posted
Just for speculation's sake, could TMP have theoretically taken place in 2279? There was some dicussion on the TrekBBS about this, as it was pointed out that Decker said V'Ger was launched "more than 300 years ago." (The original Voyager probe was launched in 1977, so Voyager 6 could hardly have been launched before that...)
Anyway, was there ever any line in later shows that would make a 2279 TMP impossible or highly unlikely?
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Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
Decker's line could possibly be explained away by the fact that he was horribly wrong, or failed history at school, or he's just completely thick when it comes to dates and figures.
The fact is I doubt TMP took place much later than 2271, 72. Didn't Scotty say they'd be overhauling the Enteprise for 18 months? Yes, that doesn't necessarily mean 18 months directly after the end of TOS, but it gives us a reasonable indication. Secondly, the difference between the Enterprise and the crew, and their uniforms, between TMP and TWoK. It looks like a whole new bridge module was installed in that time as well, and another significant ship-wide refit. Assuming that TWoK did take place in the early 2280's I'd say there had to be a gap of at least a decade between the events of TMP and TWoK.
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quote:Originally posted by The Red Admiral: Secondly, the difference between the Enterprise and the crew, and their uniforms, between TMP and TWoK. It looks like a whole new bridge module was installed in that time as well, and another significant ship-wide refit.
Well, just to balance it, comparing TMP to the end of TOS, doesn't it look like significantly more than two years have passed?
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Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
We can be more specific than 18 months. Decker says that Kirk hasn't logged "a single star-hour in two and a half years." Elsewhere Kirk says he spent "five years out there, dealing with unknowns." Though no one says "since your five year mission, which ended two and a half years ago," the film gives us very little wiggle room for any other interpretation.
Having said that, from just the evidence presented in the film itself, and assuming for some reason that Decker cannot possibly have overestimated how long ago Voyager 6 was launched, and taking the only two data points the film gives us (Voyager 6 being launched in the late 20th century, which means between 1977 and 2000, and it being launched over three hundred years ago, meaning, let us say, between 300 and 350 years.) We get a possible date which ranges between 2277 and 2350.
Of course, taking all the canon data into account, including that bit from Voyager about Kirk's famous mission ending in 2270, we have to conclude, or so it seems to me, that the film takes place sometime in 2272 or '73.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
There's certainly a lot of wiggle room there. And nothing definite about the date, but plenty of suggestive hints - both for an early TMP, and for a late one...
Arguments for an early TMP, 2272-73:
* 18 months of refit after 2270. * 2.5 years during which Kirk was not in space, yet he says he only spent five years out there (meaning TOS+TAS), not ten (meaning TOS, TAS and some unseen second mission). * ST3 suggests the Enterprise is twenty years old, which cannot refer to the actual christening of the ship back in the 2240s, and therefore probably should refer to the TMP refit - ergo, TMP has to take place as early as possible before ST3. * Uniforms change completely by ST2, and so do the looks of Kirk and Scotty.
Arguments for a late TMP, 2276-79:
* Kirk is a friggin' ADMIRAL! And Chief of SF Ops to boot. This must have taken some time. * Kirk could have been yanked to a desk job straight after TOS, and could have spent far more than 2.5 years in that job. "Logging a single star hour" might be something Kirk would still have a chance to do every now and then - just not in the past 2.5 years out of the 5-8 that have passed since TOS. * Pretty much everybody else has been promoted, too. Many have been promoted two steps. * And uniforms and facial wrinkles are just as different from their TOS looks as they are from the ST2 looks. * Klingons are very different from TOS, too... * And there are eleventeen hundred novel and comic book adventures that could better fit between TOS and TMP if the latter were moved to 2276 or beyond!
Kirk's rear admiral has always been based on costuming notes of what his stripes were meant to mean, compared to more senior admirals. Chekov seems to have had some stripe changes through the film, or at least during some photography phases of production, as his absent/broken/full stripes get a little confused. Some other costuming oddities were Decker's beige jumpsuit and McCoy and Spock accidentally switching jackets with green-medical and orange-sciences armbands. Rand's rank is assumed to be a good promotion, even though yeoman was a position and her TOS rank was never established, but both seem to be before she made ensign, based on the TMP costuming and character materials of her CPO rank.
