versed on when and how particular technological breakthroughs affected Earth's interstellar reach.

The original model did not include warp nacelles; those were added

...Which may well be how these things happen in "reality", too. An old rocket with big fuel tanks gets equipped with a drive that doesn't guzzle up chemical fuel, so there's plenty of room aboard for everything but these nacelles, which are fairly trivially bolted on.

when the Okudas placed the launch and disappearance date of the Valiant at 2065, which would be EXACTLY two centuries prior to the TOS episode.

Either late 2065 or early 2066, yes. Assuming the episode was part of the five-year mission, like the stardate would suggest. Of course, back then the Okudas thought that Cochrane had already flown in 2061, not 2063... I wonder why the date was changed in this direction for ST:FC? It doesn't yet explain Cromwell's aged looks vs. those of Corbett, and it doesn't shift the fantastic event significantly farther into the future from the POV of the audience, either.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

No they didn't.

So they did send sample-collecting probes to the Moon?

No, they sent reconnaisance vehicles and flyby probes to scout for possible landing sites and collect data, which is my point.

they always precede a manned mission

..:Except that our "always" only covers the scant decades of space race, which need not even be a particularly good analogy for space exploration in the Trek era, let alone a model for it. Probes never preceded anything before the space race came along,

That's because probes hadn't been INVENTED before the space race came along. We've found them profoundly useful ever since, so much so that surveillance satellites and UAVs have actually begun to supplant roles that were originally performed by human scouts and/or explorers.

If Lewis and Clarke had possessed modern rocket technology, they would have put up a satellite.

and probes ceased to precede anything when the Moon race ended.

Unless you know for sure that humanity will never return to the moon or explore Mars or the asteroid belt, this statement is demonstrably false.

Today, space probes just happen, and manned shots do not.

We launch manned vehicles into space all the time. Soyuz is still widely in use, and Shenzhou-9 just finished its docking mission a few months ago. Manned shots are relatively common occurrences, they're just not going very far because we don't have a space craft capable of reaching that far into space with its crew intact. Hence we continue to send probes: a manned expedition won't be able to complete those missions.

Anyway, you're arguing against yourself at this point. We already know that Earth was sending unmanned probes into deep space AFTER Valiant disappeared. If your assumptions about the progression of space exploration were correct, Friendship 1 should never have been launched and its very existence is very difficult to explain.

Whatever report he had received, full or otherwise, had told him the call letters of the ship and that the ship had gone missing at a specific date.

Half right. He had been told that they had received call letters from a ship that had vanished two centuries earlier. Doubtful they told him exactly what the call letters were -- they would have been meaningless without a reference to look them up -- and even more doubtful they had managed to trace those call letters to a specific vessel and not just an old ID code that nobody had used since UESPA was still a subsidiary of Microsoft.

It would be more than a tad odd if the report spanning these failed to also include the known name of the ship and at least a rudimentary description of what sort of a ship she was.

It would be even more odd if Kirk actually received a detailed report while he was sitting there in the mess hall playing chess with Spock. Especially since they hadn't even discovered the recorder marker yet and had no real information other than "Getting call letters from an old ship."

That putative "report" wouldn't contain any useful information and would be neither detailed nor particularly useful. More importantly, it isn't generally the duty of the officer of the deck to make that kind of highly detailed analysis; generally, that's what Spock is for, and he's in the mess hall playing chess. Kirk, as always, seems content to wait until the end of the game to put Spock to work pulling all the information together for him.

Kirk's DY-500 bet seemed to indicate interstellar colonization ability, in light of later TNG evidence.

And it's probably the oldest type of vessel Kirk is in any way familiar with. I doubt he'd ever SEEN a DY-100 type before, and why should that be surprising? How many modern naval commanders would be able to tell a Caravel from a Carrack if they found an old wooden ship on a glacier somewhere? Or more fittingly: how many submarine commanders would find a 1950s space capsule on the bottom of the ocean floor and would be able to tell whether it was a mercury or gemini spacecraft?

 

[Timo]

No, they sent reconnaisance vehicles and flyby probes to scout for possible landing sites and collect data, which is my point.

..And then gave up in mid-run, which is mine. Probes retrieving samples and verifying return techniques would have been the logical way to proceed, but this was skipped because crewed missions could achieve it all with acceptably bigger risk of failure (because the hardware could not be tested uncrewed) and loss of life.

We've found them profoundly useful ever since, so much so that surveillance satellites and UAVs have actually begun to supplant roles that were originally performed by human scouts and/or explorers.

This might mean something if exploration of the unknown still were taking place. But it's down to monitoring now. And uncrewed scouts don't really precede anything else yet (if ever): in military applications, too, they merely follow.

If Lewis and Clarke had possessed modern rocket technology, they would have put up a satellite.

