uss discovery with31 century weapons etc ?
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From what I recall, they didn't really name or mention any new weapons in general. Starfleet command and ships were using photon and quantum torpedoes, I believe. And the regular old pew pews. This kinda bugged me, like I'm sure the Federation isn't using any crazy ship melting super weapons, but I would have at least liked to see a new type of torpedo.
Not really, no, besides the fact that it has been upgraded.
Even by the time of Picard, you'd hope they have auto-frequency-rotating phasers, transphasic torpedoes and Batmobile armour on every ship 
How do you judge that though, based on what’s been seen so far?
Emergency transporter units from NEM being fused with the combadge is one advancement. Quantum slipstream drive seems to also be in existence, if benamite is around.
Maybe the life support belt from TAS and the bio-dampeners from VOY have been merged into a single device, but we haven’t seen it in action yet. Maybe a number of devices only seen once or twice made a comeback in later centuries. Maybe vessels like the Prometheus-class were the norm for several centuries up until the Burn. Maybe they can properly contain the Omega molecule in the 32nd century.
Maybe quantum torpedoes are considered primitive by this time, and there’s more advanced weaponry that Discovery doesn’t know about.
It does beg the question as to what happened to transphasic torpedoes, ablative armor and ablative generators, and if they were banned by the 32nd century. Not that it would make any sense to do so.
The crew got new phaser pistols, but no, I don't recall anything about the ship's weapons.
I will apologize ahead of time. This will be a lengthy answer, and as much as I try to practice some self discipline about these things, I find the subject very interesting.
I base it first on the general idea that civilizations do experience these plateaus of technology. It does not mean nothing new is being invented or that there are not great thinkers doing interesting things, but that on the whole society seems to have reached a level of development that it is either comfortable with, or else all the components in place for a next big technological leap were not all there.
For instance. Clocks. We live by them. Our computers can't run without them. If you're going to launch into an industrial age, you need them. Water clocks have been around a long time, but they're not particularly accurate. The Greeks had some interest in this, as seen with the Tower of the Winds. The Persians were likewise doing their best to get a more accurate timekeeping system. The Romans, not really the accuracy freaks that late 18th century European tinkerers might become, still could have benefited greatly from it. But the world of Late Antiquity never made, as far as anyone knows, accurate mechanical clocks. The Antikythera mechanism shows they certainly could have. The Aeolpile shows they were beginning to understand steam power as well. The Hellenistic world almost had it's toe right over the line into the industrial age. It's not impossible to imagine a Greek Babbage building the first computer in a converted temple somewhere. But it never happened. Reasons can be argued. But that technology hit a plateau that would take over 1000 years for anyone to move past. Even more than a plateau this is a case of outright technological regression.
Those can happen for many reasons. It's possible the Easter Islander's may have developed writing. If they did it was one of the very few independent inventions of writing on earth. All that's left is one rongo-rongo tablet. Why did they stop? One possible answer is that they ran out of trees. While there are a lot of arguements about what happened in Easter Island, if there was an ecological disaster, what little wood, if any, was left, would have been too important to continue.
Or what about a nation that moved heaven and earth to establish a human presence on another world, only to abandon it after a few brief visits and flags planted, only now starting to seriously make a move to return after half a century's absence?
I hope those do not sound pedantic. In the case of Disco season 3, we've seen some technological improvements. The programmable matter is a thing. OTOH Star Trek still carefully avoids post-humanism unless they need a special character like 7. Humans are still humans, Trills are still Trills. The crew of Discovery did not arrive to find that species they knew in the past are now improved in any particular way. Orions still do devious Orion shit, humans are still be base platform, Trills still long for a squid to merge with. Maybe Vulcans have changed a little. People don't seem to live much longer, either.
The ships seen seem to all be old, since exact copies of those were shown as blowing up in the Burn. It makes sense that there has not been a lot of large capital ship manufacture any longer. Why would you, and how could you, without the fuel to do so? But even before then, and for some time, the fuel shortage was an issue. They may have made a lot of progress in some areas, like efficiency.
But the weapons seem similar, to the point that an old ship like Discovery was able to withstand an attack at Earth. Maybe they haven't changed all that much. While a ship of the line from the era just before the era of the ironclads might have been swifter than a galleon of two centuries previously, in the end they were all shooting iron balls using black powder. Likewise, apart from the ignition systems used, until the era of the breech loaders, small arms did not change all that much from the the invention of the matchlock arquebus to the last of the flintlock muskets (and some countries in Asia continued to use the matchlock even at that point, as they were simpler to produce).
