Evolutionary Theory and Warp Drive

[YARN]

Warning: Sacred Cow Meat in this Post

There is a sacred sort of nostalgia which seems to inform starship design.

There is (apparently) a felt need for there to be as much linear continuity as possibly between designs with a lot of emphasis on "intermediate forms." The Enterprise C, for example, was designed to be somewhere between the B and the D, as if the form were literally evolving into the D. From Wikipedia: The Ambassador-class NCC-1701-C was designed to show a gradual progression from the Excelsior to Galaxy classes. As a result, a few particular aspects of its design resemble both classes, and its size is intermediate between the two.

But this obsessive compulsion not only informs connecting missing letters of the Enterprise alphabet, but the letter in between as well. The Drex Files, for example, features this image

http://drexfiles.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/allegiance_class.jpg

which is somewhere between the D and the E.

The idea seems to be that if you played a film strip of these ships, we would see a perfectly smooth morphing from NX 1701-J. And this is a bad idea. Think about it.
We have canonical Enterprises spanning from the 22nd century to the 26th century.

Even in historical evolution, however, there are years of stability marked by a baffling flowering of forms.

A closer analogue is actual ship and plane design. The Enterprise sloop of 1775 and the aircraft carrier are very different ships. There are discontinuities in these ships' designs are marked by profound technological shifts. Going from propulsion by sail to nuclear power results in a very different looking ship - this is on the level of "does ship X have warp nacelles or not."

The shift from recon balloons prop to recon prop planes to the SR-71 is another big shift.

There is nothing wrong with keeping an eye out for continuity -- although one wonder why Starfleet insists on this configuration when on-screen evidence has established that ships may come in almost any shape one pleases (true of Starfleet variants and of the ships of other races).

Moral of the story: "Realistic" starfleet ship design should have just as much of an eye for discontinuity (breaking with tradition) as it does for nacelles, saucers, and blue deflector dishes.

 

[Kaiser]

Nice write up there

 

[blssdwlf]

A closer analogue is actual ship and plane design. The Enterprise sloop of 1775 and the aircraft carrier are very different ships. There are discontinuities in these ships' designs are marked by profound technological shifts. Going from propulsion by sail to nuclear power results in a very different looking ship - this is on the level of "does ship X have warp nacelles or not."

The shift from recon balloons prop to recon prop planes to the SR-71 is another big shift.

You hit upon the main reason why the Enterprise keeps looking the same (using your own analogue). They're still using warp drive. All your examples of change are a result from a technological shift which has not occurred in Star Trek (yet).

 

[Robert D. Robot]

^ I guess that's why a 1901 Oldsmobile (essentially a high, horseless carriage steered with a rudder) looks so very much like a sleek 2011 Renault Alpine sports car. Still using gasoline-powered engines.

Seriously, although I really like the configuration of Kirk's original NCC 1701 and the designs that came about based on it, I was REALLY happy to see the Akira class and other class ships from "First Contact", NX-01, Olympia class, etc. that did not fit the saucer/cyclinder/two nacelles model. I would like to see more variety, and I believe that there are some rules of the physics of warp drive that are requiring that all the ships are trapped looking like variations on Constitution class vessels. There have to be other interesting configurations that would work and are used in Starfleet- we just have not been shown them.

I think that there would be breakthroughs within warp drive technology that could allow for "radical" changes in design options.

Maybe someone is afraid that too many configurations of Starfleet ships appearing in battle scenes would hopelessly confuse fans.

If all Klingons look and dress and act alike, and all Vulcans look and dress and act alike, then perhaps a fleet's ships must all look alike....

 

[Mage]

Asuming that the nacelles on the 1701-J are true warpnacelles, something doesn't add up. How come, 500 years after Cochrane's first warpflight, Starfleet vessels still use traditional warpdrive as we know it? Hell, how come they still use it in the 24th century? Why no further development of FTL? The Federation consists over 150 different races, a lot of them being warpcapable long before humans went out there. It's only logical that at one point during the 200 years the Federation excists, they would have made some sort of radical breakthrough. Look at how far aviation came in a 100 years. It would make sense that something other then warpdrive should be invented.

