It's a little frustrating, really. I've spent years working to unkink all the problems in the timeline, all the way back to the 1960s. I've used all the known data to anchor specific referents, extrapolated from there, and filled in gaps with appropriate placeholders. And it's been such a headache undoing the careless damage done by various individuals over the decades, up to and including Gene, himself.
Which is why they should start over, IMO. Do a true reboot and start over on a fresh canvas. Think of how great a new Star Trek could be without having fifty years of reverse anachronisms (women can't command starships, etc). Do it right and leave the JJ-verse to the movies, please!
My point was more that I could keep a pretty good hold on fifty years worth of content, with no research staff or assistants. And I know I'm not the only one who is so up on things. Good writers tend to welcome the challenge of coming up with something within particular strictures. The scaffold of real science, speculative/theoretical science, and a plethora of established dates and events and technological progression and such I have never felt in any way constrained by. Quite the opposite. I've had a lot of fun figuring out:
• What the Star Trek universe's 1960s to about 2000 looked like (likely no Kenedy assassination, Nixon never elected, no defunding of NASA, orbital weapons platforms, space stations, moon bases, etc.)
• How the Eugenics Wars could possibly have even been a thing (eugenics means selective breeding for desired traits, so what had been going on and for how many generations for Khan and his followers to launch some kind of offensive circa 1990?)
• What the two hundred years from 1961 to 2161 maps out like (World War III, Colonel Green's War, New United Nations, a 52-state United States, interstellar sublight sleeper ships, Cochrane's development of the
Phoenix, refitting the drive section left in stationary orbit into the
Bonaventure, the launch of the
Valiant, the interrelationship between Earth and her colonies, the formation of Starfleet, the launch of the
Dauntless, and so much more)
• The actual timeline of the 23rd century, based on intent in scripts and production notes that was never in actual dialogue (stardates were originally like 19th-century ships' logs, starting at the start of the voyage, and counting from there -- in the case of TOS, Gene intended it to be two-digit months and two-digit percentage; TWOK was Kirk's fiftieth birthday, hence why he's so aware of his age; first contact with the Klingons, and so forth)
• The evolution of Starfleet from a Human organization in the 2130s to a multispecies one in the 2270s and '80s (increases in shipbuilding capacity, advances in ship design and longevity, both resulting in a significant new vessel registration scheme -- basically recognizing Jeffries and Okuda had different notions of how it all worked, and managing a transition rather than trying to overwrite one onto the other to poor effect)
Most things work. Only a couple require some fudging. Which ain't bad, considering how much has been put out there over the last half-century. An impressive amount of things line up quite by accident, ironically in contradiction of the official timeline (i.e., with Kirk's actual derived birth year being 2235, some of the lore has him being ten years old when the
Enterprise was launched, thus 2245, which is the official launch year).
Now, inside of all of that, there's a lot we either don't know or have never seen. Enterprise
sort of shows us the early days of Starfleet, but it's an alternate timeline from Prime. It works much better as a prologue to JJ-Trek. Not only is the tech advancement way off, but it contradicts prior canon (NX-01 being
Enterprise instead of
Dauntless, per Voyager, first contact with the Klingons, etc.). That show is an example of how
not to do it. If a couple details had been tweaked, it would have worked
brilliantly as the early voyages of NCC-1701 under Captain Robert April. So if we start with the organization of Starfleet in the 2130s, we've got over a century of the timeline that we roughly know about but have never actually properly seen. Even though we know the outcome, it could still be exciting to see how it all came about -- if done right this time.
I'd've been fine with JJ-Trek if the science weren't so bad, if the characters were written better, and if they weren't so hot to change as much as they could get away with pretty much just for change's own sake. So I consider it as much out of consideration as Enterprise for doing it wrong. *heh*
Another exciting time would be the first half of the 24th century. Same story. The novels and comics and role-playing games have given us a little bit -- some scaffolding to tie things together -- but there's still so much that hasn't been explored, in whole or in part. The resetting of the stardates in 2323, right around the same time the
Ambassador class was launched. The Romulans had disappeared behind their borders, Picard was just going into Starfleet, and we were still working (with setbacks) toward alliance with the Klingons. We fought with the Cardassians, we fought with the Tzenkethi, we fought with the Tholians, we expanded our infrastructure and settled a lot of what had been explored in April's and Pike's and Kirk's era.
Plus the muddy time late in the TNG era, where the stories and poorly-researched facts and poorly-thought-out ship designs started piling up. We've got fully half of a three-hundred-year span that remains largely unexplored. That's plenty of elbow room, in my opinion. No need to do a clean-slate approach, such as what the internally--and-externally-contradictory Star Wars Expanded Universe required. (Not gonna get into ship design stuff here, as that's a whole 'nother essay.
)
--Jonah