Finally, Star Trek is really good at managing to have its primary civilization, the Federation, forget important technology. When all seemed hopeless with the Borg incursion, Section 31 did not lob out a Genesis Torpedo at the cube. We have yet to see Khan's magic blood used again, and I suspect we never will. While tragic, the fate of Enterprise C seems to imply that it IS possible to create temporal rifts to create custom alternate timelines, which while ethically questionable, might allow for significant strategic and logistical modelling. But the idea has not been visited. Keeping people alive eternally in transporter buffers (why not just move there? When we consider the problems of population and food supply, the usefulness of this process begins to become clear.) Why did, after hundreds of years, the transwork drive as envisioned for Excelsior, never work? It must have been beyond the theoretical stage for them to have dedicated an entire crewed capital ship to it, right? And the Spore drive. Which only a two person team ever thought of, and no one else ever in billions of worlds across the universe (a really good book by Galanter, notwithstanding) ever hit upon again.
I felt like it was heavily implied that the Temporal wars were basically a galaxy wide apocalypse that was so destructive that it forced galactic civilisation to regress. Some of that would have been through tech being banned and some that would have been because civilisations had become resource poor. I imagine that the Federation and any signatories to the temporal accords agreed to curtail their scientific advancement in some areas given how scientific advancement led to the most destructive war in galactic history.
Quantum and Photon torpedoes are both incredibly destructive in their own right, the writers of 90's trek just never used them that way. They could easily destroy a planetary surface at the right yield as evidenced when Mirror Georgiou wiped out the surface of Harlak. In 'People of Earth' it was pointless for the writers to come up with some new type of torpedo for the UE defence force to fire at Discovery. If the UE had used an 'Omega Torpedo' for example and Discovery didn't get one-shotted by it, people would be up in arms about how a 930 year old starship can survive being pounded by an advanced weapon.
Of course it would make sense to ban that tech and the Federation has a history of banning advanced weapons technology. Subspace weaponry for example were banned by the Khitomer accords.
There is absolutely no way that the Romulans or even the Klingons would allow the Federation to have weaponry that could one shot a borg cube. In the Klingons case, they'd probably get access to it through the alliance, but the Romulans wouldn't just stand by and allow the Federation to have such an advantage. They would either steal the technology or develop their own or even launch a pre-emptive strike against the Federation before transphasic torpedoes and ablative armour could be widespread. What if some relative of Duras decides to avenge him and gets his hands on the tech or uses it to get popular support for a renunciation of the Khitomer accords? The ramifications of the Federation continuing to use advanced technology from the future would be massive. It would probably lead to a conflict far more destructive than the Dominion War ever was.
Technology can also come back into fashion i.e. vinyl. There’s no reason to think that one off technologies seen in Star Trek don’t get revisited down the line once more uses for them are found.
We don’t see it because it would have been a terrible idea, as the Genesis device used in the proximity of Earth would have destroyed Earth at minimum in the process, and forced a relocation of both Starfleet and Federation HQs.
That remains to be seen in the Kelvinverse. Since its clearly not used in the Prime Universe.
They have the holodeck for that. Unless holodecks have been banned by the 32nd century, creating temporal rifts to explore alternative timelines is unnecessary.
Failing to share this technology would be a good enough reason for the degradation of Federation and Romulan relations after NEM, and the formation of the Typhon Pact. Of course, the supernova makes any effort from the Romulan Empire to steal or develop their own moot now.
I don’t see the Federation giving the Klingons transphasic torpedoes, after the Klingons ripped up the Khitomer Accords in the lead up to the Dominion War. Although the Federation might give the Klingons access to the ablative generator in special circumstances.
Transphasic torpedoes might just be labelled as classified. Meaning either someone from the returning Voyager crew, or high in the Starfleet or Federation chain, would have to be the one(s) to give knowledge of transphasic torpedoes away to one of the Federation’s enemies or to random rebel groups (i.e. disgruntled Cardassians post-Dominion War, or disgruntled Romulans post-supernova). To what end I would not know. But with uncertainty regarding the Borg looming post-VOY, it does not make sense for the Federation to outright remove a defensive capability from their arsenal. I can see transphasic torpedoes being placed under a Starfleet General Order that only permits its use under extreme circumstances, such as a quadrant wide Borg invasion.
And if anything, transphasic torpedoes would open the door to the Federation bullying rivals, a behaviour I don't think they've ever really exemplified before, as least on a large scale.
I guess so.
I can't wait for them to do totally nuts with programmable matter, and Green Lantern-style manifest a giant hand to swat Klingon birds of prey aside.
Only if it is a giant green hand.
