Now I know its only a TV show, but do you ever watch Trek and be slightly irked that the technology sometimes overwrites the plot. In that they often set up that they can basically do anything. Nemesis is a big example, such as "the transporters have failed." When they could have easily used the independent transporters on the numerous shuttles, escape pods, Captains Yacht, etc And then "the destruct sequence has failed." erm, just shoot a phaser on full power at the warp core. The main example I wanna mention is when you often see people complaining about the look of the USS Voyager through the series (skimming through the 'Voyager hate' thread) and how despite all the battles and attacks its taken over the years it always looks clean and pristine every week. Yet the USS Defiant gets into way more battles and skirmishes and also looked fine every time we saw it on Deep Space Nine. People would say the difference is the Defiant could be scrubbed up by DS9's personnel after such battles. What I would say is... what does a Starbase have that Voyager doesn't? More than one Industrial replicator? Voyager probably had at least one on board. (How else did they made the two Delta Flyers?) In the s7 episode "Nightingale" we see Voyager has landed on a planet and the crew is making repairs. Thinking about it I'd imagine actually this happened quite a lot, like maybe every six months or so. Whenever they need do some maintenance they could easily find an uninhabited planet, land the ship, and the whole could work together and patch it up for a few days/weeks. Even questions like where do they get all endless supply of shuttles and torpedoes from? Well where do the Starbases get them from? Surely its just raw materials put together by people. Is there really any reason the engineering crew of Voyager couldn't get the same materials together (from planets, asteroids, wherever) themselves? And with the help of an industrial replicator- hey presto new shuttles and torpedoes. They even did this in Enterprise s1 ("Silent Enemy"), when they were gonna return to Jupiter Station to install the new weapons, but Trip & Reed were just like "we can do it ourselves" and did so. And that was 220 years before Voyager. I mean personally I agree; I'd have liked to have seen Voyager gradually fall apart like in "Year of Hell", Galactica in NuBSG, the NX-01 in ENT s3 etc. But it does kinda make sense with how advanced 24th Century tech is the crew could just fix it up fine themselves. So yeah it's only a TV show and there are lot of things you have to take for granted, but what other examples can you think of or you've noticed when you've thought "why don't they just do so and so?" and what are you thoughts on the Voyager thing?
Yes. 24th century technology is so advanced the writers have to make excuses not to use them to ruin their entire story. This is also what I think is responsible for the decline of Stargate toward the end. At the start they can only travel point to point from specific fixtures and their only alien weapons are just mildly more effective than modern Earth weapons. By the end of the series they have full on Star Trek level technology including warp drive and Asgard transporters.
Except for holodecks, the 22nd and 23rd Century pretty much had everything the 24th Century had. The 24th Century just had improved versions, is all.
Awhile ago I started THIS thread about what Trek would be like if they actually used their technology to the fullest and didn't suffer amnesia at the end of every episode. Transporters the size of a comm badge that can take you anywhere, duplicate you, cure all illness and reverse ageing. A serum that gives humans telekinetic powers. Trek has a terrible track record for introducing status quo-busting changes, using them as one-off solutions and then pretending they never existed.
As for VOYAGER, I just say, "screw it." So what it's always shiney? Do I really NEED to see B'Elanna and an assigned detail buffing the outter hull after every encounter? No. So, I just take it as a sort of "short hand" that it was washed and waxed during the commercials, or between episodes and try to get into whatever the show's about. Yes, it's annoying when we - the audience - are being asked to be moved, emotionally, by someone's ailment, or predicament when the solution's already presented itself in the show, a few episodes prior. Or in the other series. For example, Spock's Fly Boots from STAR TREK 5. There was that time when Picard was stuck in an elevator that had an accident with a bunch of kids. Wouldn't those standard, STARFLEET issue Fly Boots have come in handy, in an elevator shaft? Shouldn't there be a pair in every elevator car? I can only imagine with that amount of thrust at the bottom of your feet, though, you'd never keep your legs and back straight. You'd fly erratically for a few seconds then torpedo yourself into the ground in an instant grave, ready to be covered over.
