While I get Stross’s point, I suspect there was some level of context lost here. When the Trek writers penciled in “Ensign, you need to tech the tech with the

While I get Stross’s point, I suspect there was some level of context lost here. When the Trek writers penciled in “Ensign, you need to tech the tech with the other tech, and hurry!”, the details of those particular bits of “tech” didn’t matter to the plot. What was important was that a particular bit presented a specific kind of obstacle in the moment. Your phaser doesn’t work, and you need to improvise a solution, so maybe you can open the phaser and pull out the MALFUNCTIONING THING and then smash your tricorder and pull out the OTHER THING and then bend the OTHER THING’S WHATSIT into a pretzel and put it into the phaser in place of the MALFUNCTIONING THING. Great! From a story standpoint, did you need to know what any of those things were? I’m just going to replace them with made-up words that sound like parts of an effectively magic space weapon. Does it matter if I, the script writer, make up the words or if Bob, the Senior Technobabble Consultant we have on retainer, does it? Not really. It arguably does matter that we all keep a Technobabble Dictionary so it stays consistent—it’s Bob’s job to know that MALFUNCTIONING THING is plausibly the flogiston capacitor, because an episode last season had the chief engineer mention the celebrated Dr. Flogiston—but these are, at best, little world-building bits. What “tech goes here” is manifestly not is the “what if…” you build stories on. Trek, from its beginning through TNG and up to its present day, clearly builds stories on “what if” centered around science fiction and fantasy conceits. We can argue about whether it does a good or consistent job with that, or whether the “what if” questions it asks are ones that you or I or Stross find particularly interesting. But I don’t think we can argue that it hasn’t put in the work.