And if the humans of the 2060s had not possessed modern warp technology, they might have done the same. But technology moves on.

Unless you know for sure that humanity will never return to the moon or explore Mars or the asteroid belt, this statement is demonstrably false.

Today, probes precede other probes; nothing they do is intended to be preamble to crewed missions, and in fact they are seriously undermining the need for such missions.

We launch manned vehicles into space all the time.

...None preceded by probes. And none exploring, FWIW.

If your assumptions about the progression of space exploration were correct, Friendship 1 should never have been launched and its very existence is very difficult to explain.

Yet if yours are, the Valiant would never have been launched, as the places it ended up being had not yet been charted by probes. And as far as we can tell, they never were.

Doubtful they told him exactly what the call letters were -- they would have been meaningless without a reference to look them up

Yes, it might be the name behind the letters was not told to Kirk yet. But why withhold this information if it had already been uncovered? And it certainly had:

and even more doubtful they had managed to trace those call letters to a specific vessel

If they hadn't managed that, they could not tell when the vessel had disappeared. They'd need to know her identity exactly in order to define that.

That putative "report" wouldn't contain any useful information and would be neither detailed nor particularly useful.

Yet the information given in the log is based on useful bits that are highly detailed, else it could not exist. Either Kirk was told things during the turbolift ride (Mitchell might have known more), or then the log is dictated in retrospect, like so many other TOS logs, thus confusing the issue.

If the log is retrospective narration, then the whole argument is moot from both sides, as Kirk would only be feigning ignorance and amazement there for the sake of drama.

And it's probably the oldest type of vessel Kirk is in any way familiar with.

"Wasn't there a probe called Nomad launched in the early 2000s?"

I really wouldn't bet on Kirk being unaware of the nuances of 21st century star travel...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

No, they sent reconnaisance vehicles and flyby probes to scout for possible landing sites and collect data, which is my point.

..And then gave up in mid-run, which is mine. Probes retrieving samples and verifying return techniques would have been the logical way to proceed

IF they hadn't moved on to manned expeditions (which the Soviets did not).

Your claim was that NASA "skipped" the use of unmanned probes altogether. That is NOT the case, in fact the manned missions would not have been possible without the reconnaissance data from the Ranger program.

This might mean something if exploration of the unknown still were taking place.

It is. Energy exploration is big business these days, and the use of ROVs is crucial to operators of offshore drilling platforms. Most of the ocean floor remains largely unexplored in its own right, and most of that exploration is being performed by remote controlled or autonomous robots. Probes by any other name,

And if the humans of the 2060s had not possessed modern warp technology, they might have done the same.

They DID do the same, e.g. Friendship 1.

Today, probes precede other probes; nothing they do is intended to be preamble to crewed missions

I know a number of people at the JPL who would heartily disagree with this.

...None preceded by probes.

I take it you slept through the COTS-1 flight of the Dragon?

Also, Shenzhou 1 through 4 were launched unmanned, preceding the manned launch of Shenzhou 5. And Shenzhou 8 attampted an unmanned docking with Tiangong-1 before the Chinese put a crew up there on Shenzhou 9.

So yes, manned missions are still preceded by probes. In this context, even in the highly unlikely event that Friendship 1 and Valiant had similar technical specs, they would have not have had similar MISSIONS, as this would put the entire exploration process completely ass-backwards.

Yet if yours are, the Valiant would never have been launched, as the places it ended up being had not yet been charted by probes.

"The places it ended up being" were not part of its destination. You continue to discount the incredibly obvious possibility that Valiant was exploring areas INSIDE the solar system and was never designed or intended to travel to other stars. Considering Friendship 1 is described as mankind's first tentative steps outside the solar system, then Valiant is a "Gemini" to Friendship 1's "Ranger 7."

Yes, it might be the name behind the letters was not told to Kirk yet. But why withhold this information if it had already been uncovered?

Because it hadn't been uncovered. Remember the conversation when Kelso finally called him down? Kelso tells him "the object is too small to be a vessel. It only reads about one meter in diameter."

The call letters, in other words, were coming from the recorder marker buoy, and Enterprise followed the transmission to its source not knowing where they were coming from or what to expect when they got there. Notice that Kelso doesn't say "It's too small to be the Valiant" or "The signal's coming from a small object, but no sign of the ship." Kelso made no assumptions about the source of the transmission, and neither did Kirk. They knew only that the signal was coming from a very OLD source, probably based on the nature of the call letters.

If they hadn't managed that, they could not tell when the vessel had disappeared. They'd need to know her identity exactly in order to define that.

Quite the contrary, Kirk knows the call letters are using a 200 year old code. He also knows the marker is coming from a ship called the Valiant, because he saw the words "S.S. Valiant" on the side of the recorder marker.

