Name your imponderables for Star Trek

Discussion in 'General Trek Discussion' started by Robbiesan, Jan 16, 2014.

  1. The Green Mushroom

    The Green Mushroom Commander Red Shirt

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    I've always gotten the impression that they are just arrogant __holes. Logic and emotional suppression just means that they can be in the same room as you.


    My imponderable: Why is every single admiral in Trek either grossly incompetent or someone who would rather be a captain again?
     
  2. Robbiesan

    Robbiesan Lieutenant Commander Red Shirt

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    I guess that means depriving oneself of emotions automatically makes one arrogant. If so, that's illogical as arrogance might be considered an emotion.

    ...or it could be simply bad acting. Watch Surak sometime in the TOS series episode The Savage Curtain.
    [​IMG]
    Mister Calm Cool and Collected and not arrogant...but a lot of Vulcans were arrogant.
     
  3. T'Girl

    T'Girl Vice Admiral Admiral

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    It not like she could have studied aboard the ship and became a black belt in the fourth season, becoming a black belt in Aikido takes about a decade.

    :)
     
  4. F. King Daniel

    F. King Daniel Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    I don't recall if it's from the TOS series or a novel or The Making of Star Trek, but the Enterprise computer was said to be the equal of the Federation's very best and had virtually infinite storage space. So why not cram absolutely everything in just in case a tiny tidbit became useful 100 years later?

    (except for references to the Borg or the Ferengi or "holes in space" of course:p)
     
  5. AgentCoop

    AgentCoop Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

    How come when Worf throws a Klingon word into the conversation (or when any alien character speaks their own language) the universal translator doesn't translate it?
     
  6. F. King Daniel

    F. King Daniel Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Why do they sometimes have to press their commbadges in TNG but other times just talking into the air suffices?
     
  7. Nerys Myk

    Nerys Myk A Spock and a smile Premium Member

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    You're right!

    They should have gotten a real Scotsman for Scotty, instead of Canadian James Doohan.

    And Kirk should be layed by an American, not a Canadian like William Shatner.

    Whats with casting an American as Uhura? Were there no East African actors available? She should have made the character an American.

    Sulu? That's not even a Japanese name. So Why cast Takei?
     
  8. Dale Sams

    Dale Sams Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    I *think* the common held answer for "Why did Khan age and no one else in TWOK" is that, being the leader, he worked harder than everyone else and 'sacrificed years off his lifespan to save his people'....or something like that.

    But STID inadvertently solves this problem by making Khan have Magic Blood. Khan constantly giving transfusions is a better solution.
     
  9. T'Girl

    T'Girl Vice Admiral Admiral

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    But it did seem to be strangely slow when it came to information retrieval. Searches often took several minutes, and as you noted couldn't produce information that realistically should have been in there.

    :)
     
  10. USS Triumphant

    USS Triumphant Vice Admiral Admiral

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    The ship's internal sensors could tell that if the doors opened, Spock would be off-balance, whereas Riley would not be, so they opened for Riley's convenience, but stayed closed to keep Spock on his feet.
    Troi would be able to tell you think she's a sucker, too. And by the late 23rd century, 5 card stud and Fizzbin are the games to play. ;) And if you want to get into combat tactics, why do they even allow the crew to be involved beyond saying "attack" at all? A computer's response times would be insanely faster.
    Memory Alpha might not always be available. And in a world where information is stored digitally and can be changed even retroactively with near zero effort, having copies of the information all over the place is a strategy for keeping the record HONEST - this is a problem we are dealing with NOW, in fact.
    If English is "Standard", and it seems to be, then it seems logical to me that, much like the way well-educated Indian speakers have a British accent now, so would it be for most of Standard-speaking Eurasia.
    Being on a ship gets you out away from the regime back on Earth, and there are some disturbing things about the way things are run on the Federation homeworlds. DS9 gave us a peek at that, but if you consider the implications of all the tech and social dogma we've seen, it would pretty much HAVE to be even worse than we know from screen canon.
    Surak came to the conclusions on his own. His early adherents were probably enthusiastic, too. But once it had time to become dogmatic, there's probably a lot of Vulcans who are caught between thinking it is the proper way to live and simultaneously resenting the hell out of it.
    Comm system and translator AI beyond anything we have now - perhaps it picks up on his speech pattern to clue it in, or per another haps, it determines this by the fact that Worf is normally speaking unbroken Standard, so if he has thrown a Klingon word in, he has obviously done it on purpose.
    The same AI I just mentioned is pretty good at picking up on vocal and somatic clues as part of its UI. But not perfect, and also, sometimes people just like to fondle their brooch. :D
     
  11. F. King Daniel

    F. King Daniel Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    About the Admirals or Commodores or other Captains being crazy or incompetent in Trek, I suspect minor brain damage from years and years of transporter use and exposure to warp fields and exotic forms of radiation.
     
  12. Dale Sams

    Dale Sams Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    How long did the Enterprise have to sit in orbit waiting for help after 'The Paradise Syndrome'? Two months have already gone by with no help arriving, so obviously they're way out there.
     
  13. Robbiesan

    Robbiesan Lieutenant Commander Red Shirt

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    During TOS, it was fairly common for all kinds of ethnic people to play Asians. Then you have crazy things like Ricardo Montebahn playing Khan who is a Sikh but never adopts the affectations of a Sikh regarding their spiritual practices (a point very well explained by TheRealKingDaniel in his Imponderables youtube shorts).

