The Star Trek question thread

[SmilingOtter]

How is it that all spacecraft in the known universe orient themselves in a single plane?
I mean, you never see a spacecraft upside down on the view screen.

"All Good Things" did that, when Riker's "super-Enterprise" came to the rescue, at 90 degrees to the Klingon ships. Other than that, you're right that you don't see it much.
(In "Wrath of Khan" Kirk took Spock's suggestion about three-dimensional solutions, but it would have been better, or at least cooler looking, if the Enterprise moved straight up, then pitched down to have the entire top of Reliant in view.

Another thing that always bugged me was when someone is seriously injured and they call for medics. Why not just beam them directly to the medbay? They have done it occasionally, but not all the time.

I would think by at least Kirk's time, and certainly by the TNG era that transporters would be regularly used in surgery. Any device that can scan down to the subatomic level is going to be more precise than the best surgeon.

 

[darthgordon]

On the comm, I believe there is a delay, but it's so fast that it's not noticeable. Heck- even the universal translator is able to translate in real time.

As for transporting the injured: it seems that it's done only when absolutely necessary, or preferred that a patient is examined to be safe before transport. It's like moving an injured person today. The transporter might be very precise, but any movement may cause additional injury. You'd be moving them from one surface to another possibly differently shaped surface... Not to mention on planets to ships or ship to ship, slightly different gravities. We also have no idea how the quark decouplers work. They may cause additional strain to injury. At one point, we did see doctor Crusher have to stabilize a patient for transport.

Ship orientation has always bugged me too. I can imagine that for a rendezvous ships would orientate themselves out of some naval tradition. But during a battle it seems a little ridiculous. I suppose it's mostly done to keep from disorientating viewers, but I think we could handle it. Star Wars... In fact most sci-fi does the same thing.

 

[Sluis Van Shipyards]

How about just having the person transported and put back to normal using their previous pattern? That makes more sense than going to medbay now that I think about it. I think that's what they did in that episode where the scientists on that station were rapidly aging.

 

[Irken Tech]

The holodeck makes no sense at all.

I mean, it's a cool concept, but it also makes no sense.

How do people not walk into the walls? What happens if two characters walk in opposite directions? How is the Holodeck capable of depicting -- convincingly -- larger environments than the room itself? Unless they used Time Lord technology, it just don't make no sense.

In current head mounted VR applications, large spaces in smaller rooms are simulated by slightly curving apparently straight paths. If the curve is subtle enough, you can think you are walking straight ahead while actually walking in a large circle within the room. The computer doesn't steer you into a wall. Something similar could work in a holodeck.

 

[AJTaliesen]

The communicator thing always bugged me. Especially when they didn't touch it on the receiving end and just started talking. Implying that by calling you the line is automatically live which can only lead to some truly awkward situations.



As for ship orientation, there's an episode of the old series that will forever be the king of this. The enterprise gets banged up in a fight and several key systems are knocked out.

To illustrate this to the audience, the ship is then shown from the outside....on it's side.

It...got...knocked over.

 

[Riceball]

What always bugged me, along the lines of ship orientation, is how the writers always seemed to think in 2 dimensions even though WoK pointed out just such a thing. I've seen a number of episodes where they show a given area/territory that they can't go through so they're forced to go around but that area is always shown in 2D and there's never any mention of instead of going around they could instead go above or beneath or a combination of all 3. The writers always seemed to forget that space is not flat, they're not on land and they can actually above and below things, not just around.

A minor annoyance of the show was the way they named alien creatures or animals, aside from the targ almost all alien animals were named something animal type. So instead of coming up with some sort colorful/creative name like glorbop they'd instead call it a Vulcan hawk, or a Cardassian pig, or a Klingon horse or something of that nature like every race out there names animals with an alien name and Earth animal type.

 

[Inquisitor Peregrinus]

That's a neat SF concept but such casual timey-wimey tech isn't something Starfleet was ever shown having in use as a matter of course.

Respectfully disagree. All the way back to TOS, there's been no signal lag from surface to synchronous orbit. Communicators are basically FTL satellite phones. By TNG, the tech boys (Rick and Mike) had gotten around computer processing issues like read time, recall time, access lag, latency, etc., by saying the ships computer had FTL signal processors to compensate for such delays stacking up.

