The Franz Joseph Constitution-class deck plans have a telescope in the physics lab that takes up the aft section of decks 2 and 3.
Do starships have traditional optical cameras?
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
- Start date
Not the same as old school proper lenses and optics hehe.
I did not know that that's nice to know they put that in there.
OK how about audio?
How was the NX01 able to hear people speaking on the surface of a planet while in orbit? I assume later ships like the Enterprise we all know and love have this ability.
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It would potentially work much better
Sounds right to me. What's said in the dialogue is that it was "emitting" a "scattering field" which was "scrambling" their "optical processors."
Yep, and it even pops up onscreen when V'Ger is running through the ship's library records in TMP!
Further, having "always liked" that detail, Doug Drexler paid homage to FJ and "borrowed" it for a cutaway of his own, which was eventually used in the second part of "In A Mirror, Darkly" (ENT)—though without the according "Stellar Cartography" label as shown in that link, and albeit not clearly discernible on camera. (Of course, by his comments, he seems to have allowed for the possibility that it might just be "a thing that looks like a telescope" too.)
-MMoM
I was going to post something along these lines. If you can cloak a ship or project a hologram, you can generate lenses and mirrors at will. You don't even need a full holodeck style touchable hologram. It just has to bend light. In fact, they could be superior if you can narrowly select which EM bands you're bending. Less noise. Even better if you can make them perfectly smooth. A large part of the cost of physical telescopes is the amount of grinding and polishing required to get the mirrors sufficiently smooth and shaped.
TBH, I'd expect a lot of the sensors on these ships would need massive focusing elements, so virtual lenses would probably be active at all times. You might also have bussard-like forcefield funnels for baryon collection.
I wonder what an optical telescope the size of Spacedock would see? Especially if it were stationed just outside the solar system.
With the lag free comms of Star Trek such a machine would see a hell of a lot. What would you want it to see?
The other side of the universe as it exists now.
Well it could probably do that. A massive optical telescope that orbits the outer edge of the solar system would be fantastic to have. Imagine the things we could see, and if we had the lag free comms tech they have in Star Trek I mean can you imagine the pictures that thing would beam home?
If you're willing to haul something the size of spacedock out to the stellar boonies, you could build a much smaller sensor platform that uses the sun as a gravitational lens for even better effect.
There's also the Argus Array from TNG, which appeared to be sited in deep space. It's method of operation is completely unknown. It might be a series of generators for giant virtual lenses, or subspace sensing may not have a need for such things.
Those comms are only lag free if you're close enough to a relay station. Get far enough out and it quickly lags into hours of delay. In no way do you get real time scans without being fairly close (tens of LY) either.
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Even with time lag, it ought to be possible to rig up an optical telescope hundreds of lightyears wide. Just merge data from different starships while taking into account the time it was collected (in this weird absolute-frame-of-reference universe of theirs), and you get the snapshots you want.
Apparently, the point of a subspace telescope would be to get realtime imagery: Argus provided pretty much that in "Parallels", or at least the scenes of Utopia Planitia weren't centuries out of date. But pointing that thing is gonna be the bottleneck issue: the heroes in "Parallels" could readily tell where Argus had been aimed by the bad guys, and this was tiny things such as specific spots on Mars. Trying to get a realtime picture of the Milky Way that way would take billions of years, sorta defeating the very point.
So it's no wonder Starfleet sends out starships that can get to places in realtime, and scan a cylinder a couple of dozen lightyears across on their way there. Covering the whole galaxy in more or less real time would be technologically plausible with a few thousand starships where a few thousand Argus arrays wouldn't have a prayer. Which is extremely good for the writers of "Doomsday Machine" or TWoK or the like! The heroes really have to be there in order to find out that something has happened.
Timo Saloniemi
Apparently, the point of a subspace telescope would be to get realtime imagery: Argus provided pretty much that in "Parallels", or at least the scenes of Utopia Planitia weren't centuries out of date. But pointing that thing is gonna be the bottleneck issue: the heroes in "Parallels" could readily tell where Argus had been aimed by the bad guys, and this was tiny things such as specific spots on Mars. Trying to get a realtime picture of the Milky Way that way would take billions of years, sorta defeating the very point.
So it's no wonder Starfleet sends out starships that can get to places in realtime, and scan a cylinder a couple of dozen lightyears across on their way there. Covering the whole galaxy in more or less real time would be technologically plausible with a few thousand starships where a few thousand Argus arrays wouldn't have a prayer. Which is extremely good for the writers of "Doomsday Machine" or TWoK or the like! The heroes really have to be there in order to find out that something has happened.
Timo Saloniemi
Right, but what does that imply about a "subspace telescope"? That you could get real time data on your near surroundings, but with lag increasing with distance. You could never observe the other side of the universe in anything close to real time. It might be more recent than using EM waves, but maybe not.
Scotty is seen installing a video camera in the ship’s chapel for the Tomlinson/Martine wedding in Balance of Terror.
...Which is an excellent example of something futuristic going on: as mounted, the camera could never hope to film the wedding with traditional optics. It's so low as to be behind the heads of the spectators, locked staring through them at the altar.
Also, since the heroes never needed to mount any cameras in order to capture visuals aboard their ship in other situations, our two choices here would seem to be that the happy couple insisted on using an antique, perhaps a family heirloom. for recording the special event - or that the setup was desirable for making a rare high quality holographic recording when the usual ones computed from standard imagery were of low quality. (Or perhaps the thing was a projector, and there was to be a lightshow later on?)
Timo Saloniemi
Also, since the heroes never needed to mount any cameras in order to capture visuals aboard their ship in other situations, our two choices here would seem to be that the happy couple insisted on using an antique, perhaps a family heirloom. for recording the special event - or that the setup was desirable for making a rare high quality holographic recording when the usual ones computed from standard imagery were of low quality. (Or perhaps the thing was a projector, and there was to be a lightshow later on?)
Timo Saloniemi
The chapel normally does not have recording and broadcasting capability, unlike our current TV-broadcasted church service shows we see every Sunday. There's so many atheists on the ship that the 12 or so religious crewmen will easily fit into the chapel's 24 seating, so, no ship-wide broadcast is needed. Maybe Scotty hooked up the camera again for Kirk's funeral service in the Tholian Web; the room sat 24 and 7 standing in the back (in the photo below, there's a guy off camera holding the door open) out of a crew of 428. Maybe the rest of the crew were on duty or they didn't really like the Captain.
In reality, they probably used every uniform available in the costume department, or ran out of money to pay the extras. 