Now, in the novels set in early 2380s, slipstream is now being deployed on a limited number of ships. Technically though, this isn't tech truly developed by the Federation, but reverse-enginereed thanks to intell from Voyager. But considering that three races from the Delta Quadrant (Voth, Borg and Species 116) use FTL drive other then warp, and a species (Benthan) having developed coaxial warpdrive, it's unbelievable that Starfleet has been stuck with warpdrive for so long. Logically speaking, looking at how any species would develope technology (let along a coalition of 150 species) it would only make sense that somewhere in the 24th centuty, Starfleet would be using a completely different kind of FTL drive.

Ofcourse, it makes sense that the writes would keep on using warpdrive, since it's a hallmark of Star Trek. A signature trademark, if you will. Still, it would have been nice to have seen something different by now.


*EDIT* Crap.... was reading more about coaxial warpdrive on Memory Alpha, and Doug Drexler has stated in 2009 that

the spindly nacelle struts on 26th century USS Enterprise-J were intended to suggest a warp drive that can fold space.

So, yeah, there goes my whole point.....

 

[YARN]

You hit upon the main reason why the Enterprise keeps looking the same (using your own analogue). They're still using warp drive. All your examples of change are a result from a technological shift which has not occurred in Star Trek (yet).

And all known Earth sailing ships are still using hydrodynamic hulls which cut through the water while displacing it -- but there are still a lot of differences in ship designs.

Even if there is no discontinuity on in the basic use of warp drive, there could (and arguably should) be other discontinuities that result from other technological leaps.

NOTE: Don't read the title of the thread too literally.

 

[Patrickivan]

Asuming that the nacelles on the 1701-J are true warpnacelles, something doesn't add up. How come, 500 years after Cochrane's first warpflight, Starfleet vessels still use traditional warpdrive as we know it? Hell, how come they still use it in the 24th century? Why no further development of FTL? The Federation consists over 150 different races, a lot of them being warpcapable long before humans went out there. It's only logical that at one point during the 200 years the Federation excists, they would have made some sort of radical breakthrough. Look at how far aviation came in a 100 years. It would make sense that something other then warpdrive should be invented.

Now, in the novels set in early 2380s, slipstream is now being deployed on a limited number of ships. Technically though, this isn't tech truly developed by the Federation, but reverse-enginereed thanks to intell from Voyager. But considering that three races from the Delta Quadrant (Voth, Borg and Species 116) use FTL drive other then warp, and a species (Benthan) having developed coaxial warpdrive, it's unbelievable that Starfleet has been stuck with warpdrive for so long. Logically speaking, looking at how any species would develope technology (let along a coalition of 150 species) it would only make sense that somewhere in the 24th centuty, Starfleet would be using a completely different kind of FTL drive.

Ofcourse, it makes sense that the writes would keep on using warpdrive, since it's a hallmark of Star Trek. A signature trademark, if you will. Still, it would have been nice to have seen something different by now.


*EDIT* Crap.... was reading more about coaxial warpdrive on Memory Alpha, and Doug Drexler has stated in 2009 that

the spindly nacelle struts on 26th century USS Enterprise-J were intended to suggest a warp drive that can fold space.

So, yeah, there goes my whole point.....

the spindly nacelle struts on 26th century USS Enterprise-J were intended to suggest a warp drive that can fold space.

What? That's exactly what space warp was supposed to do all along. It folds space and re-opens it, with you on the other side of the fold.

And look. Consider warp technology like the sail. Around for centuries, but evolving technologically. Lighter and stronger fabrics. Newer yet familiar configerations. Even to the point were the sail essentially turned into a wing.

So warp application is quite sound and efficient. Though technology allows it to be even more refined over time. Hundreds of years of a technological evolution like the sail. That's why the federation has so many ships that look similar.

Now why doesn't the federation look into other types of FTL? Well, maybe they have. Maybe they've incorporated what they need already. Maybe they've decided that it's not conducive to their present technological state and to completely change everything would be too cost prohibitive. They may just not be able to do it- even after 400 years of FTL travel.

 

[DFScott]

From YARN:
The idea seems to be that if you played a film strip of these ships, we would see a perfectly smooth morphing from NX 1701-J. And this is a bad idea. Think about it.
We have canonical Enterprises spanning from the 22nd century to the 26th century.

When we take a look at the "yarn" used to weave the continuity of this series (sorry, it was there, I went for it), I think it's a bit thinner than this argument suggests.