It is no stretch, for me, to say that sort of tech has been extended to all shipboard and landside comm systems to eliminate translation lag, transmission wait time, etc. It would effectively eliminate the irritation of asking a question, pausing, then saying more only to have the other person start answering and you talk over each other, due to the lag of your question reaching them plus their answer getting back to you, such as you hear on the radio all the time when they're on a satellite phone call to someone on the other side of the planet.

As for the starship orientation thing... The Klingon homeworld seems to be Z+ relative to Earth, as we always see Klingons ships approaching on a higher relative plane. And regardign Riker's refitted Enterprise-D... I've never liked the -E. I especially hate the reason the -D was destroyed -- the Powers That Be didn't like how it looked in early screen tests for the big screen, so they ordered it destroyed in the story. I thought she looked beautiful in Generations. In my headcanon, everything after Picard goes into the Nexus has been a Nexus fantasy of his. Sometime after the events of Nemesis, he does manage to get out, helping Kirk get out, too, both near the time and place they went in (why, when Scotty was found decades later, he thought Kirk was still around, not having realized how much time had passed while he was in stasis). In the real world, they don't let Geordi go back on duty until they've destroyed his clothes and VISOR and given him new ones, lest the Klingons have tampered with them; Picard points out to Soren that he'll give him a shuttle to fly into the Nexus -- doesn't matter if the ship is destroyed, he'd be in the Nexus, and Soren goes "oh, hey, you're right". So the -D ends up still being around twenty years later for Riker to have had augmented with all the latest toys as his personal flagship.

And no one can tell me otherwise.

--Jonah

 

[Treadwell]

Sure, they have FTL subspace radio, but they don't have radio that transmits into the future, and that is what it would take for the computer to play back my page to the intended recipient in real time.

 

[Inquisitor Peregrinus]

Given where we are now with quantum fiddly-ness and information states being communicated at apparently FTL speeds... Give it three hundred more years and I have a hunch we'll have gotten a handle on temporal manipulation on a small scale -- managing relativistic effects of high sublight speeds, boosting data processing in computers beyond superconducting speeds... even slurring information states by a few seconds to eliminate signal lag and response time.

--Jonah

 

[Laspector]

I have a Star Trek question. I am sitting here at work watching the ST:TNG episode The Royale. The one where the hotel is created on a planet so that the astronaut can live out his days there. The hotel being created by aliens from a cheap gangster novel the astronaut had. The aliens thinking this was how life on Earth was.

At the end Riker and team end up being the "foreign investors" at the end of the novel, and buy the hotel.

If this novel was playing out over and over eternally for the (now dead) astronaut, the foreign investors would have obviously shown up many times, carried out the plot and then the whole thing starts over.

Where were these foreign investors when the landing team takes over the hotel? Why did they not appear in this version of the story?

 

[SSgt Burton]

Perhaps the "investors" weren't expected to show up for several "chapters", and Riker and Co. accelerated the "plot" by taking their places?


Kevin

 

[Sluis Van Shipyards]

Perhaps the "investors" weren't expected to show up for several "chapters", and Riker and Co. accelerated the "plot" by taking their places?


Kevin

I saw it a few weeks back too. The only problem with that is that it would mean the program the aliens made was adaptable. The astronauts diary seemed to indicate it was replaying over and over because (if I remember correctly) he said it was hell.

 

[Sluis Van Shipyards]

Ok really really stupid question, but does the Enterprise D have a pool? I'll wait for you to stop laughing for a minute. :lol I ask because I was watching the episode where everyone has amnesia. I forgot to look at the episode name. Dr. Crusher has someone in sickbay wearing a swimsuit that was injured. The woman asked Dr. Crusher if she can borrow clothes until she finds the pool. Now I'm guessing they can use the holodeck to swim, but I figured I'd ask.

 

[The Mad Professor]

Ok really really stupid question, but does the Enterprise D have a pool? I'll wait for you to stop laughing for a minute. :lol I ask because I was watching the episode where everyone has amnesia. I forgot to look at the episode name. Dr. Crusher has someone in sickbay wearing a swimsuit that was injured. The woman asked Dr. Crusher if she can borrow clothes until she finds the pool. Now I'm guessing they can use the holodeck to swim, but I figured I'd ask.

