And what makes you think that the MSD in ENT is any more canon than the briefing room display in the episode "The Enterprise Incident" in TOS itself which shows the Enterprise, the Romulan D7 conversion, and a scale ruler? If anything the onscreen canon size of the Constitution class is 47 feet shorter than the official figure of 947 feet if you go by that scale literally (which puts it as 900 feet).
Because the scale is not recognisable. It dosn't show readable numbers, only the relative scales of the D7 and Conni where as figures can be made out on the MSD.
I don't know what feet are but if you 'know' that the canonical figure is 900 of these feet then why claim it's 947 feet.
That particular shot IS readable, though barely (for instance you can clearly see the notation of "scale in feet" under the bar and the 50' mark is visible enough. There are other frames in which other parts are slightly clearer as well, and the original graphic still exists and had been published elsewhere (including a 9x11 print in the old plastic model kit papers) so the scale is known well enough. It does point out an important point though in that the scale is slightly off because no one thought people would actually measure the thing and so they got a close approximation instead of taking the time and expense to go to a micrometer-accurate rendition. It is still not bad, they got within 47 feet of the official figure of 947 for a shot that that lasted all of a second or two.
The actual shooting models have scale notations that put the ship at approximately 947 feet, the internal documentation for the show gave that figure (along with several others at times, like the ship was originally supposed to be 200 feet long and the entire teardrop shaped structure on top of the saucer was the bridge but they decided to make it real-world aircraft-carrier sized instead as the pre-production phase went along), and Jefferies himself mentioned the figure in interviews.
Irrelevant as those details didn't make it onscreen.
No, they did make it onscreen in every outside shot of the ship because the ships were scale-accurate. The fact that they never had some silly giant space-ruler or whatever floating alongside in the show itself does not negate the fact that the official length of the fictional ship the models represented and scale the models were built to was known and marked on the plans and models themselves out of sight of the camera, and that those figures were used in scaling the shots.
Actually, Roddenberry usually took the opposite approach, that older canon is more valid than newer canon, even going so far as to say that they only real canon was the first two seasons of TOS and everything else was just an approximation at best. He later loosened up about that, but he still ruled in favor of older canon most often with his notoriously capricious pronouncements.
What Roddenberry did or did not do is relevant as canon is set by CBS not Roddenberry. I don't believe CBS has ever said whether newer or older material is more canonical, and I don't think they mch care, they simply reference newer material far more than older material so the older stuff is out of continuity by default. This has been the case since during TOS.
Wrong. It was NBC and Desilu (later Paramount) who set the canon along with Roddenberry. CBS did not come into it until the very end of ENT.
The Starship Class USS Enterprise of the UESPA, captained by James R Kirk, and first officered by yellow-shirted, Half-Vulcan science officer Mr Spock (as he's officially addressed on documents), a Vulconis with a human ancestor from a planet with no moon. This ship breaks the time warp barrier and can travel at warp 14 and is powered by lithium and is able to reach both the Galactic Barrier and Galactic Centre in well under 7 years.
Every single part of that statement was retconned in TOS and the TOS films apart from the warp 10 limit (TNG) and the Galactic travel times (VGR).
UESPA exists until the founding of the Federation. After that all Starships are operated by either the Federation Starfleet or small, non-Starfleet groups (like the Regula 1 station or The Raven). It's apparent command of the Enterprise in TOS was retconned.
You are taking it all out of context. Some of the things come from the background still having fluid areas (the series bible cannot cover every single detail of everything) and the show startup was rough and chaotic, it was constantly on-again, off-again, and people were not always on the same page when it came to names of people, ship classes, and agencies and whatnot. Roddenberry called the ship a battleship but NBC would not have that at all, and they went back and forth even calling it a "cruiser" since the network considered it too military sounding at a time when anti-war protests were so prevalent.
There never was a "James R. Kirk", it was a typo that was not discovered until too late to change it without expensive delays in shooting. It is not some "retcon" since he never had that initial in the first place, and it even became a kind of in-joke that Gary Mitchell had godlike powers but still made mistakes. Other errors were made and not all were caught in time to keep them out of the episodes.
One good example is that the "proximity phaser" stuff in "Balance of Terror" was supposed to be the introduction of the photon torpedo. The SFX people got the memo and used the new torpedo effect, but someone apparently missed it and when they saw the unfamiliar weapon reference in the script they "fixed" it. By the time someone noticed the error they had shot too much to go back and re-shoot with the proper reference so phasers got a new power to add to their already large repertoire.
The "Starship class" thing was because the details had not been hammered out and there were a lot of kludges used in places were people were not expected to be able to actually read what they said. Originally they were referring to the ship as a "starship class XVII" (which is where the '17' part of the registry came from, Enterprise ('01') was supposed to be the first active ship of that class (00 was for prototypes)) but the number was scratched out while they decided what to put as a class name, so when the time ran out the plaque was made with the remaining "Starship Class" kludge in place and they made a point of never showing the plaque close up.
UESPA was not "retconned out", the official explanation was that Enterprise was passed around between departments within Starfleet a bit before the organization was streamlined. It is the same as the way the Vulcan Diplomatic Corps was part of the Federation diplomatic service while at the same time being a Vulcan institution. In TOS there were ships that were generic Federation but also ones associated with a particular planet as well, such as the Enterprise was with Earth and Intrepid was with Vulcan even though they were all part of Starfleet together. It is not like that kind of organizational mess is absent from the real world where separate or semi-separate political entities combine operational units, so why should the Federation be any less of a tangle under the same situation?
None of that is either official or canonical.
Nevertheless, that concept was the way Paramount explained it over the years, and it is not directly contradicted by anything onscreen that could not be explained in that way. In fact, Starbase 11 is identified as a UESPA facility by its internal signage in "The Menagerie" after the name Starfleet was established in previous episodes, and if you look in the background in "Generations" there is a UESPA logo on the wall in Enterprise-B too. In "Tomorrow is Yesterday" Kirk makes a statement about a "combined service" which is vague enough that it could very well refer to the kind of overlapping tight alliance situation that Paramount talked about.
Its head canon but could the 2 organisations still exist with close links? Starfleet with the bigger ships and UESPA sending out probes?. I mean space is crazy big, even with probes and starships you will never get it all.
It would make sense for UESPA to be folded into a Starfleet branch (like Exploratory Division) and maybe the logo still exists as a kind of department or sub department. The UESPA facilities would still be on earth and used, after all.
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
In TOS, Delta Vega was somewhere toward the rim of the galaxy. There was an unmanned lithium-cracking station there, and later they added the corpse of a would-be god.
Not that Delta Vega, the other one from 09 where Spock watched Vulcan go the way of Alderaan.
That particular shot IS readable, though barely (for instance you can clearly see the notation of "scale in feet" under the bar and the 50' mark is visible enough. There are other frames in which other parts are slightly clearer as well, and the original graphic still exists and had been published elsewhere (including a 9x11 print in the old plastic model kit papers) so the scale is known well enough. It does point out an important point though in that the scale is slightly off because no one thought people would actually measure the thing and so they got a close approximation instead of taking the time and expense to go to a micrometer-accurate rendition. It is still not bad, they got within 47 feet of the official figure of 947 for a shot that that lasted all of a second or two.
It's not visible. You only think it is because you have familiarity with the original image. Either way, it dosn't fit the sets built and has been retconned as of ENT.
No, they did make it onscreen in every outside shot of the ship because the ships were scale-accurate. The fact that they never had some silly giant space-ruler or whatever floating alongside in the show itself does not negate the fact that the official length of the fictional ship the models represented and scale the models were built to was known and marked on the plans and models themselves out of sight of the camera, and that those figures were used in scaling the shots.
Except the whole reason Drexler resize the ship in ENT was because all the measuring business never worked out. So no, the supposed measurements never did make it onscreen.
And, though you probably thought it funny, nobody needs a 'floating ruler', size can be guessed by context. Even if you don't arrive at exactly 170m, the size of the Defiant can be guessed by noting the size of the Type 10 shuttle, comparing it against the shuttlebay, and that bay against the rest of the ship. The Conni in TOS doesn't fly close enough to any other ships we know the sizes of, but in ENT we roughly know the size of the NX (thanks to the observation pod scene) and the scale of the Conni relative to it, ditto for the Crossfield, there's window zoom out shots and the shuttlebay (that dosn't change sizes unlike some I could mention) that we can use to guess it's in the 600-800m range and the Conni that we can scale alongside it.
Some ships are impossible to scale, including the B'rel because it ranges from sub-100m to the size of a Galaxy Class, but the Conni is not one, the only reliable figures we have place it in the 350-450m range. Partially helped by comparisons to the Excelsior, whos MSD, damage patterns in 'Generations', and size relative to the galaxy in TNG put it to be in the 500-600m range.
Wrong. It was NBC and Desilu (later Paramount) who set the canon along with Roddenberry. CBS did not come into it until the very end of ENT.
Irrelevant, Roddenberry was kicked upstairs into a position where all he could do was whine because he kept doing stupid things like trying to declare random sections of the franchise non-canon. Where the difference between CBS and Paramount came in is not relevant to Roddenberry's influence or lack thereof.
You are taking it all out of context. Some of the things come from the background still having fluid areas (the series bible cannot cover every single detail of everything) and the show startup was rough and chaotic, it was constantly on-again, off-again, and people were not always on the same page when it came to names of people, ship classes, and agencies and whatnot. Roddenberry called the ship a battleship but NBC would not have that at all, and they went back and forth even calling it a "cruiser" since the network considered it too military sounding at a time when anti-war protests were so prevalent.
The context is what the story is telling and how the story evolves. Referring to a fixed 'series bible' is literally taking things out of context as the context has now changed and did whilst filming. Not to mention, again, irrelevant as only what made it onscreen counts.
There never was a "James R. Kirk", it was a typo that was not discovered until too late to change it without expensive delays in shooting. It is not some "retcon" since he never had that initial in the first place, and it even became a kind of in-joke that Gary Mitchell had godlike powers but still made mistakes. Other errors were made and not all were caught in time to keep them out of the episodes.
Yes there was. It's written on his tombstone as you go on to describe. I don't think you know what a retcon is. It means retroactive continuity and it applies to any concept in the media in question that is ignored or contradicted instead of being retroactively fixed (like digitally painting over it in the remasters).
One good example is that the "proximity phaser" stuff in "Balance of Terror" was supposed to be the introduction of the photon torpedo. The SFX people got the memo and used the new torpedo effect, but someone apparently missed it and when they saw the unfamiliar weapon reference in the script they "fixed" it. By the time someone noticed the error they had shot too much to go back and re-shoot with the proper reference so phasers got a new power to add to their already large repertoire.
And as the proximity phaser made it on screen it is now canon and the lack of further reference to it means it was retconned out. You're not making any new points here.
The "Starship class" thing was because the details had not been hammered out and there were a lot of kludges used in places were people were not expected to be able to actually read what they said. Originally they were referring to the ship as a "starship class XVII" (which is where the '17' part of the registry came from, Enterprise ('01') was supposed to be the first active ship of that class (00 was for prototypes)) but the number was scratched out while they decided what to put as a class name, so when the time ran out the plaque was made with the remaining "Starship Class" kludge in place and they made a point of never showing the plaque close up.
Nevertheless, that concept was the way Paramount explained it over the years, and it is not directly contradicted by anything onscreen that could not be explained in that way. In fact, Starbase 11 is identified as a UESPA facility by its internal signage in "The Menagerie" after the name Starfleet was established in previous episodes, and if you look in the background in "Generations" there is a UESPA logo on the wall in Enterprise-B too. In "Tomorrow is Yesterday" Kirk makes a statement about a "combined service" which is vague enough that it could very well refer to the kind of overlapping tight alliance situation that Paramount talked about.
Except it is directly contradicted by the fact that Starfleet are nothing to do with the United Earth (the Earth Starfleet from ENT was dissolved along with MACOs) and no other organisation other than Starfleet Command has any sort of command over Starfleet except, possibly, the Federation Council. The reference in 'The Menagerie' is another example of something later retconned. Same with 'Tomorrow is Yesterday' as the only subdivisions of Starfleet are the departments like Starfleet Medical or Section 31. I don't know of the reference in 'Generations'.
It seems you're not really getting the point of my post. By whatever means, deliberate or intentional, whatever ends up on the screen is now canon and part of the continuity, when those concepts are later overridden or ignored all that has happened is that the continuity has changed to ignore them, it doesn't matter if you consider them intentional or not, they are equally canon just, now, out of continuity.
TOS suffers from all the issues you pointed out (though I don't think you understood why) which is why it is more or less completely ignored by every other instalment, primerally starting from TMP but also by TOS itself. That is my point. Pointing out reasons behind each of those is meaningless as it's not the purpose, I'm listing things that were canon in TOS and later retconned in TOS.
Kirk's middle name may not have been intended to be 'R', but it was 'R', for a whole episode before it became, and always had been 'T'. It doesn't matter if it was an error or an early concept, it was his middle name until the show decided it was 'T'.
It would make sense for UESPA to be folded into a Starfleet branch (like Exploratory Division) and maybe the logo still exists as a kind of department or sub department. The UESPA facilities would still be on earth and used, after all.
