• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Starship design history in light of Discovery

Christopher said:
Because that practice is utterly stupid. It makes no sense to give the same registry number to different ships of the same name; the entire purpose of a registry number is to be a unique identifier for a ship independent of whatever names it may be given over its lifetime, and to give meaningful information about when and as part of what class or series of ships it was built, something that's totally lost if you keep reusing the same number over and over again for half a dozen ships built over more than a century. It's frustrating enough that we're stuck with that idiotic practice being used for the Enterprise -- at least having it be unique to that ship makes it slightly less nonsensical.

I gather that in real life, appending a letter to a ship's registry number is something you do for a refit of that specific ship. So really, it should've been the TMP Enterprise that was 1701A, and the TVH Enterprise should've had a different number. (If they wanted it to resemble the original number, they could've made it 1761, say, a later ship of the same class.)
Click to expand...
Under close scrutiny, much of Star Trek is stupid. Why is this worse than, say, making the bridge an obvious target on top of the saucer? Or the captain and most of the senior staff all adventuring into dangerous situations on unknown planets? Or Trek's depiction of time as a constant across the universe, regardless of velocity?
 
Groppler Zorn said:
That Data never got a grammar upgrade always bothered me. Can’t Siri use contractions?
Click to expand...

The thing is, all that "Datalore" actually claimed was that Data preferred not to use contractions, that it was his choice to speak more formally (even though he'd used one or two contractions earlier in the same episode). It wasn't until "The Offspring" and "Future Imperfect" that it was misinterpreted as something Data couldn't do.


And “Kling” was the name of a city on Qo’Nos (I think I nicked that from beta canon).
Click to expand...

That doesn't fit the line. It was actually Korris saying "I would rather die here than let the traitors of Kling pick the meat from my bones." He was referring to the entire Klingon government by that epithet, so it makes no sense that he was referring to a single city.

Although, of course, it wasn't that long ago that I was arguing in another thread that an alien planet could easily have dozens of different names in different languages.


I always liked to think that “time warp” was a reduced form of “space time warp”, which is basically what warp drive is - so when they were going on about “the time barrier” in the Cage they really meant “the space time barrier” or some such so they were really talking about good old fashioned warp drive.
Click to expand...

No, because the expedition could never have gotten to the Talos Star Group in the first place if they hadn't had warp drive, and we now know that the drive was invented nearly a century before "The Cage," not less than 20 years.

I once read a suggestion from Doug Drexler that the "time barrier" was actually a timing problem that kept the warp coils from generating a dedicated symmetrical warp field without a separate governor. The module between the nacelles on Enterprise NX-01 was intended by Drexler to be that governor, and he saw the "breaking of the time barrier" to refer to the technological advance that eliminated the need for the governor and allowed warp engines to break warp 6.


Given that we’ve seen the Vulcans be a bit mean to Spock about his human heritage, maybe when he referred to Vulcanians he was passive aggressively insulting them back (at least in his own way and to himself)
Click to expand...

"Vulcanian" was used by Harry Mudd in "Mudd's Women" (the first mention of Spock's species in production order); Kirk, the computer, and Spock in "Court Martial"; Spock in "A Taste of Armageddon"; Elias Sandoval in "This Side of Paradise"; and Kor's subordinate in "Errand of Mercy." "Vulcan" was used in "The Man Trap" and "The Naked Time" as the name of the planet the Vulcanians came from, but "Vulcan" was first used as the species name in "Balance of Terror," followed by "Dagger of the Mind," "The Menagerie," "This Side of Paradise," "The Devil in the Dark," "Errand of Mercy," and "Operation -- Annihilate!" before it became the exclusive term from season 2 onward. (Interesting that two episodes had both forms used by different characters.)


King Daniel Beyond said:
Under close scrutiny, much of Star Trek is stupid. Why is this worse than, say, making the bridge an obvious target on top of the saucer? Or the captain and most of the senior staff all adventuring into dangerous situations on unknown planets? Or Trek's depiction of time as a constant across the universe, regardless of velocity?
Click to expand...

I never said it was the only stupid thing. I've complained about a lot of stupid things in Trek (including at least two of the things on your list), and this is one of them.
 
I have been reading the transcripts for the first series. People have spoken about the lack of shuttlecrafts in "The Enemy Within". There are many other episodes where the story would have turned out differently if the shuttlecrafts were not conveniently forgotten. And, there are episodes with our decades of progress in many fields would not work now. We have technology now which can grow organs - Spock would not be in a self-induced hypnosis as he was in "A Private Little War" due to there not being replacement organs on board the ship. In our technology, we could grow new tissues from the patient's stem cells. Goodness knows what people could do hundreds of years from now.

Many of the stories from TOS have not aged well. I do not mind it as much now that Discovery is giving the prime timeline a new coat of paint. I just wish their stories were better written.
 
Last edited:
Christopher said:
The thing is, all that "Datalore" actually claimed was that Data preferred not to use contractions, that it was his choice to speak more formally (even though he'd used one or two contractions earlier in the same episode). It wasn't until "The Offspring" and "Future Imperfect" that it was misinterpreted as something Data couldn't do.
Click to expand...

...But of course merely described as Data not "mastering" the art. And Data is a highly self-critical character, which was pretty much the meat and bones of "Datalore" already.

That doesn't fit the line. It was actually Korris saying "I would rather die here than let the traitors of Kling pick the meat from my bones." He was referring to the entire Klingon government by that epithet, so it makes no sense that he was referring to a single city.
Click to expand...

...Washington, anyone?

