Ok, so in a thread on the RPG forum, I made an observation about Star Trek: TOS:
Quote from: Skarg;941964* In Star Trek (TOS - I didn't get into the later ones), I was frequently annoyed by the extremely frequent encounters with "something is making most/all of our technology not work" scenarios. Especially after getting into the Star Fleet Battles game, I was interested in situation within the setting, where stuff works (e.g. the episode "Balance of Terror" and several others) but it seems like 5/6 of the episodes involve 80% of the technology being unusable 80% of the time for forced hokey reasons. The forced hokeyness is mainly what I didn't like. If they had just designed the setting with common means to jam sensors, shields, communications and transporters, and used those instead of inventing some BS each episode (like, for example, how shields can block phasers - makes sense, fine), I would have found that interesting instead of forced, lazy and lame.
Omega then challenged the accuracy of my estimates of how often the standard techs were unusable:
Quote from: Omega;941971off topic...
Uh... since when? A majority of the episodes are the tech working fine. Some piece might give out, be jammed, or be damaged. But overall 5/6th of the episodes were not "most of our technology wont work" Out of 79 episodes only three, maybee 4 have most of the tech failing. Some have aliens that blockade one or more bits of tech. But even then it works fine on everything else. And sometimes the puzzle is how to use what you have to beat them. Or just out think them. Or solve the problem non-violently.
Comparing it against wargame is worse than erroneous. History has shown time and again that tech can be stonewalled, or just up and fail miserably, or simply succomb to good ol mother nature.
That was off-topic digression for that thread, so I'm starting a new one here to examine in nerdilicious glory what the actual frequency of forced tech sabotage was in TOS.
To my mind, what matters is when the main techs in the setting (sensors, shields, communicators, transporters, phasers) don't work for non-standard reasons. It won't be perfect, but just going from memory at first, I am curious to see what the actual breakdown is.
the times when everything is working 'just fine'? - that is called those boring days and weeks between episodes.
If everything was working perfectly it would be be a boring episode.
- Ed C
There's a reason Star Trek is known for technobabble. It's because...
Most of the episodes have shit not work right because of Technobabble.
Resolving the problem before Bad.Things.Happen will be done by Technobabble.
That's because episodes like "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" aren't about how those aliens can control the ship at will, and render themselves immune to all ST weapons, but about the futility of Racial Hatred.
To be honest, going episode by episode, my guess would be TOS technology rendered ineffective by aliens or by technobabble would be at least a third, maybe 50/50.
Quote from: CRKrueger;942057There's a reason Star Trek is known for technobabble. It's because...
Most of the episodes have shit not work right because of Technobabble.
Resolving the problem before Bad.Things.Happen will be done by Technobabble.
That's because episodes like "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" aren't about how those aliens can control the ship at will, and render themselves immune to all ST weapons, but about the futility of Racial Hatred.
To be honest, going episode by episode, my guess would be TOS technology rendered ineffective by aliens or by technobabble would be at least a third, maybe 50/50.
Not really. They get by a surprising number with nothing getting stonewalled or broke.
They do those have a few where at least something get broken. Well fucking DUH they are in combat or being attacked. What the hell stupid assumption is that?
The times Skargs "Everythings broke" was just short of none. Doomsday Machine comes to mind. The Enterprise takes a hell of a beating.
Quote from: Koltar;942004the times when everything is working 'just fine'? - that is called those boring days and weeks between episodes.
If everything was working perfectly it would be be a boring episode.
- Ed C
I'm not the only one who thinks "Balance of Terror" is one of the more interesting episodes largely because it does not conveniently break the standard equipment for plot convenience reasons.
Quote from: Omega;942235Not really. They get by a surprising number with nothing getting stonewalled or broke.
They do those have a few where at least something get broken. Well fucking DUH they are in combat or being attacked. What the hell stupid assumption is that?
The times Skargs "Everythings broke" was just short of none. Doomsday Machine comes to mind. The Enterprise takes a hell of a beating.
I'm sure I overestimated but am interested to see by how much. I would not count damage as a forced hokey reason. I would call Space Liberace's magic powers doing that a forced hokey reason.
There's a question on scifi.stackexchange about this currently getting closed and downvoted with the comment: "Every single week, and as often as the plot requires." so I'm not alone in my perception of this.
Quote from: Skarg;942244I'm sure I overestimated but am interested to see by how much. I would not count damage as a forced hokey reason. I would call Space Liberace's magic powers doing that a forced hokey reason.
There's a question on scifi.stackexchange about this currently getting closed and downvoted with the comment: "Every single week, and as often as the plot requires." so I'm not alone in my perception of this.
Let's start with the beginning. I don't remember anything breaking down in "The Man Trap". In "Charley X", things break down due to magic in the end, but it's a plot point and not something to make the plot possible.