The series "Enterprise" was plagued with a lot of bad story ideas, one of which was: taking a disposable character from the future and plunging him back into the past for the sole purpose of convincing our hero that he should do important things, because come on, man, look how importantly history treats him in the future! One of the (lame) story tools created for this purpose was the Enterprise-J. Notwithstanding all of Doug Drexler's artistry in creating that one painting, the "bad idea" that YARN points out of extending one element of industrial design for half-a-millennium, is actually the fault of one episode, and not even a really good one. It's a prop designed to make the point that what Jon Archer has started carries on for at least five centuries.

With that leap of logic, we should have had our time traveling character "Daniels" leap back to 1775 and have a similar mano-a-mano with our good friend Benedict Arnold. "Look what you've started, man! You're important!!"

So if it's a bad idea, we should take comfort in the fact that it's a flimsy thread that adheres it to the framework of this story. A great many folks here subscribe to the dogma that "if it's displayed on the screen, it's canon," meaning that ideally, all other stories have to accept that as the contextual truth. But not even Enterprise itself adhered to that cardinal law as closely as the average fanfic writer (automatic two-way video communication between races, cloaking devices a whole century before they were invented, and on and on).

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.

But simply extending this unbroken chain into infinity without suggesting the myriad, profound changes that could potentially take place, is to shut the door on science fiction itself. Science fiction should always examine the potential of the profound, and when faced with a yes-or-no decision, take the "yes" side for the hell of it and see what happens. I'm not so certain I like the idea of a quasi-galactic race of English speaking socialists who paint the same license plate number on their fuel-consuming vehicles, well into the second half of this millennium. History is not only about broken chains but the act of breaking them. I would be much more astounded by a story that tells how these chains were broken and new ones were forged, than by one that suggests an endless, unchanging river of carefully perpetuated bad ideas.

We've already seen how easily a general audience takes to the idea of intentionally breaking continuity in order that they may embrace some truly terrible story ideas (killing Kirk's dad, killing Spock's mom, destroying Planet Vulcan, putting Spock in a time machine but having him not think about going back and preventing the destruction of Vulcan, etc., etc., etc.). So I would think it a relatively trivial matter to flip a similar hypothetical switch to wipe clean the "Enterprise-J" matter from our roster of bad ideas to reconcile, in order that we may embrace once again the concept of a revolutionary breakthrough in science and even in thought itself.

DF "To Boldly Go The Direction That This Guy from the Future Told Me We Should Go Because Hey, I'm Important!" Scott

 

[Patrickivan]

^
Well said...

And maybe this would be best off in the tech forum?

 

[sojourner]

What? That's exactly what space warp was supposed to do all along. It folds space and re-opens it, with you on the other side of the fold.

No, warp drive in trek does not "fold space". It creates what basically amounts to a standing wave of space time around the ship that it rides.

 

[YARN]

From YARN:
The idea seems to be that if you played a film strip of these ships, we would see a perfectly smooth morphing from NX 1701-J. And this is a bad idea. Think about it.
We have canonical Enterprises spanning from the 22nd century to the 26th century.

When we take a look at the "yarn" used to weave the continuity of this series (sorry, it was there, I went for it), I think it's a bit thinner than this argument suggests.

The series "Enterprise" was plagued with a lot of bad story ideas, one of which was: taking a disposable character from the future and plunging him back into the past for the sole purpose of convincing our hero that he should do important things, because come on, man, look how importantly history treats him in the future! One of the (lame) story tools created for this purpose was the Enterprise-J. Notwithstanding all of Doug Drexler's artistry in creating that one painting, the "bad idea" that YARN points out of extending one element of industrial design for half-a-millennium, is actually the fault of one episode, and not even a really good one. It's a prop designed to make the point that what Jon Archer has started carries on for at least five centuries.

With that leap of logic, we should have had our time traveling character "Daniels" leap back to 1775 and have a similar mano-a-mano with our good friend Benedict Arnold. "Look what you've started, man! You're important!!"

So if it's a bad idea, we should take comfort in the fact that it's a flimsy thread that adheres it to the framework of this story. A great many folks here subscribe to the dogma that "if it's displayed on the screen, it's canon," meaning that ideally, all other stories have to accept that as the contextual truth. But not even Enterprise itself adhered to that cardinal law as closely as the average fanfic writer (automatic two-way video communication between races, cloaking devices a whole century before they were invented, and on and on).

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.