Then again, these folks are Klingons. If the traitors betray "Kling", they are probably betraying something pretty fundamental.

So dropping either "Washington" or "humanity"/"people" in place of Kling in Korris' sentence would make it instantly recognizable as political blustering down here on Earth today.

(And omitting the silent "g" from the word would make it instantly recognizable as the latter sort of expression from certain Trek novels. If you betray Klin, you better beware of Thought Masters coming to you from beyond the grave...)

Klin(g) is certainly a tidbit I could see returning in something like DSC or the latest revival movies, just for the heck of it - much like Vulcanians.

Timo Saloniemi
 
There were some details about Data that were contradicted and retconned even before the end of Season 1, not the least of which is his statement to Riker in "Encounter at Farpoint, Part I" that he graduated in the Starfleet Academy "Class of '78." That implies that Roddenberry originally intended the first season of TNG to take place sometime after the year 2378 but by the time "The Neutral Zone" was written the calendar year for the first season had been firmly established as 2364.

I suppose one can always say that Data meant there there 78 total cadets in his graduating class. It's marginally less of a stretch, even if that seems like a very tiny number of graduating cadets for one academic year.
 
Ghouleddie74 said:
There were some details about Data that were contradicted and retconned even before the end of Season 1
Click to expand...

And later. In the first two seasons, Data was portrayed as capable of subdued emotion, particularly where Tasha Yar was concerned, even though he didn't always understand it. It wasn't until "The Ensigns of Command" near the start of season 3 that Data was first overtly stated to be emotionless. Which really annoyed me at the time, because it was falling back on the hackneyed sci-fi cliche that "computers don't have feelings, only programming," which is nonsense. Emotion is basically the closest thing we have to programming -- automatic responses to stimuli that are inbuilt rather than learned or chosen. Emotion is a simple, straightforward thing that animals possess. Conscious thought is enormously more complicated and advanced, so if you can create an AI complex enough to think, then giving it the ability to feel should be vastly simpler.

Data was also originally meant to have been created by mysterious aliens in order to preserve the minds and memories of a destroyed human colony. "Datalore" retconned his origin by introducing Noonien Soong, and the preserved-memories idea was ignored until "Silicon Avatar," where it was reinterpreted as simply storing their journals and writings rather than their actual minds. Also, "Brothers" created a continuity error by casting Brent Spiner as Noonien Soong (rather than Keye Luke, who had to drop out of the role due to illness). In "Datalore," nobody knew that Data had been created by Soong until they found Soong's lab. But how hard would that have been to figure that out given that Data looked exactly like the Federation's most famous proponent of positronic AI? (Although you could argue that this logic error exists within "Datalore" itself, since Soong was the only person known for believing positronic brains were viable, so it should hardly have been a mystery even without the facial resemblance.)
 
Data also presents the real problem that even if he was invented by a genius and no one else has been capable of making another, it's only a matter of time until someone does, and that, combined with holographic self-aware entities pushes any furture trek into post-humanoid era where organic lifeforms simply cannot compete. The Borg are nothing compared to a UFP filled with the next generation of Datas, EMH's and Vic Fontaines.
 
XCV330 said:
Data also presents the real problem that even if he was invented by a genius and no one else has been capable of making another, it's only a matter of time until someone does, and that, combined with holographic self-aware entities pushes any furture trek into post-humanoid era where organic lifeforms simply cannot compete. The Borg are nothing compared to a UFP filled with the next generation of Datas, EMH's and Vic Fontaines.
Click to expand...

But remember Ira Graves, who proved an organic mind could be uploaded into a positronic android, and Danara Pel, whose brain was uploaded into a holomatrix. So really, immortality should be just around the corner.
 
Christopher said:
But remember Ira Graves, who proved an organic mind could be uploaded into a positronic android, and Danara Pel, whose brain was uploaded into a holomatrix. So really, immortality should be just around the corner.
Click to expand...
Honestly, I'd LOVE to see that kind of future trek story. UFP a body-swapping hybrid of holographics, organic, and andoid tech able to jump into holographic universes to run long term scenarios, ethical but almost god-like compared to their origins.

I know I am directing this at the author of Only Superhuman (great novel, do you have more stories set in that?) so somehow I think you have more thoughts about that.
 
Christopher said:
But remember Ira Graves, who proved an organic mind could be uploaded into a positronic android, and Danara Pel, whose brain was uploaded into a holomatrix. So really, immortality should be just around the corner.
Click to expand...
Living Forever, gets pretty boring after about the first 3000 years.
:cool:
 
XCV330 said:
Honestly, I'd LOVE to see that kind of future trek story. UFP a body-swapping hybrid of holographics, organic, and andoid tech able to jump into holographic universes to run long term scenarios, ethical but almost god-like compared to their origins.

I know I am directing this at the author of Only Superhuman (great novel, do you have more stories set in that?) so somehow I think you have more thoughts about that.
Click to expand...

I touched on it in Department of Temporal Investigations: The Collectors.
 
the star trek twitter account is all klingon-upped for some reason today. they just shared this image:
AHAwcqc.jpg

are these discovery season 2 klingon battlecruisers or nah?
 
XCV330 said:
Honestly, I'd LOVE to see that kind of future trek story. UFP a body-swapping hybrid of holographics, organic, and andoid tech able to jump into holographic universes to run long term scenarios, ethical but almost god-like compared to their origins.

I know I am directing this at the author of Only Superhuman (great novel, do you have more stories set in that?) so somehow I think you have more thoughts about that.
Click to expand...
I like this idea.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top