I agree "The Man Trap" has no such tech issues.
"Charlie X" has extreme psionic powers (muting, silence instrument, destroy starship at vast distance, create animals he's never seen(turkeys), makes people and all phasers on the Enterprise vanish into thin air, turn human into iguana, teleportation, telekinesis, breaking bones, remove human face, control starship), and that's just the brat. Then the Thasians show up and are able to undo all the damage. That makes it almost (but not) as extreme an example as you can get of exactly what I mean to enumerate in this thread. All the tech is practically useless to the point of disappearing and reappearing and making things appear, because god powers. Being the plot doesn't make it not an example of overriding anything in the setting with mysterious uber powers.
"Where No Man Has Gone Before" spends most of the time relatively normal, but the psionic powers increase exponentially so that by the end of the episode, psi powers are overpowering all technology (force field, phaser rifle nullified) creating food plants out of thin air, and threatening the ability to destroy starships from great distances, rather than merely operate their controls from anywhere onboard and levitate and shock people. I would say the mega uber psi powers in the later part of the episode do qualify for "your tech is useless" status (only Kirk's fast-talk skills and fisticuff abilities are able to solve this one...), if not for most of the episode.
"The Naked Time" has no such tech issues.
"The Enemy Within" has two extremely (in)convenient (plot device) transporter problems and a nonexistent shuttle, and the reason for the malfunction seems rather weird or lazy (strange magnetic ore dust on a uniform causes the transporter to overload and somehow split Kirk into Good Kirk & Evil Kirk). It's definitely a case of a standard tech being out for a weird plot reason (actually two - Evil Kirk "accidentally" just happens to phaser more transporter tech later) for almost the entire episode. These are technically supposedly technical reasons/damage, but seem very lazily forced to make the plot/danger happen, so I would count it as an example, applying to one core tech for pretty much the whole episode.
"Mudd's Women" has no such tech issues.
"What Are Little Girls Made Of?" has no such tech issues, and has good examples of cutting off communications using ordinary means (killing people, taking away communicators and mimicking voices) rather than resorting to forced new magic causes.
"Miri" has no such tech issues. (Communicators stolen.)
"Dagger of the Mind" has no such tech issues.
Well, given life support OR transporters to beam down onto a planet with compatible atmosphere, the show would have around 3 minutes to solve that crisis...
Seems like most of the baseline essential tech worked just fine in order to have a show.
I wonder if there is a correlation between that and if the author of the episode was a Science-Fiction writer or a general TV writer. Whether they even realized there was a "standard" technology to the universe?
Though with that said, Richard Matheson wrote The Enemy Within. Still, he might be more of a fantasy author than sci-fi.
You probably don't ever want to read the original comic book. In some issues of that, the warp nacelles are rockets
Quote from: Opaopajr;943024Well, given life support OR transporters to beam down onto a planet with compatible atmosphere, the show would have around 3 minutes to solve that crisis...
Seems like most of the baseline essential tech worked just fine in order to have a show.
The writers of the shows that don't have lazy causes for things don't seem to have had any trouble writing shows with crises in them.
How difficult would it be to come up with a more plausible reason to have stranded crew? Not very, it seems to me. Even if the writers had known about the existence of a shuttle bay to contend with, there could have for example been a shuttle returning from the surface when something caused it to crash on landing, damaging the shuttle bay, the other shuttles, and/or the transporters (since engineering happens to be relatively near the shuttle bay). Wow, that was hard.
"The Corbomite Maneuver" is an interesting case for this question. It does have an alien that counters almost everything the Enterprise does, particularly when it drains all their power to move or attack. But later it gets defeated by using the impulse engines... So it does have the nature of "aliens make everything not work", though the theme is about not knowing alien capabilities and bluffing and testing each other. So I actually find this episode quite cool and interesting rather than annoying, except that the specifics aren't very consistent with the specifics of the more self-consistent episodes. So it is an episode where they lose all their ship's abilities, but it also just looks like they're utterly outmatched, when really it's a bluff, sort of, but it's also seems a bit silly that the alien ship can do what it does and then gets driven to destruction by just running the engines against its tractor beam. But, ok. So it's both a "lose all abilities" episode which I like because it's clever and supposedly there's technological reasons even if they seem a bit off from the way things work otherwise. i.e. it would look really crazy in Star Fleet Battles mechanics.
"The Menagerie" similarly seems to have overpowering loss of abilities, but turns out to be something else. It turns out to not have the issue that annoys me, and has some nice examples of things actually being consistent and ways stories can be interesting without overriding the setting with magic powers (e.g. Spock's hijacking techniques, even though there are also some alien uber powers, they at least work logically).