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Phanatic posted:Yeah, but it's still a case where the implications of that being so readily available aren't dealt with. First Contact had this whole thing where the Borg attacked Earth so they could go back in time and prevent first ontact and assimilate Earth in the past. But why would they need to fly to Earth first? Just slingshot around some other sun nearer to where they are where there's no Federation fleet to interfere, and *then* travel to Earth and assimilate it. If all you have to do is go fast enough to travel back in time in Trek, then any of the major players can do this any time they want to. Apparently it's just another uncouth thing to do that's universally frowned upon and so nobody does it. Except if they want to. assimilating Earth in the past was plan B when their plan A of assimilating Earth in the 24th century had failed. for whatever inscrutable Borgish reasons they had, they didn't really want to go back in time. probably would suck being isolated and so cut off from the Collective back in the 21st century. who would have been ever further away and less capable of bridging the gap.
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Mar 15, 2023 18:25
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Cerv posted:assimilating Earth in the past was plan B when their plan A of assimilating Earth in the 24th century had failed. Well I mean, part of the point of assimilating civilizations is to steal their technology, and there's kinda jack-all worth stealing in post-WWIII Montana compared to the modern Federation. I can understand why it's considered the backup option where you're willing to accept pathetic material gains and more just taking a player off the board.
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Mar 15, 2023 19:19
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I always chalk up those wacky Star Trek wonder phenomena to having some seriously bad side effects once they're thoroughly studied. Like the transporter stuff is repeatable but just hilariously inconsistent and so finicky and sensitive to interference that 9 times out of 10 you just end up with a pile of goo and someone in a nearby park with an ipod is enough to hose the whole thing. And the anti-aging stuff liquefies your internal organs after a couple years or something like that. The universe is just full of flukes and one-offs that you could repeat but are just so fussy and costly to do so that Starfleet parks it in some research think tank and says "yeah maybe we'll get it worked up to a generally available form in a few decades, don't hold your breath."
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Mar 15, 2023 20:06
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But then sometimes they turn around and use the one-off phenomenon. Transwarp drive is a result of that TOS episode where another Federation starship got sucked through a space rip (the one where Kirk was floating around in his square-head spacesuit).
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Mar 15, 2023 20:27
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I'm imagining a ST writer reading these complaints and just getting an instant migraine
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Mar 15, 2023 21:48
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Then in Star Trek Online you can order your Science Officer to spit out a greatest hits list of negative space wedgies that nearly killed the crew of the Enterprise onto whatever poor bastards you're there to defeat 20 times for a reward of some sort. This is actually a fairly effective strategy, if kind of repetitive.
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Mar 15, 2023 23:07
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CainFortea posted:I mean, I didn't watch all of SG-1 but they seemed to forget details about their tech stuff all the time. LIke with the taser guns. The little snakey ones that fire blue lightning? I think they carried them as sidearms pretty exclusively in later series.
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Mar 15, 2023 23:46
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Sanford posted:The little snakey ones that fire blue lightning? I think they carried them as sidearms pretty exclusively in later series. Yes, but they were introduced as weapons that could stun, kill, or disintegrate. The first shot stunned a person. Just straight up knocked them unconscious. A follow up shot would kill them. A third shot would disintegrate the remains. I don't recall if the show ever specified how close together the shots had to be in order for that to work. Three shots to an inanimate object would also get rid of the object. Early on in the show, the writers mostly stuck to that standard, and there was at least one point where the SG-1 team used their zat guns to destroy evidence of advanced future technology, in an episode where they were temporarily stuck in the 1960s. Later in the show, the zat guns were pretty exclusively used as stun guns, and the duration of that stun varied. Sometimes people would get zapped and knocked out cold. Sometimes they'd only get knocked out for a few seconds. Sometimes they'd just grimace and fall over but remain conscious. Whatever the plot required. Sometimes, a person would get zapped, get back up a moment later, and get zapped again, which really should have killed them, going by the rules set out in the earlier seasons. This wasn't really a case of the writers forgetting about a capability. I recall reading a couple of interviews when the show ended where the writers admitted they hated the wide range of zat gun functions and purposefully avoided using them, because they could wrap up too many plots with "Hey, just disintegrate this locked door" or whatever.