I noticed that Stargate was being turned into Star Trek, too. Maybe the producers/writers felt their style was being cramped...with the constraints of the stargate network?
Agree with Jirin and 'Frakes...maybe the metal is like a self-cleaning oven? Wonder what a "Platinum Package" Starship Wash costs at Starbase DeltaSonic...??? And, how many attendants does it take to dry a ship? And, how much do you tip them. And, what in the hell do you you tip with? And, finally...which Air Freshener would you choose?
The way their artificial gravity is portrayed, there's no good reason (in-universe) for the turboshafts to have gravity at all. A weightless turboshaft would be more efficient. The only place you need gravity is inside the lift. If you wind up in Picard's position and need to travel through the shaft: Just climb out of the lift into the weightless environment and push off. If turboshafts have gravity all throughout that requires the lift to climb against it and allows for accidents: then 24th-century tech is too advanced for its own good.
Turboshafts could have gravity as a result of "bleed-over" from the various decks with gravity all around them.
Re Voyager: Maybe Seven built in some Borg ship-regen tech at some point and we were just never told. And Year of Hell was 1) too much for it, and/or 2) maybe damaged the regen tech itself sufficiently that it didn't function. I could see her doing that without permission, then Janeway giving her an angry "you better clear that sh_t with me from now on" lecture and then giving it a pass.
I don't think it's the shiny look necessarily, but how much threat the crew is perceived to be in. It's like the difference between being in a Spanish galleon vs. a modern cruise-ship. It just didn't feel quite as "final frontier"-like anymore. The Equinox as portrayed in the 2-parter did a good job of delivering the idea of a crew stretched to the breaking point, but not Voyager itself.
Well, it's not like their whole "lost" situation was that bad in the first place. Voyager was simply in the same spot Kirk and Picard had been in more than once. There was no reason for them to get anxious or desperate when they knew others had been where they'd were.
A starbase gets frequent resupply, voyager all out by itself would not. replicators might be able to fix a lot but they need energy which isn't limitless my Trek tech pet peeve is combadges. They're supposed to replace communicators and be used by away teams on planets, yet any time the ship's computer or internal intercom system is jacked up they fail to work. Archer's and Kirk's communicators may have been bulkier but they were much more useful.
If the replicators are limitless, there really would be nothing to prevent Voyager from producing a fleet, and thus increase their chances of surviving the trip. With that said, there really is nothing the ship can't do, and that turns out to be its greatest weakness. It can go faster than warp, so you gotta shut that down somehow. It can fight off a large Kazon armada, so you have to sabotage it. She can time travel (to be fair, like many other Trek ships anyway), so you introduce the Temporal Prime Directive. But in most cases, had it not been for the demands of maintaining a TV show premise, Voyager would've been home much sooner than 7 years (hell, a time bomb in the pilot would have ended the show on a happy ending for everyone).
It's Gilligan's Island. The professor can make a nuclear reactor out of coconuts but couldn't fix a lousy boat.
Capt. Kathryn Janeway = Capt. Jonas Grumby Ensign Harry Kim = First Mate Gilligan The Doctor = Professor Roy Hinkley Seven of Nine = Ginger Grant B'Elanna Torres = Mary Ann Summers Neelix = Thurston Howell III Kes = Lovey Wentworth Howell
The way I figure it all of these marvelous discoveries solved the immediate problem but they were then relegated to the massive warehouse full of packing crates for Star Fleet experts, the top minds, to analyze and figure out a way to either integrate them into the next line of production ships. In TOS the Federation ran into a lot of great new technology, the Refit incorporated a lot of these which explains the totally different appearance of the new systems and such. What ST-V, TNG and DS-9 discover would be incorporated into the line of ships being designed next, but it takes a few years to get it all together. In one ENT novel you have a newer Earth ship which has Vulcan and Andorian Tech but balancing the systems with existing Earth tech is causing all sorts of headaches.