Wolf 359 indiscrepency

Frankly, frostytheplebe's initial post in this thread is the thing that drove me from Star Trek. This overthinking has hurt more than its helped and the same goes for Star Wars.

No, I don't care how much yield a Mark IV torpedo has - and I don't care how many weapons Boba Fett has on his armor, either. What good does that knowledge do anyway? I can't think of the last time I picked up a Star Wars book and say "Wow, this was a real Star Wars story!"
 
Bandit LOAF said:
(Then we run into the problem of two bodies of further continuity: the official still-broad stuff in the technical manuals and novels and comics and such... and then the incredibly incredibly incredibly specific fan technical details that while incredibly fascinating aren't based on anything.)
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That's kind of the thing about the novels, though, is that they aren't ever considered official, at least as I've ever understood. That becomes glaringly evident when the writers of the various shows come along to blast previously-written novels into dust with aired shows.

The novel "Dark Mirror" comes immediately to mind. It was a TNG novel written in the early '90s that had an attempt by the Mirror universe to invade our own. It even made mention of the Terran Empire conquering the Klingon Empire...Worf was a broken slave in that book. It was obviously alive and well. Then DS9 comes along and destroys that little theory with their first episode dealing with the Mirror Universe ("Through The Looking Glass"? I forget what it was called exactly) in saying that the Terran Empire was defeated long ago by the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance. And Worf was in a very high position during that recurring series of DS9 Mirror shows.

I never really pay attention to putting this or that novel into whatever "official" continuity comes into play.

And speaking of continuity, on your question of that on TNG, did we enjoy it for the continuity or for the show itself: Outside of the pilot, "The Naked Now" and the one where Scotty made an appearance, did the show really ever reference anything from TOS in those seven seasons? I don't recall much of anything really going there. Then again, 75 years into the future, they didn't really need to. :)
 
The novels are "official" in that they're a licensed product that's based on whatever the Star Trek canon is when they're released - they're not the-c-word and so future stories are free to disregard them (or, in all likelyhood, just not know about them in the first place.)

The problem is that fans are such doofuses about this entire concept and you have whole armies of people who see Paramount saying that the novels aren't "canon" and decide that this automatically means they aren't interesting or aren't well done or aren't fun or aren't worth their time... which kind of sucks. The Star Wars people, at the very least, are kind enough to realize how their fans think about this stuff and lie to them.

Edited to point out: I'm going to my local comic book store tonight to pick up two new Star Trek comics... and I'm going to do my best to enjoy the heck out of them whether or not JJ Abrams knows if they "realyl happened" :)
 
Bandit LOAF said:
The novels are "official" in that they're a licensed product that's based on whatever the Star Trek canon is when they're released - they're not the-c-word and so future stories are free to disregard them (or, in all likelyhood, just not know about them in the first place.)

The problem is that fans are such doofuses about this entire concept and you have whole armies of people who see Paramount saying that the novels aren't "canon" and decide that this automatically means they aren't interesting or aren't well done or aren't fun or aren't worth their time... which kind of sucks. The Star Wars people, at the very least, are kind enough to realize how their fans think about this stuff and lie to them.

Edited to point out: I'm going to my local comic book store tonight to pick up two new Star Trek comics... and I'm going to do my best to enjoy the heck out of them whether or not JJ Abrams knows if they "realyl happened" :)
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I enjoyed the comic books back when DC did their first run series before it started to look...well, computerized. That had a six-story arc on the Mirror Universe as well which still holds my all-time favorite arc in that entire series. I still have them, I'll reread them from time to time and I'll STILL enjoy the hell out of them, as much as I did when they were new in 1985 (I think).

I'm really pretty picky about which books I pick up, mainly because my reading time is rather limited, but there are very few Trek books I haven't enjoyed. Out of all of the books I've read, (quite a few), I can only think of two had me going, "Okay, that sucked".

And I know this is in another topic, but looking at the new teaser trailer, it brings back to mind that I'm just hoping that the new movie is intelligent enough to keep to the spirit of TOS. I'm not expecting flashy stuff, big battles or major insight on everything to make me go, "That was a good movie" (though big battles wouldn't hurt as eye candy, eh? :D ), the only thing I hope for it keeping the spirit of TOS intact. That's all I ask.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
The novels are "official" in that they're a licensed product that's based on whatever the Star Trek canon is when they're released - they're not the-c-word and so future stories are free to disregard them (or, in all likelyhood, just not know about them in the first place.)
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I believe the standing agreement between authors and "franchise holdes" like Paramount is that the author can write anything he or she likes but they have to "undo it" by the book's end.

