Bad world building of Enterprise

Yeah, that's the same mentality that almost gave us an NX-01 that would look exactly like an Akira class starship.

(The rolleye emoji is not for you, it's for the producers of ENT.)

 

Indeed. But instead we got a ship with perhaps the best thought out details in the trekverse since the original, thanks to designers who really care about their work and subject.

 

Ehh, a 22nd century Romulan BoP with those holographic sensors, antennas, and disruptors, and making those kinds of barrel roll movements would have been pretty unique to see. And something believable in regards as to something the Romulans would do at that particular time, even from the perspective of Romulan military strategy. Could have used it to write out that they had cloaks on their ships and was relegated to mines, too. Of course, higher ups didn’t even want the signature bird on the bottom of its hull when it was first developed, so why would this cool development happen?

Reusing the sensor array from VOY to be the Yosemite 3 space station in ENT made sense, since it look primitive enough to fit in with the 22nd century; reusing a chaotic space hulk to be a Romulan drone ship – especially when they already had a BoP model to use – did not.

Right now, I just want to believe that, canon wise, the Temporal Cold War altered everything about that era.

 

When you just forget the VOY episode, the model fulfills the role well enough. It's not like ship models hadn't been reused in wildly different roles before this ep.

 

I find the constant reuse of models, both physical and CGI, is what made Star Trek look cheap and unoriginal. But that’s just me.

 

Your right. I just think of TOS, where the Romulans just had their BoPs only. And yes, they did have a Warbird too, but that was due to an alliance with the Klingons, so the BoP is the only ship that was truly developed by Romulans. There’s no indication that they ever seriously developed diverse ship designs like in the TNG/DS9/VOY era.

Its believable if the drone design was a prototype (kind of like an NX class ship) and then they just mass produced the tech for their BoP to varying degrees - holotech for one set of BoPs, drone tech for another set of BoPs, upgraded weapons for another set, and a number of different sets of BoPs that have some varying combo of the three. While still maintaining a few BoPs that still have cloaking tech.

I’d imagine that they’d have to develop a matrix of some kind to substitute for Aenar telepathy if they didn’t have Aenar present for the drone ships though.

There’s also no reason to believe that the MACOs didn’t initiate a complete takeover of the NX ships, or other Earth vessel, and made them their own (with MACO weapons and shields and replaced the command structure) during the Earth-Romulan Wars. That is my head canon speaking, although is a way to get around Archer and his crew not being present for the majority of the war.

I think its just coming to terms that the ENT story from 2151-55, while is still useful and important as a backstory, was rough around the edges at some points and just didn’t get around to telling the Romulan War part on the ENT story. Although I don’t know if the producers would have told the story, or conveyed it, the same way that I envision it – the Earth-Romulan Wars being a rather psychologically frustrating event for Earth and their allies due to the various tactics and ceasefires the Romulans employ.

 

Well, if I remember right, the Enterprise was tracking the BOP was being tracked by motion sensors.. when it was stationary, they couldn't find it.. so there was a probablem with the cloak in that it couldn't mask movement. Where a mine.. doesn't move, so it would work.
So, having the romulans with a glitchy, or something like they showed in ST 3 where they could see or detect a ripple or sensor echo where its not the full cloak of the 24th century.. just something as a shadow.. or a Preadator shimmer..

where the Suliban seem to use a particle system, maybe a nanites that communicate with the others and show the world around them.

 

Regarding LGBT....

I understand that there are a few species of fish in which members can change sex. A bizarre bit of biology that. Now imagine such applying to a sapient species.

I would choose the Tellarites. We don't know much about them. And they look different enough from humans that a sex change might be plausibly depicted. Maybe hair color changes upon transition, or eye color.

 

A sex change with a Human could also be plausibly depicted.

 

I'm pretty sure the post-ENT Rise of the Federation novels have a trans character.

 

I kind of figured that the Romulans either loaned the Suliban Cabal cloaking technology - or stole it from them – and that the Cabal were their proxies of sorts, hence all the genetic enhancements as well. But the mysterious humanoid figure from the 28th century that we tend to call Future Guy, despite appearing to wear a Romulan uniform and responsible for the Suliban Cabal's advancements, was supposed to be revealed as Archer.

Unless it was an Archer living in a future where the Romulans won conquered either Starfleet or the Federation. And he was trying to fix a mistake made that caused it.

