Maybe the lack of 0g sex?
I doubt that even someone as…free spirited…as Kaylee would have found him to be attractive.
Now that’s a woman that flosses her teeth.
(Having fought my battle with gum disease, you just can’t downplay a healthy set of gums.)
You mispelled “demi-goddess,” but okay.
Dude, in my 39 51/52 years on this planet, I’ve spent the bulk of it (from the time I was 7 and working in my father’s door shop) in industrial operations. I’ve worked in foundries, small to medium sized machine shops, skyscraper construction, airport construction, and one of the largest automotive plants in the country, to name but a few. Okay, I haven’t done any ship building, but I know industrial operations better than most of the engineers I’ve dealt with (many of whom lacked a basic understanding of physics), and I was always the “go to guy” when a problem cropped up that no one else could figure out. Believe you me, if the companies could ditch their human employees and replace them with robots, even if the robots were slower than the humans, they’d do it.
What you don’t understand is that a fabber is optimized for whatever its creating, and it turns one offs into mass production items. You don’t need a huge inventory of parts and supplies, when you’ve got a machine which can spit out anything it needs, in whatever shape it wants, with whatever characteristics it requires. The cost savings from cutting the supply inventory for things like tooling, safety gear, etc. are huge.
The person who doesn’t “get it” is you. There is no need to “tune” a fab unit. None, because, by default, it is going to be optimized for whatever its producing. As an added bonus, not only is a fabber going to able to produce your I-beam, its also going to able to produce the wiring harnesses, EPS power conduits/taps and the like, already attached to the unit, rather than simply spitting out an I-beam, then the wiring, then the EPS conduits/taps, etc. That’s a huge savings in terms of time and cost.
It doesn’t need AI. Right now, one of the debates going on in computer circles is what constitutes AI, because processing power is reaching the point where you can have a machine which exhibits all the signs of having AI without actually having that ability. The example given is of a person who speaks English being locked in a room when someone slides a note under the door written in Chinese. The English speaker picks up the note, goes to a chart which says, “If you get a note with these pictograms on it, slide a note with these other pictograms on it under the door.” The person in the room is able to match up any possible combination of comments and responses using that chart. The person outside the room will think that he/she is communicating with someone who speaks Chinese, even though they’re not. News accounts have described people being identity theft victims of bots in IRC chats. The mark thinks that they’re chatting with a human, when they’re really talking to bot. Computers also have the advantage in that if they run across a problem once every 10 years, they don’t have to remember that they have seen the problem, then fight through the haze of accumulated memories to try and recall how they fixed it. They’re also not stressed out by bill collectors, spouses cheating on them, and everything else which distracts humans.
Its a canonical answer, and tanks and aircraft are all built one assembly lines.
Not irrelevant at all. And when you’re talking about fitting parts together, the reasons why a part isn’t going where its supposed to are pretty limited. We’ve got vehicles which are able to drive themselves under controlled conditions, and the military expects to deploy them on the battlefield in about a decade or less. If we’re about to put computer controlled vehicles in an evironment as random as a battlefield, then programming a robot to realize that the reason a panel isn’t going where its supposed to because there’s a dead rat in the way, is a piece of cake. Japan already has fully automated factories, where only a handful of humans work. The difference between putting a PC together and a starship is merely one of scale. If we can go from strapping chimps onto a modified ICBM to putting humans on the Moon in a decade or so, we can (and are) work out how to fully automate large scale operations.
And the newest cars also have collision avoidance systems and are self parking. The computer which tells you that your seatbelt is unbuckled is connected to one which monitors things like cylinder firing, throttle position, engine temperature, exhaust composition, fluid levels, and other things, several thousand times a second, and probably has as much computing power available to it as is found in your average cellphone. The cars currently in development have even more processing power available to them.
Apparently so, since its an industry standard.
