No, the Metrons were the ones who stranded Kirk all alone to fight the Gorn in “Arena.” In “Spectre of the Gun,” the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens were Melkotians.
I would abjure this sort of thing in most cases because it’s . . . lazy. A writer says, “I want to put these spaceman characters in an Old West setting just for fun, so I’ll set it up like . . . nah, can’t make the Nazi Planet setup work again . . . Mobster Planet was good for a laugh once . . . still trying to live down the Rome Planet . . . Kohms and Yangs, what was I thinking . . . so we’ll do it like . . . puffcough* . . . like there’s this race of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who want to put the characters in an Old West setting just for fun! Or to test their character or something . . . the Metron/Gorn thing was long enough ago for a replay . . .”
I mean, this is putting your Deus ex machina at the start of the story!
OK, you want gutsy? We’re taking the series in a slightly different direction:
HARD-SF SPACE OPERA!
No more indistinguishable-from-magic black-box technologies will be assumed than are strictly necessary for the story premises and general setup and the existence of an interstellar state/civilization. Therefore, there will be FTL travel, spaceships that move without expelling reaction mass, and internal artificial gravity/antigravity/inertial-dampening fields to provide a shirtsleeve environment aboard ship and to save the crew from becoming a film on the walls every time the ship accelerates. But no transporter beams, use the damned shuttlecraft or you’re not setting foot on that planet.
At least some effort will be made to root at least some of the black-box technologies, however tenuously, in physical theories now known or seriously proposed by reputable physicists. (See Indistinguishable from Magic, by Robert L. Forward.
No line of technobabble will appear in the script until an engineer specializing in technical writing has been shown it and asked how he might improve it. Any concepts that can be expressed in real-life technical terms will be, regardless of whether the audience can be expected to tell the difference.
There will be no indistinguishable-from-magic natural phenomena, either, such as telepathy.
Not only will there be no Q or Organians, there will be no Vorlons or Shadows – no embodiments of cosmic principles. Any much-more-advanced-than-us aliens will be like the humanoid-dinosaur race in that Voyager episode – simply people who have been at it a lot longer; not especially interested in guiding the destinies of younger races or some shit.
Add to the above: In a Hard-SF Space Opera setting that is clearly a future derived from the real-life present (or some timeline very close to it), then the characters, who are professional space explorers and civilization-finders, should be expected to employ relevant concepts known in the present – not just employ them, but be conscious and discuss in those terms that their mission includes finding definite or better values for all the variables in the Drake Equation, or verifying/falsifying the general framework of the Kardashev Scale. (Both date from the 1960s. It might be too much to expect SF writers working in Hollywood in the same period to know of them, already – but, in this version of TOS, an effort will be made to know of them.)
(Fans unfamiliar with these terms will look them up. If they cannot be found in the Encyclopedia Americana 1967 edition, you may be sure they will be included in the 1968 edition.
In Earth’s history, in 1492 a more technologically advanced [group of] nations encounters the North American populations, colonizes and exploits them. The Europeans were not too terribly more advanced, meaning that the NA’s could make a fight of it, some times.
Would this be interesting as an episode arc, with the Federation on the smelly end of the stick? (I think it could be.)
What can the Feds do to prevent from being assimilated, in your hard science series?
(I got tired of Voyager being the most technically [magically] advanced ship in the Delta quadrant. You’se got REPLICATORS? Gimmee!)
If this is hard-SF, the Federation avoids being conquered/assimilated by having/being nothing in which any non-human species could have any conceivable interest. See this GD thread.
For simplicity’s sake, writers will assume that the technology allows the Enterprise to travel from Earth to a star 100 light years away and back in one week’s ship time and find one week has passed on Earth. But whenever that happens, the writers will say we’re going 200 light years in a week.
Plenty of dialogue will make clear that ship’s time != audience time. “Well, there was no life in those last seven systems we explored since [events of last episode], but this one looks promising . . .”
