Are there too many "convenient" planets or scenarios to beam down to ?

Re: Are there too many "convenient" planets or scenarios to beam down

If the landing party is walking around in sunlight, that would imply a sun. No?

 

Re: Are there too many "convenient" planets or scenarios to beam down

Or a big torch off camera

 

Re: Are there too many "convenient" planets or scenarios to beam down

Janus 4 (the Horta planet) seemed lifeless on the surface and required generators to provide air beneath. Right?


To take one of the most iconic shots in Trek lore and nitpick?--I just don't get it.

Human colonies and planets with similar humanoids would require a sun and breathable air, similar gravity, etc.

I want story not dry exposition for my 50 minutes of entertainment. It's not Forbidden Planet where they have 100 minutes for McCoy to say "wow, look at that purple sky, and that warm sun and that nice clean air." Although he does, sort of, in paradise syndrome.

 

Re: Are there too many "convenient" planets or scenarios to beam down

As the OP here I think I am being picked up wrongly on this, I`m not nit picking iconic Trek imagery or demanding meaningless and meandering dialogue to explain why theres a certain type of foliage on a certain planet.

I was merely stating that it would have been more challenging for a crew or landing party to encounter a different type of world, one which demanded life support suits or whatever, to give any story another dimension. By using the word "convenient" I was merely saying that its always a sunny terrain, always warm, no need for a jacket eg.
Surely even other Class M worlds would not all be so hospitable weatherwise ?
As for information being given on planets and their Sun which they orbit, I have always believed that info to be in the dialogue.
Surely eg, Eminiar 7 is the seventh planet orbiting the sun Eminiar. surely Talos 4 is the fourth planet in orbit of Talos in the same way as Earth could conceivably be Sol 3 ?

 

Re: Are there too many "convenient" planets or scenarios to beam down

Perhaps, in the distant past, the Preservers or others terraformed planets in the Solar neighborhood to be more conducive to huminoid life?

 

Re: Are there too many "convenient" planets or scenarios to beam down

Yes, I agree, it would have been cool to see many types of planets and landscapes/seascapes---it was, as others have stated, purely a money question.

Heck later they even began to really rely on 'paralell planets' with natives wearing on hand wardrobe.

I think we all wanted to see a little more 'outer space' in our outer space show!

 

Re: Are there too many "convenient" planets or scenarios to beam down

Remember ST is a TV show and it has to be produced to a budget, as for it always being sunny, isn't that more a case of were the show was filmed.

 

Re: Are there too many "convenient" planets or scenarios to beam down

Was there even one episode of TOS where it rained--on Earth or an alien world?

 

Re: Are there too many "convenient" planets or scenarios to beam down

Not that I can think of, off hand. Los Angeles is generally a dry region. Of course that doesn't mean they couldn't have simulated rain on the soundstage, but then it would probably mess up Spock's eyeshadow and Kirk's "Hair"!

Plenty of myst and wind, though.

I can scarcely think of many episodes where it Rained in TNG or DS9, either. It happened, but It wasn't all that common even in later trek.

 

Re: Are there too many "convenient" planets or scenarios to beam down



KIRK: I should have brought a jacket!



SULU:Yeah, everything is fine here. Loving the weather



MCCOY: I thought the report said warm and sunny!!!!???

 

Re: Are there too many "convenient" planets or scenarios to beam down

^Don't think so, but thats irrelevant. Even in places with a high rain fall, it doesn't always rain every single day.

Well as pointed out we did see snow.

 

Re: Are there too many "convenient" planets or scenarios to beam down

I just thought of one---sort of--the street is clearly wet in the final exterior scene of All Our Yesterdays as Kirk goes back to the portal access.
It was filmed on backlot and in real world it could have been a case of studio people just hosing the location off.
But in the context of the episode it had to be evidence of it having rained.

McCoy mentions 'rainy day' in 'Devil in..'and sandoval mentions, 'moderate rainfall' in This side..'


that's as close as we get I suppose.

 

Re: Are there too many "convenient" planets or scenarios to beam down

Even of the air were breathable, think of all the different germs you'd be breathing in and/or letting in through cracks in your skin. Even travelling to a different part of this planet people have to adjust to different pollen and can be sick from that.

It was 1966 tv, a vehicle with which to tell stories about people. It's ok.