The first computer I wrote a program for was a Timex/Sinclair T-1000 back in the early 1980s. I’ve written programs in BASIC, COBOL, Linux, done some HTML, G-code (a machine specific language used by CNC machines) and Cold Fusion. I’m by no means an expert by any stretch of the imagination, and I’ve not done anything terribly complex, but I know the basics. As I pointed out above, the actual number of possible permutations is relatively low, and not nearly as complex as something as the DARPA Grand Challenge.
I’m not interested in doing that.
There’s an old axiom in manufacturing, “Quality, fast, cheap. Pick any two, but you can’t have all three.”
Its pretty much standard practice. You don’t have people using knobs to open doors in Trek. Every door automatically opens, even though in cases without power, this means its a bitch to get in or out of someplace. How often have we seen someone wearin jeans in Trek?
Agreed.
No, you haven’t.
Then they shouldn’t even be able to design and build the thing to begin with.
We’ve seen how little shuttle pilots do. They punch a couple of buttons, then sit there. That’s less than a commercial airline pilot does. They don’t even have control sticks to use.
Good question. It certainly can’t be because they lack computer processing power. There’s been threads here about the amount of processing power needed to disassemble a human, store them, then successfully reassemble them some distance away. It is an insanely huge number. IIRC, it is several orders of magnitude larger than the combined processing power of every computerized device we currently have on Earth, and it can do it all in about a minute.
For the same reason you have someone sit at navigation, because its a centralized location. It could (and was done in TNG) be done at any terminal.
Because when it comes to military tactics, the Federation apparently can’t fight its way out of a paper bag.
Wrong on all accounts. First of all, we’ve had sci-fi which lacked all those things that did quite well at the box office (Armageddon comes to mind). Next, finding plotholes, fuck ups, etc. is part and parcel of Trekdom. Eddie Murphy even made jokes about it (“The shit worked last week!”)
You realize that 2001 is little more than that, and the primary reason that more wasn’t done with the 2001 universe has everything to do with Clarke’s decisions and not that there wasn’t a market for it. (Hell, Cameron even ripped off 2001 with his The Abyss. The primary difference between the two being that one took place around Jupiter, while the other one took place underwater.)
As I’ve pointed out, you couldn’t even begin to design a starship without massive amounts of computing power and automation being available, let alone build or fly one.
Additionally, the loss of population caused by a nuclear war is going to spur the demand for automation, the same way the massive deaths caused by the Black Death in Europe led to things like the reapers which could do the work of more than one man.
Not in any prominent manner AFAICT – as you point out the 20th-century-style welder is the main theme of the “under construction” teaser… which is meant to communicate the concept of “under construction” to a general audience of our time.
Both Roddenberry’s and Gerrold’s books from the pre-TNG era admit that between a real exploration of how things would be in the 23d Century, and telling a story that will connect to people of our time, the latter wins.
You know what? I’ve just been reminded of something about original-Trek: it did not try to explain the entire background of the Universe. It was even part of the original “writers’ bible” to NOT go back to Earth to show how things had changed. The Enterprise had been built, and built well, and that was that, and never mind how, now just show what’s happening to the people aboard her and those close to them.
The whole “build a background universe” thing was heaps o’ fun back in the time while we wandered through the desert with only 3 seasons of syndication to feed upon. But the fierce obsession with self-consistent continuity really looks pointless when the actual owners of the franchise don’t care for that.
You spend a lot of time bogging down the conversation with irrelevant tangents, but I’ll endeavor to deal with them one by one:
Good for you!
What is this “fabber” you speak of? Describe it exactly. Is it nano machines? Laser resin hardening? Is it a full sized auto factory with computer controlled equipment? All will have a place in futuristic manufacturing.
But a stand-alone machine that makes anything isn’t as fast as a machine that has been optimized to make only one thing.
