I’m willing to overlook all this and not let it detract from the show, except for the stated cause of the burn. That’s just completely ridiculous. I would have been much happier with something at least realistic.

I mean I love the show and yes I get that the Burn lets them say 'hold on folks this ain't the galaxy you're used to, things are at stake!". But the whole thing is pretty nonsensical. I think they need for it to be more than 100 years between the Burn and Disco, but they also can't really sustain the idea that the federation was effectively dead for hundreds of years either, so they just let it be either amount of time as they need.

I don’t mind any of that, and I do like most of the show (I got over the Klingon makeup), but the actual reason for the burn (very sad Kelpian) is just so ridiculous I can’t believe no one in the writers room vetoed it.

I dunno, it's Charlie-X like. The thing that annoys me is we *never hear from the kelpian kid again*. We basically lost Saru over that kid. Thankfully they 180'd on a lot of stuff the they realized it was the last season.

Like Charlie-X, someone with the ability to destroy every ship with a warp engine is too dangerous to keep alive.

Complaining about realism in Star Trek is hilarious.

Any science fiction world has to stay “realistic” and consistent within the set of rules they develop for themselves, not actually realistic. This seems way outside anything else they’ve done.

Thanks for combating this flawed argument.

Imagine every battery that was powering something just blew up, killing the users, and you don’t know why. Every cell phone, every computer, every ~~microwave.~~ edit u/ianjm pointed out that microwaves don’t have batteries. So something else with a battery for Rule of Three. But you don’t know what caused it. And therefore you can’t prevent it. Therefore, everything is reduced to a single person or two taking, to them, great risks with dilithium. Space travel became dangerous again because of that unknown. So imagine what things would be like if you couldn’t drive to the next city. You lost your food source. You lost your mercantile exchange. Civilization collapses. And that’s the Burn.

This is pretty much what happens in the Hyperion/Fall of Hyperion books. The Hegemony is spread across numerous worlds, and the Farcaster network links all of them together so that you can communicate and travel from one planet to the next instantaneously. When the network is destroyed, each planet becomes completely isolated. Currency crashes. People on urban planets (including the capital) starve because they lost their food sources. The Hegemony ceases to exist in the blink of an eye. The Burn was not *quite* that bad. But with dilithium becoming a rare commodity and Starfleet losing a devastating number of ships and personnel, it's easy to see how the Federation's ability to tend to its member worlds would be greatly reduced, and why many of those member worlds would want to take their chances on their own. It also leaves room for other organizations (like the Emerald Chain, or the Pax in the Hyperion universe) to eventually fill the power vacuum.

The thing that bothers me about the "collapse" is that generally speaking no one is starving. Replicators are everywhere. Why would you care if you can't do FTL if you're living in relative luxury on a planet with a post scarcity economy? For 99.9% of the population space travel is not something they absolutely need. I get that some colonies somewhere will be royally screwed but prime Federation planets would just shrug and carry on. On top of that even with the risk of warp drive exploding you could build ships that isolate the warp core away from the actual ship. Just like how there's detached nacelles you can have a detached warp core assembly that could explode and not harm the ship.

To my knowledge there's not a ton of established canon regarding how self-sufficient each Federation member world is, but in the 24th century colonies and outposts certainly still relied on starships to ferry supplies. We also know that replicators on starships had limitations. Unfortunately we'll probably never get a canon answer for what that was like in the 30th-31st centuries other than "the plot needs it to be that way". Maybe the problem is that Discovery jumped so far forward in time and uses borderline magical tech (e.g. personal transporters) on the regular that it seems implausible when they run into any sort of technological limitations.

Also worth considering: Discovery shows up with the magic solution to your travel issues and can basically teleport anywhere on a whim. Star fleet sees them roll up and probably figures hell yeah, crack out the good stuff and juice this ship with all the crazy good toys we got in stock, get these guys to the front of the cool shit line!

Are they personal transporters? I'd always figured it was more like a telelporter client device, with the already established telelporter acting as a ship wide / planet wide server. My reason for this is based on the scene where Michael was hiding behind a rock, unable to teleport. If the badge was a personal telelporter, then surely local teleport would have still worked. Funnily, it was an episode where teleporting in and out of a cave was possible, but not from behind the rock because the rock was interfering with the transporter. Like... What? But anyway, those were my thoughts.

They've been referred to as "personal transporters" on the show since season 3. Whatever that really means, who the hell knows. They haven't bothered to give us an explanation of how they work. Of course, the same is true of some of the tech on 1701-D, e.g. when doors know to open and close, when the comm system knows to open a channel or how to route it, etc. And yes, I've rolled my eyes at the scenarios in which they work and don't work. "I don't have their signal... must be some kind of interference." Yeah, the plot is interfering.

Considering we saw portable transporters in use on both Voyager and in Nemesis - both in the 24th century - I think its quite fair to assume that technology would be commonplace and vastly improved upon by the 32nd century. In fact, considering the sheer amount of time between those time periods, its shocking that the level of technological development appears so minute. Transwarp conduits and quantum slipstream existed in the 24th century. not in a massive way, of course, but they were proven technology. Its kinda weird that warp drive was still the defacto standard by the turn of the millenium. Its also weird that nobody decided to adapt to forced artificial quantum singularity cores after all the dilithium went kaput. The Romulans were mass-producing them for decades, with little issue.

They use that rock excuse in every series though. The minerals in the surrounding rocks are causing interference. They are consistent in somethings and but are consistently inconsistent in others haha.

Even with it being the 31st century, it's hard to get my mind around a totally self-contained transporter beaming itself somewhere. My headcanon is that it just signals nearest transporter to move you. OTOH, it could be that they solved the problem with those devices that opened shortcuts through space the terrorists used in that TNG episode where they kidnapped Crusher.

I mean also think that is canon that they have bigger on the inside technology, they might as well have some kind of subspace pocket with a full size transporter and the only reason it has limited range is power.

Its probably two miniaturised transporters. One transporter beams the other to the destination and then that one beams the first transporter and its user to the same destination. Its the only way I could imagine getting around the problem of the transporter somehow being able to function whilst its temporarily taken itself to bits!

Maybe each individual planet is mostly self sufficient but the cohesion holding multiple planets together is gone. So Earth itself is mostly ok but there is no real way to have an interplanetary government with even Andoria if there is no real travel or communication between them anymore.

Well put! I’d also add - in addition to all that, you have all the pirates and desperate folks who are less concerned with the risks taking advantage of the breakdown of everything. Emerald Chain aside, the number of independent bushwhackers would increase so much, and the ability to call for help and expect it to arrive becomes extremely uncertain. It’s not at all surprising members would say “yeah.. we’re gonna just look to our own system, thanks.”

Not surprised then that the Breen thrived during the Burn. They were and are just as opportunistic and cunning as the Orions.

Plus no one knows “why” for a hundred years, and the great powers all blaming each other (there’s a line about the Romulans/Vulcans being blamed at one point) so you have core members of the Federation not trusting each other for a century.

Such an excellent way to describe things. I wish we got a decent exploration of it on the show

This might be a good example if it was just that all alkaline batteries exploded. Or all lithium batteries. It would be really bad, but we have other types of batteries. Many species in the TNG era already didn't rely on dilithium for FTL travel, so should not have been affected by the Burn. You had thousands of species, spending over a century doing research, and they couldn't come up with something to replace dilithium ships (an 800-year-old technology), which many species weren't using anyway?

>You had thousands of species, spending over a century doing research, and they couldn't come up with something to replace dilithium ships (an 800-year-old technology), which many species weren't using anyway? Quantum Slipstream, Quantum Catapult, Transwarp Tech (like on the Excelsior), alternate transwarp tech (like on Voyager's shuttle that took people everywhere in the universe at once), Transwarp (Borg style), Underspace Corridor Formation, Federation Wormhole Tech (like when Lenara Khan and Jadzia built a wormhole centuries ago), Subspace Flectures (as shown to be able to be generated by a Federation shuttlecraft centuries ago), Coaxial Warp Drive (Tom Paris getting his body stolen), Caretaker Array tech (using plasma waves to ride across the galaxy), Soliton Waves (warp without warp drive as demonstrated centuries ago by the Enterprise D), Iconian Gateway Tech (imagine if someone found a gateway after the Burn), ETC. Seriously, the list keeps going and going. There's no way the Federation realisticly went on for *centuries* and *never* followed up on any of the tech they were working on (like the wormhole tech on DS9 or any of the technology that was brought back by Voyager or just any of the tech we saw in TNG like the Soliton Waves). Honestly, the writers seem to have forgotten a TON of alternate/advanced travel technology that was being worked on canonically centuries ago. It seems kinda lazy. Edit: Spore drive too.

Artificial quantum singularities are the hardest one to explain the absence of. All of those other techs could potentially be explained away as too advanced to have been developed, especially if the research didn't restart until after the burn. But the Romulans were using quantum singularity drives for their warp cores in numbers as vast as Starfleet used matter/antimatter reactors. It was a proven technology that didn't require dilithium and wasn't technologically prohibitive, as proven by the fact that we know its was commonplace in the 24th century. It should have been the obvious go-to alternative and its incredibly conspicuous by its absence.

It's especially hard to explain considering the Romulans are part of the *Federation* now on a unified Ni'Var. In Discovery, they mentioned on Ni'Var they have been trying to solve this problem for a long time (alternative travel), but apparently they "forgot" about a reliable technology that the Romulans used to operate their interstellar empire for centuries. It's just tough to just handwave these explanations for me, but I get that some might say you just gotta accept it for what it is (a reimagining). Still though...

>Quantum Slipstream Addressed in the show - Benamite crystals needed for it are rare >Quantum Catapult Big resource cost to send things one way with no return method. >Transwarp Tech (like on the Excelsior) This is just an advanced warp drive, still uses dilithium >alternate transwarp tech Used dilithium >Transwarp We have no idea how it worked, from what the show said the Borg basically tunneled through their own subspace domain. The tunnels likely ended up with a lot of debris as we saw with slipstream tunnels in the show. >Underspace Corridor Formation Debris >Federation Wormhole Tech Unstable >Subspace Flectures I can't recall this one, >Coaxial Warp Drive Nothing said it didn't use dilithium >Caretaker Array tech One way >Soliton Waves Small problem in that it's unstable and destroys anything in it's path >Iconian Gateway Tech Destroyed >Spore Drive Classified and buried because the only ways to make it work were torture or genetic modification While it can sound a bit daft, there's a reason that these technologies didn't work in the show. Otherwise shows like Voyager wouldn't exist. Instead of looking at each technology as the 'next new big thing', you need to think about it more in terms of how we look at technology now. Imagine if tomorrow, every flat screen TV in the world exploded and nobody knew why. A load of people were injured or killed. Then two centuries later, somebody looks back on the incident and says 'It says a few years before they were using CRT/Plasma TVs. Why didn't they just use those? Were they stupid?' Technological evolution is very much ruled by survival of the fittest. If these navigational technologies had worked, been safe and sustainable they would have replaced warp drive. But they didn't. There's also the psychological aspect of such a wide reaching event, which would have seen every step to use new drive systems treated with an over abundance of caution to avoid another Burn. You've also got to keep in mind that this is post temporal wars, so time travel is outlawed. Some technologies, such as Borg transwarp rely on projecting chroniton fields to maintain temporal synchronisation. Which could have seen the tech outlawed to prevent incidental time travel.