 

Re: Are there too many "convenient" planets or scenarios to beam down

I'm not really sure why you assume these planets are "just there".

Many times we join the ship when it is already orbiting a planet. Other times we might see a planet gradually growing larger on the viewscreen. The ship's sensors are centered around showing their destination, the planet itself.

You can easily imagine Spock's science station picking up all of the other relevant astronomical details and forwarding them to anybody else who needs to know if you like.

Honestly I think you are in the minority in wanting more of those types of details...which is fine! We all like different aspects of the show, but for most viewers I really don't think it would add much, and might even be dull or annoying to others. It simply wasn't the focus of the show to delve into such minutiae.

 

Re: Are there too many "convenient" planets or scenarios to beam down

You forgot to quote the part right after that paragraph where I said I was kidding. Of course I don't expect them to get into all of that, unless the story specifically called for it. I was pointing any question I could think of, into response to Timo's post about what more the the matte painting could possibly cover.

Sure, it does a great job setting the scene, but to say the landscape doesn't raise any questions, is off the mark. So to simply point out that questions could be asked, I rattled off a list of things that came to mind...and to be honest I wasn't even sure what episode that was from, and how it might have fit into the narrative of a specific story didn't even come to mind. I was just pointing out questions for the sake of pointing them out.

 

Re: Are there too many "convenient" planets or scenarios to beam down

I'm not assuming they're just there. That was someone else, as I mentioned in my post. I was commenting on the general need to at the very least give the appearance that you care about including some level of detail beyond simply warping up to a planet and beaming down to see what the locals are up to.
It doesn't matter what the details ever are, if they're towards a planet, a type of weapon being used, or the type of power flowing through your engines...which Star Trek is known for getting into. We even had to invent a word to define the level of technical detail Trek gets into, even though most of it is made up...technobable is all about details. Think of it as the difference between saying, "they're shooting at us," and "we're taking enemy disruptor fire."

The same mentality should be applied across the board, so rather than saying hey, there's a planet let's check it out....you instead get, we're approaching an M-class world, with a pre-warp civilization approaching one billion inhabitants." The latter is usually the standard of what we get and that's fine...And before that's again construed as an plea for vastly more detail to be included, let me say clearly that I feel Trek gets into plenty of detail as it is, and could stand with a little less detail, particularly in the case of technobabble. Too much detail can be dull an annoying and it has to be done carefully.

Anyway, to get back to the original topic, I think it's really amazing now that we're finding so many actual planets beyond our solar system and that some of them may very well be possible of supporting some sort of life.

In the past, it did seem strange that Trek came across so many habitable planets, but it seems sort of fitting in a way to find out now that Trek may have actually had it right after all. There are tons of planets out there and many of them will likely support life, not only life as we might expect to find it, but possibly life beyond anything we might image. It's a great time to be a science fiction fan...seeing what we thought was fiction, actually becoming science fact.

 

Re: Are there too many "convenient" planets or scenarios to beam down

Sorry, didn't mean to put somebody else's words in your mouth, it's late here.. I get what you're saying and mostly agree.

I think we can assume that the Enterprise probably investigated many other sorts of worlds off camera and that we are only shown the most interesting ones. Also I imagine that more emphasis is put on checking out the more earthlike planets, or inhabited planets in general for obvious reasons.

To your last point...yes I agree that is quite as awesome thing isn't it?! Very exciting.

 

Re: Are there too many "convenient" planets or scenarios to beam down

Well, it goes without saying that any planet is going to be orbiting some star or other. And the nomenclature was often quite specific. For example, the planet in "This Side of Paradise" is Omicron Ceti Three, meaning it's the third planet orbiting the fifteenth brightest star (omicron being the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet) in the constellation Cetus (the whale).

 

Re: Are there too many "convenient" planets or scenarios to beam down

Not always. In "Enterprise" episode "Rogue Planet" they found a planet with no sun that somehow managed to support a complete ecosystem. There was no explanation for what the planet's source of heat was, and I don't think there is anything redeeming that episode scientifically.

 

Re: Are there too many "convenient" planets or scenarios to beam down

From Gene Roddenberry's original series outline, as quoted in TMOST:

So . . . yeah. It was part of the concept from the beginning that the Enterprise would be mostly limited to exploring Earthlike planets, obviously for budgetary reasons.