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Mar 16, 2023 00:00
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Sanford posted:The little snakey ones that fire blue lightning? I think they carried them as sidearms pretty exclusively in later series. Stargate would correctly remember how tech worked (one zat shot stuns, two kills) unless it was stupid (three shots from a zat disintegrating someone). The zat is the kind of weapon you would give to cops to reduce accidental deaths, only for the cops to shoot everyone 91 times at the slightest provocation
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Mar 16, 2023 00:01
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Megillah Gorilla posted:One of the books from the 70s had a planet where a virus(?) caused everyone under puberty to stop ageing and live for hundreds of years while anyone older than 13 died. ST:TOS series 1 episode 8 “Miri”. And at the end of the episode they find a cure. So at the very least they have a way of extending the lives of pre-pubescent children for hundreds of years and then curing them of the life extension disease when they hit puberty. I guess that knowledge had no practical benefits for the Federation.
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Mar 16, 2023 00:35
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CainFortea posted:I mean, I didn't watch all of SG-1 but they seemed to forget details about their tech stuff all the time. LIke with the taser guns. They didn't forget that. They deliberately ignored the three shots disintegrates bit. Least I'm pretty sure that was said at some point but I could be misremembering.
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Mar 16, 2023 03:13
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On the zat guns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGFz3X8PqKM
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Mar 16, 2023 08:23
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Hillary 2024 posted:ST:TOS series 1 episode 8 “Miri”. And at the end of the episode they find a cure. So at the very least they have a way of extending the lives of pre-pubescent children for hundreds of years and then curing them of the life extension disease when they hit puberty. I guess that knowledge had no practical benefits for the Federation. Trek fans and permanent children, a match made in prison.
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Mar 16, 2023 16:19
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General Battuta posted:These things are not done because it is quietly agreed to be in poor taste. In regards to using technology to get a younger body, get rid of a disease, or avoid aging, saying that in Trek they agreed as a society that they just wouldn't do it sounds possible until most anyone on their death bed with space cancer or whatever actually has to face their mortality and imminent demise and goes "yeah gently caress that". Even if it means you're an outlaw of the federation or whatever, the amount of people that would peace out to whatever planet where it was allowed would probably be so high, they would have to rethink their policy or face widespread problems. I know the real answer is "it's just some dumb sci-fi stories, don't worry about it" instead of "well actually they can't because of some technobabble reason invented after the fact to address that issue unless they actually want to use that idea again anyhow" but if it were reality even the most devoted and convicted are probably going to have a change of heart and abandon their ideals once it's their time, even if not indefinitely.
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Mar 16, 2023 23:38
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I mean they clearly have SOME sort of anti-ageing treatment. McCoy was still puttering around in the TNG era, and he was no spring chicken in Kirk's time. Hell, Picard was canonically somewhere in his 70s
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Mar 16, 2023 23:51
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Twenty Four posted:but if it were reality even the most devoted and convicted are probably going to have a change of heart and abandon their ideals once it's their time, even if not indefinitely. There's even a whole movie about the Federation getting in bed with the Sona, a literal race of crinklies, to go all colonialist and evict the native population from a planet so they can harvest its youth-rays for themselves. The latest episode of Picard even has another captain give Picard poo poo about "violating the Prime directive" for banging one of the natives, while completely not mentioning you know, the Federation violating the prime directive by stealing their planet. The Federation's apparently completely willing to sell out its most sacred principles for a fountain of youth, but it already *has* a fountain of youth on every ship and shuttlecraft and base in the fleet. (Incidentally, whatever technology Star Trek uses to vet its admirals sucks. Into Darkness, evil corrupt admiral. Insurrection, evil corrupt admiral. The Undiscovered Country, evil corrupt admiral. TNG S01E16, evil corrupt admiral. S07E12, evil corrupt admiral. DS9, S04E10, evil corrupt admiral. This isn't even counting the ones who are assholes and/or incompetent, just the ones who are outright criminal.)
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Mar 16, 2023 23:55
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Phanatic posted:Incidentally, whatever technology Star Trek uses to vet its admirals sucks. Turns out the department that vets it's admirals is run by an evil corrupt admiral. 
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Mar 17, 2023 00:08
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Twenty Four posted:
To be fair the technobabble reason was invented before they wrote that episode. They just ignored it when writing that episode
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Mar 17, 2023 01:20
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You see the smart sci-f writer comes up with a technobabble reason at the start of the show for why they keep forgetting/mixing up past technobabble stuff.