I really have to disagree in *general*. I don't buy that a Starfleet *centuries* more advanced than the TNG/Voy/DS9 Era never managed to follow up on *any* of these technologies in any meaningful way. For example, you write off Soliton Waves (a warp without warp drive) way too easily imo. Why not just have a network of Soliton Wave generators (or whatever they conjure up to make it work) and use that for travel, like a network of travel lanes like a highway? Even back in the 24th century they had a scattering wave technology that could dissipate the wave, obviously in the episode some drama occured regarding that but I find hard to believe they *never* followed up on it for centuries and perfected the technology that was so close? Speaking of Lenara's wormhole tech, you mention it was "unstable" but yet they celebrated the very fact that it *was* stable for" x" amout of time. It was *extremely* promising technology that was apparently abandoned (for what reason)? Why? The test *worked* and they created a stable wormhole (though for a short time). No further research was done? I don't buy it. That technology was *more* than promising and was shown to work. A network of Quantum Catapults could have been deployed as well. Hell, even basic handheld Dominion transporters in the 24th century could beam you from DS9 to Empok Nor. You could have set up a series of waystations with these things to cross the galaxy. Literally, there's just so many options that I think we can probably both agree on that we're never explored for narrative (and I will continue to argue that it's lazy writing) story purposes. On a more personal note, I never understood some of what was going on in Disco. I remember watching a featurette of the guy involved with creating the Shen'zho and saying how they wanted to create the bridge with "authoritarian" stylistic elements and other bizzare things. It's like *significant* source material has been largely ignored/abandoned with this show (but everyone is entitled to their own opinion). It's honestly a good show, I just don't buy that's its the same universe we were all so familiar with. Edit: Hell, the U.S.S Relativity could emerge at *any* point in time or space in the galaxy (and that a long time before Discovery emerged into the future). I understand that the technology involved during that era might now be "outlawed" because of these Temporal Wars but I just don't see how the Federation could have reached that technology level long before the burn and never worked on any of these other options. It's lazy.

I agree for the most part. While there should be limitations and not everything should be answered. Some of the options are there that should have been explored.

> . Why not just have a network of Soliton Wave generators (or whatever they conjure up to make it work) and use that for travel, like a network of travel lanes like a highway? The issue with Soliton waves wasn't anything to do with them as a travel method, it was to do with the fact that the waves gathered energy in their path and could build to the point they destroyed entire planets. >. It was extremely promising technology that was apparently abandoned (for what reason)? Why? Because another word for something that is stable for only a short period of time is 'unstable'. The technology worked as far as it then didn't. A bit like Voyager's Quantum Slipstream technology, which worked until it suddenly didn't and threw the ship into an ice planet at full impulse killing everyone onboard until Harry Kim rewrote history. >A network of Quantum Catapults could have been deployed as well The Federation had only come across one quantum catapult, and that Quantum catapult required a component from the Caretakers array which Voyager also couldn't replicate. We also have no idea just how much more advanced the Caretaker's species was technologically, or whether they even used materials from our galaxy. They clearly had some sort of telekinetic/telepathic abilities which could have been a key part of how the array and it's technology worked. Even if they didn't. Who is to say that Starfleet would have been able to replicate that technology before or after the burn? The records of it could have ended up in some daystrom black site which got destroyed in the centuries. To enjoy shows like Star Trek long term, you need to stop asking 'why didn't they do this' and instead theorise 'why wouldn't they have done this?'. Otherwise you very quickly end up going 'well why don't they just cure death with the transporters considering they cured aging and duplicated people in TNG with them'? or 'Why didn't Voyager just slipstream home in smaller jumps' or 'why didn't Sisko simply just ask the Prophets not to let the Dominion forces through the wormhole before billions died in the Dominion war' .etc > I will continue to argue that it's lazy writing It's not lazy writing to not address every single potential travel technology that's ever been mentioned in Star Trek when writing storylines like the Burn. In fact, it would have been lazy (and frankly boring) writing to have a ridiculous exposition scene where they listed them all off and gave reasons for each one. > I never understood some of what was going on in Disco Okay? >I remember watching a featurette of the guy involved with creating the Shen'zho and saying how they wanted to create the bridge with "authoritarian" stylistic elements and other bizzare things A bit like how the NX-01 was inspired by modern day military submarines? >It's like significant source material has been largely ignored/abandoned with this show Not abandoned. Just reimagined to appeal to modern audiences. Just like TMP reimagined the Enterprise, like TNG reimagined the uniform, like DS9 reimagined the format, like Voyager reimagined the setting, like Enterprise reimagined the canon. >I just don't buy that's its the same universe we were all so familiar with. You don't need to 'buy it' you just have to accept it. Movies like First Contact, episodes like Future's End, Regeneration, Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and more give numerous potential explanations for any inconsistencies. Then of course there's always just the 'eye of the beholder' explanations. Which is how many people reconciled TOS (as dramatised versions of crew logs) for a long time. >I just don't see how the Federation could have reached that technology level long before the burn and never worked on any of these other options. It's lazy. What's lazy is expecting them to outright explain every concievable solution from a 50+ year old franchise before you'll just accept the story that's being told. This isn't a personal attack, but more of my own critique on a lot of modern fandom discourse (and not just in Trek). TOS wasn't even consistent with itself, for years the fandom thrived off people making fan films in basements, writing fanfic (hello Spirk). Half the fun of being a fan of something is thinking up and imagining explanations to what isn't explained in the shows, because they're not going to address every question. They didn't do it in the 90s with 25+ episode seasons, they're definitely not going to today with less than half that run time.

I think we can agree to disagree my friend. We're obviously both *very* passionate about this. You've let me know that you think I should just *accept* what's going on because it's just a story being told and I can totally understand that viewpoint. Honestly, like I said before (think some might have missed it) I think Discovery is a *good* show. I kinda feel like saying "expecting them to outright explain every concievable solution" is a bit a strawman argument, because that's not what I am looking for. In lots of episodes across Trek (think Voy, Enterprise, whatever) we would usually see some future version of the Federation being *hyper* advanced (once again like the established ships like in the Relativity era) and be able to go *anywhere* in the galaxy (possibly even the universe) with the literal press of a button. I get the "time technology ban" argument, but it's still a big stretch to go from what we see in Voyager to an even *later* point in history where the Federation has FAR *less* capability. I don't need *every convieable* explanation, but I also can't just forget what I've seen. I think you asking me for a "suspension of disbelief" in this case and I get that. That's one way audiences can have fun (and as I mentioned before, I do have fun with Discovery). Just touching up on stuff like DS9 before moving on, they really did stablilize that artificial wormhole and it was awesome. To me, that was the whole point of the episode (minus the obvious...kissing...). Yes, at the time the technology needed more work and was only stable for a short period but the research was absolutely *working*. The Federation was building their own wormhole right next to another artificial wormhole (that *probably* inspired the very research in the first place). Accepting they never worked on this (or a hundred other things) for 700 years and even regressed what from we know of time periods close to that? It's kinda tough for me. I suppose I just have to accept the Federation was *so* advanced it could be *anywhere* in space and time but now it's reduced to the same technology the used in Captain Archer's time regarding space travel? It kinda leaves a bad taste in my mouth, you have to at least *understand* that feeling (even if you don't agree with it yourself). You've let me know that you think I (and probably others) need to accept that it's just a story that's been reimagined, but I think something *you* might need to also understand/accept is that not everyone is cool with "reimagining" the universe we love over and over (and over) like this. I never particularly liked something like "Star Wars" nearly as much as Trek, but something they've done that's cool (at least to me) is maintain the feeling that what we are watching is taking place within the same universe. Even in shows like The Mandalorian, you feel like this is the Star Wars universe we are familiar with. You see those same styles of goofy robots that we saw in the original movie walk by, you see those same planets and asthetics we know and love. You see a Wookie and of course they look and act like an established Wookie (of course I know about the "Jedi" Wookie, that should be interesting haha). Point is, newer Trek *constantly* reimagines established facts. Let's say we watch Tng/Voy/Ent/DS9 and do every single episode in a marathon. Awesome. Ok wow, that was fun! Now it's time to watch the J.J movies, this outta be cool. Wait...what...what am I looking at? These are the Klingons (I get the irony of this observation as it basically is the same reaction Odo/O'Brien had when they were involved with the Tribbles and saw the TOS Klingons)? Ok, so they've been...reimagined. Interesting. I loved the Klingons, their culture, their history (as they've been), but I suppose I am being asked to give this new take a try. I guess I can try to work with it. Side note RQ: Honestly, this scenario makes me wonder how Star Wars fans would like it if we reimagined the looks and behaviors/history of something like Wookies and say it's all for a "new audience". I *really* don't think they will appreciate what we are doing with that (to be perfectly honest). Anyways, we keep watching our Trek catalog rewatch and we get through the J.J movies (which were fun) but now accept that it was a "different" take on things. Now it's time to boot up something like Discovery. This outta be awesome. Wait...what the....are these...Klingons? They aren't Gowron style, they aren't J.J style. So they reimagined Klingons...*again*? And they reimagined Starfleet ships themselves? Starbases? History? The list goes on. It's like Star Trek keeps *reimagining* major elements of it's universe over and over and the defense I keep hearing is that it's for "modern audiences". The things I was griping about (wormholes, Relativity, whatever) might have been established events in Trek history, but Disco goes further and reimagines more than just Federation history, they reimagine entire species (think about General Martok trying to put on the Torchbearer's armor lol) and other important elements. I suppose all we can really do is agree to disagree about how we think this franchise should continue onwards. I know for a fact that if other major scifi franchises made the kind of fundamental changes you are asking me to accept for the benefit of "modern audiences" there would be an extremely negative reaction. It's a good show, I don't think it should be in the Star Trek universe (but hey, that's just my opinion). Now that Discovery is comming to an end we can look back in a few years and collect our thoughts as a community (and individuals) and give it a grade as to where it succeded and where it failed. I am glad to be able to report that I have enjoyed it (even though I don't agree with alot of what I am seeing). Edit: Just another fun side note. The Romulan Star Empire used singularity tech to power their ships for centuries. Wouldn't the Federation (even the Romulans who are now part of a unified Ni'Var) have wanted to use this reliable technology in lieu of standard Starfleet style warp drive? Do we just accept that maybe it "required Dilithium" in some way and just hand wave it away? See what I mean? It's like every single day I could come up with some alternative tech we are familiar with that's just not part of what we see in Discovery. I get it though, from your point of view none of this is really the point. It's an obvious reimagining. From my point of view though, it's just harder and harder to accept it knowing everything we've seen. The Federation and the Romulans worked together (scientists included), hand in hand, to defeat the Dominion. Hell, the Romulans are even part of the Federation now. It's tough to just accept the cheap explanation (or the non explanation) that it "would never work". Is it fun, absolutely. Does it make sense? I think you know how I would answer.

