Spoilers Tech issue with 1x06

All of which are hypotheticals, assuming what the technology can and can't do. Some are based on Twitter posts.

Similarly, people said the holograms we saw in the first episodes were less advanced because they were fuzzy transmissions from other vessels. Now we've seen perfectly solid and indistinguishable-from-reality Klingons on a ship that was far larger than the actual room they were in.

 

But not transmissions from another ship...

It's actually interesting how Lorca and Tyler do their entire shootout in one and the same corridor junction. It's almost as if they were playing inside a set of limited dimensions, and aware of the limitations!

Timo Saloniemi

 

Isn't that exactly what the "It's exactly like a holodeck!" camp are doing?

 

When you see a very well known Trek staple like the holodeck in a show called Star Trek, what's more likely? That it's a holodeck from Star Trek or that it's a much more primative version of a holodeck from Star Trek full of limitations which they just didn't bother to show the audience?

 

Seeing as it's a prequel, I presume the latter until shown otherwise. Why would someone just decide that it must be identical?

 

As Voltaire once said: Remember in the day they looked like Puerto Ricans and they dressed in gold lame. Now they look like heavy metal rockers from the dead with leather pants and frizzy hair and lobsters on their heads.

It was oficially stated that this show was prime timeline canon and since we know that there are no holodecks as capable as the TNG ones around we can conclude that these must be more limited. But I also doubt that the show will less primitive sim rooms because otherwise that tweet wouldn't be very thought-out.

 

I sure hope future eps don't show this simulator being extremely and unquestionably holodeck-like. That would make the board hard to deal with for a few weeks.

 

Except they did show limitations. It needed physical projectors in the room instead of being built in the walls.

I'll have to rewatch, but I don't think Lorca and Tyler were ever a couple feet away from each other during the simulation.

 

When I see a TV set on a show that takes place in the 1950s, I'm not going to automatically assume it's a 4K smart TV until they prove otherwise.

 

Or moved beyond the walls of the actual room they were in. Although the virtual playground sort of invited them to peek around corners, they never did.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Another thing that's frequently overlooked: it's vaguely implied in "11001001" that the holodeck wasn't capable of creating realistic-looking humanoid figures with actualized personalities until the Binars started tinkering with it specifically to give it that capability. Prior to this, it seems like it was only capable of reproducing landscapes and scenery, and maybe its interactive characters weren't particularly realistic in the first place.

More to the point: MOST things on the holodeck aren't actually holograms. The snowballs are an obvious example, but also the water that Wesley falls into in "Encounter at Farpoint." Riker and Data, discussing the workings of the holodeck, compare it to transporter technology and Riker says the rocks and foliage have "simple patterns." So they're not holograms, they're REPLICATIONS.

IOW, the real advanced thing in the Enterprise holodeck was the capacity to create holograms that looked and felt like the real thing (necessary for interactive characters, unless your holodeck is programmed to mass produce humanoid robots on command). This technology probably isn't all that new, to be sure, but it's being combined with advanced artificial intelligence systems in the Enterprise computer AND the flash-replicator systems of the holodeck, so it's an old technology being used in a completely new way.

 

So all the attempts to show how what we saw on Discovery can be justified has failed.

To those who think so, would you really rather not have the tech present in order to conserve continuity over not having a tech that will probably be a reality in the future included which, the absence of would serve to date the show?

 

Holodecks have been around since at least the 5 year mission, and holographic projections were used with only Earth technology in 2153.

Discovery having them in particular is not a canon breaking issue.

 

I would also add that this is probably a difference between the Enterprise holodecks and DS9's holosuites. The former actually reproduces physical analogs of real objects, the latter is literally just hyper-realistic holograms. And this for a station like DS9, which is at least 30 years old by the time we see it for the first time, and it's also a given that the Cardassians are nowhere near as advanced as the Federation at this point.

Discovery's battle simulator is basically the hyper-expensive and Starfleet-use version of what 100 years later becomes consumer-end technology. This shouldn't really be surprising, considering that the world's first digital computers were first used by the Allied military during World War II. The ballistic calculation system on the Iowa class battleship is one of the distant ancestors of the modern personal computer, and the GPCs that were built into the Space Shuttle were close/early cousins of the laptop I'm using to write this message.

 

Or just admit its a reboot, which is clearly what it is. Beyond the technology, and different social values, there's just no way these Klingons line up with the ones from TOS (I'm not talking appearance).

 

If I understand you correctly, I'm not sure Marsh read your entire comment before liking it.

 

Or changed his mind and this is his subtle way of letting us know.

 

Honestly, this makes the continuity more coherent, and ironically what these people see as carelessness was likely a conscious choice by the producers/writers with full understanding of what they were doing. Everything we've heard from them for months now indicates this.

Better question: Would they rather the continuity be that folks like Harry Kim grew up with holodecks their whole life, but Scotty reached his 70s without ever seeing anything like it in his life, so the whole thing developed from nothing to holodeck in just the 50ish years in between... OR that it developed in stages?

I wonder, if Metamorphosis was never produced (the one with Zefram Cochrane), would these people be rejecting First Contact and Enterprise on the basis that warp drive could only exist 30 years TOS, because Pike was telling those humans from 18 years ago how much faster the ships were in The Cage?

The only hypothetical explanation I've seen here is the idea that the holo-stuff is more of Discovery's experimental tech. But that isn't what the bulk of these posts have relied on, and I for one don't buy it anyway.

In fact, what most people seem to be doing is not making assumptions. That is, most people here, like me, as well as the silent majority who didn't even feel the need to bring this up on a discussion forum at all. Really, the only reason we need an "explanation" in the first place is because some people made knee-jerk assumptions like "buhh it's a holodeck" and "buhh it's The Doctor".

If you just take what was actually presented in the shows, then there is literally no inconsistency. You only need to "assume" the technology does not do what it literally has not done in the show. You should understand this, because it's the same basic reasoning you're using to suggest there can't be any holograms around the TOS era. The difference is, you're holding on to an assumption that has now been proven false, and pretending a head-canon inconsistency is a real inconsistency.

None are. The tweet simply confirms that our interpretation matches the writer's intention. Remember, the reason I brought it in was because someone suggested that the writers will in the future write a Ship in a Bottle episode establishing that the technology is equivalent to holodecks. Now what was that about hypotheticals again?

Of course people said that, because they were, and still are. As usual, the problem is you're equating all types of holographic tech. We've actually seen three distinct types so far:

- Full room environment
- Augmented reality
- Portable display

And they've all been presented differently, as they should be. The proto-holodeck is of course the highest definition, then the AR (projecting into a real environment), then the portable version which is basically flat and one-sided (Georgiou's will). And we know all of these will be further refined many years later as we see in TNG and VOY. We're seeing the progression. It works. I'm sorry you can't see that.

 

It works for you.

 

If you really believe that and it helps you enjoy the show, good for you.

Good luck trying to fit the new Klingons and their fleet into the classic Trek universe.