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Rewriting episodes for the modern day a.k.a how to solve them in 5 minutes

Regarding "THE SOUND OF HER VOICE", the Defiant was in a very remote sector, where subspace communication was a fair distance.

And it has been established that the main computer on the Defiant doesn't hold as much as, say, a Galaxy class ship... primarily because it's main function is being a warship.

Couple that with the Olympia being a long way away from the Federation on at least a multi year mission, and it could have been classified, I can easily see why the Defiant would not be privy to the Olympia being lost.
 
Regarding "THE SOUND OF HER VOICE", the Defiant was in a very remote sector, where subspace communication was a fair distance.

And it has been established that the main computer on the Defiant doesn't hold as much as, say, a Galaxy class ship... primarily because it's main function is being a warship.

Couple that with the Olympia being a long way away from the Federation on at least a multi year mission, and it could have been classified, I can easily see why the Defiant would not be privy to the Olympia being lost.

I disagree on the computer storage being an issue - if only because I don't think writers back then grasped how small something like a personnel file would be Vs how much data can be stored in a very small space.

I'd also think that with Sisko being in charge of fleet operations (or at least subject to Ross' approval) that he would have been given access to deployments for tactical purposes.

Going back to the original premise though (being how a modern writer would approach it) - you come across them, first thing you'd do is look up the ship and person you are speaking with to make sure they exist and it isn't a trap and also if you are going to spend time speaking with them then it helps to know a bit about them.

You then hit the brick wall of classified data (taking your premise) but surely you'd ask the person, or even you'd say, "oh 8 years is a long time to be away from family. When did you last see them?" At which point they give you a stardate, doesn't match the 8 year time gap, and you get to the same answer of realising they haven't just crashed.

I think as an in-universe reasoning yours does make sense. I'm trying to kind out out of universe this to account for what writers in 1993 understood of tech (or society, or anything else that might be interesting) Vs writers now and how that would change the approach to the story
 
The Naked Now

Instead of Data reading insane amounts of text, I'd imagine he'd do an indexed search today and just checked the hits, possibly enhancing his query step by step.
 
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Even at the time the show aired, Starfleet's flagship should've had info on Mark Twain in its database.

Did it not? Wow...

That's shocking considering how America-centric Star Trek has a tendency to be. The equivalent of Star trek being a British show and the computer not knowing about Dickens.
 
Maybe that's why Picard keeps a physical copy of the complete works of Shakespeare?

Starship computers are weak on literature.

Funny that Picard managed to find a copy of something obscure like The Royale, but no Twain...
 
From a modern perspective there's no reason though that they should be "weak on literature" or stuff like that.
I just googled it and, apparently, a kindle can hold 250-300 books per gigabyte.
That's,at the lowest 256000 books by terabyte, and you'd imagine by the time of TNG they'd have long since moved beyond giga- and terabytes.
But even today when we cans tore books like that many people still have physical ones, so Picard probably just prefers his physical copy of Shakespeare
 
I disagree on the computer storage being an issue - if only because I don't think writers back then grasped how small something like a personnel file would be Vs how much data can be stored in a very small space.

I'd also think that with Sisko being in charge of fleet operations (or at least subject to Ross' approval) that he would have been given access to deployments for tactical purposes.

Going back to the original premise though (being how a modern writer would approach it) - you come across them, first thing you'd do is look up the ship and person you are speaking with to make sure they exist and it isn't a trap and also if you are going to spend time speaking with them then it helps to know a bit about them.

You then hit the brick wall of classified data (taking your premise) but surely you'd ask the person, or even you'd say, "oh 8 years is a long time to be away from family. When did you last see them?" At which point they give you a stardate, doesn't match the 8 year time gap, and you get to the same answer of realising they haven't just crashed.

I think as an in-universe reasoning yours does make sense. I'm trying to kind out out of universe this to account for what writers in 1993 understood of tech (or society, or anything else that might be interesting) Vs writers now and how that would change the approach to the story

Agreed that it is just one ship and a file for one ship may be small. But Starfleet has thousands of ships in service at any given time, never mind the tens of thousands that were in service previously... just look at the number of Voyager's registry, 74656. At the time of its commissioning, it was at least the 74,656th ship Starfleet made.

And consider having a file on ALL the crew of the Olympia. Whether it's a dozen or 500, that's still a lot of memory to keep for one ship. All the way back to "THE SEARCH, PART I", Bashir laments to Sisko about how tiny the medical database is on the Defiant. If something as critical as a medical database for sickbay has minimal storage capacity, I don't think it's a stretch to say the main computer won't have information on a lone ship from a decade ago that was outside Federation space.
 