There's all sorts of possibilities of what happened to UESPA, but one thing it doesn't do is have any sort of command over the Enterprise as that's a Federation Starfleet ship.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
Actually, Roddenberry usually took the opposite approach, that older canon is more valid than newer canon, even going so far as to say that they only real canon was the first two seasons of TOS and everything else was just an approximation at best. He later loosened up about that, but he still ruled in favor of older canon most often with his notoriously capricious pronouncements.
What Roddenberry did or did not do is relevant as canon is set by CBS not Roddenberry. I don't believe CBS has ever said whether newer or older material is more canonical, and I don't think they mch care, they simply reference newer material far more than older material so the older stuff is out of continuity by default. This has been the case since during TOS.
Wrong. It was NBC and Desilu (later Paramount) who set the canon along with Roddenberry. CBS did not come into it until the very end of ENT.
Roddenberry was so inconsistent that it's hard to guess WHY he said stuff. Also he changed his mind often. What was his final decision?
Realistically most works of fiction don't use the "oldest is best" approach simply because it reduces the value of things added after the first.
That particular shot IS readable, though barely (for instance you can clearly see the notation of "scale in feet" under the bar and the 50' mark is visible enough. There are other frames in which other parts are slightly clearer as well, and the original graphic still exists and had been published elsewhere (including a 9x11 print in the old plastic model kit papers) so the scale is known well enough. It does point out an important point though in that the scale is slightly off because no one thought people would actually measure the thing and so they got a close approximation instead of taking the time and expense to go to a micrometer-accurate rendition. It is still not bad, they got within 47 feet of the official figure of 947 for a shot that that lasted all of a second or two.
It's not visible. You only think it is because you have familiarity with the original image. Either way, it dosn't fit the sets built and has been retconned as of ENT.
It is visible enough to do measurements with, and people have done them, arriving at the approximately 900ft figure. It is a quick graphic not meant to be analyzed however so it does not measure out to exactly 947 feet official figure though it is close. It being short by 47 feet is reasonable, but being short by over 1300 feet (which it would be with your claimed 400 meters length) is not reasonable error. They intended to show the ship at 947 feet in that graphic and came close enough for the brief time on camera and the low resolution of TV at the time.
No, they did make it onscreen in every outside shot of the ship because the ships were scale-accurate. The fact that they never had some silly giant space-ruler or whatever floating alongside in the show itself does not negate the fact that the official length of the fictional ship the models represented and scale the models were built to was known and marked on the plans and models themselves out of sight of the camera, and that those figures were used in scaling the shots.
Except the whole reason Drexler resize the ship in ENT was because all the measuring business never worked out. So no, the supposed measurements never did make it onscreen.
Just how big do you think stage nine at Desilu was? Cawley rebuilt the entire thing using the original blueprints in a strip mall store. The live sets fit in the hull very easily, the ONLY thing that does not quite fit was the forced perspective shuttlebay miniature because of perspective errors, and that was nothing but an error, just like the "James R. Kirk" headstone. And as I said earlier, if you unbend the miniature set and calculate it all out it STILL would not need a 400 meter long Enterprise. And don't think that it has to fit a Budweiser plant in the secondary hull just because the Kelvin one does, those are two entirely different ships from different universes though they share a few similarities and an existential link.
And, though you probably thought it funny, nobody needs a 'floating ruler', size can be guessed by context. Even if you don't arrive at exactly 170m, the size of the Defiant can be guessed by noting the size of the Type 10 shuttle, comparing it against the shuttlebay, and that bay against the rest of the ship. The Conni in TOS doesn't fly close enough to any other ships we know the sizes of, but in ENT we roughly know the size of the NX (thanks to the observation pod scene) and the scale of the Conni relative to it, ditto for the Crossfield, there's window zoom out shots and the shuttlebay (that dosn't change sizes unlike some I could mention) that we can use to guess it's in the 600-800m range and the Conni that we can scale alongside it.
Some ships are impossible to scale, including the B'rel because it ranges from sub-100m to the size of a Galaxy Class, but the Conni is not one, the only reliable figures we have place it in the 350-450m range. Partially helped by comparisons to the Excelsior, whos MSD, damage patterns in 'Generations', and size relative to the galaxy in TNG put it to be in the 500-600m range.
The Enterprise was always "close" to a ship of known size in TOS: itself. When the creator of the series, the creator of the ship design, and all the paperwork dealing with building the ship to scale all agree on a size then that is the size. The ship in TOS was literally designed to be 947 feet long.
As for the B'rel, that is only one class of ship based on the same hull configuration at different scales. There is a heavy cruiser that uses the same hull in a larger size for instance, Riker was assigned to one of that class briefly as an exchange officer.
Wrong. It was NBC and Desilu (later Paramount) who set the canon along with Roddenberry. CBS did not come into it until the very end of ENT.
Irrelevant, Roddenberry was kicked upstairs into a position where all he could do was whine because he kept doing stupid things like trying to declare random sections of the franchise non-canon. Where the difference between CBS and Paramount came in is not relevant to Roddenberry's influence or lack thereof.
Yet he was still held up as the ultimate authority in a lot of ways as well. The Paramount movie division did have the usual contempt for a "jumped up TV producer" that was common at the time (and still is to some degree) which set a bad precedent but Paramount overall still acknowledged him as the creator of the series and listened to him on a lot of points. It is not all as black-and-white as you seem to think.
You are taking it all out of context. Some of the things come from the background still having fluid areas (the series bible cannot cover every single detail of everything) and the show startup was rough and chaotic, it was constantly on-again, off-again, and people were not always on the same page when it came to names of people, ship classes, and agencies and whatnot. Roddenberry called the ship a battleship but NBC would not have that at all, and they went back and forth even calling it a "cruiser" since the network considered it too military sounding at a time when anti-war protests were so prevalent.
The context is what the story is telling and how the story evolves. Referring to a fixed 'series bible' is literally taking things out of context as the context has now changed and did whilst filming. Not to mention, again, irrelevant as only what made it onscreen counts.
The only thing I said about the series bible in that paragraph was that it could not possibly contain everything, and all you take away from it is that I used the term "series bible"? Seriously?
No, the context is not quite that simple because it also included a certain amount of the things that made the onscreen stuff what it was in the first place. And you are not even taking what was onscreen into account anyway, you are simply cherrypicking stuff that agrees with you and ignoring other onscreen evidence.
There never was a "James R. Kirk", it was a typo that was not discovered until too late to change it without expensive delays in shooting. It is not some "retcon" since he never had that initial in the first place, and it even became a kind of in-joke that Gary Mitchell had godlike powers but still made mistakes. Other errors were made and not all were caught in time to keep them out of the episodes.
Yes there was. It's written on his tombstone as you go on to describe. I don't think you know what a retcon is. It means retroactive continuity and it applies to any concept in the media in question that is ignored or contradicted instead of being retroactively fixed (like digitally painting over it in the remasters).
I know what a retcon is, and the "James R. Kirk" thing is not one. Yes, there is that tombstone inscription, but you misinterpret it as something that it is not. Gary Mitchell got it wrong is all, simple as that, just like when he called Smith "Jones" and Smith corrected him shortly before they were to leave the galaxy.
One good example is that the "proximity phaser" stuff in "Balance of Terror" was supposed to be the introduction of the photon torpedo. The SFX people got the memo and used the new torpedo effect, but someone apparently missed it and when they saw the unfamiliar weapon reference in the script they "fixed" it. By the time someone noticed the error they had shot too much to go back and re-shoot with the proper reference so phasers got a new power to add to their already large repertoire.
And as the proximity phaser made it on screen it is now canon and the lack of further reference to it means it was retconned out. You're not making any new points here.
Again, it is not a "retcon", retcons in even the loosest sense are active insertions that add to, modify, or replace previous information. In fact the term was first used for flashback storytelling that fleshed out character backgrounds in sometimes unexpected ways, not for changing canon. Using something in one episode that never appears again does not mean it is "reconned out" of canon, it just means they never use that particular schtick again. In fact, a variant of the idea is seen later in handheld phasers where it has a the same kind of "yelp" sound and a bright flash instead of the colored beam and trill of normal phaser operation, though they call it "wide angle" there instead of prox.
The "Starship class" thing was because the details had not been hammered out and there were a lot of kludges used in places were people were not expected to be able to actually read what they said. Originally they were referring to the ship as a "starship class XVII" (which is where the '17' part of the registry came from, Enterprise ('01') was supposed to be the first active ship of that class (00 was for prototypes)) but the number was scratched out while they decided what to put as a class name, so when the time ran out the plaque was made with the remaining "Starship Class" kludge in place and they made a point of never showing the plaque close up.
Ditto.
Here you do have a point. TNG, by actively officializing the common lore notion of the class name being "Constitution" did retcon the kludge on that plaque. It went from an undefined placeholder to an actual class name (which is what a retcon was originally supposed to do, provide "retrograde continuity" to fill in the blanks though the term is often used for anti-continuity changes nowadays too).
That is not what happened with UESPA though. NOTHING onscreen positively says that UESPA was ever actually disbanded rather than folded into Starfleet and references (no matter how obscure and in the background) to it are made right up until the last movie that featured the TOS crew (or at least the movie hook featured a number of them and Kirk was a major part of it).
Nevertheless, that concept was the way Paramount explained it over the years, and it is not directly contradicted by anything onscreen that could not be explained in that way. In fact, Starbase 11 is identified as a UESPA facility by its internal signage in "The Menagerie" after the name Starfleet was established in previous episodes, and if you look in the background in "Generations" there is a UESPA logo on the wall in Enterprise-B too. In "Tomorrow is Yesterday" Kirk makes a statement about a "combined service" which is vague enough that it could very well refer to the kind of overlapping tight alliance situation that Paramount talked about.
Except it is directly contradicted by the fact that Starfleet are nothing to do with the United Earth (the Earth Starfleet from ENT was dissolved along with MACOs) and no other organisation other than Starfleet Command has any sort of command over Starfleet except, possibly, the Federation Council. The reference in 'The Menagerie' is another example of something later retconned. Same with 'Tomorrow is Yesterday' as the only subdivisions of Starfleet are the departments like Starfleet Medical or Section 31. I don't know of the reference in 'Generations'.
And what do you claim contradicts it? There is no actual mention of UESPA being disbanded or that Starfleet is an absolutely monolithic organization. Instead there are hints that it is more like how the Paramount explanation painted it.
It seems you're not really getting the point of my post. By whatever means, deliberate or intentional, whatever ends up on the screen is now canon and part of the continuity, when those concepts are later overridden or ignored all that has happened is that the continuity has changed to ignore them, it doesn't matter if you consider them intentional or not, they are equally canon just, now, out of continuity.
Fair enough, in an oversimplistic black and white sort of way, but it is really a bit more complicated than that. And the "ignored" part is just dead wrong except in cases where there is already an established canon on a particular point and an error is made that contradicts the canon, like the "you cannot turn in warp" nonsense in one episode of Voyager, and that silence is a tacit acknowledgement of the error and a return to the previously established canon.
Star Trek canon is worded such that even quasi-canon sticks until actively replaced by a new canon, silence does not achieve that in the least. The only thing that comes close to silence equaling canon change is a major shark jump that cuts itself off from previous canon like how Kelvin did it or Primeval did it several times with their timeline anomalies.
TOS suffers from all the issues you pointed out (though I don't think you understood why) which is why it is more or less completely ignored by every other instalment, primerally starting from TMP but also by TOS itself. That is my point. Pointing out reasons behind each of those is meaningless as it's not the purpose, I'm listing things that were canon in TOS and later retconned in TOS.
Kirk's middle name may not have been intended to be 'R', but it was 'R', for a whole episode before it became, and always had been 'T'. It doesn't matter if it was an error or an early concept, it was his middle name until the show decided it was 'T'.
It would make sense for UESPA to be folded into a Starfleet branch (like Exploratory Division) and maybe the logo still exists as a kind of department or sub department. The UESPA facilities would still be on earth and used, after all.
There's all sorts of possibilities of what happened to UESPA, but one thing it doesn't do is have any sort of command over the Enterprise as that's a Federation Starfleet ship.
Again, there is no direct retcon that actively contradicts most of that stuff, and perfectly reasonable explanations that cover nearly all of the so-called discrepancies. There is no such thing as a passive retcon, just because you refuse to listen to Paramount's explanations since they are generally not onscreen or are too subtle for your tastes when they do appear onscreen does not mean that their not revisiting the points you dislike automatically negates them from canon.
You yourself admit that you have no idea what happened to UESPA yet insist that it absolutely cannot not exist anywhere in Starfleet, even against onscreen references to it interleafed with Starfleet references (if you check, all references to UESPA did not end before the first Starfleet ones). Enterprise was just as associated with Earth as Intrepid was with Vulcan so it is quite possible it had some sort of sharing arrangement with UESPA, or UESPA could be part of Starfleet itself in the TOS era (which seems the most likely of the possibilities).
.