BTW, i think that saying that Kirk logged a star hour at some point in his years as an admiral is betraying the line's written intentions. That line was placed there as a story point, to establish that it had been almost two-and-a-half years since Kirk flew the E home.
So I gotta go with it being during 2272, past the middle of the year, based on that 2.5 line and the Voyager mission end date 2270.
And there are very few comic/novel deals that actually take place BETWEEN TOS and TMP..maybe youve forgotten this entails the E to be disassembled. So far, the only comics to tread there would be the second DC first series annual, which was about the end of the five year mission, and then the 75th issues of the second DC series, the end of the 'Star-Crossed' series that takes place as Admiral Kirk decidesto take the job at Ops because of crooked admirals mismanaging starship construction and refitting at skunkworks facilities. The novels that go here were designed to fill in a two year span, and there arent many.. 'The Lost Years' is about the immediately post TOS actions of the crew, followed chronologically by 'Traitor Winds.' 'A Flag Full of Stars' and 'Recovery' take place also, ending the Lost Years series and leaving definite open ends into the film, so theres not much to say these 6 stories wouldnt fit in 2 years. sorry.
Registered: Sep 2001
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posted
Chekov wasn't a full Lieutenant in TMP? My mistake, then. But Captain to Rear Admiral *is* a two-step promotion in a universe that features the rank of Commodore and even devotes a separate cuff-stripe code to it...
Hmm. I guess a post-TOS, pre-TMP novel is an ambiguous concept. But plenty of the apparent "TOS" books could take place between 2270s and 2276, thus spreading out the adventures a bit and making them more plausible. These just wouldn't be from the same timeline as those "Lost Years" books are.
Speaking of novel timelines, all the cool Diane Duane works seem to be post-TMP (even if the covers confusingly have TOS images), so there is an incentive to make TMP as early as possible to fit all those in...
posted
Chekov was a full Lieutenant during TMP. Since there was no rank for Lt. JG, it wasn't a two-step-promotion.
There are a few promotion pictures, showing the crew with their old TOS ranks. Uhura has one solid stripe for Lt. and Chekov one broken stripe for Ensign.
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posted
no lieutenant j.g.? sounds like ST:Mag rubbish to me.
Registered: Sep 2001
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We know that the rank of Lt. JG was used very very rarely during TOS. It is possible, that Povill assumed, that the rank did not exist, because he hasn't seen it in any TOS episode. Hence he left out the rank when writing this memo.
Even Mike Okuda forgot about the TOS Lt. JG rank in his encyclopedia.
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Registered: Mar 2000
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posted
This scheme also lacks the rank of Commodore. And in ST2-5, there was no rank pin for Lt.Cmdr.
Yet it seems logical to assume that at least some of these ranks would exist despite this omission. Lt(jg) was present from ST2 onwards, and Lt.Cmdr from ST6 onwards. Both ranks had also been witnessed prior to the gap - "Lieutenant" Tormolen with the single broken strip, and Lt. Cmdrs Sulu and Uhura in TMP and McCoy et al in TOS with the broken/solid strip combination. So the brief absence of these rank markings shouldn't count as implied absence of rank. IMHO. AFAIC. YMMV.
Commodore is an iffier issue, since there's no obvious rank marking for that rank in any of the post-TOS Trek incarnations. Or, rather, in the later TOS movies the marking exists in memo form but is not seen on-screen, which is the opposite of the Lt.Cmdr and Lt(jg) cases. For all we know, this rank may indeed have disappeared from Starfleet after TOS. IMHO. AFAIC. YMMV.
Then again, what is the one-pip flag rank in TNG? And if there is none, then why is the pip system designed so that this obvious variant does not exist? The absence of a "3.5 pip" rank from the straight flush of line ranks is more understandable than the omission of the 1-pip flag rank. IMHO. AFAIC. YMMV.
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