There does seem to be some inconsistency about what is stored in a starship's database. Like in TNG Sins of the Father, the Enterprise had to put in a request to Starfleet for the sensor data from the ship that responded to the distress call from Khitomer and had to wait for the data to be sent to them. Meanwhile, in Voyager's Flashback, Voyager's database already has info about the nebula the Excelsior was checking out at the time Tuvok was flashing back to and they even had a log entry from Sulu in which he covered up the battle and deaths that occurred by saying the ship was undergoing "routine maintenance."
 
Agreed that it is just one ship and a file for one ship may be small. But Starfleet has thousands of ships in service at any given time, never mind the tens of thousands that were in service previously... just look at the number of Voyager's registry, 74656. At the time of its commissioning, it was at least the 74,656th ship Starfleet made.

And consider having a file on ALL the crew of the Olympia. Whether it's a dozen or 500, that's still a lot of memory to keep for one ship. All the way back to "THE SEARCH, PART I", Bashir laments to Sisko about how tiny the medical database is on the Defiant. If something as critical as a medical database for sickbay has minimal storage capacity, I don't think it's a stretch to say the main computer won't have information on a lone ship from a decade ago that was outside Federation space.

That is the point I'm trying to get at (and I think we are talking at crossed purposes) - the reason for Bashir lamenting it is because the writers didn't get just how much data can be stored and on how small a device.

Considering a mutli TB harddrive can fit in my pocket I'd expect a ship's computer to easily manage it - except at the time this was unthinkable and so the writers came from that perspective.

Apologies if I'm not explaining myself well
 
There does seem to be some inconsistency about what is stored in a starship's database. Like in TNG Sins of the Father, the Enterprise had to put in a request to Starfleet for the sensor data from the ship that responded to the distress call from Khitomer and had to wait for the data to be sent to them. Meanwhile, in Voyager's Flashback, Voyager's database already has info about the nebula the Excelsior was checking out at the time Tuvok was flashing back to and they even had a log entry from Sulu in which he covered up the battle and deaths that occurred by saying the ship was undergoing "routine maintenance."

Think this is evidence itself of my thought process that the writers by Voyager had started to clock the capabilities for data storage that the TNG ones couldn't imagine
 
No need to apologize. Maybe I was the one not being clear.

I get what you are saying. But consider this... we are trying to compare our current computer memory capacity in terms of information from just one planet, Earth. The Federation at that time had over 150 worlds. There's no way a single starshipcan store THAT amount of information, I don't care how advanced or small the technology gets.

It's why Memory Alpha was created by the Federation to begin with... it takes a planet to contain all those databases.

My apologies if I wasn't clear enough or am on the wrong track.
 
The Orion hypnosis might be chemical in nature, distinct to male physiology, and therefore not be dependent on a person's sexual orientation.

It is amazing enough that what works on Orion males would work on even a single human, let alone on all humans of one gender.

Good shout - didn't think of that.

I would then add that it should be able to differentiate as presumably a Klingon heart beats differently to a humans, to a Vulcans etc etc

Dr. McCoy commented on the differences in the Vulcan heart, the Vulcan blood pressure, and the Vulcan heart rate. In "The Trouble with Tribbles" he scanned someone with a medical scanner and took less than a minute to declare they were a Klingon.

The lack of any kind of video monitoring for critical areas drives me nuts, one could almost forgive TOS, but in “Court Martial” they show it exists.

It was quite inconsistent:

In "The Menagerie Part 1:" the screen showed a scene on the bridge of the Enterprise from "The Cage" Kirk wondered about their cource:

KIRK: Screen off. Chris, was that really you on the screen? (flash) That's impossible. Mister Spock, no vessel makes record tapes in that detail, that perfect. What were we watching?

MENDEZ: Captain Pike, were any record tapes of this nature made during your voyage? (flash, flash) The court is not obliged to view evidence without knowing its source.

They continue wtaching the scene on the Bridge, and then see a private discussion between Captain PIke and the doctor in PIke's quarters. And i think that would have been a good time for a discussion of where the images they saw were coming from, because it would seem unlikely to record events in private quarters.

Though shown before "Court Martial" , "The Menagerie Part 1:" was filmed later. I note that the records of the events on the bridge in "Court Martial" are all shown from the overhead angle, except when Lt. Shaw asks the computer to show a different angle. Apparently there were several cameras recording from different angles on the bridge.