But simply extending this unbroken chain into infinity without suggesting the myriad, profound changes that could potentially take place, is to shut the door on science fiction itself. Science fiction should always examine the potential of the profound, and when faced with a yes-or-no decision, take the "yes" side for the hell of it and see what happens. I'm not so certain I like the idea of a quasi-galactic race of English speaking socialists who paint the same license plate number on their fuel-consuming vehicles, well into the second half of this millennium. History is not only about broken chains but the act of breaking them. I would be much more astounded by a story that tells how these chains were broken and new ones were forged, than by one that suggests an endless, unchanging river of carefully perpetuated bad ideas.

We've already seen how easily a general audience takes to the idea of intentionally breaking continuity in order that they may embrace some truly terrible story ideas (killing Kirk's dad, killing Spock's mom, destroying Planet Vulcan, putting Spock in a time machine but having him not think about going back and preventing the destruction of Vulcan, etc., etc., etc.). So I would think it a relatively trivial matter to flip a similar hypothetical switch to wipe clean the "Enterprise-J" matter from our roster of bad ideas to reconcile, in order that we may embrace once again the concept of a revolutionary breakthrough in science and even in thought itself.

DF "To Boldly Go The Direction That This Guy from the Future Told Me We Should Go Because Hey, I'm Important!" Scott

Even if you don't want to count the Enterprise J as canon, we still have from 2151-2387 to contend with.

I submit that these years evidence too much continuity too much gradualism and too little of the discontinuity produced by technological changes. Over roughly 200 years in a high technology society that is constantly gaining new technologies from contact with other cultures you would not expect to see a simple morphing that reflects mere mutation of what is already there.

 

[Patrickivan]

What? That's exactly what space warp was supposed to do all along. It folds space and re-opens it, with you on the other side of the fold.

No, warp drive in trek does not "fold space". It creates what basically amounts to a standing wave of space time around the ship that it rides.

Nope...

And to warp space is to warp time...

 

[YARN]

And maybe this would be best off in the tech forum?

I don't think so. I am reaching out to those of you who are playing the game of starship design in addition to critiquing the excessive graudalism of existing designs.

There is technical stuff that informs the discussion, but the governing principle is the "aesthetic of gradualism." This aesthetic is informed by a misplaced sense of evolutionary gradualism which serves to enhance "realism." Lurking behind this plausible analogy to incremental evolutionary adaptation is another motivation (a more fundamental and influential one) and that is nostalgia - for fans the Enterprise is an ideal form. Even when it changes it must, somehow remain the same. Gradualism serves this purpose well.

 

[DFScott]

Over roughly 200 years in a high technology society that is constantly gaining new technologies from contact with other cultures you would not expect to see a simple morphing that reflects mere mutation of what is already there.

Absolutely agreed. History is not some infinitely-inflatable balloon; the evolutionary process is greater than slapping on some "New / Improved" starburst on the package. I would expect a trip into the 27th century to demonstrate the degree to which humanity has reconciled itself with the rest of the galaxy, becoming less and less like itself.

And I know, I know, there's the ever-burning question of, "Is this a question for the Trek Art Forum?" Well, yes it is, because this is not a question that can be resolved with technology, or even purely with literature. We're at the cusp of the reach of our imagination, and speaking as an artist myself, bridging the gap to the next waypoint requires artistry.

DF "Your Next Stop. . . the Twilight. . . Something" Scott

 

[sojourner]

What? That's exactly what space warp was supposed to do all along. It folds space and re-opens it, with you on the other side of the fold.

No, warp drive in trek does not "fold space". It creates what basically amounts to a standing wave of space time around the ship that it rides.

Nope...

Yep...

And to warp space is to warp time...

Hence, the use of the phrase "time warp" used early in the series.

The memory alpha article:

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Warp_drive

 

[Maverisms]

There's a bit of false comparison going on here.

Well, two bits.

The fist is the evolutionary example. The Flowering of forms argument only holds up if you look at all evolution. Every known creature that ever evolved. If you look at one creature, say a house cat Evolution looks completely different.

Put a house cat on the front of line. But the first mammal on the other end. Behind the the cat, put it's mother. Behind the cat's mother but it the cat's grandmother. Behind the grand mother, great grand mother. Keep going until you reach the ancestor that was the daughter of the first mammal.

If you walk along this line, looking at each animal, you will never see a point where one form doesn't look like the forms around it. But if you pick a form from the near the front and one from near the end, they will look completely different.

