10-04-2022, 08:08 AM
(This post was last modified: 10-04-2022, 11:20 AM by FaceInTheCrowd.)
Sorry about the stardate confusion, but yes, you are right about the timing. The Valiant disappeared 200 years prior, so it would have been a 21st century ship.
Zephram Cochrane launches his warp ship and makes first contact with the Vulcans in the 2060s, but the Vulcans won't start helping Earth build warp 5 ships until the 22nd century, so a 21st century Valiant could have made warp 3 or 4 at best. It's 26,000 light-years from Earth to the edge of the galaxy, so depending on which of the several inconsistent speeds Trek has quoted over the years for warp factors it would have taken the Valiant anywhere from 120 to 900 years to get there. I think the only practical scenario for a magnetic storm to put the Valiant on the other side of the barrier would be if it swept it into a wormhole much closer to home whose other end was outside the galaxy. We know very little about wormholes in either the real or Star Trek universes, but we do know that even in Star Trek's 24th century they don't know how to create them on demand. So I would say there's no way the Valiant deliberately set out to be anywhere near where it ended up (and no way it was ever going to make it home again, either), and Kirk's opening log entry, made before they received the signal from the Valiant's recorder, makes sense; they had no expectation that any Earth ship had ever been where they were going.
The potential blooper in this episode is that at warp 6, which was later established as the Enterprise's maximum safe speed, it would still have taken them at least 60 years to get from Earth to the edge of the galaxy. But every version of Star Trek through the years has underestimated how long it should take for any version of the Enterprise to travel to Earth from deep space and by now someone must have pointed that out to the showrunners. Does a science error count as a blooper if they choose to go on doing it deliberately?
Zephram Cochrane launches his warp ship and makes first contact with the Vulcans in the 2060s, but the Vulcans won't start helping Earth build warp 5 ships until the 22nd century, so a 21st century Valiant could have made warp 3 or 4 at best. It's 26,000 light-years from Earth to the edge of the galaxy, so depending on which of the several inconsistent speeds Trek has quoted over the years for warp factors it would have taken the Valiant anywhere from 120 to 900 years to get there. I think the only practical scenario for a magnetic storm to put the Valiant on the other side of the barrier would be if it swept it into a wormhole much closer to home whose other end was outside the galaxy. We know very little about wormholes in either the real or Star Trek universes, but we do know that even in Star Trek's 24th century they don't know how to create them on demand. So I would say there's no way the Valiant deliberately set out to be anywhere near where it ended up (and no way it was ever going to make it home again, either), and Kirk's opening log entry, made before they received the signal from the Valiant's recorder, makes sense; they had no expectation that any Earth ship had ever been where they were going.
The potential blooper in this episode is that at warp 6, which was later established as the Enterprise's maximum safe speed, it would still have taken them at least 60 years to get from Earth to the edge of the galaxy. But every version of Star Trek through the years has underestimated how long it should take for any version of the Enterprise to travel to Earth from deep space and by now someone must have pointed that out to the showrunners. Does a science error count as a blooper if they choose to go on doing it deliberately?