I would imagine that the E-D would have a pool, given that the ship houses families (a huge design flaw, but I digress). In addition to being a place for spouses and children to go during the workday, swimming is one of two activities that engages all the major muscle groups at the same time (the other being what gave the crewmen the children in the first place). One could argue that the Holodeck could be used for the same purpose, but given that the Holodeck seems to be a privilege, I imagine that it would be more of a "hey, let's take a day trip to Acapulco" swimming.

 

[bikemancs]

I have a Star Trek question. I am sitting here at work watching the ST:TNG episode The Royale. The one where the hotel is created on a planet so that the astronaut can live out his days there. The hotel being created by aliens from a cheap gangster novel the astronaut had. The aliens thinking this was how life on Earth was.

At the end Riker and team end up being the "foreign investors" at the end of the novel, and buy the hotel.

If this novel was playing out over and over eternally for the (now dead) astronaut, the foreign investors would have obviously shown up many times, carried out the plot and then the whole thing starts over.

Where were these foreign investors when the landing team takes over the hotel? Why did they not appear in this version of the story?

I think the Nitpicker's Guide addressed this, but... The Astronaut was supposed to be the foreign investor when he entered the Casino... BUT, he had never read the book, so he wasn't getting the hints as to his actions, thus he died. When the Enterprise crew came in, Data had to fast forward through the book for them to figure out what to do and to 'finish' the story. Hence, once the Casino reached the end of the story, they were able to leave and then transport back up... kinda messed up that they didn't leave some real literature for the aliens to process and thus, actually be able to communicate with the Federation and go from there...

 

[SSgt Burton]

Ok really really stupid question, but does the Enterprise D have a pool? I'll wait for you to stop laughing for a minute. :lol I ask because I was watching the episode where everyone has amnesia. I forgot to look at the episode name. Dr. Crusher has someone in sickbay wearing a swimsuit that was injured. The woman asked Dr. Crusher if she can borrow clothes until she finds the pool. Now I'm guessing they can use the holodeck to swim, but I figured I'd ask.

Going off memory, but my impression is that the "Until I can find the pool" line is a bit tongue-in-cheek. Crusher didn't even know she was a doctor until she picked up the scanner- so bathing suit woman might not even know if they use a holodeck or an actual pool.

Again my opinion only but I don't think they have a dedicated pool- the holodeck simulates water effectively. I think the same can be said if the Enterprise has a "gym." For what it is worth there is no mention of a "pool for swimming" (as opposed to the game of pool), in either the TNG Tech Manual or Star Trek Encyclopedia.


Kevin

 

[Inquisitor Peregrinus]

Well, there is a swimming pool on deck 22, but given where the woman in the bathing suit is, I'm guessing it's for one of the physical-therapy whirlpools in the greater sickbay complex there on deck 16. Yay blueprints.

--Jonah

 

[Jeyl]

The Royale... One of the rare episodes where a poorly written story somehow manages to also be poorly executed in the most glaring way possible. Right off the bat the episode opens with this.

LaForge: Nasty. Nitrogen, methane, liquid neon. Surface temperature -291 ºC. Winds up to 312 metres per second.
Riker: Not exactly a vacation planet, eh?​

-291 ºC. That's pretty cold when you consider that it's 17.85 ºC below ABSOLUTE ZERO. Even if there was some technobabble explanation for it, wouldn't that kind of environment be so devastating that it would render anything literally impossible to thrive? Also, 312 meters per second would cover almost the length of three entire football fields. With wind that fast and temperatures that low, this planet is impossible. And the real killer? None of these amazing details factor into anything. You could have had this planet be a deserted yet hospitable one and nothing would be different. If these aliens had the intellect to read a book, replicate it's environment with great detail and set it on a planet that is the exact opposite of life, how could they not have simply figured out where he came from and send him home?

But that's not even the biggest problem I have with this episode.

When a studio has a shooting script and the prop department cannot come up with a prop to match what's in the scene, do the actors really have to stick with what the shooting script says no matter what? Are scripts literally that binding to the point where if a script says a car is red but the car they're using is blue, can they not say that the car is just freaking blue? Why are our characters looking at Mr. Bones here and make a point about how un-decomposed he is?

 

[Laspector]

Yeah, but it is still a fun episode.

 

[Apollo]

Blame the director for that one!