How They Should Have Done It: Enterprise (Part 1)

[athelind]

Yesterday, I was castigated as a weak-minded tool of the advertising industry for actually enjoying Harry Potter.

So, what the hell -- let's dive right into the deep end of mediocre, over-merchandised pop culture, and talk about Star Trek.

One of my earliest LiveJournal entries was a critique of the excreable television maladaptation of Birds of Prey, cast in the form of dissecting what had gone wrong with the pilot and suggesting how it could have been done more effectively. I ended by promising that my next entry in the How They Should Have Done It category would, in fact, be the Star Trek prequel series then entering its second season.

I've kept that promise...in that I haven't done any other installments of that particular heading in the intervening half-decade. Enterprise -- pardon me, Star Trek: Enterprise -- has been off the air for two years, now. Yesterday, however, the discovery of an interesting Trek proposal that never came to pass and the conversation it prompted brought those long-simmering thoughts up to the front burner once more.

Part 1: TECHNOLOGY

The single biggest change I would make in the setting is that NX-01 would be the first Warp 5-capable starship.

No, not the first Human Warp 5 ship... the very first one, in this part of the galaxy, anyway.

The Vulcans never broke Warp 3. They had very good, solid, consistent, logical theories as to way it was impossible to break Warp 3.

Then they started collaborating with the humans, who'd go off on wild tangents, and talk about interpretations of quantum mechanics that the Vulcans never seriously contemplated because they weren't "logical".

Humans couldn't have done it without the vast quantities of data that the Vulcans had gathered during their years (centuries?) of warp flight. Vulcans couldn't have done it without the nonlinear thinking and eccentric interpretations of that data that Humans brought to the table. This was something that was only possible when two different races, with different cultures and different psychologies, sat down and collaborated.

And the nature of the Human/Vulcan First Contact, and the humanitarian (vulcanitarian?) aid mission that followed, meant that this was the first time two races had really done that. Contacts between already-established warp cultures were too loaded with suspicion and vested interests to reach that kind of synergistic collaboration.

(Did I mention that I wouldn't have made Vulcans assholes?)

With that established, I certainly wouldn't have given them tech that worked JUST LIKE TNG TECH with "quaint" names. "Phase pistols"? "Polarize the hull plating?" Please. The whole idea of a prequel was because the familiar stuff was too familiar.

They should have taken more cues from the few references that TOS made to the early days of starflight -- bits that popped up in "The Cage" and in "Balance of Terror".

Space battles would largely be fought with missiles, mostly thermonuclear, some antimatter. Instead of "polarized hull plates" that act exactly like deflector shields, the primary defenses would be point defense lasers. That's not just for the NX-01 -- "Balance of Terror" made it clear that the Romulans were armed in the same way, and there's no reason to assume the other local races would be any more advanced. If they were, why didn't they intervene in the Earth/Romulan war decisively?

It would be a very different kind of space combat than the familiar Star Trek long-range ray-gun fighting, and one that would show off the advances made in SFX since the '60s.

It's hard to justify not giving them "plasma shields" as radiation protection, since those are under development in our time; those might dissipate some of the force of directed energy weapons, as well. That gets a little too close to Classic Trek's magic deflectors, but I could live with it -- especially if they were a lot more ablative than later generations.

Maybe, just Maybe, they might have some kind of Directed Energy Cannon -- but it would labor under Wave Motion Gun restraints. Hard to aim, slow to fire, you have to channel all the power of the ship into it. You know the drill. But that starts getting away from "Reasonable Precursor TrekTech" and into "Not Really Trek At All".

Given the established rationales for later TrekTech, you need some kind of navigational deflector to keep stuff from running into you at multiples of c -- but we could explicitly state that the way it works is by focusing the warp bubble generated by the engines into a beam of some sort. (That would have the handy side-effect of explaining how, centuries later, Voyager could use the Navigational Deflector to pull all kinds of souped-up-warp-drive tricks.) Alternatively, the Point Defense System could use those Deflector Beams instead of or in addition to lasers.

In our next installment: THE RIGHT STUFF.

Comments

[scarfman]

qtrhorserider said at the time that the soul of Birds of Prey is that it was a buddy story about adult women; turn it into teen angst and you lose what makes it special.

And your "interesting proposal" link doesn't seem to work. Were you linking to someone linking to this?

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Fixed -- it was a simple matter of the suffix changing from ".htm" to ".html".

You always seem to pick up on my bad HTML coding before anyone else. Thanks.

[circuit-four.livejournal.com]

This inspired me to hunt down the notes I took one (very, very intoxicated) night on how to fix the sequels to The Cube. :)

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

Re HP:

There's nothing sillier than liking something because it is popular than NOT liking something because it is popular.

::B::

[hafoc.livejournal.com]

Well said. A good example of the principle that whether you try to comply with everything or rebel against everything, you're still letting the other guy direct your every move.

[hafoc.livejournal.com]

Excellent comments.

