It often falls to the books and other media surrounding the Star Trek shows to expand
upon, explain or even retroactively add continuity, retcon events. This has been status Q for
some time now and has led to a myriad of stories classified as “Beta” content. This content
adds a lot of stability, depth and rationale to the universe and narratives of Star Trek
but exists in a sort of maybe, maybe not state, like Star Wards legends material after the
Disney Order 66. Hi, Ric here and today I’m looking into
the beginning of the Kelvin timeline and why it may look so different from the Prime Timeline.
Other than licensee agreements. The Kelvin Divergence is the origin of an
entire universe that span off from the so called Prime timeline of Star Trek continuity.
Centred around the destruction of the USS Kelvin NCC-0514 in 2233, the event was nonetheless
instigated by events of the Prime timeline in the year 2387. The event itself is explained
in the 2009 film Star Trek but leaves a lot to be desired. In short, a supernova in the
Hobus system destroyed Romulus and Remus, the home of the Romulan Star Empire, a vengeful
Eric Banner called Nero attempted to enact said vengy-ness on Spock who had failed to
save his home. In the ensuing firefight, Spock and Nero’s ships fall back in time to 2233.
Well Spock actually arrives a little later, but irrelevant. Nero comes across a Federation
ship, the USS Kelvin and destroys it, setting events down a radically different path and
creating an alternate timeline. Here is where it falls to the aforementioned
beta content to fill in the pieces and explains things like why a supernova wiped out a system
light years away, sure radiation may travel that far, but that’s not radiation. That’s
a big wall of fiery explode. That topic has been covered fairly well in the past by different
lore hounds. I myself go into great detail about the actual event as explained in Star
Trek Online, but if you want a quick summary, you could check out this video from Ketwolski,
s’bout a year old now but tell him I says hi.
No, the topic for today’s video is why the universe ended up looking so different from
the Prime one we saw in TOS, TNG the other films and so on, and I don’t just mean 43
years of differing film techniques. So according to the Star Trek graphic novel Countdown,
the Hobus supernova was detected by numerous powers of the alpha and beta quadrants, Starfleet,
Vulcan and Romulus among them. And with the new Picard Series alluding to Picard being
affected deeply by the destruction of Romulus, looks like the writers may be drawing inspiration
from the novel. Anyway, Ambassador Spock was the only one
who theorised that the supernova would result in the destruction of major star systems and
no one else believed him on the principle that “that’s not how supernovas work.”
Frankly an understandable approach. In response to this, he teamed up with Nero, a Romulan
who had bourn first hand witness to the unstable Hobus system. His ship was the Narada, a simple
mining vessel that looked quite different from the one that we see on screens in Star
Trek. Ultimately, Spock fails to convince the Vulcans
to lend him the Red Matter research, Nero blames spock for wasting time and the worst
happens. Hobus explodes, Nero makes it back in time to watch Romulus get engulfed in fire
and manages to rescue only the Romulan Senate who escaped ahead of any major populous from
the planet. Through them, Nero learns of the rally point
set up for emergencies such as this. A cloaked space station, deep in Romulan space called
the Vault. This massive construct is comparable in size to a fleet yard, or a small moon and
has been the origin for much of the Romulan research and development for many years. Thalaron
research and Borg tech being the big two, though they also express interest in advanced
cloaking and other useful inventions. The station is under the command of Commander
D’Spal who sympathises with Nero’s anti-authoritarian notions and in the absence of the Senate,
(Nero flushed them into space) she allows him to dock the Narada in the Vaults expansive
interior as she is finally able to conduct whatever radical experiment she likes with
no governmental oversight. She introduces repurposed Borg technology
into the Narada, grafting large weapon spokes into the humble ship. What’s more, this
technology is adaptable as it is rife with nano-machines so it serves to literally grow
and shape the vessel as desired. In Nero’s case, he wanted a warship. S’Spal calls
it the point of the sword and allows Nero to leave to test its new capabilities. This
is also the storyline than Star Trek Online incorporates into its narrative and Starfleet
itself has always expressed an interest in understanding Borg tech because of its numerous
formidable applications. So I don’t find the notion that Romulus was experimenting
with it too all that strange. If anything, I doubt they’d just ignore such a tactical
advantage. Looking at the Narada now, it never states
in the films that Borg technology was present, but just look at it. It ticks all the right
boxes. Internally it is cavernous and wrought from black metals with deep green glows from
inside the vessel. The maw like design is sharp and looks like exposed machinery yet
despite its appearance, it is far more advanced than most other Starships.
