The most important part is have it be just realistic enough, and also being very VERY consistent between several series Edit: And to clarify my use of "consistent" i meant that every star trek series has a jeffries tube, a warp core, a replicator, and another big factor is that you can see how the tech evolves between eras.
@DrewLSsix it's definitely consistent with most of the shows. There were mistakes of course but it wasn't until NuTrek that the writers didn't even try to be consistent. They admitted that's why they jumped STD into the future.
@@DrewLSsixi think that 22nd century shuttlepods use only impulse thrusters. 23rd century shuttles have an ftl system that can generate a warp field using warp plasma but no dedicated core capable of creating it, so TOS SNW and DISCO shuttles need fual from their home starship or starbase giving them a decent but limited range. 24th century shuttles and runabouts have miniaturised warp cores and can be refueled on-mission assuming they find a source of deuterium and anti-deuterium.
I think another reason Star Trek tech is inherently believable has to to with the reciprocal relationship real world technology has with Star Trek. Think of how many pieces of technology were inspired by the shows that are now common place. Society has almost been conditioned the if it shows up in Star Trek we will develop it eventually.
I think it’s more inspirational that conditioning, does anyone remember Alcubierre? Correct me if I’m wrong but I’m fairly certain he was a Star Trek fan before he published his FTL travel theory
@@polarisukyc1204yeah he specifically set out to see if there were a valid solution to the relativity equations which resembled a “warp bubble” (as Star Trek had already used the term)
I think it helps that everything keeps breaking, not working right, and needing maintenance all the time. Deep Space 9 did such a good job of making the station feel lived in.
You see the that in TNG too, where someone's running a "Level 3 diagnostic" constant, or the starboard power coupling always breaks and the ship turns off. I don't remember if VOY had that...except for them always keeping the ship pristine, even when tech that got added to it would give them an advantage.
I think I'd add one more element to the mix: conviction. The technobabble is delivered with such serious conviction that it lends to it's credibility and thus it's believability.
I wouldn't have been able to hold back a rant in your shoes. Something along the lines of "the spoor drive makes no sense in the context of the Star Trek universe, and don't get me started on the fact that Spock never ONCE mentioned a human foster sibling during ANY of his observations on human peculiarities with his closest friends at any point in..." etc.
Stargate is one of the best for it because you can almost always see some technology Earth has, and then go back and watch the episode they discovered it in. Even technology that wasn't explained much, like the Asgard Plasma Beams from the last episode of SG-1, it's a plasma beam, and plasma is generally very very hot, so it would make a good weapon, probably initially controlled with powerful magnetic fields.
Internal consistency is the most important aspect imo. The instances that get criticized the most about Star Trek are those where this consistency is broken - but I'd argue that those only stand out so much because they're generally good about upholding it. Every ship has a visible propulsion system. The few times they don't, it's explicitly called out in-universe. Warp speeds exist on a certain scale. A slower ship can't catch up to a faster one. Only exception is when the difference is very small and there are some temporary enhancements that can be made - usually at risk of failure or by damaging the system. FTL tech uses subspace. Be that warp drive, communications or scanners. Same basis for the same effect. etc.
I remember back when they were making episodes for ST: TNG. The Producers would consult with scientific advisors from NASA to help with the storyline and a US Navy advisor on the military structure aboard a Vessel.
For me it seems believable primarily because of the consistency of the rules, I think it comes from my love for games where everything you can do in a game has a more or less rigid set of conditions
I've always found trek tech believeable when it's got a nugget of actual science in it, warp drive works because antimatter power is possible, photon torpedos work because antimatter would make a powerful weapon. Subspace works because extra dimensions are a real thing. Transporters work because they address the Heisenbergs uncertainty principle. It all makes it easy to suspend diebelief and go along with it. Not to mention a good bit of technobabble with some real science words thrown in, heavy lepton interference, inverse tachyon beams, ion storms, temporal flux....it just sounds like it makes perfect sense. It's when they out right make things up that I find it hard to believe, the spore drive being the most obvious example closely followed by the explanation for the burn.
I can accept the explanation for The Burn, although I don't like it at all and wish they hadn't made that part of canon. It's explained reasonably well given what we know of science in the world of Star Trek. However, the spore drive makes no sense whatsoever, including the silly spinning thing the ship does when activating it. It's basically hand-wavium explanations from the top down, instead of something sounding possible. Notably there's no real mycelial network in space, nor even any theories that one exists.
@@warwolf88I actually look to our *decades-long struggle* to move off of fossil fuel and see parallels to the lead-up to The Burn. Booker lays out in Episode One all the alternatives to Warp-slipstream requires boromite, transwarp conduits are highly unstable, solar sails are slow as balls (and unsaid, it probably pretty hard to get your hands on the protostar)-and given how _tried and true_ Warp has been across millennia (and it having been invented independently across thousands of worlds) and across cultures, I totally get it.
You nailed it, I think. I'd like to note that the 'new guard' (Trek'09 onwards) sometimes has trouble considering the long-term ramifications of the changes/additions they make to the technology canon: teleporting from Earth to Kronos (why use starships? or why not beam starships?), magic augment blood that cures death (why die?), spore drives that can go anywhere instantly (like Starfleet would have _actually_ stopped researching this).
On the other hand, the "new guard" are -all- mostly _Trek fanatics_ who've been pondering the lore for decades. For the Roddenberry years, the writers were just trying to draw a paycheck. For the Piller years, it was a passion. For the Kurtzman generation, it's a _religion._
I think this is a good third principle of why it was believable: They didn't overreach. Real-world tech advances, but on a generational scale. The starships of TNG are faster, more powerful and more comfortable than the TOS era, but not unbelievably so. TNG's replicators and com-badges were a believable advancement over tech we'd seen before. When they introduced tech that could do something shockingly powerful there was usually a terrible downside to explain why everybody wasn't already using it. That's what killed Discovery's spore drive for me. If such a thing existed, everybody would use it all the time It was too big a leap in tech, especially for a prequel.
@@eXcommunicate1979 First off: I was talking about the *writers and technical consultants,* not the showrunners. Second, I have nothing for you if you don't believe that Olatunde Osunsanmi and Michelle Paradise have shown _phenomenal_ reverence for _Trek._
Deanna Troi's telepathy always seemed overpowered to me. Detecting emotions while talking to someone is one thing, but she could detect emotions down on the surface of a planet that the ship was orbiting, like long-range sensors.
Betazoid telepathy was a super power, Vulcan telepathy was much more grounded, since it required physical contact for the most part. (Spock mind-melding with V'ger being one notable exception.)
@@ManabiLT V'ger was an unusual entity. Also Spock was well past contact with and was in a sense inside V'ger. sorta/kinda/from a certain point of view.
TNG wanted to have things that borrowed from TOS but still make it different. The mind meld was potentially over-used in TOS but it was a tool. Roddenberry didn't want to put another Vulcan in the main crew. Someone probably figured out standard telepathy usually breaks plots, so they downgraded Deanna to only being able to sense emotions, a lesser version of telepathy. Anyone who's read X-men comics knows that telepaths can be problematic for storytelling, so you have to either find a way to take them out of the game (being too sensitive and getting telepathy backlashes) or you put them against people who were immune to TP.
I think it's due to multiple reasons. The main reason is, as you said, partly due to what you said about having it behind layers, but I also believe it has two other factors that are just as important. One is due to the fact they do pull from real-world science. When people hear it's a thing people are actually studying, it makes it sound more believable, for it has a base in reality. The second reason I want to add is how they treat lore and technology. They are applications of concepts that people know or are information more than one person knows. I think we have a harder time believing in, say, Marvel or Star Wars because only one person knows how certain technology works, the only one that uses certain technology, and has to give technological dumps. However, in Star Trek, it is usually done in three ways. One is to explain how, by using a concept all of them know or have knowledge of (which is shown on screen) or someone done before (even if off-screen) and applying it in a way the crew and the audience can follow. Second, showing how incoperated the technology is and how quickly people not even trained to operate such technology can use it makes it more believable. Finally, having multiple people explain a subject to the more ignorant crew members to show that while it's not common knowledge, it is knowledge people would have heard about and applied in their lives. The crew accepting the explanation and asking specific questions to get more details on how it works on terms they understand just adds to the believability. The skeleton locks through the VOY transporters and the TNG Dyson Sphere.
There is a third component. Established procedures. BSG does this well. Nobody ever explains how the jump drive works, just that it has many limitations due to needing jumps to be calculated, low range per jump and needing Tylium fuel. Other than that it has even less explanation than the Spore Drive, which does much the same thing. But all the procedures leading up to the jump, like the calculation, like retracting the flight pods, like preparing all the systems for it, like counting down for it, all make it feel like a very real thing, that was very complicated and needed a lot of training to use. And it clued into some elements of its operation over time. For Star Trek I guess a good example is the transporters. The operation always has this very specific moving of these three sliders, even in TOS, that is always prominently shown and connected to the process in a relevant way, and gets retained all the way to ENT at least. It really grounded the technology as something that was very touchable. You could almost consider those things rituals. Repeated patterns of actions with a clear significance. A step by step process that clearly leads to things happening every time that its done.
I've been a Trekkie since I was a kid in the 80s. Watched everything up thru Enterprise. As well as All the TOS and TNG movies and several books. In one of the later seasons of Voyager Belanna Torres speaks a ton of technobabble to Capt. Janeway. I turned to my mom who was sitting next to me and said ' Belanna just spoke about 3 paragraphs of pure techno babble and I understood everything she said.'
I am glad you mentioned consistency. The idea is so key. Once we know what a piece of tech does and more importantly DOES NOT do you need to stay within those established rules. When that happens the audience can understand the limits of your ship and characters in every situation and buy into the worldbuilding.
Sidenote: the First Hyperdrive in Star Wars basicly powered by The Force until the Corellians build one that replaced the Spacemagic parts with "mechanical" ones, sooo ist was at some point really driven by Space Magic And well, with telepathie and ESP you REALLY notice when Star Wars was written
Wait, really? I'd never heard that...do you have somewhere I could go read up on that? I've never understood completely how hyderdrives work in SW, except for them running them on what seems like TRS-80 level tech (in that they can't deviate from set "lanes" and such), unlike Trek which you can go to warp in space at almost anytime, for any reason, and not get smooshed.
@@Corbomite_Meatballs must have been one of the Essential Guides and in Parts KotOR 1 where it was mentioned and Hyperlanes are more fairways and that you can "jump to lightspeed" outside them but the navigation is more complex or unsafe since the Hyperdrive is way faster than Warp, it's like steaming Fullspeed ahead though the Northsea, that begs to run aground on a Sandbank or a Rock.
