• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Hey, I never noticed that before....

^ The holodeck doesn't create space where there is none.

This is normally not a problem on a starship, as there is already plenty of space for the crew. But on Gideon, where nobody has any space, the holodeck couldn't create any. People would be stuffed into the holodeck area just like any other building.
I see that you took my statement more literally than I intended.

One of the problems with the Gideon overcrowding was that they had no privacy, no space to themselves. The holodeck would eliminate that aspect of the problem. A holodeck could give the person in it the sensation that they were in a very large space, many, many times larger than the volume of the holodeck itself. It doesn't have to create space to do that. Just look at all the times they were in a holodeck, when it created the illusion that they were in much larger spaces, like, outside for instance.

Of course it wouldn't eliminate the problem of resource scarcity.

They craved privacy, ergo they didn't have holodecks. That was my point.
 
A holodeck could give the person in it the sensation that they were in a very large space

Not with a population the size of Gideon's, it can't.

Just look at all the times they were in a holodeck, when it created the illusion that they were in much larger spaces, like, outside for instance.

That's because there were relatively few people attempting to use that holodeck at the same time.
 
A holodeck is substantially bigger than a person...so if the people are that crowded, where are you going to find the space for a holodeck for each person?
Then just pack them into holodecks. They could run a simulation where they were each in a room in a house all to their own. Force fields would make them feel as if they were separated from each other.

The idea that there were so many Gideons that there was no room for their essential machines is absurd; their economy would collapse immediately if their essential machines were literally overrun with people.

And it's worth considering that a holodeck that could give an individual the sensation of being in a space all their own would not have to be a fully-featured holodeck by 24th century standards. The simulated vista could be there largely just for show, just to be seen and heard. That would reduce the overhead of the devices considerably.

Anyway, if they had the ability to simulate the feeling of being in open spaces even when there weren't anyway, the episode would have brought it up is something that could be further developed to mitigate their problem. So, they didn't possess the technology, ergo the phony starship was a practical reconstruction, weird as it was.
 
A holodeck is substantially bigger than a person...so if the people are that crowded, where are you going to find the space for a holodeck for each person?
The holosuites on DS9 are a fraction the size of the holodecks on the E-D. A personal holodeck/suite wouldn't have to be any larger than a shower stall to be effective, if the walls of the holofield are pliable enough to make the user think the space is much larger.

As such, a partially holographic recreation of the Enterprise is feasible, if they can get a scan to use to build the holographic interior. The problem is recreating the solid surfaces. That entails detailed shaped forcefields. I don't remember any indication that the Gideonites had that level of technology. Hence a practical recreation, at least a partial one is necessary. I have to agree that it's more likely that they made a mockup of the ship, or at least enough of one to fool Captain Kirk temporarily. And then used Odona as a distraction when it became clear that the mockup wasn't going to be enough on its own.
 
If the planet Gideon has the same land area as Earth, 148,940,000 squae kilometers, and the land is covered with buildings 100 stories tall, there would be a total of 14,894,000,000 square kilometers of floor space on all the levels of the buildings.

Suppose that the average person had 1,000 square meters of living space plus machinery space to keep them alive, there would be room for 1,000 people in each square kilometer of floor space. there would be room for 14,894,000,000,000 people on Gideon, that is over 14 trillion, almost 15 trillion, people.

Suppose that there were 100 stories and each person had a total of only 9 square meters of llving space, with the machinery to keep them alive down in many stories of underground basement perhaps. In that case the 100 storiea total of all the buildings could hold a total of 1,654,888.800,000,000 people - over one and a half quadrillion people.

The food for the Gideonites would have to be synthized by replicators from matter containing the 4 main elements (96 percent) in the human body (crbond, oxygen, hydrogen,and nitrogen, puls the s4 major elements (3.5 percent) in the human body, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulpher, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium, and the 14 trace lements vital for health, boron, chromium, colbalt,copper, flourine, iodine, iron, mangnese, molybdenum, selenium, silicon, tin, vanadium, and zinc.

