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I've counted at least three civilization-shattering technologies in Star Trek which were simply thrown in, without consideration for the long-term, for reasons

I've counted at least three civilization-shattering technologies in Star Trek which were simply thrown in, without consideration for the long-term, for reasons of budget and convenience, but largely to maintain the Sailing Ship, Days of Yore set of metaphors. Transporters: Originally designed to save on tedious shuttle launches and landings and, most importantly, footage, these would utterly rewrite medicine, aging, manufacturing, and so on. Notice in many high adventure films, the dinghy, the shuttle's ancestor, is often ignored. Artificial Gravity/Inertial Dampeners: We want our ship to be under our boots, and occasionally slosh around when we are enduring space weather. Casual mastery of the force of gravity so we can have an ion storm to knock us about. Faster-Than-Light: Aside from that messy causality business, real FTL would make the concept of territories quite fuzzy. Sure, you could draw lines on your star charts, but given that someone could zip a few dozen light years in and attack your capitol planet, it's just not the same. I could go on and on about this, but a lot of this space opera harkens back to a time when governments would just have to trust that some captain or governor was a reasonable person to have in charge because messages back and forth would take so very long.

aidenn0 3y ago
> Faster-Than-Light: Aside from that messy causality business, real FTL would make the concept of territories quite fuzzy. Sure, you could draw lines on your star charts, but given that someone could zip a few dozen light years in and attack your capitol planet, it's just not the same. Star Trek avoids this one by just completely ignoring the lightspeed barrier with handwavy "subspace" technobabble. They can communicate, detect, and track objects moving FTL with as much (or more) ease as done with radio tracking slow moving objects today.
- at_a_remove 3y ago
  If you can get from A to B faster than a photon in a vacuum could, I'm counting it as FTL. They've been really inconsistent about it. For a while, communicating through subspace was not quite as long as travel, but it was still a non-zero amount of time. Now, communication seems to be via ansible, and the less said about the wildly varying rates of travel, the better.
  - Izkata 3y ago
    Several episodes mention subspace relay stations, and between how communication seems to jump between real-time and waiting hours or more for a reply (I don't recall any minutes-long delays), I have a suspicion the unwritten rule is subspace communication has some sort of speed decay. Like it actually slows down the further it has to go, instead of going at the same speed but weaker, and subspace relay stations intercept the message and re-send it at top speed. More advanced technology in the later-set series could also then just send it faster than in the prequel series, explaining how they communicate over larger distances even though it's supposed to both be subspace communication.
    - smogcutter 3y ago
      I think the unwritten rule is that subspace communication takes precisely as long as the plot requires it to. (Especially in the more modern series)
      - hef19898 3y ago
        Star Trek is an extreme case of the plot driving the tech, and not the other way round. They manage to pull it off, most of the time, using ingenious Starfleet engineering and technobabble. For some reason, with Star Trek it works most of the time.
  - SenHeng 3y ago
    And yet, we have something like the Picard Manoeuvre that uses FTL to make it look like you have 2 or more ships in a single location. So they acknowledge that FTL is reality breaking, then just hand wave it away.
mrec 3y ago
> Artificial Gravity/Inertial Dampeners Surely this one was much more about those "reasons of budget and convenience"? Star Trek couldn't afford non-styrofoam rocks, I can't see them stretching to filming all bridge scenes on the Vomit Comet or building a 2001-style rotational set.
caseysoftware 3y ago
> Transporters: Originally designed to save on tedious shuttle launches and landings and, most importantly, footage, these would utterly rewrite medicine, aging, manufacturing, and so on. I'm more interested in how it would rewrite the rules of war. If you can transport a nuke (or even a strike team) directly into your enemy's headquarters, wars end faster with less widespread destruction. Until you develop no-transport fields but now you've just created massive dead zones which - in themselves - highlight key points of interest to investigate and/or target. Then you have to deploy LARGE scale (think city wide or bigger) no-transport fields or lots of smaller fields to obfuscate the high value targets. But regardless, you still need normal shields because teleporting a nuke just outside the zone and letting it drop in is just as effective. And all of that still ignores conservation of mass.. the physical material has to come from somewhere.
- jimbokun 3y ago
  In a Star Trek novel, where bad guys take over the bridge of the Enterprise, someone in the crew repurposes a mini transporter that’s part of a game, to transport explosives into the parts of the ship controlled by the enemy as a way to fight back. I thought that was a clever use of transporter tech.
- crooked-v 3y ago
  > the physical material has to come from somewhere Extended canon Star Trek has references to both (a) feedstock material storage, with big blocks or tanks of elementally pure materials that get shaved off and recombobulated as necessary by the replicators, and (b) synthesis of elements from pure energy on demand, though usually with the preference of the first method over the second because it's far, far less demanding on all the systems involved to just move atoms around.
  - caseysoftware 3y ago
    That works well if you're going TO a transporter pad. It doesn't work when they use a transporter to go to a desolate planet.
- mnw21cam 3y ago
Terr_ 3y ago
That makes me think of the "teraport" invention from Schlock Mercenary, which is basically faster than light teleportation powered by a very small/evenly-spread amount of mass-to-energy conversion of whatever you're sending. (So basically three magics rolled into one.) Large portions of the web comic are involved with how it completely rewrites the rules of politics and war, with and without review techniques designed to create interdiction zones.
aquova 3y ago
I think there's a fourth, which in my opinion is even more world shattering than the others -- the replicator. It often was shown as a novelty device to make food or warm beverages, but the ability to convert energy into any needed material would instantly transform the world into a post-scarcity, post-economic future. What would you even use as currency when everyone has personal money making machines? I've seen some people be skeptical towards the utopian future of Trek, and I understand that a bit as the show puts great emphasis on the warp drive, but I think the replicator is quietly the greatest invention they depict (and unlike warp drive, at least vaguely possible).
- at_a_remove 3y ago
  Oh, I lump the replicator in with the transporter. I can see the replicator as an ancestor of the transporter.
- shiroiushi 3y ago
  >I think there's a fourth, which in my opinion is even more world shattering than the others -- the replicator. It often was shown as a novelty device to make food or warm beverages, but the ability to convert energy into any needed material would instantly transform the world into a post-scarcity, post-economic future. IIRC, in Star Trek, the replicator does not convert energy into needed material: it simply reorganizes existing molecules into a new form. So, for instance, you can't use it to make yourself a bunch of gold: you could use it to convert a bunch of gold jewelry into gold bars, or vice-versa, but you would need some actual gold. It won't convert lead into gold. I think I heard or read somewhere in the lore (maybe non-canon) that the food replicators needed supplies of biochemical ingredients to use for making food. They could get that from various places, including breaking down the waste of the crewmembers, but they couldn't just conjure food out of nothing using pure energy.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > What would you even use as currency when everyone has personal money making machines? Cumals. You can give everyone as much food as they want (and we already do!), but you can't eliminate scarcity.
readyplayernull 3y ago
You can apply Disney's Star Wars logic to Star Trek and get an abominable time traveling FTL space ram that can destroy anything.
crooked-v 3y ago
I think that last part about FTL is taken more into account in the stories than you've considered. 'A Borg ship moving super fast suddenly showed up Federation core territory' is the driving conceit behind "Best of Both Worlds" and Star Trek: First Contact, FTL travel is the main technobabble allowing for surprise appearances of Romulan/Klingon/Ferengi ships in unexpected places in a number of episodes, and there are whole arcs in DS9 about the impact of the Gamma Quadrant wormhole and how it's abruptly connected two politically opposed parts of the galaxy.
amanaplanacanal 3y ago
One thing that struck me about TNG was how many plots were about Data and whether he should be considered alive, and what rights he should have, and absolutely no thought was given to the AIs in the holodeck.
- hef19898 3y ago
  They did put Moriarity in his own holo reality. Quite cruel after all. Not sure ehat happened to him, I didn't watch the last season of Picard. Also, the holodeck: Not only can the ship computers run multiple, basically self-aware General AI characters in parallel, it can also extent space beyond the confines of the decks physical dimensions. Pretty amazing tech, no idea why they don't use it to build the interior of all their ships, after all it also has superior environmental controls.