For instance, say there are nano machines that make whatever you want. If you can assemble an I beam in 1 second with the machine and in the next second assemble a bonsai tree and the second after that the complete works of Shakespeare carved on whale scapulae. It is by definition losing efficiency because it can assemble both metallic elements, dna and the complex detail necessary to etch tiny, tiny writing on whale shoulderbones.
If you build a nano fabricator that is optimized to only work on metal, doesn’t have a supply of the tiny nano machines that are used for biological rendering, that has feed bins and throughputs and customized offloading and shipping materials it will be faster than the general machine.
So please let off the inane idea that there is a one sized fits all machine that will be more efficient than a specialized one.
Also, are you trying to get at the idea that the construction site will be a giant fabrication machine? Seriously, state your thesis in detail.
What you aren’t getting is why is it more efficient to get the 9000 miles of fiber optic tubing on site as opposed to a place that specializes in it? A place that uses economies of scale to gather the raw materials and hyper specialized tools to make it faster, cheaper and better than the fabricator on site.
That’s one of those irrelevant comments bogging down the conversation I was talking about. 
No, it’s doublespeak. They don’t call the Greenpeace survey ships when the Kingons come a knockin’, they call Star Fleet. Which makes them the military. Tanks and aircraft aren’t the Nimitz or skyscrapers.
Sure, by using AI.
Awesome. Truly great. Amazing. Nothing to do with what we’re talking about here.
The assembling giant starship industry? Or are you still going on about assembly lines?
So you’re not an expert and you have no idea how complex it will be?
Good, because I’m not interested in seeing it.
I know it. I was in the print industry before I quit to work full time answering your wordy fucking posts.
I’m pretty sure the doors slide so that you can open them if there is a decompression. Doorknobs would be cool, sure.
What? :eek:
That’s better. I was getting worried for a minute. Remember I was fanwanking about how tritanium can only be welded by a gamma phased, thingamjigger, that happens to look similar to a stick welder.
In your opinion. Ignoring the nuclear war slowing technology for a bit.
None of the essential Star Trek technology is ever going to exist. Force fields, tractor beams, ftl and the like are fantasy. So you’re honestly arguing that they should have more technology, because otherwise they wouldn’t have invented the pretend technology? It’s freaking pretend technology! Where it fits along the continuum of Earth technological progress is up to the writer.
A shuttle computer is incapable of bouncing off the atmosphere, yet Piccard could instruct an unskilled pilot how to do it over radio. And they appear to operate controls for pretty much the whole trip.
Why is that another irrelevant piece of trivia disguised as a point?
Yes, but why have a communication terminal at all if their automation technology is so good?
So it’s your contention that the ship needs 400+ crew members because the Federation doesn’t understand tactics? Not because their automation technology is low?
This might be the sillienst thing you’ve said thusfar. You think a realistic sci-fi series would be the phenomenon that Star Trek has been? Star Trek is space fantasy. It relies on the silly fake technology of their mythology to tell it’s stories.
Yes and different movies satisfy different needs.
If you want hard sci-fi, great, I love hard sci-fi. If you think Star Trek is hard sci-fi you haven’t really thought about it very much.
Given the mythology of Star Trek the manual welders make perfect sense. As I’ve said before, I think that they probably will have largely automated structural engineering 200 years from now. I think humans will have a larger role in it than you think, but primarily for cultural reasons. Star Trek isn’t about that future, it’s about the one where you have magic ray guns and invisible force fields.
It seems only fitting as how this is pretty much a hijack of the thread subject.
I can’t help but notice your own list of qualifications seems to be missing.
Using what “rules?” Do I base it on the things we’ve seen in TOS? What we’ve seen in the trailer? A reasonable extrapolation of current technology?
The point is that a fabber is optimized to make everything. Is your fabber a 1 foot by 1 foot cube and you need a starship? Not a problem, your fabber can build a slightly larger unit, which will then build a slightly larger unit, etc, until you have one large enough to build the whole starship. You can then have that fabber turn out a fabber of equal size, and while the new fabber is building a starship, you can have the one which created it turning out more starship sized fabbers. One fabber is enough to change the world, all you need is a little bit of time. That’s the point of the fab@home project. They’re driving the cost down so that everyone can have them.
