You know what moment has always bugged me in Star Trek Enterprise?
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 had to reset my expectations after they dropped off that space slug on another planet cause it wasn’t doing well. Like what’s your mission to explore the galaxy and spread invasive species??
To be honest, all of this sounds like exactly what humanity would do if we stopped having scientists in charge of implementing space exploration.
Especially after Humanity's existing exploration at the time amounted to just a few colonies on otherwise uninhabited planets where WE are the primary invasive species, and limited exploration outside our immediate vicinity due to speed constraints.
The Vulcans were right about humanity in many ways, humaity is very reckless, as evidenced by many of the issues we see like these in Enterprise.
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 :)
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.
insist on not having a unit of exchange or currency, but then some how having massive amounts of trade and economy.
As you mentioned before, they have replicators, so why would they have currency inside the Federation?
They don't need money in the Federation, but since they have limited resources on a spaceship and also interact with other species, they kinda have to barter, mostly to curry favor with these species.
The gap was pretty big. No way fingers were getting sliced off. Trip was being overly dramatic.
Still not a great design, but Trip being the chief engineer, he could have ordered it changed AT ANY TIME, but never did. He just complained like an annoying pregnant woman, which was the intention of the scene.
I've seen similar problems on actual escalators. It might not slice your fingers off, but if your arm was stretched out it would snap your arm off at least. But then again I have a phobia of elevators and escalators so it is particularly apparently to me. I blame that Resident Evil movie when the person got their head cut off trying to exit a stalled elevator.
I damn near had my head taken off one time when I was a kid. I was leaned over the side looking down as the escalator went up. My mother grabbed me and yanked me back just moments before my head got stuck in the scissor trap caused by the bottom of the down escalator intersecting with the up escalator.
A couple years later I noticed the started putting plexiglass a foot or two in front of that part. I wonder how many kids didn't get their head pulled back in time before they started doing that.
What always bugged me in Voyager was that the Doctor didnt get any story lines really exploring what he is. After he got his mobile emitter from the future, he basically was a near immortal AI made of light. He could still be around doing snarky remarks during the heat death of the universe. What a waste of story potential.
Robert Picardo directed a lot of those episodes, so I'm sure he could have written in that recognition...but preferred the tension of having talent and ability mixed with a personality that made him unbearable. His character recognized this at times but never really grew. One of the better jokes was that all the other EMRs of him were so toxic that they were decommissioned as doctors and put to work piloting garbage transports.
The Enterprise crew is a bunch or warlike cowboys hopping at random and breaking things everywhere.
The series actually acknowledges that. Several times.
What I really like is the soothing and cheerful opening theme, that tends to play just after some 2% of Earth is destroyed, or somebody decides to kill half of the galaxy.
The opening theme is garbage. I say that as someone who actually enjoys the most cheasy opening themes from the worst TV shows of all time, because horrible TV shows opening themes are a very unique style of jingle composition.
The opening theme for Enterprise is not an opening theme at all. It's just some random song that maybe someone on set liked at the time.
The one that irrationally bugged me was when Tripp told the captain that he lowered the chair by 1cm, and the chair was still too high for everyone who sat there.. I know it's not supposed to be noticable but I could tell somehow that it wasn't lowered at all
Do I remember them decontaminating the dog at one point? I haven't seen the show since its original run.
But yeah the decontamination chamber was pretty much someone at Paramount saying "Guys I've got this great plot device we can use to peel our cast of pretty people down to their undies sometimes, and even rub lotion on each other!"
Give it another shot. It was legitimately cancelled too soon.
And if you watch it you'll feel your dream come alive at last, you will touch the sky. And they're not going to hold you down no more, no, they're not gonna change your mind. Because you'll have faith of the heart, strength of the soul.
He is absolutely right and elevators in startfleet stay a serious hazard throughout all the shows (for hundreds of years!) after he addressed the problem. At least in my country open elevators have been outlawed decades ago, the only one in my city is part of a listed building and kind of an attraction because it´s the only one left. I also found it pretty mean how some members of the crew make fun of him for getting pregnant - not cool!
I just finished up the show and absolutely hate they decided to just kill off Tripp in the last five minutes because apparently four hostiles of some random species with unknown tech capabilities were able to get onboard the Enterprise in the exact area where the Captain and Ch-Eng were walking and no M.A.C.O.'s happened to be.
He didn't even need to die for the show's ending to make sense, cause there's no further plot to explore anyways. They just did it because fuck it.
I always took it as if the last episode is its own thing. A single standalone holodeck program used as a history lesson for the people who would grow up learning about the events leading up to Archer's no doubt historic speech.