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Posted by Baloo (Member # 5) on :

In The Cage (and The Menagerie), Captain Pike announces that starships are much faster now, that they've "broken the time barrier". I presume there's nothing canon to go on, so I'd like a discussion of the following:

What did Captain Pike actually say onscreen, word-for-word?
How much faster is the Enterprise compared to the ship that crashed? How fast did that ship go?
What could Pike have meant wen he referred to the "time barrier"?

Keeping in mind that there is no canon information for most (if any) of this, let's keep this civil and try to figure out not what the scriptwriters had in mind at the time, but what actually fits and does not contradict established information.

--Baloo

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Posted by Enterprise (Member # 48) on :

I think he ment warp drive, but the other ship would have had to have had that.

Screenwriter oversight, as Gene hadn't decided on what the heck to do yet....

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Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :

Perhaps he's simply referring to the ability to get between star systems in a comfortable amount of time. I've never seen the eps, so I don't know what this other ship was, but could it have had a primitive warp drive? One that takes weeks or even months just to go between relatively nearby systems?

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Posted by Masao (Member # 232) on :

I can't help on this one, but is there some archive on the web with continuity scripts (i.e., transcripts) of all the episodes? I can't imagine that no one has ever prepared such things. After all, after TOS went off the air, fans had a lot of time on their hands until ST:TMP and TNG.

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Posted by Timo (Member # 245) on :

Actually, it's not Pike who says the line. After the landing party discovers the "survivors" from the crash of SS Columbia, the leader says how he never expected to see humans again. Navigator Joe Tyler then bursts out blabbing: "The time barrier has been broken! Our new ships can...". At which point Susie Oliver comes to steal the scene, and understandably shuts up Tyler.

Unfortunately, I don't remember the very first words of Tyler on the subject at the moment ("You won't believe something-something"), but those probably didn't offer anything crucially important. Tyler is clearly saying that a scientific/engineering breakthrough has been achieved during the time the Columbia has been missing, and ships built after the departure of the Columbia are capable of something the preceding ships were not.

Considering that it is an excited junior officer speaking of something rather closely related to his department, it could be Tyler is making a mountain out of a molehill. "Our new ships can move at warp eight now! Boy, a major improvement over the previous warp seven! Isn't it so exciting?!"...

Anyway, the Okudaic timeline would go

before 2236: Columbia departs, unaware of the breaking of the time barrier and not capable of the feats made possible by that achievement. Vina is listed as being aboard, so the launch date cannot be before her birth.
2236: Columbia crashes on the distant Talos IV; others killed, Vina repaired by Talosians. At this point, Vina is the young woman she looks like when the Enterprise finds her.
2245: Enterprise launched
2254: Enterprise arrives to Talos IV, and probably is now capable of whatever was made possible by the breaking of the time barrier

So the time barrier was broken between the unknown launch date of the Columbia, and the year 2254. Not very accurate. Also, we cannot be 100% sure if the Enterprise is one of the "new ships of ours" Tyler mentions. Perhaps only some other, newer ships can do... whatever it is, while the Enterprise still belongs to the "old ships"?

In any case, the Enterprise was coming from Rigel,
almost 900 ly away from Earth, and going to Vega, which is close to Earth and almost in the opposite direction from Rigel. So the ship would've had to have been capable of traveling 900 ly in less than two years, or 1800 in less than four (assuming Pike took over from April in 2250, near Earth, and went to Rigel and back without detours). Which isn't too bad even for a modern ship!

If we don't want to think that Pike spent two years brooding over his mistake on Rigel VII before talking with Boyce, we have to shorten the time interval, so the ship becomes even faster. Or then we have to say that Talos is close to Rigel and not to Vega, in which case the Enterprise would have to be even faster to get to Talos in "The Menagerie" and still have all the other TOS adventures in other star systems.

Timo Saloniemi

Posted by Laz1701 on :

If memory serves (as Spock would say), the dialogue went something like this:

Survivor: Is Earth all right?
Pike: Same old Earth, and you'll see it soon.
Tyler: And you won't believe how fast we can get back. The time barrier's been broken, Why, our new ships can --

Chalk this one up to sloppy writing plus the fact that many things had not been established yet this early in the series.

BTW, Pike called his ship the space vehicle Enterprise, which he explained was from a stellar group at the other end of the galaxy (from Talos, that is). This implies Talos is on the other side of the galactic core, which we know can't be possible.

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Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :

considering that the galaxy is roughly spherical - there is no true 'end' to the galaxy... it could be that it was simply hyperbole to imply that Earth was a ways-away from Talos.

The time-barrier

I think that the 'broken the time-barrier' means either
1. They can go now at speeds with out relativistic effects...
2. The ships can go at 'warp' speed instead of impulse - which doesn't make sense - but maybe they meant big ships... i.e. smaller ships may have been warp capable since Zee Cochrane but ships with large numbers of people at the time of Columbia's departure?
3.Maybe they simply meant that the ships have broken a 'time' barrier - i.e. time travelled between certain points or maybe colonies... maybe it matches with Riker's comment about Warp Drive compared to Warp Coil in "A Matter Of Time"?? The one with Berlinghoff Rasmussen... he said with the advancement of technologies they were confined to one sector with warp coils but weith warp drive they weren't...
4. Maybe they have gotten just faster... i.e. jumping into a new warp speed scale... i.e. needing a recalibration - warp 4.75 then might be equivalent to TOS's warp 3 and TNG's warp 1.5??