And no one makes any attempt to query the library computers or the ship's records about the Valiant, and they do not seem to know or care what kind of ship it was or who launched it or why. It could just as easily have been a Vulcan vessel that disappeared six months ago that they didn't know about; as far as their mission is concerned, all that matters to them is "What destroyed the ship and how do we deal with it?"

It's very clear that leaving the galaxy was a complete accident, so the answer to Kirk's log entry question was "No, another ship did NOT probe out of the galaxy as you are about to do." Knowing what we do now, then, it's all the more likely that Valiant's departure from the Sol system was equally accidental and no one has any record of the ship because it's disappearance is a minor footnote in the history of obscure space missions.

Yet the information given in the log is based on useful bits that are highly detailed

It's based on the call letters, and nothing else. This is because nothing else was KNOWN until they beamed aboard the recorder marker; they didn't even know what kind of ship they were looking for.

And it's probably the oldest type of vessel Kirk is in any way familiar with.

"Wasn't there a probe called Nomad launched in the early 2000s?"

I really wouldn't bet on Kirk being unaware of the nuances of 21st century star travel...

Travel, yes. Probes have historical significance because of what they represent. Most people probably wouldn't know the name of the spacecraft Alexi Leonov used for his space walk, but if you say "Sputnik" suddenly everyone knows what you're talking about.

To put that another way: Lewis and Clarke and Sacajewea are household names in America. But if I asked you for the name of the first permanent settlement in modern day Chicago, you'd probably have to google it.

 

[Timo]

Your claim was that NASA "skipped" the use of unmanned probes altogether.

The skip was over the task the manned missions could accomplish - landing, gathering rocks and returning. The high risk part, the one in the greatest need for testing and fact-finding.

Which is what would happen in the Trek universe, too. Flyby probes are fine, but there's no point in sending robotic spacecraft to do what landing parties do (except of course the real-world point that robots do it cheaper, faster and more reliably and without certain important risks - but that is overridden by the "human interest aspect" in reality, and in later Trek, so why not in 21st century Trek?).

Which means Earth would not have waited for a round of warp probe missions to be completed before launching into a variety of crewed enterprises, including Conestoga, Valiant (and no doubt countless others, as neither of these two was considered unique in her own field).

They DID do the same, e.g. Friendship 1.

That one was supposed to span quadrants. The Valiant ending up at the galactic rim was an unintended development.

And in any case, Friendship 1 isn't proof for the argument that Earth would wait and not launch crewed warships, or for the idea that the Valiant was a sublight or nearspace warp ship not intended for the stars.

You continue to discount the incredibly obvious possibility that Valiant was exploring areas INSIDE the solar system and was never designed or intended to travel to other stars.

This is a highly improbable idea to start with. We are talking about the era of warp exploration, one way or another, and you want to insist that Valiant was part of the rear guard even when odds are that a front guard also existed? There's no good reason for that - it would be a low-probability occurrence, much like saying that yes, Kirk is a handsomely built starship skipper, but he was born legless. It's out of the left field, it isn't in the spirit of the era, and it doesn't explain anything.

Considering Friendship 1 is described as mankind's first tentative steps outside the solar system

If so, it just tells us how to read such descriptions, as Earth's probes were already flying to distant stars more than half a century before that date, and human crews were disappearing in-and outside the system several decades before.

Because it hadn't been uncovered.

This is the one interpretation that can be completely ruled out. Without positive ID of the vessel, the disappearance date could not be known. No way around it.

Kirk knows the call letters are using a 200 year old code

Says who? There is zero evidence that codes would have been changed at any point, much less that they could be used to establish a date. Which doesn't even begin to address the fact that the dating of the ship alone would not suffice anyway: the full ID would have to be known to establish the date of the disappearance, or indeed the very fact of it.

Just drop this line of argument. There's no way around it: Kirk knew the name of the ship. Or then somebody in his crew knew it and used the knowledge to tell Kirk the facts of her disappearance, while withholding the name, which is just plain silly.

To put that another way: Lewis and Clarke and Sacajewea are household names in America. But if I asked you for the name of the first permanent settlement in modern day Chicago, you'd probably have to google it.

So you want to have it both ways: DY-100 must be a special pathfinding exception to every rule, but it must also be so mundane nobody knows the first thing about it?

Naah. If anything, the Valiant could be the household name, explaining how a man 200 years later can know she disappeared. Which takes us right back to Kirk necessarily knowing what the Valiant was like, just like we know (or think we know, but in Trek that's less of a distinction) what the Santa Maria looked like and was capable of even if we're in the dark about the specs of the Saõ Gabriel built by Diaz and used by da Gama in the same era and for the same purpose.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Your claim was that NASA "skipped" the use of unmanned probes altogether.

