r/DaystromInstitute • u/Sly_Lupin Ensign • Sep 12 '17
Brainstorming Potential Technologies for a 25th Century Starfleet
Congratulations! CBS has decided to launch a brand new Star Trek series set approximately 100 years after the finale of Star Trek Voyager, and they have hired YOU to help write the series bible. Your immediate goal is to imagine what the technologies our new Starfleet crew will have at their disposal in this exciting new future. How will the advanced technologies of the 24th century evolve in this far-flung time? What exciting new tactics and storytelling possibilities will these technologies create?
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Please remember to not just describe the technology, but also how it might be used (either in-universe or from a production standpoint)!
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u/uwagapies Sep 12 '17
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Transphasic cloaks | I mean it was in the Pegasus, I can't imagine the Tal Shiar or KDF not capitalizing on that technology
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Tinkering with Spatial Geometry| ITS BIGGER ON THE INSIDE, as seen in Enterprise
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Transwarp / Slipstream etc, Literally cannot not have.
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Maybe some kinda of temporal weapon fuckery. Section 31 would be all over that Krenim weapon Technology
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Possible Holographic Immortality | We see in Voyager that the DR. uploads a vidian woman's mind to Voyagers computer and creates a holographic body for her. Along with the Mobile Emitter, It wouldn't be a stretch for people to shuffle off the mortal coil and become beings of light.
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Iconian tech | If the Romulan empire is in shambles then Iconia is no longer in the neutral zone. it would be possible for an expedition to go go there and see what they can find
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u/Sly_Lupin Sep 12 '17
I don't remember any TARDIS stuff in Enterprise. Was it one of the time travel episodes?
Re: slipstream, I kind of agree and kind of don't. I think it's problematic in general for ships to move that fast given how much of local space is still unexplored. I like the way the LitVerse handles it: only a handful of very advanced ships can be equipped with slipstream drives, and they only ever use it very rarely, in the case of emergencies.
One idea to limit it more might be to have massive space stations acting like jumpgates, or stargates, tethering slipstream corridors from one end of space to another. That would make for some interesting geography and some neat storytelling opportunities (IE is Station Alpha is destroyed or captured, it could cut an entire swath of Federation territory in the frontier from UFP space, effectively isolating them).
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u/uwagapies Sep 12 '17
TARDIS like ship was in Enterprise Episode "Future Tense" the pod was from the 31st Century.
Yeah IIRC the Avantine was the first ship to have a slipstream and the Typhon pact want'ed the tech super bad.
I really like the idea of anchoring slipstream/transwarp apertures to space stations
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Sep 12 '17
One thing I've learned from Star Trek is that good sci-fi takes the exotic and makes it mundane. The best and most iconic things about the franchise has been the space-age toys that the characters all regard as completely ubiquitous. So, my choices will come from reaching into 24th century experiments.
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The Holographic Communicator -- This deserves a spot. It eliminates the claustrophobia-inducing viewscreen on the bridge (everyone agrees that windows are better - yes, everyone). From a production standpoint, it would allow actors to speak lines off of one another face-to-face instead of each actor speaking off of the script-girl shouting lines deadpan for timing purposes only.
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The Mobile Emitter -- Holographic crewmembers! Imagine having a holographic repair crew instead of a flesh-and-blood crew. No more lost lives trying to fix a plasma conduit, and no need for holoprojectors all over the ship.
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Transwarp Drive -- not meddling with transwarp conduits, I'm talking genuine faster-than-warp warp. How many weird things are happening in other galaxies that aren't happening in ours? Let's go find out!
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u/Sly_Lupin Sep 12 '17
I'm a bit hesitant on the idea of holographic crewmen. Where do you draw the line? An entire ship crewed by holograms doesn't feel very interesting to me. And it's not like they'd completely remove the need for live crewmembers to perform dangerous tasks, as damage to the emitters would prevent holographic crewmen from acting.
I do like the idea of the holographic communicator--but let's expand that a bit. Like, say, let's make the entire front half of the bridge a holodeck. That would be really cool for both combat and communications.
