OnToMars
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Member # 621
posted
Mim,
First off, I could've sworn that that last bit wasn't in there the first time I read your post. If I was mistaken, I apologize.
Now, go back and reread my posts very carefully. Nowhere did I start claiming that Enterprise has violated continuity this way or that way. I really wish that people would stop assuming that anti-Enterprisers automatically resort to bitching about continuity. As has already been concluded, TPTB have been very careful about avoiding technical violations of continuity.
-------------------- If God didn't want us to fly, he wouldn't have given us Bernoulli's Principle.
Registered: Jun 2001
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quote:Originally posted by MinutiaeMan: Here's a probable continuity violation: "Balance of Terror" establishes that they didn't have viewscreen technology during the Earth-Romulan War. (It was why they didn't know what the Romulans looked like.) And Spock said that their level of tech "allowed no quarter to be asked for or given." Yet the way we've seen ENT tech is hardly different from later years, even the TOS era.
Ew. Now that's anal-retentive. I think the going interpretation for decades has been that visual contact was not made impossible by a lack of viewscreens but by an unwillingness on the Romulan's part. There's no reason transmitting video will be any harder than transmitting audio between spaceships. The idea that viewscreens didn't come into widespread use until 200 years from now or later more than a little silly.
quote: But I think that ENT has very little tech difference from the others. What kind of "advancements" are they going to make between ENT and TOS?
Well, to be honest there aren't many tech differences between TNG and TOS, either. Aside from holodecks and replicators appearing, over the course of 100 years people still have type-1 and type-2 hand phasers and tricorders, the ship still has phasers (albeit fired using a slightly different system), photon torpedoes, shields, forcefields, tractor beams, transporters and shuttlecraft. One assumes that the vast majority of tech improvements between those series were "under the hood," so to speak: isolinear chips allowing for a computer system that's exponentially more powerful, a doubling of the warp speeds ships are capable of travelling at, more powerful shields, more powerful phasers etc.
So, looking at what'll change in the 115 years between 2151 and 2165, we can point to the addition of true functional phasers (howsoever they differ from phase pistols) and true tricorders to away teams, and the ship getting phaser emitters, photon torpedoes, forcefields, shields, a tractor beam, a safe and almost universally-trusted transporter system, and warp-capable shuttlecraft to replace shuttlepods (according to the Enterprise bible and barring a writing hiccough in "Shuttlepod One"). Mightn't sound like much, especially since most of the above functions have been filled by another device, but it's a lot more than TOS-to-TNG. "Under the hood," we can expect the computer system to canonically take a big leap with the invention of duotronics during that interval, along with a doubling in how fast the ship can go and presumably a variety of evolutionary rather than revolutionary changes: gravity plating to individual gravity generators, better sensors, better food synthesizers, etc.
-------------------- "I was surprised by the matter-of-factness of Kafka's narration, and the subtle humor present as a result." (Sizer 2005)
Registered: Mar 1999
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quote:Originally posted by MinutiaeMan: Here's a probable continuity violation: "Balance of Terror" establishes that they didn't have viewscreen technology during the Earth-Romulan War...
No, it establishes that there was no visual communuications between the Romulans and Earth forces during the war. Did you ever stop to think that it might mean the Rommies had a *lower* level of tech than we did? Maybe while our ships were capable of using viewscreens (as per ENT) theirs weren't??
This is what I meant in my first post. These one-liners can be interpreted to mean many different things, and there's always been room to wiggle through these so-called "continuity violations".
-MMoM
-------------------- The flaws we find most objectionable in others are often those we recognize in ourselves.
Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
If you really want a technological continuity violation, just look at the fact that the ENT viewscreen can zoom in on a planet so far that you could take high-resolution snapshots of people's faces if you wanted. Somehow, this technology must be lost, and, by the late twenty-fourth century, they're still lucky when they can accurately detect the types of life-forms on a planet.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
I can't bring myself to believe in this viewscreen thing. It seems utterly implausible that the writer of the episode could have meant anything even remotely like that - of course future spaceships will ALWAYS have viewscreens, and have always been going to have them (uh, see Douglas Adams: "Restaurant at the End of the Universe" for more proper temporal forms), ever since the 1930s.
And there's nothing in Spock's dialogue to establish a lack of viewscreens, only some musings about lack of visual contact. It's up to us viewers to figure out what the heck Spock *did* mean. But not having viewscreens is out of the question, and already was in the 1960s.
quote:Originally posted by MinutiaeMan: Okay, so this is minor, but little details like that are the things that gave the timeline a sense of progress and advancement. But I think that ENT has very little tech difference from the others. What kind of "advancements" are they going to make between ENT and TOS?
Mini-skirts and those blinking lights below the viewscreen. Buttons that go ZOOT! and BLING! when you press them. Painting starships white instead of ST:FC black. Starfleet's decision to stop recruiting members of the good ship Lollypop.
Orion (green) slave girls.
-------------------- "God's in his heaven. All's right with the world."
Registered: Apr 2001
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I think the going interpretation for decades has been that visual contact was not made impossible by a lack of viewscreens but by an unwillingness on the Romulan's part. There's no reason transmitting video will be any harder than transmitting audio between spaceships. The idea that viewscreens didn't come into widespread use until 200 years from now or later more than a little silly.
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