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Being a Right Honorable Traveller Grognard, I tend to be dismissive of the Space Opera of Star Trek.
Traveller has its space opera components, but is solid, crunchy, science fiction nonetheless.
Star Trek doesn't let it's technology be solidified far enough to allow any conclusions follow to their natural end.
How many problems would be solved should any of several transporter malfunctions be researched and reproduced reliably?
The main problem with Star Trek is that it's a utopia. The technology is so miraculous that many conflicts and motivations shouldn't be present. We could ignore that, but they've shown us the tech that solves the problem. This is far more evident in Next Generation than the OG series.
Traveller, on the other hand, assumed that humanity would remain human even five thousand years from now and the conflicts we carry would remain. There's no magic technology that solves human nature or eliminates supply and demand in a way that allows Marxism to be realistic.
And I am a snob about it!
Well, Traveller has it's handwavium, but it tries to 'science' the handwavium and make it universal across the board. The concepts are the same from the beginning of history in the game to the end, if you play it far enough to the heat-death of the universe.
ReplyDeleteWhereas the tech of Trek is episodically applied. What makes this neat trick in this episode vs what makes that neat trick in that episode. One episode has phaser rifles and another episode they've only got hand phasers to fight a war. One moment they've got the ability to use phasers to stun a whole planet or at least several city blocks, another episode they can't stop mind-controlled children from running amok (gee, like stunning them wouldn't work, right, or would it, oh, that's right, it's not in the script.)
Yes, NextGen tried to do a tech manual to handle things like this, but...
And then they threw that tech manual away during Voyager. Yeah, I'm gonna harp upon all the power to run the holo-deck but not the food processors but able to run the transporters, all which use basically variations of the same tech. Oh, but they say, there's different power requirements... Gee, I say, if we can make variable frequency drives today here now or conversion drives using old motors to adjust phase and polarity, can't the vaunted Trek techies do the same? Oh, that's right, it's not in the scripts.
Traveller assumes that the ship owner will find pieces-parts to keep their ship running. That if they find better pieces-parts they can modify their ship to use the new pieces-parts. So, well, one can have a seriously bubba'd (means it's been modified but will last, and with much coolness factor, especially if one is a bubba) space ship or space tank or space gun or space armor, and it will work. And given the tech base, if it works once, it can be repeatable, even to the point of actually becoming economically viable (rather than just a onesie or a twosie.)
Trek, especially after the communist/socialist takeover during Next Gen (seriously, no money? what? you get what you have due to merit only? what bullshit is this?) assumes... if it isn't in the script or pushes the message, then it doesn't matter. If it is in the script and/or pushes the message, even if it is contrary to what's been done previously, then it's A-OKAY! Which explains the latest tv show version of Trek.
Babylon 5 did it better. But that's more because the creator created the universe, and tried to stick to mostly plausible handwavium integrated with real science, and the handwavium and science in the first episode is the same handwavium and science in all the rest of the episodes. (Though I shudder to think of what the reboot is going to look like.)
It would have been nice and neat and wonderful if the inventors of Trek had thought about a Trek bible and a Trek tech manual. It would have been nice if the post-Next Gen shows and movies had stuck to the Trek Canon that was populated so vastly by all the novels, the fanzines, the people who tried to make Trek more real. Discovery was okay until the time travelling bullscat got involved. I liked DS-9 for some of the stuff. Voyager (as you may have guessed) pissed me off for the stupid tech part of the Trek. And that dogsqueeze new show deserves to be curbstomped and then set on fire in a dumpster while being compressed, then tossed into a star or black hole.
Our favorite examples of Traveller handwavium are the meson guns and black globe generator.
DeleteThey're handwavium, but they work exactly as described every time. If that causes something strange, then something strange happens. Every time. Even if the players can exploit the strangeness. Like firing their own lasers at the inside of the black globe to charge the jump drive.
Thing is, with the science of the early 70's, the concept of spinning a collection of mesons to travel FTL and appear suddenly at a particular place was hypothetically potentially pseudo-possible. It's just an advancement of 70's particle accelerator theory applied to the mysterious meson, which at the time appeared, then disappeared, then appeared on various detectors at odd intervals and was mysterious so there was a lot of hypothetical hypotheses about mesons and their existences. Now it's more bosuns and quarks that are at the hypothetical edge of science.
DeleteAs to Black Globes, well, again, early to mid 70's 'science' hypotheses dealing with Black Holes and suchness, combined with coolness factor of having 'shields' and such like everyone's been talking about since the 1930's or so, and, really, is it too difficult to assume that given enough energy and the right type of energy one could project a field to control the local space-time fabric? Isn't that the theory behind the Alcubierre warp drive? How would said Alcubierre warp drive look to someone outside of the warped field created by said drive system? A suddenly squashed globe of compressed 'space'? And other scientists have hypothesized about creating a charged particle field projected ahead of a vehicle in order to deflect light-speedish particles and larger slower objects (the 'theory' behind some versions of the Bussard Ram-Jet?
So, well, again, based on early to mid 70's science, the existence of meson guns and meson screens and black globes aren't exactly completely handwavium, there's a tad bit behind the handwavium that may be somewhat real. Again, based on the science of the time.
It's why in Traveller the ship's computer is still, with all the peripherals, such a huge arsed thing. Why avionic and astronomic sensors and such make up such a huge portion of the space assigned to the ship's bridge. And why the ships' hulls are considered to be so damned thick that a tramp freighter cobbled together has thicker armor than a modern main battle tank's turret (something I have fought every time I've talked to the traveller gurus over on Citizen of the Imperium. I mean, even in WWII, tanks had hull armor as thick (early years) to far thicker (French tanks and later years everyone elses) than even good freighters, and said tanks were able to shoot holes through said freighters even with early years' guns.
Some parts of Traveller didn't age well, other parts were obviously put there to simplify game play. (One can still get into huge arguments over the ability of a 1G grav drive to push a ship out of a 1G grav envelope. I mean, wouldn't the grav drive lose the pushable grav from the planet as it travelled farther from the source of gravity, thus needing a set of thrusters to move the vehicle away? And that was dropped from first edition to second edition... still, to me, just plain grav drives make no sense, more handwavium?)
Still, again, the pseudo-science behind Traveller handwavium is there.
At least Traveller handles the existence of human-like humanoids scattered about everywhere better than Trek, to whom the existence of so many 'aliens' just like us is no big thing.
(And Traveller also handles the lack of any verifiable proof that there are many other alien species out there. Current science behind planetary and system formations required to allow and sustain life are pointing at the rather astronomical odds behind all the things that had to be pert-near perfect in a set sequence before life could even start on Earth, let alone advance to the point it has (things like gas giants starting in the inner planetary orbits and moving to the outer planetary orbits and sweeping space clean ahead of them, thus stopping the continued bombardment (for the most part) of space debris from hitting Earth (and Jupiter is still sweeping the skies even today.)) Weirdness.