Spoilers ST Lower Decks - Starships & Technology Season 4 Discussion

[Mark_Nguyen]

Here we go - more references! More callbacks! More Easter Eggs from all those other series!

TrekMovie has collected stills from the first couple episodes. Let's see here:

- Totally didn't clock that T'Lyn has a provisional rank pin, which not only makes sense, but is awesome. DID anyone from Voyager have a provisional Ensign rank, though?

- Voyager! Already a museum within, what, seven years? Are those the heads of all those Project Full Circle people sad now?

- New station design. As often happens, it's a hand-drawn still and not a CG-model, so we can't rotate around it like we do with the Cerritos. It's got extra-long framework structures that can hold multiple ships end to end, but not much room for passing a parked ship. I mean look at that Akira in there.

- Also, LOOK AT THAT AKIRA IN THERE!

Mark

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

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[David cgc]

So, we've got our first canon (and second official) appearance of the vertical Romulan warbird. We don't see it next to anything, so it's hard to guess if this canon version is a massive command-ship like it was in the Ships of the Line painting, but why wouldn't it be? It makes it more impressive that the little whatever-it-is one-shotted it.

Despite the implication in the season finale of PIC with the "turning out the lights" scene, the premiere showed museum ships are open to tours and aren't just exhibits of the exteriors.

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

I won't be seeing the first four episodes until the theatrical premiere tomorrow (yay!), but there are examples of museums which don't let people take a look inside. Most naval museums do, but air force museums generally have the bigger exhibits roped off (or suspended from the ceiling) in a look-but-don't-touch sort of arrangement. I've been to the Pima museum in Arizona which has multiple planes just sitting there for anyone to stick their heads in to explore, while the USS Midway has their planes locked up tight.

Even so, I'd say that the interiors of most Starfleet ships on display would have the vast majority of their hulls emptied out and roped off from the tours. Who WOULDN'T want to sit in the captain's chair of the Enterprise? But OTOH, who WOULD want to explore Transporter Room 8 on the same ship, when O'Brien's #3 is sitting right there? All that extra stuff would be stripped out and sent to Qualor II.

Mark

 

[blssdwlf]

I won't be seeing the first four episodes until the theatrical premiere tomorrow (yay!), but there are examples of museums which don't let people take a look inside. Most naval museums do, but air force museums generally have the bigger exhibits roped off (or suspended from the ceiling) in a look-but-don't-touch sort of arrangement. I've been to the Pima museum in Arizona which has multiple planes just sitting there for anyone to stick their heads in to explore, while the USS Midway has their planes locked up tight.

Even so, I'd say that the interiors of most Starfleet ships on display would have the vast majority of their hulls emptied out and roped off from the tours. Who WOULDN'T want to sit in the captain's chair of the Enterprise? But OTOH, who WOULD want to explore Transporter Room 8 on the same ship, when O'Brien's #3 is sitting right there? All that extra stuff would be stripped out and sent to Qualor II.

The naval museum ships I visited are not emptied hulls though. Their equipment is permanently modified in some way to prevent them from being used in most cases but apparently for USS New Jersey and maybe other Iowas they aren't fully disabled. From Lower Decks and Picard it would seem that their museum ships still have their equipment and only software security prevents them from being misused.

 

[Dukhat]

The Bounty still had its completely working and apparently easily stolen cloaking device installed even after 120 years. The logic of this boggles the imagination, but there you are.

 

[Unicron]

Plot logic, which is not always logical.

 

[kirk55555]

It never made sense to have museum ships be "look but don't enter" exhibits for me, at that point they might as well be holograms. Many, if not most, Navy museum ships in the real world are things you can enter and at least take a tour of, I figured that Trek museum ships would be the same thing.

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

Well in the case of Voyager, they’re having their cake and eating it too; and a mobile museum makes a lot of sense really, as it’d be able to have far more visitors on tour versus sitting in one place and having starship nerds book passage to come TO them. Who knows, maybe this helps explain some things in Picard S3…

Mark

 

[blssdwlf]

Lower Decks showed a hilarious problem which I wonder impacts how sensors work. The nacelles' glow is so aweful that anyone with quarters facing them require some kind of filtering to keep it tolerable. I wonder if sensors aimed that direction are blind to red light?

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

I've been wondering this ever since TNG, with all those neck windows giving a great view of a constant red shine. We can filter out colors NOW, so some sort of digital equivalent on those windows that can keep the bussards unobtrusive regardless of what they're sucking in / crimson forcefielding / sitting idle. Or even just blackin ghtem out all the way, which is seems like half of the people there are doing anyway.

Sensors-wise, the California class and others may have this problem, but sensorts in TNG seem to be relatively directional. ON a Galaxy and similar saucers they have lateral arrays on the rim that are not blocked by anything major; the secondary hull has some of these too. If we're talking about the main dflector dish's sometime-use as a sensor array, a Cali-class may have some interference issues, but OTOH a Cali-class isn't necessarily built for that sort of work.

Mark

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

I've been wondering this ever since TNG, with all those neck windows giving a great view of a constant red shine. We can filter out colors NOW, so some sort of digital equivalent on those windows that can keep the bussards unobtrusive regardless of what they're sucking in / crimson forcefielding / sitting idle. Or even just blackin ghtem out all the way, which is seems like half of the people there are doing anyway.

Since they have the ability to filter out the intensity of the light, maybe they should apply it to the Bussard Collector cover and prevent everybody outside from spotting your ship from long distance.

There's no need for your Bussard Collectors to act as giant (Notice me Here) lights.

A soft casual glow like a night light would be good enough, no need to be so intense.

