A window on a starship wouldn't work. For proof, turn on the lights in your house and look out the window at night. All you'd see in the window is the bridge crew's reflection. It's why IRL, astronauts don't have lights inside their helmets. You wouldn't be able to see anything outside the window.
Indeed. It only works if you keep things darker inside than out.
And even if that weren't an issue (perhaps less on DSC than in the Abrams films?
), a bridge window would still give you a fairly narrow field of vision. At best, you're going to be able to see maybe 90 degrees side to side, and even less than that top to bottom (not least because of the saucer section blocking the view). Basically it would provide a wedge of a dorsal, fore-facing view, and that's it; for anything else you'd be SOL. Sensors, OTOH (even simple optical ones), can throw the view from
any direction up on that viewscreen in an instant.
...It just made sense that it should be the same prop since the trend with technology is to combine as many functions into a device as we can.
But why does it make sense to expect that current trends in technology would continue for the next 250 years?
The problem is: It doesn't look futuristic anymore to modern viewers. They are used to smartphones with apps. That's not a problem of the show, but with the viewers. But a good show would try to ease viewers in this regard anyway. Introducing simply one device that can do everything would be a way.
But this is where canon and the whole prime timeline argument comes into play: It's essentially unimportant if that technological development was made in the 23rd century or the 24th, it's still the future. But in-universe there is a clear progression bar, that would be destroyed. Thus, every prequel show IS restricted in how it can portray the future - thus even looking somewhat like retro-future sometimes (which is bad for Star Trek!). While a simple sequel show (set in real-time distance after TNG) could easily ignore everything and be as futuristic as modern day viewers expect from a space opera show.
Some interesting points overall, but I can't agree with all of your assumptions. Why would a degree of retro-futurism be "
bad for Star Trek"?
Firefly had a healthy dose of retro-futurism in its design. So did
Dark Matter.
NuBSG had a friggin'
ton of it... Adama even had
corded phones on his bridge. Audiences never seemed to mind any of it. And unlike Trek none of those shows even had a nostalgia factor involved, never mind established continuity.
No, if I remember correctly the translator is shipboard. And where is it a tracking device?
Sure, it was built into the ship's computer (and particularly Uhura's comm station). But landing parties never needed to carry a dedicated translator (except when encountering wildly different life forms like the Companion in "Metamorphosis"). I always took it as understood that the capability was built into the communicators.
And beyond "understood," it was
explicit that they served as tracking devices... they were used that way to locate people for beam-up time and again!
The computer also keeps track of all personnel and monitors their brainwaves.
How do you figure? If that were the case, the entire plot of "Court Martial" would fall apart. Am I forgetting some later episode that established this?
The Star Trek world also had a pretty large reset throughout the 21st century.
Indeed! It puzzles me to see so many people speculate about Trek's technology as an extrapolation of our own, as if they've forgotten that in Trek's reality, Earth suffered devastating global (or at least regional) wars in the 1990s, the 2020s, and (especially) the 2050s. That's the sort of thing that can throw any predictable course of tech development off-track, and quite plausibly require lots of things to be reinvented, or at least reconceptualized and taken in different directions. For that matter, what little we
do know about the history of tech development in Trek's reality includes the fact that much of it in the late 20th century was derived from reverse-engineered future tech, and that much of the emphasis in the 21st century (when not derailed by the wars) was on space travel and exploration, to a far greater extent than in our reality. Seems to me like more than enough to justify any differences from present-day expectations.
