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Looking for Feedback from Jesse Heinig and Other Canon Gurus

SystemSystem Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
I have a story I'm cooking up for when UGC goes live but I need some thinking cap action from some canon (and expanded universe) gurus.

A core part of the story premise involves imagining a version of Trek history without time travel that remains recognizable and isn't dystopian.

I need to revisit two moments in Trek history and make them work WITHOUT time travel and also without completely derailing everything else. These are two moments where time travel saved the day and I want to convincingly create versions of these events where the problem is solved without the use of time travel.

1) The attack of the whale probe in STIV.

2) O'Brien's repeated time jumps in "Visionary", which averted the destruction of the station at the hands of the Romulans, who were intent on destroying the wormhole.

Basically, these two events are big sticking points for me. In terms of my plot, I need explanations for how both scenarios were safely averted without the destruction of the Federation or DS9, only assuming for a second that time travel was no longer possible and all prior instances of time travel never happened.

I invoke Mr. Heinig's name here because I know he worked on a Decipher sourcebook which covered a Mirror Universe version of Star Trek IV. Most alternate universe accounts of the whale probe incident end up pretty badly for the Federation if no one travels back to get George and Gracie. The Decipher Mirror Universe sourcebook is one of the few times someone has envisioned a scenario where saving the whales was unnecessary (and, in fact, made things worse) and an alternate solution emerged.

In terms of "Visionary", my issue is that time travel seems like the only way to justify DS9's continued existence, given the nature of the Romulan plot to blow it up.

The alternative might be to imagine that in a world without time travel, the wormhole doesn't exist, Sisko (being half-Prophet) is never born, and consequently the Bajorans are a secular people. (That does have some pretty far reaching implications, among which include DS9 contimuing to be in orbit of Bajor.)
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Comments

  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited November 2010
    Well I can't speak to the second scenario, but regarding the first.

    It seems to me that the probe rolled in and began it's whale song, looking for an answer in kind. In the books more is explained about how it searched for an answer, and the motivations.

    What I never understood was why they just never analyzed the sounds it emitted and just replayed them back..
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited November 2010
    I'm not sure if you want to rewrite some st episodes with known figures from st? If that is the case I think it's not allowed. They've mentioned it somewhere where foundry topic is that you can't use Kirk or other known characters from st universe. Unless you get permission to do so. Or directly involve them in some new storyline etc.

    So I guess if you change everything like 100% and use generic names then I guess it will be legal. But you may want to ask Devs to be sure.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited November 2010
    Mr.Chris wrote:
    I'm not sure if you want to rewrite some st episodes with known figures from st? If that is the case I think it's not allowed. They've mentioned somewhere where foundry topic is that you can't use Kirk or other known characters from st universe. Unless you get permission to do so. Or directly involve them in some new storyline etc.

    So I guess if you change everything like 100% and use generic names then I guess it will be legal. But you may want to ask Devs to be sure.

    You can reference, not use directly, if, say, CBS' cafepress license were a template for Foundry guidelines...

    Either way, my trick here would be, in part,, to assemble all the pieces of this alternate history and then present people with the net result, without necessarily explaining everything. Hence, no one has heard of the Dominion or the Borg but I might not bore the player to tears with WHY those changes occurred or may have non-required NPC dialogues that connect the dots.

    So the idea partly rests on the premise that I've done my homework and connected the dots but I might not share the how's in the mission itself, instead showing rather than telling.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited November 2010
    Well, without going into details I'd suggest you try doing this like weekly episodes. You can start with some history background and some action then work it out with more action and continue to add some info until you reach middle of your story and progress to final mission and conclusion with for example possibly an epic battle.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited November 2010
    Two interesting consequences off the bat:

    Donatra would be the Romulan head of state, most likely, because Sela would not exist without time travel.

    Also, Klingons retain their TOS appearance and are still afflicted by the augment virus because the events in the "City on the Edge of Never" mission never happened.

    Even without direct references, one possible consequence is that the Romulans and Federation are allies, the Cardassians remain antagonistic (no prophets = no wormhole = no Dominion War), and the Klingons are much less stable and strategic.

    Oh. Wow. There's a funny consequence right there: assuming Worf exists, he'd look like a TOS Klingon. (Ie. a white guy in Laurence Olivier Othello makeup with bushy eyebrows.) Which might mean he wouldn't have Michael Dorn's likeness AT ALL. Which would mean that if the final Foundry EULA just bars actor likenesses, Worf could show up because he wouldn't resemble his onscreen portrayals.

    Yes, this is a crazy plot with grassy knoll, "A Beautiful Mind"-level insanity behind it. But half the fun of planning it is a "What if there were no what ifs...?"

    Oh. Crud. Maybe the Devidians become an issue again. The good news is, they can't travel back in time and cause problems. So I guess Driffen's Comet gets destroyed present day. Haha. And here I thought time travel was a headache. Imagining what things would be like if there was no time travel, now or ever, gets kinda crazy.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited November 2010
    Very nice and interesting if I were you I wouldn't worry too much about canon. Why? Because it's your story you can of course stay true to canon but at the same time, sky is the limit. You seem to have good imagination and that's your ticket to making successful mission or chain of missions :)

    Best source for star trek canon for ya is watching ST movies, tv series........ to get inspired.

    PS. Good story + action usually = fun :)
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited November 2010
    Mr.Chris wrote:
    Well, without going into details I'd suggest you try doing this like weekly episodes. You can start with some history background and some action then work it out with more action and continue to add some info until you reach middle of your story and progress to final mission and conclusion with for example possibly an epic battle.

