The basic difference is whether or not it’s possible to have a meaningful two-way conversation with HQ while the ship is out on a mission. If all messages have to be physically carried, the answer is always “no”; with subspace radio as used in Trek, the answer is “yes, unless it’s inconvenient to the plot, in which case we handwave that the range is long enough to create a major time lag”.
That being the case, I don’t think drones are equivalent (in story terms, not just Treknobabble terms) to subspace radio. Having the former as the fastest means of communication is going to have significant effects on the universe, even if drones can fly a lot faster than starships.
But that’s what subspace radio is. It travels at warp 9.995. You’re introducing the opposite error, the idea that a physical object must travel slower than information. That holds for sublight travel and radio waves, but there’s no reason it would have to for FTL travel.
The problem is just that there was no consistency in what is or is not out of range. But that’s already going to be fixed by some of the other proposals.
I personally even think that using drones is a cool idea, because it removes one extra level of super-tech we have to accept. It also could be very dramatic when a beacon doesn’t come back.
But I don’t think it will fix the problem you are having with subspace radio. You’d need to go a bit further. Have the drones not move quite as fast as ships, but be less resource intensive. A fast ship requires a big reactor, and these drones just have stored up energy. All you are really wanting is slower communication, right?
And, even then, you’re probably going to have relay stations that will eventually be assumed to be between the ship and Starfleet command, except when it is explicitly stated otherwise. You’ll just have to explicitly state otherwise a lot so that doesn’t happen.
One other thing I’d change is terminology. Star Trek took the Space Navy/wet Navy parallels that had been around in science fiction and ran with them, but along the way they picked up some naval terms and misused them, and their influence has been so powerful that that misuse is now permanently ingrained in popular SF.
One is the use of “quadrant” to represent a Region of Space. as even the Star Trek folks pointed out (you can see in the reprinted memos in Stephen Whitfield’s the Making of Stark Trek), “quadrant” means “one fourth of something”, which seems kind of weird when discussing three-dimensional space, and still kinda weird if you’re discussing the projection in one plane (the galactic plane). Why should one fourth be significant? especially when any fourths you slice things into aren’t going to be very symmetrical. “Quadrant” eventually was used as synonymous with “Area” or “region”, regardless of whether it was 1/4 of anything.
The other was “warp”, which was a perfectly good naval term for the dockline of a ship, or for bringing a ship into dock.ST used it as a weird measure of FTL speed, and eventually they rationalized it into meaning powers of two times lightspeed. So we got “warp speed” and, eventually, with people expanding on it, “time warp”, which gave us a Rocky Horror dance.
I don’t mind adding new terms. I could even see “quadrant” evolving the way it’s been used. But “warp” doesn’t really make a lotta sense. And now we’re stuck with it.
One is the use of “quadrant” to represent a Region of Space. as even the Star Trek folks pointed out (you can see in the reprinted memos in Stephen Whitfield’s the Making of Stark Trek), “quadrant” means “one fourth of something”, which seems kind of weird when discussing three-dimensional space <snip>
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We still divide the Earths 3D globe into North, South, East, West. (Hemispheres)
The “prime meridian” of the galaxy runs along a straight line from roughly Sol to the center of the galaxy, and out the far side. (Humans think pretty highly of themselves in Star Trek. Who knows how the non-Fed folks “grid” the galaxy.)
Then they take a line perpendicular (90 degress) from that, and pass that through the center, too. (Think equator)
Instead of calling these pie slices N, S, E, W, They call them Alpha, Beta, Delta, Gamma. Sol system is on the edge of Alpha and Beta Quadrants. (Or, on the globe, on the Prime meridian at roughly 45 degrees south lattitude.)
The other was “warp”, which was a perfectly good naval term for the dockline of a ship, or for bringing a ship into dock.ST used it as a weird measure of FTL speed, and eventually they rationalized it into meaning powers of two times lightspeed. So we got “warp speed” and, eventually, with people expanding on it, “time warp”, which gave us a Rocky Horror dance.
I don’t mind adding new terms. I could even see “quadrant” evolving the way it’s been used. But “warp” doesn’t really make a lotta sense. And now we’re stuck with it.
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The engines “warp” (I thought of it as bending) space around the ship to cheat Einsteinian Physics.
I really think that they decided to use this after they decided to use the term “warp” itself, rather than vice-versa.
As for “quadrant”, it’s not obviously “natural”. I don’t know of any uses of it in science fiction (or anywhere else, for that matter) to describe chunks of space. We sure as heck don’t call the hemispheres the four “quadrants”. And, as I note, although “quadrant” implies one fourth of something, I’ve never seen a case where anyone in Star Trek uses the term to describe one fourth of anything, or to talk about other Quadrants in relation to the one they’re talking about. In short, I think it’s a term they liked the sound of, without any reference to its real meaning. The fact that there’s a nautical device called a quadrant has, I suspect, more bearing on the adoption of the term.
Likewise, time travel stories are right out. In particular, the crew will never visit Earth in the 20th Century (find some other damned way to save money on sets!). And we will strongly resist the temptation ever to have a 20th-Century Rip van Winkle revive in the present day – not because that premise is impossible or implausible but because it is, well . . . cheap (find some other damned way to illustrate the cultural changes of the past three centuries and don’t even bother trying to give the viewers a stand-in character!).