The skip was over the task the manned missions could accomplish - landing, gathering rocks and returning. The high risk part, the one in the greatest need for testing and fact-finding.

Has anything in any canon Trek given us the impression that Valiant was equipped for landing operations or sample return?

They DID do the same, e.g. Friendship 1.

That one was supposed to span quadrants.

No it wasn't. It was merely supposed to wander around until it found something living.

The Valiant ending up at the galactic rim was an unintended development.

Sauce for the goose; there's absolutely no indication that leaving the solar system AT ALL was intentional. And blssdwlf has already made a compelling case that a vessel equipped with warp drive would have been able to escape from a magnetic storm with only minor difficulty.

And in any case, Friendship 1 isn't proof for the argument that Earth would wait and not launch crewed warships

Actually, that's EXACTLY what Friendship 1 is: the unmanned probe that preceded the exploration missions that eventually came to define Starfleet. It's directly suggestive that Valiant wasn't part of that progression, and was doing something else when it disappeared.

This is a highly improbable idea to start with. We are talking about the era of warp exploration...

Even THAT much hasn't been established, since the exact date of Valiant's disappearance isn't known. If the ship had been launched just a couple of years earlier, she would still be in space when the Phoenix completed its warp flight.

you want to insist that Valiant was part of the rear guard even when odds are that a front guard also existed?

Warp or no warp, Friendship 1 was DESCRIBED as the vanguard of humanity's exploration outside the solar system. The Valiant was not.

If so, it just tells us how to read such descriptions, as Earth's probes were already flying to distant stars more than half a century before that date

Earth's probes have been flying to distant stars since 1972. REACHING those stars is another matter entirely.

This is the one interpretation that can be completely ruled out. Without positive ID of the vessel, the disappearance date could not be known.

That is already untrue of aircraft tail numbers. If I see an unidentified aircraft sitting on an airfield somewhere with the tail numbers "P-I1701" I look up a reference thinking "Who uses the suffice P-I?" and my computer tells me "Persia," and suddenly I realize this aircraft has been out of circulation for at least a century (because a modern Iranian aircraft use only letters and no numbers).

Greg Jein painted the suffice "ADC" on the side of his Valiant model. Since ADC is a nod to the Air Defense Command from "Tomorrow is Yesterday," you could make a pretty good guess how old the ship is by knowing when exactly the Air Defense Command ceased to exist as an entity.

Kirk thinks it's a given that these call letters suggest the ship is at least 200 years old. That's probably because the ADC was obliterated in WW-III, which would certainly explain why the Cochrane rocket team had unregulated access to an ICBM in Montana several years later.

To put that another way: Lewis and Clarke and Sacajewea are household names in America. But if I asked you for the name of the first permanent settlement in modern day Chicago, you'd probably have to google it.

So you want to have it both ways: DY-100 must be a special pathfinding exception to every rule, but it must also be so mundane nobody knows the first thing about it?

Actually I said the DY-100 was so old that Kirk didn't know the first thing about it. That doesn't mean it isn't important (in some context or another) just very very old.

Naah. If anything, the Valiant could be the household name, explaining how a man 200 years later can know she disappeared.

Kirk never states any knowledge of Valiant's disappearance, only her destruction. This is, again, based entirely on the conclusions he draws from his inspection of the recorder marker.

And again, no one on the Enterprise professes any knowledge of the Valiant whatsoever except for what they derive from the data in front of them; no querying of historical records, no reference materials. They either didn't think it would help, or they knew that the destruction of the ADC was so complete that none of the records would have remained from their pre-warp space missions.

 

[Timo]

Has anything in any canon Trek given us the impression that Valiant was equipped for landing operations or sample return?

Hmh? The question is whether the capabilities of the crewed mission at hand (be it Apollo or Valiant) differ from those of the respective uncrewed one (late Luna or Friendship). If and when they do not, there is no reason to think that one would logically have preceded the other. And what Friendship achieved is quite in line with what Kirk thought Valiant might have achieved, i.e. probed across long distances in the 21st century (or with a 21st century launch anyway).

Actually, that's EXACTLY what Friendship 1 is: the unmanned probe that preceded the exploration missions that eventually came to define Starfleet.

Patently false, as other probes such as Vega from "Tin Man" continued abreast with crewed exploration. Nothing about the existence of a probe indicates "preceding", then.

Earth's probes have been flying to distant stars since 1972. REACHING those stars is another matter entirely.

...And was achieved by NOMAD early on, as its collision with Tan Ru took place at a location quite distant from Earth and forced the resulting monstrosity to seek advice from passersby, instead of homing in on the nearest star system.

Really, with propulsion that gets you to Mars in a week, in a ship as puny as Ares IV (and don't try "booster stages" or "jettisonable fuel", because what we saw would necessarily have been the entire return vehicle, and if a ship can get there in weeks, it's quite unlikely to return in months), going interstellar in mere decades shouldn't be much of a problem. Indeed, Khan seems to have done that, and more, with less.

Greg Jein painted the suffice "ADC" on the side of his Valiant model. Since ADC is a nod to the Air Defense Command from "Tomorrow is Yesterday," you could make a pretty good guess how old the ship is by knowing when exactly the Air Defense Command ceased to exist as an entity.

If our heroes engage in that much expertise-dependent speculation, they can no doubt further use their expertise to establish what sorts of ships this short-lived organization used at that date!

That's probably because the ADC was obliterated in WW-III, which would certainly explain why the Cochrane rocket team had unregulated access to an ICBM in Montana several years later.

Continuing with this level of speculation, naturally the ADC vessel Valiant would thus see further service as a warp-powered explorer!

(Incidentally, if you accept ADC, you also accept warp nacelles. Which creates a contradiction if you also insist that ADC ceased to be before warp came to be.)

Kirk never states any knowledge of Valiant's disappearance, only her destruction.

There is no ambiguity about him knowing from the very start that the vessel at hand has been "missing for over two centuries". This sort of knowledge is extremely specific and requires unique identification, as vessels merely dating from that era would not have gone "missing" as a rule.

It cannot be argued that Kirk didn't know which specific vessel he was dealing with. The only thing to be debated is whether this knowledge allowed him to correctly assess the vessel's capabilities, or whether his conclusion about her perhaps having "probed out of the galaxy" is completely unrealistic.

And again, no one on the Enterprise professes any knowledge of the Valiant whatsoever except for what they derive from the data in front of them; no querying of historical records, no reference materials.

Yet those sources were consulted, or else the fact of her going missing could not be known.

We can debate the forms this consultation took. Did Kelso ask the history department to look up some obscure files? Did Spock rattle off the pertinent data out of memory during the corridor walk? Or did everybody aboard remember what had happened to this famous early vessel with the same ease we remember what happened to Gus Grissom?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Has anything in any canon Trek given us the impression that Valiant was equipped for landing operations or sample return?

Hmh? The question is whether the capabilities of the crewed mission at hand

No. The issue (the latest version you have morphed into) was "The skip was over the task the manned missions could accomplish - landing, gathering rocks and returning. The high risk part, the one in the greatest need for testing and fact-finding."

So are you aware of any information that suggests Valiant setup for landing, gathering rocks and returning, or similar high-risk type missions that require a lot of personal fact-finding outside the solar system?

Actually, that's EXACTLY what Friendship 1 is: the unmanned probe that preceded the exploration missions that eventually came to define Starfleet.

Patently false, as other probes such as Vega from "Tin Man" continued abreast with crewed exploration.

Vega did not precede Friendship 1, and is therefore irrelevant. More importantly, the Vega probe traveled outside the range of explored space and immediately preceded the Enterprise, case in point.

...And was achieved by NOMAD early on

Nomad wasn't equipped with anything resembling an FTL drive. it had as much chance of encountering an alien intelligence as Voyager 6. Star Trek is full of these kinds of accidents but they ARE accidents, not features.

Really, with propulsion that gets you to Mars in a week, in a ship as puny as Ares IV (and don't try "booster stages" or "jettisonable fuel", because what we saw would necessarily have been the entire return vehicle, and if a ship can get there in weeks, it's quite unlikely to return in months), going interstellar in mere decades shouldn't be much of a problem.

Unless the ship is equipped with a ramscoop and/or warp drive, it very much IS. Such a vessel can only carry a limited amount of fuel on board, enough to reach Mars in a week evidently, but not much farther than that.

Khan seems to have done that, and more, with less.

And we again do not know how or why, or whether the Botany Bay was designed for this kind of mission.

The problem you're having with this is that you are as usual supplying supposition where you lack data and now you've gone so far into supposition that you no longer remember what position you started with: that impulse engines cannot produce FTL speeds. I and most others in this thread disagree, and your only point to the contrary was to suggest that Valiant need not have used impulse drive to leave the solar system because it must have been equipped with warp drive.

So back around through the loop: due to the launch date of Friendship 1, it is EXTREMELY unlikely Valiant was an interstellar mission, with or without warp drive. IF it had a warp engine, an extrasolar mission would have been premature and ill-prepared; if it did not, then it was an impulse-driven craft exploring the planets. But let's not loose sight of the overall point: everything -- especially the launch date -- is suggestive of Valiant being powered by a more traditional impulse drive engine and not being really capable of space warp.