The Enterprise was always "close" to a ship of known size in TOS: itself. When the creator of the series, the creator of the ship design, and all the paperwork dealing with building the ship to scale all agree on a size then that is the size. The ship in TOS was literally designed to be 947 feet long.
I just want to point out that you can't really compare a ship to itself in terms of a scaling object. I ran into that kind of issue years ago when I made a model of Babylon 5 in a CAD program in school. Sure it was a relatively basic model, but I know the station's supposed to be 5 miles long. However there was no reference to SHOW that it was 5 miles long. It could be 5 miles, or 5 inches.
What he's referring to was how big the ship was compared to a known scaled ship, such as the USS Defiant flying alongside an NX class starship. We have a pretty good idea based on many visual clues as to how big the NX is. Now stick an NX next to a Connie, and we have an object to scale to in order to determine size.
Taking into consideration angle, perspective, and distance between the ships... you can figure out that the Defiant is bigger than the Avenger, but doesn't dwarf her.
The NX class is listed as being 225 Meters long.
The Constitution Class is listed at 288.6 Meters long (pre-refit)
If we only knew the length of the NX, we could use the NX as the measuring stick to determine the size of the Connie. But we can't compare the size of a Connie to the size of a Connie without knowing her size, or the size of a nearby object. Otherwise it can be argued that the Connie could be as you say 947 feet long, or 947 INCHES long. There is no scale to reference.
As to the scale seen in one episode of TOS... on screen there's not enough detail to clearly read anything. All we got really is how big a Connie is compared to a D7. Yes there is the scale shown on screen, but again its not clear enough for the viewer to see numbers, so it is rather ambiguous as to the actual scale.
What everyone intended behind the scenes doesn't make it onto the screen all the time. Diving that deep into Behind the Scenes stuff is not something a casual viewer would do to determine the size of a ship. It would be easier to compare to another object present to get the size. Not so easy to just say "we can compare her to herself" without anything around her of a different size to actually compare her size to. We know the Fesarius dwarfs the Enterprise, and we know the Botany Bay is smaller than the Enterprise.
To further demonstrate, we can use the Enterprise to judge the size of the Botany Bay as we know the length of the Enterprise. But if the Enterprise wasn't there... there is absolutely nothing to compare to in order to judge size. So for all we know the Botany Bay could be 5 miles long. BUT... put her next to the Enterprise... we get a better understanding of how big she really is, about the length of the secondary hull, give or take a few.
The Enterprise was always "close" to a ship of known size in TOS: itself. When the creator of the series, the creator of the ship design, and all the paperwork dealing with building the ship to scale all agree on a size then that is the size. The ship in TOS was literally designed to be 947 feet long.
I just want to point out that you can't really compare a ship to itself in terms of a scaling object. I ran into that kind of issue years ago when I made a model of Babylon 5 in a CAD program in school. Sure it was a relatively basic model, but I know the station's supposed to be 5 miles long. However there was no reference to SHOW that it was 5 miles long. It could be 5 miles, or 5 inches.
What he's referring to was how big the ship was compared to a known scaled ship, such as the USS Defiant flying alongside an NX class starship. We have a pretty good idea based on many visual clues as to how big the NX is. Now stick an NX next to a Connie, and we have an object to scale to in order to determine size.
Taking into consideration angle, perspective, and distance between the ships... you can figure out that the Defiant is bigger than the Avenger, but doesn't dwarf her.
The NX class is listed as being 225 Meters long.
The Constitution Class is listed at 288.6 Meters long (pre-refit)
If we only knew the length of the NX, we could use the NX as the measuring stick to determine the size of the Connie. But we can't compare the size of a Connie to the size of a Connie without knowing her size, or the size of a nearby object. Otherwise it can be argued that the Connie could be as you say 947 feet long, or 947 INCHES long. There is no scale to reference.
As to the scale seen in one episode of TOS... on screen there's not enough detail to clearly read anything. All we got really is how big a Connie is compared to a D7. Yes there is the scale shown on screen, but again its not clear enough for the viewer to see numbers, so it is rather ambiguous as to the actual scale.
What everyone intended behind the scenes doesn't make it onto the screen all the time. Diving that deep into Behind the Scenes stuff is not something a casual viewer would do to determine the size of a ship. It would be easier to compare to another object present to get the size. Not so easy to just say "we can compare her to herself" without anything around her of a different size to actually compare her size to. We know the Fesarius dwarfs the Enterprise, and we know the Botany Bay is smaller than the Enterprise.
To further demonstrate, we can use the Enterprise to judge the size of the Botany Bay as we know the length of the Enterprise. But if the Enterprise wasn't there... there is absolutely nothing to compare to in order to judge size. So for all we know the Botany Bay could be 5 miles long. BUT... put her next to the Enterprise... we get a better understanding of how big she really is, about the length of the secondary hull, give or take a few.
I was mostly being facetious about it always being close to a known size ship: itself, but that was to stress the point that despite never having a reason for the length to be said in dialog the intended length of the ship was well known. And it has been confirmed by measurements of the ship features that are of known size, like the two windows on the outboard side of the shuttlebay catwalk that are clearly visible on the hull in the shuttlebay area in the picture you provided, and inside in this shot opposite the internal windows that Kirk is pointing to (the angle distorts their horizontal dimension slightly but the vertical one can be directly used):
The ship was designed to be 947 feet (about 288.6 meters) long and they did a reasonably good job of scaling the models and the set to fit that length.
Oddly enough that is the ONLY place you can make that measurement since the observation deck windows are the only windows in any part of the set even in rooms that are on the outer rim of the saucer as shown by the angle of the wall in those windowless rooms.
It is visible enough to do measurements with, and people have done them, arriving at the approximately 900ft figure. It is a quick graphic not meant to be analyzed however so it does not measure out to exactly 947 feet official figure though it is close. It being short by 47 feet is reasonable, but being short by over 1300 feet (which it would be with your claimed 400 meters length) is not reasonable error. They intended to show the ship at 947 feet in that graphic and came close enough for the brief time on camera and the low resolution of TV at the time.
Again, it is only visible when you have the original image. You have no idea from what’s onscreen what the units are. They could be feet, they could be metres, they could be leagues, or kellicams for all you (or anybody else) knows.
Just how big do you think stage nine at Desilu was? Cawley rebuilt the entire thing using the original blueprints in a strip mall store. The live sets fit in the hull very easily, the ONLY thing that does not quite fit was the forced perspective shuttlebay miniature because of perspective errors, and that was nothing but an error, just like the "James R. Kirk" headstone. And as I said earlier, if you unbend the miniature set and calculate it all out it STILL would not need a 400 meter long Enterprise.
It’s not me you need to convince here, it’s Doug Drexler. Good luck.
And don't think that it has to fit a Budweiser plant in the secondary hull just because the Kelvin one does, those are two entirely different ships from different universes though they share a few similarities and an existential link.
Firstly, I wouldn’t because I’ve never indicated anything of the sort, try stick to points made and not making stupid assumptions about what I ‘might’ claim. Secondly, they’re different timelines but the same universe, and thirdly the KT Conni is a mere 366m long and nowhere near big enough to fit the Budweiser Brewery and National Ignition Facility in.
The Enterprise was always "close" to a ship of known size in TOS: itself. When the creator of the series, the creator of the ship design, and all the paperwork dealing with building the ship to scale all agree on a size then that is the size. The ship in TOS was literally designed to be 947 feet long.
Oh goody, circular reasoning. What a rock solid argument. The Conni is the same size as the Conni because… Wow.
As for the B'rel, that is only one class of ship based on the same hull configuration at different scales. There is a heavy cruiser that uses the same hull in a larger size for instance, Riker was assigned to one of that class briefly as an exchange officer.
Fanfiction. The B’rel has never been indicated to be any other class and considering the dramatic change in size between TSfS and TVH, it’s clear nobody had any clue how big to make it.
Yet he was still held up as the ultimate authority in a lot of ways as well. The Paramount movie division did have the usual contempt for a "jumped up TV producer" that was common at the time (and still is to some degree) which set a bad precedent but Paramount overall still acknowledged him as the creator of the series and listened to him on a lot of points. It is not all as black-and-white as you seem to think.
Nope, it’s black and white. It’s either onscreen and canon or not onscreen and thus not canon. That is CBS’ position. They own the IP.
The only thing I said about the series bible in that paragraph was that it could not possibly contain everything, and all you take away from it is that I used the term "series bible"? Seriously?
I don’t think you’re really in a position to be arguing against cherrypicking or selective arguments considering you’ve selectively left out any post with evidence in thus far.
No, the context is not quite that simple because it also included a certain amount of the things that made the onscreen stuff what it was in the first place. And you are not even taking what was onscreen into account anyway, you are simply cherrypicking stuff that agrees with you and ignoring other onscreen evidence.
Case in point. If you’d bothered paying attention you’d see that most of this has been about retcons, i.e. onscreen evidence that contradicts and supplants other onscreen evidence. The only person to keep bringing up non screen stuff is you for some reason when it matters as much as asking your Gran’s opinion.
I know what a retcon is, and the "James R. Kirk" thing is not one. Yes, there is that tombstone inscription, but you misinterpret it as something that it is not. Gary Mitchell got it wrong is all, simple as that, just like when he called Smith "Jones" and Smith corrected him shortly before they were to leave the galaxy.
Guesswork again, though I’ll come back to this later as it’s the first part where you seem to understand what’s going on.
Again, it is not a "retcon", retcons in even the loosest sense are active insertions that add to, modify, or replace previous information. In fact the term was first used for flashback storytelling that fleshed out character backgrounds in sometimes unexpected ways, not for changing canon. Using something in one episode that never appears again does not mean it is "reconned out" of canon, it just means they never use that particular schtick again. In fact, a variant of the idea is seen later in handheld phasers where it has a the same kind of "yelp" sound and a bright flash instead of the colored beam and trill of normal phaser operation, though they call it "wide angle" there instead of prox.
When a concept appears once and is never used or mentioned again chronologically after the event it is a good bet it has been retconned out. Even if it’s not explicit.
Here you do have a point. TNG, by actively officializing the common lore notion of the class name being "Constitution" did retcon the kludge on that plaque. It went from an undefined placeholder to an actual class name (which is what a retcon was originally supposed to do, provide "retrograde continuity" to fill in the blanks though the term is often used for anti-continuity changes nowadays too).
Sigh. You were doing so well as well. There is absolutely no such thing as ‘anti-continuity’. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess it’s your own little arbitrary made up term to settle in your own head why DSCs retcons are in any way different from every other retcon. If I’m wrong let me know, but if I’m right then you’re clearly beyond all help.
That is not what happened with UESPA though. NOTHING onscreen positively says that UESPA was ever actually disbanded rather than folded into Starfleet and references (no matter how obscure and in the background) to it are made right up until the last movie that featured the TOS crew (or at least the movie hook featured a number of them and Kirk was a major part of it).
You know that being folded into Starfleet is the same as being disbanded right?
And what do you claim contradicts it? There is no actual mention of UESPA being disbanded or that Starfleet is an absolutely monolithic organization. Instead there are hints that it is more like how the Paramount explanation painted it.
Why should I care how Paramount describes it? The shows indicate all planetary exploration in the Federation is done by Starfleet and homeworlds have their own cargo fleets and that’s it. No United Earth fleet, no UESPA, simple.
Fair enough, in an oversimplistic black and white sort of way, but it is really a bit more complicated than that. And the "ignored" part is just dead wrong except in cases where there is already an established canon on a particular point and an error is made that contradicts the canon, like the "you cannot turn in warp" nonsense in one episode of Voyager, and that silence is a tacit acknowledgement of the error and a return to the previously established canon.
Star Trek canon is worded such that even quasi-canon sticks until actively replaced by a new canon, silence does not achieve that in the least. The only thing that comes close to silence equaling canon change is a major shark jump that cuts itself off from previous canon like how Kelvin did it or Primeval did it several times with their timeline anomalies.
And here we get to the crux of your misunderstandings. The difference between canon and continuity.
Canon is a meta concept that exists solely as a means for the IP owner or overseer to keep certain parts of the franchise under as much direct oversight as possible and to set, essentially, a reference pool. In Star Trek this is done by CBS (Paramount operates under licence from CBS they do not set canon, even in the films as Abrams found out) and, as per the latest statement, includes the films and TV shows and that’s it.
Continuity is the degree to which the different instalments are linked to each other, this can be done in universe (such as alternate timelines like the Kelvin Timeline or Yesterday’s Enterprise) or out of universe via retcons.
The Kelvin Timeline films are entirely, totally, and wholly in the exact same canon as every other instalment and are no more separated than any other alternate timeline episode or film is in the franchise.
The difference between the two is clear cut and means that, yes, canon is as simple as black and white. If it’s a film or TV show in the franchise, it’s canon.
The VGR example is just another retcon and doesn’t even illustrate your point so I’ll move on.
Again, there is no direct retcon that actively contradicts most of that stuff, and perfectly reasonable explanations that cover nearly all of the so-called discrepancies. There is no such thing as a passive retcon, just because you refuse to listen to Paramount's explanations since they are generally not onscreen or are too subtle for your tastes when they do appear onscreen does not mean that their not revisiting the points you dislike automatically negates them from canon.
