One change-slipstream drive! 
What tech advances are there from 23rd to 24th centuries?
- Thread starter Shawnster
- Start date
Site-to-site transporters: no longer needed a transporter room to beam within the ship.
Medical transporters: Bashir used one in DS9's "The Passenger".
NEM personal transporter.
JANEWAY: It was a very different time, Mister Kim. ...Even the technology we take for granted was still in its early stages. No plasma weapons, no multiphasic shields. Their ships were half as fast.
KIM: No replicators, no holodecks...
Standard shuttles seamed to become more autonomous as well - like mini-starships, with superior engines, power-cores, weapons, transporters.
Medical transporters: Bashir used one in DS9's "The Passenger".
NEM personal transporter.
JANEWAY: It was a very different time, Mister Kim. ...Even the technology we take for granted was still in its early stages. No plasma weapons, no multiphasic shields. Their ships were half as fast.
KIM: No replicators, no holodecks...
Standard shuttles seamed to become more autonomous as well - like mini-starships, with superior engines, power-cores, weapons, transporters.
Yup. "Beam them directly to sickbay" was a phrase you never heard in TOS.
And yet they saw incredibly little use overall. You'd think transporters would render most forms of surgery obsolete. Just lock onto whatever needs to be removed and beam it out. Or beam in a new implant. Or edit a person's transporter pattern to fix what's wrong with them. That's already what the biofilter does by removing infections or toxins. And we know transporters can deactivate energy weapons, so they must be capable of subtle particulate- or quantum-level modifications to the pattern. We've even seen them reverse aging on two occasions ("The Lorelei Signal" and "Unnatural Selection").
That concept was first seen in VGR: "Non Sequitur," albeit in an alternate timeline. Though it makes no sense as presented; how could a transporter dematerialize itself and still be able to function? It only works if you assume it's merely a remote control for some existing transporter mechanism nearby.
Sadly, thanks to the way the network suits demanded that "Enterprise" be a lot like TNG, with "Phase Pistols" and "Photonic Torpedoes", it looks almost like there are very little changes between even the 22nd and 24th centuries (let alone the 23rd and 24th) except maybe ship size.
For Enterprise we should have had ships with high-powered lasers and possibly some sort of early particle beams, and nuclear weapons instead of photonic weapons, and no ship-to-ship visual communication *except* for between other Earth ships and ships of races that Earth had already contacted, so they new how to get both ship's computers to talk to each other....and Enterprise should have been too cramped for a brig.*
I did like how in "In A Mirror, Darkly pt2", Mirror-Trip mentioned how different the TOS-era 23rd century Constitution Class Defiant was from their own NX-01 Enterprise. I think hew said it was like an old wooden sailing ship crew suddenly being put on a steamship and having to figure out how everything worked. (Though, they *did* figure out a lot of it pretty quick, especially how to work the bridge controls.)
And I believe that somebody else here pointed out the fact that in "Relics" Geordi told Scotty that iso-linear optical chips had replaced duotronics, and that they could now re-crystalize dilithium while it was still inside the articulation frame of (an active-looking warp core - though how Scotty was able to just pull the crystals out while it was running and not make a bog explosion was beyond me) - but in Scotty's time, during the events of "The Voyage Home", it seemed like re-crystalizing dilithium crystals was something rarely done at all.