As a writer I’ve realized what draws people in and pushes them away from universes like Lotr, Star Trek, Warcraft, etc. The biggest things are consistency and grounding. When a story follows consistent rules and behaviors, the suspension of disbelief stays low and the IP is enjoyable; when an orphan with no training can best a sith knight with years of training over the course of a minute, people leave your work by the millions. Grounding is what draws us in: why is it relatable? The environment, the struggle, the people? The better explained and detailed it is, the easier it is to stay connected, and when those elements are called into question during the story, the audience is as eager to resolve it as the characters. This is why overpowered characters are almost always boring and uninteresting, as are characters that never make mistakes or do anything wrong. Star Trek grounds itself in an above average capacity and has average consistency. It was higher but thanks to the constant push to produce content for the universe those values keep dropping over the last 20 years. This is only my opinion, of course. Spectacle is not an appropriate compensator for story-accurate story development. Case-in-point: Discovery season 2 end battle versus DS9 fight to defend mine-laying at wormhole, season 5 ending. Discovery felt lazy, too much was on screen, along with an unlikely response to the situation. An AI is trying to take over and they’re sending several ships to hunt us down? Don’t contact Starfleet or other ships for help, of which, canonically, there are thousands in the territory by this point. No, better to clutter the screen with easily targeted and destroyed minor vehicles that distract from the importance of what’s happening. DS9: when’s Starfleet sending help? Oh they’re busy with something important and can’t spare ships, that sounds unlikely but at least it’s addressed. So we can defend the Defiant on our own? Maybe, but if we don’t, the entire quadrant is at risk. We do have improved shields that the Dominion and Cardassians don’t realize we’ve developed, and the Rotarran is hiding nearby to ensure it ambushes any attackers. The minefield is setup, how do we win this battle? ...oh, we’re leaving the station? ...When are we coming back home? Night versus Day.
I think part of the reason the explanation for the spore drive doesn't work for a lot of people is because it feels too small. Matter/antimatter reactions, we get it, that generates a lot of power, makes a big ship go fast, etc. But "the ship inhales magic mushroom dust and now it can teleport" feels too far out there. A ship teleporting feels like too big a thing to happen because of mushroom spores (honestly anything teleporting because of mushroom spores feels absurd unless maybe you're in a Super Mario game).
Haha. I would love a fan-edit of _Discovery_ where they replace the Spore Jump effect with an animation and sound effect of the ship passing through a Warp Pipe.
I think another factor is Trek usually has science consultants as well, to extrapolate where current tech could end up in the future. It's how the communicators in TOS become flip phones irl eventually, and the touch screen tech from TNG eventually hits irl too. They generally don't go too far beyond the possible for most things.
Touch screens were actually invented before even TOS, many of the screens in the TNG era shows were real touch screens and actually did things when you touched them.
Absolutely they did - when they did TNG they actually consulted with NASA for speculative opinions as to how the tech would work & even what kind of tech.
Excellent video! ⭐️ I totally agree with you. When you ask someone “How does the Heisenberg compensator work?” and they answer “Very well,” you want to know that they’re laughing with you not at you. Trek’s tongue is always in its cheek. Everything is true, “Especially the lies.”
Big problem with the spore drive is why did no other race discover and develop it? it has too great of a tactical advantage to not use it. And there are plenty of very old and advanced races whom would have had more than enough time to do so.
@shocktnc How do you know? Just because it doesn't look like the ones the Federation uses doesn't mean they don't use a form of it, or used it in the past.
another thing I think helps is that for the most parts the characters treat these as tech that's well known in universe so you don't get (often) get info-dumped on things the characters should already know nor do the characters really "speak to the audience" when they explain things. Some franchises fail on this account (and Star Trek does sometimes too, nobody is perfect after all) and over explain things in a way that sounds unnatural or sounds like they're breaking the 4th wall to explain things to audience that in-universe characters know, Star Trek avoids this for the most part.
That internal consistency is the key for me. So, if someone says "Chronotons" you know there's some time stuff going on. Also the best episodes don't rely on technobabble as a solution. It's fine if technobabble instigates the plot, as long as it doesn't *resolve* the problem.
The cool thing about all the layers is they actually become part of the writing and stories, they aren't just an explanation in a reference book for ultra nerds somewhere. The downside of this is when a series or movie ignores some of these established rules, it becomes way more of an issue.
This is actually one of the things I love about Star Trek, most other sci-fi franchises don't even bother trying to explain anything, and where Star Wars has been amazing at building the Star Wars universe creating backstories that cover thousands of years, and setting in stone what's canon and what's not because the people behind it know that's what their fans really care about. Star Trek has just now in the last ten+ years really started to really decide what's canon and what's not partly I think because of the J.J. Abrams movies and the need to show how they coexist with everything before them, but what the people behind Star Trek have done better than anyone else mainly because they know their fans care is the science of the Star Trek universe and putting out the technical manuals. The level of detail they put into them is amazing. I truly believe if it was currently possible to build on the scale of a starship like the Enterprise that you could use the blueprints in the manuals to do it.
I like that it's "like real life unless noted". Another good example is Gundam and the Minovsky particle. What is the Minovsky particle? It's a byproduct of nuclear fusion that expands in a lattice and disrupts electromagnetic waves, preventing long range radio communication, constantly giving an emp-like effect to circuits, and eventually dissipating visible light. You can shield against it, but it's relatively heavy. So long range guided missiles don't work, lasers eventually dissipate, long distance targeting is basically impossible, and it also has some implications for beam weapons being possible (apparently). Sure seams like a good excuse as to why giant robots that carry big guns and energy swords are feasibly dogfighting in universe rather than just laser, railgun, or missiling people from the opposite orbit. Except G-Gundam. I mean it's awesome, but it's whole reason for existence is "what if giant fighting robots had mystical kung-fu magic?"
Trek-Tech works because it doesn't just reply on the "space magic" principle to make it happen. There is some grounding (no matter how limited or slight) in real-world science, and there is marvellous consistency between episodes and series when it comes to technobabble and the development/evolution of the tech.
I thought the spore drive is just a massive transporter, and they use the spore network to send the signal threw as it all over the universe, but can be confusing when they can go halfway into the network when saving tilly
Hot take: they've actually done a *really good job* _not_ explaining the Spore drive. The way it's presented is: - Stamets knows how it works - Tilly knows how it works - Adira knows how it works - Burnham, Ariam and Nielsen know _vaguely_ how it works But the physics is *so complex* that without any of them staying behind in the 23rd century, there was *zero chance* of anyone implementing it again.
Thank you for the videos! I wish STO either added story content quicker or added a means to replay the various story arcs to provide fresh content for your excellent series.
I believe that you are on point with everything that you mentioned in your video. However i also think, at least in my case, that what makes Star Trek so great for me is that it has the layers as you mentioned , but they are not afraid to dabble with concepts and theories that are almost unbelievable to us average citizens of the "Dark Ages" as McCoy once called our 21st century existence.
Haven’t played it myself, but a lot of ships I’ve seen in Star Citizen convey this super convincing and almost tactile impression. I think they look even more real than what Star Trek delivers, but it also feels much close to out time than the golden age of Trek.
This is a fantastic video for any writer to watch. It doesn't matter if it is books, shows, movies, or games, world building has a huge impact on the popularity of a story. I think most people underestimate how important it is. I wish I could show this to every writer out there.
This is the most important Star Trek video you have made yet. You have explained simply the idea that makes trek work. This should be required watching for anyone working on the new shows.
Even voy which has trechnobable in 60% of its dialog, (it feels like it at least), is just consistent enough and uses enough real-world science to make it believable
Really been a fan of your vids for a couple years now sir, be they class breakdowns, legacy videos or the Story Series of STO. Keep up the great work Ric!
This layering is one of my favorite things about Trek. It's always disappointing to peel back the layers and find nonsense. But when you peel back the layers of Trek you find lovingly-crafted technical manuals and beautiful schematics. The great designers like Sternbach, Probert and Eaves clearly designed their ships, props and sets with the fictional science and design lineages in mind. The ships didn't just have to look cool or scary, they had to look RIGHT in the technological and cultural context already established. That kind of passion and craftsmanship is a rare thing. As a visual person, that's why the tech feels believable to me.
I think a large part of making the technology believable is simply making it not overpowered. If the characters have a technology so powerful that it can accomplish their goals with relative ease, that makes it not believable. If, however, the characters have to understand how their technology works, and they have to use it in a way that they find challenging, that makes the story compelling, and the compelling story makes the technology more believable.
This has crystallised a lot of ideas I’ve had while discussing some of these topics with people. Especially the layers of mechanics ultimately leading to “because we said so”, as I realised there’s still no definitive answer as to whether a warp coil alone can warp space or if you always need dilithium plasma to do it. Ultimately both have been said to have subspace components and it’s fiction and doesn’t really matter. But that’s when I started to think, this isn’t as well thought out as it seems on the surface and they just have a lot of interlocking smoke and mirrors to keep it looking fairly plausible without much digging. It’s still fun to talk about though.
The Phoenix was able to jump to Warp 1 w/o dil (that we know of) and likely some type of warp coil. Pretty sure ENT didn't have dil, but I can't find a good source to say whether or not that's the case.
As a man of science myself, I think a huge part was that the script writers would literally write [Insert Technobabble] in some places, and get consultants with physics, chemistry, or medical backgrounds to fill in the blanks. Using real terms, real theory's, etc. really creates a layer of immersion that hasn't often been matched.
Watching Skallagrim? He did a video on verisimilitude himself earlier. I love verisimilitude in my sci-fi, that small amount of realism act as a bridge that brings you into the world
Long ago in the TOS times I asked similar questions. I found out Gene actually talked to NASA and other scientists asking them what might be possible. Since then I have always kept that thought that - who knows it might happen. After all look at cell phones and tablets :D
As well as your reasons Rick, I always thought that the tech was also loosely supported by current established theories in Newtonian, Einsteinian and Quantum physics. Great subject to discuss.👏💯
Huh, your three-step breakdown of the Spore Drive helps explain why, even though I love when there's a lot of detail to unpack in a sci-fi element, I'm usually good with just one or two layers of explanation. I _like_ knowing how certain techs are supported, but once I get the "What" and the first "How," I usually don't care that much unless I've fallen in love with the show. It's like the G-Diffuser System on the Arwing -- I was fine with "it allows the Arwing to perform otherwise impossible maneuvers in-atmosphere" but I know way more about it than that.