 

I believe the problem is they had so much which is thinly veiled conventional Trek tech, and changing the colors would have just been a visual version of what they did with the names. Phase weapons instead of phaser weapons, photonic torpedoes instead of photon torpedoes. Even the polarized hull plating works exactly like shields in the scripting with how it degrades by percentage rather than just being a bolstered armor. The point of Enterprise was to do Trek before Trek, by stripping the crew of the easy technological solutions, and give writers a broader set of problems as setups to episodes. They jumped away from that concept due to fear of changing anything, or overconfidence that the only way to make Trek work is to do exactly what came before.

Laser small arms without stun, or projectile weapons would have made use of force far more complicated. Ship based laser weapons would have been a good aesthetic choice, a connection to the TOS pilot, and introduce speed of light limitations. Missiles could be out because it would require dedicated crew and equipment on an otherwise science based ship, and because they might be seen as ineffective without shields. Give them something like a depth charge to use when running from an enemy at warp, but have nothing forward in a chase.

Transporters, just don't have them, and dedicate more hull to bigger more capable shuttles, perhaps give each one a different role. The grappler is a fun idea, but could be pushed further by making it bend midflight due being charged in some way and by making the impact force something which has to be very carefully balanced. The ship could also have a set of tentacle/elephant trunk like robotic arms mounted on rails. I remember looking forward to seeing something like Canadarms.

Tricorders should exist but should have fewer functions and a lot less capability. They could also have capability scaled directly to their size, so there might be very large deployable units, as well as hand held units, and the ship could deploy recoverable satellites, as well as have its own sensors, and everything would communicate to share information. Because of the need for significant setup, if a mission has to be carried out very quickly an away team might only have the very limited and short range hand held information plus what ever information can be gathered on the way down.

Cloaking just shouldn't exist, but stealth against faster than light sensors would have been great. Electronic warfare could have also been a far bigger deal. That would have been a great complementary role for Hoshi.

It should have been explicit the time frame between episodes is a matter of a month, or longer, rather than a week as with other Treks. Maybe even give the ship cryogenic pods to maximize mission duration.

Give the ship a fixed mission range so it has to return to Earth after a certain amount of time, and undergo restocking, maintenance, and crew rotation.

There are other things which could have been done like give the ship skyscraper deck orientation, make heat management a bigger deal, make remote planetary study a bigger deal, make in-field fabrication and resource gathering a bigger deal to extend mission duration or save the mission.

 

My take on this was that the phase cannons and photonic torpedoes were straight-up supposed to be phasers and photon torpedoes. They haven't got their more familiar names yet because they're brand-new technology; to humans, anyway. Not really disagreeing with the overall point, but in these cases I don't think the devices were pretending to be anything they weren't.

 

Most of this technically could have still happened, since the NX-01 was supposed to get a refit to make it be more like the TOS Enterprise. So, from an in-universe perspective, those that built and designed Enterprise may have just had the crew experiment with the technology to see how well they work in deep space and on deep space assignments. And then decided to have the crew go back to what Starfleet was using before the ship's inaugural launch, until they were ready to mass produce those technologies. We just never got to see those developments on screen.

It also seems like small arms would have been the last thing they took out of service, going by TATV.

I agree that it should have taken them longer to travel between systems and deal with issues they confronted. The crew is still learning and doesn't have all the answers, so conflicts that arise shouldn't be resolved so quickly.

And the ship should have restocked more frequently. Although, they were getting better at making the ship stay closer to Earth & Vulcan in the 4th season. And the existence of the Coalition of Planets meant there was going to an influx of new crew members, so crew rotation would have been more likely.

Heat management is not something I have thought off, although maybe its something that was just solved by the time of ENT, since they weren't the first vessel into space. There were various colonization missions before them, and the XCV-330 did exist prior to the NX-01. Meaning situations like "Shuttlepod One" were unlikely to occur on a regular basis, much like how antigravity was unlikely to fail during missions.

 

But would that have been realistic? I mean, the NX serves 100-110 years before the Constitution class enterprise (though we don't know how old that class is by the time TOS plays). It'd be like having a navy ship from the Titanic era have a refit to be more like the very newest Zumwalt destroyer class ....unless we assume technological progress between 2150 and 2250 was a lot slower than in the 20th century.

 

Technically the warp 5 engine is also supposed to leak delta rays, which should be a sufficient enough reason to replace the engine.