*(I was actually thinking about Spock's lines in TOS about the Earth-Romulan ways, and why they would have been using nuclear weapons when they had anti-matter based photonic weapons, and why the ships were so crammed, and I noticed how in the Enterprise follow-up books, there are Daedelus-class ships fighting in the Earth Romulan War, and I was thinking that perhaps in the 22nd century anti-matter is still pretty rare and expensive to make, so Earth Starfleet would be faced with one of two choices - either make a few, large anti-matter powered starships loaded with a precious cargo of photonic torpedoes....or make a whole lot of smaller anti-matter powered ships, loaded to the brim with still very effective nuclear torpedoes. If I was in charge of Starfleet, I would have gone with the latter option, And maybe those smaller Daedelus-class hulls had NO extra room for brigs to take on prisoners. Though if I was fighting an unknown enemy, I'd certainly want to catch a few dead - or even better, live - specimens to study, so I am assuming that all Romulan ship sslef-destructed rather than be captures. And that Romulan secrecy is why they never allowed visual ship-to-ship communications. And I guess that in the alternate JJ-brams timeline, the events of the destruction of the Kelvin pretty much blew the whole Romulan cover thing, and we knew what they looked like. Though with the destruction of Vulcan in that timeline, there may even be much *worse* anti-Romulan bigotry...but also an even harder push to open diplomatic relations with these Vulcan cousins, since so few of the Vulcan species survived.)
For Enterprise we should have had ships with high-powered lasers and possibly some sort of early particle beams, and nuclear weapons instead of photonic weapons, and no ship-to-ship visual communication *except* for between other Earth ships and ships of races that Earth had already contacted, so they new how to get both ship's computers to talk to each other....and Enterprise should have been too cramped for a brig.*
I did like how in "In A Mirror, Darkly pt2", Mirror-Trip mentioned how different the TOS-era 23rd century Constitution Class Defiant was from their own NX-01 Enterprise. I think hew said it was like an old wooden sailing ship crew suddenly being put on a steamship and having to figure out how everything worked. (Though, they *did* figure out a lot of it pretty quick, especially how to work the bridge controls.)
And I believe that somebody else here pointed out the fact that in "Relics" Geordi told Scotty that iso-linear optical chips had replaced duotronics, and that they could now re-crystalize dilithium while it was still inside the articulation frame of (an active-looking warp core - though how Scotty was able to just pull the crystals out while it was running and not make a bog explosion was beyond me) - but in Scotty's time, during the events of "The Voyage Home", it seemed like re-crystalizing dilithium crystals was something rarely done at all.
*(I was actually thinking about Spock's lines in TOS about the Earth-Romulan ways, and why they would have been using nuclear weapons when they had anti-matter based photonic weapons, and why the ships were so crammed, and I noticed how in the Enterprise follow-up books, there are Daedelus-class ships fighting in the Earth Romulan War, and I was thinking that perhaps in the 22nd century anti-matter is still pretty rare and expensive to make, so Earth Starfleet would be faced with one of two choices - either make a few, large anti-matter powered starships loaded with a precious cargo of photonic torpedoes....or make a whole lot of smaller anti-matter powered ships, loaded to the brim with still very effective nuclear torpedoes. If I was in charge of Starfleet, I would have gone with the latter option, And maybe those smaller Daedelus-class hulls had NO extra room for brigs to take on prisoners. Though if I was fighting an unknown enemy, I'd certainly want to catch a few dead - or even better, live - specimens to study, so I am assuming that all Romulan ship sslef-destructed rather than be captures. And that Romulan secrecy is why they never allowed visual ship-to-ship communications. And I guess that in the alternate JJ-brams timeline, the events of the destruction of the Kelvin pretty much blew the whole Romulan cover thing, and we knew what they looked like. Though with the destruction of Vulcan in that timeline, there may even be much *worse* anti-Romulan bigotry...but also an even harder push to open diplomatic relations with these Vulcan cousins, since so few of the Vulcan species survived.)
For some reason, The Federation isn't or won't make use of cloning, like using it to make needed body parts.
Picard has a mechanical heart. Geordi has artificial eyes. Nog has a mechanical leg (I think).
Apparently at that point, cloning wasn't considered a hard thing to do. It was already done several times already.
Funny but in some ways 23rd century artificial intelligence and androids seemed more superior to the examples of the 24th century. They seemed more self aware with more personality than the standard 24th century computers.
There's never been an official explanation for why androids were forgotten, except the idea that it became a lost technology.
Sounds silly, but it's not entirely a crazy idea -- some scientists say they don't know how the Egyptian pyramids were actually built, or if we could do the achieve the same thing today if we tried.
At least that's the story.
