Because starfleet is a military. They would have specialized equipment that civilians wouldn’t have any need to use.
USS Enterprise (eventually) on Discovery?
- Thread starter EJD1984
- Start date
About that...
In any case, this whole discussion is stupid. I really do not think most of the audience cares about such things. They don't care about it in Star Wars either. And no, they most definitely do not care about SW not actually being in the future while ST is. If the stuff looks cool to them, it's fine.
Has not stopped most discussions here, since we don't really have a metric for what the "audience" thinks is "cool."
That would be a kind of silly way of thinking about it, but considering that literally IS the whole point of stacking all those PADDs on the desk like that, it actually fits.
Think about it: If I have a shit ton of work to do at the office, I'm going to have like 8 browser tabs open along with two PDFs, three different word documents, a calendar and an email app, and it'll all be open on my computer at the same time. I'm not going to have a different laptop for every single one of those apps, even though the EFFECT is that I have 10 different programs running all in the background. But that's hard to represent on TV without making us look directly at a cluttered display on Picard's PADD that we won't really understand anyway and can't grasp the context, so it's just easier to show us a stack of PADDs on a desk than it is to show us a stack of windows open on a screen.
Interestingly, this wouldn't be a problem if they were using holographic interfaces that just threw what they were working on onto floating screens in the room around them. Picard would basically walk into a roomful of blizzard of floating windows all begging for his attention, which would in some ways be an apt metaphor for OUR busy lives as much as for his.
I do wonder if phones exist in the Star Trek universe. I think the closest we ever saw to one is some schmuck seemingly videoing the burning USS Vengeance saucer as Khan and Spock ran by in Into Darkness. In some of the novels, civilian characters have "personal comms" which are phones in all but name.
To weigh in on this one: I have always assumed (and have indicated in fanfics) that the Starfleet communicator is just an impact/radiation hardened version of a standard civilian communicator, which in turn is just a standard Universal Commset (made by Motorola). The Starfleet version just has slightly longer range, built-in encryption and a more extensive translation library than the civilian version.
I also imagine that Starfleet's hand phasers are and have probably always been a source of controversy, since they're not nearly as powerful as some other, deadlier weapons on the market but they're a lot more efficient and their stun setting is a lot more reliable (in that it is far less likely to cause permanent damage and/or death) than some competing designs.
Every single word in that post is wrong. Starfleet is not military per se, and that doesn't prevent them from using consumer equipment either way. Finally, there is nothing in the PADD that indicates in any way, shape or form that it has special military applications. It's an Amazon Kindle. But even if everything you said was true, it absolutely doesn't address the question of why the PADD is such a shit technology.
Oh please not this argument again
Though I'd say it is a military, just unlike any we have in the current day, so hard to make a comparison to what we identify as military.
As far as tech, SF probably keep certain things to themselves. Top secret stuff and the like, but communicators could use any range of hyper speed technology and SF would probably reserve certain frequencies and encoding that the general public wouldn't have access to. Same tech more or less.
Why do civilian need a comm unit that independently accesses subspace frequencies? Not certain about a built in UT.
I want to call my mom on Io from the shuttle station waiting line.
Or at least call your mom on whatever remote planet she might have retired to. Or Risa, if that's her thing.
Subspace frequency comms in the 23rd century would be as commonplace as cellphones are now, they just have better coverage.
It necessarily is not shit technology. You have just decided it is. That the people use several PADDs is in no way or form indication that they could not have all those files and programs windowed in one PADD, if they for some reason wanted to work in old fashioned way.
There are human colonies all across the Alpha Quadrant.
Because the writers wrote it that way.
Well you've moved the problem to "the characters are stupid".
Why no one seems willing to accept that it was just that people in the 80s couldn't predice that our tech would get a lot better in such a short time is a mystery to me. There HAS to be a in-universe explanation.
Yeah, and I have friends and family thousands of miles away, but my cell phone only has a range of a couple dozen miles, tops. My home wi-fi network has a range of a a few hundred feet. I, as a civilian living in a built-up technological infrastructure, don't actually require equipment capable of transmitting three thousand miles to actually contact someone three thousand miles away.
Likewise, the Human, Vulcan, or Trill on the street won't require a communicator capable of transmitting with crystal clarity to the local moon, or emitting avalanche-causing ultrasonic frequencies, or tying in with foreign or even previously-unknown communications networks. They can talk to the next continent, the next planet, or the next system using local infrastructure without actually having to have a high-power subspace transceiver in their own house (or pocket). A starship doesn't have that luxury.
No, it is just that you have outdated (even by today's standards) views about how pads/computers/etc are used. I have told you this several times already. People use multiple devices right now in 2018!
You must be new to this forum. That indeed probably was the real reason, but it doesn't mean we need to interpret it that way, especially as they accidentally got it right.Why no one seems willing to accept that it was just that people in the 80s couldn't predice that our tech would get a lot better in such a short time is a mystery to me. There HAS to be a in-universe explanation.
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