There’s a known element within Star Trek canon that makes BrainGlutton’s idea quite practical: subspace radio. Suppose in reality we sent a conventional ion drive ship out to Alpha Centauri, and by the time the ship got within half a light year of the system they were detecting what were unambiguously alien radio waves. We could then conclude that there was some intelligent life in that system. But Starfleet has the Prime Directive - the Enterprise can’t just visit all of those 100 million intelligent civilizations, only the ones that have already developed to the point of being aware of interstellar civilization. As a narrative shorthand for this, in order to do that you need warp drive, and by the time you invent warp drive, you have invented subspace radio. So the Enterprise, in BG’s TOS, could be given a list of probable subspace radio sources and told to go out and investigate each one. Adventure ensues.
That’s a gross exaggeration, unless your numbers are way off. Intelligent species would be dead easy to find if there’s one around every star in a thousand – nine hundred something of that thousand can be rejected out of hand just for being the wrong spectral type and/or being in binaries where there’s no stable orbit in the liquid-water zone, and that’s using 1960s planetbound astronomy.
That said, a galaxy where intelligent life is fairly rare, such that there are a dozen or so known races and the discovery of a thirteenth is a major event in itself (not a plot-device handwave for some other story) could make a good foundation.
If you want to have a setting where the captain is as much on his own as an 18th century sailing-ship captain, don’t have subspace radio – messages travel on ships or robot drones.
You are presuming that subspace physics and the [warp] technology they lead to, has to be the only way to achieve effective FTL travel. Is that acceptable, or an unreasonable plot device?
Depends on how you want to build the world in which the show is set. Certainly in Star Trek as it exists in reality, it’s very much implied that every FTL capable civilization communicates via subspace radio. It’s also very much implied that almost everyone uses some version of warp drive, because non-warp FTL shows up now and then and is treated as an exception. You can either justify this by saying it’s the easy and obvious way to send FTL messages, or you can leave it unjustified, and let the advent of some other method be a plot development.
Steve, FTL drones are just another way of having FTL “radio”, and keeping your starship captains within reach of HQ. Doesn’t matter whether the message travels by drone or carrier wave if it still gets there in time for Starfleet HQ to provide an official response to a captain’s query. That said, in TOS as it actually happened, Kirk often was on his own, even with subspace radio to Starfleet. That’s because he was so far out on the perimeter that even the subspace radio was too slow. Later, in TNG, Picard and crew occasionally waxed nostalgic for that kind of “wilder, rougher era”.
FTL “radio” still isnt remotely instantaneous communication. If its taken you anywhere from weeks to months to years get “way out there”, unless your drones are orders of magnitude faster than your ship, its still going to take weeks to months to years to communicate back with HQ.
The technology in Trek is all supposed to be related due the “transtator.”. Remember the concern over the Iotians having McCoy’s lost communicator?
Capt. Kirk: Alright Bones, in the language of the planet: “What’s your beef?”
Dr. McCoy: Well I don’t know how serious this is, Jim, and I don’t know quite how to tell you…
Capt. Kirk: Go ahead.
Dr. McCoy: But in all the confusion, I…
Capt. Kirk: Tell me.
Dr. McCoy: I think I left it in Bela’s office.
Capt. Kirk: You left it?
Dr. McCoy: Somewhere, I’m not certain.
Capt. Kirk: Your not certain of what?
Dr. McCoy: I left my communicator.
Capt. Kirk: In Bela’s office?
Spock: Captain, if the Iotians, who are a bright an imitative people, should take that communicator apart.
Capt. Kirk: They will, they will. They will find out how the transtator works.
Spock: The transtator is the basis for every important piece of equipment we have.
Capt. Kirk: Everything, everything.
Dr. McCoy: You really think it’s that serious?
Capt. Kirk: Serious, serious, Bones. It upsets the whole percentage.
Dr. McCoy: How you mean?
Capt. Kirk: Well, in a few years, the Iotians may demand a piece of our action.
Every Important Piece of Equipment. To me, this implies Warp Drive, Replicators, Transporters, Communications (ftl and otherwise), Medical stuff…