Picard has a mechanical heart. Geordi has artificial eyes. Nog has a mechanical leg (I think).
Apparently at that point, cloning wasn't considered a hard thing to do. It was already done several times already.
Funny but in some ways 23rd century artificial intelligence and androids seemed more superior to the examples of the 24th century. They seemed more self aware with more personality than the standard 24th century computers.
There's never been an official explanation for why androids were forgotten, except the idea that it became a lost technology.
Sounds silly, but it's not entirely a crazy idea -- some scientists say they don't know how the Egyptian pyramids were actually built, or if we could do the achieve the same thing today if we tried.
At least that's the story.
I always liked the idea that in the future, there would be rival subcultures that considered cybernetic replacement organs superior to cloned replacement organs and vice versa.
I agree with a lot of what you've said, Bryce. I've always scratched my head at new series that chose more unusual settings only to turn them into near copies of earlier ones. If you're going to go bat-shit crazy, then by all means, please go bat-shit crazy.
Good catch on the isolinear chips and dilithium re-crystallization.
A couple more that come to mind are VOY's bioneural gel packs and holographic dilithium miners.
...Though sentient humanoid holograms to mine dilithium was...too much creative license. The sentience was farcical and the humanoid inefficient.
EDIT: Re cybernetics, were any of the sentient androids in TOS Federation-made though? Maybe Data was special because he was the first of his kind by the UFP or by comparable powers? Maybe also his positronic brain was especially impressive, even if his skin-tone wasn't an exact match or his personality as indistinguishable.
Good catch on the isolinear chips and dilithium re-crystallization.
A couple more that come to mind are VOY's bioneural gel packs and holographic dilithium miners.
...Though sentient humanoid holograms to mine dilithium was...too much creative license. The sentience was farcical and the humanoid inefficient.
EDIT: Re cybernetics, were any of the sentient androids in TOS Federation-made though? Maybe Data was special because he was the first of his kind by the UFP or by comparable powers? Maybe also his positronic brain was especially impressive, even if his skin-tone wasn't an exact match or his personality as indistinguishable.
I think progress is implied (if only by the sheer amount of references to research and discoveries being made in episodes) but is intentionally left vague.... similar to how computer capacity is measured in 'kiloquads'. (The advantage of this would be to sketch a picture of steady progress without being tied down to contradictions.)
Even if we get hard numbers, I think we're not sure how to compare them. (For example: Janeway stating that TOS era ships were 'half as fast', what does that mean? Top warp speed half as fast ? Cruising warp speed half as fast ? Top impulse speed half as fast? Impulse maneuverability or reaction times to helm or automated commands speeded up by a factor of 2 ? Or even all of these ? We don't know for sure (I think).
And if we hear that duotronic circuitry has been replaced by isolinear circuitry, the implication would be that isolinear circuitry is 'better' in some respect (even if it would be only cheaper), but we're not told why, and by how much. And of course such a tidbit of information that dilithium can now be recrystallized in the warp core is nice to know, but except for showing that Scotty is a bit behind the times, it is never used again (AFAIK).
Though I would like to know if "beam them directly to sickbay!" never being used in TOS was because of a deliberate constraint in the writer's guide, or that the writers just never got the idea to use the transporter in that way during TOS ...
Even if we get hard numbers, I think we're not sure how to compare them. (For example: Janeway stating that TOS era ships were 'half as fast', what does that mean? Top warp speed half as fast ? Cruising warp speed half as fast ? Top impulse speed half as fast? Impulse maneuverability or reaction times to helm or automated commands speeded up by a factor of 2 ? Or even all of these ? We don't know for sure (I think).
And if we hear that duotronic circuitry has been replaced by isolinear circuitry, the implication would be that isolinear circuitry is 'better' in some respect (even if it would be only cheaper), but we're not told why, and by how much. And of course such a tidbit of information that dilithium can now be recrystallized in the warp core is nice to know, but except for showing that Scotty is a bit behind the times, it is never used again (AFAIK).
Though I would like to know if "beam them directly to sickbay!" never being used in TOS was because of a deliberate constraint in the writer's guide, or that the writers just never got the idea to use the transporter in that way during TOS ...
That last bit is taking fidelity to decades-old assumptions too far. It wasn't their job to be slavishly faithful to "Balance of Terror" so that the tiny minority of fans who cared about such a trivial detail wouldn't be offended. Their job was to make a modern television show that would be satisfying to a present-day general audience, and that means being visual. It means using technology that feels advanced to that audience rather than a throwback to 1960s assumptions.
Roddenberry himself didn't hesitate to upgrade Federation technology in ST:TMP, when he had the budget and the opportunity to make it look more advanced. He never actually wanted the 23rd century's technology to look like it was a product of the 1960s; that was just the best approximation of futuristic tech that his production team on TOS could manage at the time. In his TMP novelization and in comments he made in promoting TMP, he put forth the idea that TOS was an imperfect dramatization of the "actual" adventures of the Enterprise and that TMP was a more accurate version. So he would've wholeheartedly approved of Enterprise updating the tech and ignoring the more shortsighted assumptions of the '60s writers.
And they didn't put a brig in until season 3, when they were deliberately refitted for a combat mission. I don't see a problem there.
Well, yes, of course -- TVH was the first time it had ever been done. But Scotty was around for about a decade after that, during which time it would've presumably become a more standardized practice.
But they're not smaller. "Power Play" said the Daedalus class had a crew complement of 229, while NX-01 had only 83 people aboard.
Although I've established in my fourth Rise of the Federation novel (coming next year) that the Daedalus class managed to hold crews that size by having much more cramped, submarine-like conditions than the NX class had. So maybe they wouldn't have had extra room for prisoners, assuming a full crew complement.
It's a BS story from wacky conspiracy theorists. There are a number of plausible theories of pyramid construction that have been tested in practice and proven valid. And of course we achieve far more massive construction projects all the time using modern technology, like dams. Just because we don't know the exact details of how it was done doesn't mean we're incapable of doing the equivalent. It's only a question of how they were able to do it with technology that was barely out of the Stone Age.
All the androids in TOS were indeed made by people or entities outside the Federation establishment -- the Old Ones of Exo III, the Andromedan colonists of Mudd's Planet, Flint the immortal, V'Ger. Flint was human, but had access to knowledge far beyond what the Federation had. "Return to Tomorrow" did show the Enterprise crew building androids based on instructions from Sargon and Thalassa, but evidently they failed to get some vital piece of information about how to make them work.
I question whether most TOS androids were actually sentient, though. Rayna definitely was, but she suffered the same kind of emotional collapse that killed Lal, suggesting she had the same flaws as Soong-type androids (the books have even established that Flint was Soong's mentor in robotics). Ruk seemed to have a degree of independent thought, but Andrea showed little sign of being capable of more than following a limited program, and the others' minds were copies of human brains. The Mudd androids were essentially just drones operated by a single central computer, not autonomous beings in their own right, and that central computer seemed quite limited and rigidly programmed, incapable of coping with contradictory input. I wouldn't call them anywhere near sentient. My phone is probably smarter. Sargon's androids would've just been mindless receptacles for the Arretians' consciousnesses, and the Ilia probe had a copy of Ilia's mind within it, beneath a fairly limited program.
So while the knowledge of how to build android bodies could've been available to 23rd-century roboticists, the missing element was the mind. Artificial sentience is a rarity in the Trek universe, and when it is achieved, it is frequently unstable. Rayna and Lal both died from being unable to process emotional conflicts. Soong's early prototypes suffered cognitive collapse and Lore became a psychopath. Voyager's EMH almost suffered critical failure on at least two occasions, "The Swarm" and "Latent Image."
"Day of the Dove" established that using a transporter to beam somewhere inside the ship itself was dangerous; they weren't designed to work that way. Before then, it was just a given that transporters were for beaming to and from the ship, not within the ship. "Dove" had to come up with intraship beaming before TNG could refine the idea into beaming someone up from a planet and forwarding the signal directly to some other part of the ship.