And now we come to another one of your set of arbitrary distinctions. There are no sub-divisions of retcon, if it is different to what was previously shown, it’s a retcon. But this is a wonderful paragraph, nicely showcasing fractal wrongness. Wrongness that spawns yet more wrongness.
Firstly, Paramount, knock it off with Paramount, CBS owns the franchise, this insistence on Paramount reeks of the Midnights Edge bollocks about DSC being produced under a separate licence.
Secondly let’s just go over how to actually draw conclusions shall we…
I watch the show, I draw a conclusion based on what is in front of me if it’s not explicitly stated, if it’s later contradicted, I revise my conclusion. I don’t draw evidence from outside canon, I don’t keep clinging onto TOS as holy writ when its’ retconned and I’m prepared to shift my conclusion back again if the retcon is retconned.
Gary Mitchell got it wrong is all, simple as that, just like when he called Smith "Jones" and Smith corrected him shortly before they were to leave the galaxy.
This shows you know how to draw conclusions but you still don’t understand what retcons do despite insisting you do. It’s a reasonable guess but as Kirk doesn’t correct Garry despite protesting he’s not a god doesn’t provide enough evidence to say one way or another, but you draw that conclusion by relying on non-canon evidence to ‘strengthen’ the evidence that leads to the conclusion.
All I am refusing to do is use any of the material gathered from outside the set canon to draw conclusions. There are three (and I’m being incredibly generous counting your graphic here) sources of the size of the Conni, the graphic from TOS, the MSD from ENT, and the comparison with Disco in DSC. The latter two match each other and fit the sets better so it’s clear that by this point the size has been retconned (obviously supposing your graphic does use feet in-universe).
You yourself admit that you have no idea what happened to UESPA yet insist that it absolutely cannot not exist anywhere in Starfleet, even against onscreen references to it interleafed with Starfleet references (if you check, all references to UESPA did not end before the first Starfleet ones). Enterprise was just as associated with Earth as Intrepid was with Vulcan so it is quite possible it had some sort of sharing arrangement with UESPA, or UESPA could be part of Starfleet itself in the TOS era (which seems the most likely of the possibilities).
The Intrepid is crewed by Vulcans, it is not ‘associated with Vulcan’. Every ship in the franchise excluding the Intrepid is overwhelmingly human crewed and are yet, Federation vessels not Earth ones. This is another piece of fanfiction you’re using to draw your conclusion.
There is very little of any individual homeworld that is not Federation in some way, especially Earth, it has even less character than the others, being almost indistinguishable from the Federation as whole. I’ve already gone over this above.
Though you’ve picked a very strange part of the thread to keep bringing up. It’s a retcon plain and simple, and even if it wasn’t it doesn’t address any of the other instances of TOS retconning itself, nor does it even matter because your acceptance of what is and what isn’t a retcon doesn’t change the fact that if it’s been changed it’s a retcon.
If you sincerely believe the unreadable graphic is readable than you then accept that ENT and DSC retconned the Conni to being 400m, if you accept that it’s not readable then the only canonical evidence you have of the Connis size are ENT and DSC and therefore the size has never changed.
You can personally believe the sets fit in a tiny Conni all you want, Jeffries can believe that all he wants, but at the end of the day, the beliefs of Drexler and whoever made the Conni in DSC actually got their beliefs unambiguously onscreen and remain the most recent retcon until somebody decides the Conni is actually 3.6 metres long and made of cheese.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
It is visible enough to do measurements with, and people have done them, arriving at the approximately 900ft figure. It is a quick graphic not meant to be analyzed however so it does not measure out to exactly 947 feet official figure though it is close. It being short by 47 feet is reasonable, but being short by over 1300 feet (which it would be with your claimed 400 meters length) is not reasonable error. They intended to show the ship at 947 feet in that graphic and came close enough for the brief time on camera and the low resolution of TV at the time.
Again, it is only visible when you have the original image. You have no idea from what’s onscreen what the units are. They could be feet, they could be metres, they could be leagues, or kellicams for all you (or anybody else) knows.
And here you go ignoring the fact that that even if the scale was totally unreadable (which it is not, you would be surprised what you can glean from images like that, there are even agencies specialize in gathering information from photographs worse than that frame in fact) clear prints of that graphic, the very graphic that was shown onscreen, exist which can, and have, been measured.
As for the B'rel, that is only one class of ship based on the same hull configuration at different scales. There is a heavy cruiser that uses the same hull in a larger size for instance, Riker was assigned to one of that class briefly as an exchange officer.
Fanfiction. The B’rel has never been indicated to be any other class and considering the dramatic change in size between TSfS and TVH, it’s clear nobody had any clue how big to make it.
Wrong. They specifically call the ship in "The Search for Spock" a "small scoutship" whereas they specifically identify the ship in "A Matter of Honor" as a "cruiser", which was further reinforced by dialog in "Yesterday's Enterprise" that identified the large BoP style ships as K'vort-class battlecruisers. The simple fact is that Star Trek used physical models for a long time, and for budget and time reasons the same model was slightly modified for use as several different classes of ship, the same way they reused other ship models. They also mention a possible third class using the same model, the D-12, but it uses stock shots without anything nearby to estimate the length so "D-12" could be the Federation identification code for either the B'rel class, the K'vort-class or a class of its own.
Eliminating outliers and taking the most consistent sizes for each, the onscreen length of the B'rel has been measured at about 110meters (which agrees with the figure the designer, Nilo Rodis, gave for it when he designed it for the movie), and the K'vort came in at about 330meters or so (a little under one and a half times the length of the D7 and a little over half the length of the Galaxy-class).
I know what a retcon is, and the "James R. Kirk" thing is not one. Yes, there is that tombstone inscription, but you misinterpret it as something that it is not. Gary Mitchell got it wrong is all, simple as that, just like when he called Smith "Jones" and Smith corrected him shortly before they were to leave the galaxy.
Guesswork again, though I’ll come back to this later as it’s the first part where you seem to understand what’s going on.
Here you do have a point. TNG, by actively officializing the common lore notion of the class name being "Constitution" did retcon the kludge on that plaque. It went from an undefined placeholder to an actual class name (which is what a retcon was originally supposed to do, provide "retrograde continuity" to fill in the blanks though the term is often used for anti-continuity changes nowadays too).
Sigh. You were doing so well as well. There is absolutely no such thing as ‘anti-continuity’. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess it’s your own little arbitrary made up term to settle in your own head why DSCs retcons are in any way different from every other retcon. If I’m wrong let me know, but if I’m right then you’re clearly beyond all help.
You may not like the word ‘anti-continuity’, but it turns up in all sorts of places to indicate things that break continuity. So no, I did not make it up, and even if I had made it up the concept that it describes exists so just call it what you like as long as you understand the concept itself. And why are you so hung up on DSC that you assume that everything is some kind of attack on that particular series?
That is not what happened with UESPA though. NOTHING onscreen positively says that UESPA was ever actually disbanded rather than folded into Starfleet and references (no matter how obscure and in the background) to it are made right up until the last movie that featured the TOS crew (or at least the movie hook featured a number of them and Kirk was a major part of it).
You know that being folded into Starfleet is the same as being disbanded right?
It take it that you consider US units placed into the structure of NATO to have been "disbanded" then? Or the state armies that were folded into the continental army to have been "disbanded" even though they were kept as distinct at least units partially supported by their originating state in the revolutionary war and the very early US? Up until the early 1900s the US kept a very small standing force at the federal level and depended on temporarily folding in state militias into the federal umbrella to beef that small standing force up. There is no evidence says the UFP did not do something similar, and considering some of the other conventions Roddenberry used when creating Star Trek it is even probable that they used that or a similar model to some extent.
We seem to be working with two completely different versions of the idea of "folded into".
The UFP has the goal of being a single, diverse but seamless society, but TOS clearly showed that they had not quite gotten to that point yet, and their federal level government was often forced to take a back seat in cultural matters concerning one or more of its members for instance. In many ways it was still a very, very, close alliance with shared pools of various resources than a truly unified nation. That comes later, with the TNG Federation being much more homogenous and unified than the TOS era one.
In fact, with the sometimes extreme diversity of the member planets it seems likely that their progress was probably fairly slow and contentious like the current day EU and their ponderous two steps forward, one-and-three-quarters-back political dance. From the way ENT presented things there is no way the Federation could instantly become 'one big happy family', and the organizational churn seen in early TOS is quite typical of the kind of "growing pains" an organization like that would have under those conditions.
A personal theory I have is that the close brush they had with the Klingon war the Organians nipped in the bud could have been the wakeup call that got them to stop the nonsense and organize properly, but that is just a theory.
And what do you claim contradicts it? There is no actual mention of UESPA being disbanded or that Starfleet is an absolutely monolithic organization. Instead there are hints that it is more like how the Paramount explanation painted it.
Why should I care how Paramount describes it? The shows indicate all planetary exploration in the Federation is done by Starfleet and homeworlds have their own cargo fleets and that’s it. No United Earth fleet, no UESPA, simple.
You are obviously getting your Paramounts mixed up. I am not referring to the particular Viacom movie division that is currently called "Paramount", I was talking about the Paramount that Desilu studios (the ones who originally made Star Trek) became the TV division of and who wholly owned the IP rights Star Trek to at the time that they presented those explanations. That Paramount went almost entirely to CBS later on when Viacom split and is the sole reason that CBS now ones those rights. The Paramount that made the Kelvin stuff is actually the remainder of the old Paramount movie division from before Gulf+Western acquired Desilu that was left after what used to be Desilu was stripped out and bundled with CBS, and NOT the one I was referring to.
And you still have not come up with anything that contradicts what Paramount (the one that owned the IP at the time) said at the time.
Fair enough, in an oversimplistic black and white sort of way, but it is really a bit more complicated than that. And the "ignored" part is just dead wrong except in cases where there is already an established canon on a particular point and an error is made that contradicts the canon, like the "you cannot turn in warp" nonsense in one episode of Voyager, and that silence is a tacit acknowledgement of the error and a return to the previously established canon.
Star Trek canon is worded such that even quasi-canon sticks until actively replaced by a new canon, silence does not achieve that in the least. The only thing that comes close to silence equaling canon change is a major shark jump that cuts itself off from previous canon like how Kelvin did it or Primeval did it several times with their timeline anomalies.
And here we get to the crux of your misunderstandings. The difference between canon and continuity.
Canon is a meta concept that exists solely as a means for the IP owner or overseer to keep certain parts of the franchise under as much direct oversight as possible and to set, essentially, a reference pool. In Star Trek this is done by CBS (Paramount operates under licence from CBS they do not set canon, even in the films as Abrams found out) and, as per the latest statement, includes the films and TV shows and that’s it.
Continuity is the degree to which the different instalments are linked to each other, this can be done in universe (such as alternate timelines like the Kelvin Timeline or Yesterday’s Enterprise) or out of universe via retcons.
The Kelvin Timeline films are entirely, totally, and wholly in the exact same canon as every other instalment and are no more separated than any other alternate timeline episode or film is in the franchise.
The difference between the two is clear cut and means that, yes, canon is as simple as black and white. If it’s a film or TV show in the franchise, it’s canon.
The VGR example is just another retcon and doesn’t even illustrate your point so I’ll move on.
I do sometimes use the term "canon" rather loosely because it is so often used that same way on discussion boards and even some articles. As for your definition of canon, it is no more "official" than the loose way I was using it, since there are no official dictionary definitions of the word that have anything to do with things outside of the church.
The Voyager example is NOT a retcon, it is a point that went against established continuity that was subsequently dropped. Had they kept the "no turns in warp" nonsense and established a new continuity point instead of tacitly withdrawing it, only then would it have been a "retcon". It illustrates my point well enough.
Again, there is no direct retcon that actively contradicts most of that stuff, and perfectly reasonable explanations that cover nearly all of the so-called discrepancies. There is no such thing as a passive retcon, just because you refuse to listen to Paramount's explanations since they are generally not onscreen or are too subtle for your tastes when they do appear onscreen does not mean that their not revisiting the points you dislike automatically negates them from canon.
And now we come to another one of your set of arbitrary distinctions. There are no sub-divisions of retcon, if it is different to what was previously shown, it’s a retcon. But this is a wonderful paragraph, nicely showcasing fractal wrongness. Wrongness that spawns yet more wrongness.
Firstly, Paramount, knock it off with Paramount, CBS owns the franchise, this insistence on Paramount reeks of the Midnights Edge bollocks about DSC being produced under a separate licence.
Since I did not mention any "sub-divisions of retcon" that fractal nonsense is irrelevant. My point was that there is no such thing as a passive retcon, continuity sticks until something actively changes it. There is no need to continually refresh content to keep it in continuity or canon or whatever you want to call it, it simply does fade away like you seem to think it does.
Why are you fixated on Midnights Edge? This has nothing to do with them or Doomcock or any of the other Trek conspiracy theorists. I mentioned Paramount since they were the IP holders at the relevant time, not CBS who now owns it, and they are not even the Paramount that exists today, and that should have been plain enough by context.