aidenn0 3y ago

> Faster-Than-Light: Aside from that messy causality business, real FTL would make the concept of territories quite fuzzy. Sure, you could draw lines on your star charts, but given that someone could zip a few dozen light years in and attack your capitol planet, it's just not the same. Star Trek avoids this one by just completely ignoring the lightspeed barrier with handwavy "subspace" technobabble. They can communicate, detect, and track objects moving FTL with as much (or more) ease as done with radio tracking slow moving objects today.

at_a_remove 3y ago
If you can get from A to B faster than a photon in a vacuum could, I'm counting it as FTL. They've been really inconsistent about it. For a while, communicating through subspace was not quite as long as travel, but it was still a non-zero amount of time. Now, communication seems to be via ansible, and the less said about the wildly varying rates of travel, the better.
- Izkata 3y ago
  Several episodes mention subspace relay stations, and between how communication seems to jump between real-time and waiting hours or more for a reply (I don't recall any minutes-long delays), I have a suspicion the unwritten rule is subspace communication has some sort of speed decay. Like it actually slows down the further it has to go, instead of going at the same speed but weaker, and subspace relay stations intercept the message and re-send it at top speed. More advanced technology in the later-set series could also then just send it faster than in the prequel series, explaining how they communicate over larger distances even though it's supposed to both be subspace communication.
  - smogcutter 3y ago
    I think the unwritten rule is that subspace communication takes precisely as long as the plot requires it to. (Especially in the more modern series)
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Star Trek is an extreme case of the plot driving the tech, and not the other way round. They manage to pull it off, most of the time, using ingenious Starfleet engineering and technobabble. For some reason, with Star Trek it works most of the time.
- SenHeng 3y ago
  And yet, we have something like the Picard Manoeuvre that uses FTL to make it look like you have 2 or more ships in a single location. So they acknowledge that FTL is reality breaking, then just hand wave it away.