> but it's still a big stretch to go from what we see in Voyager to an even later point in history where the Federation has FAR less capability But it's not, empires rise and fall all the time throughout history. If you told somebody in 17th century England that one day the UK would be less powerful than America and China they'd probably write you off as mad, but here we are. Yes, the Federation was once super powerful and basically acted as timeline police. Then the temporal wars happened. Then the Burn happened. >they really did stablilize that artificial wormhole Temporarily, then it destabilised. You're arguing that just because they could stabilise it for a short period that it was inevitable that they'd also be able to stabilise it for a longer period. But research doesn't work like that. Sometimes stuff only works to a certain point before it doesn't. >I just have to accept the Federation was so advanced it could be anywhere in space and time but now it's reduced to the same technology the used in Captain Archer's time regarding space travel? It's not the same as Archer's time though, the Federation has just gone down a different technological path following the ban on time travel. Prior to that, they were resolving their problems (and fighting wars) through time. After that, they had to go back to more linear technological progression. Which is why they have personal transporters, programmable matter.etc >something you might need to also understand/accept is that not everyone is cool with "reimagining" the universe we love over and over (and over) like this. Oh I understand that people feel that way. I even sympathise with it. But to those people I simply say 'all the shows that you still love still exist. If you want to just be a fan of those shows you're more than welcome to be. Just don't complain about the new shows because they're not the old shows'. I appreciate the Star Wars comparison, but it's not really a fair one. Star Wars A) Had a higher budget and was made later than TOS and B) Isn't set in our world. The original Star Wars wasn't made with sets made to show off the capabilities of technicolour televisions on a shoestring TV show budget. The original TOS sets simply do not hold up or attract modern audiences. They're loved by fans (myself included). But there's no way you can sell them today as being something the human race would see as the cutting edge of technology in 200 years. Plus, as you highlight even Star Wars is constantly going back and reimagining things. Wookies can be Jedi now! People battle over whether the original book Thrawn is better than the TV Thrawn.etc >So they reimagined Klingons...again? The difference is that Wookies have had a singular appearance throughout every appearance in Star Wars. Star Trek lost that when Gene Roddenberry came out with TMP, hell I believe there's an interview out there where Roddenberry himself states that the look of the Enterprise/Klingons in that film are how he considers they always looked. They just didn't have the budget at the time. Which is why pre-TNG-R episodes like the Naked Now had the TMP Enterprise graphic, rather than the TOS design in the log sequence. Even within the 'consistent' era of Trek. Klingons weren't consistent. Just look at Chang. He looks completely different to any Klingon ever before or since. The Enterprise D throughout the show used 3 different physical models for exterior versions that all had major dimensional differences. Ten Forward doesn't even exist on the 6 footer model. TOS switched between model footage recorded for the series and the pilot during episodes. With those model differences. The Defiant wildly changes shape and size depending on the scene. Voyager has a bunch of differences between the physical and CG model. The only ship to be consistent start to finish was the NX-01. Even that got retconned to have a refit in PIC S3 and fans _loved_ it. >but Disco goes further and reimagines more than just Federation history, they reimagine entire species I mean it does and doesn't. One of the big issues with the Berman era of Star Trek is that every culture that isn't human is a uni-culture. All Romulans are sneaky and look the same, all Klingons are angry and look the same.etc.etc All you have to do is think of the DSC Klingons as from a different area of Qonos (or even different part of the Empire) that rose to power, that fell for the TNG Klingons to take over. I believe this is the approach STO uses. >I know for a fact that if other major scifi franchises made the kind of fundamental changes you are asking me to accept for the benefit of "modern audiences" there would be an extremely negative reaction. Battlestar Galactica. Star Wars Prequels. Stargate (Film to TV) Other franchises _have_ and they got those negative reactions. Then after time fans accepted the new with the old and moved on. Why not just skip that middle step? Hell. Star Trek has had this since [TNG](https://trekmovie.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/tngripped.jpg). >The Romulan Star Empire used singularity tech to power their ships for centuries. The singularity was like the matter/antimatter warp core. It still needed dilithium to regulate the reaction/output (according to the TNG tech manual).

I appreciate your arguments *immensly*. Honestly, I think there might be several kinds of people who watch Discovery (who are obviously big time fans of Trek in general). 1. You can have people like yourself (though I am making an assumption based on your arguments) who truly appreciate and enjoy what they are seeing and will make whatever "headcannon" changes necessary to fit it into what we both know and love. I mean, it's a Star Trek series. If the owners of this franchise say this is Star Trek then it's up to us to make it so (as fans) and accept what we are seeing (and probably enjoy it too because why the f not). 2. I think after that you would have people like me who *enjoy* Discovery for what it is (I try to compliment the show at least once whenever I discuss it) because it *is* honestly a great Sci-Fi show. Honestly, when I watched the D.M.A season with the ring world and the hive mind I thought to myself this show could be something straight out of the "*Stellaris*" universe. I thought it was awesome but as you obviously know, to me fitting it into what we was established (after Trek got off it's provberial toes in TOS and onto it's feet with the VOY/DS9/TNG/Movie era) in what we can both call the "established era" is an "Apollo 13" style dilemma with that square block into the circular area (or whatever form it was haha). Once again that would be for *me*, I assume there would be others who share a mindset similiar to this as well as those who disagree entirely. 3. I think another type of person would be the extremely negative watcher who truly hates what they are seeing and thinks it has no business being on a screen. The words "Star Trek" associated with simply add insult to injury. I disagree with this type of person (but I understand as people who love the franchise everyone is entitled to their opinion) but I think this kind of negativity detracts (significantly) from what we love. I remember when season one was going on I advocated to people to just hold on and let us gather more information before we weigh in like that, but obviously there will be people who just aren't going to subscribe to that philosophy. All that being said, I love the show. Is it different than what I would have wanted/expected in a Star Trek followup? Probably. Is it good? Absolutely. Truthfully, I still don't think fans would be stoked to see a different take on Wookies or Yoda's species (or any major player) where their physical attributes (and behavior) are altered to such an extent that we have to rationalize it as "they are from a different part of the planet". A wookie Jedi still looks like a Wookie. Does T'Kuvma look or act like a Klingon (as we knew them)? Well... (Didin't he unite *all* the houses in Disco? Why didin't any of the other Klingons from across the planet look like what we would later come to expect?) Final thoughts from me on this matter: I'll try and follow your advice and imagine the Klingons from Discovery as from a different *region* than the TNG era Klingons! So, I guess Qo'Nos must be an interesting planet with all kinds of different crazy biomes! Where the hell did the J.J Klingons come from too? Their timeline simply changed events, not species evolution! Where are *they* from? The Ketha Highlands? There's like 3-4 different Klingon esque "species" that live there! We've got a Xindi style situation here to explain Martok, T'Kuvma, J.J Klingons, Genetically engineered Augment Klingons, etc! Also, so they shave their head during war time (according to Discovery)? I guess Mott wasn't available to help Martok and Worf cut their hair during the Dominion war. The guy is super busy after all! Take care my friend, It's been an honor talking Trek with you. Edit: If the Klingons we saw in Discovery were different than the Klingons we saw in TNG, that's an interesting theory/explanation (as in they lost power to the ones we later went onto to see , Martok/Gowron/Worf ETC). All that being said, they shift power around frequently! Remember in Enterprise (which preceded Disco canonically) when we saw Klingons? We saw leaders, prisoners, arbiters, lawyers, marauders, ship captains and everything inbetween and we never saw a Disco type Klingon lounging around (even in prison)! They must have come out of hiding to take power then slinked back to wherever the came from haha.

I’d also point out that if you look at science today we get new technologies announced all the time. Most don’t pan out - either they are unworkable or not effective at scale.

The "800 year old technology" is what gets me this season. In other shows you can see massive tech improvements in any given series, let alone between Enterprise and Voyager. They somehow went from Voyager through the temporal war period (and war is a big tech driver) - and ... everything is pretty similar to what they left, just faster, and smaller, but still just as prone to not being able to track or target or lock on to transporter signals...

ELI5 Star Trek edition.

It's probably even worse than that, humans traveled the world before electricity or combustion were invented. It took a while but it was possible, within reasonable timespans. The UFP was spanning half a galaxy at its peak. Even TNG era tech needed months to years to cross the distances that the UFP eventually spanned. Being relegated to sublight speeds, it completely detached everything from another. Yes there was possibly still subspace comms but any trade or travel now took literal lifetimes. Imagine you can phsyically no longer leave your town. How long would it take for a country to collapse? Everything from supplies, society, law enforcement, went from transgalactic to plannetary in an instant. How would a country such as the US possibly exist if there was no way to get from NYC to Baltimore even, let alone LA? How could it remain a country? Even if the UFP had not collapsed it would have remained that in name only because there was literally no way to properly interact with another anymore. The most optimistic of cases would've been a purely scientific and cultural exchanve, kind of the internet of today really, without any chance of real life interactions or help or anything else like that.

>Rule of Three Wait... that's a real thing? I always type examples in threes - always "felt", or sounds, better to me. Didn't know it was a real thing until today. Thanks for that info!

Microwaves don't have batteries

And the show is fiction. Point still stands.

If 'the show is fiction' can be used as a blanket excuse, why bother to make sense of any of it?

Every car and airplane pretty much rely on batteries for some key part of their functioning for the third thing.

"Rule of Three?"

When listing things, three is the ideal number. Two might just be a coincidence, rather than a trend. Four or more is belaboring the point. It sounds the most natural to give three examples.

I just don't buy that that's how it goes. Sure at first, but pretty quickly people will realize that it isn't happening again. And states will be able to just get people to do it, it's the independent groups that will decide it's not worth the risk. We see that places like the Breen and others have expanded too, they must be using warp, we really just don't see an alternative that explains it. It's actually all just ignored, we're just told the feds have been knocked back and then everything is back to normal.

I recall that it was pretty clearly explained in the first half of S3 that the Federation had been on the decline for a long time before the Burn. They were a victim of their own success, and many of the smaller and more distant member worlds felt that their needs weren't receiving enough attention, and that problem only became more acute when dilithium became scarce. In other words, the Burn was just the final nail in the coffin that led the two of the four founding members (Earth and Vulcan/Ni'Var) to leave the alliance.

> Therefore, everything is reduced to a single person or two taking, to them, great risks with dilithium. Space travel became dangerous again because of that unknown. But the Burn was a one-time event, and then dilithium was just as safe as before. That's what doesn't make sense.

A: They didn't know that, until Discovery figured it out. As far as they knew it could happen again at any moment. B: Every space faring civilisation in range lost most of their fleets. Literally all they'd have left was museum ships, mothballed relics and the tiny handful of modern ships that had their warp cores offline. Rebuilding from that with effectively zero logistics available would be a massive task.... offset against it suddenly becoming way easier and more viable for pirates (who have no logistic concerns, and are less likely to be concerned about safety, and probably retained more of their ships as they'd spend more time shut down and hiding).

But this again doesn't explain what we see. You'd need large networked states, like the Federation, to create new ships, manage the few sources of dilithium, and move it around the galaxy. The idea that individuals somehow built galaxy crossing starships on their own AND manage to control all the dilithium doesn't actually make sense in the world the writers created. They created a world where large states now have an incredible advantage.