It spent some time in the Prime timeline on an escapade of destruction before being sucked
into a singularity created by Red Matter and Spock. Everyone in the Prime timeline who
bore witness to this concluded that Spock had died collapsing the supernova along with
Nero and marked the incident as the final heroic act of a Starfleet legend.
So now we reach the divergence of timelines as Nero is plopped back out into the year
2233. The USS Kelvin, en route back to Earth is diverted to investigate the strange emissions
the emergence is causing and we get our big alteration to history. The Kelvin was destroyed
in the fight and the Narada skulked away to await the emergence of Ambassador Spock some
25 years later. During those years though, the ship engaged other powers such as the
Klingon Empire but mostly Nero just bided his time however, though enough detailed scans
were taken from the Kelvin’s encounter with the Narada and later encounters that made
their way back to Starfleet, so a lot of the technology the Narada had was able to be studied
in great detail. The encounter with the Narada would resonate
with those in Starfleet Command who believed a more militaristic approach was needed when
patrolling the stars and they were able to leverage the idea that there were powers out
there that dwarfed the Federation into making some subtle changes to Starfleet. To be honest,
this is understandable. Look what happened in the year 2365 when Picard and the Enterprise
D encountered the Borg for the first time. After their reveal, Starfleet immediately
commissioned research and specialty branches to develop counter Borg initiatives leading
to characters such as Commander Shelby and two years later after Wolf 359, Starfleet
literally began churning out warships like the Defiant class, the Sabre class and revaluating
its policies about maintaining a civilian presence on Starships. It short, it became
far more militant in response to a bigger threat after that threat demonstrated a significant
power gap. The same thing happened in the now increasingly
alternate Kelvin timeline. Starfleet ships became larger in scale as they were crammed
with more technology. You could argue the Enterprise NCC-1701 ended up so big when compared
to its prime timeline counterpart because although the technology they created based
on the Narada’s scans was superior, they couldn’t downscale it enough to fit in the
original constitution frame. Just look at real life, the miniaturisation of technology
takes time. In fact, the Enterprise of the prime universe
was launched in 2245 but the incursion caused by Nero sent the team that were designing
the constitution class back to the drawing board and choose to develop a larger alternative
concept to be the Federations new pride and joy. They basically took one look at the data
recovered from the Kelvin, looked at their blueprints for the connie. Paused and went,
we’re gonna need a bigger boat. These extensive redesigns included much of what had been learned
from the Narada’s alien technology and meant that the constitution line ended up being
delayed for 13 years, being launched in 2258 instead. Replete with a crew who have now
lived radically different lives based off of a different Starfleet, a different Federation.
We see new designs for Warp cores, uniforms, almost everything began to take on a different
tone from the Prime universe that it could have been. And the repercussions only escalated
with time. Section 31 for example. A secretive, clandestine organisation within the Federation
in the Prime timeline, received far more funding and received Starfleet recognition in the
Kelvin universe, although it was still secretive. After all, it operated on the premise that
in extreme situations or in the face of extreme threats, the policies of the Federation became
more flexible. By the time Vulcan was destroyed in the Kelvin universe, section 31 had all
the motivation it needed to greenlight internal projects such as the USS Vengeance, the most
un-Starfleet Starfleet ship ever made. All this began with the introduction of technology
from the future into a time it didn’t belong, in the form of the Romulan, Borgified mining
ship, the Narada. So that’s the impact that one event could
have. As for the difference in designs in pre Narada? Well there’s numerous theories.
I just chalk it up to creative choice, at least the uniforms and the like made allusions
to the original material. But there are theories that say that when time was altered, it was
less like a split and more like a bending of the timeline, so events before and after
the incursion were changed, but that has way to many implications that make my head hurt.
And by the time of Star Trek Beyond, the Federation was beginning to try to reassert itself as
an exploration focused force, about betterment, not just defence and had finally instituted
the 5 year missions that the original series was known for, so it’s not like the lessons
learned over the last 170 shared years of Prime Timeline history were lost, just the
aesthetic. The Kelvin universe just learnt its lesson about the bigger threat a lot sooner
than the federation of the main continuity. Just look how visually different the Prime
universe looked after its encounter with the dominion.
Anyway, thanks for watching. This is a video I wanted to make for a while now but I was
spurred on by the recent news from the Picard series, about which I speculate here, shameless
plug, my progress through Star Trek Online, also plug and the fact that I finally obtained
a copy of Countdown for myself to read. But that’s all for now. Like I said in the
intro, a lot of this is beta content, but it’s usually the job of beta content to
tidy up after the main event. And only an idiot doesn’t give the cleaning staff their
due, so I’d like to think its relevant. Thanks for watching, I’ve been Ric and until
next time, goodbye!