ST Picard - Starships and Technology Season One SPOILER Discusssion

Ten Forward is an impossible kludge. I'm amazed they made a zoom in that worked as well as it did, considering you have to scale up the ship 2x in order to make it fit on the 6-footer.

The window shapes were wrong on the outside (not the inside) but I'm not sure if the 6-foot model had the wider windows the 4-foot one (and the Ten Forward set) did.

 

We do have the "out" of dream logic here.

 

They could be separate entities.

We've known ever since GEN that there are at least four different news networks: Federation News Network, Galactic News Network, Earth Broadcasting Service, and Starfleet Broadcasting (each one of these networks sent a reporter and cameraperson to attend the launch of the Ent-B). The FNS could be yet another network.

 

Ironclad proof that STP actually takes place in the Kelvin timeline.

 

^ How so?

There are news networks in STID, but they are just called 2 News, 4 News, etc. They are all owned by "UFP News".

 

I was making a joke.

 

Maybe what we saw was Picards private dining room similar to what Janeway was supposed to have before Neelix "aquired" it...

 

Yup, I'm sure there was a Captain's Table to one side of the main facility (in addition to more formal ones elsewhere), and a similar facility to the other side reserved for Guinan and her special guests...

We never did see Picard give a formal dinner to any of his guests on the E-D outside "Haven", now did we?

Timo Saloniemi

 

Thought a bit about the issue of Dahj's home replicator apparently having only so few patterns . As hinted at by the existence of Starfleet's Quantum Archives, it could be that the Federation solved the problems of replicated food not being identical to unreplicated food and replicators seen in Picard could simply be more advanced than the ones seen in TNG, DS9 and Voyager. They might offer quantum resolution, which would possibly make the replicated foods and drinks identical to the "real thing". Of course such patterns may need a lot more memory space...

 

Maybe that's the standard model replicator available for home, civilian use.

Starfleet personnel, OTOH, might enjoy more advanced replicators, capable of making anything, as one of the perks of the job.

 

Or, it could be a perk of her being an android, that she can only eat certain foods and drinks.

 

Maybe you only get a replicator with some basic good patterns. If you work perhaps that goes up?

 

I just realized that when Picard retrieves the painting from the quantum archives, it uses the same replicator effect as his home unit, and not any known transporter effect (like the one used by the assassins in the same episode.

I was thinking that the painting was simply stored in some physical location and then beamed to his archive upon request, but it seems that whatever puts the "quantum" in quantum archives is a similar quanta to whatever makes his morning Earl Grey.

Mark

 

I got the impression that when items are stored in the archive, they have no physical existence, but are merely 'data' that can be reconstituted as needed.

(I mean, wouldn't that be more efficient than having to find an actual location to store those items? If they're only data, then they can simply be stored in the computer, and you'd think that by the 25th century computers would have a near-infinite amount of storage capacity. Whereas physical storage space will always be limited.)

Kind of like "Relics" where Scotty was suspended in the transporter.

Unlikely.

It would seem that Dahj and Soji, even though they are artificial life forms, are nevertheless physically indistinguishable from humans. So I'm guessing that they can eat and drink anything that a human can.

 

The quantum archiving thing sounds like a natural display of slight but logical progress in Trek. Might not work perfectly with people. Must be good enough for Captain Picard Day banners. It's just a bit odd that it would be a Starfleet Headquarters thing. Why a vault? Why not a desktop terminal in every apartment?

Whether a food replicator could ever be anything short of perfect is another matter. I could see issues with "memory size" or "processing capacity", but those would limit the number of menu items only, with each item being absolutely perfect down to the finest molecular lever. Otherwise it would just be poison.

We don't really know if resolution is a thing that can be adjusted. We never hear of transporters having resolution issue. I mean, taxi cabs and elevators don't, so why should transporters? But once or twice, demanding replication is stated to feature minor glitches that expose the dastardly plot of the week. An inherent shortcoming of the progress? Or the forger's hand slipping at the crucial moment and the da Vinci brushstroke coming off as a Rubens one this rare once?

Timo Saloniemi

 

They basically have little V'Gers in each vault that digitize all patterns and can restore them again

 

I guess this Quantum Archive thing is just stuff beeing stored similar to "normal" replicator data, just that its not atomic resolution (like a regular replicator uses) but down to the quantum level. Which would mean they finally got around to install heisenberg compensators in replicators ;-P

 

I remember 80's novels using the idea that the Enterprise stored a load of stuff in their transporter to be materialised when needed, like coffee. This seems to be the same concept.

There's great potential for it all to go wrong and San Francisco quickly fills up with tons and tons of everyone's patterned, stored junk.

 

"Storage Wars: Starfleet's Finest"

The "quantum" nomencalture suggests that artifacts are stored in a non-matter state, but the materialization effect suggests that it's not in a classic transporter buffer. The simplest explanation to me is that all the computer banks Picard and the archive Index were walking along were the storage for all the artifacts, which are called back into material form as needed. Heck, the back room full of Picard's stuff could have been bare moments before he entered, and the Index called up his room's default or previous state knowing he needed the workspace.