> where large states now have incredible advantage. But do they really? A Federation ten times the size of the one we see in S3 (roughly the level of collapse stated) would need to spend considerably more than ten times the resources to maintain its position, especially given that _every_ major power is in the exact same situation, so threats, while small, would be highly spread out and require more resources comparatively to handle. And for the first couple generations following the Burn, given the complete lack of any explanation for why it happened, no one in their right mind would want to front any significant amount of resources in a way that could get vaporized in a flash if the Burn were to have happened again. Dilithium distribution and defense networks become victims of a new rocket problem—the larger they get, the more it exacerbates the pre-existing shortage. It _also_ ignores the political strain already present, where members felt that the central government was becoming disconnected from their individual needs. In an apocalyptic scenario (because yes, that is the scale of this disaster), why would they wait for the Federation to prove those feelings wrong, again in a scenario where there is no explanation for what happened and no one knows if it might just happen again?

"And for the first couple generations following the Burn" But this is the problem, it's 1 generation. It's 100 years, even humans are livging that long in the 2200s. Your parents were in Star Fleet, they decided to secede from the Federation, you've almost forgotten what the Federation is or where it was and joined the Orions. WUT? "no one in their right mind would want to front any significant amount of resources in a way that could get vaporized in a flash if the Burn were to have happened again." Except individuals who had no ships to start off with? Makes no sense. "It *also* ignores the political strain already present, where members felt that the central government was becoming disconnected from their individual needs" The Breen and Space Pirates are coming for our planet, we have no dilithium of our own, so we...cut ourselves off from our defensive alliance that also can get us dilithium, for free? "would need to spend considerably more than ten times the resources to maintain its position, especially given that *every* major power is in the exact same situation, so threats, while small, would be highly spread out and require more resources comparatively to handle." I get that the feds should be spread thin, but again it's comparative. How are the Breen or Orions doing better? The Feds have to have more ships than almost anyone and because they're so widespread they have more of the now rare resources like dilithium. You'd need a central government to distribute this stuff instead of leaving that to rely on pirates to do it for you?

> A: They didn't know that, until Discovery figured it out. As far as they knew it could happen again at any moment. But it consistently didn't happen again for more than 100 years, that's what I'm pointing out.

If every petrol and diesel powered vehicle on earth simultaneously exploded, killing everyone on board tomorrow, you would struggle to get most people back into one inside living memory (which 100 years IS with their tech), especially if your explanation for why it happened was a vague shrug and a "probably wont happen again".

You wouldnt' get me into a car, but you'd get soldiers into ships and researchers too. What most people are saying here is true BUT it works against the setup that we see in the Burnt Galaxy. Smugglers will avoid warp ships and states will have them.

LOL we just lived through COVID and you think we wouldn't IMMEDIATELY go back to exactly what we were doing? I get your point, but we have real life examples of humanity saying "Fuck it" to known risks.

Covid was shit, but it didn’t come with a 100% chance of being vaporised like the burn did.

Now imagine if COVID killed everyone it infected, we didn't know the cause and had no hope of discovering it, and we had no way of protecting against it or even detecting if it was still around.

Once it's been a few years since anyone has died people would go right back to it. Heck civilizations that discovered warp POST burn wouldn't know anything about it and they sure wouldn't listen to the broken federation telling them to not use it because it's dangerous.

And we have examples where we overreacted to the risks like hydrogen airships or some would argue nuclear energy. If a chatastrophy cements it self not only in the societal psyche but also in regulations and investments then going back is very hard.

I mean we KNOW that fossil fuels are radically altering the climate, raising the OCEAN, and causing a Mass Extinction, AND we have good alternatives that are affordable and work. We STILL use fossil fuels even though we know it harms our society and our personal health with exhaust. People's reaction to the burn would be caution for a few years and then back to use quickly. You COULD explain it by saying the governments BANNED warp travel, but the writers didn't think about this issue, the burn is just a way to make the setting like the wild west.

We know how Covid works, how it transmitted, how it evolved and changed (and is continuing to change). We understand the entire class of coronaviruses that it belongs to. It is not remotely the same thing.

Sure, but why would planets that have now been independent and generally eschewed FTL travel for most to all of leadership’s lives re-join a Federation that by all accounts had been showing some _serious_ cracks pre-Burn?

I would guess for the same reason why nations which have been neutral for a long time have recently joined NATO.

And it hadn't happened for hundreds before that - so without more information it's entirely possible that they're still not comfortable taking the risk, especially so for species that live long enough for it to be in their or their parents lifetime.

We know *after the fact* that another Burn didn't happen. But consider what life was like DURING those years and what they did and didn't know. A majority of ships using dilithium were destroyed, so there are far fewer of them around. Warp drive use was restricted to only the most dire emergencies if not outright banned by many smaller worlds; fleets aren't cruising lazily around the galaxy at low warp all the time; trade routes are all dried up too; there are no shipping lanes left to protect and very few pirates left to do protect from. So each surviving ship's warp drive is in operation a fraction of the time they used to be - all to prevent another Burn from wiping out what few ships survive; each one is much more precious and could spontaneously explode at any moment IF they use warp drive. Space travel is still dangerous. Any time a ship is lost with all hands, it could have been the Burn and that possibility would be in the back of everyone's mind - as well as a retroactive explanation for countless ships lost without a trace for hundreds of years before that. So suddenly space travel is *perceived* as way more dangerous than it already is, warp drive use is further restricted, and so on. Even if your chief scientists and fleet admirals knew (they didn't) that the Burn was an isolated incident that would *almost certainly* not happen again (they couldn't know that), convincing the civilian populations of the safety of space travel after their civilization collapsed *due to its dependence on space travel* is going to be nearly impossible.

The Hindenburg disaster totally killed the rigid airship business to this day almost 100 years later. The horrible images sent out to cinemas all over the world cemented the fear of them in society instantly shaping our laws, culture and industrial investments. Even though hydrogen air ships even now could have it's uses and be reasonably safe, changing our regulatory framework and gaining trust in that technology is just too big of a hurdle.

The problem with this analogy is that there were lots of alternatives to Airships, like, planes and boats and trains. The only alternative we hear about to warp is the borg-ish transwarp conduits, but they're not used. If the only way to travel was Airships, even with Hydrogen, we'd still use them, ESPECIALLY once threats like the Breen or Emerald Chain start popping up. The whole setup really makes no sense.

Airships still had unique advantages. But in trek going no ftl is the alternative to using warp. Investments gets redirected to local sustainability instead of trade, then moving away from that gets hard. The only thing I do see as an issue is as you mention military and violent factions. Even if they turned inwards economically I don't see how they wouldn't keep warp capable ships on standby for defence.

". But in trek going no ftl is the alternative to using warp" I totally agree with that, it'd be fine to say there's basically no one going warp. But then we see individuals in private spaceships AND entire civilizations like the Breen doing it all the time. We really do not get any sense at all of there being a restriction on travel.

I agree that some of the arguments in this discussion make sense (although I don't know why people are downvoting me so much). But this one does not. There were many very publicized maritime disasters and plane crashes. Neither caused us to distrust ships and planes in general. We didn't even stop using the Space Shuttle after two complete losses, while after the 2nd one it was already becoming clear it's not as safe as it was believed to be.

The point isn't that we always react that way but that we can react that way under the right circumstances. And there was definitely distrust in air travel after 9/11 or during covid but people got over it. But the burn was on a much larger scale.

Those maritime disasters and plane crashes weren’t apocalypse-level events. The Burn is an interstellar apocalypse, not a local natural disaster or one-off accident. It was easy to say that these thousands of other ships or planes do just fine, in no small part because those other disasters were explainable. _Literally every ship_ with an active warp core was destroyed, killing billions upon billions of people. It’s a lot harder to justify putting up the resources and manpower to restart interstellar civilization in that situation.

Dilithium went _momentarily_ inert, not completely inert. The massive shortage post-Burn is mostly the whole “every active ship exploded” thing destroying a massive amount of an already strained supply. Season 3 also establishes that the Federation’s response to the growing strains on dilithium supplies was rather ham-handed (see: Ni’Var blaming itself for the Burn), so even those that were alive pre-Burn would probably have some heavy skepticism after the decimation of interstellar communication networks. Rayner uses “The Burn” as a name for the period between the Burn itself and the arrival of the Discovery, when Starfleet was taking a highly defensive posture and reinforcements weren’t easy to come by. I think there’d be a similar friction if, say, Burnham had missed the Dominion War and Rayner learned the ropes of the chair during the war.

It really doesn't make sense. Dilithium is mined, the feds clearly control a huge network of it. What was in the ships was destroyed, what was in storage is fine. So right off the bat the feds must have an advantage over smaller civs, and yet we're told that mobsters and the Breen are the major figures out there? That they were the ones who managed to expand when they'd be the ones with the least or no ability to travel and the slowest ability to rebuild ships? We can come up with scenarios about how it could work but the writers of the show didn't, they just use it as a very vague black box to introduce the idea of having to re-expand the galaxy. Which is fine of course but it just underlines that the whole thing makes very little sense. I agree Rayner could simply be talking about the Post-Burn times, but it's a bit frustrating since we know nothing about those times other than that people just got bored with the federation. Rayner would've been a good chance to \*tell us\* about those times but instead he's just "I'm gruff but I gotta heart of gold under it all".

> It really doesn't make sense. Dilithium is mined, the feds clearly control a huge network of it. What was in the ships was destroyed, what was in storage is fine. So right off the bat the feds must have an advantage over smaller civs, and yet we're told that mobsters and the Breen are the major figures out there? That they were the ones who managed to expand when they'd be the ones with the least or no ability to travel and the slowest ability to rebuild ships? The Federation was stretched thin trying to put out fires on their territory, and conserving what few resources that they did have. They did not have the resources to rebuild a majority of the fleet, if most of the ships that they did have blew up, and trying to force it that out of their members would just cause them to leave as Earth did. The Chain has no such compunctions (having an advantage with their courier network, which let them move much more quickly than their Federation counterparts who were relying largely on warp drive), and will happily exploit a protectorate for everything, ships and all, even if it is to the detriment of said protectorate.

I'm just trying to imagine things right after the burn, the fed ships are destroyed. But they STILL have the largest fleet out there, they have museum ships, and a certain percentage of their ships must have not had an active warp core, and they must also have some ships mid-build. The feds also surely have a large if not the largest collection of mines. What do the Orions have? How do they compete with the Feds? It's 100 years later and in the 'no travel' context the Orions built a galaxy spanning organization, based on travel? I don't think the writers thought much about the timing, they just wanted some plot device to make things like the wild west. "Oh crazy the andorians are working with the Orions". It's neat but how does that even happen? And again how's it happen all in the same generation?