In hostile situations, you don't want the enemy to easily notice the location of your ship, making it harder for them to see would be good by naturally lowering the intensity of your Bussard Collectors.

 

[penguin44]

yes that was one thing that made me laugh out loud! I was always like what would they see. Also any window directly under a phaser array. OMG

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

yes that was one thing that made me laugh out loud! I was always like what would they see. Also any window directly under a phaser array. OMG

Somebody must've turned on the Party Light / Rock Concert Lighting mode on the Bussard Collectors or doing some crazy experiment.

There's really no logical reason for it to be that damn bright in most cases.

 

[Shik]

So, hey, was looking at the S4 poster & not only is Badgey there, but AGIMUS is atop the pyramid, so maybe he's connected to the Space Vaporizer™ (which oddly looks like a cross between an agonizer & an Orb Ark)?

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

401:

- Boimler is cleaning holodeck 3. Take THAT, allegedly superior Intrepid-class!

- So why IS the Voyager museum mission classified? Still worried someone might come after her for all the stuff they doubtlessly stripped out of her since she got back? Is that what they do in the Portello system? What's that Akira-class ship doing there, then?

- And if they missed all the stuff that caused the stuff that happened in this episode, what does that say about how well the Portello guys do their job? It doesn't seem like a Starfleet facility if the docent guy isn't an active officer?

- He also gets flummoxed about a "mission-worn" uniform, which begs the questions as to whether the Voyager crew replicated all their duds, if the ship actually HAD a laundry or cleaning facilities (and a tailor to boot), or if they spent at least the first few years of their journey (when replicator energy was supposedly at a premium) replicating their uniforms. Or I guess, if that was the uniform that Harry Kim was wearing when they came home in "Endgame", stripped offa him as soon as they landed at Earth, and kept for posterity?

- There's a whole display on the "Neelix Cheese" on Deck 7, which Memory Alpha reports has nothing particularly interesting on it. I guess that means there's tons of space for episode-by-episode displays of all the wierd stuff they ran into.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Intrepid_class_decks

- What do Borg smell like? And how does T'Lyn know this?

- Plot contrivance aside, why did Tuvok's orchids and other stuff need to be transported on the Cerritos? They clearly had enough room on Voyager, even amongst the existing piles of boxes.

- Is the Intrepid class starship's ventilation system so efficient that a petal falling off in the sthuttlebay - a space where foriegn stuff will come aboard regularly - can reach ANOTHER room where foreign stuff comes in regularly, which is probably NOT adjacently placed?

- Voyager's Shuttlebay 1 was lifted from its appearance in "Counterpoint", sideways door access and all. We didn't see the shoehorned door to Shuttlebay 2 this time, though. I guess that's where they were keeping all of Voyager's remaining shuttles and/or the Flyer?

- Why was everyone NOT on Voyager innocualted against the macrovirus? Was the vaccine just worked into a cocktail of common vaccinations everyone gets, "just in case" anyone runs into anything similar?

- Voyager seems AWFULLY close to that Borg cube. There are relatively many references to Borg encounters in this series (that aren't the Enterprise or Voyager), which suggests a bigger problem than can be covered here.

Mark

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

402

- Gary had to replicate some new pants, ref: laundry in the past episode.

- Tucker tubes! But we see that the infamous prop was chronologically seen in "Cold Station 12" (thanks to @Mike McDevitt for the look-up), so in practice it's probably not something Charles "Trip" Tucker III came up with and had become ubiquitous, before its first IRL appearance in Star Trek II. Whatever the Tucker Tubes do, here they output energy and with some neat tweaking they can be increased.

- The bowl of fruit Boimler's first two billets are identical, but reversed. I guess the entire arrangement can be replicated as-is, and some Ensign can place (and replace them) in time for new Lt. (jg)s to move in.

- Dentistry is also something we don't go into in Trek very much. Electric toothbrushes still exist (DSC), but other than that we've all been assuming that everyone from McCoy to Guinan to Boothby should all still have their original teeth in the TNG era. I actually have veneers and they ain't cheap, so a full dental plan with replicated teeth should be one good reason to sign up in a post-want Starfleet.

- Let's talk about promotions for a sec. We've seen people get promoted offscreen between episodes or seasons, and also in the context of an episode without any pomp or circumstance (plus a few instances with more of it). There doesn't seem to be any "standard" way of doing things. Heck, even in TNG "Lower Decks" Lavelle and Ogawa got promoted without their fellow Lower Deckers around. And in TNG "Data's Day, it was totally routine for four promotions to happen that day, though we don't know if they were officer or enlisted. Anyway, in this episode it was literally done with a shrug, so I guess the pip and paperwork is more important than the pomp.

Mark

PS - "Narj" is 100% how I misspell my own name when typing on a keyboard, every single time.

 

[mithril]

402
- Dentistry is also something we don't go into in Trek very much. Electric toothbrushes still exist (DSC), but other than that we've all been assuming that everyone from McCoy to Guinan to Boothby should all still have their original teeth in the TNG era. I actually have veneers and they ain't cheap, so a full dental plan with replicated teeth should be one good reason to sign up in a post-want Starfleet.

given we're getting closer to learning how to regrow teeth IRL, and we know that they can grow tissues for medical transplants, it feels weird that they'd resort to veneers and other fake teeth approaches. unless the implication is supposed to be that he's just so vain that he insisted on a cosmetic coating being added to his newly grown teeth.

 

[David cgc]

Could also be the veneers are the equivalent of a temporary crown today, and they're only there until his new organic teeth can grow out in-situ, or be regrown and implanted.

 

[Dukhat]

PS - "Narj" is 100% how I misspell my own name when typing on a keyboard, every single time.

Huh. My name is Mark too, and I’ve never had that problem.