Heck, before TOS, the usual assumption in science fiction was that teleportation would have to be station-to-station -- there would have to be a teleport device at both the sending and receiving ends. The idea of a teleporter that could send someone to any location, or (even more incredibly) dematerialize them remotely and pull them in from any location, was pretty rare. So if having a transporter platform at only one end of the beaming process was a novel idea, they couldn't have been expected to jump right to the idea of having a platform at neither end.
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But should it remain able to function? For all we know, transporting is 100% done once the subject is "phased", and nothing further is required of the machinery in the following few seconds where the subject travels to destination and then bobs back to the non-phased realm. And on top of that, possibly phasing is done well before the subject is completely phased, involving only an initial "seed" action (much like a phaser hit that moves the victim to oblivion), and the machinery can then relax and let itself be englobed by the effect as well.
Agreed, though, that all the alternate Tom Paris had was a remote control of Earth's transporter net with privileged access to otherwise locked destinations. Would the tech have been available to 23rd century civilians on Earth? Possibly, considering we never saw that Earth all that well.
And possibly all Data had to offer for Picard was a pattern enhancer of sorts, allowing a transporter system whose sensors were crippled to nevertheless beam up the user. Was that specific to the 24th century? Or just an improvement on what the heroes used in "Patterns of Force"?
Well, Mulhall appeared pretty confident the Feds could build those android bodies for Sargon's lot without outside help. Sargon within Kirk's body just claimed they could do better. And since he had the final word (two great leaders crammed into one male body always outweighs a sensible woman, especially in arguments of vain one-upmanship), that's what they did.
Timo Saloniemi
What about all the times when people where almost lost because of signal degradation, etc, etc, and Scotty/O'Brien had to push a million buttons and levers to succesfully complete the transport? It certainly made it seem like transporting was a very sensitive process that required constant activity from the machine. Even if it wasn't, transporting without any possibility of adjusting the stream mid-transport should obviously be significantly more dangerous.
Well to say TOS ships where half as fast is not entirely accurate.
TMP establishes that Vulcan(Vulcan being 16ly from Earth) is 4 days away from Earth. No whilst we don't know the speed the ENT was travelliing at we are told that Kirk wants to give the Enterprise a proper shakedown so wouldn't that include running at top speed for a period of time? SO if we take it's 4 days at Top Speed that would mean VOY Journey would take ~48years Even if we say 6 days at crusing speed to travel from Earth to Vulcan VOY journey would take ~71 years. So crusing speed might not have changed that much. Now take a car from 100 years ago and compare it today, I'm willng to bet a modern car can happily cruise at a higher speed than one from 100 years ago. Of course if we say the 4 days was at crusing speed, ships have got slower.
Trek has never been remotely consistent about travel times. Many technical references, from Star Trek Maps to the TNG Tech Manual to Star Charts, have asserted that the actual effective speed of a given warp factor varies from one part of space to another due to local conditions like matter and energy density, subspace geometry, and so forth, and that there are effectively "space lanes" where warp travel is faster than in other places.
News flash: Naturally evolved sentience, where ever it is found, is frequently unstable.
I agree with the general feeling that the time between TOS and TNG did not seem to include any significant period of technological revolution. This is plausible and consistent with most other periods of human history. But this also reflects some practical boundaries imposed by producers in TNG to keep plots somewhat within reason. For instance:
They discovered very quickly that it would be possible for the ship to go too fast, removing many qualities of the vastness of space (including territorial or galactic borders) and diluting the dramatic sense of urgency. Hence, the warp curve was conceived with an upper limit that could only be broken with proper explanation within a given story.
As many know, the transporter was a convenience edition, saving time and money in TOS. They have come up with some very creative uses for it over the years, but it has to be roped in. For the sake of drama, it can't be a cure-all for medical emergencies or a crutch for (eh-hem) plot holes (transwarp beaming? WTF?) all the time.