(This thought experiment brought to you by Richard Dawkins)

The same problem exists in the automotive or aircraft analogies. Hot air balloons are not airplanes. Airplanes have, until recently, been very similar in form. Wings, vertical stablizers, flaps, etc. Same with the automobile. The design settled on 2 or 4 wheels and has been stable since. The shape of components might change, but the function and general placement has not. waterborne hulls are the same. They may show a lot of variation but one can glance at any given watercraft and know it is a boat of some kind.

Starships are different. Their shapes don't seem to dictated by the physics of their environment. They are dictated by the whims of their builders, divided along racial lines.

This doesn't make any sense. Logically, different races, isolated on different world would come to different means of doing the same thing. But if we use evolution as a guide, different animal types do develop different solutions, but the solutions are remarkably similar in gross form. The wings of a bird vs. the wings of a bat, for example. At a glance both are wings.

Beyond evolution, these warp capable creatures have something animals typically don't. Engineering text books. They can look at the different solutions and build off of them. Warp capable design should converge toward a common shape, but it doesn't.

 

[YARN]

Maverisms,

it appears that this is the line you are objecting to:

Even in historical evolution, however, there are years of stability marked by a baffling flowering of forms.

Below, I will unpack your objection.

First, allow me to begin by following my own advice. Yeah, I think you’ve got a point there. I will drop further references to this particular point – it creates more confusion than it’s worth.

Put a house cat on the front of line. But the first mammal on the other end. Behind the the cat, put it's mother. Behind the cat's mother but it the cat's grandmother. Behind the grand mother, great grand mother. Keep going until you reach the ancestor that was the daughter of the first mammal.

First of all, I should note that my comment does not reject or challenge evolutionary theory. Rather, it is an observation about (to our present science) unpredictable variations in rates of change in species. Sometimes evolution is very stable, during which time most species evolve at a very consistent gradual rate, a slow drip, drip, drip, of mutation and variation. Sometimes we find evidence in the fossil record of a flowering of new species. During these times things are happening very fast – no, not in terms of looking at each individual creature’s offspring (change occurs so slowly at the level you describe that change is imperceptible), but in terms of rate of change it is very rapid.

When I speak in metaphorical terms of evolutionary flowering shaking up gradualism, I am speaking about the relative rate of change.

The evolutionary metaphor is admittedly a bad one. Indeed, I think the gradualism that guides starship design is informed by thinking of starships like “gaps in the fossil records” – “Hey, we need an intermediary Starship here! Chad, design the ‘missing link’ between the B and D for this episode.” Well, if this is how we are thinking (i.e., fossil record representations of starships), then variations in rates of change of evolution should occasionally (relatively speaking) shake things up.

If, however, we view starships not as fossils in the record but as “direct descendants” (and we might have fun imagining what could have possible mated with the 1701 A to produce the 1701 B – an Oberth Class LOL?), then your objection has ground. That is, from cat to cat, we would see no big changes on average. That the Enterprise, for example, does not reproduce by sexual reproduction, however, suggests why the evolutionary metaphor is a bad one and why I prefer a tighter comparison to ships and planes.

You say the same problem attaches here, so let’s consider it.

The same problem exists in the automotive or aircraft analogies.

I don’t recall drawing a comparison to automobiles in this thread.

Hot air balloons are not airplanes.

True, they are not “planes” – but a lighter-than-air craft are just as much “aircraft” as heavier-than-air craft. No offense to the Wright brothers, but the first person to fly did so in a balloon in 1783. No offense to Louis Bleriot, but the first flight across the English Channel happened in 1785, not 1909.
The means by which they fly is so different that you object to the comparison, but that’s the point! They are very different. There is discontinuity between human flight in the 19th century and human flight in the 20th century. We go from balloon, balloon, balloon, balloon (drip, drip, drip gradualism) to BAM! AIRPLANES!

Airplanes have, until recently, been very similar in form. Wings, vertical stablizers, flaps, etc.

Jet planes look very different from prop planes. The absence of the external prop is a major design change. For looks compare, for example, an F-102 Delta Dagger to a Sopwith Camel.

The next generation of fighter planes is predicted to be unmanned so another major design change will be the absence of a cockpit, canopy, and pilot!

Same with the automobile. The design settled on 2 or 4 wheels and has been stable since.

How long have cars been around? They only been around for about a hundred years in the stabilized form you refer to. One century as compared to the four centuries spanning from the NX-01 to the Enterprise J.

Now imagine cars changing over the course of four hundred years. Moreover, imagine that Earth car designers are in contact with the advanced alien races that populate the Star Trek universe. Would you expect mere gradualistic progression?