You explained it perfectly. That's also why when they introduce something like the Q, they shouldn't explore it too much because, as it is outside our comprehension and outside the realm of believable technobabble, it should remain in the dark to preserve the mystery. (although, as someone generally curious, I still want an answer and the attempt is still commandable to a point, Klingon appearance explained in Enterprise was perfectly fine to me despite the obvious "we could have acknowledge the budget was a thing in the 60s and got away with that, the ballsy way". As for the Q, as Picard once stated: "I refuse to believe that the universe was THAT badly designed." so the Q have to come from somewhere, they can't come from nothing and they have to have some limitations, only blinded by their arrogance, so my take on the Q is that they are NEAR omibpotent beings, but they can't be truly omnipotent, otherwise they would have created reality itself, which is clearly not the case. The closest explanation that I could find is that they are ascended beings... like the Ancients in Stargate.
This is an element of why I feel new Trek has some consistency issues. Discovery had the psychic space child tantrum near magic rocks kill millions of people and the Turbo Lift void. Though I think I'm bugged more by how large rocks are an issue for Discovery's shields in one episode of Disovery, and then shields in an episode of Strange New Worlds can handle putting the ship inside a brown dwarf without a slight issue with the air conditioning. I'm still bugged by S2 of Picard having Wesley Crusher say that the Universe is constantly nudged onto a timeline of his groups preference, and even more so that the time line they preferred is the one with the Burn :/
The Travelers / Watchers probably had to adhere to the terms of the Temporal Accords, so influencing events after the Temporal Wars would have been off the table.
Good analysis, Rick. The layers of comprehension apply not only to the fictional realm of Star Trek, but to the average person's knowledge of how basic devices function in the real world. For example, devices such as cars, microwave ovens, and ball point pens require specialized knowledge to create, but only a superficial knowledge to operate; in each of these examples, most people who could use the device wouldn't be tasked with repairing it, even if their knowledge extends to the second layer of "how does that work?" Not only do the layers of Trek technology mimic our understanding of the real world, but also characters in Trek are, by definition, often experts in some aspect of the technology, allowing for the drip-feeding effect of explaining in-universe to other characters who are not conversant with the minutiae. Thus the characters' acceptance of the explanations given encourages the audience's credulity to extend to the plot point in a reasonable manner.
This was a really good episode and highlights one of the best aspects of the franchise. Just last night while watching an episode of VOY my gf asked "How do they recharge the ship" And star treks rules are sufficiently consistent that i was actually able to answer her question reasonably easily It Did however highlight for me the fact that the supply of Antimatter aboard voyager was never highlighted as an issue, Only the quality available compared to local species' Leading me to conclude that Starfleet ships can either Generate sufficient quantities with relative ease, OR has a high yield process of finding and purifying it in the field
I mean surface of stars are practically particle colliders so finding a way to skim anti-matter from stars even at a distance seems to be within Star Fleet capabilities
Mycelial network is similar to dilithium crystals as in both exists in multiple subspace domains at the same time. Just like it's possible to travel between parallel universes, it's possible to travel between subspace domains. Each universe or subspace domain has intrinsic frequency which makes them mostly invisible to other universes and subspace domains. Travelling between them involves phase shift in molecular structure of any creature or object. The intrinsic frequency is similar to function of holograms where the image is only visible when viewed at certain angle. Because everything still exists in same _space_ but not same absolute time, things in one universe or subspace domain can affect others, but most people don't notice anything unless the space-time distance is small enough.
What helps me believe some of it, is how much of it is actually happening around us, cell phones and the like, I mean what you went over helps too, but it's not hard to believe the rest of it, when you can look around and everyone has at least one of TOS's communicators, lol.
It's fine that most saifi don't dive too deeply into how things work. Most people don't know how the internal combustion engine in their car works and they're okay with that
Amazing timing or the release, as i am going to try to answer this question too. At my University, i participate in a class, where we try to get to know how science is broadcasted in a way as it entertains people, while beeing accurate. Therefore, i am going to give a talk about Star Trek and how science is portaited there. Your Video is a great source for that. Allthough, according to the sources i have read so far, Star Trek is also asumed to be a social fiction. This means that the franchise combines the aspects of technologie with the social circumstances. Like, what kind of technologie is it and how does it benefit peoples needs? And how these people behave paralel to the technologie? Furthermore, the Show functions as a projection of human behavior and problems, which leads to the possibility to reflect on ongoing problems like war or destruction of the enviorment. My Sources: Quelle: Wenger, Christian: Jenseits der Sterne. Gemeinschaft und Identität in Fankulturen - Zur Konstitution des Star Trek-Fandoms. Bielefeld, 2006 and Quelle: Richter, Thomas: STAR TREK und die Wissenschaften: Der Weltraum, das Raumschiff, die Abenteuer… In: Rogotzki, Nina; Richter, Thomas; Brandt, Helga et al. [Hrsg.] Kiel, 2009, S.11 - S.16 (I know its in german, but i was to lazy to translate it.)
There is a lot of talk about “consistency” in the comments but I think a part that goes understated in regards to the believability of Star Trek tech is when it breaks an established rule or two here or there as a means of advancing a narrative and further enriching the universe. These events are usually referenced as a kind of breakthrough moment of discovery. Scotty would state in an episode that he can’t just break the laws of physics, would proceed to break that law of physics through some ingenious deus ex machina, and future trek shows would use it as a reference to deal with contemporary problems. It’s not dissimilar to how experimentation breaks some ignorant assumptions we make about what we feel are fairly well grounded scientific explanations in the real world.
Nothing touches The Expanse for being believable. But Star Trek has always been close behind, just because of how consistent it is throughout the canon.
To OP's point: Why aren't they just transporting cargo to secure spots instead of manually handled cargo, or using gravity plating as a means of anchoring them?@@Corbomite_Meatballs
Apart from fictional technologies, what is often left under-explained is that many FTL ways of travel is only mathmatically FTL, ie. divide distance by time, instead of an object (spaceship) physically moving faster than the speed of light. Quantum entanglement, as you briefly touched on, together with folding space, are perhaps the best examples of this.
This is a very helpful video on the topic of storytelling as much as Trek specifically. Loki, for example, is a great series but the main character does a complete 180 on his entire personality in the first episode, that's not enough to spoil a well told story completely but it does take a little shine off of it. It's a completely non-trek, non-tech example but I think it's about the same thing. Stories have to both be different from reality, otherwise you've made a documentary, but they also have to have an ending, that follows from the middle, which follows from the beginning. It can be very difficult to find the line where you depart enough from reality to tell the story you want to tell but not so far that you give into "well it's fiction so anything can happen!" Then it's just completely random series of unconnected events, we're reminded it isn't real and nothing matters and then... well why should we care?
I think the most accurate tech is the sublight impulse engine since it is basically a fusion engine and something very similar to an impulse engine has plans to make a debut in 2027
No no no, it's the other way around with warp drive. Alcubierre apparently literally send an email to Shattner that his warp drive was inspired by star trek. He also refers to "the warp drive in science fiction" in his paper. The warp drive was, thus, pretty much invented in star trek and is now worked on in the real world - NOT the other way around!
Pretty sure I did say "from TNG" onwards when referring to the standardised warp behind the scenes. I was not sure exactly why they settled on that drive to explain warp but I know that it did happen at a point waaay post-TOS, it's cool to see that theory was inspired by Star Trek!
For me Star Trek always throw something at the crew that they cannot deal with immidietly or have no idea what the hell is going on. A percived futuristic crew with gadgets find something they cannot comprehend always moves the science team itself into a kinship with you. As they just as stumped at an event then you are so their approach looks as good as yours and this way you feel leveled with them and don't question their methods as in such case you would questino yourself. So yeah I just feels like an Ensign that pokes around them and pretend I know everything so they don't get suspicios haha.
I always appreciated that Star Trek at least tries to explain things. It actually makes it more believable for me when something doesn’t have an explanation. How does telepathy work? “We don’t know”, is a perfectly reasonable answer to that. If enough things have an answer than it is more believable when something doesn’t. They don’t know everything and that’s ok. At least the audience knows that they’re trying to find out.
Can we talk about how warp drive has changed? During old trek, and before the Alcubierre warp drive, the way warp drive worked was by using subspace. The warp bubble would phase the ship with subspace, thus reducing the ships apparent mass, allowing for FTL. If you watch certain episodes of TNG or even voyager, they even make references to this. But ever since Alcubierre's warp drive theory became commonly known both the fandom and the modern shows all imply that's how warp drive works. Which is fine, but I'm confused on where subspace fits into the equation now.
THIS THIS THIS!! I've never heard anyone else talk about this. The warp field reduces the ship's apparent mass so that the impulse drive can push the ship past 1c. The further the mass is reduced, the faster you can go. This would also be a direct result of the existence of, and the ability to manipulate, the "graviton" (which is used all over other Trek technologies). Once you can manipulate gravity, you have access to the OTHER side of that equation… apparent mass.
I think I remember something about like... the more you warp space around something, the deeper into subspace it gets submerged. Picture folding the plane of space around something until it's in effectively a closed pocket hanging from the underside of the plane. I don't remember where I heard that concept though.
That wasn’t the explanation for warp drive, that was the explanation for impulse drive and how it’s better than “regular” thrusters (which themselves are already microfusion rockets!) It doesn’t matter how much you reduce the inertial mass, so long as it’s positive you’ll still merely asymptotically approach c. Subspace was always said to create a warp bubble around the ship and ride the wave, this even was made very explicit in the TNG episode about the “soliton wave” (which is actually what inspired Alcubierre IIRC!)
In 1976 Norman Spinrad coined the term “rubber science” for what we call Treknobabble. According to him, it exists basically for readers to hang their Willing Suspension Of Disbelief from. It has to be within the realm of the possible *as far as the layman reader is concerned* and all uses and modifications of it have to be consistent with each other. He used it to describe any fictional science in SF from the “super science” of the OG space operas to that of Star Trek. Your analysis holds up pretty well for Str Trek but I’ll point out that the OG space opera authors would often begin with a scientific effect that simply wasn’t real and write a story around it, sometimes successfully from a literary standpoint. In those cases your analytic points would come in reverse order. For example: Suppose it was possible to partially suppress the inertial mass of matter within a defined volume without killing living things within that volume. Then, you could build spacecraft capable of reaching very large fractions of the speed of light without having to carry ridiculous amounts of fuel. Further suppose that inertial mass could be completely suppressed, again without killing anything. Then, your ships could exceed the speed of light by very large margins. That allows galaxy-spanning drama involving huge space battles, interstellar politics, and no small amount of romance. That’s more or less the story of E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Bergenholm Drive which allowed him to write the Lensman series.
The care given to reasonably explaining and staying consistent with the in universe technology is one reason I became a Trek fan as a kid, and that lack of care and creativity is why I hate everything from Secret Hideout.