Beyond that, you've completely lost me. Unless you think Nomad and Botany Bay were also equipped with warp drive, all you're doing is supporting the idea that impulse engines can produce FTL velocities under the right circumstances. In which case, both Botany Bay and Nomad would be interpreted as suicidal "point at a star and gun it!" maneuvers for space missions that harbored no possibility of safe return and only a slim chance for safe arrival.

 

[Timo]

No. The issue (the latest version you have morphed into) was "The skip was over the task the manned missions could accomplish - landing, gathering rocks and returning. The high risk part, the one in the greatest need for testing and fact-finding."

Oh, come on, that was an obvious analogy. Apollo wantonly skipped Moon-related things, risking lives because risking of lives was the very point of the program; Valiant similarly could have skipped things relating to that type of space exploration.

or similar high-risk type missions

That's the relevant question. And we know what Friendship 1 was capable of: going places and exchanging pleasantries from orbit. The Valiant would by default have been capable of that, plus she would have had a more meaningful chat with anybody she happened to meet. Which would again be the point of the program: high-risk, high-yield crewed chats with aliens would be preferable to lower-risk, lower-yield automated chats, and not merely because of the better yield, but also because of the better public image.

Nomad wasn't equipped with anything resembling an FTL drive. it had as much chance of encountering an alien intelligence as Voyager 6. Star Trek is full of these kinds of accidents but they ARE accidents, not features.

In order to have the accident as described, the STL-flying NOMAD did need to reach other stars in the time allotted. An encounter just beyond Pluto would not have met the criteria.

Such a vessel can only carry a limited amount of fuel on board, enough to reach Mars in a week evidently, but not much farther than that.

But that's patently false again. When you accept that less fuel than is realistic gets the ship to Mars, you have no reason for stopping there: the unrealistic technology could go even farther with even less unless you can define its performance otherwise. And not knowing anything about the nature of the technology (except that it apparently involves rocket nozzles somehow, unless those are part of some other, secondary system) is a bad starting point for that.

Later on, we witness ships zipping across great distances with invisibly small fuel tanks, a culmination of a line of development.

due to the launch date of Friendship 1, it is EXTREMELY unlikely Valiant was an interstellar mission, with or without warp drive.

Only if one thinks warp engines would not have been installed on crewed ships before they were installed on probes. But they were: as far as we can tell, Cochrane did not perform uncrewed tests at all. So all the launch date -related argumentation is really moot. Advanced technologies are not withheld from use willy-nilly, especially not in the aftermath of a great war (see what WWI did to general aviation?) nor under international, in this case interstellar pressure to national, in this case stellar pride (see what WWII did to jet and rocket propulsion?).

Unless you think Nomad and Botany Bay were also equipped with warp drive, all you're doing is supporting the idea that impulse engines can produce FTL velocities under the right circumstances.

I'm just pointing out that FTL is never a requirement for practical interstellar operations. Perfected cryosleep and high relativistic performance are well-established features of the Trek universe, despite your attempts at not seeing them in action.

In which case, both Botany Bay and Nomad would be interpreted as suicidal "point at a star and gun it!" maneuvers for space missions that harbored no possibility of safe return and only a slim chance for safe arrival.

Umm, and? That's pretty close to what we're being shown and told. In extreme contrast, we never get a reason to believe that the Valiant would have been the least bit suicidal in mission profile (until infested with divinity, that is). So we have our very good reason to see DY-100 and Valiant as completely different beasts right there.

Now, that great difference could be explained by the sublight propulsion advances of 2018. But we have further sources of contrast. Ares IV postdates the advances, and shows the limits of what was achieved at that point: a rescue mission lacking in excuses to drag its feet reaches Mars in weeks, not in days. So we have two missions that fully expected to return, and one could never have hoped to attempt to leave the galaxy even if dropped off where the recorder marker was, while the other was suspected of having done so. Something thus changed between those two as well - and again we have a confirmed Trek date for a propulsive breakthrough in the time window, namely 2063.

Now, the one case for "impulse can do FTL" would be if the Valiant could not have warp propulsion for her critically better-than-Ares performance. But that's a tall order, as warp propulsion was available around the launch date. So one has to invent excuses to why it would not have been used on a crewed vessel - even though it explicitly was already, in ST:FC. Add to this the exploration outside Sol with STL, pre-warp vessels as per the Charybdis case and you rule out timidity and one-step-at-a-time as rationales for why Valiant would have been designed to stay close to home as late as the 2060s.

So we have a couple of options left. Perhaps Valiant had warp but only for very short ranges, barely beyond the Charybdis ones (unlikely both because those ranges no longer held cutting-edge interest for man, and because short ranges would ill explain the ability to probe out of the galaxy, with or without the boost from the storm). Perhaps Valiant had just STL impulse and was abducted from within Sol by the storm (unlikely because the callsign gives unique identification and would reveal the inability to probe out of the galaxy, and not preferable because the shorter the distance carried by the storm, the likelier the event). Or perhaps Valiant had FTL impulse and was grabbed at reasonable interstellar ranges, and was suspected of using the FTL impulse to probe out of the galaxy regardless of how she had ended up at the starting point where the call letters were heard?

