The hilarious part of that is, goofy as it sounds, the spore drive has more roots in actual science than most of the BS the TNG era came up with put together ("crack in the event horizon", anyone?).
Granted, I am not a mycologist but I had multiple semesters of mycology and know my way around mycorrhiza and mycels and in no way makes the spore drive any sense, especially since it is fueled by spores. If you just needed Tardigrade DNA to "wander" the magic subspace network it's one thing, but the whole concept is really dumb. It's different, granted, but dumb.
It's fairly recent science that was published around the time DSC would've been in development; the show's Paul Stamets is named after one of the scientists who worked on it. Plants in a forest were determined to be able to pass information around on a limited basis (in the form of chemical traces like carbon and hormones) by means of fungal mycelia. http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141111-plants-have-a-hidden-internet
This being Star Trek, they mashed up the real (or erroneous in the case of tardigrades being capable of HGT) science with hefty amounts of technobabble. But they're at least trying to use scientific terminology correctly, which is better than TNG, VGR, and ENT did most of the time.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,582Community Moderator
Is the Spore Drive really that hard to imagine, especially considering all the other kinds of FTL drives that exist in sci-fi?
I mean in an old novel, I believe the title was Timemaster, FTL was achieved with help from basically a living powder puff creature, and with some tweaking it allowed for Time Travel.
Is the Spore Drive really that hard to imagine, especially considering all the other kinds of FTL drives that exist in sci-fi?
I mean in an old novel, I believe the title was Timemaster, FTL was achieved with help from basically a living powder puff creature, and with some tweaking it allowed for Time Travel.
The Libby/Sheffield Paradrive, in Heinlein's Future History series, operated by using a Hilbert space of n dimensions, and uncoupling from the x and y axes of threespace to traverse to another point in the same threespace. In Time Enough For Love, someone came up with the idea of changing vector along the t-axis, designating "time", thus turning the Paradrive into a time machine as well as an FTL device. A semi-sequel, The Number of the Beast-, gave us the complementary Burroughs-Carter Continua Device, which assumes an overspace of six dimensions; to access any given universe within them, you take three of those dimensions to define space and one to define time. Combining the two, you can travel to any point in a large sheaf of multiverses (turns out that if your selections are too far off from your point of origin, you can find universes you can't exist in.)
(There were other implications as well, resulting in the creation of the Theory of Pandimensional Multipersonal Solipsism - ideas can, if strong enough, spin off "fictons" to form the basis of the creation of another universe, with the probability being increased the more minds share that idea. The protagonists visited Barsoom, the world of the Lensman series, Wonderland, and Oz before happening upon the protagonists of TEFL. Turned out two of the people from TNotB were Heinlein fans, while Lazarus Long vaguely remembered reading a serialization, way back in the 20th Century before the Interregnum, with four people traveling through space in a modified flying car. It had gotten as far as them running into a starship that seemed to recognize them, much as the Dora had, before the "To Be Continued"...)
Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium/Empire of Man series had the Alderson Drive, which worked on "lines of thermonuclear flux" between stars. Get to the Alderson Point, pour a great deal of energy into it, and you find yourself instantaneously (as far as anyone could tell) translated to the other end of the "tramline". Each tramline only went to one other place, but some stars have multiple tramlines (the Imperial capitol was selected because it has more tramlines than any other known system, even Sol); a given tramline can be altered, destroyed, or created due to stellar proper motion and other events. (A second tramline opened to the Mote system after a protostar formed its red-dwarf star.) I say "as far as anyone can tell" because something about the transition damages all known processing systems; humans recover faster than computers, with the rate of recovery varying by age, fitness, and personal inclination.
Is the Spore Drive really that hard to imagine, especially considering all the other kinds of FTL drives that exist in sci-fi?
I mean in an old novel, I believe the title was Timemaster, FTL was achieved with help from basically a living powder puff creature, and with some tweaking it allowed for Time Travel.
Just because there is an even worse example does not make it a GOOD FTL explanation.
Hell... I wouldn't be surprised if CBS informed other IP holders about Abdin depending on how much was "borrowed" from their franchises. I actually heard a rumor that the prologue was a full on rip from Dune. I don't know if its true, but if so that is a big problem for him.
I would put this case as very similar to the Babylon 5/DS9 thing. CBS most likely did take some ideas, but it could be that just copying premises and ideas isn't enough to sue.
Except that JMS doesn't think DS9 is derivative of his work. He feels DS9 is similar to B5 due to a literary application of the concept of "Form follows function".
It's actually plausible, but unconfirmed, that DS9 was already in development when JMS pitched his idea. Thus, they declined because they felt they didn't need it. JMS once remarked that DS9 came out a little TOO soon after he made his pitch for it to have been a revamp of his idea.
> @azrael605 said: > TNG commonly used debunked scientific theories, such as "Memory RNA", which were debunked before being used on the show.
Not to mention the "baryon sweep" from the one episode of TNG, in which it's claimed the cleaning beam is deadly to lifeforms so they have to evacuate the ship while it's being done. Well, it would be, considering that baryons are an entire CATEGORY of subatomic particles that includes protons and neutrons.
And then there's the "macroviruses" VGR came up with. That sound you're hearing is every pathologist in earshot crying.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,582Community Moderator
I can dismiss the Macrovirus easily as, well... its alien. Even Starfleet medical science didn't recognize it at first. And honestly the idea that a virus could grow to that size was both interesting and kinda scary.
Also Action Hero Janeway, and how the episode ended with her basically flipping off the aliens after they hung up was good.
The Baryon Sweep... I always figured that in order to actually be effective at cleaning the ship it had to be ramped up to a level that was dangerous to the crew. I mean... water can be dangerous too if you have enough pressure. With enough pressure, even water can cut metal after all.
Some things in Star Trek aren't gonna line up with real world science because its science fiction. They have technobabble for that to help make a good story. But some things could have explanations that weren't fully covered, like my personal theory on the Baryon Sweep. Sure its headcanon, but at least it kinda makes sense. *shrug*
> @rattler2 said: > I can dismiss the Macrovirus easily as, well... its alien. Even Starfleet medical science didn't recognize it at first. And honestly the idea that a virus could grow to that size was both interesting and kinda scary.
The reason it doesn't work is because of the nature of viruses. They're not even conventionally "alive": they're just balls of protein encasing—depending on type—DNA or RNA that parasitize another organism's cells in order to reproduce, and which do literally nothing else.
Ergo "virus" is a completely nonsensical term to use for anything demonstrating a developed-enough nervous system to communicate or display herding behavior. And how do they then install their RNA into normal-sized lifeforms' cells that are about a gazillion times smaller than they are? (To say nothing of the near-impossibility of interspecies disease transmission, but TNG handwaved that with "The Chase".)
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Remember that to be science fiction, one must pay attention to the "science" part. Lester del Rey once wrote, in an early issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine:
Gentle Reader, you often ask, "Why
Isn't 'SF' the same as 'sci-fi'?"
Well, you see, there's a fine line
Between Robert Heinlein
And "Son of the Two-Headed Fly".
Trek's usually pretty good about that, only violating science in use of theories or hypotheses that are debunked sometime after the story's written (the "junk DNA" thing, for instance), or when they handwave something by extending some new science knowledge that isn't discovered until after our era (warp drive, transporters, the way Preservers managed to genetically engineer so many different worlds, that sort of thing). But the "baryonic sweep" would have removed anything harmful to the ship, all right - and the ship itself, as it's made of baryonic matter. VOY had the most egregious violations, from a "crack in the event horizon" (how does one crack what is essentially a mathematical abstraction?) to "macroviruses" to "evolution" happening to a single creature in a matter of hours (that's not "evolving", that's just DNA unraveling, in a process similar to radiation sickness).
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,582Community Moderator
I think hiding in the magnetic field is supposed to be some form of electonic camoflauge. Visually yea its not gonna hide you. But from certain types of sensors it could have an obscuring element for some types of energy emissions. We kinda don't know.
If I remember from First Contact correctly, the Enterprise-E did this to obscure her warp signature from the Vulcans. And since the Vulcans weren't actively looking for her, its possible that their warp signature was obscured enough to do the job.
So... a starship version of hiding in a bush?
I think hiding in the magnetic field is supposed to be some form of electonic camoflauge. Visually yea its not gonna hide you. But from certain types of sensors it could have an obscuring element for some types of energy emissions. We kinda don't know.
If I remember from First Contact correctly, the Enterprise-E did this to obscure her warp signature from the Vulcans. And since the Vulcans weren't actively looking for her, its possible that their warp signature was obscured enough to do the job.
So... a starship version of hiding in a bush?
yeah it's kinda hard to say what can hide something when we don't even know how the detection equipment works.
Real-life radar is also limited, both to line-of-sight (can't radar-image something on the far side of a planet, or even a fair-sized rock) and to speed-of-light (radio-frequency photons are still photons). The sensors used by starships are clearly not radar.
I mean, you can use the ol' Mk I Eyeball to spot a lot of things that sophisticated radar suites can miss (like stealthed aircraft), but detection range is even more limited. The longer the range of the detector, in general, the easier it is to spoof. That was why, in the DSC pilot, they wound up using Georgiou's antique telescope pointed out a window to spot the Klingon ship - the fancy sensors Starfleet uses could be spoofed, but eyes are harder to fool. (Unless you start painting your starships black, so they're hard to spot against the background of space, but nobody outside the old-school SF community ever seems to think about things like that.)
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
Real-life radar is also limited, both to line-of-sight (can't radar-image something on the far side of a planet, or even a fair-sized rock) and to speed-of-light (radio-frequency photons are still photons). The sensors used by starships are clearly not radar.
I mean, you can use the ol' Mk I Eyeball to spot a lot of things that sophisticated radar suites can miss (like stealthed aircraft), but detection range is even more limited. The longer the range of the detector, in general, the easier it is to spoof. That was why, in the DSC pilot, they wound up using Georgiou's antique telescope pointed out a window to spot the Klingon ship - the fancy sensors Starfleet uses could be spoofed, but eyes are harder to fool. (Unless you start painting your starships black, so they're hard to spot against the background of space, but nobody outside the old-school SF community ever seems to think about things like that.)
One of the things that contributed to the USS Fitzgerald/ACX Crystal collision a couple years ago was the fact their radar wasn't properly tuned for close-quarters navigation. The quick-tune button was in need of maintenance (like a lot of things on the ship) and had been taped-over, and due to short training hours and lack of manpower the radar tech on duty didn't realize he had to physically send somebody to another part of the ship to manually re-tune it. So their radar literally didn't pick up the 30-kiloton container ship bearing down on them. https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/uss-fitzgerald-destroyer-crash-crystal/
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Real-life radar is also limited, both to line-of-sight (can't radar-image something on the far side of a planet, or even a fair-sized rock) and to speed-of-light (radio-frequency photons are still photons). The sensors used by starships are clearly not radar.
I mean, you can use the ol' Mk I Eyeball to spot a lot of things that sophisticated radar suites can miss (like stealthed aircraft), but detection range is even more limited. The longer the range of the detector, in general, the easier it is to spoof. That was why, in the DSC pilot, they wound up using Georgiou's antique telescope pointed out a window to spot the Klingon ship - the fancy sensors Starfleet uses could be spoofed, but eyes are harder to fool. (Unless you start painting your starships black, so they're hard to spot against the background of space, but nobody outside the old-school SF community ever seems to think about things like that.)
One of the things that contributed to the USS Fitzgerald/ACX Crystal collision a couple years ago was the fact their radar wasn't properly tuned for close-quarters navigation. The quick-tune button was in need of maintenance (like a lot of things on the ship) and had been taped-over, and due to short training hours and lack of manpower the radar tech on duty didn't realize he had to physically send somebody to another part of the ship to manually re-tune it. So their radar literally didn't pick up the 30-kiloton container ship bearing down on them. https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/uss-fitzgerald-destroyer-crash-crystal/
Did no one on deck think "Gee, we're getting a little close to that container ship. Maybe we should say something?"
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
Real-life radar is also limited, both to line-of-sight (can't radar-image something on the far side of a planet, or even a fair-sized rock) and to speed-of-light (radio-frequency photons are still photons). The sensors used by starships are clearly not radar.