I think that your problems with the Discovery Spore Drive disappear if you think of less as a proper drive and more as a kind of super transporter that teleports the entire ship instead of people and cargo. So my Layer 3 for the Spore Drive would be: Mycelial spores are quantum entangled with the Mycelial Network and the Spore Drive forms a field which envelops the ship and allows it flow through the network which acts like a vast network of superhighways in subspace. After the field dissipates, the ship emerges at its destination normal space. This would explain why the Glenn once "spun out" killing everyone aboard after a bad jump. And why the creatures living in Mycelial space where able to "clone" Culber.
Yeah except that's SW level force magic bullshit, aka inconsistent with the Trek universe. nuTrek did it his way specifically to appeal to midwit bugmen.
"Believable" and "consistent" are not terms I would use to describe Star Trek technology. The term "technobabble" emerged from TNG for a reason. I don't consider that to be a deal-breaker when it comes to enjoying the stories. A given episode is generally internally consistent enough for whatever magic governs a phaser or transporter this time around to make sense in the context of that episode, and having whizbang sci-fi tech like teleporters and brightly colored beam guns is part of the aesthetic. The fact that those systems will rely on similar but different rules a couple plot arcs from now (and they worked a bit differently last season) doesn't really change the characters, and those are where Trek really shines anyway. Seeing the clever captain and brave crew facing interesting villains and dangerous phenomena is what makes Trek compelling; the photon torpedoes and warp cores are almost incidental. Trek deserves its place as a trendsetter in sci-fi. But the tech the characters use is... Not what I'd bank on to sell the setting.
There really should have been a shout-out in the video for James Doohan bugging the first season TOS writers to start from a place where "this specific part of the engine is broken" rather than just "it will take six hours to get engines back".
Beyond consistency and having a layered explanation, I believe it's important that the characters come across as understanding how things work as they use them. Because if it looks like _they_ believe that it can happen, it's much easier for the watching audience to believe it can too. I have no problem believing something can and will happen when someone like Scotty or Data say that they can make it happen. And I have grown a strong dislike for any 'a Q did it' type of handwaving. If there's any tech in _Trek_ I don't like, it's the 'do anything, anywhere, any time sort' that sucks any tension out of any scene where such is readily accessible. Which is the ultimate failure of _DISCO_ in its recent seasons. There are no stakes because there's no reason to believe Michael Burnham can't do whatever's needed instantly.
another faction is from TOS to ENG there was a focuses on have characters normalize common technology, sometime actors where ask to imagine themself in setting and improvise what they think would be normal.
I've heard of this idea of only needing up to 3 layers of explanation for a lore decision, to be satisfactory. A classic post is one that explains "Why don't the vampires use the sewer systems to travel around the town?" A: Because there are giant alligators. Q. Why are there giant alligators and how do they survive down there? A. There's a group of nuns that keep them fed and protected. Q. Where did the NUNS COME FROM? A. The nuns use the alligators to protect the town from the vampire menace. Duh. Anything beyond that is just over thinking it.
I heard that idea a long while ago. The basis for this video is that "Layer theory", but I could not find an actual name for it so that made it hard to trace where I had heard it before. Was trying to actually find a name for it like "Occam's Razor" or "Chekhov's Gun" so I could reference it properly but I couldn't find it again. :/
The part about the technical manuals being a shortcut and supplementary material only is a very good reason why it would be a fundamentally bad idea to make Star Wars movies or TV shows based too heavily on the expanded universe, because many people have not seen anything of it and would get confused and frustrated if they had to consult novels or comic books in order to understand what is going on on screen
You mean like they did with the JJ Wars movies, where you had to read all sort of ancillary stuff to understand what was going on in the movies? (And, they started doing that w/ the Kelvinverse stuff, but stopped after a point.)
I hope you can also discuss Stargate’s believability, since it is not set in a distant future, but in our current time. I haven’t seen you discuss Stargate in any video. Thanks in advance! 😊
Let's not get too wild here. The season seven TNG episodes with the element of the week and Voyager's triaxilating everything once 7 of 9 joined did plenty to do their damnedest to test our suspension of disbelief.
6:50 I'm not sure what you're trying to say, Quantum Entanglement in real life or in science fiction? Because IRL we *know* it doesn't facilitate the transfer of _information_ faster than the speed of light. In scifi sometimes it does for some reason or another which is fine, I'm just curious which you're talking about.
I interviewed for a job as a service technician at a very young 3D Printer company 26 years ago, and during the interview with the CTO he asked me where I thought this company & technology would be in the future, well, lets just say the Star Trek Fan in me spoke up without thinking with "well sir, in the future when the Captian asked for a cup of Earl Grey Hot at the replicator I hope it will have our company logo". I then thought I blew the interview once my brain kicked in and thought "WTF did you just say?". well the CTO sat there for what seemed like an eternity before saying "I ask that question to every candidate and your answer was the most positive & futuristic answer I ever got, I like your vision, when can you start?" I'm still working for them today and with our Direct metal printing and now biological printing we are still a long way off from replicators but much closer.
Sometimes I feel like Star Trek can be more believable than harder sci-fi like The Expanse largely because the audience has done the work of suspending disbelief. When you realize that a perfectly airtight pressure vessel is pretty much impossible in real life, and anything we do have, whether it's the ISS or a submersible, can only be built to acceptable tolerances, building something like a colony or a large interstellar space craft meant to support a human crew that can survive long term in space becomes harder to get a handle on. I'm not an engineer, so there's probably plenty of ways to do it that I'm just not familiar with. But the closer a sci-fi property tries to edge toward real life, the sooner some stuff just starts to fall apart. When Prax was explaining simple/complex systems after the Ganymede incident, I found it harder to get a handle on just how colonizing the solar system like this was even feasible. If you have a hull breach on the Rocinante, you can seal off that section, and try to keep what's left. But any oxygen you lost is just… gone. All you can do is hold it together until you have a chance to resupply. Where do their suppliers get their oxygen from? Or for that matter, where does all the atmosphere on Mars, Ganymede, or Tycho come from? Well, they can probably get some from spaceborn ice, and recycle it with onboard botanical systems, but if you trace the roots back far enough, it mostly comes from Earth. …With whom they have constantly tense diplomatic relations. So try not to breath too deeply. Don't they ever run out? No, they film in Toronto. There's plenty of air there. If you have a hull breach on the Enterprise, forcefields go up to keep the atmosphere contained, then they get to work on repairing the hull. Any oxygen that was lost gets replaced by the life support system. Where does the oxygen come from? Replicators, I guess. Try not to think about it too hard. Look! Tribble! Cute!
Remember that you breathe out CO2. O2 is part of that. We've been doing that for a long time and gotten very efficient at it, even now in the 21st century. I imagine by the time the Expanse is set in, it's even better. But they do address this in the prep before fighting the stealth ship around the spin station earlier in the series. They purge all their O2 into tanks and go into suits to prevent just what you describe; being shot up meaning you lose all your O2. Of course, if your O2 tank gets hit, you're in trouble but it's still a smaller target than the whole ship. ruclips.net/video/f1dARQGAzNA/видео.html
I love that the tech behind Star Trek has all of those layers, if you look into the tech manuals and other sources, as well as what we see on screen. It does make it more believable to me. But I still have the same question about warp drive: How did Zeph get antimatter to power the Phoenix? Or di-lithium crystals, for that matter. Did he find it in Montana? Did that missile that he converted into a space ship have an antimatter warhead? If so, the earth would have been in pieces if they used such weapons in WW3. My guess is that warp drive can be powered in different ways, from something as old fashion as a fission power plant (which he could have built from the warhead, and also explains the radiation that killed all of those people in the launch tube), fusion power, though I doubt we'd have a mini fusion plant in 2063, and, of course, antimatter. As well as the Romulans who use a artificial singularity to generate power (and gives proof you don't need antimatter in canon). The Phoenix probably had a fission power pack system similar to the ones we put on long range space probes. Which is one of the reasons it could just make warp one, the other being less advanced warp coils, plus no di-lithium. Once humanity teamed up with the Vulcans, they got advanced power plants - though why the Vulcans would give earth antimatter tech is something I don't understand, unless they figured we would make a good ally in the long term.
I think its there flaws. Transporters fail sometimes(or more than sometimes), warp travel takes huge amounts of energy and even takes time to travel around the universe, if the warp core fails its go with a big boom, shields can adapt to phaser fire to lower the damage, food from replicators tasts good but is never better than "real" good food.
The most important part is have it be just realistic enough, and also being very VERY consistent between several series
Edit: And to clarify my use of "consistent" i meant that every star trek series has a jeffries tube, a warp core, a replicator, and another big factor is that you can see how the tech evolves between eras.
Agreed!
But.... its not. Not even a little bit. It's not even consistent within any of the series themselves.
@@DrewLSsixit is more consistent than many shows and movies.
@DrewLSsix it's definitely consistent with most of the shows. There were mistakes of course but it wasn't until NuTrek that the writers didn't even try to be consistent. They admitted that's why they jumped STD into the future.
@@DrewLSsixi think that 22nd century shuttlepods use only impulse thrusters.
23rd century shuttles have an ftl system that can generate a warp field using warp plasma but no dedicated core capable of creating it, so TOS SNW and DISCO shuttles need fual from their home starship or starbase giving them a decent but limited range.
24th century shuttles and runabouts have miniaturised warp cores and can be refueled on-mission assuming they find a source of deuterium and anti-deuterium.
I think another reason Star Trek tech is inherently believable has to to with the reciprocal relationship real world technology has with Star Trek. Think of how many pieces of technology were inspired by the shows that are now common place. Society has almost been conditioned the if it shows up in Star Trek we will develop it eventually.
yeah take the Communicators which we had developed into Smartphones of today and TNG's PADD's which we developed into our Tablets
“Not conditioned” inspired. Just like people have been inspired to go into the sciences, Trek has inspired viewers to create the tech
I think it’s more inspirational that conditioning, does anyone remember Alcubierre? Correct me if I’m wrong but I’m fairly certain he was a Star Trek fan before he published his FTL travel theory
@@polarisukyc1204yeah he specifically set out to see if there were a valid solution to the relativity equations which resembled a “warp bubble” (as Star Trek had already used the term)
@@kaitlyn__L it’s still being researched as well, the last paper I read on the subject was probably around 5 years ago by Erik Lentz
I think it helps that everything keeps breaking, not working right, and needing maintenance all the time. Deep Space 9 did such a good job of making the station feel lived in.
You see the that in TNG too, where someone's running a "Level 3 diagnostic" constant, or the starboard power coupling always breaks and the ship turns off.
I don't remember if VOY had that...except for them always keeping the ship pristine, even when tech that got added to it would give them an advantage.
This is so true. It's why having an engineering division in either your ship or station is crucial.