Their wastes wold have to be loaded into the replicators to produce food in a totally close cycle.

The biomass of all humasn on Earth is allegedly only about 0.01 of hte total biomass of all living things on Earth. Since there are about 7.9 billion people on Earth 14,894 billion poeple would be about 1,885.3164 times as mass as the present human population. 1,654,888 billion people would have about 209,479.49 times the biobass of the present human population, and about 20.9 times the total biomass on Earth at the present.

It is quite possible that the planet Gideon would have to import vast amounts of the 25 essential elements (mostly in various compounds) from other planets, moons, asteroids, comets, etc. If their recyling system is less than 100 percent perfect they would have to keep on importing relatively small, but still vast, amounts of essential substances.
 
A personal holodeck/suite wouldn't have to be any larger than a shower stall to be effective,

There's still not enough room for that.

There's not a single square INCH of space left on Gideon. Literally the entire land mass of the planet is covered with a seething mob of people. (Picture pre-pandemic Times Square on New Year's Eve - but worldwide.) There isn't even enough room to build one holosuite on the entire planet, let alone one for every inhabitant.

I did just have a thought, though: did the Gideonites ever consider building underground? Hell, they probably filled that up too, if they tried.
 
Last edited:
There's not a single square INCH of space left on Gideon. Literally the entire land mass of the planet is covered with a seething mob of people. (Picture pre-pandemic Times Square on New Year's Eve - but worldwide.
Thats not the least bit believable even though thats how they tried to depict it onscreen. There is obviously a lot of information we’re never told regarding what life on Gideon is like.
 
Thats not the least bit believable

Oh? How so?

It's been established that not only do Gideonites have an inbuilt prejudice against killing (themselves or each other), or using birth control, but that they also are basically immortal. For any Gideonite to die is a rare thing indeed. So why isn't it believable that every square inch of land would end up being covered by people? A population that never stops growing, and where no one ever dies...
 
Last edited:
but all of their habitats seen onscreen were INDOORS. which means they built buildings. which means that they had the ability to try to build upward in multistory structures. which means that the seething masses of people covering the surface of the planet could be abated momentarily in order to install a holo-area or other sealed room as an add-on second story to a pre-existing structure
 
I just noticed that, in "Amok Time," a Vulcan with a gold sash armed Kirk and a Vulcan with a blue sash armed Spock.
Never paid much attention to the color sashes before. Good catch. I wonder if the sash color had some meaning behind them besides trying to sell color TV's. In universe, I like the idea of Clan Colors where this marriage ceremony is well represented by several high clans being present to partake or witness in it. Some Sash colors noticed:
green (Stonn's clan color?) https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x01hd/amoktimehd396.jpg
blue
turquoise https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x01hd/amoktimehd562.jpg
magenta (possibly T'Pau's clan?)
darker blue (on Executioner)https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x01hd/amoktimehd449.jpg
purple (Spock's clan color?)https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x01hd/amoktimehd534.jpg
gold/yellow/avocado/command gold (possibly T'Pring's clan?) https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x01hd/amoktimehd609.jpg ;)
 
Never paid much attention to the color sashes before. Good catch. I wonder if the sash color had some meaning behind them besides trying to sell color TV's. In universe, I like the idea of Clan Colors where this marriage ceremony is well represented by several high clans being present to partake or witness in it. Some Sash colors noticed:
green (Stonn's clan color?) https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x01hd/amoktimehd396.jpg
blue
turquoise https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x01hd/amoktimehd562.jpg
magenta (possibly T'Pau's clan?)
darker blue (on Executioner)https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x01hd/amoktimehd449.jpg
purple (Spock's clan color?)https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x01hd/amoktimehd534.jpg
gold/yellow/avocado/command gold (possibly T'Pring's clan?) https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x01hd/amoktimehd609.jpg ;)
That would make Stonn a Romulan as he was wearing a green sash. :whistle:;)
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top