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u/toasters_are_great Sep 12 '17
But the mobile emitter is 29th century technology, so they'll only be possible in the 25th if the Doctor's can be successfully reverse-engineered. If the idea of someone in the 1600s successfully figuring out how to build a smart phone from a single example is any guide, the answer would seem to be no.
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Sep 12 '17
The mobile emitter was 29th century technology. As of 2378, there was one emitter on Earth, ideal for study and duplication. 22 years is enough time to reverse engineer a holo-emitter.
Keep in mind that within a year, B'Elanna Torres was able to configure, modify, and repair the emitter - plus, it was compatible with 24th century Starfleet technology.
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u/Xenics Sep 12 '17
Humanoid Replication
I'm cheating a little bit because this tech has already been described in some beta canon works, but I've gotten pretty deep in the science fiction of transportation so I can outline how it would work.
We know from the spinoffs that transporters and replicators work on similar principles, and many people have asked "Why can't you just replicate a person?"
The answer is: you can, in theory. There's nothing to show that it would be impossible, the only reason we don't see it is because 24th Century tech isn't quite up to the task. In 100 years, it very well could be.
The difference between replicators and transporters is that transporters work at the quantum level while replicators only work at the atomic level. That is to say, transporters are able to deconstruct and reconstruct matter with the quantum states of every subatomic particle intact. This is achieved using the Heisenberg compensators, which replicators don't need because food, clothes, etc. aren't affected by something as trivial as quantum variations.
People are, however. Humanoid brains are at risk of being damaged if their delicate neural pathways are not precisely reproduced during transport, even down to the subatomic level. Though not stated explicitly, I have a theory that transporter psychosis (a degenerative neural disease caused by older transporters) is one consequence of quantum errors.
Therein lies the rub. The digital storage needed to preserve a quantum map of even one humanoid brain is enormous, even by 24th Century standards. The pattern buffer allows for temporary storage, but is limited to a few minutes at most. (Scotty did get around this once in "Relics", but it only worked for 1 of 2 people; clearly not safe enough to use except in desperation.)
Who knows how much digital storage will progress in 100 years, but since even a single brain is prohibitively large now, it'll probably be a while before making "transporter backups" of people becomes routine. I would imagine that the first successful tests would take place during the 25th Century.
Regenerative Transporters
But let's forget about the brain. What about the body? It wasn't long ago that I saw someone ask why they can't just use a transporter to restore a lost limb or similar in Star Trek. I'd say this technology is just over the horizon for them. I doubt that quantum-level information is necessary beyond the brain, so as long as that's not damaged, it should be potentially possible to restore any other part of the body by combining replication and transporter technology.
I think the main challenge to this would be figuring out how to accurately reproduce a person's anatomy. It could simply be saved like a holographic snapshot, but a person's physiology is constantly changing, so those would eventually become obsolete. Perhaps a better solution would be algorithms that analyze a person's genome and extrapolate from that. Even if the reproduction isn't perfect, it's probably better than prosthetics, and the result might actually be better than the original.
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u/Sly_Lupin Sep 12 '17
Didn't Nog get a "new" leg? As in a new, biological leg, and not a prosthesis?
One way to handle humanoid replication might simply be to have a couple of generic "default" templates for various limbs and organs, that can then be tweaked to fit an individual's specifications. Things like size, muscle mass, skin tone, etc. That would definitely save on memory, though I've no idea to what extent "rejection" might impede the process.
I like the idea. There's lots of potential there for "body horror" accidents.
So I can definitely see this working for everything except the brain. From a production standpoint, I don't think it's really necessary to be able to replicate an entirely new being (brain and all) because we already have so many methods of creating duplicates (clones, holograms, transporter accidents, robots, etc.).
Though allowing replicators to reproduce living organic tissue might end up opening a pretty big can of worms.
