Whats the Hurry...

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One think that has always kind of bugged about Trek, and I'm talkin about TOS, TNG, DS-9, Voy and Ent. When they hail another ship, if the other ship does not respond within a second or two, the communications officer tells the Capt, no reponse to our hail

It's kind of like us making a phone call and if the person we are calling does not pick up the phone on the first ring, we assume that they are not home and hang up, whats up with that...

 

[milo bloom]

One think that has always kind of bugged about Trek, and I'm talkin about TOS, TNG, DS-9, Voy and Ent. When they hail another ship, if the other ship does not respond within a second or two, the communications officer tells the Capt, no reponse to our hail

It's kind of like us making a phone call and if the person we are calling does not pick up the phone on the first ring, we assume that they are not home and hang up, whats up with that...

I can't take credit for this, I read it in another thread here not too long ago, but the idea is that when you get that fast negative response the other ship has a sort of "call blocking" activated, basically saying "we don't want to talk to anyone". That would be a pretty quick signal return so the comm officer would see that right away.

 

[Brian]

Or the calling ship's computer received no response at all, when typically the receiving computer would send an immediate "please stand by while I get one of these lethargic biologicals to pick up". In computer time, a couple of seconds is an eternity, or so I've heard.

That would imply that the recieving ship has "unplugged the phone".

 

[rtc61]

The real reason is contemporary and practical -- each episode only lasts 42 minutes or so, no time to be wasted with expensive actors staring at each other in silence awaiting a pretend no-response. But I'm sure someone will come up with a more 'treknological' explanation....

 

[sbk1234]

Temperal distortion caused by the flim-flam thingamajig.

 

[LLAP]

The real reason is contemporary and practical -- each episode only lasts 42 minutes or so, no time to be wasted with expensive actors staring at each other in silence awaiting a pretend no-response. But I'm sure someone will come up with a more 'treknological' explanation....

What I would say.

Every minute of screen time is money so they don't have time to faff around with long periods of silence and tumbleweed. Although I wish Enterprise had more of this it would have made it more watchable.