Well, there was that one episode early in TOS where the transporter split Kirk into two people on the way up, and they could not beam the landing party up because of the malfunction, and they were down there darn near freezing to death (I guess the shuttlecraft were all on the hoists getting their underparts worked on, or something).
I cannot remember Picard getting his shirt off nearly as often as Kirk. Maybe the newer uniforms were harder to rip. If Kirk could have just turned his shirt off whenever he felt like it, well, maybe that would not have been such a good thing.
But damn, those ridiculous spacesuits they used. That is really where the attire generator would come in handy. Complete protection from the elements with no mobility or aesthetics compromises. Imagine crew members getting a chance to sunbathe on any random moon.
They’d need to rebuild the shuttle for each episode, or have a standing set for it, which would have to have the background changed. Anyhow the main advantage of the transporter is not the cost, but that it moves the story forward.
Sure they should have seen the problem, but I guess Roddenberry hadn’t read “Rogue Moon” when he came up with the idea.
I rewatched the early episodes, and they didn’t even have the Federation at the beginning. I never noticed when I watched it when it first aired. I was too happy that they understood about the speed of light.
The original design was streamlined, and too expensive to build. So they came up with a boxy design they could build out of plywood. Even so, they got a model company to pay for building it in return for rights to market the model kit.
In 1966 Star Trek was the hardest sf I had ever seen on TV. There was even a complimentary article in Analog about it. Sure it is flimsy by today’s standards.
I watched a bunch of Flash Gordons filmed in West Berlin in the early 1950s. They had no idea of what a galaxy was or how far away other stars were. Arthur C. Clarke used to complain about the ignorance of science shown by sf shows - I didn’t get what he was talking about until I watched that series.
Remember, the competition was Lost in Space, which was stupid even in its first season.
You do get that means they were only 20 years behind the bleeding edge of the actual science on galaxies, right? Hubble only published in 1929, and who knows how long it took to trickle down to public knowledge.
I have lots of sf magazines from the '40s, and it sure tricked down into them.
Another example from this show. They jet off to other stars all the time, in a matter of days or weeks, depending on the plot. Then, in one show the plot was all about exceeding the speed of light for the first time.
I rest my case.
SF writers were involved in some shows, but I’ve never seen them so I don’t know if the level of stupidity was that high. Rocky Jones, an old favorite of mine even before it got on MST3K stayed in the solar system at least.
Nonetheless, Star Trek was riddled with goofy mistakes. Like the famous episode where they amplified all the sounds in the ship by a factor of one to the fourth power. Numerous instances of crappy orbits decaying far faster than a competent crew would have allowed for them to be established in the first place. An astounding deficit of spare parts onboard. And then there was the SNG episode where Riker ordered a stationary orbit over the southern pole of this here moon.
The science in the Stars Trek was utter crap when compared to the genuinely high standards of Futurama. Sometimes it seems like an exercise in figuring out everything that could possibly go wrong so that if we ever do build starships, we can avoid the obvious and subtle design flaws. Like clothing.
I was born about just the time this show aired, and I can assure you that we had things called encyclopedias back then. Do you think that departments of astronomy sent memos out to Hollywood - or Berlin in this case?
It’s not like they couldn’t get the information, just that they didn’t give a crap. That goes for Twilight Zone episodes where they land on an asteroid and get out and breath the air.
Relativity made it the general public by this time also. Not to them, though.
Yeah, I’m sorry, theTNG-era holotech has this annoying propensity to do what you don’t expect it to. I’m not trusting my nether parts to it.
Which they happen to do these days on the ISS - polos and cargo pants/shorts, alternating with whichever’s your organization’s flight jumpsuit, as here (ISS being a zero G enviroment footwear is more like slippers or hospital socks) .
The 1970s Animated Series did have personal-forcefield “suits” for when the crew were in a hostile environment, operated from a belt device. Meaning of course they did not want to spring for doing yet another whole set of key animations for suited-up characters, so they’d just overlay a belt and an aura of sorts.
More like desperately finding things that can go wrong in order to build drama. In TOS things broke all the damn time for plot reasons. I agree about the bad science - I was just saying it was better than the standard of the time, not that it was good for today or even for TNG.
I think part of it involves the number of people who have grown up with written or even reasonable visual sf today. They know a lot of this stuff. They understand open universes.
Just read the reviews of 2001 from mainstream reviewers, like Kael, who had no idea of what was going on. Very few reviewers today (or even starting with Ebert) would be so confused.
I’d be more willing to chalk it down to a lack of consistent writing and/or a desire to limit the whiz-bang space-agey stuff, combined with some lack of foresight on the writing staff’s part.
Even TODAY’S military uniforms are flame resistant and have IR camouflage properties built in. It’s not at all unrealistic to expect that given 300 years of development, that the everyday Starfleet uniforms would be far superior to what we have today.
