[doug]Okay, I’m really a fairly big Star Trek fan, despite being very disappointed by the latest film, but this list on the Happy Fun Pundit site is too delicious to pass up. Somewhere down the page you’ll find my own comments.
Here’s item one from the list, to give you a sample:
Noisy doors.
You can't walk three feet in a starship without some door whooshing or screeching at you. My office building has automatic sliding doors. They're dead silent. If those doors went “wheet!†every time a person walked through them, about once a month some guy in accounting would snap and go on a shooting rampage. Sorry Scotty, the IEEE has revoked your membership until you learn to master WD-40.
[doug]Okay, my response on the Happy Fun Pundit site is getting a bit buried, so here it is:
10. Noisy Doors
The door sounds are cool. I've been known to add the sounds to doors that are automatic but silent (including the “piped aboard” whistle), as well as make a Force gesture to open doors that are using proximity detectors. (One can get away with a great deal of bizarre behavior when accompanied by his children.)
What has always REALLY intrigued me about the doors is that they are not based on proximity, but on the intent of the person approaching the door. Watch carefully – you'll see episodes where someone walks up to a door, turns around to continue a conversation, then faces the door – the door only opens in the second instance.
9. The Federation.
Capitalism works because people are basically greedy. With some governmental oversight to prevent robbing the blind, it works very well. If you want to rip your customers off, someone is going to come along and not rip them off, and the non-ripoff-artist will soon be raking in the bucks. A society where people just work for the fun of it and always do their best? It's called Communism, and its a colossal failure because it presumes that mankind is basically good. (Whoa, that was a bit heavy and almost off-topic. I'll be better now, I promise.)
8. Reversing the Polarity
Word.
7. Seatbelts.
They do eventually use them in full-time combat ships. There's also an inertial dampening field that is supposed to handle such (I've read the tech manuals) – but it gets overloaded in less-than-logical ways. Actually, its the physics model that's off. Starships don't need seatbelts the same way battleships don't need 'em.
6. Fuses
Item #40 on my “Heroic Character List” (based on the Evil Overlord list): “My control panels will be designed so they cannot explode under any circumstances, nor otherwise threaten to kill or injure their operators.” – http://www.wilcoxfamily.net/forhire/heroOnly.asp
5. Rule by Committee
Court-martials are in order for just about everyone on the bridge crew(s), although part of this is Picard's own management style. He wants (some) reasonable input. Other captains aren't so accommodating. Kirk wouldn't have noticed – he'd still be stuttering out his orders while the crew did what was best to keep them from doom. Janeway's crew would have to directly disobey her orders to save the ship from her self-destructive tendencies.
4. A Star Trek Quiz
This is true of virtually every television program except _24_. But it is amusing. One of the Star Trek games even included the red-shirted, unnamed ensign for away missions, and Raven's Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force makes a nod to this by making the default multiplayer character name RedShirt.
3. Technobabble
Ironically, the scripts often just say, “[tech]” when they want technobabble from the actors. So you could go from _Star Trek_ to _Who's Line_ fairly readily, I expect.
2. The Holodeck
Well, we know what Quark's Holosuites on DS-9 are used for. 😉
1. The Prime Directive
I can't top that or add anything to it.
Posted by: Doug Wilcox on May 23, 2003 08:23 AM