mrec 3y ago

> Artificial Gravity/Inertial Dampeners Surely this one was much more about those "reasons of budget and convenience"? Star Trek couldn't afford non-styrofoam rocks, I can't see them stretching to filming all bridge scenes on the Vomit Comet or building a 2001-style rotational set.

caseysoftware 3y ago

> Transporters: Originally designed to save on tedious shuttle launches and landings and, most importantly, footage, these would utterly rewrite medicine, aging, manufacturing, and so on. I'm more interested in how it would rewrite the rules of war. If you can transport a nuke (or even a strike team) directly into your enemy's headquarters, wars end faster with less widespread destruction. Until you develop no-transport fields but now you've just created massive dead zones which - in themselves - highlight key points of interest to investigate and/or target. Then you have to deploy LARGE scale (think city wide or bigger) no-transport fields or lots of smaller fields to obfuscate the high value targets. But regardless, you still need normal shields because teleporting a nuke just outside the zone and letting it drop in is just as effective. And all of that still ignores conservation of mass.. the physical material has to come from somewhere.

jimbokun 3y ago
In a Star Trek novel, where bad guys take over the bridge of the Enterprise, someone in the crew repurposes a mini transporter that’s part of a game, to transport explosives into the parts of the ship controlled by the enemy as a way to fight back. I thought that was a clever use of transporter tech.
crooked-v 3y ago
> the physical material has to come from somewhere Extended canon Star Trek has references to both (a) feedstock material storage, with big blocks or tanks of elementally pure materials that get shaved off and recombobulated as necessary by the replicators, and (b) synthesis of elements from pure energy on demand, though usually with the preference of the first method over the second because it's far, far less demanding on all the systems involved to just move atoms around.
- caseysoftware 3y ago
  That works well if you're going TO a transporter pad. It doesn't work when they use a transporter to go to a desolate planet.
mnw21cam 3y ago

Terr_ 3y ago

That makes me think of the "teraport" invention from Schlock Mercenary, which is basically faster than light teleportation powered by a very small/evenly-spread amount of mass-to-energy conversion of whatever you're sending. (So basically three magics rolled into one.) Large portions of the web comic are involved with how it completely rewrites the rules of politics and war, with and without review techniques designed to create interdiction zones.

aquova 3y ago

I think there's a fourth, which in my opinion is even more world shattering than the others -- the replicator. It often was shown as a novelty device to make food or warm beverages, but the ability to convert energy into any needed material would instantly transform the world into a post-scarcity, post-economic future. What would you even use as currency when everyone has personal money making machines? I've seen some people be skeptical towards the utopian future of Trek, and I understand that a bit as the show puts great emphasis on the warp drive, but I think the replicator is quietly the greatest invention they depict (and unlike warp drive, at least vaguely possible).

at_a_remove 3y ago
Oh, I lump the replicator in with the transporter. I can see the replicator as an ancestor of the transporter.
shiroiushi 3y ago
>I think there's a fourth, which in my opinion is even more world shattering than the others -- the replicator. It often was shown as a novelty device to make food or warm beverages, but the ability to convert energy into any needed material would instantly transform the world into a post-scarcity, post-economic future. IIRC, in Star Trek, the replicator does not convert energy into needed material: it simply reorganizes existing molecules into a new form. So, for instance, you can't use it to make yourself a bunch of gold: you could use it to convert a bunch of gold jewelry into gold bars, or vice-versa, but you would need some actual gold. It won't convert lead into gold. I think I heard or read somewhere in the lore (maybe non-canon) that the food replicators needed supplies of biochemical ingredients to use for making food. They could get that from various places, including breaking down the waste of the crewmembers, but they couldn't just conjure food out of nothing using pure energy.
thaumasiotes 3y ago
> What would you even use as currency when everyone has personal money making machines? Cumals. You can give everyone as much food as they want (and we already do!), but you can't eliminate scarcity.

readyplayernull 3y ago

You can apply Disney's Star Wars logic to Star Trek and get an abominable time traveling FTL space ram that can destroy anything.

crooked-v 3y ago

I think that last part about FTL is taken more into account in the stories than you've considered. 'A Borg ship moving super fast suddenly showed up Federation core territory' is the driving conceit behind "Best of Both Worlds" and Star Trek: First Contact, FTL travel is the main technobabble allowing for surprise appearances of Romulan/Klingon/Ferengi ships in unexpected places in a number of episodes, and there are whole arcs in DS9 about the impact of the Gamma Quadrant wormhole and how it's abruptly connected two politically opposed parts of the galaxy.

amanaplanacanal 3y ago

One thing that struck me about TNG was how many plots were about Data and whether he should be considered alive, and what rights he should have, and absolutely no thought was given to the AIs in the holodeck.

hef19898 3y ago
They did put Moriarity in his own holo reality. Quite cruel after all. Not sure ehat happened to him, I didn't watch the last season of Picard. Also, the holodeck: Not only can the ship computers run multiple, basically self-aware General AI characters in parallel, it can also extent space beyond the confines of the decks physical dimensions. Pretty amazing tech, no idea why they don't use it to build the interior of all their ships, after all it also has superior environmental controls.