posted
Holy FRACK, this one is a tech goldmine - and a good episode to boot. Hold on tight!
-Bringing aboard a derelict, the soon-to-be-identified-as-a-timeship is mysteriously put up on a convenient pedestal BEFORE anyone enters the launch bay...
-like Rasmussen's victim's ship, this timeship has no windows. Hmm. And like Rassumsen's victim, the Dead Futureguy is human. Archer initially posits that the corpse could be Zefram Cochrane, and goes over the legend how he was piloting a rumoured-to-be-experimental one-man warp ship, thus possibly explaining how he got out there.
-Enterprise is currently 30ly from the nearest human-frequented trade route, and still around 100ly from earth. Admiral Forrest suggests that the closest colony is Vega Colony.
-The timeship is stealthy - without all the damage, Enterprise wouldn't have even seen it. It has organic (bioneural?) circuitry, and is also dimensionally transcendental... Trip and Reed head down a loooong shaft to get a spanner back from what they find to be an engine room. The damage seems to be ship-wide, but they manage to locate a "black box" down there.
-The ship we saw in the trailer is not Tholian, but a Suliban freighter. It's an interesting cell-ish design involving repeating "spines" and a central shaft. Cool! It lays claim to the time ship, saying that a passing cell ship spotted it three days previous. A Suliban raiding party fails to take the timeship, and the freighter disappears (cloaks?) to get away.
-Afterwards, they arrange to meet with the Vulcan ship Tal'kir to take the ship back to Earth. The Vulcans can get the ship back in a matter of weeks, and let Starfleet do the rest. It's about time someone suggested they do that...
-The Dead Futureguy is tipped off to the crew when Phlox reveals he has Vulcan DNA, along with Terellian, Rigelian and others. This perplexes T'Pol, who echoes her species' belief that interspecies mating is icky.
-To identify the ship, Archer and T'Pol go looking thorugh the Daniels' holocomputer doohickey. There are a LOT of other ships there from the Trek universe, but they make a very big point of showing a Vulcan cruiser that hasn't been built yet. It's even longer and pointier than what we've seen so far, with three warp rings arranged in a clover fashion. We're bound to be seeing this in the future, so to speak. Anyway, the ship comes from 900 years into the future. Archer believes that the ship could belong to a researcher a la Rasmussen's victim.
-The timeship is powered by a "temporal displacement drive". Among the unknown alloys that compose its hull is one that exists in a semi-fluid state.
-The Tholian ship is pretty much the same shape we see in TOS, but they have more detail and a metal, not mineral, hull. There are things like grilles and surface detailing on a light fray hull. It looks nice, but I'd have preferred they stick with the basic obsidian look.
-Tholian space is a long way away from here, and even now they are still very xenophbic, rarely sending ships outside their territory. Vulcans have yet to see one, apparently.. Their speech is a loud, annoying screeching, and the UT only loosely translates it into an artificial voice.
-The Tholian tractor beam is a familiar shade of yellow (hint hint), though their weapons are blue-white.
-Denobulans were first contacted by the B'Saari. Phlox notes that Denobulans were reluctant to accept the notion of their not being the only intelligent species around.
-In examining the time ship, Trip and Reed get temporarily stuck in a well-filmed time loop a la "Cause and Effect", complete with deja vu. This leads them to discover the "temporal radiation" the Tholians were warning them about before they took off. Archer speculates that the Tholians could be working for another faction... Of course, T'Pol is still reluctant to believe that there even IS a Temporal Cold War. But Archer is determined to get some answers, and so presses forward.
-One the way to the Tal'kir, Enterprise runs afoul of the Suliban freighter and a bunch of cell ships of varying sizes. Again, they demonstrate that Enterprise warp 5 engine can't outrun them, or even their freighters.
-They barely manage to keep them at bay until they can reach the Vulcan ship... Only to discover that four Tholian ships have disabled it. The Tal'kir is specifically called a "combat cruiser", and is of the Turellian-inspiration type we saw last week. I think we're sticking with this design for the long run... Also, when Archer orders to return fire, he mentions the aft phase cannon in the singular.
-The Tholians disable Enterprise with some funky energy pulse (odd, since Enterprise is left inteact while the Tal'kir is blowed up real good), but the Suliban show up and engage them before they can do anything else. Suliban ships are no match for Tholian technology, and are destroyed in short order (but in one hell of a fight!).
-Archer realizes that they won't be able to beat the Tholians either, and so with Reed he goes and puts a torpedo warhead into the timeship before jettisoning it. They get stuck in the time loop, but ultimately manage to get the torpedo warhead out before the next loop resets everything again.
-But it's all for naught, as Trip apparently manages to contact the future with the black box, per earlier orders. In a wink, all the future tech, the ship, and the body are whisked away...
-As everyon is left scratching their heads, they mention that a Vulcan transport will eventually arrive to tow the Tal'kir home. Warp tow?
Whew!
Mark
[ February 18, 2003, 10:07 PM: Message edited by: Mark Nguyen ]
posted
Yeah, I guess.... Looking at this pic now, I guess it DOES look a lot like it, grilles and all. Just more detail added, and a lighter color overall. However, I'm fairly certain that the "Enterprise" edition is more tripartite - that is, identical on all three vertical cross sections.
Oh yeah - we don't get to see the Tholians this time. We only hear them, and while they DO manage to start buring through an airlock door, they don't finish before Archer and Reed jettison the timeship. However, the security guys were doing a pretty good impression of the Tantive IV crew before the Stormtroopers burned through THEIR door...
posted
Nice to get the references to the Vega Colony and to Cochrane's mystic disappearance. Too bad the Colony is now "nearest" to the Enterprise operational theater, when the real Vega is in the opposite direction from supposed Klingon and Romulan space. Oh, well. Perhaps Vega Colony is best based in the direction of (the various) Rigel(s) anyway, to allow Pike to replenish his crew there instead of going to Earth first. One thing's for sure now, though - the writers aren't reading the Star Charts after all.
Vulcan "future" ships... I wonder if those were still operating during TOS. Perhaps the Intrepid...?
Nice to hear the Tholians are supposed to be a distant menace, instead of a local one. They could be excused for not reappearing any time soon! Better to maintain some of the mystique.
And nice for them to have ships that look like their later ones. Not everything needs to be "retro" just because it appears a hundred years earlier. It would still have been nice to see a bit of variation on the theme.
Speaking of which, the Vulcans now have a pretty extensive fleet of designs. I'd love to see the ships used in mixed fleets, and serving in specific roles. Too bad some of them are "temporally distanced" - the "Fusion" ships are supposed to be outdated etc. Apparently, Vulcans do upgrade their fleet quite often, as opposed to Klingons or Tholians.
posted
Doesn't someone have Drexler's email-address? Maybe we could get an inofficial class-name for the Vulcan combat cruiser.
-------------------- "Never give up. And never, under any circumstances, no matter what - never face the facts." - Ruth Gordon
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Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
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posted
quote:Originally posted by Timo: Nice to get the references to the Vega Colony and to Cochrane's mystic disappearance. Too bad the Colony is now "nearest" to the Enterprise operational theater, when the real Vega is in the opposite direction from supposed Klingon and Romulan space. Oh, well. Perhaps Vega Colony is best based in the direction of (the various) Rigel(s) anyway, to allow Pike to replenish his crew there instead of going to Earth first. One thing's for sure now, though - the writers aren't reading the Star Charts after all.
Unless it's Vaygeh Colony or some other fecked-oop homonymical spelling...
-------------------- "The French have a saying: 'mise en place'—keep everything in its fucking place!"
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quote:Originally posted by Spike: Doesn't someone have Drexler's email-address? Maybe we could get an inofficial class-name for the Vulcan combat cruiser.
Well judging by the discription, the one in this episode was D'Kyr Class, although I don't think it's been referred to as a combat cruiser until now. The other combat cruiser(pink and pointy) is the Sukar Class according to the Fact Files, although that could've been a spelling mistake.
posted
Yeah, it's a D'Kyr-type vessel but we don't know its class-name.
quote:that could've been a spelling mistake.
I wouldn't be surprised.
-------------------- "Never give up. And never, under any circumstances, no matter what - never face the facts." - Ruth Gordon
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-------------------- "Never give up. And never, under any circumstances, no matter what - never face the facts." - Ruth Gordon
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posted
[Name of first vessel that appeared onscreen]-type is used when we don't know the vessel's real class designation. For example, if we didn't know that the Voyager is an Intrepid-class vessel, we'd call the Bellerophon a Voyager-type vessel.
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posted
Ah, I didn't know that D'kyr was the name of the first ship we saw, I was under the impression that someone had said "D'kyr type" or "class" in that episode. Well that's annoying.
[ February 19, 2003, 10:47 AM: Message edited by: Dr. Phlox ]
posted
Huh? I had thought that while never mentioned in the show, they had all but established that it *was* Hyperion class, and that the EAS Hyperion was the actual class ship.
ANYWAY, I'm wondering about the TARDIS-like timeship... The main chamber was obviously conformal to the exterior, but they had to go down some way into what must be another spatial domain to get to the engine room. Why so far? What's wrong with it jut being one floor down? Or back?
Mark
[ February 19, 2003, 12:52 PM: Message edited by: Mark Nguyen ]
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![[Smile]](smile.gif)
Anyway, the ship comes from 900 years into the future. Archer believes that the ship could belong to a researcher a la Rasmussen's victim.![[Frown]](frown.gif)
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