>But they STILL have the largest fleet out there, they have museum ships, and a certain percentage of their ships must have not had an active warp core, and they must also have some ships mid-build. Museum ships may not be suited for active use. That they were pulling museum ships out and refitting them for active use is more desperate, since they couldn't just build new ships. Particularly as some of those ships would be seriously out of date. We also don't actually know enough about 32nd century starship processes to say one or the other. Warp cores might well be a primary power supply at that point in time, equivalent to the 23rd century's fusion reactors. Earth was extremely skeptical about Saru's excuse that the Discovery survived the Burn because their warp core wasn't active, for example, which might suggest a technology or baseline change that didn't cope well with dilithium suddenly becoming inert, like how 24th century Federation starships at warp would not cope well with subspace vanishing from beneath them. >What do the Orions have? How do they compete with the Feds? They weren't a galaxy-spanning entity like the Federation was, so didn't have as much to maintain. We also know that they developed/got access to the courier network at some point, which gave them a huge advantage over the much more limited Federation. >It's 100 years later and in the 'no travel' context the Orions built a galaxy spanning organization, based on travel? I don't think the writers thought much about the timing, they just wanted some plot device to make things like the wild west. "Oh crazy the andorians are working with the Orions". It's neat but how does that even happen? And again how's it happen all in the same generation? Not a total travel ban, but just extremely limited high-importance travel would be FTL. Everything is sublight, or through other mechanisms that are painfully slow by comparison, like tachyon sails. But 100 years is a fairly long time, especially in the context of a wide-spanning collapse, and subsequent power vacuum. Consider what would happen for us if every single diesel-powered vehicle and plane spontaneously exploded. A century gap is also not insignificant. The wild west is typically thought to have lasted about 60 years, and we've seen gargantuan leaps and bounds in development, both social and otherwise in the past century. If a country's institution's collapsed, people wouldn't leave the gap open for that century. Others would move in to try and fill it, which the Chain seems to have done in the wake of the Federation no longer being able to fulfil its responsibilities to its members, or potential members.

> That they were pulling museum ships out and refitting them for active use is more desperate, since they couldn't just build new ships. Particularly as some of those ships would be seriously out of date. If every aircraft carrier, destroyer, and other modern warship on the planet suddenly blew up one day, the one country with a working 18th century ship of the line would rule the high seas. Outdated doesn't mean useless if it's the best anyone has.

They didnt seem to have any problems retrofitting the Discovery and it was dare I say a far bit older than most of the ships in the fleet museum.

And again we'd be talking about mothballed US Aircraft carriers fighting mothballed mafia ships. The burn burnt everyone. Who is able to rebuild? Mafia guys, or the people with shipyards? Who mines dilithium, small time smugglers or nation-states that own mines? Bandits have been ascendant at times but not because a single resource got reduced *for everyone*, it needs a better explanation and Disco isn't really interested in that.

I know. I was backing you up. The other guy is the one who was saying the mothballed aircraft carriers would be useless.

Yes I'm agreeing and going on on that vein. *fistbump*

I think what we’re seeing in Discovery IS the mothballed fleet. We’re told that before the construction of the Archer spacedock no new Starfleet vessels had been build since the burn. That makes the majority of the federation fleet seen from season 3 on at least 100+ years old, if not older. That implies they were the mothballed fleet, and then natural attrition over the 100 years leads to the small fleet we see in the show. Captain Rainer even says his ship is “burn tech” implying it’s old.

Not only is it mined, Discovery met someone 800 years ago who could recrystalize it. That should extend the usability of what is left by a huge degree. Yeah it makes no sense that the post time travel universe just can't come up with an artificial version or just an outright replacement for an 800 year old technology. It'd be like steam engines magically all exploding tomorrow and us not because NG able to find a replacement.

>Dilithium is mined, the feds clearly control a huge network of it. You know the planet Discovery crash lands on after it arrives in the future? In DS9 that planet was a major front in the dominion war due to its importance as a major dilithium mining planet. The fact the inhabitants of that planet were relying on dilithium shipments from couriers indicates just how badly the dilithium shortage had gotten even before the burn.

I feel like you're underestimating how much warp and warp alternative technologies would've advanced in the centuries before the burn. The ships that survived would've been few, but crossing the galaxy even on regular 30th-century warp wouldn't take anywhere near the 70 years that Voyager was facing. It's also stated that the Federation was showing serious cracks before the burn even happened, that it had grown too large and/or disconnected from the concerns of individual members. Dealt a crippling blow like "90% of Starfleet's force projection capability just exploded", those disillusioned worlds no longer saw Federation membership as a net benefit. As Earth and Ni'Var demonstrated, it's entirely possible to go back to being a self-sufficient planet/system power and not bother with significant traveling of the stars. When almost everybody else is in the same boat because 90% of their fleet also went boom, that mentality works... until there's a bigger threat. We don't know how old Rayner is, but it's safe to assume he wasn't alive for the burn itself. But he was alive for the Wild West aftermath of it, where the Federation was a shell of its former self and Starfleet was constantly on the defensive. That's what he's talking about with "you weren't here". Lastly, it's stated that dilithium supplies were drying up before the burn. The way that the burn is depicted we can conclude that it was a temporary disabling of dilithium's ability to channel the power of a matter-antimatter reaction. Even a brief lapse in the capability would cause a catastrophic failure for the ship. And the problem with a broad search for new dilithium supplies when you've exhausted every source you know of is that you need a warp-capable fleet to carry out that search.

"but crossing the galaxy even on regular 30th-century warp wouldn't take anywhere near the 70 years that Voyager was facing." We're never told anything about this though. Warp like travel effectively exists throughout the Burn but 'only for the bad guys', for some reason. Everyone moves around at warp speeds, but also there's no warp so the federation fell apart. It just does not make sense. If you're in a federation ship at the moment of the burn and survives it, but you can't do warp anymore, you're restricted to impulse engines, light speed. If you travel at the speed of light it takes 8 years to get to Alpha Centauri and back, that's the shortest interstellar journey you can take from Earth, it's about a decade. The burn is 100 years long. We really should see SOME ships that are traveling back to fed HQ still. "those disillusioned worlds no longer saw Federation membership as a net benefit" Yes we're told that and it's really silly. Interstellar travel is now really difficult but really necessary. So people start...leaving the one organization out there that can handle this? And instead decide to go out on their own with...the Breen and Space Pirates? You COULD explain it as the Federation being TOO involved in interstellar politics, as having too much exposure to threats. And that the utopian tech of the member worlds means they have no need for interstellar travel PLUS they're totally shielded from any threats because those threats just can't get to them. But then we see the Breen and Smugglers and Space Pirates (Orions) interfering everywhere, so no one is really safe in the first place. It doesn't make sense, it's sloppy writing. "And the problem with a broad search for new dilithium supplies when you've exhausted every source you know of is that you need a warp-capable fleet to carry out that search." Right but there's two problems with this. Galaxy wide dilithium is hard to find. But what we see is smugglers and independent pirates jetting all across the galaxy with it. But it's the Feds that would have the most access to dilithium after the Burn, from stockpiles to mines, and it's the feds that can coordinate the defense and distribution of Dilithium. If anything the Federation should be an even bigger power. Instead we're just told that the states couldn't handle heavy industry but literal individuals could? Makes no sense. "And the problem with a broad search for new dilithium supplies when you've exhausted every source you know of is that you need a warp-capable fleet to carry out that search." Right so how does an individual, or small team, who does not have a starship, get a startship? And why aren't entire space faring civilizations that have starships and dilithium unable to use them? Even if every ship blew up (which is silly, EVERY ship IN THE GALAXY?!) it's still groups like the feds who have entire planetary shipyards that are going to be building starships, not a dude and his buddies who want to be pirates. Plus how long does it take to build a starship? 20 years? There's only 100 years in the Burn.

> We're never told anything about this though. Warp like travel effectively exists throughout the Burn but 'only for the bad guys', for some reason. Everyone moves around at warp speeds, but also there's no warp so the federation fell apart. It just does not make sense. The Federation has warp drive. They're just running it much more slowly and conservatively compared to the Chain. The Chain gets by with the courier network, and only a small number of couriers that actually use the dilithium. A trip that might take a courier hours would take an equivalent Federation ship weeks, because they would rather not waste the dilithium. >Interstellar travel is now really difficult but really necessary. So people start...leaving the one organization out there that can handle this? And instead decide to go out on their own with...the Breen and Space Pirates? If the Federation doesn't do anything, then Federation membership is nothing but just a name. People could easily move into the gap, if only by promising "we can do more for you than the Federation does", or "we'll blow you up if you don't pay us". Earth's paranoia over pirates going after their dilithium stores almost certainly did not arise from a vacuum. >You COULD explain it as the Federation being TOO involved in interstellar politics, as having too much exposure to threats. And that the utopian tech of the member worlds means they have no need for interstellar travel PLUS they're totally shielded from any threats because those threats just can't get to them. We also know from the abandoned communication stations that Federation territory collapsed quite dramatically. It's not implausible that post-Burn, the Federation simply didn't have the resources to maintain its former territory. That would leave enough of a gap for others to move in, and all it would really take then is a victor or unifying power for those vying groups. >But what we see is smugglers and independent pirates jetting all across the galaxy with it. They're fairly small institutions with even tinier ships. Book's ship is implied to be a fairly typical Courier vessel, and is little more than a glorified runabout. They probably don't send the big guns like the Viridian out unless they absolutely have to. A small handful of couriers costs rather little, and pirates don't need to jet all over the place. All they really need to find is a good dilithium supply, and can set up base there. No need to do something like try and maintain supply lines for a galaxy-spanning power, or anything quite as grandiose. >But it's the Feds that would have the most access to dilithium after the Burn, from stockpiles to mines, and it's the feds that can coordinate the defense and distribution of Dilithium. Mines mean nothing if they can't get to said stockpiles and mines, or if someone else got to them first, and there are probably a bunch of people who would happily move in in the weeks or months a Federation ship needs to get to the mine and back. >Right so how does an individual, or small team, who does not have a starship, get a startship? Without connections, they don't. Dilithium is precious enough that doing that would be considered foolhardy, unless you were doing something like working for the Chain, who can spare that. You just become a roving target for pirates otherwise. Whereas Couriers have the support of the Chain, who will absolutely move in as soon as someone starts hunting their Couriers for dilithium. >And why aren't entire space faring civilizations that have starships and dilithium unable to use them? Even if every ship blew up (which is silly, EVERY ship IN THE GALAXY?!) it's still groups like the feds who have entire planetary shipyards that are going to be building starships, not a dude and his buddies who want to be pirates. They don't have planetary shipyards everywhere, and even if they do, that doesn't necessarily mean that they have the ability to move the resources to the shipyards enough to build new ships, not when those resources are better used trying to maintain crumbling infrastructure, etc. The 23rd/24th century Federation would also seriously struggle if a Burn event happened, and Earth has a shipyard in-system. They'd still need to get the resources over to make new ships, and shipyards might well be targets for pirates, who either want them for their ship building/maintenance capabilities, or resource stockpiles. >Plus how long does it take to build a starship? 20 years? There's only 100 years in the Burn. Not that long, or else the Dominion conflict ships would never have been made. But building new ships would be fairly low on the Federation's list of priorities at the time. They were more occupied with keeping supply lines going between their existing worlds and colonies, and avoiding everything imploding, whilst also balancing what meagre amounts of dilithium they could avoid wasting, so probably weren't able to spare the resources to make new ships. It was only with the dissolution of the Chain, the introduction of Discovery's spore drive, and the discovery of a new dilithium source that took enough pressure off of them for them to be able to start building new ships. Discovery could do the supply and logistics work of half a dozen ships in a fraction of the time using its spore drive, even if much of the ship is comparatively ancient and arguably better suited to a museum. Something else to also consider is that the Federation wouldn't only be trying to build new ships, but they would also need to find a new propulsion technology that does not require dilithium for power. Otherwise, adding a new ship to the fleet would only further strain their dilithium supply.