The thing is, the last option places some criteria on FTL impulse that make it essentially identical to the warp Earth had just before ENT. Which is why I just think it silly that this interpretation should be preferred over the simple "she had warp" one when such preference is the only way to argue for FTL impulse in the first place!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[blssdwlf]

Personally, the best option is that there are different continuities or alternate universes and the answer depends on which one we're looking at.

The reason, IMO, is that there are two different histories at play.

Since non-Warp drive labeled vehicles in TOS had FTL-capabilities it would not be a problem for an impulse ship to go FTL. Technology developed faster since sleeper ships were large and apparently in common use by 2018.

• In the TOS-continuity Impulse is slower and not as efficient as Warp drive in deep space based on "Balance of Terror", "Elaan of Troyius".
• This also gives the TOS galaxy a sense of variety (impulse drive, ion drive, total conversion drive, hyperdrive) and a history of what life was like before Cochrane "discovered the space warp".

The TNGM+VOY+ENT-continuity, on the other hand, pretty much rules out impulse (and probably ion-drive, etc) as FTL-capable. Technology developed slower, since they were only doing early and small Mars missions in 2032. And since the historical dates are fairly different, I'd argue that in this continuity,

• if there was a Valiant, she was launched at a much later date after Cochrane's warp flight.
• Cochrane's warp flight is different from discovering the space warp that is revered all over the galaxy. In this continuity, the tech tree is different since he only brought Earth in with the rest of the other warp-powered races.
• But it is just as likely that many of the episodes in TOS just didn't happen. No Valiant, no discovery of Cochrane on an asteroid, etc.
• The only things we can be sure of is that in the TNGM-continuity, Kirk's Enterprise had a "Naked Time"-like incident which differed on how the ship restarted her engines and there was a 5 year mission.

Some key differences between the continuities:

TOS Continuity

• before mid-1990's: "first three world wars" from "Breads and Circuses"
• mid-1990's: "last so-called World War...The Eugenics War" from "Space Seed"
• early 21st century: - Colonel Green from "The Savage Curtain"
• 2018: Large sleeper ships already in use for interplanetary travel prior to 2018 because "before it took years to travel from one planet to another" from "Space Seed"

TNGM+VOY+ENT Continuity

• unknown date: for The Eugenics War
• 2032: "One of the early Mars missions... Ares-4 had a 3rd Generation Ion Drive, "weeks to travel to Mars" from "One Small Step"
• 2053: "Third World War", different total killed vs TOS from "First Contact"
• 2056: Colonel Green from "ENT Demons"
• 2063: Cochrane's First Warp Flight in "First Contact"

TOSM, TNG and DS9 Continuities may share common points but not enough info to determine their history. (I separate out DS9 because their Eugenics Wars happens a hundred years later.)

 

[Crazy Eddie]

or similar high-risk type missions

That's the relevant question. And we know what Friendship 1 was capable of: going places and exchanging pleasantries from orbit. The Valiant would by default have been capable of that,

But not of reaching those unknown civilizations in a reasonable amount of time. It took Friendship-1 almost two centuries to stumble upon an inhabited world in its blind search of the cosmos. Valiant was not equipped for that kind of journey.

Which would again be the point of the program: high-risk, high-yield crewed chats with aliens would be preferable to lower-risk, lower-yield automated chats, and not merely because of the better yield, but also because of the better public image.

That was the mission of NX-01, which occurred almost 90 years later, and giving every possible indication that it was the first Earth vessel to attempt this kind of expedition.

That was the point of the Goddard analogy. Just because you've invented a new kind of engine doesn't mean you have the means to conduct a mission. Goddard's liquid fueled rocket required another fifty years of development before it manifested into something capable of putting humans on the moon, and ditto for Cochrane's warp drive.

In order to have the accident as described, the STL-flying NOMAD did need to reach other stars in the time allotted.

So did Voyager 6.

But that's patently false again. When you accept that less fuel than is realistic gets the ship to Mars...

How much fuel is realistic for an ion-based propulsion system in 2032? Especially since, judging by the design of the craft, Ares-IV's entire drive section would be one giant propellant tank, possibly with a nuclear reactor on board for power (were those solar panels or radiators on the service module? You never know).

I've seen the VASIMR design studies that suggest a 2MW nuclear reactor would enable a trip to Mars in 39 days. If I ran the numbers for a 60MW reactor, I'd wager we'd see an interesting result.

Only if one thinks warp engines would not have been installed on crewed ships before they were installed on probes.

