TOS Science/tech changes

[TREK_GOD_1]

I'd say maybe try to make future medicine more advanced.

How many times does someone die and that's it, no attempt at resuscitation.

Actually, there are episodes where McCoy tried to keep a patient alive, but the person was beyond medical help, such as Kirk's sister-in-law Aurelan ("Operation--Annihilate!") and Joe Tormolen ("The Naked Time").

And I can't understand how some of the characters that died should have, like Miramanee for starters.

Severe internal injuries. She was stoned by her people and by the time the landing party beamed down, she had been left in that condition far too long to be saved.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Severe internal injuries. She was stoned by her people and by the time the landing party beamed down, she had been left in that condition far too long to be saved.

Also, she was far too involved with the lead to be saved. But seriously, I love that episode.

 

[Timo]

That's just it though - does a TOS landing party ever use them for such long distance communication?

No landing party was split across great distances, but certainly in "Gamesters of Triskelion" Kirk seems to think it worth the while to use his communicator to call the ship across what must be interstellar ranges. That is, while making the call, he already believes he's on the wrong planet altogether, and also in a wholly different star system with the wrong number of suns.

Then again, Spock in turn makes no attempt to communicate with the disappeared landing party, either before or after he deduces they have been whisked to a different star system. But surely such an attempt would have been made offscreen ASAP anyway. And the failure to mention it is neither here nor there - and the unseen attempt failing would also fail to establish any "here" or "there" about how far Scotty or Spock would assume the recipient to be and still hear the hail.

Is Kirk just hoping the ship was moved to this wrong system, too? Is he counting on the communicator hooking up to a local commnet automatically? Or does he think his pocket phone can go interstellar?

Perhaps this is where Roddenberry might have been prompted to "go prescient": the show could make more references to interstellar infrastructure, including a communications network that allows for the transfer of complex data. Not out of bounds for the 1960s by any means, but also not actually mentioned in TOS.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[johnnybear]

Also, she was far too involved with the lead to be saved. But seriously, I love that episode.

Who wouldn't want to be stranded on a planet like that with beautiful Sabrina Scharf as your wife??
JB

 

[Mytran]

Severe internal injuries. She was stoned by her people and by the time the landing party beamed down, she had been left in that condition far too long to be saved.

She can't have been that far gone though; they had time to carry her all the way back to the hut, have a fairly detailed conversation and she STILL barely died before the end of the episode!

Beam her up, put her on life support and let the doctor repair those injured organs

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

She can't have been that far gone though; they had time to carry her all the way back to the hut, have a fairly detailed conversation and she STILL barely died before the end of the episode!

She was on her way to death, and the landing party was not going to beam sone random person up (who, unlike Aurelan on a recognized colony world like Deneva, or the source of a threat to all reality such as Lazarus) to perform emergency surgery. There were enough PD violations (though unintentional) going as it is.

Beam her up, put her on life support and let the doctor repair those injured organs

There's no drama...and its not realistic if everyone is saved.

 

[Ronald Held]

She can't have been that far gone though; they had time to carry her all the way back to the hut, have a fairly detailed conversation and she STILL barely died before the end of the episode!

Beam her up, put her on life support and let the doctor repair those injured organs

If you ignore the PD, put her in status until you get to a Starbase.

 

[Timo]

Ah, if anything, letting Miramanee die is a cop-out, whereas having her survive and bear Kirk's son or daughter would cater for shiploads of drama. Of course, this would be drama unsuited to the TOS format, but still...

Of course, an entire TOS episode could be dedicated to the dilemma of whether to beam the healed Miramanee back. It would be intriguing to see TOS do TNG, with 1960s sensibilities and all!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ronald Held]

TOS would not return her,as McCoy might not be able to erase her memories aboard the Enterprise. Might take 10 minutes of anguish to make the decision.

 

[Silvercrest]

For some in-universe reason (arriving on Tuesday or whatever) ... I like the idea that the Enterprise was simply without any shuttles at the time of the The Enemy Within. Shit happens.

If so, Kirk needed to keep his lip buttoned in Generations. If he got on Harriman's case over the Tuesday business, Demora Sulu could just turn around and say, "You know, Dad once told me you almost got him killed when ...."

 

[Henoch]

Nay, she adores Kirk. Kirk saved Sulu's life and the Federation many times in addition to saving the entire universe once. He's earned the right to criticize Starship Captains and Starfleet itself. Besides, wasn't it Sulu who was the only one to come to Kirk's aid in ST:TUC? I don't see Sulu ever badmouthing Kirk.

 

[johnnybear]

She can't have been that far gone though; they had time to carry her all the way back to the hut, have a fairly detailed conversation and she STILL barely died before the end of the episode!

Beam her up, put her on life support and let the doctor repair those injured organs

Yeah I never bought that idea either, that she was so badly injured that she couldn't be saved, look at all the miracles that McCoy has performed to save Kirk and Spock many times over the series and yet he couldn't cure the odd abdominal haemorrhage here and there?
JB

 

[yotsuya]

I'd want to kibitz a bit and get them to start off with things like Starfleet. And finish the port side of the Enterprise model. They saved a few pennies and in the long run it wasn't worth it. I'd have him get a technical continuity person whose job it was to keep things consistent and to work with him and Jefferies to pin down some of the tech early on. And maybe some horizontal details in the corridors to break up the walls.

 

[The Old Mixer]

More tech advice for TOS with 53 years of hindsight: Don't have the computers make punch card noises.

 

[Qonundrum]

For TOS tech, if one wanted to address smart phone functionality, the most obvious thing would have been to put the tricorder functions into the communicator...which makes it less likely that we would have later gotten combadges, as running scans with a pin on your chest doesn't seem practical. Unless they went all Siri and were asking the pin to scan things for them.

I like to pretend that radiation falloff lacks enough space within the tricorder's dimensions, where the RF and other radiation output would interfere with signals. That's the trouble with combining disparate technologies in a tiny space....

 

[Forbin]

It's a mil-spec radio which has to work in diverse environments,during combat, and connect at FTL speeds for at least solar system distances.

For a current example of a comperable military communications device:
https://www.harris.com/solution/harris-falcon-iii-an-prc-152a-wideband-networking-handheld-radio

 

[Winterwind]

I guess I would just advise him to stick with his producer status and not take a backseat like he did, avoid the stupider stories that gave the show what negative rep it got, never let Freiberger near the show, and listen to the saner advisers. Down the road, tell him Berman may be a decent producer, but keep him from ever writing anything...

Poor Fred gets way too much blame for S3 that I've never considered fair considering all the other issues that affected the season.

And Fred wrote some decent episodes for Starsky and Hutch.

Agree with the rest though.

 

[Warped9]

The TOS communicator was also originally envisioned as a translation device, but they eventually opted to create a new piece of hardware for that purpose. Then again given so many lifeforms encountered that spoke English maybe it was working as a translation device and we just never paid attention to it (and it was never pointed out).

I, for one, would like to have seen the other side of the 11 footer Enterprise finished along with a few more beauty shots from different angles.

 

[Poltargyst]

The TOS communicator was also originally envisioned as a translation device, but they eventually opted to create a new piece of hardware for that purpose. Then again given so many lifeforms encountered that spoke English maybe it was working as a translation device and we just never paid attention to it (and it was never pointed out).

I, for one, would like to have seen the other side of the 11 footer Enterprise finished along with a few more beauty shots from different angles.

I don't think the new lifeforms actually spoke English, I think we were supposed to just consider that the Universal Translator was working and not think further about it.

 

[johnnybear]

Anyone remember the robot woman Siri from the Logan's Run pilot back in 1977? Now it's a well known name and device!
JB