I know people who don’t like Star Trek because they can’t suspend disbelief in warp drives, transporters, replicators
and time travel and often the solution of the week involves a bunch of nonsensical technobabble. I get that. What I don’t get is how making more torpedoes suddenly goes too far. Makes no sense! Ruined the show!
I always thought latinum was silly. In a world of replicators and apparently no need for money, they invent a magical substance that can’t be replicated and that somehow makes it valuable. Presto, money!
We saw lots of transactions using currency or barter of some sort. They used some type of “gel” in one DS9 episode.
Presumably, Latinum was a substance which could not be replicated using conventional techniques. Which makes sense both as to why it would be valuable as a currency and also because it establishes a limit on replicator ability. As an analogy, these days we can transmit most information online easily, but for some type and volume of data it’s still more economical to send it vide hard copy or through physical media.
The funny thing is Quark goes back to 1950s America and is interested in the gold that’s offered him, even though in other episodes he made it clear that gold is worthless.
It is roughly established that replication costs a lot of energy. Perhaps latinum simply cost much more to replicate, per quantity, than it was worth. Nor is this particularly special about latinum; after all, there are depicted worlds with replicator technology that still engage in mining, and agriculture, none of which would make much sense if replicators were really the unlimited-free-stuff machines that some viewers seem to think. Replicators are fast multipurpose precision factories, but the Trekverse still has a raw-materials economy, and a scarcity effect at some level.
They’re not all working elsewhere every week. When the script called for somebody who had been seen on the ship before, I expect they could have found one that was available.
The challenge you have in making “Star Trek” is that you have nearly six decades of Star Trek to try to remain consistent to. In the course of sixty years of TV shows, movies and the like, having to come up with story after story after story, the rules of the Star Trek universe have necessarily conflicted with themselves a thousand times.
The initial concept was full of obvious holes and technical limitations of what TV was capable of. Gene Roddenberry had a neat idea but it isn’t like he had the time, resources, or even a reason to spend years designing a totally consistent 23rd century universe. Just the existence of transporters requires a bazillion work-arounds about why they “Can’t lock on to his signal” to explain away why it isn’t possible to beam out of any dangerous situation. You need seemingly perfect universal translators to make a 44-minute show NOT be 35 minutes of someone translating Klingon. And once you have introduced replicators you’re inevitably going to have to come up with a hundred reasons why you can’t replicate X, or else the lack of a thing or substance can never, ever be a plot point if the characters are aboard the Enterprise.
EVERY fantasy world has the same problems. Why doesn’t someone just apparate inside Hogwart’s and kill Harry Potter? Because you can’t apparate into Hogwart’s, it’s got some force field or something - actually, it’s the same excuse as why the transporter in Star Trek won’t work all the time. But having given wizards the ability to apparate and disapparate, Rowling had to create that added rule in order to insulate Hogwarts from unstoppable intrusion.
So it is with “Gold-pressed latinum.” The problem facing the makers of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is that Roddenberry had sort of blithely decided his ideal future had no money and no material wants. That decisions cascades into stupidity, though; if there is no limit to resources the Star Trek universe makes no sense; any problem can be solved by simply creating more resources, and if there is no material want, how can you have a resource shortage. (It is additionally curious that the shows reinforce, on many occasions, the notion that poker is still a very popular card game in the future.* Poker can’t be played with much meaning or skill unless the player can win or lose something that matters.) So they had to come up with some medium of exchange, and in fairness, “latinum” is at least a bit more original than “credits.”
= Marina Sirtis herself has noted how ridiculous it was that her character, Deanna Troi, was allowed to play poker at all; as she pointed out, her character’s telepathic abilities should have given her an unbeatable advantage. But she was always portrayed as playing in the weekly game, that fact seemingly having eluded the writers.
She was an empath, not a telepath. She could’ve sensed that someone was feeling confident or uncertain, but not known exactly what they held in their hands (still a definite advantage, to be sure).
Because the premise of the show was being light years away from home. If you have infinite torpedoes, infinite shuttlecraft, infinite crewmembers, and a consistently immaculate starship, you might as well have just set the show in the Alpha Quadrant.
And the torpedoes are supposed each contain a miniature warp core, with a 1:1 ratio of matter to antimatter. I think it would be plausible to say that a torpedo wouldn’t be that easy for a stranded starship to make.
And in the meantime, take the time to figure out what commodity was common in 1950s America but rare in his own time, or which had at least held its value, and eventually convert his gold to that before he got rescued.
Poetic license.
Too many story plots involved crashing a shuttle craft.
Looting enemy ships and having various shuttlecraft that had been hot wired by Paris would have been good.
Just watched the Voyager two parter “Equinox.” Sigh.
Janeway spends most of the episode moralizing about how the crew of the Equinox are a bunch of criminals. It gets to the point where she goes Captain Ahab and very nearly murders a man. And the whole time I wanted to scream, “Come on, lady, literally half your crew are pirates and terrorists!” And then at the end she berates the surviving crewmen and strips them of their rank. And I’m like, “WTF? Last time you met a space criminal you made him your First Officer!”
This show is so weird. I know it aired like 17 years ago, but I’m glad I have somewhere I can bitch about it.
Well real estate would be a lot more scarce in the 2370s than it was in the 1950s (Atlantis project aside it can’t simply be replicated), but he even if he could get a formal title he’d have to set a trust to manage it for over 400 years without his being able to monitor it, survive numerous legal regime changes, World War III & the Post-Atomic Horror, and Earth’s transition to a post-scarcity economy not based on money.
