Archers quaters was what he used a ready room and may have like the conference room
"Enterprise" too advanced for 22nd Century
- Thread starter CaptainSpirk
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A
A true line of thought as to all prototypes and advancements to come
You know what I liked that look that they gave all the consoles and screens. Another thing if you look close is that they have tactile buttons, so no real use of touch interfaces on screens, and lots of numeric keypads. Real buttons and switches. No fancy LCARS rubbish
It looks to me like it fits the period depicted quite well.
Looking at my ipad I'm writing this on Enterprise didn't look advanced enough. Tactile buttons ... please. LCARS actually make a lot of sense to use extensively, with limited 80s and 90s technology they were shown as mostly static but actual LCARS would be flexible like our touchscreens today.
I find LCARS confusing in that when we see people use it in the show they seem to press buttons with numbers on them that make no sense, yet the computer knows exactly what they want.
It must be haha.
I bet you had to look at the iPad to type that though, and you are slower then on a physical keyboard. No one would type a 30 page document on a touch keyboard. Look at cars, some car companies, especially Volvo, and Tesla, have moved controls for temperature, air speed, volume, and radio stations to touch displays, meaning you have to take your eyes off the road to make your adjustment. At best this is poor ergonomics, at worst this is actually dangerous. A knob can be operated without taking the eyes off the road. In other areas touch devices are the better solution, especially those involving many complex operations. To stay with cars, touch screens are better suited for making adjustments to things like suspension settings, throttle response etc. It would take many, many buttons, in this case you just need a screen. Plus these functions are used infrequently.
Or take aviation, both Airbus, and Boeing have moved things like the controls for interior lighting to touch devices, so that every airline can set their own color to suit their corporate ID. But no one is even considering moving critical flight controls to touch devices. If an aircraft has a rapid decompression the pilots have roughly 20 seconds to respond, but since they will likely be momentarily blinded since the air is fogged up, and the blood vessels in their eyes have burst, you do not want them dabbing around on a touch screen, you want to give them a physical interface they can operate without seeing.
I can easily imagine a starship hundreds of years from now still using physical interfaces for critical functions.
Good points, I hadn't thought about that. I still think it doesn't look advanced enough though, even if physical interfaces are used Enterprise used them too much for my tastes.
Why use a physical button to open a door for example? Why not a touchpad that can be illuminated if necessary and have several modes ranging from being a simple "open" button to a num pad for access codes? It would be more flexible.
And you're right, typing 30 pages on a touchpad isn't something I'd want to do but by the 22nd century voice recognition should make that a non issue, I hope that works reliably by then.
That's because the numbers aren't supposed to be visible. Michael Okuda designed LCARS before there was HDTV, and the expectation was that viewers wouldn't be able to see the consoles clearly enough to read the text on the control pads. So, to save time and effort, they just put on random numbers to suggest text rather than going to the trouble of coming up with actual text. It's the lorem ipsum principle.
So presumably, in-universe, the buttons have actual legible text on them. Although if you wanted to, you could rationalize the seemingly random numbers as a security feature -- the console functions are encrypted so that people who don't know the codes can't use them. Although that seems overly paranoid for Starfleet, and I'm sure we've seen examples of civilians or intruders managing to operate ship controls well enough.
That's where haptic feedback comes in. According to the TNG Tech Manual, the touchscreens include a "transducer matrix" that generates tactile feedback so users can feel the buttons without needing to see them. There's a similar technology used in advanced touchscreens today, using vibrating actuators under the touchscreen that create the tactile impression of a textured surface: http://blog.caranddriver.com/we-try...ouch-screen-are-touched-by-its-effectiveness/
By the time of Voyager, I would have expected hologrammatic interfaces, with hologram generators in the console overlaying the traditional LCARS interface, so that the user could generate and customise whatever control layout and format they are most comfortable with (a bit like that time Moriarty gave the Enterprise a shake with a lever in the holodeck), or when the steam train was going to Verteron City.
It always made me giggle a bit, Tom Paris' hot rod Delta Flyer, with a traditional LCARS console for attitude control, and buttons and levers for the trivial, non-immediate stuff, where I would have expected it the other way around. But the potential for a starship with a steering wheel and gear shift (to select Warp numbers) would have been a nice bit of hologrammatic goofiness.