23rd-24th century improvements:
Speed: 1701 Max normal cruising= Warp 6, or about 500 times the speed of light... 1701-D normal cruising=9.2, or about 1200 times the speed of light (warp factors represent orders of magnitude of light speed.) In short, Picard could cruise along at least twice as fast as Kirk could. Voyager is even faster, and its warp drive has the added green feature of not damaging subspace in its wake.
Weapons and Shields: You build a bigger wall; I'll build a bigger ladder. It's the classical arms race. Though it should be said that TOS ships had to be more self-sufficient because of a smaller infrastructure and the cold-war situation of the times. By contrast, 1701-D is more a of diplomatic vessel.
Ship Size and Captain's quarters: Yes, for anyone who is still unsure, Picard's Enterprise-D was a beast compared to Kirk's. The bridge, the corridors, and the crew quarters all reflect that fact.
Androids: As mentioned, TOS androids were not created by Federation folk. I think most were remnants of long gone species. I'd like to add that we should also keep in mind that Noonien Soong was not funded; Data was a creation he made basically out of his garage, so it's very possible that Soong's access to ideal skin, for instance, was limited (it was also referenced that some of Soong's neighbor's were offput by his inventions, so maybe the pale skin was a deliberate attempt to make his androids seem not-so-oddly human.) Data is also the first android we saw on Trek that wasn't preprogrammed with any purpose or directive. Soong gave Data the essential tools he needed to survive and let Data make his own decisions and create his own destiny.
Also, the 24th century got laptops, which Bill Gates stole and sold to us. So then Data got mad and invented the iPad, and Steve Jobs ripped that off too and stuck it to Gates. Then the 29th-Century got mad that the 21st was stealing all this cool stuff from the 24th. So they gave Voyager the mobile emitter. So try to match that, Google!
Not what I meant. I was referring to the kind of instability that leads to permanent collapse and "death," as with Rayna or Lal. The point, which I thought I had made clear enough already, was that it is extremely difficult in the Trek universe to create a sustainable artificial consciousness, one that can operate on a sentient level without suffering a fatal breakdown fairly early in its existence. This is presumably why such consciousnesses are so rare.
Although that was forgotten later on, when DS9 had characters casually commuting from the station to Earth, or battle fleets crossing from Cardassian to Klingon or Romulan space in mere days. Not to mention ST V having the ship get to the galactic center in less than half an hour, or STID implying a trip of less than a minute from the Klingon border to Earth.
No, warp 6 was still considered regular cruising speed, although the velocity scale was reworked to make each warp factor faster. Checking my copy of the writers' tech manual used behind the scenes on TNG, it gives Warp 6 as "normal cruising speed" and Warp 9.6 as "Ship's maximum rated speed." Warp 9.9 says "auto-shutdown after 10 minutes," 9.99 says "nearly infinite power required, and 10 says "Warp 10 CANNOT be reached."
As for the different scales, I don't know where you're getting 500c for TOS-era warp 6. The alleged formula back then was that the velocity was the warp factor cubed times the speed of light, so it would've been only 216c. The TNG chart defines Warp 6 as 392c, which is the warp factor to the power of 10/3 (3.333...). Of course, neither alleged warp scale bears any resemblance to the speeds actually shown onscreen, which are always much, much faster. (The writers' tech manual chart I consulted says "Use these estimates for comparison only -- your actual mileage may vary.")
If you're looking for caveats and ways around something, you'll find them. Oh we can see a cloaked ship now; oh now we can't. Oh there's a Federation genetic engineering center; oh it's been illegal to the public since 1996. Interpreting Trek history is more art and making choices than science and writer's intent. When a series captain says ships were half as fast, they're not talking about impulse speeds, but who knows? (I'm more than willing to choose to forget "faster than light; no left or right" though, which would survive a writer's meeting less time than an ST09 trip from Earth to Vulcan.)