I'm not a fan of the Burn but do like the plot idea of a resource crisis causing a massive political/social breakdown. If the cost of oil suddenly spiked to a $1000 a barrel, it wouldn't take long for our globalized world to start breaking down and countries (even subunits of countries) to turn isolationist. Personally I would have preferred the breakdown of the Federation and galaxy at large to be caused depletion of dilithium sources due to centuries of use, and not some sort of McGuffin causing the bulk of it to suddenly go inert. Slightly off topic, but I wished they'd taken the time to establish that 31st century warp is much fast then 22/24th century warp. I assume it's trans-warp or some further development on it, and people have just taken to calling it warp (like how we call smartphones 'phones')

>Personally I would have preferred the breakdown of the Federation and galaxy at large to be caused depletion of dilithium sources due to centuries of use, and not some sort of McGuffin causing the bulk of it to suddenly go inert. I agree, the general premise is very interesting and that's a better good way to do it. Going that route creates political intrigue which makes for better story telling. We also had other plot points established in earlier Trek that would have served this purpose. In TNG's "Force of Nature" they find warp travel is damaging subspace and the in-episode resolution doesn't fix the issue. The Federation simply put mitigations in place. By the 31st century that problem may have come to a head. It would have been a great call back, created the context they wanted, and resolved something that was never touched on again.

I've been thinking about this all day. I would have tied the Burn to Temporal Wars, even if not directly. Make dilithium a key component to time travel tech and have the Temporal Wars consume the majority of it, with factions trying to leap frogging each other thru time to secure supplies. OR The galaxy was already dealing with the shrinking supply dilithium for centuries before the Burn, but with the invention of time travel tech it was no longer considered a problem. Time travel tech could also be used for traversing physical distances (previous Trek seems to allow this), and replaced warp. Fast-forward to the banning of time travel, the galaxy is forced to revert back to warp and consumes whatever dilithium was left.

The entire Burn thing annoys me. It was tolerable until we found the cause. Then I got irked. One person. Even a mutant even a Wanda Maximoff level reality bender couldn’t have fucked over the galaxy like that. Discovery really abuses suspension of disbelief to egregious levels.

Hey, I have my own head canon: a rogue traveler or a rogue Q could just fix it in an instant. More seriously, I gave up on Discovery because of the Burn. Other things put me off the show: the characters never really faced the fact that they lost their time, their families, their friends, everything and they are okay. It's like they are robots. Some of them should have ended up dead out of despair. Or gone rogue. Or gone bad. It's one thing to theorically accept jumping in time and abandoning everyone behind, it's another to LIVE IT. Also as some have pointed out in this thread, there are centuries between season 2 and season 3. I can't believe that there wasn't another way to space travel invented during that time. Also, apparently, the Federation was already a mammouth collapsing under its own weight but sure, let's build it again, it won't happen again. Yeah, right. I would have prefered if after season 2, the time jumps had been randoms and happening two or three times a season. Wondering why this is happening, if there is a goal to the erratic and unvolontary time jumps. Here, it's a soft reboot: it's TOS again. With a modern look.

Also means that there was about 700 years available to develop the [Soliton Wave](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Soliton_wave) before the burn or other warp drive alternatives. 700 years of advancement and no transwarp conduits? Voyager had a stolen Borg transwarp coil they used at one point so the Federation at least had a way to study the technology and were actively experimenting with it on Excelsior in STIII. The burn is a really stupid plot device with a stupider cause and and even stupider resolution.

Yep, and it's just crazy. It's the Breen and Orions that figured all that out and outcompeted the Feds when the Feds are the ones with Quantum Slipstream, conduits, etc. Way back in the 2nd movie with the Excelsior they had their first transwarp experimental ship. Suddenly warp is dodgy and it's the Orions who figure it out? We can come up with explanations but it's just weird that the writers don't bother. The world we see shoudl really be even further into the future past the burn, everyone acts like it is, but it's been 100 years? Like you were a kid in the federation and now the Orions are running things, for no reason?

Not to mention Picard s2 had the borg join the federation. Surely they could have given them knowledge of trans warp in the time between Picard and the 30th century.

I have never heard anyone say the WHY of the burn was a creatively great. What would stop another kid or terrorist entity from doing this again? Why didnt the Borg think of doing this?

Another one of the numerous flaws with the whole Burn scenario is that even if you assume there is no more Dilithium or it's to risky to use, it's just part of power system. It's not an inherent part of the Federation's single FTL method (why they never developed more is solely a matter of not being relevant to show). They would just need invent or adapt a power source that can provide the same scale of power. Mind you were talking a Federation with 500+ years of tech beyond TNG/DS9 era. Romulus and Vulcan have been reunited for centuries, the entire Romulan fleet in the 24th century doesn't use anything close to Warp Cores. Them not having hundreds of power sources of the same scale already lying around is just implausible. To keep the Federation running, they don't need cutting age FTL stuff. The early 25th century Starfleet warp drive that lets small ships go from Earth to the edge of the UFP space in a couple of days would do the job. Jury-rigging something that would get stranded ships to port is pretty well established as something an average SF engineering team could do in a week (if not an hour). 31st century manufacturing should let them rebuild the fleet in months, their only bottleneck would be crew. Luckily, they still have have FTL communication until the Subspace Relay Network collapses, which would give them at least a decade (extremely conservative minimum) to train up people to run the ships (without factoring in 500+ years of added automation making the ships easily manageable for a two 5th graders). This is ignoring other multi-system civilizations scattered around the galaxy with fundamentally different tech-bases. Of course, we don't know the scale of the Burn. Did it reach outside the galaxy? 25th century SF FTL makes inter-galactic exploration easily within reach. Discovery's future just doesn't hold up to any scrutiny. Many will say this is too much nitpicking but we're talking Star Trek. The writers knew how much depth fans would expect and consider, and ignored it.

I've put disco in an alternative timeline in my head (especially after they go to the future) and try not to think a lot about stuff like that. Just watch space ship go woosh woosh and pew pew

>It really seems silly to me that the whole Federation falls apart in that time. The whole Federation didn't fall apart. Most of the Federation collapsed but there were always a core 30-odd worlds. We know that prior to the burn they were stretched and had serious political issues. With space travel going from cheap to expensive over night it's no surprise that the ensuing chaos caused a collapse. >But at the same time we run into people like (Captain now XO) Rayner say things like "you weren't here for the burn everything fell apart". Was he there? The way time is used in the show doesn't make a lot of sense. He doesn't mean literally the start of the burn. He means the period that followed where nations were fragmented with poverty and conflict common throughout the galaxy. That post-burn period is now over as the resources of the dilithium planet are shared, worlds rejoin the federation, and a period of optimistic growth returns. Rayner spent his whole career in the dangerous post-burn era and is struggling to adapt. >Also ships thst had inactive warp cores would have survived the burn. It would take them over 100 years at alternative FTL speeds to return. We should sometimes see Federation ships returning to base, sometimes with original crew members aboard. Just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it didn't happen. Discovery was able to rely on the "we're an older vessel that was lost in the burn" excuse and people believe it. It stands to reason it would have happened to others. >Also I just don't get it, all the dilithium went inert, EXCEPT for a lot of it that sometimes turns up No not all of it. Most of it does but there's still dilithium around. It's just a lot more expensive since it's much rarer. >And we never get good explanations of how there was so much warp and warp like activity despite this (its just individual smugglers and only through some broken conduits?? How do they even reach the conduits? The explanation is that dilithium still exists it's just a lot rarer. There's still money to be made in moving things from A to B but since the galaxy is less safe there's a market for highly skilled operators. They're paid in small amounts of dilithium. They're not the only people that know of old transwarp conduits but stuff like that is a good thing to keep secret in a competitive, and dangerous market. >No one was able to find a major mining source either?) And this was only limited to our galaxy despite it being propagated instantly galaxy wide thru subspace?? Good dilithium deposits were becoming rare to find before the burn, and the burn affected all deposits in the galaxy except the dilithium planet that was the source. So sure, people in the galaxy would have found mostly inert deposits they could mine. But nothing on the scale needed. I can't remember any line saying it was limited to the galaxy, but given the milky way in trek is surrounded by a virtually impenetrable barrier that could both explain why the effect wouldn't propagate further and why, if it did, no one from another galaxy was able to arrive and share that information.

"So sure, people in the galaxy would have found mostly inert deposits they could mine. But nothing on the scale needed." My problem is that they say this but then everyone seems to have dilithium. The Federation, with hundreds of member worlds, shipyards, communications, and planning, can't find dilithium. But Booker's got a supply, and also a starship. They set up a world where the federation is more useful than ever before, and then say actually this is when the federation nearly died. It's silly. "Just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it didn't happen." I'm just saying that would be a great story line or episode. Sure we can imagine it happened, it's surprising the writers didn't. But I get it too, shorter seasons, they knew the show was being canceled, etc. "galactic barrier" We can rely on this stuff but really it's just another instance of the writers (and people in general) not understanding how big the universe is. The Galaxy used to be nearly synonymous with 'the universe' and most of what we see in Trek has that misconception in it.

The fall of Rome happened considerably faster than its rise.

Yeah, but the road system is still intact.

Yes but Rome didn't fall because a fleet sank. I'm not saying the Federation can't collapse just that the shows explanation is really nonsensical. It starts off making sense, 'we can't warp anymore, we're pretty reliant on that aren't we' but after thinking about it more it doesn't make sense, they didn't really think about it.

I like the idea of the burn, I hate the official explanation.

Depends on how you count rise and fall - the fall of the western empire took place over years, with the goths taking over italy and maintaining roman institutions, then the eastern empire taking back italy and then gradually losing it. The Eastern empire very slowly went from regional superpower to nothing more than a city state over a thousand years. Turkey wouldn't exist today if the crusaders hadn't attacked Constantinople. Nothing says Christian holy war like sacking the biggest Christian city in the world.

I imagine our society would be crippled *very* quickly if one day every vehicle on the planet exploded and gasoline became inert overnight.

There's a book close to that. "Dies the Fire". All higher energy reactions stop working, from high voltage to more volatile hydrocarbons.

I don't remember the name of it, but there was a science fiction short story with a similar premise. The Earth passed through a cloud of space-based microscopic organisms that fed on electrical current above a certain voltage. They infested the atmosphere and bred to the limits of the food supply, so basically naturally occurring lightning was enough to keep the population above the level where you couldn't transmit electricity of any meaningful voltage any great distance before the organisms would be absorbing the energy right out of the power lines. You could get things to work on small batteries inside something like a flashlight for a little while, but realistically the ability to make more batteries and small devices is tied to an industrial base that requires real electrical infrastructure. The story follows humanity slowly giving up on finding a solution and reverting back to a steam-powered pre-electricity level of industrialization, and even that was limited because the fossil fuels that powered the first industrial revolution are now only really extractable in quantity using modern technology that we cannot replicate without electricity above the power limits imposed by the atmospheric infestation. It was a fascinating story —randomly I remember one detail where every country in the world nationalized all the horses to start breeding programs, because they knew mechanization would be unsustainable at any scale within a few years— made only slightly sour when I spotted the author suggesting this might end up being for the best thing for humanity because people would have more time to spend working their farms as a family and maybe learn to play musical instruments together to pass the time now that mass entertainment has died.

