Berllinghoff Rasmussen and enterprise(nx)

[Timo]

According to Worf, there were no phasers in the 22nd Century, and he would know.

And this is his answer to Rasmussen's question on what Worf considers an important example of progress. So essentially Worf should be saying "Phasers were invented in the 22nd century - first there were none, and then there were some, which is important progress in my opinion". He just chooses brevity in saying so.

Rasmussen wants "progress in the past two centuries". So Worf would mention the 22nd century no matter whether it was an important watershed in phaser tech or not. But the way he says it, and more importantly the reason he says it, allows for the watershed to have been in that very century.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

Come on, now. They deliberately and knowingly ignored Worf's line about phasers when making Enterprise, just as they knowingly and deliberately ignored Picard's little sperch about Klingon first contact in "First Contact", and just as they ignored all the stuff Spock said about Romulan War-era technology (no viewscreens, no brigs, atomic weapons) and cloaking devices being an amazing new technology in "Balance of Terror"

It may annoy die-hard continuity nuts, but it was their Star Trek and they could do whatever they wanted with it. All those lines were put in to the episodes as thowaway tidbits, not as some great and greviously violated master plan.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Fans place too much stock in one off, throw away lines. According to various TOS episodes Kirk's adventures take place 200 years in the future and also 600 years in the future, no the 23rd Century. If you believe Encounter at Farpoint Data graduated the Academy as part of the class of '78. Either roughly 15 years after the events of TNG season one or nearly 100 year prior. Should we go with those and ignore later revisions as well?

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Either Worf just got it wrong, or phasers and phase pistols are not the same thing and don't have to be. Both are equally likely. And can both be true.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I might have been able to buy that phase weapons and phasers weren't one and the same if the didn't use the same visual effect, beam colour, sound effect and function in exactly the same manner. Ditto photon(ic) torpedoes.

 

[Nerys Myk]

I might have been able to buy that phase weapons and phasers weren't one and the same if the didn't use the same visual effect, beam colour, sound effect and function in exactly the same manner. Ditto photon(ic) torpedoes.

All beam weapons in Star trek do the same thing with the same SFX, be they lasers, phase pistols, phasers or disruptors. The laser weapons seen in Star Trek use the same beam color as phasers and phase pistols. Though the colors of phaser beams hasn't been consistent.

 

[Timo]

They deliberately and knowingly ignored Worf's line about phasers when making Enterprise

Yes, of course they did. But the point is that Worf's line is still compatible enough with what we saw, and we shouldn't worry about it even if we want to think that our characters are consistent, continuous and not complete morons.

The same with Picard's line about Klingon first contact. Although the "no viewscreens" interpretation is complete nonsense - Paul Schneider wouldn't have been thinking about anything even remotely like that when writing "Balance of Terror", not with decades of scifi tradition and real world precedent weighing on him.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

Aplologies - the line was "no ship-to-ship visual communication" - which although retconned by the post-series Enterprise novels to mean they merely refused visual contact, the original intent was clearly that such communication wasn't possible on the primitive space vessels of the era.

Worf isn't a "complete moron" for getting what, post retcon, is a basic fact wrong. Taken in the context of the TNG episodes themselves, these aren't mistakes. Taken in the context of the bigger picture, the lines are merely obsolete.

 

[Nerys Myk]

The "no ship-to-ship visual communication" was just an excuse to make the reveal that the Romulans look like Vulcans more dramatic and to provide fuel for Stiles's bigotry. Nice drama, but not well thought out given the state of visual communication at the time the episode was made and the projected state in the science fiction of the day.

 

[Timo]

But again, the interpretation that visiphones didn't exist sounds like absolute lunacy, not justified by the text itself. The Romulans just didn't communicate visually, just like they didn't give quarter. It's fan nonsense that the old ships wouldn't have had facilities for giving quarter (some even think there weren't quarters aboard for prisoners!), and it's fan nonsense that the ships wouldn't have had visiphones. Rather, with poorly protected yet apparently heavily armed ships, both sides had to play a cruel game where niceties such as video chats and displays of mercy were rare luxury.

And that's not even Trek context, that's the general context in which even the single TOS episode from the 1960s has to exist.

TOS is unfortunately burdened by half a century of overtly literal fan interpretation, leading to unsupported ideas such as "Spock is first Vulcan in Starfleet" or "photon torpedoes were invented two minutes before Kirk met the Gorn". Hacking off the crust of such ideas to expose the stories beneath can hardly be considered "retconning" when it's only retroactive in the sense that it for some reason wasn't done in time!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

Actually, there's quite a bit of merit in the concept that ship to ship streaming visual communication, between alien space vessels, would be rather more difficult than Trek depicts. Alien computer systems. Being able to interpret vastly different data formats on the fly. This isn't skype.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Perhaps there is a generally accepted, freely available communications protocol that any starfaring race can use. Like the Trek version of freeware.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Actually, there's quite a bit of merit in the concept that ship to ship streaming visual communication, between alien space vessels, would be rather more difficult than Trek depicts. Alien computer systems. Being able to interpret vastly different data formats on the fly. This isn't skype.

Incompatible systems is a different thing that not having viewscreens.