Just what happened when the Klingon moon exploded?

[gastrof]

I've been thinking about the explosion of the Klingon moon Praxis.

Since it was said that the environment of the Klingon homeworld was going to be ruined and the planet unable to properly support life, I can't help but wonder what ended up happening.

We know by the TNG era the planet certainly seemed to be doing all right. Help from the Federation to restore the environment?

If that's the case, then how could the sacrifice of Enterprise-C have been so important in preventing a war from breaking out?

Wouldn't the Klingons have already viewed the people of the Federation in a pretty good light?

Also, are we sure Praxis was a moon orbiting the Klingon homeworld, or might it have been a moon of a colony world, a colony world that (for some reason) the homeworld was very dependent on, and now wouldn't have support from (since the COLONY world's environment was now ruined)?

 

[Klaitu]

Prepare the canon vs non canon debate!

All we know about Praxis is that it was a "klingon moon" and an energy production facility. It's explosion created a subspace shockwave that somehow damaged the ozone layer of the Klingon homeworld.

Seeing as how the shockwave manages to spill Sulu's tea, and he's all the way in Federation space, I don't think Praxis neccessarily has to be anywhere near the homeworld.

Spock calculates that the homeworld would be unsustainable "within 50 earth years". We also know the federation has weather control technology, so it's entirely possible that the federation could restore the ozone.

Insofar as the Enterprise C and the Narendra III outpost incident, you know those sneaky romulans, maybe the Federation got set up and it made the Klingons so angry they went to war. If there's one thing those Klingons like to do, it's fight.

 

[Anwar]

I think with the ENT-C situation what happened was that relations had degraded to the point that war was possible, but then the ENT-C incident happened and defused the hostilities. So it wasn't the ENT-C disappearing that caused the war, but it was her sacrifice that defused it before it happened.

 

[Myasishchev]

The proliferation of huge-ass, natural or semi-natural FTL phenomena in Treks 6-11 is a bit of a frustrating point, isn't it?

I always figured that Praxis was Kronos' moon, and a major antimatter storage site, and the Klingons didn't have the sense to bury it so that direct radiation damage wouldn't photodissociate the O3 in the atmosphere of Kronos (or much worse), or to keep discrete sites that wouldn't cook each other off in the event of an accident, or to not stockpile that much near a major population center in the first place... if it were another planet's moon, I find it hard to buy that the damage could be that great. I don't know what to make of the Excelsior's debacle at all. If it's enough energy at that distance to severely shake a starship, it ought to have exterminated all life on the exposed side of the planet, which you'd think they'd have mentioned...

At any rate, I like Bernd Schneider's hypothesis that TNG's Kronos is not TUC's Kronos. The planetary evacuation was in fact undertaken; the TNG Kronos is a major Klingon colony world to which the High Council, the Chancery, and much of the population of the original Kronos was removed. The Federation helped, but didn't save the homeworld itself.

 

[mythme]

I also like Bernd's hypothesis. It accounts for the different "look" of Qo'noS in ENT to that of TNG. It also accounts for the seeming "closeness" of the Klingon homefront in ENT and TOS as compared to TNG.

 

[Myasishchev]

Kinda makes you wonder if the Romulan Empire turns out to be more or less just fine despite losing Romulus itself.

 

[The Castellan]

Well, the Federation president did mention evacuations before his near assassination.

For Praxix....maybe it's like the one bit from ALF, talking about how his homeworld, Melmac, was destroyed.

ALF: Everyone plugged in their hair driers at the same time.

 

[gastrof]

I think with the ENT-C situation what happened was that relations had degraded to the point that war was possible, but then the ENT-C incident happened and defused the hostilities. So it wasn't the ENT-C disappearing that caused the war, but it was her sacrifice that defused it before it happened.

Nobody said the disappearance of Enterprise C caused the war.

The question was WHY would things have degenerated into war, even without the Enterprise-C's fight to protect the colony, since the Federation was already known as a source of help at the time of the Praxis incident.

WHY did, in your words, "relations degrade to the point that war was possible"? HOW could it have happened, after all the help given after Praxis exploded?

 

[gastrof]

I also like Bernd's hypothesis. It accounts for the different "look" of Qo'noS in ENT to that of TNG. It also accounts for the seeming "closeness" of the Klingon homefront in ENT and TOS as compared to TNG.

This might explain why, in early TNG episodes, we hear talk of "The Klingon Homeworld", not hearing it called "Kronos" until later in the series.

They possibly renamed it at some point, in memory of their original homeworld.

 

[DonIago]

WHY did, in your words, "relations degrade to the point that war was possible"? HOW could it have happened, after all the help given after Praxis exploded?

Given the beating America's reputation has taken since the World Wars, I don't find it at all hard to believe that relations between the Feds and the Klingons could degrade to the point they must have been at around the time of the Narendra III incident.