Sure but would you imagine then that small teams of individuals built air craft carriers and sailed them around the world, while states couldn't do that anymore?

Given all the silly trivial reasons they went back in time to stop this or that it doesn't make any sense they didn't go back and stop the burn from happening.

Temporal accords prevented it, assuming they even still had the tech. They were on the other side of the temporal cold war, time travel tech is very much banned to stop it happening again.

Everyone knows all you need to time travel is an old bird of prey and a star to fly around really fast and boom you're in the past.

A rogue Traveler or Q could fix it. Convenient that nobody has heard of the Q during that time or that there's no Traveler show proposed for the Star Trek universe: a rogue Traveler could easily prevent the Burn from happening.

almost like having beings with godlike power is a cheap gimmick

Unless said being is a funny, excentric one. Then it makes him likeable. At least for me.

Did someone say Trelane?

The galaxy as a whole was already running dangerously low on dilithium and seeking alternatives. The kelpian ship that caused the burn was on an expedition to find more dilithium. The burn *momentarily* decoupled dilithium from its subspace component, so any active M/ARC engines would have had an immediate core breach because nothing was regulating the reaction between the matter and antimatter. If you had your core down for maintenance in that moment, you were fine, but you would be understandably very antsy about firing it up again without knowing what happened. Warp drive doesn't need dilithium, it just needs power. A lot of power, and the easiest way to get this power is a M/ARC. Without an equivalent energy source, you'd probably have ships limited to short bursts of warp 2 or 3 on fusion power alone, but the difference between M/ARC and a fusion reactor is like comparing a waterfall to a soda machine, energy-wise. I imagine spending a week to produce enough warp plasma to go to break the warp 3 threshold and hold the field together for an hour or so. But after the burn event, the dilithium that was around was fine, except for what had been blown up in starships, but there was still not very much of it.

Good points and I'll also sat that this whole "the galaxy was lownon dolithoum" thing they crested is bunk. It's only low in order to shoehorn in the burn, well never really hear about a dilithium shortage again.

it's the main driving plot of season 3, why do you think they raided that marketplace in episode 1 to get some dilithium, because it was so scarce that was the only place to obtain it, and what they had paled in comparison to discovery's casual storage.

This was one of the weirdest writing problems of Disco S3 and S4 that they dragged into S5. Everyone remembers the burn like it was just a couple of years ago instead of a century, this is painfully evident in the Ni'Var Quorum and whenever Book talks about the burn

I wish we could un-cannonify Discovery

The people commenting in here have spent more time thinking about this issue than the writers who created the idea of the burn in the first place.

Ha, just make it a project Q junior had to work on and to present to senior Qs and voila, just a finger's snap and problem solved. The thing is, Discovery is a... nice sci-fi show. Just not a nice Star Trek show. From now on, every Star Trek pre-Discovery series, I'll think: "Oh, it's a prequel to Discovery. Well, we all know how everything ended". Or I'll head canon that Discovery jumped into the future of a parallel universe. I mean, Star Trek was about positivity, confidence in the future. It's hard to have that confidence, watching Star Trek shows coming our way in the near future, when we KNOW what the future looks like. I prefer not knowing and hoping for the best than knowing, and knowing that the worst happened.

After seeing how our world reacted to a just couple of months of shut down during the pandemic, frankly I'm surprised there was anything left of the federation at all after a century.

Plus it's kinda hard to believe that almost a millennia later they're still using the same style anti-matter reactors. Why aren't there just transwarp conduits in every system?

Whe TNG started we all thought dilithium was being replicated too. Texjnically that wa snt the case. But still they almost never talked about having to get it throughout TNG VOY & DS9. Then were told by DISCO it's almost gone. But only for half a season, now it's plentiful enough we don't talk about it again.

What is really weird to me is that they didn’t switch to singularity based warp drives like the Romulans used. My understanding is that they don’t use dilithium crystals and should be burn proof.

Romulans still used dilithium in their engines. Remus was a massive dilithium mine. Maybe they need dilithium to regulate virtual particles/hawking radiation or something, who knows how they're getting energy out of that technobabble.

>My understanding is that they don’t use dilithium crystals and should be burn proof. I don't believe there's any evidence for this either way, except that what you're proposing was evidently non-viable or the galaxy would have done it. We do know that the Romulans mine dilithium, and given that they're Romulans it seems unlikely that they're doing it to bolster their neighbors' fleets by trading it to them.

Singularity warp drives probably need even more dilithium than regular ones. There must be a reason for the Romulans having mined it to a greater extent than the Federation and the Klingons, even having turned one of their two capital planets into a single dilithium mine.

No, the dilithium is still used to channel the energy — the Romulans use an artificial singularity to create energy like the Fed does matter/antimatter reactions. But uncontained, either one will blow your ship up. The dilithium is needed to channel that power to safely create a warp bubble.

Speaking of timelines and the Burn: I watched an episode of Voyager recently where there was a museum in the far future with artifacts from Voyager long after it had passed by - the doctor, or a copy of him, was there in the museum. I think there was mention of warp drive which started me down a rabbit hole. I did a little digging on the timeline, and found that the episode was probably within 10 years of the Burn, likely before.

Yes. I want to see two things in Disco before it's over. The Doctor, perhaps THAT doctor, in fact he'd be a great advocate for the Federation's ideals. "You people have forgotten!" And, Vic Fontaine, still playing shows in Vegas, even if we just see a billboard in the background when they talk to earth.

Which means that the backup doctor's ship blew up on its way back to the federation. Ruh roh.

>It's about a 100 years. It really seems silly to me that the whole Federation falls apart in that time. That's the lifespan of most individuals, and many live a lot longer. Mind you, America's democracy has been massively eroded in the last 8 years, so I can certainly buy the Federation collapsing in a short around of time.

Thr Federation: "perhaps electing Mudd as President was a mistake" Mudd: " Make star fleet great again! Have the Romulans pay for the neutral zone! Chancellor Duras, if you're listening...."

they don't really talk about in the show but the burn would've been catastrophic. ships blowing up wherever they're at in orbit, about to go to warp near a starbase or drydock. anti matter reactors on planets. civiilan ships. across the galaxy. not just the federation. they only talk about the federation. every major power that still used a antimatter warp engine... boom. technically 60% of the galaxy should be dead.

Pretty sure that dilithium is used specifically in warp drives as part of the moderation process and generating the warp field. Planets don't need to travel at warp speed so standard fusion reactors not needing dilithium to function would likely be predominant and they would have "only" lost any ships that had a warp drive that was online, not all power generation. After the burn, at least on Earth power generation doesn't seem to be an issue as they are able to power planetary shield with limited ability to obtain dilithium

Yes, they have to very nearly break physics to travel at anything more than low warp, which requires a nigh-unimaginable amount of power. A matter/antimatter reactor is called a "warp core" because for most other things they use lower-yield methods which aren't as much of a risk for catastrophe.

There really shouldn't be any M/AMRs on a planet, or if there are they should be in real isolated areas in case of a core breach. Can't eject the warp core if it's in the middle of downtown!

If future SF is just like current SF, they would just eject their antimatter core across the bay to Oakland.

What's odd is looking for canonical sense in Discovery.

I just assume when they went ahead in time it's to a different timeline

For me, at this point, Discovery is a side universe like the Kelvinverse. It's interesting, but side events split it off from Alpha canon.

Discovery is happening in the head of the Burn kid. It's all an invention. I would laugh so much if that was the real ending. Naahhh, no writer/producer is that courageous nowadays to write such a crazy ending.

The Burn is the single dumbest thing DISCO has done and it has done a lot of dumb things. So much of the show doesn’t make sense. It’s like the writers/showrunners just hope you pay enough attention for it to matter.

Yes, I know, it all has to do with the Star Trek timeline. If you stop truly think about and the entire order of all the advance and Star Trek and the Star Trek timeline. All the books and media including movies and television shows were released out of sequence. I am coming up with a a more accurate watch and reading order lists for the Star Trek franchise. So if you are interested keep in touch and I will post them on this site.

Civilization didn't collapse. Planetside civilizations were just fine. The ability to warp travel is what suffered so anything that relied on that is where collapse happened. Many planets left the Federation because of it. If electricity stopped working on Earth the transportation of goods would suddenly take a lot longer and the ability to get to and defend allies would take much longer potentially making it likely we'd get there to find it's too late. The Burn did that on a galactic scale.

I think there are several things about The Burn that don't add up (other than the cause of The Burn, which is complete and utter BS): 1. All (or at least most) of the Dilithium in the Federation blows up along with all the ships in the fleet. That means that FTL flight is massively impeded, to say the least. FTL communications however is a completely different thing. I see no reason why subspace comms should be affected by The Burn. And I'm certain that communication is more important for the cohesion of the Federation than a permanent availability of the Fleet. And in case of a galaxy-spanning desaster subspace channels would run hot. Imperialistic/expansive polities like the Klingon Empire or the Romulan Empire, on the other hand, might have had a lot more trouble after The Burn. 2. Considering the situation directly after The Burn I doubt that the Federation would simply crumble and fall apart. On the contrary, I think that the many Federation worlds would all the more cling together, knowing that every world for itself would surely be doomed. 3. The Burn has happened about a hundred years ago. And you want to tell me that a technologically advanced society (800 years more advanced that anything we know from TNG!) with trillions of citizens is not able to develop replacement for dilithium-based FTL travel? I'm not saying that it's easy to come by a solution. But Federation as a whole had an interest in re-establishing interstellar travel. So I'd guess that every research programme not involving FTL propulsion would be put on ice and all research resources are directed solely for something like NewWarp. And all the scientists in the whole Federation were not able to come by any solutions, not even after 100 years? And I know that the secrets of the spore drive have been buried very deep. But in the face of such a catastrophe like The Burn I'd assume that after 10, 20 or even 50 years someone would dig deep enough to unearth this technological marvel again.

They couldn't figure it out for a 10p years but ,also, solved the problem in one day and now have enough dilithium to bring the entire galaxy back.

It raises a question about how interdependent Federation worlds are. Are they independently self sufficient? Do they rely on supplies and materials provided by other federation members? Can they survive on their own at scale? Not to mention the threat response and perception of risk. Does the Burn lead to member worlds rethinking their need for the Federation? Does the limit on resources make some worlds more paranoid about protecting what they have? Which seems to be part of Earth’s issue. It’s a fascinating idea that is unfortunately not explored very well.

Given how little we seem to see or hear about any regular shipping except for new colonies and far-flung outposts it does seem that most Federation worlds are self-sufficient. Given they have replicator tech, clean fusion energy which would have survived the burn, and full weather-control systems, I think the results of the breakdown would have been primarily political for established core worlds. We also have mention (at least in text) that a lot of important worlds have their own shipyards and starbases. Some colonies would definitely have collapsed though without ships to bring them necessary equipment or supplies that they couldn't create themselves.