What you’re forgetting is that once you’re down to the molecular size, whether you’re shunting around a carbon atom or an iron atom doesn’t matter! You’re not going to be manipulating stuff at that scale with minaturized tweezers, you’re going to be using electro-magnetic fields! To switch from carbon to iron, to beryllium, to whatever, isn’t going to involve getting a new tool, its going to involve dialing in a different electro-magnetic field!
But lets say you’re going to stay above the nano-scale level of engineering, no big deal, really. We adapt and use tools designed for one job to another, all the time. We also have spent a great deal of money in designing machines which are universal in their application. Its a lot cheaper to buy one wrench which can handle a variety of jobs than it is to buy a selection of wrenches which can only do one specialized job. And even in those situations where an adjustable wrench isn’t the right one for the job, the socket wrench you use can do other jobs as well, simply by swapping out the socket. Gone are the days in the automotive industry where you had limited slip wrenches that were only good for tightening down the heads on an engine block. Now the guy that puts the axle on the car is using the same pneumatic airwrench the guy installing the heads is. The settings on them might be different, they might have a different socket on the end of them (though car makers like Honda tend to use a very limited number of sizes of fasteners, so it might well be the same), but they’re not different tools by any stretch of the imagination.
By your logic, everything has to purpose built to handle one task. Which would mean that every industry has to have its own dedicated equipment, and a forklift, or a clothing sorting machine, could only be used in one industry. Forklifts look pretty much the same no matter where you go, and clothing sorting machines have been used to sort books, and look (and function) identical to the luggage sorting machine used in the Denver airport. The foundry that makes steel for battleships can also make steel for cars.
What do you think the replicators in TNG are? They are “one size fits all” machines that can do everything but make a whole starship, and that’s only because of some stupid technobabble about “materials which can’t be replicated.” (And even the folks associated with Trek admit that’s lame.) I can, however, actually buy the argument that the kind of replicator with which Picard uses to make his tea couldn’t spit out a whole starship if scaled up to the necessary size because of energy requirements. However, that in no way negates using a full automated assembly system to build a starship. Converting matter to energy and back again no doubt takes a huge amount of power, while an automated facility doing things in the conventional manner wouldn’t.
Yes, the construction site will be a giant fabbing machine. We’re practically doing that with roads and buildings now.
Wrong. GM spent billions to develop the “lost foam” casting technique to be able to cast more of the engine in one piece. By your logic, GM shouldn’t have bothered with that, but continued to follow the same old processes they’ve used in the past. GM did it because they knew that it would lead to lighter engines, fewer parts and supplies to inventory, and they would be able to have characteristics in the block they wouldn’t be able to obtain in any other manner.
If by “irrelevant” you mean that it shows I’m right and you’re not, then I agree.
Doesn’t matter. The techniques of mass production are applicable to everything. We’ve even got factory farms now. If the US were to decide that we had to double the Navy in a very short period of time, you can damn well bet, they’d go for mass production methods to do it. We have, after all, done it before.
The “AI” on the Apollo capsule consisted of a computer which used wire for data storage and had less ability than a calculator you can now buy at the dollar store. I’ve machined parts for satellites and JDAMs on a mill that was running Windows 3.0. My sole purpose in being there was to load/unload the machine, and replace any broken tooling. A modern machine wouldn’t even need me around to do that.
You were the one who brought up the computing power of cars, not me.
Last time I checked, there wasn’t one.
I’m talking about current levels of technology. If we’re going to extrapolate that humans have the ability to build FTL ships, then I see no reason why we can’t use modern technology as a starting point for how that could work.
