Season 2 idea: meat rendering plant and agricultural farm on Discovery

Hear me out on this one.

Discovery is maybe going to be going on a deep space mission in an age before replicators or spacecraft with huge amounts of storage space. Wouldn't it make sense for the ship to be self-sufficient when it comes to food provisions? If the crew can raise and slaughter their own crops and animals, they'll be able to venture much further before having to make a pit stop for supplies.

A character whose whole job is to work in the slaughterhouse and on the crops all day could also be an interesting addition to the crew. They could do a day in the life episode to show how stuff like harvesting corn and beheading cows is done in the 23rd century!

 

The starship butcher? I think cowherd or dairy farmer would have wider audience appeal . Nevertheless I don't think that would fit in with the tone they are going for on Discovery.

 

Have you seen TOS????

 

During the TOS era starships didn't have replicators, but they had "food synthesizers" which did essentially the same thing from a story purpose, even if they might not have been as advanced.

Stepping outside of canon for a second, presuming deep space missions without resupply, crew would eat mostly vegetarian meals. Bringing livestock into space would require growing crops to feed the livestock, which is 90% less efficient than just growing plants to eat. Some low-level aquaculture with fish fed by algae tanks could be possible however.

Also stepping out of Trek canon, considering we have 3D printers which can print food like, right now, there's no reason to think more advanced versions of the same don't exist by the time of DIS.

 

Food Synthesizers are VHS to Food Replicators' DVD. Eventually colored cubes became passe.

Though food synthesizers could make chicken soup, much to the shock of a 20th Century Air Force Guard who was beamed aboard the Enterprise in "Tomorrow Is Yesterday". So maybe the Food Synthesizer is more like Laser Disc.

 

Out of curiosity, which tone are we talking about?

If it's the super-grimdark, maybe the slaughterhouse operator could have, say, a drug addiction, or be a murderer in his spare time. Maybe he's leaking information to the Romulans about advanced Federation food processing techniques that could lead to an outbreak of war.

If it's the violence and gore angle you're talking about, well, it doesn't get much gorier than cattle processing, live on camera!

 

Doesn't Discovery already have replicators?

 

"Matter Synthesizers"

 

Sure looked like a replicator when Burnham made her new uniform.

Same dumb thing Enterprise did with phase cannons, hull plating and protein resequencers.

 

Come off it, already. It would be so much easier for some people if that's what Discovery did, so they could say all their exaggerations about the series are true. But they're not. All they are are exaggerations.

 

Why is it dumb? Food Synthesizers make food. Matter Synthesizers make the non-edible stuff. Like the guns in "A Private Little War" or the uniforms in "Patterns of Force".
I don't see the problem with the Enterprise terms. Language evolves and grows. Technical terms are often based on previous ones. The technology it's self also evolves. The gap between ENT and TOS isn't so great that a similarity in tech and nomenclature is impossible.

 

I'm in no way convinced that I understand the point of all this.

 

Admittedly, Discovery will probably have a much lighter tone for Season 2 given the arrival of Captain Pike, and taking into account interview statements made by SMG. So, grimdark and gore may not be applicable. But that wouldn't prevent the overall concept from happening!

 

No, but the technology of the 23rd Century would.

 

Troll thread.

 

vat grown meat is a possibility now, albeit extremely expensive. There's no need to ranch beefalos on Deck 8 for the captain's birthbay barbeque. The Soviets were working on protein synthesis back in the 80s. Parts of the DISCO uniform are 3d printed NOW.

They don't need starship ranches/butchers/red shirt gauchos: 3d printing food is almost a real thing, and no one ever saw TOS crew doing the laundry. There.

 

This is a really convincing argument - but how do we reconcile the fact that in Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country, we clearly see a fully operational kitchen, where people are making things with ingredients? There is also what appears to be a frozen turkey sitting out on a countertop. If it were possible to replicate or 3D print food, why would they need an entire turkey? Let alone individual ingredients? You could just print out the whole dinner and be done with it.

 

why do Klingons starve and eat human scalp when they have power to keep anti-gravity on. Trek doesn't really make any sense if you focus in too clearly

 

I agree with this. Maybe Nero's incursion brought with it advanced replicator technology into the Discoverse, and so it's only in the Prime timeline that people still cook and need to have cattle ranches on their starships for deep space missions during the Kirk era? IDK.

 

Edit: I see synthetic meat has already been pointed out.