The Valtane Enigma

It is rather silly that every little detail about starship life is being preserved for future generations to read. And I'd be making this complaint even if it were a ship in the Alpha Quadrant checking up this detail on Memory Alpha over the space internet. Really, how far do we take this? Did Ben Maxwell read over the maintenance floor logs of the Kelvin's janitor detailing what times each day he mopped the decks, scrubbed the toilets and washed the windows to gain the inspiration he needed to attack the Cardassians? Did Riker review the shipping invoices of every food, drink, spice, ingredient NX-01's chef brought aboard while trying to decide what to do about Admiral Pressman? Do Starfleet cadets have to review the files related to Robert April's soap shortage and determine how they would deal with this, both from the perspective of being the captain and being one of the crew?

 

Woah, hold on there.

I'm saying that Ben Maxwell HAD ACCESS to the Kelvin's janitorial reports, not that he read each and every one of them. Riker HAD ACCESS to the manifest for NX-01, but that doesn't mean that he read them.

But it is conceivable that , say, a bridge crew complains of a particular illness at random intervals. Check back through the logs, and all of a sudden... "Captain! We've found that the Starship McGuffin had a similar illness, and they discovered that it happened every time Ensign Ricky had the night shift because he liked the 'new shuttlecraft' scented air freshener. That air freshener was made with Blekovian pine, and it's only after traditional Blekovian holidays that our crew suffers the same illness. Our Blekovian officer, Lieutenant Biagkjrguahreig is cooking a traditional Blekovian dinner for himself - using Blekovian pine - and the traces of the food on his uniform are being spread to the rest of the bridge crew and causing the illness!"

Given the sort of weird shit we've seen Starships deal with, this would be pretty tame by comparison! And yet it was only the records of the air freshener used on the night shift on some other ship who knows how long ago that allowed the connection to be made. I'm sure Starfleet has learnt that ANY detail can be important. And dumping the whole text file into a ship's computers is going to be much easier, faster and more productive in terms of manpower than sifting through each and every scrap of information, determining how likely it is to be helpful in some potentially unknown situation, and then keeping or discarding it based on that. And as I said, when you are dealing with tiny little plaintext files being put into almost bottomless computer banks, space is NOT an issue.

 

Stuff like that loses relevance over time though. By the 2360s and 70s, no one would care at all that Crewman Foster cleaned the bridge viewscreen window of the Kelvin at 14:35 on stardate 2233.03. Or that Chef had an unusual amount cumin shipped aboard NX-01 before it was decommissioned. Or that Robert April's crew had to stop bathing for six weeks in early 2247. Or that Harriman thought crew quarters had a door with faded paint in 2298. Or that Excelsior needed minor repairs in 2293.

Damn it, an alarmingly large amount of people don't save their receipts, usually throwing them away almost immediately after they make a purchase if they even bother to take the receipt. Starfleet's not hold onto shipping manifests and maintenance reports a century after the fact.

 

This is one of the most unrealistic aspects regarding future computer use. Just look at today, and the turn to cloud based services. Starship computers would not contain anything other their own data. Anything else would be accessed "online".

 

Not every Starship would be in an area where "service" is available.

 

I thought it was weird that Tuvok's memory included external shots of the Excelsior.

Even the VOY special effects crew made a mistake in "Flashback", the Excelsior's nacelles never glowed in the films and early TNG, but they did in "Flashback". Tuvok's wacky mind again.

 

Wasn't that the difference between the two 30th Anniversary episodes. The people behind DSN's "Trails and Tribble-ations" seemed to pay more attention to those small details. As if it a lot more care was paid by everyone involved in making it.

 

Trials and Tribbleations was a fun adventure the whole crew was in on and got a part of that tied back to a classic.

Flashback.. was just Janeway and Tuvok with the others spitting out a bit of technobabble that isn't even consistent with itself. Great effort to get Takei and all the Excelsior extras. Poor execution.

 

Tuvok remembers the Praxis shock wave, and he remembers the battle around Khitomer, but owing to the illness he doesn't recall the months of relatively uneventful events in-between. The shock wave and the battle were dramatic events that left more of a imprint upon Tuvok's memories

Tuvok likely remembers Valtane's actual death aboard the Excelsior, it just got "moved" by his illness. there could be a lot of things in the episode that occurred years before or later that were juxtapositioned into that time period.

 

Well, to be fair, Nemesis was the first and only reference to a space internet, thereby proving that not everything is kept in a starship database.

 

Y'know, the concept of a Starfleet internet could provide for some fascinating connectivity between starships which we've never really seen overtly referred to before, but which would indeed why minute information seemed accessible on almost any ship. Of course, the whole real-time subspace connectivity thing seems like it would be prone with problems to me.

 

I always assumed that computer access is always available, everywhere, in the Trek future. There literally is no area where service is unavailable. Their equivalent of the Internet would be truly universal.

I mean, with all that technology, really, how could this NOT be the case?

That being said: "The Valtane Enigma" would be a great name for a murder mystery. Somebody should get right on that.

 

Ships on deep space missions of exploration far from Federation space.

 

Or that a guy on a research station took a shower in his clothes in 2265...

Why not? Like I've said, it's not going to take up much space, and they are very organized.

 

Well, since Janeway was able to access Sulu's logs from the Delta Quadrant, and I doubt Voyager had a connection to Starfleet at the time, I don't think this is true.

 

^Well remember that Voyager was generally strange with databases. Just remember 11:59.

 

Oh, I'd really prefer not to...

 

Like Sisko's bright yellow command shirt

 

I rewatched TUC last night, and can confirm this, because I looked for it when the time came. Sure, it probably was a production error, but it does provide a canonical hook to hang Opus's theory off of if one wanted to. I like it, anyway.