I think I'd add one more element to the mix: conviction. The technobabble is delivered with such serious conviction that it lends to it's credibility and thus it's believability.
And then you get those clips from discovery.....
@@shocktnc I wouldn't know. ; )
You were so incredibly diplomatic and restrained when you said "this is why I have such a hard time.. with the spoor drive". Bravo
I wouldn't have been able to hold back a rant in your shoes. Something along the lines of "the spoor drive makes no sense in the context of the Star Trek universe, and don't get me started on the fact that Spock never ONCE mentioned a human foster sibling during ANY of his observations on human peculiarities with his closest friends at any point in..." etc.
agreed
It's actually so believable that even Stargate SG-1 took a page from it to explain their their technobabble.
Col. O'Neill was right. They should've named the first ship, the Enterprise.
Indeed. It was also nice of them to literally reference that on screen in dialogue from time to time as well.
@@masterhypnos6783I see you are a fan of Teal'c as well
Stargate is one of the best for it because you can almost always see some technology Earth has, and then go back and watch the episode they discovered it in.
Even technology that wasn't explained much, like the Asgard Plasma Beams from the last episode of SG-1, it's a plasma beam, and plasma is generally very very hot, so it would make a good weapon, probably initially controlled with powerful magnetic fields.
Indeed
Internal consistency is the most important aspect imo. The instances that get criticized the most about Star Trek are those where this consistency is broken - but I'd argue that those only stand out so much because they're generally good about upholding it.
Every ship has a visible propulsion system. The few times they don't, it's explicitly called out in-universe.
Warp speeds exist on a certain scale. A slower ship can't catch up to a faster one. Only exception is when the difference is very small and there are some temporary enhancements that can be made - usually at risk of failure or by damaging the system.
FTL tech uses subspace. Be that warp drive, communications or scanners. Same basis for the same effect.
etc.
I remember back when they were making episodes for ST: TNG. The Producers would consult with scientific advisors from NASA to help with the storyline and a US Navy advisor on the military structure aboard a Vessel.
For me it seems believable primarily because of the consistency of the rules, I think it comes from my love for games where everything you can do in a game has a more or less rigid set of conditions
I've always found trek tech believeable when it's got a nugget of actual science in it, warp drive works because antimatter power is possible, photon torpedos work because antimatter would make a powerful weapon. Subspace works because extra dimensions are a real thing. Transporters work because they address the Heisenbergs uncertainty principle. It all makes it easy to suspend diebelief and go along with it. Not to mention a good bit of technobabble with some real science words thrown in, heavy lepton interference, inverse tachyon beams, ion storms, temporal flux....it just sounds like it makes perfect sense.
It's when they out right make things up that I find it hard to believe, the spore drive being the most obvious example closely followed by the explanation for the burn.
the burn always seemed odd to me u would think they would of moved beyond dilithium faster than light drives and developed something more sustainable
you are wrong on the warp core actually,and on the "extra dimensions existing" isn't that just a theory in our world?
I can accept the explanation for The Burn, although I don't like it at all and wish they hadn't made that part of canon. It's explained reasonably well given what we know of science in the world of Star Trek.
However, the spore drive makes no sense whatsoever, including the silly spinning thing the ship does when activating it. It's basically hand-wavium explanations from the top down, instead of something sounding possible. Notably there's no real mycelial network in space, nor even any theories that one exists.
@@firstname9954 Antimatter annihilation would release a lot of energy, that part is accurate. Extra dimensions is indeed just a theory at the moment.
@@warwolf88I actually look to our *decades-long struggle* to move off of fossil fuel and see parallels to the lead-up to The Burn.
Booker lays out in Episode One all the alternatives to Warp-slipstream requires boromite, transwarp conduits are highly unstable, solar sails are slow as balls (and unsaid, it probably pretty hard to get your hands on the protostar)-and given how _tried and true_ Warp has been across millennia (and it having been invented independently across thousands of worlds) and across cultures, I totally get it.
You nailed it, I think. I'd like to note that the 'new guard' (Trek'09 onwards) sometimes has trouble considering the long-term ramifications of the changes/additions they make to the technology canon: teleporting from Earth to Kronos (why use starships? or why not beam starships?), magic augment blood that cures death (why die?), spore drives that can go anywhere instantly (like Starfleet would have _actually_ stopped researching this).
On the other hand, the "new guard" are -all- mostly _Trek fanatics_ who've been pondering the lore for decades.
For the Roddenberry years, the writers were just trying to draw a paycheck. For the Piller years, it was a passion. For the Kurtzman generation, it's a _religion._
@@GSBarlev What? This couldn't be more wrong. They don't care about Star Trek at all, they just want to use it to push their agenda.
I think this is a good third principle of why it was believable: They didn't overreach. Real-world tech advances, but on a generational scale. The starships of TNG are faster, more powerful and more comfortable than the TOS era, but not unbelievably so. TNG's replicators and com-badges were a believable advancement over tech we'd seen before. When they introduced tech that could do something shockingly powerful there was usually a terrible downside to explain why everybody wasn't already using it. That's what killed Discovery's spore drive for me. If such a thing existed, everybody would use it all the time It was too big a leap in tech, especially for a prequel.
@@GSBarlev I seriously doubt the showrunners if Disco were star trek fanatics
@@eXcommunicate1979 First off: I was talking about the *writers and technical consultants,* not the showrunners. Second, I have nothing for you if you don't believe that Olatunde Osunsanmi and Michelle Paradise have shown _phenomenal_ reverence for _Trek._
Deanna Troi's telepathy always seemed overpowered to me. Detecting emotions while talking to someone is one thing, but she could detect emotions down on the surface of a planet that the ship was orbiting, like long-range sensors.
Hence, the episodes always make her an idiot or take her out of action.
Yeah, especially when she could sense emotions through the viewscreen for the speaker on a different ship some AUs away.
Betazoid telepathy was a super power, Vulcan telepathy was much more grounded, since it required physical contact for the most part. (Spock mind-melding with V'ger being one notable exception.)
@@ManabiLT V'ger was an unusual entity. Also Spock was well past contact with and was in a sense inside V'ger. sorta/kinda/from a certain point of view.
TNG wanted to have things that borrowed from TOS but still make it different. The mind meld was potentially over-used in TOS but it was a tool. Roddenberry didn't want to put another Vulcan in the main crew. Someone probably figured out standard telepathy usually breaks plots, so they downgraded Deanna to only being able to sense emotions, a lesser version of telepathy. Anyone who's read X-men comics knows that telepaths can be problematic for storytelling, so you have to either find a way to take them out of the game (being too sensitive and getting telepathy backlashes) or you put them against people who were immune to TP.
I think it's due to multiple reasons. The main reason is, as you said, partly due to what you said about having it behind layers, but I also believe it has two other factors that are just as important.
One is due to the fact they do pull from real-world science. When people hear it's a thing people are actually studying, it makes it sound more believable, for it has a base in reality.
The second reason I want to add is how they treat lore and technology. They are applications of concepts that people know or are information more than one person knows.
I think we have a harder time believing in, say, Marvel or Star Wars because only one person knows how certain technology works, the only one that uses certain technology, and has to give technological dumps.
However, in Star Trek, it is usually done in three ways. One is to explain how, by using a concept all of them know or have knowledge of (which is shown on screen) or someone done before (even if off-screen) and applying it in a way the crew and the audience can follow. Second, showing how incoperated the technology is and how quickly people not even trained to operate such technology can use it makes it more believable. Finally, having multiple people explain a subject to the more ignorant crew members to show that while it's not common knowledge, it is knowledge people would have heard about and applied in their lives. The crew accepting the explanation and asking specific questions to get more details on how it works on terms they understand just adds to the believability.
The skeleton locks through the VOY transporters and the TNG Dyson Sphere.
There is a third component. Established procedures.
BSG does this well. Nobody ever explains how the jump drive works, just that it has many limitations due to needing jumps to be calculated, low range per jump and needing Tylium fuel. Other than that it has even less explanation than the Spore Drive, which does much the same thing.
But all the procedures leading up to the jump, like the calculation, like retracting the flight pods, like preparing all the systems for it, like counting down for it, all make it feel like a very real thing, that was very complicated and needed a lot of training to use. And it clued into some elements of its operation over time.
For Star Trek I guess a good example is the transporters. The operation always has this very specific moving of these three sliders, even in TOS, that is always prominently shown and connected to the process in a relevant way, and gets retained all the way to ENT at least. It really grounded the technology as something that was very touchable.
You could almost consider those things rituals. Repeated patterns of actions with a clear significance. A step by step process that clearly leads to things happening every time that its done.
The techno-babble in ST is often more consistent than the hacker talk in regular movies or TV shows.
I've been a Trekkie since I was a kid in the 80s. Watched everything up thru Enterprise. As well as All the TOS and TNG movies and several books.
In one of the later seasons of Voyager Belanna Torres speaks a ton of technobabble to Capt. Janeway.
I turned to my mom who was sitting next to me and said ' Belanna just spoke about 3 paragraphs of pure techno babble and I understood everything she said.'
I am glad you mentioned consistency. The idea is so key. Once we know what a piece of tech does and more importantly DOES NOT do you need to stay within those established rules. When that happens the audience can understand the limits of your ship and characters in every situation and buy into the worldbuilding.
Sidenote: the First Hyperdrive in Star Wars basicly powered by The Force until the Corellians build one that replaced the Spacemagic parts with "mechanical" ones, sooo ist was at some point really driven by Space Magic
And well, with telepathie and ESP you REALLY notice when Star Wars was written
Wait, really? I'd never heard that...do you have somewhere I could go read up on that? I've never understood completely how hyderdrives work in SW, except for them running them on what seems like TRS-80 level tech (in that they can't deviate from set "lanes" and such), unlike Trek which you can go to warp in space at almost anytime, for any reason, and not get smooshed.
@@Corbomite_Meatballs must have been one of the Essential Guides and in Parts KotOR 1 where it was mentioned and Hyperlanes are more fairways and that you can "jump to lightspeed" outside them but the navigation is more complex or unsafe since the Hyperdrive is way faster than Warp, it's like steaming Fullspeed ahead though the Northsea, that begs to run aground on a Sandbank or a Rock.
As a writer I’ve realized what draws people in and pushes them away from universes like Lotr, Star Trek, Warcraft, etc. The biggest things are consistency and grounding.
When a story follows consistent rules and behaviors, the suspension of disbelief stays low and the IP is enjoyable; when an orphan with no training can best a sith knight with years of training over the course of a minute, people leave your work by the millions.
Grounding is what draws us in: why is it relatable? The environment, the struggle, the people? The better explained and detailed it is, the easier it is to stay connected, and when those elements are called into question during the story, the audience is as eager to resolve it as the characters. This is why overpowered characters are almost always boring and uninteresting, as are characters that never make mistakes or do anything wrong.
