I’m always bugged more by individual moments than bigger things. So while T’Pol might be wearing an old fun center carpet as a uniform, and the temporal Cold War is both overly complex and excruciatingly boring neither of those things bothers me more than the following.
In season one, there is an episode titled ‘Unexpected’. In this episode Tripp becomes space pregnant from an alien space mama. During his pregnancy he is framed as becoming irrationally overconcerned about the safety of very minor or unlikely hazards.
At one point, he is in engineering and complains that if you hold onto the handrail of the elevator while it moves, your fingers will be sliced off against the scaffolding since there is no gap.
A crew member brushes him off by just saying, essentially, “Lol skill issue, just don’t hold the handguard.”
Again, Tripp is the one being framed as irrational in this discussion. Because he has a problem with a handguard that slices your fingers off.
Space hormones or not, he’s right that it’s a terrible design.
I had to reset my expectations after they dropped off that space slug on another planet cause it wasn’t doing well. Like what’s your mission to explore the gallery and spread invasive species??
I mean… he didn’t even get on about the lack of seat belts.
Federation space ships are in fact horribly designed. - thruster placement is off balance with CoG requiring constant control inputs to go in a straight line.
- seatbelts.
- surge protection.
- replicator technology exists, yet they don’t design ships capable of being repaired with self created parts. (Even if they have to build the replicator large enough first….)
- replicators take energy and convert it to matter- or matter into energy. Yet they don’t design ships to use this as fuel.
- they send ships that are expected to go into battle- and carry children and civilians on board-but this ships are also able to go toe to toe with their equivalents from hostile races 1v2-3. But then insist they’re not warships.
- insist on not having a unit of exchange or currency, but then some how having massive amounts of trade and economy.
- their ships waste a shit load of internal volume with the saucer, the neck and the nacelles.
Hello fellow space alien posting on Terran communications boards.
All of your points are correct with the following exception:
• Matter replicators expend energy to convert it into matter, or do the opposite. It is a lossy process, meaning you do not get 100% as a return. The best S+ or A-5 engineered units are 88-98% efficient.
• Theoretically, fuel in space is “infinite” as stars and hydrogen are literally everywhere, so going to planets to gather resources to disassemble in replicators is both a literal waste of time and energy. Dilithium crystals in the show are a hilarious example of contrived scarcity for plot.
- They have carpets on the TV show. Carpets. On a space ship. That is guaranteed not a warship, because carpets.
I’ve taken the mass hit and installed gray carpets in key locations of our own ships and instigated a no shoes policy and I’ll tell you what, it’s never been more comfortable :)
You should definitely try installing carpets
- Naz
Fuel considerations in Voyager are very canonically not common. But then that probably has more to do with using antimatter as fuel, instead of your nearest asteroid or gas pocket.
While you are correct that it is not perfectly effecient… the ability to stop off at a random star and expect to find some form of matter that can be turned into fuel simply by transporting it aboard and processing it into a singularity or something… would be extremely useful for an “exploration” ship
- insist on not having a unit of exchange or currency, but then some how having massive amounts of trade and economy.
As you mentioned before, they have replicators, so why would they have currency inside the Federation?
They don’t need money in the Federation, but since they have limited resources on a spaceship and also interact with other species, they kinda have to barter, mostly to curry favor with these species.
They have trade. Inside and outside.
Currency facilitates trade. Next question: why do they need trade? (Besides cultural exports- let’s…. Not get into that.)
(Besides cultural exports- let’s…. Not get into that.)
The British Museumthe Doctor wants to know you location.I mean, why do you think Picard was a student of archeology? You thought it was just being ‘well rounded’… nuhuh.
the only thing of value are the intangibles- culture, art, etc. even that can be quickly and near-perfectly reproduced. the reality is the only things worth trading are either illegal (see Mudd), new technology (also see Mudd) or cultural.
their ships waste a shit load of internal volume with the saucer, the neck and the nacelles.
It’s called style.
it’s almost like they got this guy instead of proper engineers:
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Handrails slicing off fingers is why the Star Wars universe doesn’t have railings at all.
Remember, there’s crewmen stationed in the fucking Death Star main laser tunnel, right next to the firing beam.
How else would they make sure the laser is, indeed, firing?
Laser Verification Technician / Body Disposal Unit
And he makes the best s’mores.
Plus all the old and decrepit people fall to their deaths, thus removing dead weight and allowing space communism to function. It’s a win-win!