I mean, you can use the ol' Mk I Eyeball to spot a lot of things that sophisticated radar suites can miss (like stealthed aircraft), but detection range is even more limited. The longer the range of the detector, in general, the easier it is to spoof. That was why, in the DSC pilot, they wound up using Georgiou's antique telescope pointed out a window to spot the Klingon ship - the fancy sensors Starfleet uses could be spoofed, but eyes are harder to fool. (Unless you start painting your starships black, so they're hard to spot against the background of space, but nobody outside the old-school SF community ever seems to think about things like that.)
That's why they have bridge windows on ships. So you can physically look outside and spot the distortion patterns from cloaks.
Not canonically as far as I'm aware, but I like to think they knocked the windows in in the Coalition-Romulan War to spot cloaks and didn't cover them up until the Klingon War was over.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
Naturally-occurring magnetic fields, such as from planets' polar regions, can interfere with sensors and transporters. (TNG: "Final Mission"; DS9: "Whispers"; Star Trek Into Darkness)
Real-life radar is also limited, both to line-of-sight (can't radar-image something on the far side of a planet, or even a fair-sized rock) and to speed-of-light (radio-frequency photons are still photons). The sensors used by starships are clearly not radar.
I mean, you can use the ol' Mk I Eyeball to spot a lot of things that sophisticated radar suites can miss (like stealthed aircraft), but detection range is even more limited. The longer the range of the detector, in general, the easier it is to spoof. That was why, in the DSC pilot, they wound up using Georgiou's antique telescope pointed out a window to spot the Klingon ship - the fancy sensors Starfleet uses could be spoofed, but eyes are harder to fool. (Unless you start painting your starships black, so they're hard to spot against the background of space, but nobody outside the old-school SF community ever seems to think about things like that.)
One of the things that contributed to the USS Fitzgerald/ACX Crystal collision a couple years ago was the fact their radar wasn't properly tuned for close-quarters navigation. The quick-tune button was in need of maintenance (like a lot of things on the ship) and had been taped-over, and due to short training hours and lack of manpower the radar tech on duty didn't realize he had to physically send somebody to another part of the ship to manually re-tune it. So their radar literally didn't pick up the 30-kiloton container ship bearing down on them. https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/uss-fitzgerald-destroyer-crash-crystal/
Did no one on deck think "Gee, we're getting a little close to that container ship. Maybe we should say something?"
That's in the article too; search on "lookout". It was the middle of the night, the port and starboard lookouts had had to be combined due to personnel shortages, and the person who was supposed to be walking back and forth stayed on the port side to get some extra OJT in, ironically, spotting nearby ships from a shipmate, because he had missed a promotion on his last tour due to the captain thinking he was bad at it. They did see it, but the officer of the deck made a mistake and misjudged its position and course, and didn't wake the captain when she should have.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
You're making an awful lot of assumption about how starship sensors work. These are devices that can return results at superluminal speeds, such that you can scan something a lightyear away and get results near-instantly, not in a year's time. And based on the information made available to us in the shows (our only source of data on this point), strong magnetic fields, such as those found at planetary poles, can interfere with clear readings on starship sensors. How do we know this? Because the writers have told us so. Several times.
You can argue with the writers all you like, but in the end they're the ones defining how the sensors work, not you. And said sensors don't rely on radio-frequency photons, the way radar does - this much is quite plain. You keep making the wrong comparison, as if comparing the functioning of radar to that of sonar. They're fundamentally different technologies, with different applications, different strengths, and different weaknesses.
Real-life radar is also limited, both to line-of-sight (can't radar-image something on the far side of a planet, or even a fair-sized rock) and to speed-of-light (radio-frequency photons are still photons). The sensors used by starships are clearly not radar.
I mean, you can use the ol' Mk I Eyeball to spot a lot of things that sophisticated radar suites can miss (like stealthed aircraft), but detection range is even more limited. The longer the range of the detector, in general, the easier it is to spoof. That was why, in the DSC pilot, they wound up using Georgiou's antique telescope pointed out a window to spot the Klingon ship - the fancy sensors Starfleet uses could be spoofed, but eyes are harder to fool. (Unless you start painting your starships black, so they're hard to spot against the background of space, but nobody outside the old-school SF community ever seems to think about things like that.)
That's why they have bridge windows on ships. So you can physically look outside and spot the distortion patterns from cloaks.