Star Trek grounds itself in an above average capacity and has average consistency. It was higher but thanks to the constant push to produce content for the universe those values keep dropping over the last 20 years. This is only my opinion, of course.
Spectacle is not an appropriate compensator for story-accurate story development. Case-in-point: Discovery season 2 end battle versus DS9 fight to defend mine-laying at wormhole, season 5 ending. Discovery felt lazy, too much was on screen, along with an unlikely response to the situation. An AI is trying to take over and they’re sending several ships to hunt us down? Don’t contact Starfleet or other ships for help, of which, canonically, there are thousands in the territory by this point. No, better to clutter the screen with easily targeted and destroyed minor vehicles that distract from the importance of what’s happening.
DS9: when’s Starfleet sending help? Oh they’re busy with something important and can’t spare ships, that sounds unlikely but at least it’s addressed. So we can defend the Defiant on our own? Maybe, but if we don’t, the entire quadrant is at risk. We do have improved shields that the Dominion and Cardassians don’t realize we’ve developed, and the Rotarran is hiding nearby to ensure it ambushes any attackers. The minefield is setup, how do we win this battle? ...oh, we’re leaving the station? ...When are we coming back home?
Night versus Day.
This was excellent Rick. I love your videos and I'm always excited to see you have another Star Trek video delving into ships and technologies.
I think part of the reason the explanation for the spore drive doesn't work for a lot of people is because it feels too small. Matter/antimatter reactions, we get it, that generates a lot of power, makes a big ship go fast, etc. But "the ship inhales magic mushroom dust and now it can teleport" feels too far out there. A ship teleporting feels like too big a thing to happen because of mushroom spores (honestly anything teleporting because of mushroom spores feels absurd unless maybe you're in a Super Mario game).
Haha. I would love a fan-edit of _Discovery_ where they replace the Spore Jump effect with an animation and sound effect of the ship passing through a Warp Pipe.
Agreed, its just a plot device instead of its own interesting concept to be explored.
I think another factor is Trek usually has science consultants as well, to extrapolate where current tech could end up in the future. It's how the communicators in TOS become flip phones irl eventually, and the touch screen tech from TNG eventually hits irl too. They generally don't go too far beyond the possible for most things.
Touch screens were actually invented before even TOS, many of the screens in the TNG era shows were real touch screens and actually did things when you touched them.
Absolutely they did - when they did TNG they actually consulted with NASA for speculative opinions as to how the tech would work & even what kind of tech.
Love this video. I had never thought about your layers of technobable explaination, but that makes a lot of sense.
Excellent video! ⭐️ I totally agree with you.
When you ask someone “How does the Heisenberg compensator work?” and they answer “Very well,” you want to know that they’re laughing with you not at you. Trek’s tongue is always in its cheek. Everything is true, “Especially the lies.”
Say, that reminds me, I need some pants hemmed and jacket sleeves shortened.
The spore drive always gave me an nosebleed, but i could never articulate why, you did that now, thanks mate
Big problem with the spore drive is why did no other race discover and develop it? it has too great of a tactical advantage to not use it. And there are plenty of very old and advanced races whom would have had more than enough time to do so.
@@Stormcrow_1 simple answer; They did. That's how there are so many godlike beings to whom distance and time is just a suggestion.
@@kendrakiraiexcept they don't use spore drives
@shocktnc How do you know? Just because it doesn't look like the ones the Federation uses doesn't mean they don't use a form of it, or used it in the past.
A lot of the high tech stuff in Star Trek feels like it's there because it sounds or looks high tech.
another thing I think helps is that for the most parts the characters treat these as tech that's well known in universe so you don't get (often) get info-dumped on things the characters should already know nor do the characters really "speak to the audience" when they explain things. Some franchises fail on this account (and Star Trek does sometimes too, nobody is perfect after all) and over explain things in a way that sounds unnatural or sounds like they're breaking the 4th wall to explain things to audience that in-universe characters know, Star Trek avoids this for the most part.
That internal consistency is the key for me. So, if someone says "Chronotons" you know there's some time stuff going on.
Also the best episodes don't rely on technobabble as a solution. It's fine if technobabble instigates the plot, as long as it doesn't *resolve* the problem.
Too bad "Tachyons" are such a catch-all, though...
The cool thing about all the layers is they actually become part of the writing and stories, they aren't just an explanation in a reference book for ultra nerds somewhere.
The downside of this is when a series or movie ignores some of these established rules, it becomes way more of an issue.
This is actually one of the things I love about Star Trek, most other sci-fi franchises don't even bother trying to explain anything, and where Star Wars has been amazing at building the Star Wars universe creating backstories that cover thousands of years, and setting in stone what's canon and what's not because the people behind it know that's what their fans really care about. Star Trek has just now in the last ten+ years really started to really decide what's canon and what's not partly I think because of the J.J. Abrams movies and the need to show how they coexist with everything before them, but what the people behind Star Trek have done better than anyone else mainly because they know their fans care is the science of the Star Trek universe and putting out the technical manuals. The level of detail they put into them is amazing. I truly believe if it was currently possible to build on the scale of a starship like the Enterprise that you could use the blueprints in the manuals to do it.
I like that it's "like real life unless noted".
Another good example is Gundam and the Minovsky particle. What is the Minovsky particle? It's a byproduct of nuclear fusion that expands in a lattice and disrupts electromagnetic waves, preventing long range radio communication, constantly giving an emp-like effect to circuits, and eventually dissipating visible light. You can shield against it, but it's relatively heavy. So long range guided missiles don't work, lasers eventually dissipate, long distance targeting is basically impossible, and it also has some implications for beam weapons being possible (apparently).
Sure seams like a good excuse as to why giant robots that carry big guns and energy swords are feasibly dogfighting in universe rather than just laser, railgun, or missiling people from the opposite orbit.
Except G-Gundam. I mean it's awesome, but it's whole reason for existence is "what if giant fighting robots had mystical kung-fu magic?"
Trek-Tech works because it doesn't just reply on the "space magic" principle to make it happen. There is some grounding (no matter how limited or slight) in real-world science, and there is marvellous consistency between episodes and series when it comes to technobabble and the development/evolution of the tech.
I thought the spore drive is just a massive transporter, and they use the spore network to send the signal threw as it all over the universe, but can be confusing when they can go halfway into the network when saving tilly
Hot take: they've actually done a *really good job* _not_ explaining the Spore drive.
The way it's presented is:
- Stamets knows how it works
- Tilly knows how it works
- Adira knows how it works
- Burnham, Ariam and Nielsen know _vaguely_ how it works
But the physics is *so complex* that without any of them staying behind in the 23rd century, there was *zero chance* of anyone implementing it again.
@@GSBarlevstarfleet would know, if they don’t that’s its own inconsistency
Thank you for the videos! I wish STO either added story content quicker or added a means to replay the various story arcs to provide fresh content for your excellent series.
I believe that you are on point with everything that you mentioned in your video. However i also think, at least in my case, that what makes Star Trek so great for me is that it has the layers as you mentioned , but they are not afraid to dabble with concepts and theories that are almost unbelievable to us average citizens of the "Dark Ages" as McCoy once called our 21st century existence.
Haven’t played it myself, but a lot of ships I’ve seen in Star Citizen convey this super convincing and almost tactile impression. I think they look even more real than what Star Trek delivers, but it also feels much close to out time than the golden age of Trek.
The spore drive shenanigans visually seems to be like deus ex machina above the standard warp drive.
This is a fantastic video for any writer to watch. It doesn't matter if it is books, shows, movies, or games, world building has a huge impact on the popularity of a story. I think most people underestimate how important it is. I wish I could show this to every writer out there.
This is the most important Star Trek video you have made yet. You have explained simply the idea that makes trek work. This should be required watching for anyone working on the new shows.
Even voy which has trechnobable in 60% of its dialog, (it feels like it at least), is just consistent enough and uses enough real-world science to make it believable
Really been a fan of your vids for a couple years now sir, be they class breakdowns, legacy videos or the Story Series of STO. Keep up the great work Ric!
This layering is one of my favorite things about Trek. It's always disappointing to peel back the layers and find nonsense. But when you peel back the layers of Trek you find lovingly-crafted technical manuals and beautiful schematics. The great designers like Sternbach, Probert and Eaves clearly designed their ships, props and sets with the fictional science and design lineages in mind. The ships didn't just have to look cool or scary, they had to look RIGHT in the technological and cultural context already established. That kind of passion and craftsmanship is a rare thing. As a visual person, that's why the tech feels believable to me.
Well done, Rick! Cranking the Geek-O-Meter up to 11! Loved it!
I think a large part of making the technology believable is simply making it not overpowered. If the characters have a technology so powerful that it can accomplish their goals with relative ease, that makes it not believable. If, however, the characters have to understand how their technology works, and they have to use it in a way that they find challenging, that makes the story compelling, and the compelling story makes the technology more believable.
Good point there.
That was an excellent video man, really well put!
This has crystallised a lot of ideas I’ve had while discussing some of these topics with people.
Especially the layers of mechanics ultimately leading to “because we said so”, as I realised there’s still no definitive answer as to whether a warp coil alone can warp space or if you always need dilithium plasma to do it. Ultimately both have been said to have subspace components and it’s fiction and doesn’t really matter. But that’s when I started to think, this isn’t as well thought out as it seems on the surface and they just have a lot of interlocking smoke and mirrors to keep it looking fairly plausible without much digging.
It’s still fun to talk about though.
The Phoenix was able to jump to Warp 1 w/o dil (that we know of) and likely some type of warp coil. Pretty sure ENT didn't have dil, but I can't find a good source to say whether or not that's the case.
As a man of science myself, I think a huge part was that the script writers would literally write [Insert Technobabble] in some places, and get consultants with physics, chemistry, or medical backgrounds to fill in the blanks. Using real terms, real theory's, etc. really creates a layer of immersion that hasn't often been matched.
Watching Skallagrim? He did a video on verisimilitude himself earlier. I love verisimilitude in my sci-fi, that small amount of realism act as a bridge that brings you into the world
I have watched him before yeah! But have not recently, no
Long ago in the TOS times I asked similar questions. I found out Gene actually talked to NASA and other scientists asking them what might be possible. Since then I have always kept that thought that - who knows it might happen. After all look at cell phones and tablets :D
Thank you again Rick.
For all you're hard work.
As well as your reasons Rick, I always thought that the tech was also loosely supported by current established theories in Newtonian, Einsteinian and Quantum physics.