And the scenes from "The Menagerie Part 1:" were different, they were edited like scenes from a movie or tv show, which they were. So maybe Kirk knew where all the cameras on the Bridge were and knew that some of the shots were from angles where there weren't any cameras.

That is the point I'm trying to get at (and I think we are talking at crossed purposes) - the reason for Bashir lamenting it is because the writers didn't get just how much data can be stored and on how small a device.

Considering a mutli TB harddrive can fit in my pocket I'd expect a ship's computer to easily manage it - except at the time this was unthinkable and so the writers came from that perspective.

Apologies if I'm not explaining myself well

But at the time that was not unimaginable. Humans remember only a tiny amount of what they experience. But over a human lifetime that totals to be a imense amount of data. And yet science fiction writers are constantly imagining alien lifeforms which have just as much intelligence and reasoning capacity as humans and just as much memory storage as humans with brains the same size as humans. And science fiction writers constantly imagine robots which have the same intelligence as humans and humanoid aliens, and just as much memory capacity, with brains the same size.

You know, robots like Data, for example.

Apparently television writers imagine that a computer devoting all its volume to computing would have to have a volume the size of a building, becuase computer parts are so much less efficient than biological brains, but if you build a robot body the size of a man with most of its interior volume occupied by a power supply and the eqivalent of muscles and bones, the tiny computer brain you squeeze into the space left over will magically become many times more efficient and equal to a human brain. :lol:
 
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Think this is evidence itself of my thought process that the writers by Voyager had started to clock the capabilities for data storage that the TNG ones couldn't imagine

More than half the writing staff of VOYAGER came from TNG... Taylor, Piller, Braga. It's more likely they figured it out after all those years. (Though it would seem odd that Moore or Echevarria, who also were from TNG and went to DS9, didn't follow suit.)
 
No need to apologize. Maybe I was the one not being clear.

I get what you are saying. But consider this... we are trying to compare our current computer memory capacity in terms of information from just one planet, Earth. The Federation at that time had over 150 worlds. There's no way a single starshipcan store THAT amount of information, I don't care how advanced or small the technology gets.

It's why Memory Alpha was created by the Federation to begin with... it takes a planet to contain all those databases.

My apologies if I wasn't clear enough or am on the wrong track.

I think we were both on the right track but with a different point of view and we didn't necessarily get it across - call it quits.

There would be certain limitations (not clear on the range of subspace Comms - usually range of plot) but I'd then think there would be some sort of interstellar networking to access Memory Alpha.

Could argue also that ship deployments, due to Sisko's role, would be key data?
 
More than half the writing staff of VOYAGER came from TNG... Taylor, Piller, Braga. It's more likely they figured it out after all those years. (Though it would seem odd that Moore or Echevarria, who also were from TNG and went to DS9, didn't follow suit.)

This is me in another moment of poor articulation - I am not too hot on who wrote for which other than the main ones but just meant that their understanding of the scope for tech had expanded greatly in that period
 
Yeah, I also subscribe to the theory that the writers just didn't consider how much data storage capacities would evolve in the future. Yes, the Federation has a lot of planets, and would probably also have a lot of data about its neighbours, but still.
And Memory Alpha? Well, that's from the TOS days, isn't it? That's the 1960s idea of how data would be stored. Not saying that there can't be a library planet, but it would be like, for example a national library today, I imagine.

What would really be interesting, though, is whether a form of "internet wi-fi" exists within Federation Space, I'm not sure whether it's feasable, so someone please correct me if not, but could it be that they can perhaps access data through subspace channels as a form of "internet"?
We have seen in episodes like the Vangeance Factor that they can access and sift through data from a non-Federation world.
 
Yeah, I also subscribe to the theory that the writers just didn't consider how much data storage capacities would evolve in the future. Yes, the Federation has a lot of planets, and would probably also have a lot of data about its neighbours, but still.
And Memory Alpha? Well, that's from the TOS days, isn't it? That's the 1960s idea of how data would be stored. Not saying that there can't be a library planet, but it would be like, for example a national library today, I imagine.

What would really be interesting, though, is whether a form of "internet wi-fi" exists within Federation Space, I'm not sure whether it's feasable, so someone please correct me if not, but could it be that they can perhaps access data through subspace channels as a form of "internet"?
We have seen in episodes like the Vangeance Factor that they can access and sift through data from a non-Federation world.

My view is that if subspace communication works (which we know it does) then it is no different to how modern comms work as both are just data packages.

Could also be that with "static" data being less bandwidth intensive than video they could probably use that at greater ranges than they could communications
 
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