I know this is how people in the 80s and 90 imagined the future and a lot of concepts were probably too far fetched for them.
BUT… why arent they using drones to explore planets? why are there not more drone-spaceships? why does enterprise need a crew to begin with? Why is there so little automation? Why so few uses of AI in general?
I am saying this as a star trek the next generation person. I’d also expect them to have full video and sensory streams of any surface mission teams.
No one’s going to watch a realistic exploration sci-fi show about small unmanned ships quietly going about their jobs with no drama.
You sure about that…
In a similar vein, I’ve been rewatching TNG and find myself thinking that they really should have put a cctv camera in engineering. Could have saved them a lot of trouble.
I can’t remember who said this in the show in Universe; maybe Janeway? But I think a similar question was posed, and the answer was that nobody would have anything to do if exploration was entirely automated. It’s fun and exciting and gives people’s lives meaning.
My headcanon is that many mundane things are automated, and we don’t see them because they aren’t plot-relevant.
They are mundane and automated until something goes wrong, then we get a holodeck episode.
Like pooping
I hate that this was the first thing I thought of. :)
Why invest in tech when there are so many red shirts around?
😂
I mean, the Borg are right there on the poster!
They live in a post-scarcity world with insane science fiction technology, but they keep the executive decisions in the hands of crew members.
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You probably hit it on the head about the limits of people’s imagination in the 80s/90s, but also I wonder if it had anything to do with Roddenberry and his opinions of what was / wasn’t going to show up in Star Trek? He famously forbid interpersonal conflict between federation people, making it annoying AF for the writers on TNG. Plus drone ships exploring everything might not make for captivating TV
You are right, it would remove all the stakes, but then I feel that is just bad/lazy writing, If you really went into such a future with your imagination, I am pretty sure it might even raise the stakes as there might be probes hiding/sleeping in places you do not expect or in general all of that while making exploring a planet more secure, it could then make for a great twist if all of the sudden a swarm of drones dropped out of hyperspace right on top of them.
I seem to remember at least one episode about a rogue drone missile (nuke?) of some type that they had to board / disarm, but yeah that aspect of things was really ignored. Same thing with space infrastructure / communication relays and all that, never hear about it unless its a hook for a specific episode…
I also don’t understand why they use elevators instead of just asking to be beamed to whatever part of the ship they need to go. At least the captain could probably be beamed around.
This drives my husband insane. He can’t figure out why anyone bothers to walk anywhere. Why do they still use bathrooms when you can just transport the pee from your bladder into the replicator recombinator or whatever?! I assume the transporters must use an amount of energy that makes it inefficient to use for every little thing.
transporters must use an amount of energy that makes it inefficient to use for every little thing. that makes a lot of sense
Transporter technology constantly evolves across all the series and eras.
So in the 32nd century, yes they do just use the transporters built in their com badges to zip around the internal volume of the ship, but there are protected areas. The Transporter room is more like a formal entry.
In TOS, internal site to site transport was dangerous, so only used in emergencies. You’ll note that they almost always transport to outdoor locations.
In TNG, less dangerous but not generally enabled. Used under emergency or ideal conditions only. There are a lot of situations on planets where portable pattern enhancers are used to improve functionality and safety - kind of a take it with you transporter pad set up.
The same reason all the top ranking officers go on all the away missions; so the show isn’t boring.
They also don’t have armies in star trek, like, if it makes senses to send 5 armed people why wouldn’t it make sense to send platoons or batallions in some cases? it is always individual enemies they never seem to face entire armies on foot.
So, this one is a little more justifiable.
Phasers, and starships. And because ST isn’t about war; it’s about diplomacy.
With the exception of the Borg, there are no personal shields. One person with a phaser is a WMD; it’s a sweep-able, incredibly destructive weapon, and if you’re not interested in merely maximum casualties, it also has an effecting area-effect stun mode.
But the other reason is starships. Ignoring plot devices, orbital targetting is incredibly accurate and starship phaser banks can anihilate entire areas. If you tried to move an army across an area, it could be vaporized by a single enemy starship.
Either the enemy has superior technology, in case it doesn’t matter if you send 1 or 1,000 people; or they have inferior technology in which case you need only one person. And if you have air (space) superiority, you can level cities with even a smaller starship.
So ST is more like special forces making surgical strikes, sending in problem solvers and diplomats, and hoping nobody starts shooting in earnest.
Because phasers are OP.
a phaser is a WMD
I had no idea about this tbh they come of as very tame weapon, especially the whole stun setting part.
It can be used that way, sure, and the Very Civilized Starfleet uses them conservatively. But a beam weapon that is capable of disintegrating anything (unshielded) that it touches is crazy powerful. And those are only the hand phasers; we don’t often see the phaser rifles, but holy heck. If phasers scale like projectile weapons do, a single phaser rifle would be capable of vaporizing entire buildings, tanks, aircraft.
Wouldn’t a simple mirror be enough to reflect the rays back to the sender?
Phasers aren’t lasers, and the beam isn’t light; so, probably not.
They tried to, but the exocomms became sentient and they couldn’t be used as slave labour anymore.
What’s up with Troi’s nose?
This image smells like AI art a bit, dunno maybe I am wrong.
Cocaine?
Probably because the butlerian jihad forbade them.
butlerian jihad
dune is a trip! 😂
This may be in jest, but they actually fully made this an actual plot point in Picard.
I gave up on Picard. :(
1 argument against the use of drones:
Before that, M5 was one of the worst disasters in Starfleet history.
And although it was probably at least partially covered up control wasn’t exactly great.
See also: any time an AI has been given command of a vessel (except Data, and even then he caused problems a couple times).
“That was the stun setting. This is not. I can reduce this pumping station to a pile of debris.”
—Data, the most sophisticated android in the federation, conducting diplomacy
And more importantly, the drone MISSED data that revealed the planet was inhabited!
Not Star Trek, but the Three Laws of Robotics is the textbook on why AI and any strict programmatic interpretation of Rules is a flawed goal.
Please explain, this is a starfleet drone attacking a starfleet ship? Was the drone highjacked or just went rogue on it’s own?
Thats drone ships going bad from lower decks
Option B
Rogue AI hidden in code.
Why aren’t they using drones
They use probes all the time… Those are basically drones. But better.
Also: The Borg have several drones. 😏
I mean i just watch a the next gen episode where some science guy had created a rift in spacetime and instead of sending in a drone/probe they almost got Lieutenant Data killed. Another thing I was wondering why aren’t they backing up Lieutenant Data?
One thing to remember, is that the concept of drones and AI, how we are currently developing and improving those, was not something people back then had on the radar.
Having also recently seen that episode, they send Data in because he’s the only one who wasn’t confused by the time weirdness. Picard even tells him sending others would only slow Data down and if they should get hurt it would make the time sensitive mission even more difficult.
As for why they don’t have more Datas: They don’t even know how he works. The dude who made him and Lore died without sharing his research.
Oh I didn’t get that far, I do remember Data’s whole exploring his roots/dad episode from back in the 90s when I watched at the time. But haven’t gotten that far in rewatches yet. That would explain why they can’t back him up to hdd. They probably wouldn’t get all the permissions for all the folders right so a restore from backup would probably not work.
Actually… That kind of backup may be possible… 🤔
I mean, if they can accidentally backup real humans (second Riker, Scotty in the transport buffer, Broccoli turning himself into a super computer, etc), surely they could purposely backup the android. lol
The one time they purposely “backed up” a human via the transporter it took up so much space they had to dump the backup into the holosuite and it still nearly brought the entire station’s computer to its knees.
To be fair, that was Cardassian technology. Maybe the Federation’s stuff is better.
You forgot to add “Are they stupid?” at the end of the post title
😂
It’s fun to see what modern tech is missing from decades old Sci-fi.
One of the most interesting ones for me, is that there aren’t any screens with text on them shown in the original star trek. That’s because when TOS was made, computers communicated by teletype/printout. TOS is older than the concept of text on a screen.
That said, I feel like a drone would be part of a tricorder. I have a DJI drone with a good camera, and I use it a lot for getting pictures of things that are out of my reach, if you had one paired with a tricorder, you could look at things out of your reach.