Something I’ve complained of in the past, and want to re-iterate is this: Leave Out the Character Who’s Learning What It’s Like to be Human.
Every entry in the Star Trek Franchise has had one. First it was the Human-Vulcan hybrid* Spock who had to learn about human emotions and how to deal with them. Then we had the android Data. Then Odo on Deep Space Nine, and The Doctor on Voyager. Enough!
*and no human-alien hybrids!!! As Larry Niven said of Superman, he’s as likely to mate with a human female as he is to mate with an Ear of Corn.
I imagine your right. They did do a lot of retconning, especially after the show became popular in sindication, and in the paperback novels that followed.
“Natural”?
If we finally establish a star spanning, err.. Empire… we humans will probably break it up into “chunks” for ease of conversation. (Example: Mr. Sulu, pull up the charts of the Outer Rim.) Whatever method we use, whatever terms we use, will be completely arbitrary. Nature sure won’t care. Quadrants is as good a word as Quatloos, as far as “nature” is concerned.
There will be many (and we might try to push the censors’ boundaries on costuming as often as possilbe), but all will be Homo sapiens. There will be noRubber Forehead Aliens. That doesn’t mean they all need to be Starfish Aliens. We could get plenty of in-between ideas from Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials – not suggesting copyright infringement, just that this SF TV show’s writers should look at the work of the field’s print writers, and the kinds of lifeforms they dreamed up when they did not expect to have to bring their creations off the page and into a rubber suit or something; and try to do what they did, and then we’ll work out the details with the props and costuming depts. Just the rule has to be: A being does not have to have a humanlike facial physiognomy (two eyes arranged horizontally above one mouth with vertically-hinged jaw, nose optional) to be a character. We’ll work with it. We’ll find some way for the audience to identify with that character without it having a face they can see as human or a facial expression they can read.
As for sexual relations between persons of any two sentient/sapient/sophont species, it will never be mentioned or thought of except in the context of jokes that depend upon the preposterous, impossible or unthinkable, as in, “I’d sooner stick my dick in an Altairean!”
It’s a serious misreading of TOS to think that Spock was trying to “learn about human emotions and how to deal with them.” Spock didn’t give a good goddamn about human emotions and felt no desire to emulate humans. Kirk didn’t give a good goddamn that Spock didn’t have normal human reactions. McCoy sometimes affected to care about the issue, but much of that was just their mock enmity. Every time Spock demonstrates humanlike passion, it’s viewed as an aberration due to forces beyond his control, forces which he needs to either endure, master, or escape from.
Hell, if Spock had seen his human side as something he wanted to explore, he’d have been fucking Chapel. And the Jill Ireland from the spores episode. (Okay, he did do her, but only under an outside influence, and stopped it as soon as he was himself again.) And a couple of other hot blondes. And possibly Uhura. (I thought long before the 2009 movie that she had a thing for him, but unlike Chapel had too much respect for him and concern for her own dignity to throw herself at him.
Data was noteworthy at the time he was introduced because he was superficially like Spock but in fact very unlike. Data did “want” to be more like humans. But, again, Spock would neither have shared that longing nor approved of it.
I don’t believe Odo ever expressed the desire to emulate humans. For one thing he would never have expressed it thus; he thought of Bajorans, Terrans, Vulcans, Trills, Ferengi, and so forth as all being in the same basic category (solids) to which he did not belong. Od was motivated by a desire to belong to something larger than himself. As the series began, he wanted to learn about his origins, because he thought he’d never truly belong to the solids; then, as matters progressed, he was torn between his affection for certain specific solids, his insistence on justice, and his instinctive desire to be with other Founders. Odo is very unlike Spock and even Data.
I think that was William Shatner’s motto throughout the entire series. He wanted the show to have more guts, obviously, and spared no efforts towards that goal.
I agree with this, and have advocated it on this very Board. But I suspect this will be an uphill battle. They wanted to clip Spock’s ears, after all, and de-green his coloring. Babylon 5 had a non-humanoid alien at first, but it disappeared pretty quickly, I believe. The actors will insist that they need their faces to emote and elicit sympathy. I agree that the effort should be made. The day we can have a cross-eyed mouthless noseless alien with moving facial palps accepted as a sympathetic character, we will have won. But it’ll be a struggle.
On the contrary, it’s precisely what his character, in terms of the series, was about. Every franchise, as i say, had its non-human character who was trying to deal with what it was to be human.
I think we are going to have to disagree about this.
agreed on all counts. It’s only the Dr., Seven, and Data that share the “learning about emotions” shtick. At least until Spock dies.. he’s a bit different from STIII onward.
There was also this one, in the first season at least, who looked like a giant praying mantis. Apparently a puppet – significantly we never saw him walking around, only sitting in his quarters. I guess they decided they just couldn’t develop him as a character – not human enough. Even Kosh looks like a tall, hunchbacked (face lower than shoulders, anyway) human in some kind of all-covering religious robes.
Hard-SF Trek will do it anyway – Mantis Alien, Starfish Alien, whatever. I don’t care what it takes. I don’t care what it costs. In this timeline, I first used my time machine to acquire just enough money to buy NBC. We will develop CGI or whatever else we need in 1966. We will explore strange new expenditures. We will seek out new cost overruns and new paths to bankruptcy. We will boldly spend like no media network has spent before!