Secondly let’s just go over how to actually draw conclusions shall we…
I watch the show, I draw a conclusion based on what is in front of me if it’s not explicitly stated, if it’s later contradicted, I revise my conclusion. I don’t draw evidence from outside canon, I don’t keep clinging onto TOS as holy writ when its’ retconned and I’m prepared to shift my conclusion back again if the retcon is retconned.
So, in other words, you watch a show and ignore anything the creators, writers, or anyone else directly involved with that show says about it, and instead make up your own fan theories about what you see on the screen.
Personally, I prefer using the comments from the production team, the onscreen finished product, and even the zeitgeist of the time the show is produced in (which is very important in a show that has run as long as Star Trek) to draw conclusions that have context. Without context it is too easy to mistake what is on the screen (like how later generations assumed the miniskirted uniforms were sexist and demeaning when in the 1960s zeitgeist they were just the opposite, an empowering symbol of freedom from traditional roles.
Gary Mitchell got it wrong is all, simple as that, just like when he called Smith "Jones" and Smith corrected him shortly before they were to leave the galaxy.
This shows you know how to draw conclusions but you still don’t understand what retcons do despite insisting you do. It’s a reasonable guess but as Kirk doesn’t correct Garry despite protesting he’s not a god doesn’t provide enough evidence to say one way or another, but you draw that conclusion by relying on non-canon evidence to ‘strengthen’ the evidence that leads to the conclusion.
By not taking context into account you are making an error. In fact, something I forgot about is that if you look at the "death" date it too is wrong since it is quite a bit off (Mitchell wrote an '8' where there should have been a '3' compared to the stardate of Kirk's log). Do you claim that was a retcon followed by another retcon that negated the first retcon right in the episode or that they time traveled for that one scene? Mistakes happen in production and those mistakes are often talked about later so cutting yourself off from information at the source just because someone did not come out onscreen and talk about the error being an error during the episode (or the next one or whatever) is not the best way to go.
All I am refusing to do is use any of the material gathered from outside the set canon to draw conclusions. There are three (and I’m being incredibly generous counting your graphic here) sources of the size of the Conni, the graphic from TOS, the MSD from ENT, and the comparison with Disco in DSC. The latter two match each other and fit the sets better so it’s clear that by this point the size has been retconned (obviously supposing your graphic does use feet in-universe).
Sure, you can ignore everything the creator, writers, modelers, and other inside people say and make up your own fan theories about what you see onscreen, but in the end that is what they are: fan theories.
You yourself admit that you have no idea what happened to UESPA yet insist that it absolutely cannot not exist anywhere in Starfleet, even against onscreen references to it interleafed with Starfleet references (if you check, all references to UESPA did not end before the first Starfleet ones). Enterprise was just as associated with Earth as Intrepid was with Vulcan so it is quite possible it had some sort of sharing arrangement with UESPA, or UESPA could be part of Starfleet itself in the TOS era (which seems the most likely of the possibilities).
The Intrepid is crewed by Vulcans, it is not ‘associated with Vulcan’. Every ship in the franchise excluding the Intrepid is overwhelmingly human crewed and are yet, Federation vessels not Earth ones. This is another piece of fanfiction you’re using to draw your conclusion.
There is very little of any individual homeworld that is not Federation in some way, especially Earth, it has even less character than the others, being almost indistinguishable from the Federation as whole. I’ve already gone over this above.
There may be more ships crewed by humans (and not necessarily humans from earth) than by others, but there is no definitive proof of it since the inside of only a few ships are seen in the series. In fact, little clues imply that most ships were crewed by a single race with perhaps a few outsiders who could tolerate the conditions well enough (Spock has mentioned how unpleasantly cold and damp the Enterprise is but found it tolerable except during "The Deadly Years" where he cranked the temperature up in his cabin). At least one of the thirteen active Constitutions is probably set up for Andorians with cooler temperatures, and (just for diplomatic prestige) probably one or more associated with the Tellarites as another of the original major founding member nations.
Admittedly that particular point is a bit iffy, but in TOS they strongly hint that the Vulcans are still pretty much the same condescending jerks they are later depicted as back in the ENT era, and that they do not play well with Starfleet itself. The dialog implied that the Intreped mainly limited its duties to scientific missions in conjunction with the Vulcan Science Academy, which their powerful influence in the Federation and somewhat holier than thou attitude makes believable enough.
Though you’ve picked a very strange part of the thread to keep bringing up. It’s a retcon plain and simple, and even if it wasn’t it doesn’t address any of the other instances of TOS retconning itself, nor does it even matter because your acceptance of what is and what isn’t a retcon doesn’t change the fact that if it’s been changed it’s a retcon.
I am not sure what you are considering a "very strange part of the thread". If it is the UESPA part it is not particularly strange and it is definitely not a "retcon", it is just not explained on-camera in a soliloquy or monologue or whatever and was never more than a background element no one bothered to write an episode about. Not being worth a story of its own the official explanation Paramount (the IP holder at the time, not the current company named "Paramount") gave is quite sufficient for the purpose of clearing the mystery up.
As for retcons, you need to realize that the word is short for "retrograde continuity" and was originally coined for series that have a strong flashback element to them. The practice of sometimes changing the meaning of events but not the events themselves by showing things that shed a new and (hopefully) surprising light on them in backstory (such as tying things together in ways the writers did not originally think of) is what got some people thinking it meant going back and actually changing continuity points. But even in the sloppiest interpretation of the term, those points can only be changed by active, deliberate action on the part of the writers, not by neglecting to revisit points that the writers and producers consider already sufficiently touched upon.
If you sincerely believe the unreadable graphic is readable than you then accept that ENT and DSC retconned the Conni to being 400m, if you accept that it’s not readable then the only canonical evidence you have of the Connis size are ENT and DSC and therefore the size has never changed.
You can personally believe the sets fit in a tiny Conni all you want, Jeffries can believe that all he wants, but at the end of the day, the beliefs of Drexler and whoever made the Conni in DSC actually got their beliefs unambiguously onscreen and remain the most recent retcon until somebody decides the Conni is actually 3.6 metres long and made of cheese.
The graphic is readable enough to work with, and like I said several times before clear prints of it are quite readily available. In fact, here is one of them:
In the episode they use both of those graphics though I only showed one of the before for brevity in an already too long post:
The 400 meter length on the display in ENT could mean a lot of things, it could be actually be that length and be from one of the many alternate universes shown (as in TNG: "Parallels") or just be another error or it could even be some long and twisty justification of the sort that Roddenberry's sense of humor sometimes prompted him to give (like how the stardates were not all in order because the network sometimes showed the episodes out of order became a long BS tale of how the stardate depended on where in the galaxy you are).
It could even mean that something was overwriting the prime universe and destroying everything that that was seen in before ENT in the process, which if true would mean that by definition ENT and DSC are reboots and not actual prequels.
And here you go ignoring the fact that that even if the scale was totally unreadable (which it is not, you would be surprised what you can glean from images like that,
The relative scales of the two ships to each other, not that amazing.
there are even agencies specialize in gathering information from photographs worse than that frame in fact) clear prints of that graphic, the very graphic that was shown onscreen, exist which can, and have, been measured.
I’m sure you believe that. You’ve not supplied any so I’m sure you’ll understand that all us mere humans have are TV screens and the DVDs.
Wrong. They specifically call the ship in "The Search for Spock" a "small scoutship" whereas they specifically identify the ship in "A Matter of Honor" as a "cruiser", which was further reinforced by dialog in "Yesterday's Enterprise" that identified the large BoP style ships as K'vort-class battlecruisers.
You realise that the franchise makes designations up as it goes along right? The D7 in ‘Friday's Child’ is called a scout ship.
The simple fact is that Star Trek used physical models for a long time, and for budget and time reasons the same model was slightly modified for use as several different classes of ship, the same way they reused other ship models.
How wonderful, you’ve pointed out that Star Trek reuses models and has a low budget. What revolutionary knowledge.
I’m glad you’ve pointed that out as none of my other posts have been made with me knowing that.
They also mention a possible third class using the same model, the D-12, but it uses stock shots without anything nearby to estimate the length so "D-12" could be the Federation identification code for either the B'rel class, the K'vort-class or a class of its own.
Interesting, a conclusion based on your earlier headcaon that the B’rel and K’vort are separate ships with no hard evidence to back that up.
Eliminating outliers and taking the most consistent sizes for each, the onscreen length of the B'rel has been measured at about 110meters (which agrees with the figure the designer, Nilo Rodis, gave for it when he designed it for the movie), and the K'vort came in at about 330meters or so (a little under one and a half times the length of the D7 and a little over half the length of the Galaxy-class).
Estimations for the Bird of Prey (possibly called K’Vort class) range from shuttle sized to larger than a Galaxy Class. This is based on watching the episodes. Also on the TOS films where the same ship quadruples in size, no different classes there.
You may not like the word ‘anti-continuity’, but it turns up in all sorts of places to indicate things that break continuity. So no, I did not make it up, and even if I had made it up the concept that it describes exists so just call it what you like as long as you understand the concept itself.
And why are you so hung up on DSC that you assume that everything is some kind of attack on that particular series?
Why are you so hung up on it? You’ve not mentioned the errors in another series once, even the ones in TOS you’ve tried to blow off by all sorts of double think but for some reason don’t do the same for DSC.
It take it that you consider US units placed into the structure of NATO to have been "disbanded" then? Or the state armies that were folded into the continental army to have been "disbanded" even though they were kept as distinct at least units partially supported by their originating state in the revolutionary war and the very early US? Up until the early 1900s the US kept a very small standing force at the federal level and depended on temporarily folding in state militias into the federal umbrella to beef that small standing force up. There is no evidence says the UFP did not do something similar, and considering some of the other conventions Roddenberry used when creating Star Trek it is even probable that they used that or a similar model to some extent.
You know ‘distinct’ means identifiably different right? There’s no identifiably different parts of Starfleet beyond the departments and even some of them are indistinguishable from each other.
The UFP has the goal of being a single, diverse but seamless society, but TOS clearly showed that they had not quite gotten to that point yet, and their federal level government was often forced to take a back seat in cultural matters concerning one or more of its members for instance. In many ways it was still a very, very, close alliance with shared pools of various resources than a truly unified nation. That comes later, with the TNG Federation being much more homogenous and unified than the TOS era one.
Really? Are you suggesting TOS is portraying a form of the Federation that is not parsimonious with how it was portrayed in every other incarnation of the franchise such as DSC!? A retcon if you will.
In fact, with the sometimes extreme diversity of the member planets it seems likely that their progress was probably fairly slow and contentious like the current day EU and their ponderous two steps forward, one-and-three-quarters-back political dance. From the way ENT presented things there is no way the Federation could instantly become 'one big happy family', and the organizational churn seen in early TOS is quite typical of the kind of "growing pains" an organization like that would have under those conditions.
Maybe that was the case in the past. It wasn’t by the end.
I do sometimes use the term "canon" rather loosely because it is so often used that same way on discussion boards and even some articles. As for your definition of canon, it is no more "official" than the loose way I was using it, since there are no official dictionary definitions of the word that have anything to do with things outside of the church.
Feel free to use it loosely. That is the complete opposite of what the concept is for, but sure, it does give you far more sources to draw on if you full all the random fanfiction out, but I’ll ignore them and stick with only material that falls under the correct definitions of canon.
The Voyager example is NOT a retcon, it is a point that went against established continuity that was subsequently dropped. Had they kept the "no turns in warp" nonsense and established a new continuity point instead of tacitly withdrawing it, only then would it have been a "retcon". It illustrates my point well enough.
Dear gods above and below, you’ve latterly spelt out a retcon there where what was continuity is now not. I don’t know how to make that any more clear,
My point was that there is no such thing as a passive retcon, continuity sticks until something actively changes it. There is no need to continually refresh content to keep it in continuity or canon or whatever you want to call it, it simply does fade away like you seem to think it does.
So, in other words, you watch a show and ignore anything the creators, writers, or anyone else directly involved with that show says about it, and instead make up your own fan theories about what you see on the screen.
Ooh, so close until the last part, you almost had it. Want to try again? Posts are free.
Personally, I prefer using the comments from the production team, the onscreen finished product, and even the zeitgeist of the time the show is produced in (which is very important in a show that has run as long as Star Trek) to draw conclusions that have context. Without context it is too easy to mistake what is on the screen
Fine, you do that. But unless it’s onscreen it’s not canon. You can draw conclusions from in universe context because that’s presented information, but drawing conclusions from BtS context is simply inserting somebody else’s headcanon into the show.
Like how later generations assumed the miniskirted uniforms were sexist and demeaning when in the 1960s zeitgeist they were just the opposite, an empowering symbol of freedom from traditional roles.
They can still be sexist now though, context shifts people’s perceptions change. Things can’t always be excused by just saying ‘that’s how things were back then’. Besides looking stupid, those uniforms are latterly sexist as they are sex segregated uniforms exclusive to one sex.
Sure, you can ignore everything the creator, writers, modelers, and other inside people say and make up your own fan theories about what you see onscreen, but in the end that is what they are: fan theories.