    Yeah. I kinda was thinking that, on a smaller scale.

    You're on DS9. Something goes screwy. Suddenly, you're on DS9 but everything is screwy. The station is loaded with references and clues you can spend a long time digging through... Or you can just stick to getting the mandatory clues and move on to figure out why you're there and why and where "there" is, with an emphasis on getting home/setting things right.

    So it would be something where you can do the bare essentials in a normal sitting or you can plunge off the deep end exploring and talking to every NPC to get the "whys" behind the differences.

    I mean, say there are TOS Klingons roaming the promenade. You can just shrug it off as random weirdness or you can talk to someone who walks you through the point that there is no kuvah'magh. (Point 1: B'Vat can't go back in time with Miral Paris if there is no time travel. Point 2: There is no Miral Paris at all without time travel because if you undo all the time travel episodes of Voyager back to the earliest versions we saw of what their future "should have been", Torres died and Tom Paris married Kes and it was BECAUSE of time travel that events DIDN'T happen that way. Hence there is no kuvah'magh and even if there was, she couldn't be taken back to cure the augment virus.)
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited November 2010
    Startruck wrote:
    What I never understood was why they just never analyzed the sounds it emitted and just replayed them back..

    Probably the same reason that a playback of your own voice would not fool you into thinking that you had found a different sentient creature.

    On the OP's point. You'd have to deal with the Cochrane Drive problem and the Vulcan "First Contact," too.

    Maybe you could approach the problem like Larry Niven theorized. Any parallel 'verse that invented and used time travel wouldn't exist because the changes inherent in meddling with your past would cause your 'verse to cease to exist. Time travel would become the chainsaw that chopped your timeline completely off the temporal tree.

    In this light, all of the physical manifestations caused by canon time travel (especially covert time travel) can be explained by the more "official" explanation: "I was just convinced that that was the best day to try out the ship." "A little birdie told me..." "It came to me in a dream (vision)." Both ends of the experience become a shared hallucination.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited November 2010
    Roy_Vash wrote: »
    Probably the same reason that a playback of your own voice would not fool you into thinking that you had found a different sentient creature.

    On the OP's point. You'd have to deal with the Cochrane Drive problem and the Vulcan "First Contact," too.

    Maybe you could approach the problem like Larry Niven theorized. Any parallel 'verse that invented and used time travel wouldn't exist because the changes inherent in meddling with your past would cause your 'verse to cease to exist. Time travel would become the chainsaw that chopped your timeline completely off the temporal tree.

    In this light, all of the physical manifestations caused by canon time travel (especially covert time travel) can be explained by the more "official" explanation: "I was just convinced that that was the best day to try out the ship." "A little birdie told me..." "It came to me in a dream (vision)." Both ends of the experience become a shared hallucination.

    Why is first contact a problem if:

    A) There's question over whether the Borg exist.

    B) If they do exist, they (like everyone else) are incapable of time travel.

    I guess the technobabble I'm operating under at the moment is that everything within the galactic barrier is flooded with residual levels of Antichroniton Radiation, stabilizing everything into more or less forward moving temporal sync. (Ie. yes, the relativistic twin paradox still applies. But the radiation mitigates backwards time travel.)

    There is a reason that the known galaxy is flooded with antichroniton particles (which I'm saving for the mission itself) but the net result is a total cancellation of time travel and any macroscopic non-linear phenomena.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited November 2010
    Maybe the computer revolution of the late 20th century would never have happened and everyone would be at a lower level of technology.

    Because if you remember in the episode of Voyager they said that Starling's computer advances were only because of the crashed 29th century ship in the 1970s.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited November 2010
    Galactrix wrote: »
    Maybe the computer revolution of the late 20th century would never have happened and everyone would be at a lower level of technology.

    Because if you remember in the episode of Voyager they said that Starling's computer advances were only because of the crashed 29th century ship in the 1970s.

    I kinda assumed those advanced were lost in WWIII and Cochrane built his warp ship pretty close to from scratch either way.

    If nothing else because it's simpler to ignore predestination since we SEE the future changed.

    That isn't to say two variations on the past can't produce a similar future but I'm kindof of the mind that the universe pre- and post-First Contact or pre- and post-Yesterday's Enterprise are technically not the same universe as the one before but just a close approximation.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited November 2010
    Well, depending on whether you're using the animated series or not ... sans time travel Spock would have died early in the Vulcan desert and the Enterprise's first officer would have been an Andorian named Thelev.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited November 2010
    Lockup wrote: »
    Well, depending on whether you're using the animated series or not ... sans time travel Spock would have died early in the Vulcan desert and the Enterprise's first officer would have been an Andorian named Thelev.

    Good catch.

    And that episode specifically has been referenced in canon (flashback elements have anyway) and built on quite a bit. Although the new science officer was Thelin. Thelev was an Orion spy posing as an andorian in TOS. (And technically the only live action Orion male seen before Enterprise, I think.)

    I also have to parse out what happened to Nero.

    I'd easily go crazy if I tracked every example of time travel in the books and spinoffs but I am acknowledging other time travel in-game and it might be worth a nod to "Yesteryear" to work in Spock's death as a child.

    Funny detail there though: Mirror Spock and JJverse Spock exist. Which means either they save themselves in the same way OR Spock's death as a child was a result of time travel in some respect as well.
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