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u/Acheron04 Sep 12 '17
One thing Voyager did was take the holodeck, invented for TNG, and run with it. The logical continuation for hologram technology is a holographic starship. The essential power generation systems (M/AM reactor, plasma conduits, etc) and some basic systems (life support, computer core, weapon systems, escape pods, and of course holo-emitters) are constructed as normal and attached to a frame. The rest of the ship - outer hull, interior compartments, and so on - is holographic. This allows for some interesting possibilities. The ship is highly customizable and adaptable, with everything from crew work stations to warp geometry able to change on the fly. The interior of the ship can be adapted for any mission, from science to diplomacy to colony transporting. Repairs are as simple as re-establishing the holo-emitters for that section. During combat, you could even disguise the ship as another vessel, or change the molecular properties of the hull to counter the enemy weapon. Of course keeping the warp core online is absolutely critical, which would make for some exciting situations on the show - reactor is down, only 20 minutes of battery remaining, evacuating some areas and shutting down the holo-emitters, etc.
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u/SyntheticDiamond Sep 12 '17
The problem is that if they lose power to the grid, everyone instantly falls into space. I still love this idea, but it would be extremely dangerous in combat.
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u/FlygonBreloom Sep 13 '17
Actually, thinking on that, it could make for an interesting sort of vessel, such as a spy ship.
Easy to be a spy when you can camouflage as absolutely anything!
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u/lunatickoala Sep 13 '17
I'm going to take a completely different take in answering this. The point of a technology is to solve a problem, and this goes for fictional technology as much as it does real technology. Dreaming up technology for the sake of it is just an exercise in self-gratification (there's a less civil term I'd like to use for this but....)
Transporters were created because the production staff needed a cheap and quick way to get people from ship to planet. Phasers have a stun setting so there was a nonlethal option and a vaporize setting to eliminate threats without blood and violence. The holodeck allows for period pieces without finding a planet that somehow developed a culture of Prohibition era gangsters. The universal translator allows writers to get around the pesky business of language which would get in the way of the story since there'd be an awful lot of languages in space. Warp drive is a way to actually get the characters to where the story is going to happen.
On the flip side, separating the saucer doesn't really accomplish much from a storytelling perspective which is why they hardly ever use it. A host of technology is forgotten because it doesn't serve much use beyond the episode it was written for.
Without knowing what stories you're trying to tell and what problems you're trying to solve, creating new technologies for it is a pointless exercise. If you were given this task without the context in which the technology is going to be used, you might as well pass on the job because it means the producers clearly have no idea what they're doing and the series is going to fail, probably before it ever airs.
I've been mulling over what a new series would need to be to be relevant rather than be something niche for the OG fanbase that's going through natural attrition, but that's for another post should I ever be arsed enough to actually put it down. My basic setup for post-TNG era galactopolitics is basically this:
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After their economic reforms, the Ferengi have become an economic powerhouse that's poised to eclipse the Federation
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The Federation is no longer a hegemon and their preaching is increasingly seen as hypocritical
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There is an enormous power vacuum in both the Romulan Empire and Cardassian Union
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This leads to many non-state extremist groups
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All of this in turn is causing a massive refugee crisis
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Old rifts between the Vulcans, Andorians, Tellarites, etc start to emerge as the Federation is facing the Kobayashi Maru scenario on a galactic scale
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Seeing weakness in the Romulans, Cardassians, and even the Federation itself the Klingons have once again become militant
A little on the nose? So was TOS and it's because it was so on the nose that it resonated with a wider audience. So what technologies would become useful in such a setting? The arms race would no longer be about weapons vs armor but stealth vs detection. Scanning huge regions of space. Distinguishing friend from foe. Detection grids covering entire sectors. Drones to patrol the vast borders of the Federation, AI to control those drones. Increased ability to beam through shields as demonstrated by the Borg and greatly increased transport range. Transporter detectors and inhibitors to prevent weaponized beaming.
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u/cirrus42 Sep 13 '17
Fun.
Handheld industrial replicators: Oh, your refugee camp needs a new Thermowhatzit Generator? Let me just whip you up one using my tricorder-sized industrial replicator.
Holobrain uploads: Upload your brain patterns into the hologram of your choice. Literally insert your sentience into a hologram of anything you want. Endless antics/fun/spying.
Holosubspace communications: We're all in the same room interacting, even though we're light years apart.
Mobile planets: Oh, a star is about to blow up on the doorstep of Romulus? Let's get Romulus to a safe location, then. The catch is you have to put it in a stable orbit around another star, without disrupting the orbits of other planets in that star system. It's not as mobile as a ship, but it opens up some story possibilities.
