I didn't get that impression myself but I'll refrain from commenting further until I've seen the Terralysium episodes again.
What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?
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I was speaking metaphorically.
Yes, and more important the transporters were invented to solve a pacing problem when the series was first conceived. Our Heroes need to get from the Enterprise down to a planet. So they equip and launch a shuttlecraft, have shots of the shuttlecraft leaving the shuttle bay, then entering the planet's atmosphere, then coming in for a landing, and then Our Heroes disembarking. Minutes of airtime spent and not advancing the plot at all. On the other hand, the captain says "We're beaming down", quick shot in the transporter room, another shot on the surface, and there we're done.
They have used the transporter malfunction episode and the holodeck malfunction episodes. It's terrible writing. Episodes need a conflict, but the crew vs. stubborn nonworking devices is not an interesting conflict. Writers need to come up with plausible conflicts between people, not fighting with a device that isn't working.
^
Not to mention additional optical effects money being spent every time our characters boarded a shuttlecraft to travel down to the planet in that week's episode. Even if they reused the same launch effects in many cases they'd need to matte the landing sequence into different backgrounds every so often and that means more money being spent from what was already a pretty strictly-controlled budget.
Not to mention additional optical effects money being spent every time our characters boarded a shuttlecraft to travel down to the planet in that week's episode. Even if they reused the same launch effects in many cases they'd need to matte the landing sequence into different backgrounds every so often and that means more money being spent from what was already a pretty strictly-controlled budget.
If I were the Grand Poo-Bah of Star Trek, I would keep both, but writers would not be allowed to use them malfunctioning more than once in an entire series. These are supposed to be reliable, everyday devices. If they broke down all the time, our characters would be taking shuttlecraft for safety and reading books and training manuals instead of using the holodeck.
I would limit them to prevent repetitive story telling, but I don’t think the number of malfunctions as has been presented stretches believability by any means. People tend to ignore/dismiss dangers they face all the time in real life. For instance, most people don’t seem to think twice about driving or riding in a car, but it’s estimated that around 3,700 people die in traffic accidents every day globally, and I don’t think the transporters or holodecks have demonstrated that frequency of danger of fatality.
I'm currently rewatching TNG, and just with Deanna and K'Ehleyr, I'm already sick of the half-human hybrids. I get the reasoning, people who had been raised by at least one human parent would be more likely to want to serve on a ship where the majority of the crew, and the captain, are human. Even Worf being raised by humans makes sense in that context.
In Spock's case, I expect that an all-Vulcan crew wouldn't have accepted him, even if nothing like that is said in TOS.
Even VGR, which features the refreshingly alien Tuvok, Neelix, and Kes, has to have B'Elanna Torres as a human-Klingon hybrid. I'd also argue that Seven remains something other than fully human for the rest of her life.
In Spock's case, I expect that an all-Vulcan crew wouldn't have accepted him, even if nothing like that is said in TOS.
Even VGR, which features the refreshingly alien Tuvok, Neelix, and Kes, has to have B'Elanna Torres as a human-Klingon hybrid. I'd also argue that Seven remains something other than fully human for the rest of her life.
I don't think anyone questions the necessity of using the transporters on a 1960s TV budget. But modern shows don't need it -- The Orville has proven you can do Trek-style space opera just fine without them. And I think they open too many cans of worms in terms of inviting the question about why it's not used as a weapon and as a medical treatment more often. So I'd find an excuse to get rid of them if I were High King of All Star Trek.
But of course that ship sailed many decades ago, and now on DIS we see incredibly casual use of transporters just to go from room to room. *shrugs*
But of course that ship sailed many decades ago, and now on DIS we see incredibly casual use of transporters just to go from room to room. *shrugs*
ENTERPRISE showed they can do shuttlepod launches on a regular basis without it killing the momentum.
They didn't use the transporter that often. I'm glad for that.
They didn't use the transporter that often. I'm glad for that.
Neutronium in the novel.
So, if these guys also built the Doomsday Machine…what was their opponent’s death weapon? Biological?
I wouldn't be surprised if somebody created a genetically engineered virus to kill their opponents.
Section 31 did it to "The Founders".
If it wasn't for Odo and the cure that Bashir found for him, "The Founders" and their changeling species would've gone extinct.
We all know how incredibly effective a virus can spread via airborne thanks to our IRL situation with COVID.
Now imagine that with the deadly virus that Section 31 genetically engineered to target a specific species.
Or how bad "The Phage" was to the Vidiians.
But if they'd really wanted to use a shuttlecraft, they could have filmed a couple of versions of shuttle flight and reused them as stock images as needed.
"Reg, how many transporter accidents have there been in the last ten years? Two? Three? There are millions of people who transport safely every day without a problem." -La Forge,
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Transporter_accident
So how come ALL the transporter accidents in the entire Federation happen on ships named Enterprise? Reg just may have a point - if not about transporters in general, then about transporters on the Enterprise.