Not canonically as far as I'm aware, but I like to think they knocked the windows in in the Coalition-Romulan War to spot cloaks and didn't cover them up until the Klingon War was over.
If you can see a ship with your naked eye when you are moving at even quarter impulse speed, you are crashing.
Not in Trek. If you'd noticed, speeds and positions are dependent on visual impact for the audience, not realism.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
Comments
It's fairly recent science that was published around the time DSC would've been in development; the show's Paul Stamets is named after one of the scientists who worked on it. Plants in a forest were determined to be able to pass information around on a limited basis (in the form of chemical traces like carbon and hormones) by means of fungal mycelia. http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141111-plants-have-a-hidden-internet
This being Star Trek, they mashed up the real (or erroneous in the case of tardigrades being capable of HGT) science with hefty amounts of technobabble. But they're at least trying to use scientific terminology correctly, which is better than TNG, VGR, and ENT did most of the time.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
I mean in an old novel, I believe the title was Timemaster, FTL was achieved with help from basically a living powder puff creature, and with some tweaking it allowed for Time Travel.
(There were other implications as well, resulting in the creation of the Theory of Pandimensional Multipersonal Solipsism - ideas can, if strong enough, spin off "fictons" to form the basis of the creation of another universe, with the probability being increased the more minds share that idea. The protagonists visited Barsoom, the world of the Lensman series, Wonderland, and Oz before happening upon the protagonists of TEFL. Turned out two of the people from TNotB were Heinlein fans, while Lazarus Long vaguely remembered reading a serialization, way back in the 20th Century before the Interregnum, with four people traveling through space in a modified flying car. It had gotten as far as them running into a starship that seemed to recognize them, much as the Dora had, before the "To Be Continued"...)
Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium/Empire of Man series had the Alderson Drive, which worked on "lines of thermonuclear flux" between stars. Get to the Alderson Point, pour a great deal of energy into it, and you find yourself instantaneously (as far as anyone could tell) translated to the other end of the "tramline". Each tramline only went to one other place, but some stars have multiple tramlines (the Imperial capitol was selected because it has more tramlines than any other known system, even Sol); a given tramline can be altered, destroyed, or created due to stellar proper motion and other events. (A second tramline opened to the Mote system after a protostar formed its red-dwarf star.) I say "as far as anyone can tell" because something about the transition damages all known processing systems; humans recover faster than computers, with the rate of recovery varying by age, fitness, and personal inclination.
I think that's called Whataboutism
It's not the only thing borrowed from Dune... Except that JMS doesn't think DS9 is derivative of his work. He feels DS9 is similar to B5 due to a literary application of the concept of "Form follows function".
It's actually plausible, but unconfirmed, that DS9 was already in development when JMS pitched his idea. Thus, they declined because they felt they didn't need it. JMS once remarked that DS9 came out a little TOO soon after he made his pitch for it to have been a revamp of his idea.
My character Tsin'xing
> TNG commonly used debunked scientific theories, such as "Memory RNA", which were debunked before being used on the show.
Not to mention the "baryon sweep" from the one episode of TNG, in which it's claimed the cleaning beam is deadly to lifeforms so they have to evacuate the ship while it's being done. Well, it would be, considering that baryons are an entire CATEGORY of subatomic particles that includes protons and neutrons.
And then there's the "macroviruses" VGR came up with. That sound you're hearing is every pathologist in earshot crying.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Also Action Hero Janeway, and how the episode ended with her basically flipping off the aliens after they hung up was good.
The Baryon Sweep... I always figured that in order to actually be effective at cleaning the ship it had to be ramped up to a level that was dangerous to the crew. I mean... water can be dangerous too if you have enough pressure. With enough pressure, even water can cut metal after all.
Some things in Star Trek aren't gonna line up with real world science because its science fiction. They have technobabble for that to help make a good story. But some things could have explanations that weren't fully covered, like my personal theory on the Baryon Sweep. Sure its headcanon, but at least it kinda makes sense. *shrug*
> I can dismiss the Macrovirus easily as, well... its alien. Even Starfleet medical science didn't recognize it at first. And honestly the idea that a virus could grow to that size was both interesting and kinda scary.
