Conversely, I think operating within the parameters established before makes more sense than increasing Trek tech based on contemporary knowledge, because I don't see how your conclusion follows from your premise here. After all, it's fiction — none of the tech is real, and it's not supposed to be an extrapolation from real-world 2018. Our present is not the past of Trek's setting. Its own established history is.
Except that
Star Trek was created to be forward-looking, cutting-edge science fiction, not just an exercise in cozy nostalgia for a past vision of the future. We already have
Star Wars for that. The details of the tech don't matter -- they're just means to the end of telling stories about ideas and values. And the ideas driving
Star Trek are about looking forward to the future, building a better world for our descendants. It's not about the exact details of the technology, it's about the abstract ideals they embody, ideals of progress and scientific utopianism. No, it's not literally an extrapolation from the present, but it's symbolically a representation of where we could go in the future if we keep striving forward. So the vision driving it should be forward-looking, not nostalgic.
And, ultimately, it's always been made for the audiences of the time, so what really matters is how it plays today to modern audiences, including non-fans, casual fans, hardcore fans, and everything in-between.
Exactly. The thing that allows a franchise to endure is its ability to attract new fans. A respect for nostalgia has to be balanced with an embrace of modernity. People who really love a franchise should
want it to evolve and attract new audiences, because that's the only way it can live on. Instead of getting upset when a franchise no longer appeals exclusively to our tastes and expectations, we should be grateful that it's adapting itself to draw in a new generation of fans, so that it can live on after us.
It's not about "canon." It's about what works as a theatrical effect--since a STAR TREK episode is, in a very real sense, a performance. It's theater as much as its an intellectual exercise in world-building, which means you have to take the effect on the audience into account.
Well said. Any depiction of the future is figurative and symbolic, because of course we can't know what the real future will look like. We can try to make it feel plausible, but the most plausible future in one decade is bound to seem dated and fanciful a couple of decades later. So the only way to maintain a consistent feel of being futuristic, or plausible, or whatever effect you're going for, is to update with the times.
Like I said, ENTERPRISE already made that irrelevant a century earlier. The idea of cloaking being new tech in TOS is retconned, which is fine as it has no impact on the actual story of "Balance of Terror". It's still about our heroes trying to find an invisible ship. Whether it was new tech or not isn't the point.
Also, cloaking has been "new" many times in Trek history. They could see the visual distortion of Klingon cloaks in ST III but that distortion was gone by ST VI. They found a way to detect cloaked ships by engine exhaust in ST VI but it was gone by TNG. The Mirror Klingons had cloaks in "Crossover" but not in "The Emperor's New Cloak." The logical interpretation is that cloaking is not one technology, but multiple distinct technologies, each of which is rendered obsolete once a means is discovered to penetrate it. So cloaking is a technology that goes through cycles of obsolescence and reinvention, an ongoing arms race between stealth and detection.