    Some of that is excusable but embarrassing writing by early writers or them simply feeling such details were unimportant as the average American probably had no idea what a Sikh believed or did within their culture. It was a different time.

    To do this in later series was a big mistake, particularly because Star Trek is an international phenomena. If an actor is good enough to be on the series, heck embrace his/her background and incorporate it into the show. Linda Park is Korean, so the writers could have included every Asian detail in the same manner but not switching it to Japanese culture. Things like her name, her background, her cooking, her martial arts training, etc. This is so simple to do.

    The same is true of Patrick Stewart. He's a fine actor. Let him be English and especially since he can't seem to remember that he's French (saying things like schedule as shhed ule really gives this away).

    The back story is that Hoshi had a black belt in Aikido before she joined Starfleet Academy, was running an quasi-illegal honor code violation poker game, and broke the arm of the captain who caught her doing it. Then nothing about those two things plays any role within the story, previous stories, previous examples of her performing those things, etc. It's a classic non sequiter. It also doesn't make sense that a person booted out of Starfleet would have then been on the maiden voyage especially since there likely would be other linguists who had followed protocol. Remember, the Vulcans are watching over the shoulder of Starfleet even about minutia.

    Here's an imponderable about Enterprise episode "Observer Effect:
    The Organians are inhabiting the crew of the Enterprise to observe the way that they respond to a contagious disease from a particular planet with a silicon based virus. In effect, the Organians are the observers and using a form of the Prime Directive, far before Starfleet adopts that principle.

    Cruelly, they observe and have been observing for many hundreds...perhaps thousands of years when this sort of event happens. They dispassionately watch and then collect the data, but don't involve themselves.

    Right away, the cruelties of such a form of observation are evident. When it becomes apparrent that Hoshi and Trip will die, the crew are deeply concerned, and a dialogue between the observing Organians demonstrates that one of them believes they should interfere and help the Humans.

    What this really is setting up that the Prime Directive is evil through inaction, and hence not moral, and should not be the way an advanced species deals with species who don't have the same level of technology.

    And yet, this is one of the events in Captain Archer's life that will eventually lead to the Prime Directive...

    The Prime Directive has always been a bigoted form of noninterferrence solely based upon warp drive technology. Can you think of anything more ridiculous? Why would this even matter? Say a race has advanced genetics skills, the best medicine in the galaxy, the most advanced linguistic ability, the best architects found anywhere, the most wonderful musicians, etc. Nope, sorry...you're a backward species.
     
    Last edited: Jan 18, 2014
  14. USS Triumphant

    USS Triumphant Vice Admiral Admiral

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    I don't *think* anything in canon has established that what makes a civilization worthy is necessarily warp drive - warp drive (or presumably any other fast interstellar transport system) is just a dead giveaway that the PD is moot for that civilization, because they are now out looking for other civilizations to interfere with them.

    A few of the novels have said that there is a complex system of civilization analysis involved that gives a civ a score and determines if they are ready for contact or not, and interstellar drive is only one factor in calculating that score among others such as those you mentioned here. I like that concept.
     
  15. Robbiesan

    Robbiesan Lieutenant Commander Red Shirt

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    http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Prime_Directive
    The link above is pretty exhaustive in an attempt to track down the examples of observing and not interfering with pre-warp civilizations. The major exception has to do with the Omega Molecule and suspending the Prime Directive due to urgency.
     
  16. USS Triumphant

    USS Triumphant Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Here is another imponderable for me: torpedoes have their own propulsion and guidance systems. So what, exactly, is so difficult about pushing one set to passive out of a cloaked ship, then moving away and activating it? I mean, I understand that the BoP from ST VI was supposed to be special because it could fire torpedoes out while cloaked, but to me, that just seems like a bad idea - the torp should show up on sensors as soon as it's out of the cloak. You'd want to MOVE AWAY first before it shows up on sensors.
     
  17. Robbiesan

    Robbiesan Lieutenant Commander Red Shirt

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    Sensors have been with us since the fifties. Inexpensive temperature and humidity sensors are so useful that lots of factories have them to tune the controls within compartmentalized production areas. By the 22nd Century, one would expect sensors everywhere looking across the electromagnetic spectrum frequencies and reporting back to a central sensor network, and reporting any anomalies on a room by room basis.

    And yet, we have anomalous intruders and phenomena that the crew have to hunt down, isolate, locate, etc. That makes no sense.

    While the hunting aspects adds to the claustrophic effects of that, or peril, a lot more interesting science could have been discussed, tactics due to sensor detection, creative strategies using one's noggin instead of fists or phasers, etc.
     
  18. Nerys Myk

    Nerys Myk A Spock and a smile Premium Member

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  19. Dale Sams

    Dale Sams Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    I hadn't even heard of this episode, and the premise sounded great so I ran to watch it on Netflix...

    ...in the words of that little kid neighbor of The Incredibles Family...."That was awesome!!!" That was the best PD episode I've ever seen.
     
  20. USS Triumphant

    USS Triumphant Vice Admiral Admiral

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    ^ This, plus, they regularly forget that they can isolate deck sections with force fields and then pump gas in. Really, if it was my ship, I would have the computer programmed to automatically grab ANYONE who was onboard without an authorized communicator pin and beam them straight to the brig, and then program timed exceptions for expected guests - who would still get beamed straight to the brig if they somehow managed to enter secured areas I didn't want them in.