In TOS Kirk and crew took shore leave on a planet were things they imagine became reality. I haven’t watched this episode in several years. Were the creations of objects and people on the shore leave planet actual physical objects composed of ordinary matter, or were they like objects on the holodeck and composed of photonic holomatter? IMO, it would be easier to recreate people and beings with holomatter. The planet's caretaker might have replicator technology too. Perhaps the shoreleave planet is kind of like a large-scale holodeck and has holoemitters or perhaps one large holofield. The reading of people’s thoughts is reminiscent of the reading of Riker’s mind by Barash’s thought scanners in "Future Imperfect”. If the shore leave planet employed holomatter and replicator tech, this wasn’t the first time humans and Starfleet encountered these technologies. The crew of the NX-01 encountered an alien ship with a holodeck and the automated space station with replicators in ENT. Whatever the case, the planet is never seen again onscreen and is never mentioned in TNG and beyond. Most people in the Federation and surrounding worlds seem to take their vacations on Risa. The shoreleave planet makes an appearance in TAS too, but that’s it.
TOS shore leave planet?
- Thread starter Lyon_Wonder
- Start date
Might be one of the many small breakthroughs that eventually gave the Federation its replication abilities. Many, many ENT, TOS and TAS cultures had finer control over materials than the Federation did. It might simply have taken some time to reverse-engineer sufficiently much of this stuff to create the first replicators - after which their use and design would have swayed in new directions, not resulting in exact copies of the Shore Leave Planet after all. But certainly the SLP might have influenced the creation of matter-manipulating entertainment devices as one of the very first UFP applications of perfect replication tech...
FWIW, the TAS story of a return to the SLP reveals to the audience that the last Caretaker of the world has died/ceased to work, and the machinery is behaving erratically. Our heroes form a rapport with the machines and manage to get them to work to their pleasing after all. A good time for UFP engineers to step in and do some research on this now nicely cooperating supertech...
Timo Saloniemi
FWIW, the TAS story of a return to the SLP reveals to the audience that the last Caretaker of the world has died/ceased to work, and the machinery is behaving erratically. Our heroes form a rapport with the machines and manage to get them to work to their pleasing after all. A good time for UFP engineers to step in and do some research on this now nicely cooperating supertech...
Timo Saloniemi
Do you suppose that if the story line for Shore Leave had been written during TNG, DS9 or Voyager that the planets creations would've been holographicly created rather than physical matter? As was said by the OP holo matter would make more sense as there'd be more freedom to what you could do than if you had to manufacture each imaginery object.
For the writers of TOS maybe at the time holographics would've been unimaginable (I'm assuming) and this was they only simplistic way of explaining the creations.
For the writers of TOS maybe at the time holographics would've been unimaginable (I'm assuming) and this was they only simplistic way of explaining the creations.
Well, TOS was rather rooted in the era of scifi thinking where amazing feats were achieved by "forcefields" and "beams" - which, not so incidentally, were also cheaper to VFX than advanced materials or nanotech or the sort. Science fiction in the 1980s was already leaning more heavily towards fantastic materials rather than magical forcefields as the way of the future. So if anything, I'd expect TNG to have stressed the materials tech even more than TOS did.
But Trek scifi concepts have often been well behind the avant-garde, and TNG usually shied away from radically new ideas in that respect... Holodecks were a nice blend of old and new scifi ideas, and would no doubt have been used in many unwritten TNG storylines, just like they were used in the written ones.
Timo Saloniemi
But Trek scifi concepts have often been well behind the avant-garde, and TNG usually shied away from radically new ideas in that respect... Holodecks were a nice blend of old and new scifi ideas, and would no doubt have been used in many unwritten TNG storylines, just like they were used in the written ones.
Timo Saloniemi