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Mar 17, 2023 01:27
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We know that in star trek psychic powers are real and also various advanced space goobers keep saying humanity has "promise". All the best human engineers and doctors and such are pre-Q potentiates working off Warhammer Ork rules where half the stuff only works because they're subconsciously thumbing the scales. The Enterprise is the flagship so they get all the most successful people, so it's the ship with the most concentrated waaagh power which is why they pull off the most frequent and most obvious gibberish. Meanwhile on DS9 they only have Miles and all his waaagh is spent trying to keep the station from exploding so they have barely any weird tech at all. Splicer fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Mar 17, 2023 |
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Mar 17, 2023 04:30
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Splicer posted:We know that in star trek psychic powers are real and also various advanced space goobers keep saying humanity has "promise". All the best human engineers and doctors and such are pre-Q potentiates working off Warhammer Ork rules where half the stuff only works because they're subconsciously thumbing the scales. The Enterprise is the flagship so they get all the most successful people, so it's the ship with the most concentrated waaagh power which is why they pull off the most frequent and most obvious gibberish. I'm just reminded of the meme post where humans are all goddamn mad scientists and all standard Federation ships are overengineered insanity that's usually running at like 20% of full capacity and the Vulcans are quietly terrified of them. Nog learned from humans and ended up reanimating a corpse via remote control
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Mar 17, 2023 06:10
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here you go: Replies to it here: https://www.tor.com/2016/10/17/the-answer-to-why-humans-are-so-central-in-star-trek/ Edit: to many replies to post but this is probably the best one, that people remember: 
dr_rat fucked around with this message at 07:17 on Mar 17, 2023 |
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Mar 17, 2023 07:15
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A lot of headcanon and fluff and frankly canon comes down to humans being the manic pixie dream species to Vulcans.
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Mar 17, 2023 07:31
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I know I've said it before, but it sure as hell wasn't Vulcans who first discovered you could travel in time by going really fast around a sun. I mean, if I had a ship with warp and shields I would absolutely fly it around the sun just to fly it around the sun.
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Mar 17, 2023 08:24
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IIRC the method they use literally only works with Klingon Birds of Prey of a particular model.
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Mar 17, 2023 09:07
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Ghost Leviathan posted:A lot of headcanon and fluff and frankly canon comes down to humans being the manic pixie dream species to Vulcans. Hey, the Vulcans landed in Bozeman and what's the first thing ol' Zefram Cochrane does? Offer his hand. Which we know what that means to Vulcans thanks to Star Trek III: it's foreplay. Honestly? Props to that first Vulcan for just looking around, shrugging, and going for it. In public. Ghost Leviathan posted:IIRC the method they use literally only works with Klingon Birds of Prey of a particular model. Nah, they discovered it on the original Enterprise when they accidentally traveled back to 1967 and kidnapped/rescued an Air Force pilot who turned out to be someone famous' grandpa so they needed to figure out how to put him back They ended up beaming him back into his own body a second before he left so he forgot everything. Because that makes sense. Lemniscate Blue fucked around with this message at 09:11 on Mar 17, 2023 |
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Mar 17, 2023 09:08
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Megillah Gorilla posted:I know I've said it before, but it sure as hell wasn't Vulcans who first discovered you could travel in time by going really fast around a sun. "The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible" - T'pol for like 4 seasons
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Mar 17, 2023 16:22
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Hey, the Vulcans landed in Bozeman and what's the first thing ol' Zefram Cochrane does? Offer his hand. Which we know what that means to Vulcans thanks to Star Trek III: it's foreplay. That guy was the Captain Kirk of Vulcans
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Mar 17, 2023 16:28
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CainFortea posted:"The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible" - T'pol for like 4 seasons Clearly every time Vulcan's got time travel they hosed poo poo up so someone else went back in time and made sure the vulcan's got the wrong idea about any time travel accidents and conclude it's impossible abusing their logic.
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Mar 17, 2023 16:41
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Aren't there time cops in star trek that are supposed to sort out all that dumb poo poo?
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Mar 17, 2023 18:02
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Guyver posted:Aren't there time cops in star trek that are supposed to sort out all that dumb poo poo? Yes. Multiple bureaus!
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Mar 17, 2023 18:31
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Presto posted:But then sometimes they turn around and use the one-off phenomenon. Transwarp drive is a result of that TOS episode where another Federation starship got sucked through a space rip (the one where Kirk was floating around in his square-head spacesuit). Yeah that's why I think that a lot of those space-magic phenomena that would 'change everything' just don't scale well for whatever reason. Or don't scale in the time frame that we see these stories in. The little window of a few years when it would take decades or centuries to ramp up a convoy of people to plant youth or distribute to thousands if not millions of ships the finely tuned, high-powered, just-so version of transporters that can do whatever magic they do without it getting patched out by accident (or on purpose) in the next transporter firmware release for whatever reason. Which is perfect for the show because you can play with weird space phenomena that does wacky goofy stuff and without even needing to technobabble it just let it fade out into the explanation of "it's going to take a while for this to get around, we have more exciting and meaningful things to do with our heroes." It already takes a decade or more in real life for a medicine to go through the development process to being publicly available, I don't see why the Federation wouldn't have their Space FDA do their due diligence on that youth potion. Sometimes they do bring stuff in like the Transwarp stuff, they don't always toss a thing into the bin and I thinking SG-1 is pretty good about that. They use all sorts of stuff that they hoover up from around the galaxy, and for the most part it's just enough to be useful to them but isn't in enough quantity (yet) to change the world. I really do wonder what the average dude's knowledge of things is like in very late-series or a few years post-show SG-1. The writers are pretty clear that it (SGC, aliens, etc.) isn't going to stay secret for long but that the knowledge release will be managed in order to keep everyone from flipping their poo poo. I remember they did a whole episode where they rounded up all the various world leaders to clue them in and tell them to get their poo poo together to manage this new paradigm. But yeah for things like Star Trek I don't think we really quite 'get' how big the Federation, and even the whole of inhabited space is.
