Time dilation was studiously ignored in all iterations of the series. From the way they were able to communicate with Starfleet Command whenever they really needed to, it obviously didn’t apply to them. There was never any obvious discrepancy between the way time was passing on Earth (or anywhere else in the Galaxy) and on board the Enterprise.
Five year missions actually sound reasonable when you factor in shore leave, crew rotation, replacements joining the ship at Star Bases, et cetera. It wouldn’t be like being cooped up inside a submarine for five years.
Chemically castrated? That’s it! Kirk was the only man on board who could still impregnate women, so he felt it was his duty to do it on behalf of the whole crew.
You can’t say that the Ninth Quadrant is way out in the periphery of known space, when a mission in the Ninth Quadrant starts at alpha Centauri.
And I’ve never heard of astronomers using eight quadrants. If for some reason you’re dividing the sky into eight sections (already an unusual practice-- it’s more likely to refer to imprecise locations by constellation), you’d refer to them as octants.
Constellations are sometimes referred to being in the north or south quadrant x, e.g. Sagittarius is in SHQ1. That gives eight divisions, but you are correct that is is not appropriate to refer to tnorth and south as separate quadrants; I was just looking for a rationale as to how one could interpret more than four quadrants. The entire notion of mapping the galaxy in tems of rectilinear divisions dowsn’t make much sense, anyway. It would make far more sense to break it into sectors not based on current position but association with comoving groups of interstellar clouds, and beyonfd that with structures of the galactic arms. Since stars are in constant motion with respect to one another calling out a fixed position on a map makes no sense.
But then, Star Trek was conceived as a Wagon Train to the stars any many episodes of the original series were as metaphorical as anything from The Twilight Zone, so presenting grounded science was never a concern for the original producers, and subsequent entries to the franchise have essentially used science as trappings for a superficially plausible narrative universe which just happens to work like an “Age of Sail” C.S. Forester novel.
Over the last 50 years, I’ve heard ante meridiem, post meridiem, above the horizon, below the horizon, above the celestial equator, below the celestial equator, and probably some other terms. I don’t recall ever hearing “north or south quadrant.”
Northern or southern *hemisphere *makes sense. There are eastern and western hemispheres too. I suppose that would give you a division of four. You’d have to start dividing at the First Point of Ares, where the meridian of 00:00 RA crosses the celestial equator (i.e., the Vernal Equinox).
So are there any canonical or non-canonical estimates of how much of the five-year mission TOS covered? It ran for three seasons, but was no doubt partway through the mission when we first see it. My understanding is that the stardates in the original series are largely arbitrary (and a more consistent system was used in later series), but is there any consensus about what time period it covered? (And I would exclude the retconning of the first pilot as The Menagerie).
I’m not really trying to argue the point that this actually creates eight “quadrants” because that is definitionally nonsensical; I was just advancing some rationale for how four actual quadrants could be further delineated to create eight divisions. This is clearly more thought than any screenwriter put in when he wrote dialogue about a “ninth quadrant”, just as George Lucas didn’t bother to figure out what making “the Kessel Run in twelve parsec” actually meant, resulting in four decades of fanwanking over how that sentence could possibly make any sense.
If we are now done dissecting an throwaway line in a forgettable episode of a show that never bothered conforming to any kind of actual science, can we get back go the nature of the Enterprise’s five year mission, and what that even means in relativistic terms to a spaceship that can flit across the galaxy at orders of magnitude faster than Einstein says it should be allowed to go?
I do not believe that the show at any point in any of the filmed episodes actually defines what is going on with the “five year mission”. Vague references to their basic mission are made at various times. But given that they both explore fringes of the galaxy (energy barrier, snort) and transport delegates to Babel, take Spock to Vulcan (Epsilon Eridani IIRC from the Star Fleet Technical Manual of the 70s), etc., they obviously aren’t just out there doing exploration.
Probably that was a good thing. Given the episodic nature of the show, lacking story arcs made it easier to do whatever they really wanted for a story in whatever order they wanted. Continuity wasn’t a big issue (besides the two Mudd episodes, there’s very little other internal reference to earlier happenings in the series). This is the complete opposite of Voyager, and since I despise that show, I think that’s a good thing.
If I were to do a re-boot of the series, however, I would LOVE to take the five-year mission and actually treat it like that. Send out a moderately powerful, fully scientifically equipped ship to do five years of exploration out on the fringes of known space, with all the appropriate limitations involved (no more communication at the speed of plot!). Meet new civs and make first contact. Find new potential colonies. And compete with the Romulans and the Klingons as they, too, explore the area. That way, Kirk’s personality as a risk-taker and a getter-out-of-bad-situations guy would be challenged meaningfully. Oh, and he’d have a plethora of hot alien babes to kiss.
And the casualty rate was pretty high, given that it was ostensibly a peacetime mission. Per the [Star Trek](Service aboard the Enterprise proved to be hazardous duty. Between 2265 and 2269, individuals who were killed while assigned to the ship included at least fifty-eight officers and crew – thirteen-point-five percent of the standard complement of 430.)wiki:
Different sites give slightly different figures, but according to this article, taking their proportion it the crew it wasn’t redshirts who were at highest risk of death (10%) but goldshirts (18%). However, among the redshirts those assigned to security (rather than engineering or communications) had an appalling 20% fatality rate.
What made Voyager suck was not that they recognized continuity. What made it suck was that they recognized continuity, and then ignored it anyway. An episodic show that you actually treat as episodic works. A continuity show that you actually treat as having continuity works. Heck, you can even have an episodic show that recognizes continuity, and that works, too, though I don’t know why the writers would put in the extra effort without the payoff. But a show where you make continuity matter, and then violate it, like Voyager, does not work.
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