It always made me giggle a bit, Tom Paris' hot rod Delta Flyer, with a traditional LCARS console for attitude control, and buttons and levers for the trivial, non-immediate stuff, where I would have expected it the other way around. But the potential for a starship with a steering wheel and gear shift (to select Warp numbers) would have been a nice bit of hologrammatic goofiness.
Nice idea, but the reason for the touchscreen displays was budgetary and practical. It was cheaper to print out a transparency made with a simple graphics program and backlight it than it was to build physical controls, and the conceit that the buttons could be reprogrammed to serve different functions gave the actors more flexibility in the motions they performed on the set. In-universe, a Trek-style hologram could create any "solid" controls on request, but in real life, the set decorators would have to physically build and install them each time, and that would've taken more time and money.
To this day, I still wish that the 'hero ship' had been a Daedalus-Class.
Damn the real world getting in the way of all the 'cool' ideas. It's like that 3D holo-communicator they trialed briefly in DS9, a nice idea on paper, but didn't look too convincing on film, and made shooting on the set impractical.
Maybe as a rare use option to show that the technology existed, say when Voyager had to land on a planet, and dealing with atmospheric flight and reconfigured control surfaces needed a whole new control method, but they obviously don't have time to install new console fascias.
What am I thinking? They already did it. Barclay in the holodeck in the Nth Degree.
That would be cool. A starship bridge gets destroyed in action, and the surviving bridge crew make it to the holodeck, and order it to activate the back-up bridge!
Personally, I think the tech and visuals of Enterprise were great. Remember this was produced in 2001, and set in 2150. And already some of the tech even now looks out of date.
TOS unfortunately has to now be seen as an outlier-- it was designed in 1965, a very different time in projecting what tech would look like in 300 years, and had limited resources of the time for sets and props.
I think one attempt they made to get around a lot of the visual discrepancies was by making the environment of the ship feel smaller, less open, more rugged, more industrial, less "clean" which helped push the feeling that it was more primitive. I also saw be pretty clever and design the touchscreen interfaces with big bright squares that were reminiscent of TOS' jellybean buttons.
But when discussing this, let's remember what they had to do:
#1: make it look 100-150 years more advanced than the present day (where we had laptops, handheld cell phones, flat-panel TVs, GPS, and other advanced every day tech, with more they had to know soon on the horizon (like smart phones)
#2: visually look 100 years LESS advanced than TOS, much of which itself seems very outdated to contemporary audiences
#3: fit into a well-established technological timeline.
#4: look visually appealing to contemporary audiences
#5: provide enough material to tell the stories they want to create (meaning they needed transporters, phasers, tricorders, communicators, or some iteration of them).
I think considering goals they had to achieve, they got it as good as I could have hoped as a fan, at the time. The only quibble I'd have is the uniforms, actually, which were designed a bit too "present-day flight suit" style for my liking.
TOS unfortunately has to now be seen as an outlier-- it was designed in 1965, a very different time in projecting what tech would look like in 300 years, and had limited resources of the time for sets and props.
I think one attempt they made to get around a lot of the visual discrepancies was by making the environment of the ship feel smaller, less open, more rugged, more industrial, less "clean" which helped push the feeling that it was more primitive. I also saw be pretty clever and design the touchscreen interfaces with big bright squares that were reminiscent of TOS' jellybean buttons.
But when discussing this, let's remember what they had to do:
#1: make it look 100-150 years more advanced than the present day (where we had laptops, handheld cell phones, flat-panel TVs, GPS, and other advanced every day tech, with more they had to know soon on the horizon (like smart phones)
#2: visually look 100 years LESS advanced than TOS, much of which itself seems very outdated to contemporary audiences
#3: fit into a well-established technological timeline.
#4: look visually appealing to contemporary audiences
#5: provide enough material to tell the stories they want to create (meaning they needed transporters, phasers, tricorders, communicators, or some iteration of them).
I think considering goals they had to achieve, they got it as good as I could have hoped as a fan, at the time. The only quibble I'd have is the uniforms, actually, which were designed a bit too "present-day flight suit" style for my liking.
Does anyone know what that word is that a group of actors will say over and over in the background that makes it sound as if a bunch of people are having a conversation?
Walla
There must be another one. A 3 or 4 syllable word I think.
David Gerrold referred to it in one of his behind-the-scenes Trek books (probably The Trouble With Tribbles) as "natter and grommish." "Walla" is the more commonly used term for the practice, though.
Isn't that added in post production? I always thought background extras just move their mouths not saying anything just like there's no music during dance scenes.