The length of time that starships have been around suggests that ships would make for a better comparison – so let’s move on to your next point.

The shape of components might change, but the function and general placement has not. waterborne hulls are the same. They may show a lot of variation but one can glance at any given watercraft and know it is a boat of some kind.

Did you not catch the spot upthread where I said the following?

And all known Earth sailing ships are still using hydrodynamic hulls which cut through the water while displacing it -- but there are still a lot of differences in ship designs.

Yes, some aspects have remained the same over the centuries, but a tall masted ship looks very different from a steam powered paddle boat, which looks very different from a nuclear aircraft carrier.

My point is that we should not simply see endless morphing of familiar shapes, but discontinuous surprise changes as well.

Starships are different. Their shapes don't seem to dictated by the physics of their environment. They are dictated by the whims of their builders, divided along racial lines.

True. Starship design appears to be more arbitrary than aircraft design.

This doesn't make any sense. Logically, different races, isolated on different world would come to different means of doing the same thing. But if we use evolution as a guide, different animal types do develop different solutions, but the solutions are remarkably similar in gross form. The wings of a bird vs. the wings of a bat, for example. At a glance both are wings.

Beyond evolution, these warp capable creatures have something animals typically don't. Engineering text books. They can look at the different solutions and build off of them. Warp capable design should converge toward a common shape, but it doesn't.

Good point. I agree. Enterprise designs should reflect interactions with other cultures.

At any rate, I am not opposed to any and all aesthetic gradualism in starship design. I think it makes sense, but again there should be discontinuous “surprise features” which appear too.

 

[DFScott]

All of us, especially myself, are guilty of over-anthropomorphism. We tend to see technologies in terms of living creatures, and we view their evolution on a Darwinian scale. Granted, Star Trek's starships are supposed to evoke creature-like images (eagle's wings, a manta ray, crocodiles, seagulls) because their artists want us to identify with them as characters in themselves; but these starships aren't really technologies. They're works of art.

Which may be the problem. Because if we want our art forms to resemble realistic future technologies, then we need to start endowing them with more technological, less anthropomorphic characteristics.

At least 300,000 years ago, perhaps longer, what passed for human beings banged rocks onto other rocks to make flint tools for tearing flesh. About 100,000 years ago, humans banged rocks onto other rocks to make flint tools for tearing flesh. Maybe 5,000 years B.C., you started to see folks attaching sticks (which we now call "support pylons") to these flint tools. But making the tools themselves required banging rocks against other rocks to make tools for tearing flesh.

Fast forward a little bit more, and suddenly humans were using T.N.T. to break into rocks. Now, you look at a stick of dynamite, and you look at a hammer stone, and they really don't resemble each other all that much. Somewhere along the line, our understanding of the functions implicit within objects expanded. Relatively rapidly, we got a lot smarter. When we do this, we throw away old technologies and get new ones.

Technologies are by-products of who we are. Humans evolve gradually, but as we do, our understanding of our universe can change dramatically. And when that happens, our technologies can change radically.

Certain technologies die when our resourcefulness and our capability to adapt new tools to manage those resources, changes. And other technologies take their place. Imagine teleporting Ben Franklin into our century, and showing him an automobile. I bet you his first exclamation (to paraphrase the Wendy's ad) would be, "Where's the horse?"

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.

But meanwhile, back at Star Trek: Has anyone taken a moment to consider pinpointing the likely period of time in this fictitious history when starships would no longer be practical? Imagine a time when an Earth-bound traveler walks into a portal that looks like an automatic garage door, and he enters on the other side on Vulcan. Or Qu'onos. Or Rigel. If we were to throw a dart at a timeline in our minds and pick the 30th century (in honor of "Futurama"). . . What's to keep us from moving that time back to the 29th? The 28th? The 27th? Hell, who's to say that the Enterprise-E doesn't encounter a species with that technology already in hand, and it changes the entire Federation overnight?

If we can accept this as not only a possibility but a wild-card variable, then certainly we can embrace the much more conservative likelihood that within a two-century span of time, spacefarers would have discovered and put to use a more versatile form of physics that's more practical than warp drive.

DF "You'll Recognize Them Sir. They Paint The Bellies of Their Ships with a Giant Giraffe of Doom" Scott

 

[Warped9]

Interesting discussion. It reminds me of a debate I had with a friend many years ago regarding DS9's Defiant. His position was that it didn't make for a good Starfleet design because it wasn't more like the classic saucer/secondary hull and nacelles configuration. I argued that it was more credible if Starfleet had a variety of designs in its service.

