"Ohh, my."
TMP's uniforms
- Thread starter RobertScorpio
- Start date
"Ohh, my."
I can buy prison bars and devices that are, for the most part, stationary and hooked up to a UPS system. Such systems could give real practical advantages over their simpler counterparts.
A clothing belt, though... would be subjected to quite a lot of stress, and for little to no practical benefit over normal clothing. Replicated clothing from a fixed wall unit sounds far more practical in a Star Trek world.
Well, for one thing, there's the fact that "wall" forcefields and "tow-cable" tractor beams are physically absurd; fields of force don't actually work that way and couldn't be used as replacements for those functions anyway. Levitation is the most reasonable of those proposals, assuming it's a maglev system, because a totally frictionless system has obvious advantages over wheels.
What practical benefit is there to a tie or hoop earrings or stiletto heels or bell bottoms or t-shirts with goofy slogans on them? Fashion is never rooted in practicality. Fashion is often wildly impractical, pointless, extravagant, and ridiculous. If the technology existed to generate clothing based on powered energy fields, there would inevitably be a point at which it was fashionable to wear such clothing. And then, a year or two later, something else would become fashionable and forcefield clothing would come to be seen as thoroughly gauche.
Only to have forcefield clothing make a come back a generation or two later, when it would be seen as retro or vintage.
Yes, to prevent his Vulcan makeup rubbing on the collar of his uniform. Easier to replace the black collar every few takes than to swap shirts.
Check out his uniform in "Where No Man Has Gone Before". He has Velcro on both sides - unlike all other cast members - so that between takes the collar could be loosened and prevent the makeup rubbing.
An early Pocket novel, "The Prometheus Design", actually had a murderer set a sonic shower to suffocate the occupant with spray 'n' wear clothing raw material.
I touched on this in Ex Machina, briefly discussing the flaws in the system -- for instance, that a device that beams a form-fitting uniform onto your body doesn't take into account the changes the body undergoes just in the course of a single day, and thus the clothes can get uncomfortable after a while. Basically I treated it as a faddish gimmick that was turning out to be more trouble than it was worth.
Nice. About what I thought. Thanks! IIRC, in 'The Corbomite Maneuver' his called was also different-looking from the rest. I think it was taller and had a zipper on the side.
Sulu's collar is the same, as is Baily's; higher with a visible zipper that ran through it. I chalk it up to still fine tuning the costumes since that was the first episode shot after the second pilot sold. The only one who had a proper fit shirt and collar in that episodes is Shatner. As the star, his uniforms had to be the best of the best since he was on camera the most.
Perfectly plausible...
... in Star Trek world.
They aren't reliant on a power supply and electronic circuitry that, if it failed, would leave you completely naked wherever you are.
An airplane replies on a power supply and electronic circuitry that, if it failed, would leave you dead wherever you are. But people still fly in airplanes, because our technology is capable of producing power supplies and circuits that usually don't fail. Surely technology 260 years more advanced wouldn't be as incredibly fragile as you're assuming.
Besides, as discussed earlier, we're talking about a future culture that doesn't share our nudity taboo. (Quite plausible; people in America today are comfortable showing amounts of skin that would've been considered obscene in Edwardian times, or in Muslim countries.) So presumably such a failure wouldn't be considered all that disastrous.
On the other hand, it would give new meaning to the phrase "wardrobe malfunction"...
An airplane? Are you in the correct thread?
If we must compare... compare it to a present-day mass-produced public consumable, not a feckin airplane. A PDA perhaps. They're slightly more convenient than pen and paper. They're certainly more advanced. When they fail, though, you lose your data.
Pen and paper ain't gonna lose no data. Clothes ain't gonna disappear on you. Many people use PDAs for storage of non-critical data. No business in their right mind will keep anything important on one, though. Paper all the way.
Being left freezing cold because your superbelt has failed due to any number of reasons, where you could just have worn trousers and a shirt that have a 0% failure rate, would leave most people decidedly pissed off.
My point, which is being lost in a sea of airplanes and other unrelated nonsense, is that this supposed advanced clothing would offer nothing practical over simple fabric, and would be less reliable.
In short, there would be no reason to use it.
Again, though, we're talking a technology centuries ahead of our own, so why are you assuming failure would be commonplace?
Conventional clothes can and do fail in embarrassing ways. The seam of your pants can tear open when you bend over. A bathing suit can come undone while you're in the water and leave you exposed. A garment can be excessively thin or translucent and reveal more than you'd prefer. A low neckline or tank top with no bra underneath can lead to accidental exposure if a woman leans over too far. Heck, half of what paparazzi do is try to get "nipple slip" photos of celebrities. Conventional clothing is not as foolproof as you assert.
Why in the world would you assume that this is meant to be worn in every situation to the exclusion of all other clothing? It's just one option. It's a fashion choice. Nobody ever said people would be wearing this in the dead of winter or in Antarctica or something. You'd be left freezing cold if you wore a t-shirt and shorts in the dead of winter, but that doesn't mean nobody ever wears t-shirts and shorts. It just means they wear them in contexts where it makes sense to do so. Naturally the same would apply to this or to any other clothing choice.
And that is not in dispute. We're talking about fashion. There's no practical reason for most fashion choices. Sometimes the sheer gratuitousness of it is the whole point.
Not commonplace, but possible.
Clothes, on the other hand: Impossible.
All of those depend on the social taboo you mentioned earlier. They don't cause the physical discomfort that holographic/whatever clothing would if it suddenly vanished from you in anything less than a climate-controlled environment.
Anything in your pockets? Now it's all over the floor.
That's the impression that I got from this quote:
"Even better, many future people will carry nothing but a belt. But what a belt!"
As for assuming every situation... I'm not; I do assert however that it would be ultimately pointless in most situations, and would offer zero advantage while also incurring a slight potential disadvantage.
Fashion suggests that the holoclothes could have a distinct look... more likely, in my view, they'd look identical to whatever normal clothes are available by then.
If they had some sort of distinct look that couldn't be reproduced using classical means... perhaps they could be sold to the teenage girl crowd...
GodThingFormerly
A Different Kind of Asshole
"In the far distance, the distinctively pointed shape of the old TRANSAMERICA BUILDING. Everywhere else, the San Francisco urban sprawl is totally gone, replaced by lovely groves of large trees, green meadows, streams, lakes, and crystal clear air. (There still exists a small San Francisco "Living Museum" city but it is far enough away to be hidden by trees and will not appear in this story.) Here, as in much of the world, people live mostly in the climate-controlled, colorful and efficient "subterra cities." All industry and transport is now underground. Clearly Earth has become the home of a people who love and protect their living planet." - Star Trek: The Motion Picture Draft Screenplay by Gene Roddenberry (1978).
TGT
Apparantly this group was eliminated by the time on TNG where everyone is happy all the time. And they keep a psrink on the bridge to ensure it.
GodThingFormerly
A Different Kind of Asshole
^ "psrink"? 
TGT
TGT
^ "psrink"?
Psi shrink?