Small arms without a stun setting makes sense if the early Federation was more militaristic than anyone in later centuries would care to admit – to the point that a Prime Directive became an absolute necessity to have. It’s also possible that there were small arms dedicated solely with a stun setting to make up for that change, and officers carried both on a utility belt. It wasn’t like anyone was being vaporized with the phase pistols in ENT anyways. Changes were bound to happen, resulting in them starting over with TOS-y small arms with pulse phases. Projectile weapons make no sense, unless your talking about DY-class colonization ships that left Earth in the early 22nd century.

They had spatial torpedoes before the Xindi crisis, and they could have had them again in the aftermath or the Romulan War, due to the whole primitive atomic weapons deal, and a possibility of trying out a photonic spatial torpedo – shaped like a spatial torpedo, but the size of a photonic one. And the Romulan BoPs in the 23rd century were carrying atomic weaponry of their own, so there’s no reason to think that, up to the start of the Federation-Klingon Cold War at least, Federation ships weren’t doing the same thing.

It’s possible that the early transporters had a very limited lifespan, like a refrigerator or a computer, resulting in numerous transporter accidents. So, no one wants to use them anymore (or they’re even banned for a time), resulting in their removal until the technology has been perfected – which would be the TOS transporters. Until then, a reliance on shuttles & aqua-shuttles (TAS) would be needed for away missions. And restocking of supplies would necessitate stops at starbases, instead of just beaming those supplies from a passing cargo ship, since all supplies would have to be manually brought on board. And when reintroduced into service, transporters could have been much smaller, and been relegated to cargo only before being expanded to transport officers, and then civilians.

Robotic arms make the most sense to succeed the grappler, if the early Federation had not yet figured out tractor beam technology.

The various scanners (hand scanner, medical scanners, heavy scanner) are technically primitive tricorders, that were made to be practical for use on a ship with limited space onboard. The terminology just hasn’t entered use yet. And the tricorder in ST’ 09 onboard the USS Kelvin resembles a briefcase.

Stealth against sensors & electronic warfare would be useful in an Earth-Romulan War setting, as well as a Federation-Romulan Cold War, Federation vs Klingon Cold War, Section 31 missions, and a conflict with the Sheliak.

And we know about holographic technology on the bridge. And the Constitution class vessels are supposed to have recreation rooms, so a small recreation room could have been installed at some point as well.

We are assuming that the NX-class got retired permanently, instead of the possibility that they were taken out of mothballs and reassigned for other missions related to Section 31. There is a clear Section 31 influence by the time of DSC; there is no reason to think that the reassignments of the NX-class ships weren't the beginning of that. Circa 2156 – if that was when the refit happens - frequent transporter malfunctions to the point of its removal, robotic arms, stealth against sensors, and electronic warfare likely exist. Everything else happened after the founding of the Federation.

 

That's my issue, they are the same technologies, they didn't do anything different despite the 100 gap from ENT to TOS. They missed the opportunity to create a new setting with different advantages and disadvantages.

I imagine their kill only weapon being a matter of engineering, not choice. As in they cannot engineer a practical kill-stun combo weapon, and even if they could it still wouldn't be idiot proof enough to be safe. A stun only weapon, sure, but I also imagine that working like a better Taser, meaning it doesn't cause a comfy coma, it causes momentary physical collapse, and is even iffier against aliens than the phaser.

When phaser stun fails it just doesn't work, but an incompatible Taser could kill, not work, cripple, or cause any number of issues.

 

Well cops even now carry both a Taser and a hand gun, so it is possible for a security officer to carry both on an away team ( Which should have had, like The Cage, a guy or girl carrying a backpack of stuff, like a tent, water etc. ) In Babylon 5, had PPG's plasma pulses.. and in now way were they "Stun"..

But I agree, they had to many of the conveniences of the past series in the ship.. "Protein Re-sequencer" is a food replicator.. had sub space, that was real time 100 light years away ( hell in TOS had Uhura say it would take days or weeks to get a response.. not immediate) Maybe the use of Com Drones.. or just voice transmissions..

For the Transporters, had a bit in the book series after that Archer and Reed were suffering some mal effects of multiple uses, and were banned for abit to just emergency's..

For weapons, could easly had some lasers, and some type of scale able yield nuclear missiles

 

To be fair, the ship in TNG wasn't any faster than the ship on TOS. Aside from better holograms and robots, there was barely any progress at all.

 

Wasn't there a whole revamp of warp-scales between TOS and TNG, roughly that TNG speeds are '1' warp factor ahead of the old scale? Eg TOS Warp 8 is their 7.