I have a holodeck question or two

Yeah that episode stands out a bit. How exactly did that work I wonder

 

It turned Janeway Klingon in the same episode. Unless that was surgical alteration.

 

No doubt the same way any non-pregnant actress wears a prosthetic to simulate pregnancy, just with a holographic prosthetic. The "kick" is presumably a bit of force-field manipulation against Torres's belly underneath, probably not as authentic as the real thing.

Janeway starts as a Klingon in the holodeck and is human in sickbay while the Hirogen medic confirms her injuries aren't fatal. Presumably that would take priority over undoing cosmetic surgery, so that suggests the appearance change is holographic. Although her Klingon uniform remains, so it must be real.

 

How about something I don't recall seeing much of, but considering the way online interactions have developed in the real world in recent years with 3D chat rooms or "virtual worlds," as well as online gaming... real-time holographic interaction with other users located somewhere else entirely? We've certainly seen holographic communications from time to time, especially in Discovery, but what about purely recreational use? Like connecting with a handful of different people throughout the sector for a laser tag match or a LARP session or perhaps certain more personal types of interaction. You'd have to be careful about connecting with anyone too far away when it comes to subspace range, or with an unstable connection.

Kor

 

Jamiroquai was doing that in the 90s

 

You'd think rather than having actual families on board the Enterprise, you could just set up some time in the holodeck throughout the week, to spend with your family, just like it's your actual home, but you both inhabit avatars of yourself from remote locations.

 

Except that the original reason for having families on the ship (which was pretty promptly abandoned, admittedly) was that it was meant to be traveling in deep uncharted space, possibly not getting back to a Federation port for years at a time; the idea was that few would commit to being away from their families for that long. Presumably real-time communication wouldn't be easily achieved over such a distance, certainly not with the bandwidth to allow holocomms.

In the series we actually got, with the E-D hanging around the Federation and its neighbors much more than originally envisioned, the rationale for having families aboard is less clear, but whatever it is, it probably wouldn't be satisfied by long-distance comms, even immersively realistic ones.

In my alternate-timeline Voyager novel Myriad Universes: Places of Exile, Voyager was stranded permanently in the Delta Quadrant, but eventually established regular contact with the Federation and used holocomms for "reunions" with their families.

 

He's always been ahead of the game

 

If sometimes something doesn't make sense on the holodeck, one option would be to accept it and not let some weird thing ruin an entire episode =)
After all, in the pilot of TNG holodecks were a new thing, maybe development continues and they work differently in some episodes?

 

Except Janeway later said she'd played Flotter & Trevis holoprograms as a child. I figured that holodecks themselves weren't new in TNG, just that they were a luxury that starships didn't normally have before then, something you'd only expect to find in an amusement park or something. Although, of course, TAS: "The Practical Joker" established a holographic rec deck on the Enterprise nearly a century earlier. But perhaps that was a prototype that was abandoned for a while after the mishap in that episode, and it took a few generations to become accepted.

 

Kids and their imagination. =)
I'm going too precise here but I wonder did she mean she played those things on a holodeck or was it something like holoprojections or something? Maybe I should delete the latest sentence, it's silly, but here goes anyway. =)

When Picard and Riker riker were getting to know the holodeck better (in 11001001, right?) they were amazed by what the holodeck could do.
It appeared like they were experiencing something completely revolutionary, even if they may have been to the best holodecks that were not on a starship.

 

Holodeck history has always been inconsistent. The characters act like it's new technology in TNG. The Voyager characters had holodecks when they were children. Lower Decks characters are just as in awe of the holodeck as everyone in TNG S1. Disco had a holodeck while they were still in the 23rd century.

 

Which episode? I must have missed that scene

 

Lethe from S1. Lorca and Tyler are fighting holographic Klingons.

 

Oh ok I mus'nt have been paying attention. Well there you go even Discovery had a holodeck

 

I still wonder whether one could create circumstances where the holodeck couldn't compensate for. For example, by entering the holodeck with an inflexible straight rod, of some hard material, longer than the length of the holodeck, carried by a chain of people that also hold each other's hand, so that the holodeck cannot dematerialize any part of the rod to maintain the illusion.

 

Didn't Data just throw his communicator against the wall in Ship in a Bottle? I don't think you have to go out of your way to break the illusion, the holodeck is sometimes used to fool people but that's not its intended purpose so I don't think the computer is programmed to actively stop people from messing with the walls for example. Not letting people run into walls is a safety feature, not a way to trick them.