Moving on with my tech observations:

- I can't wait till we get a better look at the Starfleet tugs, and there's been a fair amount of discussion of them already. What resonated to me is how we're finally seeing the Franz Joseph-esque arrangement of tug an cargo modules realized. Also, the highlight hull color is a rust red, which hasn't been seen before in TNG-era starship design - the Sovereign class has darker grey paneling here and there, but not a contrasting color like red. Does it signify the ships' Martian origin? Or were they just built so quickly that LaForge forgot to apply Rust-eze to some of the parts?

- We've seen media interviews in Trek before, but I think this is the first time we've seen an entire camera crew. Usually it's just the reporter themselves plus a wearable camera or portable doodad. Also, why are the camera (?) drones buzzing around like that? The shots we see from the kitchen TV are from typical locked-down camera angles. Even the push in to Picard's face was done from where we don't readily see a drone. Wouldn't it make more sense to set up a holographic field to capture EVERYTHING, and then for the news crew to edit down from there?

- Further use of holography as a mirror, as established previously in DSC. And is the reporter's lip gloss applied by app, or is she wearing something that is effectively commanded to change color by bluetooth?

- 900 million Romulans were to be evacuated by 10,000 warp ferries. Obviously this DOESN'T necessarily mean that each ferry would carry 90,000 Romulans each in one go... They probably made some relatively simple calculations about where they would have to go, how long it would take a ship at a certain warp speed to get there and back and how big a ship of the needed speed they could build by a certain deadline to effect an evacuation before the supernova hit Romulus. Add to that the logistical preparation of both the evacuating population and destination site(s), and the need to sustain them along the way, and you balance everything out to start designing and building ships in waves that would start the evacuation as soon as they were ready to go. Also, I'm sure the Romulan Empire wasn't standing idly by and was doing their own thing in concert with Starfleet's plan.

- Mars is still on fire fifteen years after the attack. I'm guessing they don't mean that the atmospheric event that started it is still active, but that there's stuff happening like underground fires which can take years to die out even on Earth. However they were terraforming Earth probably lay down a lot of organic infrastructure for people to build on that could be unknowingly flammable.

- One wonders if the Index program is pre-EMH. Her flickering effects suggest they are more utilitarian and less flashy, and she doesn't directly touch anything (though she isn't called to).

- I'm guessing that if there was a plaque under the Calypso shuttle in Picard's archive room, it would read "Dedicated to the only Captain who EVER used their Captain's Yacht for ANYTHING". Or maybe he just liked the design.

- And if there's a model of each of his commands, why isn't the USS Verity there?

- Speaking of flickering, Dahj's phone's holo interface is relatively flicker-free, except when the image of her mom conveniently goes janky as if she's talking to a computer program... OTOH, the phone's interface is moving around with her hand whenever you see her hand, but it's pretty static when we look over Dahj's shoulder at her mom, no matter how she moves.

- So how exactly does Dahj die? The assassin apparently cracks a tooth and spits on her, but also the gun. She (and the assassin) start melting right away, but the liquid also apparently sets off the gun to blow up BOTH their melting bodies.Was that the intent?

- So the "police" (Starfleet security, no? Who gets jurisdiction for an explosion on the Headquarters campus?) find Picard, and just send him home unconscious? How did they get him there? And why did they drop him on a couch instead of upstairs? You'd think they'd put him an a hospital for observation, or at least until he woke up!

- The Daystrom Institute is in Okinawa, Japan. Having BEEN to Okinawa, I can confidently say that cliffs such as the one the Institute is built over are rare. It's not a large island. Anyways, the Daystrom Institute has been a catch-all for "place where the smart people go to do smart things with technology", and this one is specifically for "Advanced Robotics", so there may be other campuses here or elsewhere where they can dig up old tech on other planets or create murderous computers or whatever.

- The Japanese kanji actually does say "Daystrom Institute of Advanced Robotics", but I do question if the grammar is correct from my limited experience with the language.

- They keep B4's components in a box and apparently that's the only one they have in the lab. What about Lore? You'd think they'd find a place there for his body - and not reactivate him under any circumstance, ban or not.

- I'd like to take a moment here to express how relieved I am that the various sound effects are era-appropriate, if a little dated. Unlike DSC, where someone was probably given a ZIP disk full of Star Trek SFX cues and told to use whatever they want, here it seems the sound designer was at least instructed to use only the stuff from the TNG folder. All the computers, force fields and even the one non-pull-openable door use the correct TNG effects, and it's great. The Romulan segment had few existing cues that I could make out, but that's more forgivable IMO.

- Among the collection of tools on the robotics desk are a bunch of 20th century calibrated pipettes, used to measure liquids for scientific application. One wonders what kinds of fluids are being exchanged in this lab to warrant them.

- Dipping a bit ahead to the next episode clip seen on Wil Wheaton's "Ready Room" show, the VFX guys went through all the trouble of making a new CG model of the Enterprise -D to use presumably for both the opening shot of this episode and for the holo-display in SFHQ's lobby... But then they have to use THAT version of the Enterprise alongside it. And with a notable janky flicker between the images too, instead of a smoother transition! One can only hope that it's a temporary art installation.

Mark