Admittedly that particular point is a bit iffy, but in TOS they strongly hint that the Vulcans are still pretty much the same condescending jerks they are later depicted as back in the ENT era, and that they do not play well with Starfleet itself. The dialog implied that the Intreped mainly limited its duties to scientific missions in conjunction with the Vulcan Science Academy, which their powerful influence in the Federation and somewhat holier than thou attitude makes believable enough.
The only thing that is indicated is that the Intrepid is crewed by Vulcans.
I am not sure what you are considering a "very strange part of the thread". If it is the UESPA part it is not particularly strange and it is definitely not a "retcon", it is just not explained on-camera in a soliloquy or monologue or whatever and was never more than a background element no one bothered to write an episode about. Not being worth a story of its own the official explanation Paramount (the IP holder at the time, not the current company named "Paramount") gave is quite sufficient for the purpose of clearing the mystery up.
It’s very strange because the original point was that TOS was constantly retconned by the other shows and by itself and several examples were given to this effect and the ones you fixated on was the UESPA and Kirk’s middle name for some reason. It completely ignores the point and it’s quite an important point because a lot of your assumptions made in several threads involve TOS being fixed and immovable and the other shows (DSC in particular) having to move around it.
As for retcons, you need to realize that the word is short for "retrograde continuity" and was originally coined for series that have a strong flashback element to them.
It stands for ‘retroactive-continuity’ and refers to changing events previously referenced or shown without offering a reason for the change or acknowledging it.
The 400 meter length on the display in ENT could mean a lot of things, it could be actually be that length and be from one of the many alternate universes shown (as in TNG: "Parallels") or just be another error or it could even be some long and twisty justification of the sort that Roddenberry's sense of humor sometimes prompted him to give (like how the stardates were not all in order because the network sometimes showed the episodes out of order became a long BS tale of how the stardate depended on where in the galaxy you are).
Except you only draw conclusions based on the words of BtS guys so you have to accept the reason is that Drexler wanted to fit all the sets in.
I don’t so I’ll happily accept either a retcon (based on assuming your graphic is readable) or a continuation based on the fact we have no canonical length for the TOS Conni in TOS.
It could even mean that something was overwriting the prime universe and destroying everything that that was seen in before ENT in the process, which if true would mean that by definition ENT and DSC are reboots and not actual prequels.
Nope. A reboot is a new canon, an overwriting of the Prime Timeline would be an in-universe event like AGT not an out of universe event so would not alter the canon at all.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
Continuity: What's shown on screen, continuing from one episode, movie, or series to the next. TOS had next to no continuity, because it was anticipated that the episodes could be shown in any order even during the original airing. The TOS movies didn't have a lot more, frankly. Continuity was tightened up in subsequent series, but TNG was never afraid of retconning something in the interest of a better story.
Canon: The official "bible" as declared by the owners of an Intellectual Property (IP). This includes both shown continuity and Word of God, although the Word of God is occasionally subject to being overridden by either later continuity or later WoG.
Headcanon: The ideas or continuities you personally add to the official canon and continuity. McCoy's daughter falls under both WoG and headcanon, since the only materials that reference her are Roddenberry's statements and a couple of novels.
There, some definitions. Try using those consistently, and your arguments will be more fun for the rest of us (since you both seem so determined to keep arguing).
Continuity: What's shown on screen, continuing from one episode, movie, or series to the next. TOS had next to no continuity, because it was anticipated that the episodes could be shown in any order even during the original airing. The TOS movies didn't have a lot more, frankly. Continuity was tightened up in subsequent series, but TNG was never afraid of retconning something in the interest of a better story.
Canon: The official "bible" as declared by the owners of an Intellectual Property (IP). This includes both shown continuity and Word of God, although the Word of God is occasionally subject to being overridden by either later continuity or later WoG.
Headcanon: The ideas or continuities you personally add to the official canon and continuity. McCoy's daughter falls under both WoG and headcanon, since the only materials that reference her are Roddenberry's statements and a couple of novels.
There, some definitions. Try using those consistently, and your arguments will be more fun for the rest of us (since you both seem so determined to keep arguing).
Finally someone who makes sense.
Continuity does not have to only come from arcs or serialized plots though, it also refers to consistency of information across episodes (and often across different series set in the same fictional universe). It is an important part of serious drama shows since they can use it to tease that something is not quite what it seems by breaking it (such is Kirk's odd behavior at the very start of "The Enterprise Incident"). TNG's "Parellels" made the most extensive use of that continuity aberration technique of any Trek episode iirc, until Warf finally caught on to what was happening, though all of them dabbled with it a bit.
In ENT it was largely obscured by their often clumsy attempts to show the beginnings of everything (even stuff best left alone) coupled with high-level executives who seemed to have a trouble understanding what a prequel is and wanting all the signature stuff from later in the timeline in the show, but that is a potentially long discussion all of its own.
As for the argument, it obviously is going nowhere. Artan42 seems to be settling down to little more than word-twisting trolling and what looks like deliberate misinterpretations in the last few rounds of it and I am getting tired of that nonsense, so I probably will not even bother to reply.
Comments
That particular shot IS readable, though barely (for instance you can clearly see the notation of "scale in feet" under the bar and the 50' mark is visible enough. There are other frames in which other parts are slightly clearer as well, and the original graphic still exists and had been published elsewhere (including a 9x11 print in the old plastic model kit papers) so the scale is known well enough. It does point out an important point though in that the scale is slightly off because no one thought people would actually measure the thing and so they got a close approximation instead of taking the time and expense to go to a micrometer-accurate rendition. It is still not bad, they got within 47 feet of the official figure of 947 for a shot that that lasted all of a second or two.
No, they did make it onscreen in every outside shot of the ship because the ships were scale-accurate. The fact that they never had some silly giant space-ruler or whatever floating alongside in the show itself does not negate the fact that the official length of the fictional ship the models represented and scale the models were built to was known and marked on the plans and models themselves out of sight of the camera, and that those figures were used in scaling the shots.
Wrong. It was NBC and Desilu (later Paramount) who set the canon along with Roddenberry. CBS did not come into it until the very end of ENT.
You are taking it all out of context. Some of the things come from the background still having fluid areas (the series bible cannot cover every single detail of everything) and the show startup was rough and chaotic, it was constantly on-again, off-again, and people were not always on the same page when it came to names of people, ship classes, and agencies and whatnot. Roddenberry called the ship a battleship but NBC would not have that at all, and they went back and forth even calling it a "cruiser" since the network considered it too military sounding at a time when anti-war protests were so prevalent.
There never was a "James R. Kirk", it was a typo that was not discovered until too late to change it without expensive delays in shooting. It is not some "retcon" since he never had that initial in the first place, and it even became a kind of in-joke that Gary Mitchell had godlike powers but still made mistakes. Other errors were made and not all were caught in time to keep them out of the episodes.
One good example is that the "proximity phaser" stuff in "Balance of Terror" was supposed to be the introduction of the photon torpedo. The SFX people got the memo and used the new torpedo effect, but someone apparently missed it and when they saw the unfamiliar weapon reference in the script they "fixed" it. By the time someone noticed the error they had shot too much to go back and re-shoot with the proper reference so phasers got a new power to add to their already large repertoire.
The "Starship class" thing was because the details had not been hammered out and there were a lot of kludges used in places were people were not expected to be able to actually read what they said. Originally they were referring to the ship as a "starship class XVII" (which is where the '17' part of the registry came from, Enterprise ('01') was supposed to be the first active ship of that class (00 was for prototypes)) but the number was scratched out while they decided what to put as a class name, so when the time ran out the plaque was made with the remaining "Starship Class" kludge in place and they made a point of never showing the plaque close up.
Nevertheless, that concept was the way Paramount explained it over the years, and it is not directly contradicted by anything onscreen that could not be explained in that way. In fact, Starbase 11 is identified as a UESPA facility by its internal signage in "The Menagerie" after the name Starfleet was established in previous episodes, and if you look in the background in "Generations" there is a UESPA logo on the wall in Enterprise-B too. In "Tomorrow is Yesterday" Kirk makes a statement about a "combined service" which is vague enough that it could very well refer to the kind of overlapping tight alliance situation that Paramount talked about.
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Not that Delta Vega, the other one from 09 where Spock watched Vulcan go the way of Alderaan.
It's not visible. You only think it is because you have familiarity with the original image. Either way, it dosn't fit the sets built and has been retconned as of ENT.
Except the whole reason Drexler resize the ship in ENT was because all the measuring business never worked out. So no, the supposed measurements never did make it onscreen.
And, though you probably thought it funny, nobody needs a 'floating ruler', size can be guessed by context. Even if you don't arrive at exactly 170m, the size of the Defiant can be guessed by noting the size of the Type 10 shuttle, comparing it against the shuttlebay, and that bay against the rest of the ship. The Conni in TOS doesn't fly close enough to any other ships we know the sizes of, but in ENT we roughly know the size of the NX (thanks to the observation pod scene) and the scale of the Conni relative to it, ditto for the Crossfield, there's window zoom out shots and the shuttlebay (that dosn't change sizes unlike some I could mention) that we can use to guess it's in the 600-800m range and the Conni that we can scale alongside it.
Some ships are impossible to scale, including the B'rel because it ranges from sub-100m to the size of a Galaxy Class, but the Conni is not one, the only reliable figures we have place it in the 350-450m range. Partially helped by comparisons to the Excelsior, whos MSD, damage patterns in 'Generations', and size relative to the galaxy in TNG put it to be in the 500-600m range.
Irrelevant, Roddenberry was kicked upstairs into a position where all he could do was whine because he kept doing stupid things like trying to declare random sections of the franchise non-canon. Where the difference between CBS and Paramount came in is not relevant to Roddenberry's influence or lack thereof.
The context is what the story is telling and how the story evolves. Referring to a fixed 'series bible' is literally taking things out of context as the context has now changed and did whilst filming. Not to mention, again, irrelevant as only what made it onscreen counts.
Yes there was. It's written on his tombstone as you go on to describe. I don't think you know what a retcon is. It means retroactive continuity and it applies to any concept in the media in question that is ignored or contradicted instead of being retroactively fixed (like digitally painting over it in the remasters).
And as the proximity phaser made it on screen it is now canon and the lack of further reference to it means it was retconned out. You're not making any new points here.
Ditto.
Except it is directly contradicted by the fact that Starfleet are nothing to do with the United Earth (the Earth Starfleet from ENT was dissolved along with MACOs) and no other organisation other than Starfleet Command has any sort of command over Starfleet except, possibly, the Federation Council. The reference in 'The Menagerie' is another example of something later retconned. Same with 'Tomorrow is Yesterday' as the only subdivisions of Starfleet are the departments like Starfleet Medical or Section 31. I don't know of the reference in 'Generations'.
It seems you're not really getting the point of my post. By whatever means, deliberate or intentional, whatever ends up on the screen is now canon and part of the continuity, when those concepts are later overridden or ignored all that has happened is that the continuity has changed to ignore them, it doesn't matter if you consider them intentional or not, they are equally canon just, now, out of continuity.
TOS suffers from all the issues you pointed out (though I don't think you understood why) which is why it is more or less completely ignored by every other instalment, primerally starting from TMP but also by TOS itself. That is my point. Pointing out reasons behind each of those is meaningless as it's not the purpose, I'm listing things that were canon in TOS and later retconned in TOS.
Kirk's middle name may not have been intended to be 'R', but it was 'R', for a whole episode before it became, and always had been 'T'. It doesn't matter if it was an error or an early concept, it was his middle name until the show decided it was 'T'.
There's all sorts of possibilities of what happened to UESPA, but one thing it doesn't do is have any sort of command over the Enterprise as that's a Federation Starfleet ship.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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Realistically most works of fiction don't use the "oldest is best" approach simply because it reduces the value of things added after the first.
My character Tsin'xing
It is visible enough to do measurements with, and people have done them, arriving at the approximately 900ft figure. It is a quick graphic not meant to be analyzed however so it does not measure out to exactly 947 feet official figure though it is close. It being short by 47 feet is reasonable, but being short by over 1300 feet (which it would be with your claimed 400 meters length) is not reasonable error. They intended to show the ship at 947 feet in that graphic and came close enough for the brief time on camera and the low resolution of TV at the time.
Just how big do you think stage nine at Desilu was? Cawley rebuilt the entire thing using the original blueprints in a strip mall store. The live sets fit in the hull very easily, the ONLY thing that does not quite fit was the forced perspective shuttlebay miniature because of perspective errors, and that was nothing but an error, just like the "James R. Kirk" headstone. And as I said earlier, if you unbend the miniature set and calculate it all out it STILL would not need a 400 meter long Enterprise. And don't think that it has to fit a Budweiser plant in the secondary hull just because the Kelvin one does, those are two entirely different ships from different universes though they share a few similarities and an existential link.
The Enterprise was always "close" to a ship of known size in TOS: itself. When the creator of the series, the creator of the ship design, and all the paperwork dealing with building the ship to scale all agree on a size then that is the size. The ship in TOS was literally designed to be 947 feet long.