 

True. But I've heard proponents of the 'the holodeck is very good at maintaining the illusion' theory explain that away as 'the holodeck could have compensated for that if the action had been anticipated, it's simply that this was a rather unexpected action from Data', which I think has some merit. I was talking about a test the holodeck couldn't compensate for in any circumstance.

And not necessarily 'trick' them, but 'keeping the illusion intact' would count too. I mean, if I programmed the holodeck to display a very long and iconic avenue I'd want to walk down (let's say, from La Défense towards the Place de la Concorde in Paris), it would rather break immersion if I'd have to turn every 15 meters or so just to avoid bumping into the wall, wouldn't it?

 

I used to consider a similar loophole, that maybe she experienced a non-holographic version of Flotter & Trevis. But that isn't what was implied, and Enterprise, Discovery, and TAS have all depicted holographic technology existing in the 22nd-23rd century. So the preponderance of evidence now outweighs early TNG's assumptions.

Creating fiction is a process of trial, error, and refinement. Things are tried out and improved or discarded along the way. That's why we no longer talk about James R. Kirk of the UESPA ship Enterprise and his part-Vulcanian first officer. It's why Data's early use of contractions and ability to show emotions is no longer acknowledged, and why Picard no longer has the Chekov-like exaggerated pride in French culture that he had in season 1. The universe is rewritten as it goes, and a lot of early-installment weirdness is best ignored rather than worried over.

This is often a problem with long-running fictional universes, especially when they include prequels. Something that's new to the audience is often presented as new to the characters, because the characters can explain it to the audience by explaining it to each other. But once it's established, that often doesn't make sense anymore. For instance, when "The Savage Curtain" was made, Vulcan's role in the Federation was ill-defined, so it could've been a recent enough member that it was plausible that Kirk had never heard of Surak. But later works established that Vulcans had been Earth's first alien contact and co-founders of the Federation, which retroactively makes Kirk's ignorance of Surak make him seem like an uneducated fool, like someone who's never heard of Socrates or the Buddha.

Roddenberry himself saw ST as a dramatization of the Enterprise's "actual" missions, subject to artistic license and adaptational error, which is why he felt free to reinvent things as he went, like changing the Klingons' appearance and all Starfleet tech and costume design in TMP. Sometimes, if there's a scene where a character needs something explained to them when later stories establish that it should've been common knowledge, we can assume that the explanation scene was merely a literary device added to the dramatization as a convenient way to explain the idea to the audience.

No, they weren't amazed by the holodeck itself, but by the Bynars' improvement in the AI programming, allowing Minuet to interact with them like a realistic person rather than merely acting out a preprogrammed NPC script. This was three episodes after "The Big Goodbye," so it's not as if they lacked experience with the holodeck in general by that point. As Picard said to Minuet, "The holodeck has been able to give us woodlands and ski slopes, figures that fight and fictional characters with which we can interact, but you, you're very different. You adapt." Although it turned out that Minuet was a distraction programmed by the Bynars and went away at the end, so presumably that interactive AI upgrade didn't persist (although I've often thought a residue of that code may have been an ingredient in Moriarty's programming).

Also they used holocommunicators routinely in season 1. The difference is that the holograms in Discovery were intangible, visual-only. The advance by the time of "The Practical Joker" and later in TNG was the ability to make the holograms tangible with shaped force fields, although in "Joker" it was limited to environments, not characters.

In theory, I doubt it could compensate, but how would you get it in there? Unless the entrance is at the end of a really long, straight corridor, instead of opposite a wall as we usually see, you wouldn't be able to rotate the rod to get it through the door. Unless you beamed it in. But where would it have been built in the first place? The shuttlebay?

Also, why would anyone do that? Heck of a lot of trouble to go to just to mess with a holodeck. Unless it's part of the equivalent of "Enterprise bingo" for some ship's lower-deckers.

The thing that bugs me is, in "Take Me Out to the Holosuite," how did they fit two entire baseball teams, their coaches, the umpire, and several live spectators into one of Quark's suites, which we'd seen to be way too small to accommodate that many people? Even with light distortions and forcefield treadmills and such, the players would need enough room to swing bats and dive after balls and so forth. So either Quark had a much bigger holosuite than the ones we usually saw, or the participants were networked in from multiple smaller suites.

 

Of course, there'd be no practical use whatsoever

For me, it's just about the challenge to find a thought experiment that the 'the holodeck could maintain illusion under nearly any circumstance' proponents can't wave away easily.