Alternate Star Trek

[jonesy]

...the technology is otherwise either a mere convenience for storytelling purposes or it utterly irrelevant to it.

I think the biggest mistake they ever did was trying to explain everything. The show would have been a lot better if they'd just cut out the technobabble, skipped the explanations, and spent the time developing the story.

When The Next Generation was on tv I thought it was better than TOS. Nowadays I think Next Gen is the least good Star Trek series.

 

[Umbran]

I think that the writers of Star Trek have gotten very confused about tech levels and have warp drives occurring too easily and too early.

The people who think that different fictional universes should somehow obey the same technological progressions are the ones who are very confused.

The writers of Star Trek (or other scifi) are not confused about tech levels - they don't care about them, and feel exactly zero need to fit into arbitrary structures set by other authors.

 

[TarionzCousin]

Have you seen the Star Trek technical manuals? They explain everything, using wonderfully explicit terms like this one to describe what happens to people at warp speed if the inertial dampeners aren't on:
[sblock]"They become chunky salsa."

[/sblock]

 

[garrowolf]

Yep I'm big into the technology and I had all the tech manuals. They were fun.
I also really love Babylon 5 and I love the different cultures at different tech levels. I thought it would be interesting to see a setting with more then one FTL system available. Hyperdrives and Warp Drives together seems like an interesting set up.

Also I wanted to show more of a tech level progression between series settings. I was thinking about an early Hyperspace Age for Star Trek Enterprise and telling a story in that.

 

[Ed_Laprade]

</SUP>

Yes I know Mecha are fantastic but the tech levels are for conversion of many different settings, not just hard science fiction settings. ​

Warp is not necessarily slower or faster then any other Stardrive. It depends on what setting you are using. The reason that I am placing it where it is is because in nearly every setting I have read about any kind of spacial warp like a warp drive requires antimatter engines. Hyperdrives are usually attached to fusion engines of some kind. This implies that warp drives take a lot more power then hyperdrives. Therefore they require and exist in a higher tech level. ​

I think that the writers of Star Trek have gotten very confused about tech levels and have warp drives occurring too easily and too early. This is one of the main problems with the setting. It is too powerful and it gives the writers headaches trying to come up with situations that are not too easily solved. ​

Honestly the Transporters are the biggest problem in Star Trek. They can do too much with them for the setting and they are not even using them to their total advantage. They could really break the setting if they did so. ​

I know I can't get it published. I may put it up on a fansite somewhere for fun.​

Thanks for the steel info. I knew it was around, but had always gotten the impression that it was quite rare. Mecha: Big targets, expensive as heck and overengineered, thus unreliable. But if you want to use them, its your story.

As others have said, the less they tried to explain the tech, the better it looked! And yes, the transporter was always the biggest problem... except that without it there might not have been a Star Trek for reasons someone else has pointed out.

Warp speed is warp number cubed times the speed of light. So warp 6 is only 216 x C. Which is what I ment by low warp speeds being slow. And, of course, warp speed always worked at the speed of plot as well. Some fan fairly early on worked out how long it would take the Enterprise to go to all the places that were mentioned in TOS at warp 6, even though they often traveled slower than that. It wasn't years, it was centuries!

But hey, have fun with the project, just don't take it too seriously.

 

[Umbran]

Mecha: Big targets, expensive as heck and overengineered, thus unreliable.

Well, that makes a whole lot of assumptions about the state of engineering in the fictional world. In a world that's also producing free-willed computer AIs, maybe it isn't all that bad.

Warp speed is warp number cubed times the speed of light[. So warp 6 is only 216 x C.

That's Original Series. Next Generation uses a different scale.

 

[TanisFrey]

Thanks for the steel info. I knew it was around, but had always gotten the impression that it was quite rare. Mecha: Big targets, expensive as heck and overengineered, thus unreliable. But if you want to use them, its your story.

The basic problem is that of protection of armor verse its mass. Tanks are much more efficient tan a walking Mecha could ever be. The only type of mecha I could ever see being made (as in by and for the army) for real is powered armor.

 

[Someone]

I think that, like 85% of transporter plot problems would be solved it it required both a transmitter and a receiver.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I never really thought much about "fixing" Startrek's technology level. I am more thinking about creating a coherent time line (even with time travel in place, it could be better. The 20th and 21st century seem to be a mess), and remove all story elements that were just plan stupid. Transwarp Evolution of Paris and Janeway, Spock's Brain...
Also, fixing and clarifying some elements like "Do they use money? If not, how does it work - accounting for replicators and all that"

They could work to limit some types of technology stronger, more well-defined. As it is, they had to invent restrictions and so on after the fact, if they could go back to the start, the limitations would be easier to build in based on the experience we had - where does Tech X cause a serious story-telling problem?*


*) If someone were to rewrite our universe, he would probably try to limit the capabilities of cell phones. Think back to movies before the widespread use of cell phones and how some of their plots are disrupted if you take the presence of cell phones into account! The writers of reality did probably a much better job with planes and cars - within limits. Hard to tell a 21st century story about a war involving cavalries and trenches...

 

[TanisFrey]

I never really thought much about "fixing" Startrek's technology level. I am more thinking about creating a coherent time line (even with time travel in place, it could be better. The 20th and 21st century seem to be a mess), and remove all story elements that were just plan stupid. Transwarp Evolution of Paris and Janeway, Spock's Brain...
Also, fixing and clarifying some elements like "Do they use money? If not, how does it work - accounting for replicators and all that"

They could work to limit some types of technology stronger, more well-defined. As it is, they had to invent restrictions and so on after the fact, if they could go back to the start, the limitations would be easier to build in based on the experience we had - where does Tech X cause a serious story-telling problem?*


*) If someone were to rewrite our universe, he would probably try to limit the capabilities of cell phones. Think back to movies before the widespread use of cell phones and how some of their plots are disrupted if you take the presence of cell phones into account! The writers of reality did probably a much better job with planes and cars - within limits. Hard to tell a 21st century story about a war involving cavalries and trenches...

Gold-Pressed Laium could not be replicated, therefor it was the basis of the Ferig's money.