Great subject to discuss.👏💯
Huh, your three-step breakdown of the Spore Drive helps explain why, even though I love when there's a lot of detail to unpack in a sci-fi element, I'm usually good with just one or two layers of explanation. I _like_ knowing how certain techs are supported, but once I get the "What" and the first "How," I usually don't care that much unless I've fallen in love with the show. It's like the G-Diffuser System on the Arwing -- I was fine with "it allows the Arwing to perform otherwise impossible maneuvers in-atmosphere" but I know way more about it than that.
You explained it perfectly.
That's also why when they introduce something like the Q, they shouldn't explore it too much because, as it is outside our comprehension and outside the realm of believable technobabble, it should remain in the dark to preserve the mystery. (although, as someone generally curious, I still want an answer and the attempt is still commandable to a point, Klingon appearance explained in Enterprise was perfectly fine to me despite the obvious "we could have acknowledge the budget was a thing in the 60s and got away with that, the ballsy way".
As for the Q, as Picard once stated: "I refuse to believe that the universe was THAT badly designed." so the Q have to come from somewhere, they can't come from nothing and they have to have some limitations, only blinded by their arrogance, so my take on the Q is that they are NEAR omibpotent beings, but they can't be truly omnipotent, otherwise they would have created reality itself, which is clearly not the case. The closest explanation that I could find is that they are ascended beings... like the Ancients in Stargate.
This is an element of why I feel new Trek has some consistency issues. Discovery had the psychic space child tantrum near magic rocks kill millions of people and the Turbo Lift void. Though I think I'm bugged more by how large rocks are an issue for Discovery's shields in one episode of Disovery, and then shields in an episode of Strange New Worlds can handle putting the ship inside a brown dwarf without a slight issue with the air conditioning.
I'm still bugged by S2 of Picard having Wesley Crusher say that the Universe is constantly nudged onto a timeline of his groups preference, and even more so that the time line they preferred is the one with the Burn :/
The Travelers / Watchers probably had to adhere to the terms of the Temporal Accords, so influencing events after the Temporal Wars would have been off the table.
I'm reminded of a comment by a showrunner (paraphrased), "You don't have to be realistic. You just need to be convincing."
That's why I love Star trek so much because the do there best to explain how the technology works and make it as believable as possible.
Good analysis, Rick. The layers of comprehension apply not only to the fictional realm of Star Trek, but to the average person's knowledge of how basic devices function in the real world. For example, devices such as cars, microwave ovens, and ball point pens require specialized knowledge to create, but only a superficial knowledge to operate; in each of these examples, most people who could use the device wouldn't be tasked with repairing it, even if their knowledge extends to the second layer of "how does that work?" Not only do the layers of Trek technology mimic our understanding of the real world, but also characters in Trek are, by definition, often experts in some aspect of the technology, allowing for the drip-feeding effect of explaining in-universe to other characters who are not conversant with the minutiae. Thus the characters' acceptance of the explanations given encourages the audience's credulity to extend to the plot point in a reasonable manner.
Great vid Rick. You are also a master of world building. Love your stuff.
This was a really good episode and highlights one of the best aspects of the franchise.
Just last night while watching an episode of VOY my gf asked "How do they recharge the ship"
And star treks rules are sufficiently consistent that i was actually able to answer her question reasonably easily
It Did however highlight for me the fact that the supply of Antimatter aboard voyager was never highlighted as an issue, Only the quality available compared to local species'
Leading me to conclude that Starfleet ships can either Generate sufficient quantities with relative ease, OR has a high yield process of finding and purifying it in the field
I mean surface of stars are practically particle colliders so finding a way to skim anti-matter from stars even at a distance seems to be within Star Fleet capabilities
Mycelial network is similar to dilithium crystals as in both exists in multiple subspace domains at the same time. Just like it's possible to travel between parallel universes, it's possible to travel between subspace domains. Each universe or subspace domain has intrinsic frequency which makes them mostly invisible to other universes and subspace domains. Travelling between them involves phase shift in molecular structure of any creature or object. The intrinsic frequency is similar to function of holograms where the image is only visible when viewed at certain angle. Because everything still exists in same _space_ but not same absolute time, things in one universe or subspace domain can affect others, but most people don't notice anything unless the space-time distance is small enough.
So then why is the magic mushroom capable of instant transmission but the crystal isn’t?
What helps me believe some of it, is how much of it is actually happening around us, cell phones and the like, I mean what you went over helps too, but it's not hard to believe the rest of it, when you can look around and everyone has at least one of TOS's communicators, lol.
It's fine that most saifi don't dive too deeply into how things work. Most people don't know how the internal combustion engine in their car works and they're okay with that
Amazing timing or the release, as i am going to try to answer this question too. At my University, i participate in a class, where we try to get to know how science is broadcasted in a way as it entertains people, while beeing accurate. Therefore, i am going to give a talk about Star Trek and how science is portaited there. Your Video is a great source for that. Allthough, according to the sources i have read so far, Star Trek is also asumed to be a social fiction. This means that the franchise combines the aspects of technologie with the social circumstances. Like, what kind of technologie is it and how does it benefit peoples needs? And how these people behave paralel to the technologie? Furthermore, the Show functions as a projection of human behavior and problems, which leads to the possibility to reflect on ongoing problems like war or destruction of the enviorment.
My Sources: Quelle: Wenger, Christian: Jenseits der Sterne. Gemeinschaft und Identität in Fankulturen - Zur Konstitution des Star Trek-Fandoms. Bielefeld, 2006 and Quelle: Richter, Thomas: STAR TREK und die Wissenschaften: Der Weltraum, das Raumschiff, die Abenteuer… In: Rogotzki, Nina; Richter, Thomas; Brandt, Helga et al. [Hrsg.] Kiel, 2009, S.11 - S.16 (I know its in german, but i was to lazy to translate it.)
There is a lot of talk about “consistency” in the comments but I think a part that goes understated in regards to the believability of Star Trek tech is when it breaks an established rule or two here or there as a means of advancing a narrative and further enriching the universe. These events are usually referenced as a kind of breakthrough moment of discovery. Scotty would state in an episode that he can’t just break the laws of physics, would proceed to break that law of physics through some ingenious deus ex machina, and future trek shows would use it as a reference to deal with contemporary problems. It’s not dissimilar to how experimentation breaks some ignorant assumptions we make about what we feel are fairly well grounded scientific explanations in the real world.
Nothing touches The Expanse for being believable. But Star Trek has always been close behind, just because of how consistent it is throughout the canon.
The tech is believable, but their limited use of it and their lack of safety and security is not!
Yeah, I mean, I can't see it being very safe to put rocks inside the consoles.
If OSHA survived until the 2300's they would implode the moment an agent stepped on a Federation ship.
@@-epistemusIndeed. Worf’s spinal cord injury certainly comes to mind.
@@masterhypnos6783 Hey, those empty barrels aren't going to just NOT hit someone!
To OP's point: Why aren't they just transporting cargo to secure spots instead of manually handled cargo, or using gravity plating as a means of anchoring them?@@Corbomite_Meatballs
Stargate sg1 starts off with mp5s and Kevlar and ends with particle weapons and space superiority fighters and it all makes sense
Pretty awsome and deadly lazer weopons from big to small.
Apart from fictional technologies, what is often left under-explained is that many FTL ways of travel is only mathmatically FTL, ie. divide distance by time, instead of an object (spaceship) physically moving faster than the speed of light. Quantum entanglement, as you briefly touched on, together with folding space, are perhaps the best examples of this.
Rally insightful, nice work :)
I want a DS9 esk show but with a universe class ship. Do you have any ideas in mind.
This is a very helpful video on the topic of storytelling as much as Trek specifically. Loki, for example, is a great series but the main character does a complete 180 on his entire personality in the first episode, that's not enough to spoil a well told story completely but it does take a little shine off of it. It's a completely non-trek, non-tech example but I think it's about the same thing.
Stories have to both be different from reality, otherwise you've made a documentary, but they also have to have an ending, that follows from the middle, which follows from the beginning. It can be very difficult to find the line where you depart enough from reality to tell the story you want to tell but not so far that you give into "well it's fiction so anything can happen!" Then it's just completely random series of unconnected events, we're reminded it isn't real and nothing matters and then... well why should we care?
Great video Dude!
I think the most accurate tech is the sublight impulse engine since it is basically a fusion engine and something very similar to an impulse engine has plans to make a debut in 2027
No no no, it's the other way around with warp drive. Alcubierre apparently literally send an email to Shattner that his warp drive was inspired by star trek. He also refers to "the warp drive in science fiction" in his paper. The warp drive was, thus, pretty much invented in star trek and is now worked on in the real world - NOT the other way around!
Pretty sure I did say "from TNG" onwards when referring to the standardised warp behind the scenes. I was not sure exactly why they settled on that drive to explain warp but I know that it did happen at a point waaay post-TOS, it's cool to see that theory was inspired by Star Trek!
For me Star Trek always throw something at the crew that they cannot deal with immidietly or have no idea what the hell is going on. A percived futuristic crew with gadgets find something they cannot comprehend always moves the science team itself into a kinship with you. As they just as stumped at an event then you are so their approach looks as good as yours and this way you feel leveled with them and don't question their methods as in such case you would questino yourself.
So yeah I just feels like an Ensign that pokes around them and pretend I know everything so they don't get suspicios haha.
I think you brought up a lot of good points and your tips are very helpful for anyone creating their own sci-fi universes to craft stories within.
I really wish someone would make a Revelation Space series. Chasm City would be such a fun movie!
I always appreciated that Star Trek at least tries to explain things. It actually makes it more believable for me when something doesn’t have an explanation. How does telepathy work? “We don’t know”, is a perfectly reasonable answer to that. If enough things have an answer than it is more believable when something doesn’t. They don’t know everything and that’s ok. At least the audience knows that they’re trying to find out.
Can we talk about how warp drive has changed? During old trek, and before the Alcubierre warp drive, the way warp drive worked was by using subspace. The warp bubble would phase the ship with subspace, thus reducing the ships apparent mass, allowing for FTL. If you watch certain episodes of TNG or even voyager, they even make references to this. But ever since Alcubierre's warp drive theory became commonly known both the fandom and the modern shows all imply that's how warp drive works. Which is fine, but I'm confused on where subspace fits into the equation now.
THIS THIS THIS!! I've never heard anyone else talk about this. The warp field reduces the ship's apparent mass so that the impulse drive can push the ship past 1c. The further the mass is reduced, the faster you can go. This would also be a direct result of the existence of, and the ability to manipulate, the "graviton" (which is used all over other Trek technologies). Once you can manipulate gravity, you have access to the OTHER side of that equation… apparent mass.
I think I remember something about like... the more you warp space around something, the deeper into subspace it gets submerged.
