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Modern Writers & TOS Technology

One aspect of Trek tech that's always seemed too limited to me was the use of the viewscreen as nothing more than a picture window. I always felt it should have status displays, sensor readouts, holographic overlays, picture-in-picture insets, etc. rather than just a bare image. We did occasionally get glimpses of more; "The Lights of Zetar" depicted a nifty tactical plot of the "storm" approaching Memory Alpha, which still holds up pretty well today, and TWOK had its occasional uses of tactical projections. But for some reason, TNG never picked up on that and just settled for the picture window.
I think we have started to see this in some of the more recent 24th century stuff. I'm pretty sure there have been at least a couple scenes were we've seen the heroes talking to someone, and during the conversation shrinking the image of whoever they were talking to so they could look at something else on the viewscreen.
 
I think we have started to see this in some of the more recent 24th century stuff. I'm pretty sure there have been at least a couple scenes were we've seen the heroes talking to someone, and during the conversation shrinking the image of whoever they were talking to so they could look at something else on the viewscreen.

Yeah, I think it was "The Outrageous Okona" where there was a split-screen between two comm channels with a gratuitous animated effect on the dividing line. Maybe one or two other TNG episodes too. But split-screen barely scratches the surface of what 24th-century displays should be capable of.
 
Christopher said:
(except in my version, the projected comm signals weren't translucent and weirdly distorted)

Can you imagine the scene with Uhura scrolling through the various aspect ratios trying to find the correct settings during the conversation?:rommie:
 
I think we have started to see this in some of the more recent 24th century stuff. I'm pretty sure there have been at least a couple scenes were we've seen the heroes talking to someone, and during the conversation shrinking the image of whoever they were talking to so they could look at something else on the viewscreen.

Yeah, I think it was "The Outrageous Okona" where there was a split-screen between two comm channels with a gratuitous animated effect on the dividing line. Maybe one or two other TNG episodes too. But split-screen barely scratches the surface of what 24th-century displays should be capable of.

Also in DS9, either in Tears of the Prophets or What You Leave Behind there was a three way conversation between Sisko, Ross and Martok. But you're right, view screens should be used for a lot more than just viewing one or sometimes two things at once.
 
. . . One aspect of Trek tech that's always seemed too limited to me was the use of the viewscreen as nothing more than a picture window. I always felt it should have status displays, sensor readouts, holographic overlays, picture-in-picture insets, etc. rather than just a bare image.
In Trek TOS, that’s what all those smaller overhead screens around the perimeter of the bridge were supposed to be for, although they were used much less frequently than they should have been. Most of the little screens usually just had a still image pasted on them.

Christopher said:
(except in my version, the projected comm signals weren't translucent and weirdly distorted)

Can you imagine the scene with Uhura scrolling through the various aspect ratios trying to find the correct settings during the conversation?:rommie:
And how would she even know what the correct aspect ratio should be? I mean, what if they were communicating with an alien whose body was ten feet tall and one foot wide?
 
The first three examples are good ones, especially the one from "A Matter of Honor." That's exactly the sort of thing I'm thinking of -- information superimposed on top of the actual standard visual image.

As for the latter three, the first is only using false-color telemetry to show something that couldn't be shown visually, so it doesn't represent a routine use; also, there's no text incorporated, so it's not showing as much information as it could. I'm not sure about the second... is that some other ship's main viewscreen? If so, then yeah, it counts. But the third is just the viewscreen relaying the feed from Geordi's VISOR, so it's more along the lines of viewscreen-as-monitor, simply displaying what's being transmitted to it. (And don't get me started on how thoroughly TNG squandered the potential of Geordi's VISOR after the first couple of seasons. The guy had a superpower that could've been immensely useful, but more often than not, the only time the VISOR was a plot point was when someone used it to screw with Geordi.)

Overall, I'll grant that they occasionally treated the viewscreen as more than just a window or big-screen videophone, but those occasions weren't nearly as routine as they could've been. Not that that isn't understandable; it would've cost more to mock up graphics on the viewscreen than just to stick an Okudagram transparency into a console. But that's an example of the core question of this thread. When we write about Trek technology, do we observe the same limits even though we aren't bound by the same budgetary restrictions?

I've just realized that something I did in DTI: Watching the Clock is relevant here. I occasionally had the DTI agents using their padds like a modern Blackberry, both as a PDA-type device and a communications device. I figured that since they aren't Starfleet, I wasn't bound by the same conceit of having the communicator be a separate device from a padd (though they did have "temporal tricorders" as well as padds). Maybe there's a reason why Starfleet communicators are kept separate from their data devices, perhaps some sort of security issue. But a civilian agency might do things differently.
 
^

Well put. I realize the link with Geordi's VISOR didn't have any textual accompaniment, but I wanted to show that just to illustrate that they had the ability to interface with Geordi's POV if they wanted. I think the top image was also a feed from the probe telemetry of the cosmic string fragment, again, just to illustrate that they could also tie in to a probe, and see a "live feed" sensor image.

All in all, I agree with you, that we never saw the viewscreens used this way enough... in a multi-function capacity. It would have been cool to see it used more often. IIRC, the 1701-D's viewscreen also displayed the scrolling text of the Sheliak language during the treaty transmission in "The Ensigns of Command".
 
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