This is the reason why Chewbacca's death in the Star Wars novels was such a big deal (and, in my opinion, a stupid one - but then the whole Expanded Universe thing is built on really, really awful ideas, too)
 
I believe the standing agreement between authors and "franchise holdes" like Paramount is that the author can write anything he or she likes but they have to "undo it" by the book's end.
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I don't think they've had that sort of requirement in place for a while - Star Trek novels today do a lot more 'world moving' than they did ten or fifteen years ago. I'm not sure I'm a huge fan, though... I like things that are written with specific requirements, and I prefer the adventures of familiar Star Trek characters to an increasingly elaborate paired continuity.
 
frostytheplebe said:
Yes, but then wouldn't the Ambassador class have been a replacement for the Excelsior? yet we see so few of those...
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Well, there is not even a hit of that like there was for the Excelsior. The Ambassador is a sort of odd retcon thing that briefly tried to fill the gap of Enterprises. Remember, before that episode, we had two whole Enterprise letters unknown. Similarly the tricked-out Enterprise-B is a sort of odd retcon.

And then later on everyone automatically assumed that two-hull two-nacell ships were generational, as in each replaced the last, rather than specialist, where they co-exist in required numbers. I always thought the Galaxy and Ambassador were classes geared more toward diplomatic missions. It's certainly the case in TNG where they're always having house-guests over. On the other hand the Constitution and Excelsior seemed more geared to finding (or causing) trouble.

Of course the real explanation is likely that the Excelsior and Miranda had become stock models by the time TNG aired, and those were used rather than recyling the Galaxy exclusively or blowing the entire budget on more than one new and unique ship model. Remember, TV shows don't get an unlimited wad of cash, not even Star Trek.
 
LeHah said:
I take it you're pointing a crook'd finger to the Titan novels...?
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They've done several different 'relaunch' series, including continuing Deep Space Nine in a significantly different tone. Titan is actually pretty harmless, since it doesn't deal overly much with the general shape of the Star Trek universe.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
They've done several different 'relaunch' series, including continuing Deep Space Nine in a significantly different tone. Titan is actually pretty harmless, since it doesn't deal overly much with the general shape of the Star Trek universe.
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Have you read Before Dishonor? It screws with the Universe pretty bad from what I understand. Sort of the Federation's last stand against the Borg... all I really know is the rumor that 7 of 9 loses her life in the end.
 
Nomad Terror said:
The only other two ships I can think of off the top of my head with letter-suffixed registries were the Galaxy-class USS Yamato (NCC-1305-E *only* in "Where Silence Has Lease." It was NCC-71807 in "Contagion") and the USS Dauntless (NX-01-A, though this ship turned out to be an alien fabrication and not an actual Starfleet Vessel)

EDIT: I should also point out that the USS Yamato in "Where Silence Has Lease" was also a fabrication, albeit of a real ship pulled from the either the Enterprise's computer records or the crew's memory. So both of these ships we see with suffixed registries were not real.
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...well, don't forget the second Defiant from DS9, the replacement for the destroyed one... okay, the fx-guys don't changed the registry for that vessel (they simply forgot it... the ship was first called Sao Paulo)...

My best guess: if somehow a captain wish to have a new vessel with a old name... and he is famous enough... :D... than everything can happen.
 
Have you read Before Dishonor? It screws with the Universe pretty bad from what I understand. Sort of the Federation's last stand against the Borg... all I really know is the rumor that 7 of 9 loses her life in the end.
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I have. The problem with the book isn't that it "screws with the Universe," it's that it's unusually poorly written and especially uninteresting. I guess Star Trek fans don't have the conceptual grasp to complain about that sort of thing, anymore. :)

As for who dies, I'll put it behind spoiler tags:
it's not Seven, it's Janeway -- but it isn't one of those Chewbacca-style we-really-mean-this death events... the book itself is already hinting at how she comes back.
 
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