Ships in StarFleet deal with far more edge cases and weird circumstances than Transporter Systems fixed on a known, well populated planets, that has all their infrastructure setup for safety.
Just like accidents in Automotive Racing are pretty bad, but Automotive Racing deals with the extremes of Automotive performance while everyday driving doesn't.
Those accidents are due to negligence, incompetence, or malice.
Just like accidents in Automotive Racing are pretty bad, but Automotive Racing deals with the extremes of Automotive performance while everyday driving doesn't.
Those accidents are due to negligence, incompetence, or malice.
To be fair, it happens on ships called Potemkin (Second Chances), Defiant (Past Tense), Voyager (Tuvix) and Cerritos (Much Ado About Boimler) as well, and on stations like Deep Space 9 (The Darkness and the Light). But you’re right it happens even more often on ships called Enterprise!
And I do agree with you about it being overused in a story sense, I just think it’s on average not that unsafe a way to travel. I meant, how many shuttle crashes are there a year in the Federation? Seem like more than 2-3 a decade.
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The cost of building and filming a model shuttle, and more importantly building the full-size mockup and interior set that your actors need to use, is a significant outlay. This is why neither TOS nor TNG did it until later in their run. It's much easier now with CGI, as Enterprise proved and Orville still does, but even in the late 80s and early 90s convincingly mocking up shuttles wasn't straightforward.
Edited to fix a grammar issue.
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Further to this – there's a few episodes early in TOS where shuttles are not even mentioned as a possibility and it seems like the transporter is the only way to get to or from the ship, most notably "The Enemy Within". Shuttles weren't mentioned at all until "The Galileo Seven", the production of which had to be delayed for two months because the Desilu studio executives wouldn't authorise the cost of the shuttle prop – in fact they held off until they secured a model kit deal with AMT, which offset some of the costs (and also meant they could sell models of the shuttle).
TNG didn't show a shuttle for the first time until "Coming of Age", and the Type 7 shuttle as seen on screen was already a cut-down version of the much larger original TNG shuttle concept. In the end event the shuttle cockpit for season one was only a partial build – hence the awkward camera angles – and the Type 7 was never realised as a full-size prop, with partial mock-up exteriors being faked a few times. The whole reason TNG started to use that little boxy Type 15 shuttlepod so often from season two on was because it was cheap – and well it might be, it looks like a flat-pack from Ikea ("Sjüttl"?). The Type 6 introduced in the fifth season came about because the prop and set were modified from the one built for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. Voyager's production team wanted a more streamlined shuttle from the off but weren't able to budget for it until the second season; the Type 8 used in Voyager's first season came about precisely because the interior of the Type 6 could be used almost completely unmodified, since it was basically a Type 6 with Voyager-ified nacelles.
Finally – just to show how difficult shuttles can be on a show's budget, let's look at seaQuest DSV. What, really? Well why not, it was basically a TNG knockoff on a submarine. And while they didn't have shuttles in the space sense they did have launches, which were underwater shuttles that could also crawl onto land to enable them to get onto beaches and other places that didn't have a convenient docking port. In some first season episodes they tried to fake having a physical launch prop... by sticking a big cardboard cutout of one in the background while people milled around in the foreground and some hapless director hoped depth of field blurriness would make it look convincing. This never looked anything other than embarrassingly fake – and seaQuest DSV had a bigger budget than TNG, at least initially ($1.5m vs $1.25m per episode), plus they didn't have to worry about building physical models for all their effects shots since they were 100% CGI.
Edited to fix a spelling issue.
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ENT may have been the only pre-Kurtzman Trek series that had its own distinctive shuttle prop from the very beginning.
It's both a Star Trek and a wider Science Fiction opinion but...
I like humanoid aliens. Sure on occassion Star Trek got pretty lame with them (*cough* Bajorans *cough*) but overall I like the humanoid aliens in Trek and Star Wars (and to be clear I count things like Caitians and Wookies as humanoid)
A lot of people are always calling for more "alien" Aliens, but half of the time those "more alien" aliens just end up being some sort of blob/energy swirl or insects (ooooh so alien, it's definitely not like I can go outside right now and see heaps of insects
)
I do like non-humanoid aliens too on occasion, but I think I'll always prefer the humanoid ones.
I like humanoid aliens. Sure on occassion Star Trek got pretty lame with them (*cough* Bajorans *cough*) but overall I like the humanoid aliens in Trek and Star Wars (and to be clear I count things like Caitians and Wookies as humanoid)
A lot of people are always calling for more "alien" Aliens, but half of the time those "more alien" aliens just end up being some sort of blob/energy swirl or insects (ooooh so alien, it's definitely not like I can go outside right now and see heaps of insects
)I do like non-humanoid aliens too on occasion, but I think I'll always prefer the humanoid ones.
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