As for the B'rel, that is only one class of ship based on the same hull configuration at different scales. There is a heavy cruiser that uses the same hull in a larger size for instance, Riker was assigned to one of that class briefly as an exchange officer.
Yet he was still held up as the ultimate authority in a lot of ways as well. The Paramount movie division did have the usual contempt for a "jumped up TV producer" that was common at the time (and still is to some degree) which set a bad precedent but Paramount overall still acknowledged him as the creator of the series and listened to him on a lot of points. It is not all as black-and-white as you seem to think.
The only thing I said about the series bible in that paragraph was that it could not possibly contain everything, and all you take away from it is that I used the term "series bible"? Seriously?
No, the context is not quite that simple because it also included a certain amount of the things that made the onscreen stuff what it was in the first place. And you are not even taking what was onscreen into account anyway, you are simply cherrypicking stuff that agrees with you and ignoring other onscreen evidence.
I know what a retcon is, and the "James R. Kirk" thing is not one. Yes, there is that tombstone inscription, but you misinterpret it as something that it is not. Gary Mitchell got it wrong is all, simple as that, just like when he called Smith "Jones" and Smith corrected him shortly before they were to leave the galaxy.
Again, it is not a "retcon", retcons in even the loosest sense are active insertions that add to, modify, or replace previous information. In fact the term was first used for flashback storytelling that fleshed out character backgrounds in sometimes unexpected ways, not for changing canon. Using something in one episode that never appears again does not mean it is "reconned out" of canon, it just means they never use that particular schtick again. In fact, a variant of the idea is seen later in handheld phasers where it has a the same kind of "yelp" sound and a bright flash instead of the colored beam and trill of normal phaser operation, though they call it "wide angle" there instead of prox.
Here you do have a point. TNG, by actively officializing the common lore notion of the class name being "Constitution" did retcon the kludge on that plaque. It went from an undefined placeholder to an actual class name (which is what a retcon was originally supposed to do, provide "retrograde continuity" to fill in the blanks though the term is often used for anti-continuity changes nowadays too).
That is not what happened with UESPA though. NOTHING onscreen positively says that UESPA was ever actually disbanded rather than folded into Starfleet and references (no matter how obscure and in the background) to it are made right up until the last movie that featured the TOS crew (or at least the movie hook featured a number of them and Kirk was a major part of it).
And what do you claim contradicts it? There is no actual mention of UESPA being disbanded or that Starfleet is an absolutely monolithic organization. Instead there are hints that it is more like how the Paramount explanation painted it.
Fair enough, in an oversimplistic black and white sort of way, but it is really a bit more complicated than that. And the "ignored" part is just dead wrong except in cases where there is already an established canon on a particular point and an error is made that contradicts the canon, like the "you cannot turn in warp" nonsense in one episode of Voyager, and that silence is a tacit acknowledgement of the error and a return to the previously established canon.
Star Trek canon is worded such that even quasi-canon sticks until actively replaced by a new canon, silence does not achieve that in the least. The only thing that comes close to silence equaling canon change is a major shark jump that cuts itself off from previous canon like how Kelvin did it or Primeval did it several times with their timeline anomalies.
Again, there is no direct retcon that actively contradicts most of that stuff, and perfectly reasonable explanations that cover nearly all of the so-called discrepancies. There is no such thing as a passive retcon, just because you refuse to listen to Paramount's explanations since they are generally not onscreen or are too subtle for your tastes when they do appear onscreen does not mean that their not revisiting the points you dislike automatically negates them from canon.
You yourself admit that you have no idea what happened to UESPA yet insist that it absolutely cannot not exist anywhere in Starfleet, even against onscreen references to it interleafed with Starfleet references (if you check, all references to UESPA did not end before the first Starfleet ones). Enterprise was just as associated with Earth as Intrepid was with Vulcan so it is quite possible it had some sort of sharing arrangement with UESPA, or UESPA could be part of Starfleet itself in the TOS era (which seems the most likely of the possibilities).
.
I just want to point out that you can't really compare a ship to itself in terms of a scaling object. I ran into that kind of issue years ago when I made a model of Babylon 5 in a CAD program in school. Sure it was a relatively basic model, but I know the station's supposed to be 5 miles long. However there was no reference to SHOW that it was 5 miles long. It could be 5 miles, or 5 inches.
What he's referring to was how big the ship was compared to a known scaled ship, such as the USS Defiant flying alongside an NX class starship. We have a pretty good idea based on many visual clues as to how big the NX is. Now stick an NX next to a Connie, and we have an object to scale to in order to determine size.
Taking into consideration angle, perspective, and distance between the ships... you can figure out that the Defiant is bigger than the Avenger, but doesn't dwarf her.
The NX class is listed as being 225 Meters long.
The Constitution Class is listed at 288.6 Meters long (pre-refit)
If we only knew the length of the NX, we could use the NX as the measuring stick to determine the size of the Connie. But we can't compare the size of a Connie to the size of a Connie without knowing her size, or the size of a nearby object. Otherwise it can be argued that the Connie could be as you say 947 feet long, or 947 INCHES long. There is no scale to reference.
As to the scale seen in one episode of TOS... on screen there's not enough detail to clearly read anything. All we got really is how big a Connie is compared to a D7. Yes there is the scale shown on screen, but again its not clear enough for the viewer to see numbers, so it is rather ambiguous as to the actual scale.
What everyone intended behind the scenes doesn't make it onto the screen all the time. Diving that deep into Behind the Scenes stuff is not something a casual viewer would do to determine the size of a ship. It would be easier to compare to another object present to get the size. Not so easy to just say "we can compare her to herself" without anything around her of a different size to actually compare her size to. We know the Fesarius dwarfs the Enterprise, and we know the Botany Bay is smaller than the Enterprise.
To further demonstrate, we can use the Enterprise to judge the size of the Botany Bay as we know the length of the Enterprise. But if the Enterprise wasn't there... there is absolutely nothing to compare to in order to judge size. So for all we know the Botany Bay could be 5 miles long. BUT... put her next to the Enterprise... we get a better understanding of how big she really is, about the length of the secondary hull, give or take a few.
I was mostly being facetious about it always being close to a known size ship: itself, but that was to stress the point that despite never having a reason for the length to be said in dialog the intended length of the ship was well known. And it has been confirmed by measurements of the ship features that are of known size, like the two windows on the outboard side of the shuttlebay catwalk that are clearly visible on the hull in the shuttlebay area in the picture you provided, and inside in this shot opposite the internal windows that Kirk is pointing to (the angle distorts their horizontal dimension slightly but the vertical one can be directly used):
The ship was designed to be 947 feet (about 288.6 meters) long and they did a reasonably good job of scaling the models and the set to fit that length.
Oddly enough that is the ONLY place you can make that measurement since the observation deck windows are the only windows in any part of the set even in rooms that are on the outer rim of the saucer as shown by the angle of the wall in those windowless rooms.
Again, it is only visible when you have the original image. You have no idea from what’s onscreen what the units are. They could be feet, they could be metres, they could be leagues, or kellicams for all you (or anybody else) knows.
It’s not me you need to convince here, it’s Doug Drexler. Good luck.
Firstly, I wouldn’t because I’ve never indicated anything of the sort, try stick to points made and not making stupid assumptions about what I ‘might’ claim. Secondly, they’re different timelines but the same universe, and thirdly the KT Conni is a mere 366m long and nowhere near big enough to fit the Budweiser Brewery and National Ignition Facility in.
Oh goody, circular reasoning. What a rock solid argument. The Conni is the same size as the Conni because… Wow.
Fanfiction. The B’rel has never been indicated to be any other class and considering the dramatic change in size between TSfS and TVH, it’s clear nobody had any clue how big to make it.
Nope, it’s black and white. It’s either onscreen and canon or not onscreen and thus not canon. That is CBS’ position. They own the IP.
I don’t think you’re really in a position to be arguing against cherrypicking or selective arguments considering you’ve selectively left out any post with evidence in thus far.
Case in point. If you’d bothered paying attention you’d see that most of this has been about retcons, i.e. onscreen evidence that contradicts and supplants other onscreen evidence. The only person to keep bringing up non screen stuff is you for some reason when it matters as much as asking your Gran’s opinion.
Guesswork again, though I’ll come back to this later as it’s the first part where you seem to understand what’s going on.
When a concept appears once and is never used or mentioned again chronologically after the event it is a good bet it has been retconned out. Even if it’s not explicit.
Sigh. You were doing so well as well. There is absolutely no such thing as ‘anti-continuity’. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess it’s your own little arbitrary made up term to settle in your own head why DSCs retcons are in any way different from every other retcon. If I’m wrong let me know, but if I’m right then you’re clearly beyond all help.
You know that being folded into Starfleet is the same as being disbanded right?
Why should I care how Paramount describes it? The shows indicate all planetary exploration in the Federation is done by Starfleet and homeworlds have their own cargo fleets and that’s it. No United Earth fleet, no UESPA, simple.
And here we get to the crux of your misunderstandings. The difference between canon and continuity.
Canon is a meta concept that exists solely as a means for the IP owner or overseer to keep certain parts of the franchise under as much direct oversight as possible and to set, essentially, a reference pool. In Star Trek this is done by CBS (Paramount operates under licence from CBS they do not set canon, even in the films as Abrams found out) and, as per the latest statement, includes the films and TV shows and that’s it.
Continuity is the degree to which the different instalments are linked to each other, this can be done in universe (such as alternate timelines like the Kelvin Timeline or Yesterday’s Enterprise) or out of universe via retcons.
The Kelvin Timeline films are entirely, totally, and wholly in the exact same canon as every other instalment and are no more separated than any other alternate timeline episode or film is in the franchise.
The difference between the two is clear cut and means that, yes, canon is as simple as black and white. If it’s a film or TV show in the franchise, it’s canon.
The VGR example is just another retcon and doesn’t even illustrate your point so I’ll move on.
And now we come to another one of your set of arbitrary distinctions. There are no sub-divisions of retcon, if it is different to what was previously shown, it’s a retcon. But this is a wonderful paragraph, nicely showcasing fractal wrongness. Wrongness that spawns yet more wrongness.
Firstly, Paramount, knock it off with Paramount, CBS owns the franchise, this insistence on Paramount reeks of the Midnights Edge bollocks about DSC being produced under a separate licence.
Secondly let’s just go over how to actually draw conclusions shall we…
I watch the show, I draw a conclusion based on what is in front of me if it’s not explicitly stated, if it’s later contradicted, I revise my conclusion. I don’t draw evidence from outside canon, I don’t keep clinging onto TOS as holy writ when its’ retconned and I’m prepared to shift my conclusion back again if the retcon is retconned.
An example above;
This shows you know how to draw conclusions but you still don’t understand what retcons do despite insisting you do. It’s a reasonable guess but as Kirk doesn’t correct Garry despite protesting he’s not a god doesn’t provide enough evidence to say one way or another, but you draw that conclusion by relying on non-canon evidence to ‘strengthen’ the evidence that leads to the conclusion.
All I am refusing to do is use any of the material gathered from outside the set canon to draw conclusions. There are three (and I’m being incredibly generous counting your graphic here) sources of the size of the Conni, the graphic from TOS, the MSD from ENT, and the comparison with Disco in DSC. The latter two match each other and fit the sets better so it’s clear that by this point the size has been retconned (obviously supposing your graphic does use feet in-universe).
The Intrepid is crewed by Vulcans, it is not ‘associated with Vulcan’. Every ship in the franchise excluding the Intrepid is overwhelmingly human crewed and are yet, Federation vessels not Earth ones. This is another piece of fanfiction you’re using to draw your conclusion.
There is very little of any individual homeworld that is not Federation in some way, especially Earth, it has even less character than the others, being almost indistinguishable from the Federation as whole. I’ve already gone over this above.
Though you’ve picked a very strange part of the thread to keep bringing up. It’s a retcon plain and simple, and even if it wasn’t it doesn’t address any of the other instances of TOS retconning itself, nor does it even matter because your acceptance of what is and what isn’t a retcon doesn’t change the fact that if it’s been changed it’s a retcon.
If you sincerely believe the unreadable graphic is readable than you then accept that ENT and DSC retconned the Conni to being 400m, if you accept that it’s not readable then the only canonical evidence you have of the Connis size are ENT and DSC and therefore the size has never changed.
You can personally believe the sets fit in a tiny Conni all you want, Jeffries can believe that all he wants, but at the end of the day, the beliefs of Drexler and whoever made the Conni in DSC actually got their beliefs unambiguously onscreen and remain the most recent retcon until somebody decides the Conni is actually 3.6 metres long and made of cheese.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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And here you go ignoring the fact that that even if the scale was totally unreadable (which it is not, you would be surprised what you can glean from images like that, there are even agencies specialize in gathering information from photographs worse than that frame in fact) clear prints of that graphic, the very graphic that was shown onscreen, exist which can, and have, been measured.
Wrong. They specifically call the ship in "The Search for Spock" a "small scoutship" whereas they specifically identify the ship in "A Matter of Honor" as a "cruiser", which was further reinforced by dialog in "Yesterday's Enterprise" that identified the large BoP style ships as K'vort-class battlecruisers. The simple fact is that Star Trek used physical models for a long time, and for budget and time reasons the same model was slightly modified for use as several different classes of ship, the same way they reused other ship models. They also mention a possible third class using the same model, the D-12, but it uses stock shots without anything nearby to estimate the length so "D-12" could be the Federation identification code for either the B'rel class, the K'vort-class or a class of its own.
