Evolutionary Theory and Warp Drive

[Maverisms]

What YARN is suggesting, and what we should have the mental capacity to start genuinely considering not just for Star Trek but for more earthly reasons, is that we should start seeing obsolescence as a fact of existence and plan for it.

I don't disagree. All I'm trying to say is that we haven't yet seen that change in Trek. Warp drive is still warp drive. Phasers are still phasers and so on.

I think we should see that level of change, but I think we need to have a technobabble explanation that supports it.

OTOH, I don't see the E-D's nacelles as the same as the TOS nacelles. Similar, in the same way as a Conestoga's wheels are like a Veyron's, but not the same.

 

[Brutal Strudel]

Now, I think it made perfect sense, and that it was a very good idea, for the writers and artists of TNG to make the Enterprise a seamlessly transitioned vessel, because this ship is as much a character as any of the people. We needed this continuity to span at least this duration (72 years, as I recall), otherwise there's really no reason to call this Star Trek. At first I thought maybe two ships between the A and the D were too many (shouldn't an Enterprise have a service life of at least 40 years?), but that question was resolved by the trashing of the C by the Romulans.

Actually, the C was destroyed some two or three decades before the D was commissioned, which means both the C and the B had short service lives (as did the D, for that matter). The real wonder is why Starfleet went so long without an Enterprise between C and D.

 

[aridas sofia]

The one thing that is so different about Star Trek versus our boring real life existence is the proliferation of other intelligent cultures being studied by Federation starships far flung over thousands of light years. Imagine how much we might learn from one humanoid culture that had achieved a similar technology to ours, but along a different path. Then multiply this by several hundred, and extrapolate forward along thousands of branching paths.

THAT begins to describe just how ossified the portrayal of technological change is in Trek. You need to assume that the "next big leap" is so far out that even millions of paths moving forward aren't tripping over breakthrough clues.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

The one thing that is so different about Star Trek versus our boring real life existence is the proliferation of other intelligent cultures being studied by Federation starships far flung over thousands of light years. Imagine how much we might learn from one humanoid culture that had achieved a similar technology to ours, but along a different path. Then multiply this by several hundred, and extrapolate forward along thousands of branching paths.

THAT begins to describe just how ossified the portrayal of technological change is in Trek. You need to assume that the "next big leap" is so far out that even millions of paths moving forward aren't tripping over breakthrough clues.

Yep, which infers one of two "in-universe" things... either there are real, "final" technological barriers (in reality, we have strong reason, though not incontrovertible reason, to think of the speed of light as such an insurmountable obstacle, for example), or all the civilizations in the galaxy really have been interfered with regularly by someone/something unseen, keeping them at all the roughly same level.

I tend to think that #1 is more reasonable, but #2 has some interesting storytelling possibilities, doesn't it?

 

[publiusr]

The big disconnet for me is to see 21st century tech in Stargate SG-1's Daedalus--yet it can cross Galaxies, yet in Trek, we have an overall elevated tech level, yet in-galaxy travel is about all we see with few exceptions. Perhaps hyperspace doesn't work there, or there are spin offs to refining warp drive that don't come from the magic bullet of hyperspace travel.

Warp drive to me is the kink in a carpet that travels. Folding space is to bend the carpet double all at once, Wormhole or jump drive style. Trek ships surf.

 

[Warped9]

The real point is that since it's all fiction you can establish "the rules" whichever you way you want. All you have to do is look at literary SF spanning decades to see that FTL travel is handled in a myriad of ways and they're not worried about being consistent with each other. Why should film or television SF be any different?

 

[YARN]

The real point is that since it's all fiction you can establish "the rules" whichever you way you want. All you have to do is look at literary SF spanning decades to see that FTL travel is handled in a myriad of ways and they're not worried about being consistent with each other. Why should film or television SF be any different?

If so, then why not bend the rules more? Why always agonize about how to stretch a saucer into an arrow head? Why worry about how to place warp nacelles.

Designers, for example, seem concerned to squish the shape of starships vertically to make them look more sleek, but when you do this you have a problem with where to place the navigational deflector in relation to the saucer. The NX-01 solves the problem by sticking a dish on the saucer, cutting the Gordian knot. The Reliant,however, is a much more elegant design because it simply does away with this "requirement". It turns the constitution upside down and gets rid of the secondary hull entirely - and it works!

Most starship "designers," however, are so stuck with conventional rules that they can only morph sacred shapes that must be kept, more or less, in the same sacred relation to one another. And this leads to uninspiring "innovations" like adding more nacelles and photon pods to "beef up" designs. It's all rather flat.

 

[Warped9]

Anyone who has ever dabbled in designing SF hardware tends to lean heavily on the familiar, at least in the beginning. What they're doing really is little more than tweaking until they become more confident of their own ideas. Folks designing for an established universe will usually tend to do much the same because they don't want to risk alienating the audience with something too unfamiliar. This is pretty much the real reason we got the NX-01 rather than a Daedelus variant or a ringship or something rather like what you might see on Masao's Starfleet Museum website. The NX-01 didn't belong in the 22nd century in terms of credible lineage and many fans recognized that, but the show's creators and TPTB didn't have the nerve to risk going with anything other than a disk with nacelles.

Also when you're playing in someone else's sandbox you're more inclined to stick with what has been established rather than trying to shake things up. ENT should have been more daring in the tech it depicted, but instead it pretty much just mildly relabeled what was already familiar. In terms of going ahead they do pretty much the same thing. It could be argued that the 1701D should have been more advanced that what we saw, but there was a limit to how far they wanted to push the envelope.

It isn't just in what we see but also in what is referenced. In TNG we heard references to Warp 8 and 9 and such which doesn't sound faster than what we heard in TOS, and yet we're supposed to believe the 1701D is faster than the TOS E. And yet in TOS the E in one instance reaches Warp 14.2 where in TNG warp 10 is as fast as it gets. All it would have taken was a reference to the warp scale being redefined to accommodate higher speeds from more advanced drive systems. But we got nothing.