Actually, I do have a very good idea of how complex it will be, that’s why I’m saying humans will not be part of the assembly process. It’ll simply be too complicated for them to deal with. Ever see what the guys putting in the wiring harnesses of the Beoing 777 wear? Because of how large and complex the plane is, they’ve now got computers strapped to them (the test models were probably the inspiration for the Borg costumes as they look almost identical) so they can know what to do. Wanna say that a starship is less complex than a jetliner? I also note, again, your failure to submit any qualifications you might have on the matter.
Whoopie.
Doing what? Churning out copies at FedEx Kinko’s? Or did you actually run real presses?
Ever try to open a sliding door that’s suddenly lost power? And that doesn’t have any kind of knob or handle on it? I have (remember, my dad ran a door business). Its a bitch. An absolute bitch. Even the ones designed to enable you to do it “easily” are a pain in the ass. When you add trying to do this in a darkened environment, with smoke, alarm claxons going off, and possibly in a spacesuit as well, that’s a good definition of a “very bad day.”
And remember I was fankwanking about how your method became obsolete and had now been replaced by a new method and the problems that this would cause if you weren’t using a fabber.
Nope. Not ignoring it all. It is a simple fact. Just as modern jetfighters (and now some commercial jets) would have no hope of being able to fly, let alone being built without modern computers, there’s simply no way that you can build a starship without highly automated processes. None.
Actually, I disagree here. At present we do not believe that FTL is possible, however, 100 years ago, I seriously doubt that anyone would have believed that people could spend their evenings on opposite sides of the country (or the planet) arguing about ephemerial images on a screen. One of the arguments thrown out to “disprove” the possibility of transporters is that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states you can’t know enough about the position of particles within an atom to accurately duplicate it. We may find, however, that it doesn’t matter if you get the electrons of an object in exactly the same orbit or not, the item is indistinguishable from the original. (Might not ever be workable for living things, but dead and/or items like inanimate objects, it could work quite well.)
Yeah, nitpicking things, and trying to figure out the logic behind them is one of my hobbies.
Which puts it behind our technology by a considerable amount, since the space shuttle can land itself (and the Soviet-era Buran didn’t need a crew at all to go up and back).
Maybe because you’re not paying attention?
I dunno, maybe so the human has something to do in a place where they won’t screw up things?
Truthfully, its kind of hard to say, since we don’t even know what all those people do. Nor do we even know how many people are on this version of the Enterprise. There were 200+ in the original pilot of the TV series, then when it went into production, it jumped to 400+, and in TNG it skyrocketed to 2000. Maybe most of them are there simply to give the important ones company and to keep them from getting space madness on those long voyages?
Done properly, yes. The problem is, of course, that to do such a series would require the writers to actually think and not go for the “easy out.” Pop culture is getting more sophisicated and not less. The issues dealt with in The Dark Knight are way beyond the stuff of the 60s TV series, and its made huge amounts of cash. Sooner or later, someone will put out a highly entertaining and reasonably accurate sci-fi entertainment and make bucketloads of money off of it.
Yet the key elements of the best Trek stories do not revolve around the technology, but the humans surrounded by it.
Movies are never “needs.”
You’re complaining about the length of my posts and you think that I haven’t thought about Star Trek very much? 
Weren’t you just arguing that I think about it “too much.” And putting TOS in the context of when it debuted, it was pretty hard sci-fi when compared to the likes of Tom Corbett: Space Cadet
As Mr. Spock is so fond of saying, I like to believe that “all things are possible.”
I really REALLY want to be a part of this conversation, but the two of you should really get a room…and when come back bring pie.
I also suspect that when the time comes to build a starship, it’s gonna be GROWN from Nanofabric.
I’m completely in Tuckerfan’s court, I machine metal as a hobby and seeing what machines can do with some code is nothing short of stunning. There are no software related issues in fabricating a spaceship sized thing.