 

[The Castellan]

Maybe one was Kronos, and the new homeworld is Qo'Nos?

 

[captcalhoun]

there was a Praxis-shattering KABOOM!

 

[Anwar]

I think with the ENT-C situation what happened was that relations had degraded to the point that war was possible, but then the ENT-C incident happened and defused the hostilities. So it wasn't the ENT-C disappearing that caused the war, but it was her sacrifice that defused it before it happened.

Nobody said the disappearance of Enterprise C caused the war.

The question was WHY would things have degenerated into war, even without the Enterprise-C's fight to protect the colony, since the Federation was already known as a source of help at the time of the Praxis incident.

WHY did, in your words, "relations degrade to the point that war was possible"? HOW could it have happened, after all the help given after Praxis exploded?

The real reason? The REAL real reason? Yesterday's Enterprise was written before Star Trek VI, so as far as the writers knew there was no big show of aid from the Feds to the Klingons. It's the same reason the Klingons could fight a war with the Feds for 20 years even though Trek 6 says they couldn't.

 

[Timo]

I don't know what to make of the Excelsior's debacle at all. If it's enough energy at that distance to severely shake a starship, it ought to have exterminated all life on the exposed side of the planet, which you'd think they'd have mentioned...

We could argue that most of the energy went straight to subspace. Perhaps it began to leak from there back to the regular universe at a distance, and in directions controlled by the weird geometries of subspace - explaining all sorts of things.

1) Lack of damage at the center: first leak was at a distance.
2) Shape of wave: subspace projected to realspace gives a flat ring, at least as a first-order term.
3) Speed of wave: the energy propagates to distance at subspace speeds, easily reaching the vicinity of Sulu's ship, but after it leaks out it drops to low sublight velocities as seen.
4) Odds of impact: perhaps Sulu's impulse engines caused a local leak of energy from the subspace wave back to realspace, making it inevitable that his ship be hit.

Energy going to subspace might be a universal physical phenomenon that happens in every process, but is only prominent in major explosions and might be just barely detectable today at the centers of nuclear bomb detonations if we knew how to measure subspace things. Alternately, it's a property of antimatter annihilation but not of any other energy release; it would still explain Praxis, as well as the time rift (caused by photon torpedoes, or so Garrett speculated) in "Yesterday's Enterprise.

As for the Klingon homeworld being damaged and perhaps lost, it sounds like a somewhat exaggerated explanation for the minor differences in landscape around the capital city between ENT and TNG. Rather, it sounds logical that a city that originally lies in mountainous landscape would later strive to flatten the mountains and fill up the valleys... Or perhaps the capital city was relocated, rather than the planet.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Anwar]

Or maybe all those years of warfare led to more industrialization and resource consumption, leading to the darker skies of the TNG era and the altered landscape (Urbanization and the mountains collapsing from mining).

 

[Praxius]

I always figured from my understanding of the story, is that Praxis was the Klingon's main resource which is why it was mined so much to cause it to explode. Because of that greater loss of resources they needed to run the empire and their fleet, they were going to be kaput within 50 earth years.... The Empire, not the Klingons, which was their big concern during their dinner with the Enterprise crew, thinking they'd be left as riff raft beggers of the galaxy, having no way of their own to maintain themselves.... which is why some thought it'd be a good time to take them out now, rather then dealing with them and giving them a chance/time to build up a strike force of their own to invade Federation space and gain resources and power after all the starbases and security is all disbanded along the neutral zone.

Which then brought about the assassination attempts to distablalize the whole peace process and start a war now, rather then what they suspected would occur anyways later when the Federation wouldn't be so prepared.

 

[Anwar]

The loss of Praxis (I guess the Empire kept all their eggs in one basket) meant the loss of the majority of their energy infrastructure. I'm guessing this referred to their dilithium supply for their ships. So this loss of a key energy resource combined with the damage the explosion did to their homeworld's environment (if it was THEIR moon, you'd think that blast would have already destroyed the planet...) meant they had a huge non-military catastrophe to deal with.

However, their economy poured so much of their resources into the military that they didn't have anything left to deal with this crisis. They sued for peace because they needed to scale back on the space forces and redirect their money to fixing the Praxis mess. The Feds agreed to end hositilities AND help them out as well, making it easier.

 

[NIUPonyBoy]

Maybe one was Kronos, and the new homeworld is Qo'Nos?

Maybe the original was called Kling?

 

[mattyhugh]

Maybe one was Kronos, and the new homeworld is Qo'Nos?

Maybe the original was called Kling?

Yeah, but in order for that to make sense, Qo'Nos from TUC would have had to have been the second homeworld, with the homeworld from TNG being the third. Unless I misinterpret what you're suggesting.