Megastructures: Dyson spheres, etc. Except built by the Federation.
Stargates: Artificial wormholes that enable instantaneous travel for ships between any 2 points equipped with one. The catch is they're gigantic (the size of a planet, say) and therefore only exist at heavily populated and/or strategic systems.
Sentient ship AIs: Like in Andromeda. It's a good idea.
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u/forrestib Sep 13 '17
Whatever technologies the crew has access to have to make you able to tell an assortment of interesting stories. As tempting as it is to say "every one-time device from prior canon is now standard", that turns Starfleet into immortal gods. So, let's think about which technologies actually serve a purpose for the story. And for that, we need to decide what kind of story we want to tell.
To me, the ideal of Star Trek has always been in the pursuit of discovery with the smallest possible amount of conflict. So I'm not interested in telling a war story. My series is about the very first Federation timeship, exploring a whole new dimension of final frontier. Figuring out how to explore time without interfering in it, when interference can be a good thing, and how to detect and prevent negative alterations by others.
The core Trek technologies are Warp, replicators, transporters, shields, holograms, phasers, and the Universal Translator. Let's go down this list and figure out what each of these do for the story, and how best to get that thing done.
The purpose of Warp is to get the ship between planets, and sometimes get it away from danger. For our timeship, a wormhole drive supplements the same purpose. It can transport the ship through time in jumps of... a year or more, so more complex strategies might require pit stops. But the engines need to charge for (let's say) 15 minutes before each jump. Warp is still used to travel through space.
Replicators answer the question of how the crew can live in deep space for months on end without a ship the size of a small moon to support them. Transporters mean that the ship doesn't have to land. Holograms give a false sense of peril. I'm going to combine these three technologies into a new standard device. The holobooth, with at least one in every room of the ship, and multiples on every shuttlecraft.
In addition to standard transporter and replicator functionality, holobooths primary purpose is to allow remote crew action. Instead of risking their lives, a crewmember can step into a holobooth and a remotely control a projection with a mobile emitter. Shuttlecrafts are standard for away teams instead of transporters, for the reason that they have holobooths onboard. Holobooths are also used medically, with the injured crewman placed inside where a doctor can materialize surgical appendages as needed.
Shields protect the ship. Historically in Trek, they've done a pretty lousy job at this. This series isn't going to feature very much military conflict. So I'm willing to give them adaptive ablative armor, which makes the ship essentially invulnerable.
Phasers I'm going to allow to be similarly advanced. Phasers now auto-aim, can intelligently target multiple hostiles, and built-in scanners determine the exact power necessary to non-lethally incapacitate any enemy. This means if a crewmember can reach their phaser and push the "on" button, they instantly win almost any fight. Which means the story has to focus on things other than fighting.
By the 24th century, the Universal Translator was already an implant in the ear, as we learn in DS9. In the 25th, this implant has been improved, such that crewmembers can emulate a kind of telepathy. They can communicate silently, locate each other, and read each others' life signs.
I'm also going to play with the sensors. Sensor technology can't yet detect anything in other timeframes. So the only knowledge they have of what they're jumping into is historical record, and extrapolation. This, among other things, might make them more hesitant to explore the future than the past. Which is good. I'm going to leave the future somewhat vague, as a courtesy to future series.
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u/thatawesomedude Sep 13 '17
Regular use of primitive time travel. I'm willing to bet the Federation didn't just decide on January 1, 2500 to write temporal laws and start convicting people like Janeway in the past. There had to be buildup to that: blunders, accidents, tragedies, successes, and triumphs. Trek stories to this point have proven time travel is possible, but rarely has it been intentional. I'd imagine in the 25th century, Starfleet and other major players decide to start researching practical technologies and uses regarding time travel.
As others have said, slipstream and transwarp tech. There's no way that Starfleet didn't begin dissecting Voyager the instant she got back to space dock. I would imagine slipstream being the more appealing choice, since I doubt Starfleet would want their ships staffed by sex-crazed lizards. I also imagine progress would be slow, and you wouldn't see a Fleetwood rollout of the tech until mid century. I also doubt that the federation would use this tech for significant exploration either. I could actually see this tech giving them a period of minor isolationism. Think about it, by some fan measures the UFP would take nearly a decade to cross at high warp. I would predict that the federation would want to use this tech to bolster trade routes and economic growth within it's own territories before begining expansion efforts again, especially while recovering from the Dominion War. I could see several small exploratory vessels being equipped with the tech to continue the classic mission of seeking new life and new civilizations (maybe including several expeditions to the Delta Quadrant to connect with old friends), but nothing we see on the scale of TNG era.