The reason it doesn't work is because of the nature of viruses. They're not even conventionally "alive": they're just balls of protein encasing—depending on type—DNA or RNA that parasitize another organism's cells in order to reproduce, and which do literally nothing else.
Ergo "virus" is a completely nonsensical term to use for anything demonstrating a developed-enough nervous system to communicate or display herding behavior. And how do they then install their RNA into normal-sized lifeforms' cells that are about a gazillion times smaller than they are? (To say nothing of the near-impossibility of interspecies disease transmission, but TNG handwaved that with "The Chase".)
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Gentle Reader, you often ask, "Why
Isn't 'SF' the same as 'sci-fi'?"
Well, you see, there's a fine line
Between Robert Heinlein
And "Son of the Two-Headed Fly".
Trek's usually pretty good about that, only violating science in use of theories or hypotheses that are debunked sometime after the story's written (the "junk DNA" thing, for instance), or when they handwave something by extending some new science knowledge that isn't discovered until after our era (warp drive, transporters, the way Preservers managed to genetically engineer so many different worlds, that sort of thing). But the "baryonic sweep" would have removed anything harmful to the ship, all right - and the ship itself, as it's made of baryonic matter. VOY had the most egregious violations, from a "crack in the event horizon" (how does one crack what is essentially a mathematical abstraction?) to "macroviruses" to "evolution" happening to a single creature in a matter of hours (that's not "evolving", that's just DNA unraveling, in a process similar to radiation sickness).
If I remember from First Contact correctly, the Enterprise-E did this to obscure her warp signature from the Vulcans. And since the Vulcans weren't actively looking for her, its possible that their warp signature was obscured enough to do the job.
So... a starship version of hiding in a bush?
My character Tsin'xing
I mean, you can use the ol' Mk I Eyeball to spot a lot of things that sophisticated radar suites can miss (like stealthed aircraft), but detection range is even more limited. The longer the range of the detector, in general, the easier it is to spoof. That was why, in the DSC pilot, they wound up using Georgiou's antique telescope pointed out a window to spot the Klingon ship - the fancy sensors Starfleet uses could be spoofed, but eyes are harder to fool. (Unless you start painting your starships black, so they're hard to spot against the background of space, but nobody outside the old-school SF community ever seems to think about things like that.)
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
One of the things that contributed to the USS Fitzgerald/ACX Crystal collision a couple years ago was the fact their radar wasn't properly tuned for close-quarters navigation. The quick-tune button was in need of maintenance (like a lot of things on the ship) and had been taped-over, and due to short training hours and lack of manpower the radar tech on duty didn't realize he had to physically send somebody to another part of the ship to manually re-tune it. So their radar literally didn't pick up the 30-kiloton container ship bearing down on them. https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/uss-fitzgerald-destroyer-crash-crystal/
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Did no one on deck think "Gee, we're getting a little close to that container ship. Maybe we should say something?"
Trials of Blood and Fire
Moving On Parts 1-3 - Part 4
In Cold Blood
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A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
That's why they have bridge windows on ships. So you can physically look outside and spot the distortion patterns from cloaks.
Not canonically as far as I'm aware, but I like to think they knocked the windows in in the Coalition-Romulan War to spot cloaks and didn't cover them up until the Klingon War was over.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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A magnetic field CAN, emphesis on CAN, interfere with sensors. It depends on the strength of the field. So...
That's in the article too; search on "lookout". It was the middle of the night, the port and starboard lookouts had had to be combined due to personnel shortages, and the person who was supposed to be walking back and forth stayed on the port side to get some extra OJT in, ironically, spotting nearby ships from a shipmate, because he had missed a promotion on his last tour due to the captain thinking he was bad at it. They did see it, but the officer of the deck made a mistake and misjudged its position and course, and didn't wake the captain when she should have.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
You can argue with the writers all you like, but in the end they're the ones defining how the sensors work, not you. And said sensors don't rely on radio-frequency photons, the way radar does - this much is quite plain. You keep making the wrong comparison, as if comparing the functioning of radar to that of sonar. They're fundamentally different technologies, with different applications, different strengths, and different weaknesses.
Not in Trek. If you'd noticed, speeds and positions are dependent on visual impact for the audience, not realism.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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