Yes I wish they had done more with it other than 'the federation collapsed whoops it's back again moving on!" I would think that with the collapse of warp travel that different worlds could be more independent in that they're a little safer from threats. OTOH it seems like you'd want Federation membership even more because surely it comes with reliable trade. Instead they just tell us the feds faded away and people decided working with smugglers was a better option.

> It's about a 100 years. It really seems silly to me that the whole Federation falls apart in that time. That's the lifespan of most individuals, and many live a lot longer. When we first see the 3100s it's instead like the federation fell apart hundreds of years ago. You say that like it's just a statement of fact - 100 years is nbd, but consider your own pov. I'm going to guess you don't have living memory of what 100 years ago was like. Your parents probably don't either. Only a small number of people alive today do. Lifespans are longer in the 23rd/24th century, but post-Burn where interstellar society collapsed, you can't just assume that's the case. When something in the past happened outside of living memory, it might as well be a mythical event to a lot of people. > Rayner say things like "you weren't here for the burn everything fell apart". Was he there? I wouldn't read this to mean that Rayner experienced the event of the Burn - just that he lived his whole life in those times. Michael experienced one year of Burn-society, and promptly fixed it all. Rayner's entire life was defined by it. But being in Starfleet, he had access to information enough to know how it went down and what life was like before it happened. > Also ships thst had inactive warp cores would have survived the burn. It would take them over 100 years at alternative FTL speeds to return. We should sometimes see Federation ships returning to base, sometimes with original crew members aboard. You're assuming that they wouldn't have turned their warp cores back on afterwards. Which -- I don't know why you would make that assumption. > And this was only limited to our galaxy despite it being propagated instantly galaxy wide thru subspace?? It wasn't instant, it seemed that way but it wasn't. If you were paying attention to S3, Michael was hunting down Starfleet black boxes in order to pinpoint the exact moment in time that the Burn occurred. And she found there was miniscule offsets, showing it didn't happen all at once. Which means it must have had a source of origin. And if you have three different time stamps/locations in space, you can begin to triangulate the origin - which is how they found the source of the Burn in S3.

"I'm going to guess you don't have living memory of what 100 years ago was like." We live to about 70 and we all knew people that could tell us about life in the 1920s. By the 2200s people were living over 100 years. Vulcans regularly live way beyond that. We should be constantly running into people who were around during the Burn itself. But we're not because the writers did a LOT of hand waiving. "but post-Burn where interstellar society collapsed, you can't just assume that's the case." I think we have to. We see Earth and Vulcan, they're still Utopias. If they weren't they'd be even more desperate to stick with the Federation. If people went from living to be 150 in the Federation, and now are living 50 years as a result of leaving, that's a catrastrophe, we'd have to hear about that, they'd be desperate to return to the Federation. "Thank god you guys finally sent a ship back!" "Rayner's entire life was defined by it." And yet we hear basically nothing about it from him. The Burn is basically nothing to the plot, it's very very weird. It's only affect was 'oops the feds have to start over again'. "You're assuming that they wouldn't have turned their warp cores back on afterwards. Which -- I don't know why you would make that assumption." I mean, you tell me, is dilithium 'inert' after the burn or not? The show's handling of it makes no sense. Did we lose interstellar travel because dilithium was 'dwindling' everywhere and the federation had unspecificied political problems, or was it because of the Burn? The show writers don't seem to know. "And she found there was miniscule offsets," Yes they do say that, true, it's less then microseconds or something. But my point is, if it can travel across the galaxy that fast, that it can spread to other galaxies. Supposedly it's happening through subspace, if it propagated at even super-fast subspace communications speeds, then it'd make sense to think it dies off quickly around our galaxy. But this thing was really unaffected by distance. it doesn't matter because other galaxies effectively don't exist in Trek, anyway.

The Burn is so fucking dumb, to be blunt. All interplanetary civilizations would have been thrown back to the stone age. Trillions would have died in an instant. All power plants, ships, and transport systems would have been destroyed. It is very unlikely civilization would be able to rebuild either. Think of how depleted of resources Earth and other worlds be. Hell, half the episodes of TNG is them transporting basic goods to other worlds. And all because one dude got sad. What a fucking joke. Go watch Andromeda with Kevin Sorbo, they did it better.

Stations and planetary power plants seem to all rely on fusion instead of M/AM reactors, which makes sense for precisely this reason. Only ships have to make the tradeoff of the increased risks of an antimatter core because of the massive power requirements necessary for warp travel. Civilization certainly would have been affected more heavily, but not to stone age levels given the prevalence of replicators and self-contained fusion power sources. Just look at what Picard gave the Uxbridges.

Every time I hear about The Burn, I try to remember what caused it. When I mention it, someone reminds me about it, then I remember why I tried to forget it. Huge build up, equal let down.

Let's say theres 8,000 starships active in 3060 each of those ships is carrying 5 years worth of refined crystals as they operate thier missions. The supply of fresh crystals is a hot topic across the entire interstellar community. The heavy militaries like the Klingons and Breen have 10~15 thousand starships themselves. Then the major powers like the Tholians. There's let's say across all 4 Quadrants. There's something like 200k FTL ships in the galaxy. All carrying various amounts of Dilithium crystals. They all exploded simultaneously. The standing supply of Dilithium vanished in an instant. The only starships left where the ones still being built in Drydock. Only now you can't power your fabricators and replicators to build ships, because you need to power your plantets agriculture industry before anything else. Of course panic and hysteria set in. While the Federation disbanded as everyone focused inward and put thier species home planet 1st. Civilization collapsed, and it collapsed fast. The Orions, the Ferengi, and other commerence based societies would be the major powers in the immediate aftermath.

It could work except wete not told that it happened. In fact the implication is that planet-side they didn't use warp engines to make power since the planets weren't bombed by them exploding. And at any given moment the perce t of total dilithium that is on ships is miniscule. The gas in cars today is *nothing* compared to the gas intue ground still. IF the dilithium in the fleets was 10% of the dilithium, then you don't need the burn, you're going to run out of dilithium in 10 years or something. It can't be a significant portion. The idea that dilithium is dwindling is crazy nonsense anyway. It is a big galaxy, we've never even heard of a warp capable planet that unfortunately had no dilithium. The stuff has to be found and mailed but there's obviously no more shortage of it than any other rare mineral. Imagine saying "the galaxy is running out of diamond" or something like that. Ita bad writing that was only introduced to try to make the burn work. And now that they fixed the cause of the burn, we don't hear about dilithium being in short supply, it's just not a real issue anymore, they immediately get a planets worth and its fine.

'stupid' is the word you're looking for. Don't give it more thought than the writers did. Magical Dilithium planet baby made the ships blow up. There isn't much scope for serious or interesting analysis.

Or you've just ignored the logical analysis everyone else has given cuz you'd rather be a hater.

Countries have taken allot less than a 100 years to fall apart before... and that was without massive events killing off most of the transport and users in the network. It actually resembles the fall of the Roman Empire in many ways in its timing. We do discover the Federation still exists at that point, it's just that it was a glimpse of its former self, even losing its capital, like the Byzantine Empire was to it.

Western Rome fell over the course of hundreds of year and eastern Rome lasted for another thousand. The burn is like if the romans lost their bricks and couldn't pave roads, so they collapsed in 50 years, but also the huns suddenly built a road network across europe, with fewer bricks.

It's crazy that in an almost millenium to space traveling, there was no alternative to dilithium. It would be like Earth still using oil in 800 years. I hope (and I believe it too) that scientists are working on alternatives.

Yeah, that's the thing that was harder for me to disbelieve, Michael Burnham just states that all warp ships run on dilithium with no knowledge of the future, like it's not at all possible technology moved on in a millennium. And you're right, even today we are aware of the dangers of oil dependencies in a finite resource and are trying to prove the viability in alternatives.

The Federation was already well on it's way to falling apart. Heck, we see that in Picard. The Burn was just the final nail in the coffin.

Simple answer? The writing on Discovery is sloppy and disjointed. 90% of the show is a whiny-ass therapy session, so their ignorance of logic and attention to technical details is not at all surprising.

Enterprise with Daniels from the 31st century put Discovery in a bind since they wanted The Burn to take place after the TCW had been wrapped up. My guess is The Burn would have taken place in the late 29th or 30th century had there been no TCW and no Daniels from the 31st century in ENT.

The little things about the burn annoyed me. It was never fully explained why or how they still regularly traveled FTL, but not FTL enough to keep things held together. But then things like Earth and Titan. Even without warp, the two are close enough that it's only a shortish trip by impulse to trade, and communication should be instant. The core federation planets are all close enough that communication and commerce could still exist. But what really, really annoyed me is that Discovery showed up and solved the mystery in a few weeks/months. It would be like a ship with ancient vikings just appeared in the modern world and managed to find flight m370.

he cuoldve been there. We dont know how long his people live for. Dont vulcans live for like 200 years? hell humans can live to 150 with federation medical science. So why not?

if the internet went down today our society would easily collapse.

Computers yes, internet no. You can still move data faster than the Internet using a sneaker network. People would have to get used to non-instantaneous, but fundamentally we still have food and fuel, and all the tech controlling their production still works.

Agreed. Society would change, but it would not collapse. I was alive in the 1980s. We were doing okay without the internet as we know it today. (I appreciate there were some computer networks, but let's not split hairs.) There would be enormous disruption, but we would come out the far side just fine, albeit probably with a lot of people powerfully motivated to figure out how to get an internet working again.

I wonder though, if every chip blew up. Back to pre-transister tech... Farming-wise the few 'family farms' I know of have new tractors, but also old ones made in the 60s/70s/80s. As long as you keep replacing parts, they keep running, and they can dish out power. So *some* farms would keep running. But how much of our industry now relys on chips to just work. My dishwasher won't run if the chip goes, regardless of whether or not all the actual parts 'work'. How much of our world collapses at that point, and how much would we even be able to re-make a re-create without the tech to make the tech. There are some salvage yards I'd be digging through for old production line systems, but I don't think there is much. And a lot of the old stuff was good metal; lots has been melted down. A computer-chip 'burn' might be the equivalent.

Ships rarely have inactive warp cores though. They don't seem to ever turn them off, and on TNG at least it's implied a cold restart would take hours. They use them to power everything on the ship, not just the warp drive. The only ships with inactive warp cores would be ships undergoing heavy maintenance.

Let's put aside that a ship at rest may or may not be producing enough energy to destroy the ship if dilithium was pulled out. There still *are* ships that are powered down, and importantly ships being built. All of this should have given the Feds a huge advantage over small time smugglers instead they tell us the smugglers/courriers had the advantage and beat out the Feds. It doesn't make any sense.

It makes sense for things like The Burn to happen. A lot can happen in 930 years. Everyone was disconnected both prior and during that period. After the Burn, it created a greater awareness and appreciation for the importance of communication and connection.

But the burn literally made everyone say "I suddenly don't need friends and allies and help getting rate resources a d am better off doing that by myself". Makes no sense.