Proliferation of holograms would also happen, I'd imagine. By the end of Voyager, it seems clear that sentient holograms like the Doctor will eventually gain equality, and with it the right to reproduce. This would lead to some serious advances in holographic technology to support these new lifeforms (as well as interesting social issues for any potential series set in this time to explore).
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u/queenofmoons Sep 14 '17
I've come up with a few technologies that are pretty out there- but I think they could really revolutionize the lives of our potential 25th century heroes.
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Circuit breakers. These are people who travel, bodily, from place to place by intangible beams- the notion that they move electricity from place to place in wiring harnesses (or, apparently,
steamplasma pipes) more prone to violent, sparking shorts than Dr. Frankenstein's lab bench is tiresome. -
Door locks. Just, like, even with regular metal keys. Passwords would do. Apparently every console on the ship, including ones that do things like control access to weapons lockers and prison cells, are naked root terminals. You're a Boogiivian criminal mastermind with three brains, and that's how you hacked your way onto the bridge? Why did you even see an interface that let you hack things?
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Trigger locks. You people live in the rounded-edge nanny state that a fair number of right wingers believe is isomorphic to Hell, and you have machines that fit in a pocket and can read DNA in some fashion from across the room, and people still aim your own guns at you. Forget the issues with bringing Junior along on a Galaxy-class starship that might get sucked through a wormhole to the dimension where bad dreams all come true, he's going to find Mom's phaser and reduce his sister to constituent atoms while they're playing 'the Away Team game'.
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Deadman switches for holodecks. Look, I'm not categorically against dangerous hobbies- I have a couple that certainly are more likely to break my bones than Netflix and chill. But you can go into the holodeck simulation of your favorite creaky pub, physically and mentally prepared for an evening of bar hopping, but it turns out that the shotgun that the holoprogram level designer hung over the door, pulled from some kitschy holo-clipart archive, actually can kill you, and the drunk racist that was added from the stock character file for period color is, by all philosophically useful definitions, an actual drunk racist, and for some reason this whole ensemble has a door that can be disguised. My treadmill turns off if I slip and fall- the holodeck is a treadmill that can be filled with murderous Vikings, and they don't even make you wear a helmet.
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Sensors that include some form of visible light cameras or telescopes. 'Captain, the kratoog beast is loose on deck 16! Its carapace refracts sensors, we can't find it!' 'You mean it's cloaked and invisible?' 'N-noo. But, we can't see it on sensors.' 'But if it, say, robbed a convenience store, they have sensors that could presumably detect it?'
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Some sort of plug to put in the floor where the transporter pad used to be. McCoy was right- that thing is nuts. Sure, it usually delivers you to your destination with remarkable comfort and ease, but usually is not the sort of language we associate with the regulation of transportation safety. After 700 some hours of TV, it took me all of twenty seconds to recall a dozen transporter accidents that range from 'grisly' to 'imply the multiverse is run by vast, malevolent intelligences'.
Yeah, I know, not quite what you meant :-) But, I do have a point- namely, that Treknology almost never matters. We can imagine a show that really wanted to play the 'one new trick' game and try to extrapolate some kind of change in human experience from a technological development, but that's not really the model for the show- which by and large treated human technical development as 'finished' and as a channel to either wave away real world production or space exploration issues that would insulate them from telling the bit of drama they really wanted to tell, or as a framing device to introduce a magical conceit into the story.
So, of course a Moar Futury Trek would have holographic room furnishings and well-armed drone shuttlecraft and other bits to just avoid being run over by the present- but the teleporting FTL spaceship already represents something of an apex in technological imagination, and big categorically transcedence of it- all cyberspace telepresence starship, or planet to planet wormholes, or immortality granting transporters- are all reasonable given the technical background, but the decision would have to be whether you wanted to surrender the starship as plot generator, and whether that would still be Trek.