(turn the sound down if you don’t like techno) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU32Q6QXtWQ
The problem that we have today with fabrication is: your custom fabricator doesn’t build stuff that’s structural. You lay epoxy down in a media, or you use a laser to ‘cook’ the material in a tub with the support plate sinking for each level, or you use a photo-sensitive powder (or, heck, chocolate) to lay down the part in layers.
All of this can create a one off cheaply, it can THEN be used to cast a metal part, but casting isn’t relatively that strong, surely not strong enough to hold a warp nacelle to the engineering section while sitting at the bottom of the gravity well (I think that’s the movie’s biggest handwaving flaw)
You have to have a HUGE power source to lift it, and HUGE power source to power the ‘Structural Integrity Fields’. And you need the technology to do so. Vs. a cheap way to get the individual pieces to orbit (or, heck, manufacture it there.) and built it there.
Now, lets say you have stellar advancements in nano-composites…that’s where large structural parts are going now. I saw video of a whole bizjet center section being made on a robotic stand, with the robot unspooling the carbon fiber around it, kinda like paper mache-ing a balloon, or a spider wrapping it’s catch in silk. The problem there is finding a big enough oven to bake it in. But it’s BIG, it’s STRONG, it’s LIGHT, and it’s STRUCTURAL.
Now, take the same thing, but double it’s strength (nanotubes and buckyballs), give it temperature independent hardening, and BUILD IT IN SPACE, and I think you could build something that size. But it wouldn’t be out of BIG PLATES OF TRANSPARENT ALUMINUM.
The whole premise is created by folks that don’t know manufacturing processes, why is that so hard to fathom? You two are picking nits about something that wouldn’t happen, if it happens at all.
Is there a physical limit to the number of quotes possible in a post?
If there is, we’ll soon find it in this thread.
Anyone for a pool? I’m betting it’s binary, say 256 or 1024.
To heck with quotes, how much text can you fit in one post? This thread has turned into a wall o’ words.
frankly, it would be less painful to rewatch Nemesis than try to read through
If anyone would like to move this side topic to another thread:
Is autofabrication on the verge of changing the world?
In my defense, I’m just saying two things:
-
Auto fabrication of the kind he’s mentioning doesn’t make sense in the Star Trek Universe given their lack of AI or automation.
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That optimized fabricators will be faster and more efficient than general ones.
The rest of it is point by point nitpicking. So I hereby let it rest in this thread.
Is there any reason to assume that (in the 24th century), fully automated fabrication is cheap and easy?
Thing is, presently, labor is cheaper than fully automated processes. (Slower, but cheaper.) Not all components of the hull are going to need very fine tolerances.
Couldn’t some work still be done by a human union member, and the components that need it be done by computer controlled assembly?
Plenty of work done by hand is still used on Aircraft carriers and nuclear wessels… err… submarines. Some critical components are done by hand, and then inspected by xray, or some other sensor. Other things are done by presion machines. A nuclear submarine operating at or near max depth is going to be subjected to some pretty demanding environmental requirements, too.
Hmm. Finally watched the second trailer.
I was wondering if a Star Trek reboot is possible. We have 40 years of past Star Trek stuff to deal with (movies, books, TV shows).
If something “changes the past”, and we are told that everything we thought we knew about the Star Trek universe is gone (and will have to happen again, in a slightly new time line), would the regular movie going fans accept it?
As an example, in strategy games, the “what if” scenarios are always the most popular.
“What if YOU were in command of the Bismark? What if the Bismark came up against the USS North Carolina (who would win)? Can you Change History?!?”
“What if Nagumo launched a third wave against Pearl Harbor? What if Halsey had been succesful in locating the Kido Butai? Can YOU change History?!?”
History is the same up to a point in time, and then something new is injected (or happens differently), and history is shaped anew…
Ack! Sorry for post #198. I did not realise that there was another ST thread…
Well, yes, but taking a precision machine on the first dive with you doesn’t offer quite the encouragement that it does to a live Welder for a Job Well Done.