The gap was pretty big. No way fingers were getting sliced off. Trip was being overly dramatic.
Still not a great design, but Trip being the chief engineer, he could have ordered it changed AT ANY TIME, but never did. He just complained like an annoying pregnant woman, which was the intention of the scene.
That bothered me too. Any rational group of engineers with space laser tools would have fixed that immediately.
The Enterprise crew is a bunch or warlike cowboys hopping at random and breaking things everywhere.
The series actually acknowledges that. Several times.
What I really like is the soothing and cheerful opening theme, that tends to play just after some 2% of Earth is destroyed, or somebody decides to kill half of the galaxy.
The opening theme is garbage. I say that as someone who actually enjoys the most cheasy opening themes from the worst TV shows of all time, because horrible TV shows opening themes are a very unique style of jingle composition.
The opening theme for Enterprise is not an opening theme at all. It’s just some random song that maybe someone on set liked at the time.
Honestly I liked the opening to enterprise, tho I think mainly because of the visual sequence that plays with it.
I’ve seen similar problems on actual escalators. It might not slice your fingers off, but if your arm was stretched out it would snap your arm off at least. But then again I have a phobia of elevators and escalators so it is particularly apparently to me. I blame that Resident Evil movie when the person got their head cut off trying to exit a stalled elevator.
The scariest thing is when escalators malfunction.
At least with an elevator you’ll either drop to your death or the brakes kick in making you just stuck for a few hours.
But an escalator, that’s a cheese grater powered by a motor strong enough to lift dozens of people up a flight of stairs.
Why do we even bother with them?
They’re just elevators with extra steps.
They’re have more throughput. If you’re somewhere high enough traffic they’re pretty clearly the only way to serve it.
If I had to take a guess, its because elevators have to start and stop a lot - whereas escalators operate contiguously. So in an often (well maybe not so much now) crowded place like a mall, you could be waiting a bit if you needed to change floors.
Contiguously and continuously.
Because people don’t want the exertion of actual stairs.
Guys, it is a pun. 😅
I thought you were going to segue into the Mitch Hedberg “the escalator is now stairs, sorry for the convenience” joke.
Eugh, I still get nervous walking in/out of elevators because of that movie.
I’m bugged by decontamination gel.
Why is it so randomly used? Why doesn’t Shran have to use it ever? Did Phlox have to rub it on all of his animals? What’s in it?
To show the audience Jolene Blalock’s oiled up tummy and thighs, it’s that simple
And side boob.
Ah, the side boob hour.
Do I remember them decontaminating the dog at one point? I haven’t seen the show since its original run.
But yeah the decontamination chamber was pretty much someone at Paramount saying “Guys I’ve got this great plot device we can use to peel our cast of pretty people down to their undies sometimes, and even rub lotion on each other!”
I wonder what he got paid for that idea?
What always bugged me in Voyager was that the Doctor didnt get any story lines really exploring what he is. After he got his mobile emitter from the future, he basically was a near immortal AI made of light. He could still be around doing snarky remarks during the heat death of the universe. What a waste of story potential.
There was an episode where a copy of him was brought online in a museum centuries after Voyager had visited the planet featured in the episode
That was a great episode.
Robert Picardo directed a lot of those episodes, so I’m sure he could have written in that recognition…but preferred the tension of having talent and ability mixed with a personality that made him unbearable. His character recognized this at times but never really grew. One of the better jokes was that all the other EMRs of him were so toxic that they were decommissioned as doctors and put to work piloting garbage transports.
He was so bad, Andy Dick was an upgrade.
he deserved the same respect data got in tng.
This put me on Reed Alert.
Gentlemen, to your phase pistols.
Someone probably noticed it after the set was already built, complained, and it was a thing on set.
The one that irrationally bugged me was when Tripp told the captain that he lowered the chair by 1cm, and the chair was still too high for everyone who sat there… I know it’s not supposed to be noticable but I could tell somehow that it wasn’t lowered at all
Call UFP OSHA!
Ya that was an odd moment, sfdebris called it out too. I think I was just too annoyed by the silliness of the premise to really realize it one way or another.
Either way, I find the meta bigger picture just as interesting. Actors act, directors direct, to indeed portray something as X. In this case Tripp was painted as the weird one, but honestly, we as viewers should be able to make our own judgement on the situation without having to go against the story or against the suspension of disbelief.
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