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Should there be cars in Discovery?

PicardSpeedo

Commander
Red Shirt
JJ Trek riled up a lot of people with its kid-Kirk-drives-a-car and grown-up-Kirk-does-a-bunch-of-slow-donuts-on-a-motorcycle scenes. Should there be wheeled automobiles in Discovery?
 
If we're to play the continuity game, there's nothing there against the presence of automobile-type vehicles in all Trek eras as such. What we want to eliminate is a vehicle that would teach the TOS Kirk how to drive a facsimile of a 1930s automobile - but since those had the weirdest user interfaces to begin with, and the Iotians might further have built theirs with an alien version of steering, that's not much of a limitation.

It's just that automobile-sized items used to be prohibitively expensive as props go. Not so today: if there isn't a real car weird enough available off the shelf (car dealer or Hollywood shelf, take your pick), you can jazz it up with plastics or VFX at a reasonable price, and then make it fly, dive or turn itself into a briefcase.

The only problem I see in this respect is that our heroes might sometimes benefit from operating a ground or air vehicle in landing party duty - but this never happens in TOS, and even in TAS they only get wheels from aliens. So why would DIS be different? So probably the wheeled vehicles should remain on the roads of civilized planets and not travel alongside our heroes aboard their starships...

That is, unless the big secondary hull of the Discovery is a special garage just for the purpose!

Timo Saloniemi
 
This idea is based on the notion that a lot of action will take place on planetary surfaces, whilst the name of the ship/show would indicate more exploratory and space-based action. Whilst landing parties may need a vehicle for some missions (such as the Argo buggy from Nemesis) they may use a variety of hover or wheeled craft when applicable--most likely depending on planetary conditions more than anything else. Though this could also be solved by having the ship beam the team from one location to the next (assuming all is peaceful in orbit).

So my stance would be: if it's important for the plot then I don't see why not, likewise hovercraft, but don't just throw things in to try and be "cool" or "edgy".
 
Earth had bikes, groundcars and hovercars in 2259 in Star Trek Into Darkness. Data had a hovercar in 2395 in the alternate future of "All Good Things"

Enterprise had flying cars in New York in 2151 in "Shockwave" and groundcars in a deleted scene from "The Expanse" set 2153.

So... yes?
 
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A land buggy/rover would only make sense in situations when you can't beam down, and want to cover a lot of ground. Or maybe collect samples/move cargo/shuttle people. One scenario off the top of my head that I could think of: A stormy planet where the shuttle can't land close to where a bunch of sick/injured people are, and they need a vehicle to get them out and back to the landing zone, which is a few miles off.
 
Yes, but should there also be space horses, or at least hoverhorses?
A horse with rockets or jet engines strapped to it would be awesome. You could even make a plot centered around it. I'm thinking like one of the rockets on its leg fails and now you have an out of control horse tumbling through the air, threatening the structural integrity of the station.

I'd also want to see classic automobiles involved in some way. Vehicles from the golden age of cars, like the Suzuki Samurai, Chevy El Camino, and Ford Pinto. Also, the Pontiac Aztek.
 
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As long as those cars aren't fossil fuel based we could have as much as they want, but some alternative non polluting engine to show us that at least Earth had moved on to a brighter future.
 
Any gasoline based cars would likely be collectibles or antiques. With warp drive, I think they would have solved clean propulsion problems for ground vehicles.
 
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