StillPaisleyCat

It’s going to be a long road for Paramount, and the Star Trek franchise, to get past it American-centric blinkers.

IDIC seems to be an in-America rather than a global or universal concept for the executives and even most of the EPs.

Defining ‘television history’ as just what was broadcast in the United States is all of a piece of Hollywood’s century-long understanding that it was the global entertainment focal point.

Paramount is strategically moving to emphasize development and production outside the United States, and recently cut its domestic staff significantly. However, Paramount’s own communications team seems to remain quite blindly American-centric as if Paramount+ can survive on the US market alone. Geoblocked embedded video, predominantly American feature article writers and editors on the StarTrek.com official site, are all evidence of the persistent blind spot.

But it’s hurt the franchise. There’s a kind of Federation Exceptionalism baked in that comes across as an expansion of American exceptionalism. When all the hero captains other than Picard, and many of the bridge crew, are identified as coming from what is currently the United States, it says that the US is still the most important place and marginalizes other countries.

Star Trek’s impact outside North America has been constrained by these attitudes going back to the 1960s.

Canadians, used to crossborder transmissions of US networks tend to roll with it, to the point that Star Trek shows are often the most popular dramas, and not just in the sci-fi genre. The UK and Germany got TNG in syndication, which built their base, but in much of the world Star Trek only became broadly accessible through Netflix.

And what we hear in social media platforms like this one is that fans outside the US, who are attracted to and embrace Trek’s aspirational values, find these kinds of persistent markers of inward-looking American attitudes an irritant, at some points like nails on chalkboard, standing out against what Trek aspires to be.

We saw several more staff in sickbay in season one, especially in the episode with the contagion from the former Illyrian colony.

I found it very odd that Chapel was on her own with no other medical technicians or paramedics in this episode.

So pleased to see Mia Kirshner back as Amanda Grayson.

While Pelia isn’t mentioned, we do know that Pelia and Amanda have a significant connection given that Amanda was one of the first people she revealed her true identity to.

I dearly love the TNG Tech Manual.

I’m not sure why we would give it primacy over science advisor Dr Erin MacDonald’s current explanation of how warp works, especially as she frequently takes examples from Voyager to demonstrate it.

I also have the original edition of the TNG Technical Manual and it’s very well worn. I saw Rick Sternbach present at cons in the 90s and have seen more sketches and schematics beyond the Tech Manual which he put on screen (TNG, DS9, space stations etc.)

I can’t consider these supporting publications and insights into the minds of the designers to be canon though, at least not alpha canon, any more than I would give that status can tonthr the ‘official’ posters and books with schematics with the insides of the ships - from the TOS era through to the Shipyards books.

As you note in your own critique in the OP, what the designers and EPs had in mind doesn’t necessarily get validated or consistently brought on screen. Not to mention Okuda had and has his own firm ideas about ships that he put into graphics that don’t necessarily align.

One of the biggest examples of this is interior schematics.

Many fans love and cling to their charts of interior schematics of the hero’s ships. This includes some of the EPs and writers. (Michal Chabon talks about the one of the 1701 he had on his bedroom wall as a child.)

The TNG Tech Manual however validates the modular concept of the interior of ships where modules for different labs, sickbay, quarters etc are hung within the volume of the slacked frame. These line up as decks but aren’t a stacked structure like an office tower or a cruise ship. The turbolifts wind around these modules. I’ve heard this called the ‘habittrail’ ship interior model after the old environments for small pets. The concept dates back to the plans and scematics for TMP.

Anyway modular ship interiors are described in the Tech Manual and were confirmed in presentations by Sternbach at the time. In fact, when asked why he didn’t provide deck charts for the D, Sternbach would reply that the ship interior was modular and adaptable to the different needs of crews and missions. Turbolifts and Jeffries Tubes would wind between these suspended modules and deck sections.

I would argue however that, despite Sternbach’s statements and the manual, the modular interior structure has only recently been confirmed in the 23rd century was only onscreen (Discovery and Short Treks) in the wills vfx scenes of the turbolifts travelling within the ship, and the fight in the turbolift in a Discovery episode. Whether or not one believes that the interior volumes shown in those vfx shots were too large, it’s indisputable that a modular interior with interior spaces hanging in a space frame has been established for that era (or at least as it’s been overwritten).

