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Spoilers Lower Decks General Discussion Thread

If you want something closer to hard sci-fi, watch The Expanse. And even then it's not quite there.

Yeah, the Expanse is probably as close as we're going to get. Aside from the magic of the Protomolecule, and some things like mag-boots added for the sake of filming, it's amazingly rigorous. Realistic space combat with ships many kilometres apart, no sound in space, drinks poured on rotating stations show the Coriolis force, etc.

We're never going to see a Greg Egan book made into a show, so that's about all we can ask for.

I would note that as goofy as TOS is, in some ways it attempted to be "harder" than later Trek did. A lot of things we look at as "slipstream" these days like psychic powers were embraced by science fiction at the time (largely because John W Campbell believed in them, and he was such a powerful editor). Later Trek became more self-referential instead of really trying to engage with written sci-fi ideas, which meant it went more into the land of fantasy. Somehow the handle on biology got even worse as time went on as well. The things said in the Berman era about DNA make me cringe.
 
Getting back to the subject of sleeping accommodations, the situation on the Cerritos with ensigns sleeping in the corridors reminds me of David Goodman's Captain Kirk Autobiography, in which the first ship Kirk served on as an ensign stuck bunks for the lower ranked officers any where there was space. Kirk himself had to sleep in the ship's engine room.
 
From what I've read, hard scifi is scifi that only works with technologies and scientific concepts that we can right now see as being feasible.
And the last time I read something about it, the jury was out on whether warp travel is in any way feasible. That's saying nothing of ST's transporter, universal translator, replicator, magic medical tech, hordes of humanoid aliens who all can exist in the same biosphere and frequently can have offspring with each other, "de-evolution" viruses, sapient floating energy balls, "god like omnipotent aliens", psychic powers , holodecks (the way they are portrayed), wormhole travel, subspace travel, time travel, the way artificial gravity is portrayed and produced (I think), dimension hoping...the list is very long.

That being said soft scifi is not automatically worse or hard scifi isn't automatically better, just different and Star Trek is "harder" (again not necessarily better) than, for example Star Wars. I'm hard pressed thinking of a Harf SciFi franchise that's as popular as Star Trek and set in space. The Expanse might really come closest.
It all comes down to whether or not someone is willing to suspend disbelief. If they can't, they're watching the wrong show.
 
There are several ways to gauge awfulness of entertainment, but the most primary is, how hard is it to actually sit through the program and finish it. From this perspective, Threshold is not the worst Voyager episode, something like TWISTED would be- the one wherein the layout of the ship keeps changing ("Wait, this corridor is supposed to lead to the pattern enhancer repair room, but now I've ended up in the brig!")

Threshold would be somewhat akin to Spock's Brain- ridiculous, but far from the hardest to sit through- so by this metric, among the worst Trek eps would be, let's see, THAT WHICH SURVIVES, TWISTED, TERRA NOVA.

My nomination for worst episode of Alex Trek would be the one where they have to bring the doctor back from the dead by visiting the mushroom kingdom and reciting the magical incantation or whatever it is that happens in that one, don't think I'll be rewatching.
That's one of my favourite episodes, I love crazy stuff like that.

"Magicks of Megas Tu" is my favourite TAS episode.

Each to their own.
 
Getting back to the subject of sleeping accommodations, the situation on the Cerritos with ensigns sleeping in the corridors reminds me of David Goodman's Captain Kirk Autobiography, in which the first ship Kirk served on as an ensign stuck bunks for the lower ranked officers any where there was space. Kirk himself had to sleep in the ship's engine room.

I feel stuff like that (and the hallway bunks) would hamper the ship's ability to run smoothly. You want your crew rested and all parts of the ship accessible at all points. Imagine the ship gets in a fight, or a space anomaly and there's half-asleep ensigns spilling all over the corridors.

And on the Defiant

No, again, those were (very small) rooms with bunks.
 
How can Ops fire phasers? That should only be possible from the tactical station under normal circumstances XD

We've seen Data fire phasers from Ops. We've also seen both Sulu and Chekov fire phasers from both the helm and navigation consoles.

I guess everybody has a 'fire phasers' button on their respective consoles.
 
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