Watching ST:TNG in order, I was struck by some of the improvements from the original series (besides not looking like it was done in the '50s.) If they jumped 90 years further into the future, what other cool stuff would they invent?
My initial list
Implanted communicators, possible if they shrink as much as they did in the last 80.
Point to point transporters, without needing the chamber. I think they can do this, but it would become standard.
A holodeck that works.
More automation. It would make a little bit more sense having bridge officers hop off on away teams if the ship could essentially look after itself.
The Ultimate Computer put the dampers on that, in the same way that Space Seed (or rather events that preceeded it) did for genetic engineering.
Really we should have seen the ultimate humans, genetically and mechanically enhanced, pooling their minds and striving to find the best that any culture can offer and melding it into their own. Why didn’t anyone write about that kind of thing?
I think it’s difficult to say, because one of the standard things they did was to introduce some new technology, realize it was bad or harmful, and then never use it again. Sometimes they (the writers) realized that it would break the bible for the series, which had one of the main ideas being “they have cool toys, what happens when we take them away?” i.e., how many plots revolved around “oh noes, the transporter is broken” or “yikes, these things are immune to phasers?”
Examples of things they used once or twice and then ditched:
Godlike telekinesis using a drug that Dr. McCoy just happened to have in his bag
Immortality for Picard, Ensign Ro, Keiko Obrien and… whoever the fourth one was. Guinan?
Also immortality done a different way for Dr. Pulaski.
Cloaking technology (kind of a gray area, really)
Transwarp drive
IIRC, Transwarp turns you into a lizard, then lizard-Janeway has her way with you :eek:
But Kirk and co. got their hands on telekinesis drugs in “Plato’s Stepchildren”, then in “Wink of an Eye” they had a substance that would let them move faster than the speed of light. In the latter Spock even uses the stuff to repair the ship at superfast speed. So why not make it general issue for starships? Or even emergency issue?
With regards the ultra-humans above, my idea of what Star Trek should be was pretty much what I was pleasantly surprised to find in Ian M Banks Culture novels. No technobabble or technowankery, just technology that is advanced and works. Plot advances don’t depend on the technology being there, it just makes things much more interesting.
It might be interesting if the Federation had to confront it’s bias against augmentation when enough blurring of the lines between biological and cybernetic life.took place. Say, androids descended from Data who now can build their own successors indefinitely, plus a colony of freed Borg assimilatees, plus entire worlds of virtual entities living inside holomatrixes.
They aught to have phasers that aren’t hand-held guns at all, that instead automatically track the users’ vision and are thought-activated. Maybe built into a visor that shoots like Cyclops’ eye beams.
Has [del]CGI[/del] personal force fields become cheap and reliable enough to replace material environment suits?
A shout-out to Captain Proton: the personal warp-capable flight suit.
So, it’s not all bad.
Consider that it takes a couple days at least for symptoms to develop, and they knew how to fix it. They could have proceeded with their research, juiced the ship up to transwarp speed, gotten HOME, and then have everybody report to sick bay or engineering or wherever they had to go to get their DNA rebooted.
Oh man, imagine the havoc that would ensure after two people get into a shouting match.
“YOU MURDERED HIM!”
“IT WAS A THOUGHT?!”
“NO, YOU SHO–”
zap
“Oh damnit, not again!”
They had those in the cartoon series.
And the otherwise-horrible Spaghetti Western episode they did on the holodeck – Worf fashioned a one-shot personal shield out of a communicator. So with a battery the size of a camelback canteen they should be able to go for quite a while.
Of course, this being Star Trek, the idea was never seen nor heard of again.
One of the better ideas the cartoon series had. I’m sure they did it to make the animation easier, but still.
Here is one that they’d definitely do, but would never get into a series. An away team, or just about anyone, would get beamed in place and have the pattern backed up, using the much cheaper storage they’d no doubt have. Away teams would thus resemble video games - screw up, die, and then try again.
Tried in various forms, witness the creation of Thomas Riker in TNG and the holoshed episode of DS9 where the patterns of the crew are held in the holodeck memory. Some sort of b/s about the memory needed being too much for permanent storage means they only save the people going down or coming up, until they’ve been rematerialised.
Why they can do this for every dish of food known to man, woman and every other gender that exists in the 24th century, but not for the poor old yellow shirts, is one of those little writers’ mysteries.
Did you mean to say “Cylons” there?
They were avoiding saying it was because people have souls, because that would raise interesting questions about Data/Lore.
But then they dubbed Riker, of course.
No.
How about flashlights? It always cracked me up that their flashlights were the size of half an orange that…you held in your hand! My camping headlamp works better than that.
Also, some education in Starfleet that since the phaser fires a continuous beam, you should be able to hold the trigger down and sweep back and forth, killing everyone in its path.
I think it had more to do with the fact that such a device would kill off all dramatic tension in the series. Even Data ultimately “died,” which made even less sense.
If they ever solved that problem, there’d be no reason why you couldn’t just have holodeck-based crews exploring the universe. Hell, you could replicate anyone you needed from history for an away mission. “Swift, Twain and Mencken, please report to the bridge!”*
When TNG first came out, I was ever so slightly disappointed at how little things had changed in the Star Trek universe in 90-whatever years. Technology really hadn’t significantly changed anything in the interim, other than the comm badges. I realize that they couldn’t shake things up too much or it wouldn’t be recognizably Star Trek. Still, what had Federation scientists been doing for the last several decades? I figure the distribution of holodeck technology must have slowed all other progress to a crawl.
*The ship has encountered a species which communicates only in political satire.
It’s absurd that they should need anything other than light amplification goggles and maybe an LED’s worth of light. Seriously, if someday goggles are as dirt cheap as lights are now, it may be tactical doctrine to NEVER give away your position with a light.
Aside from the hefty power drain plus the risk of overheating, I’d guess they tried that originally and after some “oops” incidents made it doctrine to never fire a phaser except as an aimed shot. See “why non-Jedi should not use lightsabers”.
That’s fine for TNG, but for TNNG Moore’s Law means storage won’t be an issue. Like you said, there was already proof of concept.
They did manage to get technology which doesn’t break every five minutes. They also figured out orbits for starships which don’t involve fatal reentry if the power goes out for an hour or so.
But even more than the technology, if the Federations trend towards self-righteous smugness continues for another 80 years, starship captains will become too obnoxious to watch. “Civilizations who have reached our level of moral development always pick up litter.”