For the 24th and early 25th century, we have have conflicting onscreen evidence from Okuda’s graphics. On LCARS panels, we are shown distinct vertical cutaway elevations with an office-tower or cruise ship rigid/fixed deck structure. Lower Decks doubled down on this in the episode where Boimler crawled through Jeffries tubes to reach the bridge to meet Tom Paris.

Anyway, I’ve dove down another rabbit hole with this, and I expect that the issue of the interiors has been previously well-canvassed at the Daystrom Institute’s old location, but it’s another key example of some very different ideas having floated around in the background of production having influenced what gets established onscreen as canon.

As I noted in my response to another post, I view all of this as a kind of creative dialogue that ranges from the writers and technical and production staff to the licensed tie-in publications through to fan thinking and back.

Albucierre is a fan who is also a physicist. He’s feeding back and inputting into the dialogue. Just because the production had played around with something like but unlike warp, doesn’t mean he doesn’t have what’s canonical warp.

His fandom led to his finding a very significant workaround the limits of General Relativity. His doctoral thesis proof used, necessarily, the most extreme corner solution to make the math tractable because that’s how one establishes that there is a way around a theory that has hasn’t been previously recognized.

I do find your claim that people understand Alcubierre’s warp to be just the specific extreme case a bit puzzling, as I see the concept being picked up and extended in a wide swath of recent sci-fi literature outside the Trek franchise.

More useful and practical applications of his warp concept can only come from adding in those other variables, likely by massive computational estimates where the neat closed form math solutions aren’t possible. It seems other writers appreciate this and are looking to speculations about the theory can be expect to advance, rather than freezing it in the PhD thesis version.

In the end, I can only agree that we’ll need to seen onscreen confirmations, even if what we have from behind the scenes thinking is strongly suggestive one way or another.

In that vein, I would caution that it would be more fair to say that it remains to be confirmed as Alcubierre’s warp concept rather than that it is not.

You may be able to have both.

The key point is that the fundamental concept of space warping around the ship doesn’t necessarily mean that the ship cannot have velocity (and therefore inertia) going into warp.

That is, the idea that a ship would have to be at a full stop prior to engaging warp, rather than taking the speed from the impulse (or whatever sublight) engines, isn’t inconsistent with the basic concept of Albucierre’s drive, just the specific extreme solution he worked out the proof for.

As for thing like light stretching around the ship, it not obvious what the light outside the warp bubble or field would appear like to those inside the field. I haven’t seen a worked example to show why the light of stars in space exterior to the field would appear normally. One would rather think the opposite even if it’s the space and not the ship that’s pulled superluminally.

It seems to me that your proof that Star Trek warp is not the same as Alcubierre’s warp relies excessively on the specific results of the corner solution that Alcubierre used in his own proof.

For example, the lack of velocity going into warp and inertia within the warp bubble are specific to that corner solution, as is the lack mechanism to change direction.

But Albucierre’s corner solution would require unrealistic amounts of exotic matter even as compared to the antimatter engines in Star Trek.

So, we should expect that the advances to any kind of usable Albucierre drive will go beyond that specific closed-form solution. The last reported works to advance his finding did start to get beyond the limited case of one direction and inertia.

It’s pretty much a given that when someone is trying to find a solution around a theory as robust as general relativity, the starting point is going to be some kind of corner solution.

Others may extend the work, but it would go to far to say that the practical solutions with the additional variables allowed to have nonzero values are not Albucierre’s warp.

Thanks for the encouragement.

I will do that. I might wish to add another example or two.

The long line ships of STO are beauties, I agree.

I wish Terry Matalas hadn’t been so keen to push them out of use in Picard.

The Vesta class is also a favourite of mine. Mark Rademaker’s designs are very compelling.

It sounds like it was Nickelodeon that needed to bail first.

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The nature of a time crystal is that it’s a fixed event in every timeline forward.

Once Pike drew the crystal on Borath, it was locked in.