[Geek trivia] The Mirror Universe ships were apparently on** thirty-year** missions.[\Geek Trivia] :eek:
I think Tim has it - I recall reading this in David Gerrold’s book “(The Story Behind) The Trouble With Tribbles” but since I’m travelling now I can’t verify that. Anyway, supposedly Gene Roddenberry wanted to send the message to NBC executives that he considered Star Trek to be a five-year series, even though he barely got three years.
BTW: many people consider the animated series to have concluded the five year mission. Though it only lasted one season (22 episodes), so there should still be a year to go. I guess that year occurred offscreen to set up the first movie.
There are other gaps too. I believe the first time we see the Enterprise-E in the movie First Contact, someone says that they have already been in space for a year. So, there’s a year that was never shown.
Also, I think that there may be other missions that were supposed to have been undertaken by the Enterprise-A, because otherwise that ship had a REALLY short career from its introduction in ST IV to its order for decommissioning in ST VI (did they discover a serious flaw in the Constitution class design or something that made it urgent that they scrap all extant ones or something?).
I don’t remember who said it, but I once heard the Enterprise described as being like an inter-planetary “Mary Worth,” meddling around in their neighbors’ businesses.
Seconds are probably still seconds, because that’s the basic time unit used by science. From there, though, you can go in a bunch of different directions:
1: Use an Earth clock (or a clock based on some other prominent civilization; Vulcan maybe?) on all Federation-controlled ships and stations (obviously they didn’t do this, but it’s an option).
2: Use Earth hours, but only use as many of them as fit in the local planet’s day. Some time in the middle of the night, have a fractional hour, so the clocks go straight from 13:23:16 to 1:00, or whatever.
3: Round off the number of Earth hours in a local day to the nearest integer, and locally define an “hour” to be that fraction of a local day. You then have another decision to make, whether to define “minutes” relative to hours or to seconds.
4: Locally define an “hour” to be 1/24 of a local day, and just accept that they can be significantly longer or shorter than standard. Again, not something they actually did, but an option.
5: Choose a different convention for every station, based on what seems to make most sense in the context. Maybe one planet is really close to 24 hours anyway, and another is settled by traditionalists from Earth who observe Earth time even on the planet itself, and on another, there’s a tense diplomatic situation where we don’t want to antagonize the locals by imposing our clock, and so on.
Really, in an age when all clocks can be expected to be computerized, any of these would be viable.
Since the Enterprise in TOS was a human crewed ship (with the obvious exception of Spock), it is very likely they had three eight hour shifts and used a Terran clock and calender. However, because of the problems of relativistic time compression (which would happen when they went to impulse drive, and perhaps even in warp) Kirk uses stardates to chronicle their voyage when sending missives back to Starfleet HQ.
That is the classic answer, says a guy who has been a total geek fan since 1966.
Maybe a short career as the Enterprise, but I think it’s semi-canon that it wasn’t a brand new ship, but rather another of the same class that had undergone a refit and then re-christened as the Enterprise-A when the opportunity came up.
I believe it was supposed to have been the Yorktown.
Actually, given the level of technology in Star Trek, the absurd ease of manufacturing with replicators and the apparent supply of free labor (people work to “better themselves”), it would make far more sense for starships to be pretty much disposable, replaced or redesigned and reconfigured about as often as a PC updates its software. (Someone submits a bug report that if the [del]toilet[/del]head in the officer’s cabins could be moved 3 1/2 inches aft, it would have enough clearance to accomodate Thorian females and would provide 3 square feet of additional floorspace useable by Cephalopoidians, and the next time the ship’s in subspace communication range, all the plumbing and bulkheads are beamed out and new ones replicated in place.)
A cheap tactic to keep the network paying you, if it lasts 6 years the fans will just ignore that bit.
If it lasts 6 years, time for a new 5 year mission (hoping to get 10 years out the network).
There was no channel surfing in 1966!
The original Star Trek writers may have been big fans of communist planning.
Sly effort by The Great Bird Of The Galaxy to get a long-running series.
That really is not why they went, though (with the partial exception, perhaps, of Cook’s voyages). The Beagle’s mission was to chart the coastlines and surrounding waters of southern South America on behalf of the Royal Navy. For the world’s dominant naval power, this was a perfectly pragmatic military mission. Darwin was just taken along to keep the captain company. Captain Fitzgerald was afraid he would go crazy and kill himself from the loneliness of not having another upper-class, educated Englishman to talk to, and, thanks to his aristocratic family connections, he was able to get someone assigned to him as a companion. It is as though McCoy were only on the Enterprise to keep Kirk from going nuts. (Hmmm. Maybe something in that. And Picard had Troi…)
(Fitzgerald’s fear of suicide was not baseless. The previous captain of the Beagle, on a similar mission, had indeed hanged himself during the voyage, and Fitzgerald did eventually die by his own hand, although many years later, back in England.)
Darwin volunteered to go, of course, because he was a huge natural history geek, and fancied the exploring (and it was also a good excuse to get out of having to go and be a parson in some backwater parish, which what his father had planned for him after Charles had disappointed him by dropping out of medical school). However, it was no part of the navy’s or the British government’s plan to send a naturalist along on the Beagle’s voyage. (And if it had been, they would not have sent an amateur, as Darwin then was.)
Most of the other British naturalist-explorers of the era were really naval ships’ doctors, essentially doing a bit of natural history in their spare time. I think there was some degree of official encouragement of this, but it was not their main duty, and almost always quite incidental to their ship’s real naval mission.
There was one episode where Kirk finds himself alone on a deserted Enterprise with the alien girl of the week. He muses that he has food to last 300 people 5 years, enough to last them forever.
Or the USS Ti-Ho, depending on which source material one is referencing.
(Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual says Yorktown, Mr. Scott’s Guide to the Enterprise says Ti-Ho).
Do I get extra geek credit… or is it just sad to know that? 