Andrew

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Posted by Timo (Member # 245) on :

Fanfic often says warp four was the barrier. And it might even make sense - at warp four, the power curve of TNG Tech Manual might become pronounced enough to overcome simple "noise" from crude old warp drives, so TOS ships would begin to run into these strange power consumption maxima and minima for the very first time. It would take them half a century to figure out the whole power curve, but the maximum at TOS warp four (a bit before the "real" warp four) could have been an observable and even insurmountable problem prior to "The Cage".

Once the first such barrier would be broken, the following ones might be pieces of cake. Perhaps starship power simply increased significantly at that time (introduction of antimatter?), to allow ships to leap over the low-wf power consumption maxima?

As for why it would be called a "time" barrier... Umm, perhaps it actually was "the Tyme barrier", named after the guy, gal or BEM who took credit for the discovery?

Timo Saloniemi

Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :

Sloppy writing? Oh, please. It was a pilot, for Thor's sake.

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Posted by Bernd (Member # 6) on :

Time barrier referring to relativistic time dilation? Brilliant idea, but warp drive would have worked completely different before that, and we know that warp drive as we know it is free of relativistic effects. OTOH, there was not yet an established Trek history at that time.

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Posted by Laz1701 on :

Actually, the galaxy is not spherical, but spiral. It is many, many times wider than it is deep or high - except in the center, where the core *is* spherical. There *are* galaxies out there which are indeed spherical or globular, but the Milky Way is not one of them. So when you say that something is located at the other end of the galaxy, and you're in the Alpha Quadrant, the implication is that this something is located in the Delta Quadrant when you look at a flat representation of the galaxy.

As for the subject of sloppy writing, why should the fact the episode is a pilot be any excuse? As a screenwriter myself, I can recognize sloppy writing when I see it as opposed to a concept which hasn't been nailed down yet or refined. Saying something like EUSPA or Space Central before Starfleet Command was finally decided upon isn't sloppy writing... but loose statements such as "The time barrier's been broken" when we're dealing with ships that obviously have been traveling faster than light for some time *are* sloppy.

Even at that early a point in the series, it already had been established that ships traveled faster than light. And that they had been traveling faster than light long enough for a federation of planets encompassing many worlds to have been established and for galactic exploration to be standard. Pike himself said, "Our time warp - factor seven." This statement certainly doesn't jibe with Tyler's exclamation. Are we to believe that time warp was discovered and then implemented in ships after the Columbia left on her journey eighteen years earlier? Tyler's statement would have made sense if he had said it to Khan in the Botany Bay, not to the survivors of the SS Columbia. So, yes, it's sloppy writing.

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Posted by Baloo (Member # 5) on :

I've been giving it some thought myself. Perhaps there are time dilation effects outside the innermost warp field (where the ship is). As speed increases, the field contracts around the ship until at some point, part of the ship itself extends outside the warp field?

I would imagine that this could cause some sort of problem within the ship. One possibility is that feedback causes damage to the warp coils, so the ship must refrain from travelling at such velocities. Another possibility is that the differential between the rate of time causes the hull to suffer stress, fracturing or possibly even breaking up?

Eventually, advances in warp design analagous to swept wings¹ and area ruling² permitted starships to exceed this limit without damage, or allowed the warp field surrounding the ship to be "shoved away" from the hull, preventing the damage.

¹ Wing sweep delayed the onset of shockwaves on the leading edges of a plane's wings. A plane with straight wings would experience terriffic buffeting at near-mach speeds, which only ceased once the plane was travelling at (or possibly slightly more than) Mach 1.
² Area ruling was discovered once planes could routinely exceed Mach 1, they had more drag than calculations predicted. It was discovered that at supersonic speeds, the drag over an aircraft's fuselage increased drastically wherever the surface area changed rapidly from one section to the next. By giving the fuselage a "coke bottle" shape, the drag was significantly reduced. For example, the F-102 maximum speed was only 810 mph, much less than expected. The F-106 (originally designated "YF-102B") had area ruling, and could reach speeds of ~1,300 mph, without a significant increase in thrust.

Perhaps the "streamlined" shape of the TOS Enterprise (compared to the "apple-on-a-stick" design of the Daedalus class ships is a result of improved warp dynamics to allow the "time barrier" (or "Tyme barrier") to be exceeded.

--Baloo

[This message has been edited by Baloo (edited March 23, 2000).]

Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :

Actually, I kind of like the "warp-4" (or whatever) theory. Perhaps, early on, it was thought to have something to do w/ time, rather than simple energy consumption efficiency. Even during TOS, they don't seem to have known about this, since the warp scale wasn't revised until much later. Therefore, it was erroneously dubbed "the time barrier". Even after they figured out that it had nothing to do w/ time, the name had probably stuck.

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Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :

OK couldn't the quote
"our time warp - factor seven" actually be

our time/warp - factor seven?

thus back then they called it time/warp instead of just warp factor.

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"Who wouldn't be the one you love
Who wouldn't stand inside your love." - Stand Inside Your Love, The Smashing Pumpkins

Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :

*imagines Captain Pike, every time he orders warp speed, singing "Let's do the time warp again..."*

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Posted by Laz1701 on :

Perhaps these time dilation and warp field effects are responsible for Pike's Enterprise becoming semi-transparent while at warp.

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Posted by Fabrux (Member # 71) on :

*shudders at the RHPS reference*

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