Angus McKee sends this up brilliantly in So Beautiful and So Dangerous:
Earthman Willie: “I can’t get over how all these aliens speak English!”
Rigelian Barpo: “I know. Two hundred years ago, we all spoke French.”
It’s much worse than that. Tech combined with AI would make future battles pretty much incomprehensible to us 20th-21st century folk. Smart anti-grav projectiles that can zip around corners and obstacles in an instant then go boom, forcefield armor (The Borg have that, why not the Feds? The Animated series had life support forcefields, defense ones would just be up-powered versions of same), massive area effect weapons, holographic camouflage up to and including invisibility cloaks (scaled down from ship size)–the list goes on with a lot of stuff that we primitives could never even conceive of.
Yet personal combat 2-3 centuries hence often boils down to Wild West style shootouts with pathetic beam weapons with zero enhancements? Yeah, right. [Kirk had that photon mortar of course, never seen again, nor was his phaser rifle-my guess is that the latter prop got lost or destroyed since they reused pretty much everything else] If they simply kept the beam on and walked it to the target that would be an massive improvement.
The reason of course is to not lose the audience, make battles comprehensible to us hidebound viewers. But it just looks silly in retrospect.
If everyone who said “If only I’d held onto those old comics, I’d be rich today,” had in fact held onto those old comics, they wouldn’t be rich today. Old comics are valuable largely because they’re rare. Their current astronomical value depends on most of them having been thrown away.
I’ll bet they still can’t hit a guy hiding behind a couch.
Glad I could do my part for the collectors. I should thank mum.
That reminds me of a time travel story where the protagonist traveled back in time and bought rare art and collectibles from the past to the future to in order to make money.
Except people got suspicious they were fakes because the items were in too good condition and looked brand new.
And that reminds me of the Spider Robinson tale where the time traveler wanted everybody’s pennies. He was going to bury them, then dig them up in the future with impeccable provenance.
It took me quite a while to read that story when it first came out, because I kept hurling the magazine across the room.
Easy way to check: analyze their content of radioisotopes. Anything created after 1945 is a dead giveaway.
After having read them beforehand and then telling the recipient what was in the message.
The Chief Engineering Officer (CHENG) on an aircraft carrier is typically a Commander (O-5) or newly promoted Captain (O-6). Of course, even if the CHENG is the same rank as the Commanding Officer (CO) of the ship (who is also typically an O-6), the CHENG of course reports to the CO because of their relative billets in the chain of command.
For comparison, the CHENG on a smaller vessel would typically be a Lieutenant Commander (O-4).
The bottom line is that of all the implausible things in Star Trek, Scotty being promoted to Captain (O-6) on Starfleet’s flagship vessel is not one of them, IMHO.
One of the funniest scenes in Big Bang Theory came when Sheldon and Leonard were negotiating their roommate agreement: “If either of us invents a time machine, we will come back to this place and moment.”
Pause as they both look around the room to see if it’s happened.
As an aside, I remember the first comic I bought after the price rose from 10 to 12 cents. It was a Felix the Cat, and it must have been the autumn of 1961. (It was cold and wet outside.)
It’s not that Scotty is promoted to the rank of Captain but that he is specifically referred to as “Captain of Engineering”. There is only one “Captain” by title on a ship (which is somewhat confusing when there are Marine captains or O-3 personnel from other branches serving TDY on board a Naval ship). Regardless of rank, Scotty should properly be referred to as “Chief Engineer” or “Chief Engineering Officer” by title. I think Uhura is still a Lieutenant, and poor Chekov gets demoted back to being helmsman after serving as an exec on Reliant (although since he got his brain eaten by a mind slug, I guess he should just be happy about retaining his commission). At least Sulu finally gets his own command, so that’s something, I guess.
Stranger
Agreed, that doesn’t make much sense.
There was a rumor/urban legend that I heard somewhere that USMC O-3 personnel on board Navy vessels would be addressed as “Major” (thereby giving them an unofficial promotion), all to avoid calling them “Captain”. I never ran across this in real life, though.
I do know for a fact that when I got my first dependent ID card at age 10, the issuing office (which was on a U.S. Navy base), took pains to list my Army stepfather’s rank as “O-3 [Firstname] [Lastname]” instead of using the abbreviation for “Captain.” All to avoid confusion, I’m sure.
Yeah, I’ve heard that, too, and Heinlein specifically explained it in Starship Troopers, but I’ve never been on a Naval vessel underway where that ever came up in my presence. It is not a formal rule in US Naval parlance, nor is it mentioned in the Bluejacket’s Manual (which does note that the commanding officer of a vessel is referred to as “Captain” regardless of rank) so if it was a tradition it has probably fallen into disuse.
Stranger
There was at least one other solid call-out to this trope when the team recruited Bill Burr’s character to be the designated marksman for their heist.
Sheldon: Well, that’s disappointing.
not if you use one of those modern “mass-less” ™ black holes
“How does a massless black hole generate gravity?”
“Very well, thank you!”
New, low mass black holes! Half the weight, and one third less infinity!
I’m piloting the starship tonight, I’d better not try to handle a whole infinity.
Alan Dean Foster wrote a humorous book once, Glory Lane. In it, the “Battle Bridge” was actually a nice little lounge with bar service and snacks, since the crew were essentially irrelevant in a battle in which combat was decided in milliseconds as ships maneuvered to kill each other. Every few minutes the captain would get a report on which ships just got blown up. The idea was, they might as well be relaxed, since they might all end up dead in an instant, due to events entirely out of their control.