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Mar 17, 2023 21:55
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CainFortea posted:Babylon 5 I think has that beat. In season 1 there's a weird alien device some old lady finds that can transfer "life energy" from one person to another. Over the course of the episode you learn that the aliens made it as a capitol punishment device, so that some murderer can literally give their life for benefit of the rest of society. Actually they did use it once between those two occasions. I think it was Garibaldi in season 2 after he got messed up in the season 1 finale; they fixed him up by having multiple people use it so no one person was drained to death. You'd think they'd keep that idea in mind for future use, unless maybe the line between weakened but alive donor and oops all dead is closer than they made it look. Phanatic posted:Yeah, but it's still a case where the implications of that being so readily available aren't dealt with. First Contact had this whole thing where the Borg attacked Earth so they could go back in time and prevent first contact and assimilate Earth in the past. But why would they need to fly to Earth first? Just slingshot around some other sun nearer to where they are where there's no Federation fleet to interfere, and *then* travel to Earth and assimilate it. If all you have to do is go fast enough to travel back in time in Trek, then any of the major players can do this any time they want to. Apparently it's just another uncouth thing to do that's universally frowned upon and so nobody does it. Except if they want to. Given how very easy it seems to manage a "oops, ruined our entire civilization and/or killed everybody" mistake with time travel, feels like time travel is more trouble than it's worth unless your entire civilization being ruined is already the situation. I just wonder if all the fascist powers like the Cardassians found out the dangers of time travel by accidently turning their people into hippies or something, given how often the Federation seems to wind up going full fash every time they get wrecked by time travel. "Hey Guuuuuul Dukat, want to try the latest blend?" "NO!!!! What horrors have we wrought by changing the past?!"
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Mar 18, 2023 04:45
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Weirdly enough, DS9's use of time travel is almost entirely through the Prophets and the Orbs, who it seems implied are a lot more able to manage it smoothly thanks to non-linear time being their whole thing. Even the Guardian of Forever hosed up that one time in TAS. Which is also fun because that establishes the Federation DOES use time travel for historical research, with the Guardian of Forever glad to enable them and even admit to and help fix mistakes.
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Mar 18, 2023 04:53
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MadDogMike posted:Actually they did use it once between those two occasions. I think it was Garibaldi in season 2 after he got messed up in the season 1 finale; they fixed him up by having multiple people use it so no one person was drained to death. You'd think they'd keep that idea in mind for future use, unless maybe the line between weakened but alive donor and oops all dead is closer than they made it look. In the last appearance of the device, the character using it has more than a little bit of a martyr complex. It was a deliberate choice on their part.
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Mar 18, 2023 06:24
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Q also does a bit of that too actually, like in Picard's near-death experience episode. Of course, I feel a key thing is many of those time travel episodes are specifically about introspection, with characters exploring aspects of their life and how they percieve and relate to the world around them. The ones where characters including Garak, Odo and Kira go back to occupation-era Terok Nor gives them all an arc; Garak learning how horrible the Cardassian regime really was to Bajorans as individuals, Odo facing his past as being part of that regime, and Kira... learning Dukat wasn't lying about banging her mom. And whether Far Beyond The Stars counts as time travel is of course a fun question.
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Mar 18, 2023 06:46
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I didn't like the wormhole aliens much. Hard to make much sense of the whole nonlinearity thing, the show kinda flops back and forth on them being gods, and then there was that time they raped a lady.
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Mar 18, 2023 16:35
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DS9 certainly has the most fun time travel episodes in a serial scifi show that's not usually about time travel.
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Mar 19, 2023 10:02
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OutsideAngel posted:DS9 certainly has the most fun time travel episodes in a serial scifi show that's not usually about time travel. Trials and Tribble-ations is a great loving fun one-off episode.
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Mar 19, 2023 14:23
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I liked it when Max Headroom got marooned in the 24th century.
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Mar 20, 2023 21:30
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