There's a world of different between "crewed ships" and "manned interstellar expedition." One could require only a retrofit and would perform just well enough to shorten travel times (returning to the example of mounting the Apollo CM/LM stack on the Phoenix's propulsion section). The other would require the development of an entirely new type of space craft, built for entirely new types of missions in an entirely new kind of environment. That would be to imply that mounting a warp engine on the international space station would make it a viable starship.

Unless you think Nomad and Botany Bay were also equipped with warp drive, all you're doing is supporting the idea that impulse engines can produce FTL velocities under the right circumstances.

I'm just pointing out that FTL is never a requirement for practical interstellar operations.

Yes it is. Because the key word there is practical. Pioneer 10 and 11 as well as Voyager 1 and 2 are al conducting interstellar operations on a scale that would make the whole of recorded history look like a Sunday morning checker game. That is about as "practical" as the Botany Bay's "Anywhere but here!" flight into the black, or Nomad's "Some day you'll get there and do your thing" expedition. The first PRACTICAL attempt to probe out of the solar system was Friendship 1, and it ultimately failed in that mission because even with warp drive it was still missing EVERYTHING ELSE.

Moreover, impulse power itself is considered to be adequate for interstellar journeys only on -- once again -- very long timescales, or in situations where you're going someplace closeby and not in a particular hurry. You might take a trip to Alpha Centauri that takes 11 months both ways, for example, or you might send a probe to Sirius and expect to heat from it just before the end of the decade. People like the JPL are used to dealing with this kind of thing. But crewed vehicles with that level of sophistication are much harder to design and engineer, and if Earth was capable of it in 2065 then their level of incompetence 90 years later is baffling.

So we have two missions that fully expected to return, and one could never have hoped to attempt to leave the galaxy even if dropped off where the recorder marker was, while the other was suspected of having done so. Something thus changed between those two as well...

What do you mean "thus"? Ares-IV was rediscovered in a location much FARTHER away than the Valiant was. Both are suggested as being swept out into deep space by means not under their own control, the only question is where Valiant started out.

The time frame is too early for Valiant to be equipped with a working warp drive, UNLESS it was doing something inside the solar system and using warp drive to speed up that process. More importantly there's Valiant's inability to fight off the magnetic storm, which would have been well within its capabilities under warp power. So if Valiant wasn't still in the solar system when it was swept away, it was extremely close to it.

Now, the one case for "impulse can do FTL" would be if the Valiant could not have warp propulsion for her critically better-than-Ares performance. But that's a tall order,

No it isn't. For, let's say, a test vehicle adapting warp drive into a more conventional newtonian drive -- using the warp reaction to reduce the effective mass of the ship, or even to raise the mass of its exhaust plume -- then the ship would be able to increase its engine performance by an order of magnitude without ever producing a real warp field. There are lots of reasons to believe this would be easier to perfect than the full-on space warp developed by Cochrane and would represent a practical "short term" benefit before Earth-built warp engines finally reached maturity 90 years later.

As an historical analogy: it's a bit like the development of turbojet engines, which itself is an outgrowth of the science that also produced pulsejets and rockets. Rockets have the greater potential for exploration of space, but turbojets can be used LOCALLY and are the more practical technology.

And jets, like rockets, are capable of supersonic flight, while prop-driven aircraft were not. It's clear a similar overlap should be true of impulse and warp drives.

Or perhaps Valiant had FTL impulse and was grabbed at reasonable interstellar ranges, and was suspected of using the FTL impulse to probe out of the galaxy regardless of how she had ended up at the starting point where the call letters were heard?

Valiant wasn't suspected of probing outside of the galaxy AT ALL. Its arrival in deep space was a complete mystery, as was its eventual fate. But as usual with TOS, "How did tat get there?" is totally glossed over in favor of the latter question "what happened to it?" and no further attempt is made to investigate. If this had been a TNG/VOY episode, there probably would have been a flashback sequence and an okudagram in the briefing room describing where the ship was when it hit the storm and the last creepy transmission as it vanished.

The thing is, the last option places some criteria on FTL impulse that make it essentially identical to the warp Earth had just before ENT.

ONLY if you assume that Valiant was well outside of the solar system when it caught that magnetic storm, and there isn't a shred of evidence -- not even circumstantial -- to substantiate that.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Agreed on all points, except:

TOSM, TNG and DS9 Continuities may share common points but not enough info to determine their history. (I separate out DS9 because their Eugenics Wars happens a hundred years later.)

I don't think you need to do that. If you place the Augment Crisis around the same time as Colonel Green's war -- maybe in some way related TO it, considering the genetic engineering shenanigans going on in Terra Prime).

The different histories between the first and second series is pretty glaring at times. In the context of TOS, though, Valiant not having warp drive is almost a non-issue.