At first glance the Defiant was a good breakaway from the familiar concept. On closer inspection you can see there is something of a saucer in it with the nacelles grafted onto the side and the deflector put up front. But those elements aren't immediately obvious and yet (for me) it still makes for a credible design that looks like it belongs. It looks like a human centric Starfleet vessel yet without slavishly adhering to the familiar configuration.

One of the reasons I've liked many of Masao's designs on his Starfleet Museum site is because he made an effort to inject some diversity into the history and lineage. His 22nd century spacecraft look not only more primitive but also distinctly different. The only real familiarity are nacelles and even those were different.

I think we have to accept the fact that the production staff of the various series and films simply opted for the safest route to keep things familiar to the audience.

 

[Maverisms]

I wasn't focusing on your points alone, but trying to cover all of the design objections made. Automobiles and aircraft were among the examples given. Boats as well.

My point wrt to those machines, was that every difference you can point to between one era's design and another's can be written off as cosmetic. A prop and jet turbine are still collections of spinning blades. A buggy/bicycle type wheel and Goodyear radial are still wheels. A ship of the line and an aircraft carrier are still hydrodynamic hulls (In this case, the powerplants have changed, leading to changes in shape, but a sailor from Nelson's HMS Victory would look upon HMS Invincible in drydock and know he was looking at boat. He'd wonder what makes Invincible go, but he wouldn't be confused as to what he was seeing).

I'm not suggesting the differences are cosmetic. A prop and jet turbine function in different manners, but in a very gross sense they are similar. A Sopwith Camel side by side with a Lockheed Raptor--both would be instantly recognized as air planes, despite being very different. NCC-1701 beside NCC-1701-D, same thing. The different shapes involved don't hide the similar features.

Lighter-than-air craft don't really fit in the comparison. Sure lighter-than-air and heavier -than-air are both means of flight, but using the difference in forms and comparing it to a starship just doesn't work. It is like saying that a starship and a stargate are equivalent because they are both FTL systems.

A stargate is not a starship. It does FTL through a different mechanism, and thus it looks different. (This isn't even a technical point. As designed for the fiction they support, stargates and starships have very different purposes and their general FX reflect that to the viewer).

By the same token, a Balloon is not an airplane. Yes, they both fly but the manner in which they fly is different and their shapes reflect that. Comparing hot air balloons to dirigibles is more reasonable. They fly by the same means.

Whether cars will change radically 400 years from now depends on whether or not we come up with a better solution than the wheel and axle. From that point of view the "car" is much more than 100 years old. 100 years ago just marks the switch from animal power to the ICE. And in gross form, a wagon isn't much different than a car. 4 wheels, a body... Things really haven't changed much.

If you look at a starship as a saucer, a body, and 2 nacelles, then yes, starships remain static for a long time. But that is no different than looking at a Bugati Veyron and a Conestoga wagon and declaring the the same. Depending on your point of view they are or they aren't. You won't see any Veyons charting around 8 tons of cargo, but you also won't see any wagons going 260 mph. Yet both are made of body, 4 wheels, power plant, and driver's station.

The point I'm hammering at is that what you call sudden changes in shape, I call merely cosmetic. Comparing NX-01 to NCC-1701 to me is looking at different things. Sure they have a saucer and 2 nacelles, but 1701 has a neck and body, NX-01 doesn't. This is, to me, much more radical than the difference between say HMS Enterprize and CVN-65.

My argument is not that starships (even those of the Enterprise lineage) should all look similar. I'm saying that all real world examples are shaped by their environment. If one assumes that warp physics represent an environment, then all starships should look alike. But they don't.

A Galaxy next to a Galor are very different things. This implies many solutions to the problem of warp FTL, and it ought to be reflected in starship design. We all know why it isn't, so I won't belabor that point, other than to note that is why all Enterpises share a common gross shape.

OTOH hand, I think surplus features have appeared on various iterations of the Enterprise, from the Captain's Yacht of the D to the split neck of the F. The question becomes "how far can you push it before it isn't the Enterprise?" So far history has suggested the answer is "not far."

In general Trek, I see a lot of room for improvement. Fed ships should be more reflective of the Federation. With the advent of ENT, it is now canon that Fed ships are really Earth ships (welcome to the humans only club).