EDIT: Re not being able to see the baddie on the viewscreen being a 1960's concept that's just too much for 2010's viewers, 1) there weren't any iPhones in 12 Years a Slave either yet somehow people still bought the movie. You could do an alternate-reality version of it with iPhones that would introduce new storytelling possibilities and make for also a great movie, but that doesn't mean the original would be any less watchable; 2) this is how phase-pistols and "Polarized-hull-plating at 60%!" happen. The pre-TOS era, regardless that ENT happened, could have been vastly different and still pretty freaking amazing. Canon isn't always an improvement; it's what we have to deal with. And those in charge choose to reinterpret and change it whenever they like.
EDIT: Re not being able to see the baddie on the viewscreen being a 1960's concept that's just too much for 2010's viewers, 1) there weren't any iPhones in 12 Years a Slave either yet somehow people still bought the movie. You could do an alternate-reality version of it with iPhones that would introduce new storytelling possibilities and make for also a great movie, but that doesn't mean the original would be any less watchable; 2) this is how phase-pistols and "Polarized-hull-plating at 60%!" happen. The pre-TOS era, regardless that ENT happened, could have been vastly different and still pretty freaking amazing. Canon isn't always an improvement; it's what we have to deal with. And those in charge choose to reinterpret and change it whenever they like.
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That's happened multiple times. In "Balance of Terror" they could detect a cloaked ship with "motion sensors," but by "The Enterprise Incident" they couldn't. In ST III they could see a spatial distortion, but by ST VI they couldn't. In ST VI they found a way to track cloaked ships by their exhaust, but by TNG that was gone. It's logical to assume that there's an ongoing arms race between stealth and detection, the same "walls and ladders" principle that Jeffe525 brought up. One form of cloak gets penetrated, so it gets abandoned and replaced with a new approach that can't be detected, until a way to detect it is found, and then it starts all over again. Which is a handy way to rationalize all the continuity glitches in the portrayal of cloaking tech over the years -- e.g. how cloaks could be a new technology in "Balance" when the Suliban had them in ENT, or how the Mirror Universe's Alliance could have cloaks in "Crossover" but not have them in "The Emperor's New Cloak." Once a form of cloak were penetrated, it would become basically useless, so cloaking wouldn't be viable anymore until a better form of cloak were developed.
Now, that one's just lame. I wish modern Trek had shown genetic enhancement, bionics, and transhumanism as routine rather than subject to an illogical, uncharacteristically Luddite ban.
I think the text of the episode allows interpreting it more as a general preference than an absolute restriction, and I rationalized it that way in one of my books (The Buried Age, I think).
But that's an incredibly bad analogy, because 12 Years a Slave was set in the past, and the Romulan War is more than a century in our future. Most audiences wouldn't find it plausible for ships in the future to lack the ability to communicate visually, and most audiences would not give the tiniest damn -- quite rightly -- about slavish adherence to an incidental detail from a decades-old television episode.
Besides, it's perfectly easy to explain it away by assuming the Romulans didn't want to be seen, and that's exactly what the show and the novels actually did.
Yes, I would've loved ENT to be more different than it was. I would've liked the producers to get the differences they wanted, like no transporters, rather than having such familiar elements forced on them by the network. In my post-finale ENT novels, I've actually established that the transporters of the era caused cumulative cellular damage so that I could mostly remove them from the equation. So yes, in general, I agree that making ENT more different would've been good. But eliminating any possibility of visual contact with alien ships just because of one line in one episode? No. That's putting mindless, slavish adherence to continuity over good creative judgment.
Additionally, in The Cloud Minders Kirk orders the High Adviser beamed directly from Stratos to the cave on the planet below. Beaming directly here still involved the High Adviser to first materialize on the Enterprise, then be re-transported to the planet's surface.
And TNG's direct-beaming method is basically the same thing with a couple of steps left out -- someone is beamed into the transporter's pattern buffer, then redirected and beamed out to materialize somewhere else, skipping the step of rematerializing them on the transporter pad and then scanning and dematerializing them a second time. Which actually makes a lot of sense.
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