Eliminating outliers and taking the most consistent sizes for each, the onscreen length of the B'rel has been measured at about 110meters (which agrees with the figure the designer, Nilo Rodis, gave for it when he designed it for the movie), and the K'vort came in at about 330meters or so (a little under one and a half times the length of the D7 and a little over half the length of the Galaxy-class).
Not "guesswork" but rather context.
You may not like the word ‘anti-continuity’, but it turns up in all sorts of places to indicate things that break continuity. So no, I did not make it up, and even if I had made it up the concept that it describes exists so just call it what you like as long as you understand the concept itself. And why are you so hung up on DSC that you assume that everything is some kind of attack on that particular series?
It take it that you consider US units placed into the structure of NATO to have been "disbanded" then? Or the state armies that were folded into the continental army to have been "disbanded" even though they were kept as distinct at least units partially supported by their originating state in the revolutionary war and the very early US? Up until the early 1900s the US kept a very small standing force at the federal level and depended on temporarily folding in state militias into the federal umbrella to beef that small standing force up. There is no evidence says the UFP did not do something similar, and considering some of the other conventions Roddenberry used when creating Star Trek it is even probable that they used that or a similar model to some extent.
We seem to be working with two completely different versions of the idea of "folded into".
The UFP has the goal of being a single, diverse but seamless society, but TOS clearly showed that they had not quite gotten to that point yet, and their federal level government was often forced to take a back seat in cultural matters concerning one or more of its members for instance. In many ways it was still a very, very, close alliance with shared pools of various resources than a truly unified nation. That comes later, with the TNG Federation being much more homogenous and unified than the TOS era one.
In fact, with the sometimes extreme diversity of the member planets it seems likely that their progress was probably fairly slow and contentious like the current day EU and their ponderous two steps forward, one-and-three-quarters-back political dance. From the way ENT presented things there is no way the Federation could instantly become 'one big happy family', and the organizational churn seen in early TOS is quite typical of the kind of "growing pains" an organization like that would have under those conditions.
A personal theory I have is that the close brush they had with the Klingon war the Organians nipped in the bud could have been the wakeup call that got them to stop the nonsense and organize properly, but that is just a theory.
You are obviously getting your Paramounts mixed up. I am not referring to the particular Viacom movie division that is currently called "Paramount", I was talking about the Paramount that Desilu studios (the ones who originally made Star Trek) became the TV division of and who wholly owned the IP rights Star Trek to at the time that they presented those explanations. That Paramount went almost entirely to CBS later on when Viacom split and is the sole reason that CBS now ones those rights. The Paramount that made the Kelvin stuff is actually the remainder of the old Paramount movie division from before Gulf+Western acquired Desilu that was left after what used to be Desilu was stripped out and bundled with CBS, and NOT the one I was referring to.
And you still have not come up with anything that contradicts what Paramount (the one that owned the IP at the time) said at the time.
I do sometimes use the term "canon" rather loosely because it is so often used that same way on discussion boards and even some articles. As for your definition of canon, it is no more "official" than the loose way I was using it, since there are no official dictionary definitions of the word that have anything to do with things outside of the church.
The Voyager example is NOT a retcon, it is a point that went against established continuity that was subsequently dropped. Had they kept the "no turns in warp" nonsense and established a new continuity point instead of tacitly withdrawing it, only then would it have been a "retcon". It illustrates my point well enough.
Since I did not mention any "sub-divisions of retcon" that fractal nonsense is irrelevant. My point was that there is no such thing as a passive retcon, continuity sticks until something actively changes it. There is no need to continually refresh content to keep it in continuity or canon or whatever you want to call it, it simply does fade away like you seem to think it does.
Why are you fixated on Midnights Edge? This has nothing to do with them or Doomcock or any of the other Trek conspiracy theorists. I mentioned Paramount since they were the IP holders at the relevant time, not CBS who now owns it, and they are not even the Paramount that exists today, and that should have been plain enough by context.
So, in other words, you watch a show and ignore anything the creators, writers, or anyone else directly involved with that show says about it, and instead make up your own fan theories about what you see on the screen.
Personally, I prefer using the comments from the production team, the onscreen finished product, and even the zeitgeist of the time the show is produced in (which is very important in a show that has run as long as Star Trek) to draw conclusions that have context. Without context it is too easy to mistake what is on the screen (like how later generations assumed the miniskirted uniforms were sexist and demeaning when in the 1960s zeitgeist they were just the opposite, an empowering symbol of freedom from traditional roles.
By not taking context into account you are making an error. In fact, something I forgot about is that if you look at the "death" date it too is wrong since it is quite a bit off (Mitchell wrote an '8' where there should have been a '3' compared to the stardate of Kirk's log). Do you claim that was a retcon followed by another retcon that negated the first retcon right in the episode or that they time traveled for that one scene? Mistakes happen in production and those mistakes are often talked about later so cutting yourself off from information at the source just because someone did not come out onscreen and talk about the error being an error during the episode (or the next one or whatever) is not the best way to go.
Sure, you can ignore everything the creator, writers, modelers, and other inside people say and make up your own fan theories about what you see onscreen, but in the end that is what they are: fan theories.
There may be more ships crewed by humans (and not necessarily humans from earth) than by others, but there is no definitive proof of it since the inside of only a few ships are seen in the series. In fact, little clues imply that most ships were crewed by a single race with perhaps a few outsiders who could tolerate the conditions well enough (Spock has mentioned how unpleasantly cold and damp the Enterprise is but found it tolerable except during "The Deadly Years" where he cranked the temperature up in his cabin). At least one of the thirteen active Constitutions is probably set up for Andorians with cooler temperatures, and (just for diplomatic prestige) probably one or more associated with the Tellarites as another of the original major founding member nations.
Admittedly that particular point is a bit iffy, but in TOS they strongly hint that the Vulcans are still pretty much the same condescending jerks they are later depicted as back in the ENT era, and that they do not play well with Starfleet itself. The dialog implied that the Intreped mainly limited its duties to scientific missions in conjunction with the Vulcan Science Academy, which their powerful influence in the Federation and somewhat holier than thou attitude makes believable enough.
I am not sure what you are considering a "very strange part of the thread". If it is the UESPA part it is not particularly strange and it is definitely not a "retcon", it is just not explained on-camera in a soliloquy or monologue or whatever and was never more than a background element no one bothered to write an episode about. Not being worth a story of its own the official explanation Paramount (the IP holder at the time, not the current company named "Paramount") gave is quite sufficient for the purpose of clearing the mystery up.
As for retcons, you need to realize that the word is short for "retrograde continuity" and was originally coined for series that have a strong flashback element to them. The practice of sometimes changing the meaning of events but not the events themselves by showing things that shed a new and (hopefully) surprising light on them in backstory (such as tying things together in ways the writers did not originally think of) is what got some people thinking it meant going back and actually changing continuity points. But even in the sloppiest interpretation of the term, those points can only be changed by active, deliberate action on the part of the writers, not by neglecting to revisit points that the writers and producers consider already sufficiently touched upon.
The graphic is readable enough to work with, and like I said several times before clear prints of it are quite readily available. In fact, here is one of them:
In the episode they use both of those graphics though I only showed one of the before for brevity in an already too long post:
The 400 meter length on the display in ENT could mean a lot of things, it could be actually be that length and be from one of the many alternate universes shown (as in TNG: "Parallels") or just be another error or it could even be some long and twisty justification of the sort that Roddenberry's sense of humor sometimes prompted him to give (like how the stardates were not all in order because the network sometimes showed the episodes out of order became a long BS tale of how the stardate depended on where in the galaxy you are).
It could even mean that something was overwriting the prime universe and destroying everything that that was seen in before ENT in the process, which if true would mean that by definition ENT and DSC are reboots and not actual prequels.
The relative scales of the two ships to each other, not that amazing.
I’m sure you believe that. You’ve not supplied any so I’m sure you’ll understand that all us mere humans have are TV screens and the DVDs.
You realise that the franchise makes designations up as it goes along right? The D7 in ‘Friday's Child’ is called a scout ship.
How wonderful, you’ve pointed out that Star Trek reuses models and has a low budget. What revolutionary knowledge.
I’m glad you’ve pointed that out as none of my other posts have been made with me knowing that.
Interesting, a conclusion based on your earlier headcaon that the B’rel and K’vort are separate ships with no hard evidence to back that up.
Estimations for the Bird of Prey (possibly called K’Vort class) range from shuttle sized to larger than a Galaxy Class. This is based on watching the episodes. Also on the TOS films where the same ship quadruples in size, no different classes there.
You do know that conclusions based on context are guesses right?
No. The words are continuity error.
Why are you so hung up on it? You’ve not mentioned the errors in another series once, even the ones in TOS you’ve tried to blow off by all sorts of double think but for some reason don’t do the same for DSC.
You know ‘distinct’ means identifiably different right? There’s no identifiably different parts of Starfleet beyond the departments and even some of them are indistinguishable from each other.
You seem to be working to different definitions of a lot of common terms to everybody else.
Really? Are you suggesting TOS is portraying a form of the Federation that is not parsimonious with how it was portrayed in every other incarnation of the franchise such as DSC!? A retcon if you will.
Maybe that was the case in the past. It wasn’t by the end.
Mate, you’ve quoted and replied to five of these in this thread by now.
Feel free to use it loosely. That is the complete opposite of what the concept is for, but sure, it does give you far more sources to draw on if you full all the random fanfiction out, but I’ll ignore them and stick with only material that falls under the correct definitions of canon.
Dear gods above and below, you’ve latterly spelt out a retcon there where what was continuity is now not. I don’t know how to make that any more clear,
So you didn’t use the phrase ‘passive retcon’? That’s okay, I’m sure you can scroll back and chack.
I didn’t say or imply that.
I dunno why people are fixated on them but they do show up a lot and their bollocks trickles down into a lot of posts.
Ooh, so close until the last part, you almost had it. Want to try again? Posts are free.
Fine, you do that. But unless it’s onscreen it’s not canon. You can draw conclusions from in universe context because that’s presented information, but drawing conclusions from BtS context is simply inserting somebody else’s headcanon into the show.
They can still be sexist now though, context shifts people’s perceptions change. Things can’t always be excused by just saying ‘that’s how things were back then’. Besides looking stupid, those uniforms are latterly sexist as they are sex segregated uniforms exclusive to one sex.
Twice in a row. Really?
The only thing that is indicated is that the Intrepid is crewed by Vulcans.
It’s very strange because the original point was that TOS was constantly retconned by the other shows and by itself and several examples were given to this effect and the ones you fixated on was the UESPA and Kirk’s middle name for some reason. It completely ignores the point and it’s quite an important point because a lot of your assumptions made in several threads involve TOS being fixed and immovable and the other shows (DSC in particular) having to move around it.
It stands for ‘retroactive-continuity’ and refers to changing events previously referenced or shown without offering a reason for the change or acknowledging it.
Oh goody, two unreadable pictures.
Except you only draw conclusions based on the words of BtS guys so you have to accept the reason is that Drexler wanted to fit all the sets in.
I don’t so I’ll happily accept either a retcon (based on assuming your graphic is readable) or a continuation based on the fact we have no canonical length for the TOS Conni in TOS.
Nope. A reboot is a new canon, an overwriting of the Prime Timeline would be an in-universe event like AGT not an out of universe event so would not alter the canon at all.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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Canon: The official "bible" as declared by the owners of an Intellectual Property (IP). This includes both shown continuity and Word of God, although the Word of God is occasionally subject to being overridden by either later continuity or later WoG.
Headcanon: The ideas or continuities you personally add to the official canon and continuity. McCoy's daughter falls under both WoG and headcanon, since the only materials that reference her are Roddenberry's statements and a couple of novels.
There, some definitions. Try using those consistently, and your arguments will be more fun for the rest of us (since you both seem so determined to keep arguing).
Finally someone who makes sense.
Continuity does not have to only come from arcs or serialized plots though, it also refers to consistency of information across episodes (and often across different series set in the same fictional universe). It is an important part of serious drama shows since they can use it to tease that something is not quite what it seems by breaking it (such is Kirk's odd behavior at the very start of "The Enterprise Incident"). TNG's "Parellels" made the most extensive use of that continuity aberration technique of any Trek episode iirc, until Warf finally caught on to what was happening, though all of them dabbled with it a bit.
In ENT it was largely obscured by their often clumsy attempts to show the beginnings of everything (even stuff best left alone) coupled with high-level executives who seemed to have a trouble understanding what a prequel is and wanting all the signature stuff from later in the timeline in the show, but that is a potentially long discussion all of its own.
As for the argument, it obviously is going nowhere. Artan42 seems to be settling down to little more than word-twisting trolling and what looks like deliberate misinterpretations in the last few rounds of it and I am getting tired of that nonsense, so I probably will not even bother to reply.