I’m always bugged more by individual moments than bigger things. So while T’Pol might be wearing an old fun center carpet as a uniform, and the temporal Cold War is both overly complex and excruciatingly boring neither of those things bothers me more than the following.
In season one, there is an episode titled ‘Unexpected’. In this episode Tripp becomes space pregnant from an alien space mama. During his pregnancy he is framed as becoming irrationally overconcerned about the safety of very minor or unlikely hazards.
At one point, he is in engineering and complains that if you hold onto the handrail of the elevator while it moves, your fingers will be sliced off against the scaffolding since there is no gap.
A crew member brushes him off by just saying, essentially, “Lol skill issue, just don’t hold the handguard.”
Again, Tripp is the one being framed as irrational in this discussion. Because he has a problem with a handguard that slices your fingers off.
Space hormones or not, he’s right that it’s a terrible design.
I mean… he didn’t even get on about the lack of seat belts.
Federation space ships are in fact horribly designed. - thruster placement is off balance with CoG requiring constant control inputs to go in a straight line.
- seatbelts.
- surge protection.
- replicator technology exists, yet they don’t design ships capable of being repaired with self created parts. (Even if they have to build the replicator large enough first….)
- replicators take energy and convert it to matter- or matter into energy. Yet they don’t design ships to use this as fuel.
- they send ships that are expected to go into battle- and carry children and civilians on board-but this ships are also able to go toe to toe with their equivalents from hostile races 1v2-3. But then insist they’re not warships.
- insist on not having a unit of exchange or currency, but then some how having massive amounts of trade and economy.
- their ships waste a shit load of internal volume with the saucer, the neck and the nacelles.
Hello fellow space alien posting on Terran communications boards.
All of your points are correct with the following exception:
• Matter replicators expend energy to convert it into matter, or do the opposite. It is a lossy process, meaning you do not get 100% as a return. The best S+ or A-5 engineered units are 88-98% efficient.
• Theoretically, fuel in space is “infinite” as stars and hydrogen are literally everywhere, so going to planets to gather resources to disassemble in replicators is both a literal waste of time and energy. Dilithium crystals in the show are a hilarious example of contrived scarcity for plot.
- They have carpets on the TV show. Carpets. On a space ship. That is guaranteed not a warship, because carpets.
I’ve taken the mass hit and installed gray carpets in key locations of our own ships and instigated a no shoes policy and I’ll tell you what, it’s never been more comfortable :)
You should definitely try installing carpets
- Naz
Fuel sources in Voyager are very canonically “not common.” But then that probably has more to do with using antimatter as fuel, instead of your nearest asteroid or gas pocket.
While you are correct that it is not perfectly efficient… the ability to stop off at a random star and expect to find some form of matter that can be turned into fuel simply by transporting it aboard and processing it into a singularity or something… would be extremely useful for an “exploration” ship
At least the the ships being warships carrying civilians things has a real life analog. Many (but not all) colony ships sailing Earth oceans were usually heavily armed. This was to deter pirates or privateers from raiding the ships the day after they left port and taking all the supplies they’d need for their colony. And the ships were full of women and children. And more than a few got into battles somewhere along their voyage. Then when the colonists got where they were going, in some instances they’d just pull the guns off the ship and set them up to defend the colony.
It is not canon but one of the novels mention that it was an idea to break species nationalism and encourage a meltingpot. All those kids onboard the starships would identify as Federation not as whatever planet their parents were from.
Explosions
“Haven’t any of you guys invented fuses!” - John Crichton
Farscape is one of those shows I can only tolerate in small doses but still love. Also it’s science is too bad, considering.
I tried watching it through as a background thing while playing podcast games and found it really hard to do more than a couple episodes.
It’s damn near soap level plots for a lot of it, but I really love the characters.
Yup.
A lot of the plot is just straight up bizarre. On the other hand the characters are fairly compelling, and the comedy is classic.
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their ships waste a shit load of internal volume with the saucer, the neck and the nacelles.
It’s called style.
it’s almost like they got this guy instead of proper engineers:
