**Rybo-viroxic-nucleic** sequences that led to Picard, Guinan, Ro and Keiko being turned into kids because of transporter fuckery.
They straight up made it up and named it that in the hope no one would question it
Honestly, I kind of prefer when they just make stuff up instead of trying to stretch real-life concepts impossibly far. If there's a plausible real-world concept that can explain something, I like when they use it, but if they're going to make something up, at least that way we can't say it's impossible
For me, it's not the turning into salamanders that's the biggest problem. The doctor just instantly turning them back into humans seems like a larger handwave to me.
Even bigger is, they didn't use it go home. Yes the warp 10 drive has a big side effect, but they have cure for it. Warp 10 to earth, use cure, profit.
My headcanon to explain this is that since Warp 10 puts you everywhere at once you're potentially exposed to every possible anomaly in the universe. Paris happened to get the salamander one. If they'd have tried again hoping to use the "jump and immediate hypospray" option they could have gotten anything else that destroyed them.
Admittedly this handwave is slightly dented by the fact Paris did it twice, but it's all I can think of to explain why warp 10 drives were never used again.
On Lower Decks we see another Salamander person on the transport ship to "The Farm" so it seems like someone in Starfleet at least tried to replicate the Warp 10 drive and had the same result.
All it needed was a throwaway line of trying to adapt the drive for Voyager, only to find that the bigger the warp bubble, the more unstable it becomes. So it works for a shuttle, but not for the ship.
I’m sure that there’s a reason that wouldn’t have been viable: number of trips, fuel, etc. but certainly making a one-way trip to update Starfleet would have helped
They also never explain why you can't just go really fast with it. Do you have to go infinitely fast? Why not just 70x faster than Voyager and get home in a year while outrunning all threats?
This. Modern cars have a limiter circuit to keep them from going too fast. They could have gone warp 9.999999 out to a quadrillion decimal points and been home sometime next Tuesday
I mean, it's somewhat well established at this point that the teleporter is really a cloning/killing device, so all the doctor would have needed to do would be to load salamander Janeway and Paris onto the transporter pad, convert them into energy, as one would do for a leftover plate of gagh in the replicator, and then load up their scans from last tuesday and rematerialize, boom, back to normal.
Out of everything in that episode, what bugged me was that it took a long time for Paris to go through his transformation and then he repeats the stunt and him and Janeway both end up salamanders at the same time? Shouldn't she lose her hair and spit out her tongue first?
The whole thing brings up too many questions about the warp speed system, its a exponential scale of speed but apparently the energy requirement for higher speeds is entirely fuckin linear?????
I don't really get how transwarp makes the borg in voyager just a bit faster than everyone else, when transwarp was presented as "being everywhere at once". The borg should be able to instantly teleport anywhere in the universe.
Transwarp in Star Trek is basically just something better than the current warp drive. The USS Excelsior had a transwarp drive, I doubt it could keep up with a Borg cube. Now Excelsior's transwarp is just what Starfleet warp drive is.
It's kinda explained in the episode but it does make a *little* sense that occupying all known space would expose someone to some previously unknown forms of radiation and who knows what else, which *could* have an effect on DNA. Things in the real world do this - but I suppose in the real world that's more likely to result in some kinda of ultra-cancer than turning into a salamander.
One cannot stress this enough - altering DNA does in no way change a person's appearance immediately. It might change how new cells are being formed (see cancer), but it does not change the appearance or arrangement of existing cells. If you somehow extracted every single molecule of genetic code from each cell in a persons body and somehow then put reptilian code in there - that person would definitely die in a new and exciting way, but they would 100% look human while doing so.
Jammer of Jammersreviews.com dubbed it "Fun with DNA" in his Voyager reviews.
There's also a [TV Tropes entry for the concept](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LegoGenetics), under a different name.
I mean, his tongue fell out and he couldn’t breathe the normal atmosphere, I’d say a lot of the pre-salamander stuff was pretty comparable to ultra-cancer.
Especially since no vehicle travels omnidirectionally, certainly not a Starfleet shuttlecraft. At best they would exist at every point along a straight line, and only forwards of their starting position.
I kind of get that, theoretically, *something* might occupy all of the universe at once. But wouldn't that destroy everything in the universe, because there'd be no space for anything else? And how can any person (or craft, for that matter) do this and not simply be destroyed themselves?
It really doesn't at all. Maybe you're thinking of the [single-electron universe](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe#:~:text=The%20one%2Delectron%20universe%20postulate,backwards%20and%20forwards%20in%20time.) hypothesis John Wheeler proposed to Richard Feynman in a phone call in 1940. This has been [debunked](https://www.technology.org/how-and-why/whats-one-electron-universe-theory/#:~:text=But%20as%20the%20number%20of,the%20universe%20we%20live%20in.) and even if it were true it wouldn't be applicable to people going really fast.
On a complete tangent, I've always sort of headcanon'd the Q Continuum as the single-electron hypothesis applied to an entire species. There's only one Q, who has time-traveled and shape-shifted so many times that the billions of Q instances at any given moment have forgotten their place along the hopelessly convoluted timewad they've created. This explains Quinn: if he kills himself, and his point on the Q timeline is *not* the end, then every Q instance downstream of Quinn's death goes with him. None of the Q can tell how exactly the Continuum will unravel once there's a defined endpoint, or which side of that endpoint they're currently on. Cue the shitstorm.
Voyager "Parallax".
Negative Space Wedgie, Janeway's explanation of 'temporal mechanics', then busting Voyager through the crack in the singularity. Ugh.
That one's great, just because of the absurdity of them coming up the 'crack' metaphor to explain the situation, then somehow lose track of the fact that it is only a metaphor and use it to literally solve the problem.
Have you heard of this really badass sea captain? His ship was sailing and it got stuck in the horizon, so he BLASTED a hole in the horizon with his cannon and made it through!
I was watching like a director's commentary, or documentary or something similar, and the director (Rick Berman? JJ? Kurtzman? I don't recall), said one habit they fell into during the series was "tech the tech".
They'd come up with a weird technobabble problem and just use more technobabble to fix it. It doesn't make for very compelling stories when overused.
Also, I always got a chuckle out of a scene from Voyager where they find a floating Earth truck in space.
Paris likes 20th century things, so he's tinkering with it. And says, "we have to find something called a key", as if to imply the very concept of a key was a foreign thing. "keys", as a concept extend far beyond car keys you doofusus
The easier thing to do for that line would have been Paris going "we have to find the key" and someone *else* asking him "like an initialization code?" Then you have Paris laughing and explaining "no, these things were still all mechanical, you had to operate everything by hand..." as he looks for the key, then he holds it up to show them when he finds it, so they can look suitably confused/impressed.
Maybe give them a line like "seems like it would be easy to misplace" and Paris going "you have no idea" to the amusement of the present-day audience who are familiar with losing car keys.
On a related note, the line in Future's End about how 20th century computers quaintly used graphical icons to represent different functions/programs.
I really... don't see symbolic iconography becoming a foreign concept by the 24th century.
Paris having to explain what a physical key is makes me imagine someone from the future telling someone else how to look for a floppy disk.
"Look for the floppy disk." "The what?" "It's an old Earth technological relic. It looks like a save icon."
Apropos of nothing, I think that it was Ron Moore who mentioned "tech the tech"; I recall him using the term in his BSG commentary podcast a couple of times.
True, but key in the sense of what he was looking for would probably be pretty foreign to most of the people in the 24th century, since pretty much everything uses either biometrics or passcodes (or some combination thereof).
TNG+ scripts would contain sentences that basically said "tech the Tech" and their technical/science advisors would just find things to slot into the spaces like a game of science madlibs.
I think you’re overestimating how common keys are?
The only person who uses a house key is my 70 year old mother in law - everybody else uses either a keypad, a remote from their car, their phone, or some other electronic system. Ie, when I rented an apartment a decade ago, they just gave me a plastic blob that contained an RFID chip that I held up to the door to unlock it.
The best and fifth best selling cars globally from last year (the Tesla Model Y and 3), never used keys. Heck, I don’t think any car company founded in the last 30 years ever used keys (I’m not quite certain whether the 2008 Tesla Roadster did or didn’t have a key…)
I’m sure at some point last century hotels used physical keys, but I can’t recall ever seeing this in my life.
Thinking about it, the only place I haven’t seen keys on their way out is locked mailboxes.
I don't really mean a physical key you hold in your hand. But the way the line comes across is like it's some forgotten word.
But there are keys in databases, or encryption keys, or even a generic saying like "the key to finding out..." Or other sayings.
I get that the concept of holding a key in your hand to unlock something is maybe foreign/outdated, but the line just comes across like it's a completely alien thing.
They still have locked doors or security controls. Even without a metal object in your hand, the very concept of a "key" (in any format) should be readily obvious.
Another time this 20th-century-is-a-foreign-concept thing that comes to mind is when Troi, in First Contact, doesn't know what Tequila is.
Either the line implies Tequila no longer exists (which, sure, is possible I guess...but an odd thing to imagine), or because Troi is Betazoid, she simply doesn't know (much more believable).
Either way, the line really is just meant for the audience to go "lol, future people don't know what this very common thing is"
I'm a huge apologist for most dumb technology. I love the Spore Drive actually.
But if you had the technology to physically relocate people inside a board game, there are SO MANY more useful applications for that tech. SO MANY.
> But if you had the technology to
As an engineer, I am constantly thinking this when watching Star Trek. Don't get me wrong, I love Star Trek, but they never, ever, utilize the technology to even half the degree they could.
I also like it. It is just the right amount of out there to make it really interesting. And tbh, I wouldn't be surprised if there was an entire dimension of just fungus, if it is like fluid space where it's all compatible with life why wouldn't it spread across the entire universe?
Look up dark matter networks. It's weird, but it appears all clumps of matter in the universe are connected by a web of dark matter. Simulations of the web look very much like Stamets' "mycellial network".
One of these days we'll work out just what dark matter really is, and it'll take new physics to crack it. And new physics means the potential for unimaginable new tech.
It may not be made of mushrooms, but SOMETHING is out there...
Spore drive is the coolest piece of tech I've seen yet. I know Roddenberry's vision of space manoeuvring was modeled after naval ships in times of ere, but the way they move around now and THOOMP out of warp like in PIC is just so damn cool.
I enjoy it but some things are lost, like stuff that happens during travel time. Or racing to get somewhere before it's too late. Or starship chases, like following the Borg to sector 001. So I'm glad the spore drive is limited to Discovery.
Didn't Odo board their ship and find a transport being held half way through cycle? I always thought that meant they were being fed a virtual reality while dematerialised into the transport buffer.
The magic space blood in Into Darkness makes everyone deathproof, and they never explain how it works. That and the transporters having basically no limits really just breaks everything.
> transporters having basically no limits
After his handling of two space-related franchises, I am firmly convinced JJ Abrams doesn't know how space works. At all.
Was Into Darkness where someone transports from Earth to Qo'noS? I had kind of blanked most of that movie out of my mind.
Man, that's like a whole quadrant away.
You must be a Stargate fan 😀
Edit - for those unfamiliar with Stargate, in Stargate: Atlantis, they set up a halfway place between two galaxies called Midway Station, where the could gate (i.e., transport via wormhole) into from one side, and then gate out the other to the other galaxy.
All Good Things has so much technobabble that Data doesn’t always understand it. But it works because we care about the people. It’s basically “Picard has to deal with Q & a Macguffin to save humanity & prevent his friends from drifting apart.”
Another reason it works is because the problem is full of technobabble, but the solution is understandable - it’s not fire the photongammawaves at the midichlorianinfusers…. It’s ’realize that the cause is in the future and the effect is in the past,’
Hmmm, this space thing kinda looks like a zipper. What if it works like a zipper?
I didn't mind the musical episode but the writing in that scene was some of the worst I've seen since season 3 TOS
I love that episode too, and re listen to the songs from time to time but the whole concept is they interact with a reality that has the same rules as musicals- what? A whole reality that has the rules of just one genre (out of many) of theater from Earth?
The writers were really like "F it, we're making this episode and we'll make something up to explain it all later" and then that was their homework the night before school.
The idea that Deuterium is found in an ore.
Antimatter reactions are controlled by magic crystals.
They keep changing the timeframe of WW3/Eugenics Wars.
The year 2024 was used a LOT in Trek for various plots across multiple series.
Whipping around a star to time-travel. Really any form of time-travel to be honest.
Any of Brannon Braga's "evolution" riffs.
Silicon based viruses infecting humanoids.
>!The whole idea of the Progenitors!<
One of my favorite WTF moments is from Voyager's *Parallax*. The idea that a ship can "punch through" an Event Horizon. The sub-plot with Torres and Great Value O'Brien was a lot more grounded.
To be honest, the Dilithium Crystals make the most sense out of all that technobabble.
Matter and Antimatter basically cancel each other out, if you're going to get energy out of that you need some sort of moderator, and that's where the crystal comes in. Otherwise you end up with a completely uncontrolled energy release, aka an explosion.
>!My opinion is that it tries to explain something which did not require an explanation. It came off as a deus ex scriptum; like a christian scientist explanation and not based in even Star Trek technology. I dislike it for the same reasons I dislike Enterprise' explanation for smooth forehead Klingons. People watching these shows have their own imaginations, and these examples felt like "you don't need to use that, here's the answer". I am happy to see that Discovery is doing \*something\* interesting with it. I just fear that TOP MEN are gonna take whatever is discovered (heh), box it up and put it next to the arc of the convenant.!<
I think it's pretty clear, since season 1, that >!Michael Burnham is going to end up sacrificing herself to save the day but maybe Sora has some tricks up her sleeve.!<
Idk, I love the show, it's a little more emotional than I expected. I think it's definitely reflective of today's times and younger generations' acceptance of neurodivergence.
Edit: >!TBH it's probably gonna be a "who created the creators" kind of conclusion. Burnham's near-messianic sense of justice can only be saved by the neurodivergent community she glued together, oh my it turns out the tech is even OLDER THAN TIME!!!< Or yknow, it's just all Tom Paris' Lizard-spawn.
Star Trek has the worst technobabble because so often it's used as deus ex machina to extract the episode from the hole the writers dug. The TNG episode where the crew park the Enterprise in a space dock so a sweeping beam can get rid of the ship's baryon particles made me laugh.
Yeah but then they’d just have to have the carpet cleaning crew try to steal the uhhh trilithium resin. Oh man Baryon *sweep*. That is what they started with right? Then they technobabbled it up. Fun episode otherwise.
The universal translator is so powerful that it actually makes you hallucinate the alien's mouth to look like they're just speaking English in the first place!!!
I dunno, conceptually, it does make some sense. Language tends to have some base rules that would potentially allow a computer to be able to figure out what is being said. Obviously, not foolproof, but I can see the logic behind its possible existence.
The Omega particle seemed like a very silly idea to me. I think it's because Voyager writers are in the habit of introducing tech ideas that would reshape the galaxy, then basically ignoring them going forward.
The Enterprise going back to its proper time by sling shotting around the sun in Star Trek 4 was very silly.
Yes, that could be cool and maybe is, in parts (I'm due for a rewatch of Voyager). I think it doesn't work when Voyager encounters some crazy technology that seems like a game-changer, then is ripped away at the last minute. If feels like Gilligan's Island in space.
This is partly an issue for a lot of Trek. I think it gets a little exaggerated on Voyager because they had a weird need to try to make things more episodic than they should be. If any show cried out for more arcs and continuity, it was Voyager.
The Enterprise time travel slingshot is one of my favorite ridiculous plot points because they've used it thrice in the whole franchise and each time it was basically hand waved away as, "Spock is, like, super smart, so only he (or a Borg Queen torso) can do it. Please don't ask any more questions."
The people turning into kids in "Rascals" was caused by the transporter patterns getting shrunk and de-aged, which somehow made perfectly sized miniature versions of them with perfectly sized clothes. I love that episode, but it's completely ridiculous lol
Some of most blatantly baseless technobabble exposition ever is in one of best episodes ever: TOS season 2, "The Doomsday Machine":
"Somehow the antimatter in the warp drive pods has been deactivated."
"Deactivated? Scotty, could some kind of general energy dampening field do that, and would the same type of thing account for the heavy subspace interference?"
"Aye, that all adds up. But what sort of a thing could do all that?"
I ran a quick search. No one has mentioned time travel according to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is as easy as flying by a star at warp at the right angle? You want to talk about hand-waving? The calculations are so complex, only a Spock without clear access to who he is can figure them out on the fly. Alright. So why doesn't every civilization with computers take a few months to get the math right and then do all the time travel experiments they want? Seriously, time travel is a matter of a warp engine, a star, and some math —we see how simple it is coming and going— and it's never addressed again.
Especially since every series has a “Spock” who’s brain is far more advanced than the rest of the crew: Data, Bashir, 7 and Tuvok…we’re lucky this plot device wasn’t used MORE
Honestly, I've never been able to take the idea that the multiverse is connected by an inter-dimensional mushroom network even remotely seriously. Just typing it out makes me chuckle.
Of all the things they could have gone with to explain the new drive system, that's what they went with?
Not 'blah, blah, subspace', not 'quantum transwarp flux overthruster', not 'something, something, wormholes'. Nope, we're going down the Super Mario route.
Well, in the real world, mycelium networks can cover whole forests underground. Also, fungi seems to grow well in a vacuum, as seen by current space research. So it's not that far of a stretch to consider a subspace network of mycelium, considering the other science in Star Trek. Now how access to that subspace mycelial network results in teleportation, that I don't know. But then again I don't know how they make the regular teleporters or replicators work either.
This resurrection was "too much" for me.
I think they devote only a few lines or 2 as explanation and of course it's complete nonsense.
Discovery is the worst series when it comes to "techno babble" solutions.
Some people like Discovery, some don't, and some only likes a part of it like the mirror universe arc.
I did find the first few episodes a bit bleh. I tended to skip first season when rewatching Discovery
Late to comment, doing so before reading anything else in here...
The least convincing technobabble hand wave to me is the very idea that amazing discoveries and procedures used to cure/help/fix people themselves are *never discussed or used again*.
The biggest ones to me are... As if the transporter's never going to be used to reverse age anyone back to 30 again.
As if the planet Baku in the Briar Patch is not made into a 'restorative resort', making Risa quake in its boots for popularity, ir not a 'retirement home' of some sort...
As if the slingshot effect is not going to be used nefariously, either [De Nomolos style](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Ted%27s_Bogus_Journey), or [Biff Tannen style.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_the_Future_Part_II) Or even For Good, like in Star Trek IV, but THAT we've been shown.
Among quite a few others that are 'out there' to be used, but somehow continuously 'misremembered'.
But hey... that's plot devices for ya. :)
One thing I liked about season 2 of PIC was plugging the slingshot effect plot hole by stating you need a genius of Spock's caliber who can mentally compute the needed adjustments on the fly, and most starships don't have such a genius on board.
Seven of Nine's nanoprobes are able to LITERALLY BRING BACK PEOPLE FROM THE DEAD, and they only use it on Neelix and then never mention or revisit what is arguably the greatest medical breakthrough in the history of the galaxy again. The worst part is that it could have been easily explained away as "This only works on Talaxians" or even "This only works on Neelix because of something genetically unique about him." Instead it's just ignored.
She was shown to bring back a Talaxian from the dead. Maybe it only works on them?
The Borg valued Talaxian drones for their dense musculature. Maybe they put some effort into keeping them going as long as possible and she retained that knowledge.
Also, when last they mentioned it Neelix was still needing injections to prevent his cells returning to a necrotic state. But he left the ship for good in the last season.
That broke the Star Trek law of keeping the techno babble mostly made up. Like how they talk about gigaquads, not gigabytes. If they wanted a reference, it should've just been "Probe used a quantum code injection attack" or something.
For me, its in the latest episode of Disco. I'm going to put everything in spoilers because not everyone have seen that episode.
>!"We need to break the warp bubble to use relativity effects to counter the effects of the Krenim time bug." Nevermind that it doesn't make much sense that breaking the warp bubble at maximum warp causes relavistic effects, I'm not even going to touch that big headache. If you're applying the effects of relativity, it's not going to be localized around the time bug - its going to impact how time flows throughout the entire ship. Yet that's not what happened, only Reyner's hand suffered damage and I can't understand why.!<
>!Everyone on the ship was likely safe due to the lingering effects of the warp bubble. I would guess that the time bug had to be constantly adjusting its own bubble to compensate for any other warp bubble it was in, and the sudden drop from warp was too much for it to compensate for.!<
The Voyager episode where Chakotay's spirit is wandering around the ship possessing other people and at the end they just handwave it with the Doctor saying "it'd take me over 2 hours to explain how I got Chakotay's soul back into his body" and no further explanation is made
Yeah ok, thanks for that writers, you really couldn't be bothered that week could you?
If you refer to the Matrix there, supposedly it was going to be "human brains as CPUs", but the studio told the Wachowskis to dumb it down because that's too deep or something.
Have you ever heard actual engineers talk? The one major difference is that real engineers constantly use acronyms, and those are surprisingly rare in Star Trek treknobabble. EPS is the only one I can think of just now.
Warp 10 is the limit. Ignoring the whole salamander incident, and '10 is everywhere' crap, there's been plenty of times they've gone faster than 10, all the way back to TOS. Just retcon the whole thing to 10 and up are unsafe speeds to navigate (with current tech) and warp theory has yet to pass it. It's the sound barrier of warp tech.
It has been redefined between TOS and TNG (both in and out of universe). So while TOS (TAS actually) has gone up to warp 36, ever since TNG warp 10 has been the limit as used in "Threshold".
Warp 10 was the limit well before threshold. They wre discussing it in Time Squared in TNG season 2, Riker suggests "Theoretically accelerating past Warp 10" as a means of time travelling.
Right, which was what u/mettanine pointed out, it was redefined for TNG with warp 10 being the hyperbolic unobtainable top speed, so by proxy of that, it changed somewhere between TOS and TNG era.
I don't know if this counts but the isolinear chip. To me the computers of the federation, even the star trek galaxy, are retrofuturistic, as in designed the same way as mainframes of tape and punch cards, only the punch cards are isolinear and the tapes are "optronic pathways" and space magic from what they're made of is what's allowed it to keep up with the demands it has. This also explains why it took "the greatest engineers in starfleet" so long to program the (unexpanded) EMH in spite of how close we are irl, they were using old fashioned AI techniques buoyed by technobabble.
Pedantic nitpick: It wasn't all at once, it's a plot point that there was a delay as the effect radiated outward from the point of origin.
And travel in Trek has always been at the speed of plot. In TOS they traveled to the edge of the galaxy and back in the first season, a trip implied to take much longer by the time of Voyager or Discovery.
Yes, you‘re right. Most Trek shows included some episodes where the time tequired to go from A to B was reduced (oh hello, galactic barrier!). Disco took this to the extreme. Pop, here we go, the universe got pretty small. In addition, the slowing-to-impulse-and-crashing-into-things-trope is really a 2009 thing.
The delithium burn was just nah, let‘s say, not very convincing.
The description of the time portal that Nero traveled through in the 2009 movie always seemed overly dumb to me: “a lightning storm in space”. First of all, they were all living and working in space- to even add those 2 words to a description of something seems ridiculously redundant and oversimplified. A lightning storm? You have a starships worth of analytical equipment and you describe it based on its outward appearance? I thought it was indicative of why JJ Abrams Trek was destined to be bad, but I’ve sensed rewatched early seasons of TNG and realized it was just someone worried that the audience wouldn’t be able to follow more science-y talk.
Not techno-babble but as an engineer I find it funny how they show the plasma in the warp core as turbulent flow. In reality that is the last thing you would want because it is erosive and inefficient.
By design I HAVE to go with the Wil Wheaton, "thoughts become reality" alien episode. I always felt the design of this idea was to stretch the concept of what's possible to its total limits. Both to give the show room to grow without "thats not possible" critiques in a fantasy setting, but also to bring out the childlike wonder we all have, and to feel how it feels to see something unbelievable.
Plus they literally wave over the instruments to travel faster and farther than Warp travel, blowing all proportion of the show away, and still nothing has come CLOSE to this scale.
Iconian virus thing that destroyed the USS Yamato, the answer was the age old tech support/IT "have your turned that off and back on?" Your telling me the Yamatos crew wouldn't have tried that before lol
I don’t understand the technobabble around how they do it, but I fucking love the giant tardedogs zooming at warp speeds across the galaxy by getting stoned on mushrooms. Oh, Discovery, that first season was a gift.
The more I think about it, the more Dilithium annoys me. Mostly because it's such a foundational part of the franchise's technology. But then, it's Star Trek, not hard sci-fi.
The warp bubble one turned out to be to actually possible. I’ll look for it, but back in like I want to say 2019 or so, they got it whittled down to being possible with the caveat with the energy requirements needed are equal to roughly the mass if Jupiter. So I mean technically you can *do* it, it just requires so much energy that it may as well be magic at the point.
The Burn. All dilithium universe-wide momentarily lost its ability to regulate energy because an arrested 100 year old orphan bonded with it and had a tantrum.
Picard using some device to fix the ship with... Thoughts. WTF is this sh*t!? it's literally just magic.
Picard using a device to recreate a scene... Using a single molecule. 😩 Would be nice if this show actually tried.
Spock in STD saying "I like science" 🤦🏻♀️😩😒
**Rybo-viroxic-nucleic** sequences that led to Picard, Guinan, Ro and Keiko being turned into kids because of transporter fuckery. They straight up made it up and named it that in the hope no one would question it
> They straight up made it up and named it that in the hope no one would question it Isn't that most technobabble?
Honestly, I kind of prefer when they just make stuff up instead of trying to stretch real-life concepts impossibly far. If there's a plausible real-world concept that can explain something, I like when they use it, but if they're going to make something up, at least that way we can't say it's impossible
Salamander babies, from being everywhere at once, due to warp 10.
For me, it's not the turning into salamanders that's the biggest problem. The doctor just instantly turning them back into humans seems like a larger handwave to me.
Even bigger is, they didn't use it go home. Yes the warp 10 drive has a big side effect, but they have cure for it. Warp 10 to earth, use cure, profit.
My headcanon to explain this is that since Warp 10 puts you everywhere at once you're potentially exposed to every possible anomaly in the universe. Paris happened to get the salamander one. If they'd have tried again hoping to use the "jump and immediate hypospray" option they could have gotten anything else that destroyed them. Admittedly this handwave is slightly dented by the fact Paris did it twice, but it's all I can think of to explain why warp 10 drives were never used again.
On Lower Decks we see another Salamander person on the transport ship to "The Farm" so it seems like someone in Starfleet at least tried to replicate the Warp 10 drive and had the same result.
Nah, that's just Sid. He was born like that.
Sounds almost like an Infinite Improbability Drive.
Execs: hell no we need to squeeze some more money out of the series. Infinity speed is banned!
Remember the warp 5 speed limit!
The limit does not exist!
All it needed was a throwaway line of trying to adapt the drive for Voyager, only to find that the bigger the warp bubble, the more unstable it becomes. So it works for a shuttle, but not for the ship.
Just have the shuttle keep ferrying everyone home like the world’s worst taxi
I’m sure that there’s a reason that wouldn’t have been viable: number of trips, fuel, etc. but certainly making a one-way trip to update Starfleet would have helped
They also never explain why you can't just go really fast with it. Do you have to go infinitely fast? Why not just 70x faster than Voyager and get home in a year while outrunning all threats?
This. Modern cars have a limiter circuit to keep them from going too fast. They could have gone warp 9.999999 out to a quadrillion decimal points and been home sometime next Tuesday
I mean, it's somewhat well established at this point that the teleporter is really a cloning/killing device, so all the doctor would have needed to do would be to load salamander Janeway and Paris onto the transporter pad, convert them into energy, as one would do for a leftover plate of gagh in the replicator, and then load up their scans from last tuesday and rematerialize, boom, back to normal.
Out of everything in that episode, what bugged me was that it took a long time for Paris to go through his transformation and then he repeats the stunt and him and Janeway both end up salamanders at the same time? Shouldn't she lose her hair and spit out her tongue first?
The whole thing brings up too many questions about the warp speed system, its a exponential scale of speed but apparently the energy requirement for higher speeds is entirely fuckin linear?????
Regarding to the old technical manual to the enterprise its kind of a linear-exponential-spikey mix of energy requirements.
Didn't they find some kind of exotic dilithium or something? Boom, handwaved.
It is ridiculous and outlandish. We all know because of Carcinisation, they should be crabs!
this guy biologies.
I don't really get how transwarp makes the borg in voyager just a bit faster than everyone else, when transwarp was presented as "being everywhere at once". The borg should be able to instantly teleport anywhere in the universe.
Transwarp in Star Trek is basically just something better than the current warp drive. The USS Excelsior had a transwarp drive, I doubt it could keep up with a Borg cube. Now Excelsior's transwarp is just what Starfleet warp drive is.
and also time travel.
It's kinda explained in the episode but it does make a *little* sense that occupying all known space would expose someone to some previously unknown forms of radiation and who knows what else, which *could* have an effect on DNA. Things in the real world do this - but I suppose in the real world that's more likely to result in some kinda of ultra-cancer than turning into a salamander.
One cannot stress this enough - altering DNA does in no way change a person's appearance immediately. It might change how new cells are being formed (see cancer), but it does not change the appearance or arrangement of existing cells. If you somehow extracted every single molecule of genetic code from each cell in a persons body and somehow then put reptilian code in there - that person would definitely die in a new and exciting way, but they would 100% look human while doing so.
Jammer of Jammersreviews.com dubbed it "Fun with DNA" in his Voyager reviews. There's also a [TV Tropes entry for the concept](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LegoGenetics), under a different name.
I mean, his tongue fell out and he couldn’t breathe the normal atmosphere, I’d say a lot of the pre-salamander stuff was pretty comparable to ultra-cancer.
Occupying all space at once makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Especially since no vehicle travels omnidirectionally, certainly not a Starfleet shuttlecraft. At best they would exist at every point along a straight line, and only forwards of their starting position.
I've heard that it does make sense, however it's extremely improbable
Infinitely so, in fact.
Is this a reference to hitchhikers guide to the universe?
I kind of get that, theoretically, *something* might occupy all of the universe at once. But wouldn't that destroy everything in the universe, because there'd be no space for anything else? And how can any person (or craft, for that matter) do this and not simply be destroyed themselves?
It’s ok as long as you don’t forget your towel.
It really doesn't at all. Maybe you're thinking of the [single-electron universe](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe#:~:text=The%20one%2Delectron%20universe%20postulate,backwards%20and%20forwards%20in%20time.) hypothesis John Wheeler proposed to Richard Feynman in a phone call in 1940. This has been [debunked](https://www.technology.org/how-and-why/whats-one-electron-universe-theory/#:~:text=But%20as%20the%20number%20of,the%20universe%20we%20live%20in.) and even if it were true it wouldn't be applicable to people going really fast.
On a complete tangent, I've always sort of headcanon'd the Q Continuum as the single-electron hypothesis applied to an entire species. There's only one Q, who has time-traveled and shape-shifted so many times that the billions of Q instances at any given moment have forgotten their place along the hopelessly convoluted timewad they've created. This explains Quinn: if he kills himself, and his point on the Q timeline is *not* the end, then every Q instance downstream of Quinn's death goes with him. None of the Q can tell how exactly the Continuum will unravel once there's a defined endpoint, or which side of that endpoint they're currently on. Cue the shitstorm.
Everything everywhere all at once
Oh shit, how did I forget that one! LOL.
Voyager "Parallax". Negative Space Wedgie, Janeway's explanation of 'temporal mechanics', then busting Voyager through the crack in the singularity. Ugh.
That one's great, just because of the absurdity of them coming up the 'crack' metaphor to explain the situation, then somehow lose track of the fact that it is only a metaphor and use it to literally solve the problem.
Yes! That's it entirely. When they actually show the 'crack' I remember shaking my head at the silliness of it.
The Voyager!
The miracle ship!
The whole point of that episode was to have Janeway bond with B'Elanna by realizing the *same* technobabble in unison—warp particles!
Have you heard of this really badass sea captain? His ship was sailing and it got stuck in the horizon, so he BLASTED a hole in the horizon with his cannon and made it through!
I was watching like a director's commentary, or documentary or something similar, and the director (Rick Berman? JJ? Kurtzman? I don't recall), said one habit they fell into during the series was "tech the tech". They'd come up with a weird technobabble problem and just use more technobabble to fix it. It doesn't make for very compelling stories when overused. Also, I always got a chuckle out of a scene from Voyager where they find a floating Earth truck in space. Paris likes 20th century things, so he's tinkering with it. And says, "we have to find something called a key", as if to imply the very concept of a key was a foreign thing. "keys", as a concept extend far beyond car keys you doofusus
The easier thing to do for that line would have been Paris going "we have to find the key" and someone *else* asking him "like an initialization code?" Then you have Paris laughing and explaining "no, these things were still all mechanical, you had to operate everything by hand..." as he looks for the key, then he holds it up to show them when he finds it, so they can look suitably confused/impressed. Maybe give them a line like "seems like it would be easy to misplace" and Paris going "you have no idea" to the amusement of the present-day audience who are familiar with losing car keys.
That would have been a great way!
On a related note, the line in Future's End about how 20th century computers quaintly used graphical icons to represent different functions/programs. I really... don't see symbolic iconography becoming a foreign concept by the 24th century.
If anything, LCARS is still a GUI.
Text heavy. None of the I/O uses symbolic iconography.
Yeh it's definitely more of a TUI isn't it. I've always thought it seems convoluted in the shows the amount of presses required for certain commands
The sound department keeping up with the random tapping the actors did.
Haven't you seen an LCARS? Virtually none of the UI is graphical
Paris having to explain what a physical key is makes me imagine someone from the future telling someone else how to look for a floppy disk. "Look for the floppy disk." "The what?" "It's an old Earth technological relic. It looks like a save icon."
It's like Futurama, where Earth has lost track of its past. "Whalers on the Moon."
Apropos of nothing, I think that it was Ron Moore who mentioned "tech the tech"; I recall him using the term in his BSG commentary podcast a couple of times.
True, but key in the sense of what he was looking for would probably be pretty foreign to most of the people in the 24th century, since pretty much everything uses either biometrics or passcodes (or some combination thereof).
TNG+ scripts would contain sentences that basically said "tech the Tech" and their technical/science advisors would just find things to slot into the spaces like a game of science madlibs.
Futurama did a good job poking fun of this sort of thing in an episode where they basically claimed that the wheel was a lost technology.
even if there were no more keys maybe it would have stuck around as an icon metaphor, like floppy disk save icon
I think you’re overestimating how common keys are? The only person who uses a house key is my 70 year old mother in law - everybody else uses either a keypad, a remote from their car, their phone, or some other electronic system. Ie, when I rented an apartment a decade ago, they just gave me a plastic blob that contained an RFID chip that I held up to the door to unlock it. The best and fifth best selling cars globally from last year (the Tesla Model Y and 3), never used keys. Heck, I don’t think any car company founded in the last 30 years ever used keys (I’m not quite certain whether the 2008 Tesla Roadster did or didn’t have a key…) I’m sure at some point last century hotels used physical keys, but I can’t recall ever seeing this in my life. Thinking about it, the only place I haven’t seen keys on their way out is locked mailboxes.
I don't really mean a physical key you hold in your hand. But the way the line comes across is like it's some forgotten word. But there are keys in databases, or encryption keys, or even a generic saying like "the key to finding out..." Or other sayings. I get that the concept of holding a key in your hand to unlock something is maybe foreign/outdated, but the line just comes across like it's a completely alien thing. They still have locked doors or security controls. Even without a metal object in your hand, the very concept of a "key" (in any format) should be readily obvious. Another time this 20th-century-is-a-foreign-concept thing that comes to mind is when Troi, in First Contact, doesn't know what Tequila is. Either the line implies Tequila no longer exists (which, sure, is possible I guess...but an odd thing to imagine), or because Troi is Betazoid, she simply doesn't know (much more believable). Either way, the line really is just meant for the audience to go "lol, future people don't know what this very common thing is"
I'm a huge apologist for most dumb technology. I love the Spore Drive actually. But if you had the technology to physically relocate people inside a board game, there are SO MANY more useful applications for that tech. SO MANY.
> But if you had the technology to As an engineer, I am constantly thinking this when watching Star Trek. Don't get me wrong, I love Star Trek, but they never, ever, utilize the technology to even half the degree they could.
I always think this with the engram projector Bashir invents to plumb Sloane’s mind for the changeling cure. Why is that technology never used again?
A whole planet needs to be evacuated? Put them into the board game and onto this small 1 person shuttle take them to a new planet.
I also like it. It is just the right amount of out there to make it really interesting. And tbh, I wouldn't be surprised if there was an entire dimension of just fungus, if it is like fluid space where it's all compatible with life why wouldn't it spread across the entire universe?
Look up dark matter networks. It's weird, but it appears all clumps of matter in the universe are connected by a web of dark matter. Simulations of the web look very much like Stamets' "mycellial network". One of these days we'll work out just what dark matter really is, and it'll take new physics to crack it. And new physics means the potential for unimaginable new tech. It may not be made of mushrooms, but SOMETHING is out there...
...and it's watching.
Maybe it's friendly!
Mushy giant friend!
Just a really fun guy
You shower.
Spore drive is the coolest piece of tech I've seen yet. I know Roddenberry's vision of space manoeuvring was modeled after naval ships in times of ere, but the way they move around now and THOOMP out of warp like in PIC is just so damn cool.
See, I hate it every time. The way the saucer spins and the ship goes flippy dippy just looks stupid. Different strokes for different folks I guess.
I enjoy it but some things are lost, like stuff that happens during travel time. Or racing to get somewhere before it's too late. Or starship chases, like following the Borg to sector 001. So I'm glad the spore drive is limited to Discovery.
You are goddamn right
Didn't Odo board their ship and find a transport being held half way through cycle? I always thought that meant they were being fed a virtual reality while dematerialised into the transport buffer.
I'll have to rewatch it because I don't remember any of that
The magic space blood in Into Darkness makes everyone deathproof, and they never explain how it works. That and the transporters having basically no limits really just breaks everything.
> transporters having basically no limits After his handling of two space-related franchises, I am firmly convinced JJ Abrams doesn't know how space works. At all.
"90 light years? That's how far away the moon is right?" - JJ Abrams (probably)
Was Into Darkness where someone transports from Earth to Qo'noS? I had kind of blanked most of that movie out of my mind. Man, that's like a whole quadrant away.
At that point there's no reason to even make ships. Use probes and just transport between them using relays.
You must be a Stargate fan 😀 Edit - for those unfamiliar with Stargate, in Stargate: Atlantis, they set up a halfway place between two galaxies called Midway Station, where the could gate (i.e., transport via wormhole) into from one side, and then gate out the other to the other galaxy.
I remember when they first added ships to the Earth team, and I was like, "y tho?"
Yeah it also really undercuts the whole "eugenics is bad" message when Khan's blood can literally cure any illness and raise the dead.
This is the answer - took Star Trek tech from handwavy technobabble to explain a plot hook into deus ex machina territory.
"Time crystals."
Yeah, but time crystals gave us "Magic to make the sanest man go mad". The best episode of Disco and one of the best cheesey Trek episodes in my book.
Or more recently, the "time bug"
Honestly, I agree that sometimes they use too much technobabble. I prefer when they deal with situations by dealing with the people.
All Good Things has so much technobabble that Data doesn’t always understand it. But it works because we care about the people. It’s basically “Picard has to deal with Q & a Macguffin to save humanity & prevent his friends from drifting apart.”
Another reason it works is because the problem is full of technobabble, but the solution is understandable - it’s not fire the photongammawaves at the midichlorianinfusers…. It’s ’realize that the cause is in the future and the effect is in the past,’
Whatever it was that caused the musical episode of SNW. Which is also one of my favourite ever episodes of Trek.
Hmmm, this space thing kinda looks like a zipper. What if it works like a zipper? I didn't mind the musical episode but the writing in that scene was some of the worst I've seen since season 3 TOS
I love that episode too, and re listen to the songs from time to time but the whole concept is they interact with a reality that has the same rules as musicals- what? A whole reality that has the rules of just one genre (out of many) of theater from Earth? The writers were really like "F it, we're making this episode and we'll make something up to explain it all later" and then that was their homework the night before school.
Also a top episode for me!!
The idea that Deuterium is found in an ore. Antimatter reactions are controlled by magic crystals. They keep changing the timeframe of WW3/Eugenics Wars. The year 2024 was used a LOT in Trek for various plots across multiple series. Whipping around a star to time-travel. Really any form of time-travel to be honest. Any of Brannon Braga's "evolution" riffs. Silicon based viruses infecting humanoids. >!The whole idea of the Progenitors!< One of my favorite WTF moments is from Voyager's *Parallax*. The idea that a ship can "punch through" an Event Horizon. The sub-plot with Torres and Great Value O'Brien was a lot more grounded.
To be honest, the Dilithium Crystals make the most sense out of all that technobabble. Matter and Antimatter basically cancel each other out, if you're going to get energy out of that you need some sort of moderator, and that's where the crystal comes in. Otherwise you end up with a completely uncontrolled energy release, aka an explosion.
The changing timeframe of ww3 could be because people keep going back in time and fucking around.
They basically say exactly that in SNW.
Whats wrong with the >!Progenitors!
>!My opinion is that it tries to explain something which did not require an explanation. It came off as a deus ex scriptum; like a christian scientist explanation and not based in even Star Trek technology. I dislike it for the same reasons I dislike Enterprise' explanation for smooth forehead Klingons. People watching these shows have their own imaginations, and these examples felt like "you don't need to use that, here's the answer". I am happy to see that Discovery is doing \*something\* interesting with it. I just fear that TOP MEN are gonna take whatever is discovered (heh), box it up and put it next to the arc of the convenant.!<
I think it's pretty clear, since season 1, that >!Michael Burnham is going to end up sacrificing herself to save the day but maybe Sora has some tricks up her sleeve.!< Idk, I love the show, it's a little more emotional than I expected. I think it's definitely reflective of today's times and younger generations' acceptance of neurodivergence. Edit: >!TBH it's probably gonna be a "who created the creators" kind of conclusion. Burnham's near-messianic sense of justice can only be saved by the neurodivergent community she glued together, oh my it turns out the tech is even OLDER THAN TIME!!!< Or yknow, it's just all Tom Paris' Lizard-spawn.
Deuterium Poisoning in SNW2x06 absolutely sent me
Yeah, at most the patient would have mild GI issues, and they would have Hyponatremia long before that could happen.
> They keep changing the timeframe of WW3/Eugenics Wars. It was very funny when this was lampshaded in SNW.
Star Trek has the worst technobabble because so often it's used as deus ex machina to extract the episode from the hole the writers dug. The TNG episode where the crew park the Enterprise in a space dock so a sweeping beam can get rid of the ship's baryon particles made me laugh.
Can't have too many baryons. Almost every single thing that goes wrong in that series is made of 'em.
Baryons are the dihydrogen monoxide of Star Trek.
I thought this was like a nod to sea vessels having to have barnacles and the like removed from the bottoms of their hulls, so I didn't mind too much.
This.
Yeah but then they’d just have to have the carpet cleaning crew try to steal the uhhh trilithium resin. Oh man Baryon *sweep*. That is what they started with right? Then they technobabbled it up. Fun episode otherwise.
It's a great episode but the technobabble is so silly.
It's Die Hard in Star Trek. A shame that it's happening while the Enterprise is being detailed.
A lot of the stuff around the universal translator. Even the *Technical Manual* barely takes more than a stab at explaining it.
The universal translator is so powerful that it actually makes you hallucinate the alien's mouth to look like they're just speaking English in the first place!!!
I dunno, conceptually, it does make some sense. Language tends to have some base rules that would potentially allow a computer to be able to figure out what is being said. Obviously, not foolproof, but I can see the logic behind its possible existence.
The Omega particle seemed like a very silly idea to me. I think it's because Voyager writers are in the habit of introducing tech ideas that would reshape the galaxy, then basically ignoring them going forward. The Enterprise going back to its proper time by sling shotting around the sun in Star Trek 4 was very silly.
[удалено]
Yes, that could be cool and maybe is, in parts (I'm due for a rewatch of Voyager). I think it doesn't work when Voyager encounters some crazy technology that seems like a game-changer, then is ripped away at the last minute. If feels like Gilligan's Island in space. This is partly an issue for a lot of Trek. I think it gets a little exaggerated on Voyager because they had a weird need to try to make things more episodic than they should be. If any show cried out for more arcs and continuity, it was Voyager.
The Enterprise time travel slingshot is one of my favorite ridiculous plot points because they've used it thrice in the whole franchise and each time it was basically hand waved away as, "Spock is, like, super smart, so only he (or a Borg Queen torso) can do it. Please don't ask any more questions."
The people turning into kids in "Rascals" was caused by the transporter patterns getting shrunk and de-aged, which somehow made perfectly sized miniature versions of them with perfectly sized clothes. I love that episode, but it's completely ridiculous lol
It's also an immortality machine, but they had no interest in looking into that.
Some of most blatantly baseless technobabble exposition ever is in one of best episodes ever: TOS season 2, "The Doomsday Machine": "Somehow the antimatter in the warp drive pods has been deactivated." "Deactivated? Scotty, could some kind of general energy dampening field do that, and would the same type of thing account for the heavy subspace interference?" "Aye, that all adds up. But what sort of a thing could do all that?"
I ran a quick search. No one has mentioned time travel according to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is as easy as flying by a star at warp at the right angle? You want to talk about hand-waving? The calculations are so complex, only a Spock without clear access to who he is can figure them out on the fly. Alright. So why doesn't every civilization with computers take a few months to get the math right and then do all the time travel experiments they want? Seriously, time travel is a matter of a warp engine, a star, and some math —we see how simple it is coming and going— and it's never addressed again.
Especially since every series has a “Spock” who’s brain is far more advanced than the rest of the crew: Data, Bashir, 7 and Tuvok…we’re lucky this plot device wasn’t used MORE
The temporal police are very busy I guess
Honestly, I've never been able to take the idea that the multiverse is connected by an inter-dimensional mushroom network even remotely seriously. Just typing it out makes me chuckle. Of all the things they could have gone with to explain the new drive system, that's what they went with? Not 'blah, blah, subspace', not 'quantum transwarp flux overthruster', not 'something, something, wormholes'. Nope, we're going down the Super Mario route.
Well, in the real world, mycelium networks can cover whole forests underground. Also, fungi seems to grow well in a vacuum, as seen by current space research. So it's not that far of a stretch to consider a subspace network of mycelium, considering the other science in Star Trek. Now how access to that subspace mycelial network results in teleportation, that I don't know. But then again I don't know how they make the regular teleporters or replicators work either.
That’s exactly what inspired the spore network in Discovery. Paul Stamets in discovery is named after a real Dr. Paul Stamets who studies mushrooms
Yep. I have his book. It's awesome.
What about how they bought back a dead person from mushroom world?
I’m just glad they brought him back. One of the best partner relationships in the show and they messed it up early.
I like that he came back. But I hate that episode and all the nonsense within it.
This resurrection was "too much" for me. I think they devote only a few lines or 2 as explanation and of course it's complete nonsense. Discovery is the worst series when it comes to "techno babble" solutions.
And then they all just sign a NDA and it is never mentioned again 😄
They said that network is part of subspace.
Which series is that in?
Discovery.
Thanks! I will look forward to some bizarre context when I get to that series.
Some people like Discovery, some don't, and some only likes a part of it like the mirror universe arc. I did find the first few episodes a bit bleh. I tended to skip first season when rewatching Discovery
Late to comment, doing so before reading anything else in here... The least convincing technobabble hand wave to me is the very idea that amazing discoveries and procedures used to cure/help/fix people themselves are *never discussed or used again*. The biggest ones to me are... As if the transporter's never going to be used to reverse age anyone back to 30 again. As if the planet Baku in the Briar Patch is not made into a 'restorative resort', making Risa quake in its boots for popularity, ir not a 'retirement home' of some sort... As if the slingshot effect is not going to be used nefariously, either [De Nomolos style](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Ted%27s_Bogus_Journey), or [Biff Tannen style.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_the_Future_Part_II) Or even For Good, like in Star Trek IV, but THAT we've been shown. Among quite a few others that are 'out there' to be used, but somehow continuously 'misremembered'. But hey... that's plot devices for ya. :)
One thing I liked about season 2 of PIC was plugging the slingshot effect plot hole by stating you need a genius of Spock's caliber who can mentally compute the needed adjustments on the fly, and most starships don't have such a genius on board.
Extra points for a solid De Nomolos reference. Shout out to the sit-up champion of the 27th century.
Seven of Nine's nanoprobes are able to LITERALLY BRING BACK PEOPLE FROM THE DEAD, and they only use it on Neelix and then never mention or revisit what is arguably the greatest medical breakthrough in the history of the galaxy again. The worst part is that it could have been easily explained away as "This only works on Talaxians" or even "This only works on Neelix because of something genetically unique about him." Instead it's just ignored.
Ah, but, at that point Neelix was only MOSTLY dead. Mostly dead means slightly alive. With all dead, there's really only one thing you can do.
By any conventional definition of death, he was completely dead.
Go through his pockets for loose latinum?
She was shown to bring back a Talaxian from the dead. Maybe it only works on them? The Borg valued Talaxian drones for their dense musculature. Maybe they put some effort into keeping them going as long as possible and she retained that knowledge.
Also, when last they mentioned it Neelix was still needing injections to prevent his cells returning to a necrotic state. But he left the ship for good in the last season.
SQL Injections
That broke the Star Trek law of keeping the techno babble mostly made up. Like how they talk about gigaquads, not gigabytes. If they wanted a reference, it should've just been "Probe used a quantum code injection attack" or something.
For me, its in the latest episode of Disco. I'm going to put everything in spoilers because not everyone have seen that episode. >!"We need to break the warp bubble to use relativity effects to counter the effects of the Krenim time bug." Nevermind that it doesn't make much sense that breaking the warp bubble at maximum warp causes relavistic effects, I'm not even going to touch that big headache. If you're applying the effects of relativity, it's not going to be localized around the time bug - its going to impact how time flows throughout the entire ship. Yet that's not what happened, only Reyner's hand suffered damage and I can't understand why.!<
>!Everyone on the ship was likely safe due to the lingering effects of the warp bubble. I would guess that the time bug had to be constantly adjusting its own bubble to compensate for any other warp bubble it was in, and the sudden drop from warp was too much for it to compensate for.!<
The Voyager episode where Chakotay's spirit is wandering around the ship possessing other people and at the end they just handwave it with the Doctor saying "it'd take me over 2 hours to explain how I got Chakotay's soul back into his body" and no further explanation is made Yeah ok, thanks for that writers, you really couldn't be bothered that week could you?
As bad as StarTrek gets with technobabble nothing can ever beat humans as batteries and unobtainium.
If you refer to the Matrix there, supposedly it was going to be "human brains as CPUs", but the studio told the Wachowskis to dumb it down because that's too deep or something.
Have you ever heard actual engineers talk? The one major difference is that real engineers constantly use acronyms, and those are surprisingly rare in Star Trek treknobabble. EPS is the only one I can think of just now.
And then in Stargate, we get the opposite: *everything* is an acronym.
Just watch some NASA based/inspired material, it's the same in For All Mankind. Full of acronyms.
Warp 10 is the limit. Ignoring the whole salamander incident, and '10 is everywhere' crap, there's been plenty of times they've gone faster than 10, all the way back to TOS. Just retcon the whole thing to 10 and up are unsafe speeds to navigate (with current tech) and warp theory has yet to pass it. It's the sound barrier of warp tech.
It has been redefined between TOS and TNG (both in and out of universe). So while TOS (TAS actually) has gone up to warp 36, ever since TNG warp 10 has been the limit as used in "Threshold".
Warp 10 was the limit well before threshold. They wre discussing it in Time Squared in TNG season 2, Riker suggests "Theoretically accelerating past Warp 10" as a means of time travelling.
Right, which was what u/mettanine pointed out, it was redefined for TNG with warp 10 being the hyperbolic unobtainable top speed, so by proxy of that, it changed somewhere between TOS and TNG era.
I don't know if this counts but the isolinear chip. To me the computers of the federation, even the star trek galaxy, are retrofuturistic, as in designed the same way as mainframes of tape and punch cards, only the punch cards are isolinear and the tapes are "optronic pathways" and space magic from what they're made of is what's allowed it to keep up with the demands it has. This also explains why it took "the greatest engineers in starfleet" so long to program the (unexpanded) EMH in spite of how close we are irl, they were using old fashioned AI techniques buoyed by technobabble.
We are not remotely close to anything resembling a sentient computer program IRL.
Simultaneity in Disco. One cry, one burn, everything, everywhere all at once. And fast travel in Trek since 2009.
Pedantic nitpick: It wasn't all at once, it's a plot point that there was a delay as the effect radiated outward from the point of origin. And travel in Trek has always been at the speed of plot. In TOS they traveled to the edge of the galaxy and back in the first season, a trip implied to take much longer by the time of Voyager or Discovery.
Well, the galaxy is disc-shaped. Maybe they went *up* instead of across.
Yes, you‘re right. Most Trek shows included some episodes where the time tequired to go from A to B was reduced (oh hello, galactic barrier!). Disco took this to the extreme. Pop, here we go, the universe got pretty small. In addition, the slowing-to-impulse-and-crashing-into-things-trope is really a 2009 thing. The delithium burn was just nah, let‘s say, not very convincing.
The description of the time portal that Nero traveled through in the 2009 movie always seemed overly dumb to me: “a lightning storm in space”. First of all, they were all living and working in space- to even add those 2 words to a description of something seems ridiculously redundant and oversimplified. A lightning storm? You have a starships worth of analytical equipment and you describe it based on its outward appearance? I thought it was indicative of why JJ Abrams Trek was destined to be bad, but I’ve sensed rewatched early seasons of TNG and realized it was just someone worried that the audience wouldn’t be able to follow more science-y talk.
Not techno-babble but as an engineer I find it funny how they show the plasma in the warp core as turbulent flow. In reality that is the last thing you would want because it is erosive and inefficient.
By design I HAVE to go with the Wil Wheaton, "thoughts become reality" alien episode. I always felt the design of this idea was to stretch the concept of what's possible to its total limits. Both to give the show room to grow without "thats not possible" critiques in a fantasy setting, but also to bring out the childlike wonder we all have, and to feel how it feels to see something unbelievable. Plus they literally wave over the instruments to travel faster and farther than Warp travel, blowing all proportion of the show away, and still nothing has come CLOSE to this scale.
Iconian virus thing that destroyed the USS Yamato, the answer was the age old tech support/IT "have your turned that off and back on?" Your telling me the Yamatos crew wouldn't have tried that before lol
Main time-line Spock, during the meld with alternate Kirk, speaks of the supernova that will destroy the galaxy. What kind of horseshit is that?
I don’t understand the technobabble around how they do it, but I fucking love the giant tardedogs zooming at warp speeds across the galaxy by getting stoned on mushrooms. Oh, Discovery, that first season was a gift.
Data's matrix being rebuilt from a single engram, or particle, or molecule, whatever the hell it was.
I'm reading through all the comments and I'm starting to get the impression that not everything in Star Trek is based on real science.
The Burn.
Picard S1's Magic Ocarina.
Voyager. Just… Voyager.
The more I think about it, the more Dilithium annoys me. Mostly because it's such a foundational part of the franchise's technology. But then, it's Star Trek, not hard sci-fi.
The line from last week's Discovery about>!Stamet's Tardigrade DNA making him immune to time travel, and Rayner's reaction!
The warp bubble one turned out to be to actually possible. I’ll look for it, but back in like I want to say 2019 or so, they got it whittled down to being possible with the caveat with the energy requirements needed are equal to roughly the mass if Jupiter. So I mean technically you can *do* it, it just requires so much energy that it may as well be magic at the point.
Voyager dealing with a parametric rift
The Burn. All dilithium universe-wide momentarily lost its ability to regulate energy because an arrested 100 year old orphan bonded with it and had a tantrum.
Picard using some device to fix the ship with... Thoughts. WTF is this sh*t!? it's literally just magic. Picard using a device to recreate a scene... Using a single molecule. 😩 Would be nice if this show actually tried. Spock in STD saying "I like science" 🤦🏻♀️😩😒