Picture folding the plane of space around something until it's in effectively a closed pocket hanging from the underside of the plane.
I don't remember where I heard that concept though.
That wasn’t the explanation for warp drive, that was the explanation for impulse drive and how it’s better than “regular” thrusters (which themselves are already microfusion rockets!)
It doesn’t matter how much you reduce the inertial mass, so long as it’s positive you’ll still merely asymptotically approach c. Subspace was always said to create a warp bubble around the ship and ride the wave, this even was made very explicit in the TNG episode about the “soliton wave” (which is actually what inspired Alcubierre IIRC!)
In 1976 Norman Spinrad coined the term “rubber science” for what we call Treknobabble. According to him, it exists basically for readers to hang their Willing Suspension Of Disbelief from. It has to be within the realm of the possible *as far as the layman reader is concerned* and all uses and modifications of it have to be consistent with each other.
He used it to describe any fictional science in SF from the “super science” of the OG space operas to that of Star Trek.
Your analysis holds up pretty well for Str Trek but I’ll point out that the OG space opera authors would often begin with a scientific effect that simply wasn’t real and write a story around it, sometimes successfully from a literary standpoint. In those cases your analytic points would come in reverse order.
For example:
Suppose it was possible to partially suppress the inertial mass of matter within a defined volume without killing living things within that volume. Then, you could build spacecraft capable of reaching very large fractions of the speed of light without having to carry ridiculous amounts of fuel.
Further suppose that inertial mass could be completely suppressed, again without killing anything. Then, your ships could exceed the speed of light by very large margins.
That allows galaxy-spanning drama involving huge space battles, interstellar politics, and no small amount of romance.
That’s more or less the story of E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Bergenholm Drive which allowed him to write the Lensman series.
The care given to reasonably explaining and staying consistent with the in universe technology is one reason I became a Trek fan as a kid, and that lack of care and creativity is why I hate everything from Secret Hideout.
"The Mycelial Network"
I think that your problems with the Discovery Spore Drive disappear if you think of less as a proper drive and more as a kind of super transporter that teleports the entire ship instead of people and cargo. So my Layer 3 for the Spore Drive would be:
Mycelial spores are quantum entangled with the Mycelial Network and the Spore Drive forms a field which envelops the ship and allows it flow through the network which acts like a vast network of superhighways in subspace. After the field dissipates, the ship emerges at its destination normal space.
This would explain why the Glenn once "spun out" killing everyone aboard after a bad jump. And why the creatures living in Mycelial space where able to "clone" Culber.
Yeah except that's SW level force magic bullshit, aka inconsistent with the Trek universe. nuTrek did it his way specifically to appeal to midwit bugmen.
"Believable" and "consistent" are not terms I would use to describe Star Trek technology. The term "technobabble" emerged from TNG for a reason.
I don't consider that to be a deal-breaker when it comes to enjoying the stories. A given episode is generally internally consistent enough for whatever magic governs a phaser or transporter this time around to make sense in the context of that episode, and having whizbang sci-fi tech like teleporters and brightly colored beam guns is part of the aesthetic. The fact that those systems will rely on similar but different rules a couple plot arcs from now (and they worked a bit differently last season) doesn't really change the characters, and those are where Trek really shines anyway. Seeing the clever captain and brave crew facing interesting villains and dangerous phenomena is what makes Trek compelling; the photon torpedoes and warp cores are almost incidental.
Trek deserves its place as a trendsetter in sci-fi. But the tech the characters use is... Not what I'd bank on to sell the setting.
There really should have been a shout-out in the video for James Doohan bugging the first season TOS writers to start from a place where "this specific part of the engine is broken" rather than just "it will take six hours to get engines back".
Beyond consistency and having a layered explanation, I believe it's important that the characters come across as understanding how things work as they use them. Because if it looks like _they_ believe that it can happen, it's much easier for the watching audience to believe it can too. I have no problem believing something can and will happen when someone like Scotty or Data say that they can make it happen. And I have grown a strong dislike for any 'a Q did it' type of handwaving. If there's any tech in _Trek_ I don't like, it's the 'do anything, anywhere, any time sort' that sucks any tension out of any scene where such is readily accessible. Which is the ultimate failure of _DISCO_ in its recent seasons. There are no stakes because there's no reason to believe Michael Burnham can't do whatever's needed instantly.
another faction is from TOS to ENG there was a focuses on have characters normalize common technology, sometime actors where ask to imagine themself in setting and improvise what they think would be normal.
I've heard of this idea of only needing up to 3 layers of explanation for a lore decision, to be satisfactory. A classic post is one that explains "Why don't the vampires use the sewer systems to travel around the town?" A: Because there are giant alligators. Q. Why are there giant alligators and how do they survive down there? A. There's a group of nuns that keep them fed and protected. Q. Where did the NUNS COME FROM? A. The nuns use the alligators to protect the town from the vampire menace. Duh. Anything beyond that is just over thinking it.
I heard that idea a long while ago. The basis for this video is that "Layer theory", but I could not find an actual name for it so that made it hard to trace where I had heard it before. Was trying to actually find a name for it like "Occam's Razor" or "Chekhov's Gun" so I could reference it properly but I couldn't find it again. :/
If you're getting too worried about how they eat, and breath just repeat to yourself it's just a show. You should really just relax.
The part about the technical manuals being a shortcut and supplementary material only is a very good reason why it would be a fundamentally bad idea to make Star Wars movies or TV shows based too heavily on the expanded universe, because many people have not seen anything of it and would get confused and frustrated if they had to consult novels or comic books in order to understand what is going on on screen
You mean like they did with the JJ Wars movies, where you had to read all sort of ancillary stuff to understand what was going on in the movies?
(And, they started doing that w/ the Kelvinverse stuff, but stopped after a point.)
@@Corbomite_Meatballs I didn't even know that was an issue
I hope you can also discuss Stargate’s believability, since it is not set in a distant future, but in our current time.
I haven’t seen you discuss Stargate in any video. Thanks in advance! 😊
technically its based in the past
Let's not get too wild here. The season seven TNG episodes with the element of the week and Voyager's triaxilating everything once 7 of 9 joined did plenty to do their damnedest to test our suspension of disbelief.
6:50 I'm not sure what you're trying to say, Quantum Entanglement in real life or in science fiction? Because IRL we *know* it doesn't facilitate the transfer of _information_ faster than the speed of light. In scifi sometimes it does for some reason or another which is fine, I'm just curious which you're talking about.
I interviewed for a job as a service technician at a very young 3D Printer company 26 years ago, and during the interview with the CTO he asked me where I thought this company & technology would be in the future, well, lets just say the Star Trek Fan in me spoke up without thinking with "well sir, in the future when the Captian asked for a cup of Earl Grey Hot at the replicator I hope it will have our company logo". I then thought I blew the interview once my brain kicked in and thought "WTF did you just say?". well the CTO sat there for what seemed like an eternity before saying "I ask that question to every candidate and your answer was the most positive & futuristic answer I ever got, I like your vision, when can you start?" I'm still working for them today and with our Direct metal printing and now biological printing we are still a long way off from replicators but much closer.
Sometimes I feel like Star Trek can be more believable than harder sci-fi like The Expanse largely because the audience has done the work of suspending disbelief. When you realize that a perfectly airtight pressure vessel is pretty much impossible in real life, and anything we do have, whether it's the ISS or a submersible, can only be built to acceptable tolerances, building something like a colony or a large interstellar space craft meant to support a human crew that can survive long term in space becomes harder to get a handle on. I'm not an engineer, so there's probably plenty of ways to do it that I'm just not familiar with. But the closer a sci-fi property tries to edge toward real life, the sooner some stuff just starts to fall apart.
When Prax was explaining simple/complex systems after the Ganymede incident, I found it harder to get a handle on just how colonizing the solar system like this was even feasible.
If you have a hull breach on the Rocinante, you can seal off that section, and try to keep what's left. But any oxygen you lost is just… gone. All you can do is hold it together until you have a chance to resupply. Where do their suppliers get their oxygen from? Or for that matter, where does all the atmosphere on Mars, Ganymede, or Tycho come from? Well, they can probably get some from spaceborn ice, and recycle it with onboard botanical systems, but if you trace the roots back far enough, it mostly comes from Earth. …With whom they have constantly tense diplomatic relations. So try not to breath too deeply. Don't they ever run out? No, they film in Toronto. There's plenty of air there.
If you have a hull breach on the Enterprise, forcefields go up to keep the atmosphere contained, then they get to work on repairing the hull. Any oxygen that was lost gets replaced by the life support system. Where does the oxygen come from? Replicators, I guess. Try not to think about it too hard. Look! Tribble! Cute!
Remember that you breathe out CO2. O2 is part of that. We've been doing that for a long time and gotten very efficient at it, even now in the 21st century. I imagine by the time the Expanse is set in, it's even better. But they do address this in the prep before fighting the stealth ship around the spin station earlier in the series. They purge all their O2 into tanks and go into suits to prevent just what you describe; being shot up meaning you lose all your O2. Of course, if your O2 tank gets hit, you're in trouble but it's still a smaller target than the whole ship.
ruclips.net/video/f1dARQGAzNA/видео.html
I love that the tech behind Star Trek has all of those layers, if you look into the tech manuals and other sources, as well as what we see on screen. It does make it more believable to me.
But I still have the same question about warp drive: How did Zeph get antimatter to power the Phoenix? Or di-lithium crystals, for that matter. Did he find it in Montana? Did that missile that he converted into a space ship have an antimatter warhead? If so, the earth would have been in pieces if they used such weapons in WW3. My guess is that warp drive can be powered in different ways, from something as old fashion as a fission power plant (which he could have built from the warhead, and also explains the radiation that killed all of those people in the launch tube), fusion power, though I doubt we'd have a mini fusion plant in 2063, and, of course, antimatter. As well as the Romulans who use a artificial singularity to generate power (and gives proof you don't need antimatter in canon).
The Phoenix probably had a fission power pack system similar to the ones we put on long range space probes. Which is one of the reasons it could just make warp one, the other being less advanced warp coils, plus no di-lithium. Once humanity teamed up with the Vulcans, they got advanced power plants - though why the Vulcans would give earth antimatter tech is something I don't understand, unless they figured we would make a good ally in the long term.
I think its there flaws. Transporters fail sometimes(or more than sometimes), warp travel takes huge amounts of energy and even takes time to travel around the universe, if the warp core fails its go with a big boom, shields can adapt to phaser fire to lower the damage, food from replicators tasts good but is never better than "real" good food.
Three layers deep...that is something I'll have to keep in mind for my own fictional work.
It should be "Heisenberg" not "Heisenburg" (4:35).
Berg = mountain
Burg = stronghold/castle