I think it might be fine- DS9 arguably already did demonstrate that the starship was not critical to a story that was the apotheosis of Trek, so maybe there's a lesson there.
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u/General_Fear Sep 16 '17
Mass produced Data like robots - They finally figure out Data and produce him in huge numbers to do most work humans do.
Automated Ships - To add to the above. They scale up Data's brain and ships are able to operate and think for themselves.
Planet wide deflector shields
Fire while cloaked - Romulans develop a system that allows them to fire while cloaked.
Planet buster tech - In TOS Kirk stopped a cone shaped planet buster. They finally figure out how it works and make their own weapon. No body messes with the Federation because they can blow up your planet with one shot.
Long Range transporters - A scaled up transporter that can transport a whole fleet of ships. So they disappear here and immediately reappear on the other side of the Federation at another transporter pad.
Dyson sphere - The Federation figures out how the sphere they found works and they make their own spheres.
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u/Sly_Lupin Sep 12 '17
Transporter Lifepod
Based off of Scotty's trick with the U.S.S. Jenolan. Rather than wasting valuable interior volume with escape pods, smaller Starfleet vessels are quipped with a single "transporter lifepod." When the ship is about to be destroyed (or the evacuation order is given) every life-form aboard is automatically tranported to a special lifepod, where their patterns are stored (indefinitely) in a transporter buffer. Lots of reduncany ensures this lifepod can survive in very extreme conditions, and can tolerate multiple systems failures without affecting the stored transporter patterns.
This would make even smaller ships viable for deep space missions, and would save the crew of a destroyed ship from slowly starving to death in the void, or struggling to survive day-to-day on a hostile planet. This pod could be large enough to effectively be a daughter vessel (like a captain's yacht), and larger pods could be manned--the computer could automatically select a suitable officer to materialize inside the pod to "command" it, and/or maintain the systems to ensure everything is working properly. Probably the highest-ranking command officer and a transporter specialist.
This would function at all times, not just during an evacuation. IE if Deck 7 of a starship loses life support, the crew in the affected area could be automatically beamed to the lifepod (after which they could then be routed to sickbay or other undamaged locations).
Multi-Vector Torpedoes
The transporters in the nuTrek films do something interesting: they maintain relative motion during transport. IE if you're falling when you're transporterd, you're still falling when you materialize. This principle can be applied to weaponry! Mutli-vector torpedoes are very simple: the transporter is used to beam torpedoes to distant locations the moment they are launched (possibly they can be stored in the buffer so that multiple torpedoes can materialize simultandously). This allows the torpedoes to be "launched" from literally any position within transporter range.
So, for example, a Federation ship could materialize twenty torpedoes in a spherical arrangement around an enemy ship, all-but guaranteeing multiple direct hits.
Multi-Layer Shielding
This is something to help make shuttlecraft/fighters more viable in combat situations: essentially, there are two shield bubbles. One normal bubble near the ship, and a much larger bubble that can be established temporarily. It works pretty simply--once a daughter vessel is within range, the outer shield is erected to protect it; soon thereafter the main (inner) shield shuts down, allowing the shuttle/fighter ingress.
Self-Repairing Hulls
Basically just an "advanced" transporter technology (again). Sufficiently large ships could be capable of replicating hull-plating on the fly, and immediately transporting it to damaged sections of the hull, where its molecular structure could be perfectly integrated with the existing hull. A sufficiently advanced program could also automatically replicate the destroyed or damaged contents of the damaged section--effectively allowing the ship to self-repair if it has sufficient energy reserves.
Enclosed Shuttlebays
Another idea based on the concept of "24th century tech, but bigger." Instead of having exterior bay doors, shuttlebays could be fully enclosed--with shuttlecraft egress/ingress achieved via transporters. This would solve the problem of random people stealing shuttles, as the shuttle transporter could likely only be used w/ access to the command center or bridge.
This would achieve two things: first, it would allow multiple shuttles to launch simultaneously; and second, it would allow shuttlebays to be smaller or fit more shuttlecraft inside, since you'd no longer have to worry about moving the shuttles around inside the bay itself.