also, in an attempt to crystalize all the talk of the lack of media, i’ll say that entertainment in general has taken a weird turn for the worse in the 24th century. first off, the holodeck is kind of an “Enterprise” thing. normal people didn’t even have replicators, much less holodecks. i’m willing to say that it goes even beyond the analogy that aircraft carriers have slick movie theater setups for the crew. the holodeck has had to be explicitly explained to many dignitaries, even human ones, repeatedly. No admiral had to boast to GWBush that there was a theater aboard when he hopped off the flight deck.
beyond that, the holodeck itself was uninspired. if i had an imaginary playground to play around with, it most definitely would be used for porn. unabashedly. i mean, the initial entertainment aspects of the computer may have included Oregon Trail and Number Munchers, but the second the resolutions were crisp enough? porn. as for the holodeck, the second someone (barclay) actually USES it for porn, everyone has a fit? you mean to tell me you’ve packed on 10,000 nerds onto a closed off metal disk zooming through space and barclay is the only one who wants to use the magic box for self pleasure? and he’s a pariah for it?
and even holodeck aside, as chronos noted, the only other aspect of a video game damn near gets the entire crew taken hostage in a matter of hours? truly angry birds would have been the downfall of not only bored redshirts but the entire federation. and don’t tell me that the Klingons kids wouldn’t go berserk for a game like Halo. Romulans too probably. i’d like to see Data “deal” with a game like civ IV on Deity where “luck” counts just as much as strategy and see how he copes with stacks of barbarian longbowmen that come without reason.
instead? everybody plays chess and occasionally poker. they act out plays. read books. practice their instruments. they practice martial arts. then, all forms of recreation invented past 1900 just… vanishes. nobody plays ball-sports? madden on the holodeck would be TOO AWESOME. Picard realistically would be practicing his golf swing instead of attending data’s poetry reading. what about movies? i prefer movies to plays - especially the community-theater-level-work you get out of Crusher and Stuttering Stanley. Honestly, wouldn’t we all rather watch angelina jolie play an international spy/housewife instead of Karen from payroll?
They do however have enough range to reach into space, well beyond orbit IIRC. And the non-communication functions were all done by the tricorder.
Given the funky energy weapons and such they throw around, maybe those exploding consoles are what you get with surge suppressors and fuses and so on? The explanation implicitly used in David Weber’s Honor Harrington books for why they have consoles explode on occasion; the fuses explode too (I’ve always thought that was a “take that!” ) to people who complain about the exploding consoles in Trek).
In “Conscience of the King”, having to identify someone by voiceprint, instead of DNA testing.
In “Court Martial”, Kirk’s guilt seems established beyond any shadow of a doubt, until they finally prove something almost unimaginable- that the computer records could be false because someone hacked them.
There was one episode where they actually did use headlamps – it was the one where Geordi evolves into a gecco, if I recall.
Those handheld lights were a little goofy, imo. They looked kind of futursitic but they were always held in an akward position. Like you said, it’s definitely goofy if you’re in the dark on a dangerous world and you need a light.
Well the consoles don’t explode that hard. We’ve got material now you could throw in there to contain whatever makes it past the breakers.
Edit: They even have transparent aluminum they could use! I think it’s really meant as a form of population control. Keep the red shirts from over breeding.
In defense of the silly lamps, they had to hold them that way to hide the cable that ran down their arm to the power source. But it is indeed sad to see that Maglight doesn’t make it to the 23rd century.
Well, that’s the way of it. And in Babylon 5, swing and vaudeville were back in fashion.
They did on DS9.
Picard’s also a fencer.
Enterprise had movie night, if I recall.
I don’t know. Is she cute? Speaking of which, I think Barclay got in trouble because he was using Troi as a model for his fantasies. But otherwise, yeah, holodeck = porn. Quark knew the score.
This is not outdated technology, but is outdated science:
In the opening of one episode of TNG (I forget which one), Data enters Picard’s office while the captain is studying Fermat’s Last Theorem. Picard remarks about how this man in a pre-industrial time using nothing more than a slide-rule came up with an equation that not all of starfleet’s massive pool of brilliant minds & computers could ever solve.
Except that Fermat’s Last Theorem was solved in the real world in 1995.
Well, that and the hand phasers and the Klingon bat’leth are examples of a basic problem; when the basic design is already good, then it’s hard or impossible to come up with a futuristic design that isn’t obviously inferior. Pretty much any flashight-substitute they came up with would either have looked awkward, or just like a plain old flashlight*. Just as an alien sword substitute is either going to be impractical like the bat’leth, or look just like the swords we have. And just as most alternate-pistol designs are going to look awkward and hard to aim (although I think Space: 1999 came up with a workable design with its “staplegun” laser pistols).
*At least without spending more on special effects just for flashlight-substitutes, like a hovering drone or shoulder-mounted eye tracker version (like a flashlight version of the Predator shoulder-cannon).
And except that Fermat himself never actually solved it. He did find and publish solutions for the special cases of n=3 and n=4, and it’s probable that when he wrote his infamous margin note, he mistakenly thought that the method he used for those would generalize to arbitrary n. He surely later realized his mistake, but there’s no point releasing an erratum for a note scribbled in a book margin that you don’t ever expect anyone to read.
Quoth Der Trihs:
I like the way that Babylon 5 addressed this problem: The Minbari traditional weapon, the denn’bok, looks just like, and is used in the same way as, an Earthly quarterstaff. But their high tech enables them to make it in such a way that it collapses down to something that fits in a small pocket.
I’d give them a pass on fashion since fashions come and go. For all we know by the time the 23nd century comes around bald, naked and tattooed will be the prevailing fashion for the professional woman. But they could hardly show that on network TV.
I was just thinking about a similar thing the other day.
With the rise of the tablet PC’s over the last couple of years, we’re now pretty much around the Next Gen concept of having those little tablets with reports, and what not on them.
Only difference of course is on the show you sometimes saw a stack of the tablets on some starfleet officers desk, presumably to make them look ‘busy’. But from our actual experience with tablets, you would only expect one tablet to hold all the reports.
And Roddenberry did try to make up for putting almost every female Starfleet officer in TOS in miniskirts. Remember the skant (a mens’ miniskirt) from the 1st season of TNG? That didn’t last long and IIRC it only appeared on background extras, ever on any man with a speaking part.
Also, the data has to be physically stored somewhere – for obvious reasons, a lot of little somewheres is safer than one big somewhere if somebody’s shooting at you.
Their individual weapons tech is already starting to look rather obsolete. Yeah, they have phasers, but that’s all they have, and they are pretty wimpy weapons when it comes right down to it (and or they are misusing them-i.e. they never keep the beam on and move it around until it hits the enemy-it’s always on then off, one quick shot, which seems extremely inefficient). Some of the things we have on the drawing boards right now look to be more effective (like those shells which explode after a given distance, preferably over your enemies’ heads).