One thing I remember from the original series is the sense (never openly stated) that most of the tech on NCC-1701 was new. For all that "Pride of Starfleet" hype, Enterprise-1701 was a pretty clunky ship. The transporter never worked (and Doctor McCoy was the only person who seemed able to realize that). Any time somebody so much as spilled a cup of coffee, one of the consoles on the bridge would explode. And th' kreestals! Tha kreestals canna take it nae mair! In short, NCC-1701 acted like she was absolutely crammed with immature technology.

From what I saw, NX-01 acts more like mature tech than NCC-1701 does. NX-01 has all the basic abilities the "later" ship does, except for speed. The phasers being based on some kind of retractable gun mount that pops out of the hull (as I think I remember seeing), rather than emitting from a point on the hull plating directly, is hardly a huge jump in technology.

When I heard that Star Trek-Enterprise was coming on, I too thought we'd see the early days described in one of the original Trek episodes. Where humans duked it out against the Romulans, using thermonuclear-tipped missiles, but without ever seeing the face of their foe.

Not only is the tech level of NX-01 non-canon when compared to the descriptions in the original Star Trek, the tech level of the Romulans is as well. The Romulans didn't have warp drive even into the James Kirk era. They got it by adopting and building Klingon designs.

I really liked the special effects of ST-Enterprise. But it changes the universe of the original series so much that I can't quite accept it as part of the same timeline.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Oh, I should add something about subspace radio.

In Classic Trek, subspace messages would take days or weeks to get to Starfleet Command, and were often text or voice only (we were never sure which, because Uhura handled everything).

I never really noticed that feeling of being Out Of Touch in Enterprise.

Remember in Forbidden Planet, where they had to DISMANTLE THEIR HYPERDRIVE to send a message back to Earth? If the subspace radio in Enterprise were only a little more convenient than that, it would have been SO COOL. Maybe apply the Wave Motion Gun effect to the RADIO: if you divert ALL THE WARP DRIVE'S POWER for several minutes, you can JUST BARELY create enough of a warp to squirt A BRIEF TEXT MESSAGE back to Starfleet Command United Earth Space Probe Agency HQ.

As for the idea that the Romulans fought the war without ANY warp drive... that just doesn't work. A slight retcon saying that, in BoT, they were still flying the EXTREMELY PRIMITIVE warp drives of the NX-01 era would be fine by me. After all, in their isolation, they wouldn't have had the benefit of the rapid development that multi-racial cooperation and perspective provided the Federation.

[araquan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's the other thing- depending on which pseudocanon sources you go by, in the immediate pre-TOS era (say, 50 or 60 years before) it was supposedly not uncommon to have ships that were basically warp reactors and huge communications arrays and not much else- mobile subspace relay stations that pretty much had to direct their ENTIRE REACTOR OUTPUT into the comms system to send a message. When they could do it at all.

Also yes, they Romulans were supposed to have warp drive by then but, again, lacking the cooperation that the Federation brought, they were basically stunted at NX-01 levels even by Kirk's day- so they managed to form a technology pact with the Klingons, whose own warp technology wasn't the greatest either, but was more than adequate- their big problem was resources, since their diplomatic skills pretty much boiled down to "Give Kurge the resources we need, or Kurge smash!" Whereas the Romulans had the resources but not the tech...

[toy-dragon.livejournal.com]

As far as Romulans and warp drive go, I always took it purely as poorly thought, "still figuring our shit out" writing from the TOS days that resulted in the line suggesting they didn't have warp drive. Stuff like that from TOS is pretty easy to disregard - trying to take every single line from the prototype show of an entire universe, that had cardboard sets and christmas-tree-light props, as canon, probably can't hold up ;)

Which, in a broader sense, is one of the perspectives I have on Enterprise - see my main comment later.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much my attitude toward Romulan warp, yes. My objections to the tech we saw in Enterprise vs. the tech we expected from TOS descriptions of those early years is largely because the tech we expected would have made for a fresh, new, and much more INTERESTING setting.

[araquan.livejournal.com]

I agree pretty much on all counts as relates to the ship and its capabilities, as well as the capabilities of the other races at the time- the Vulcans were only supposed to have been an 'elder race' in that they had been at this for a very long time, but indeed, were held back by their two-dimensional thinking. I will say that having a polarized hull plating shield mechanism does make some vague sense if you know you're going to be dealing with charged particle beam weapons, but even then it should only be useful against those, and even then it might only provide a nominal level of protection. Plasma shield would indeed be a lot more generally useful.

Phase pistols... Don't get me started. I'd grant them laser pistols, but they'd be bigger and clunkier than the ones in The Cage. And they wouldn't even have the power source built in- the thing would have to be connected via a coily cord to either a belt-mounted energy pack, or perhaps a whole dedicated tactical belt/power source/holster assembly. Further, they'd be prone to overheating and failure.

I'd also grant the ship some sort of laser-based weapon beyond mere point defense, but it would perhaps be subject to the same limitations you suggest.

I'd say... no transporters, period. Not even for freight.

Really, it's sad that a show with such a great premise, characters, and cast was so hampered by its writing. But I guess the Vulcans aren't the only ones suffering from two-dimensional thinking; the writers in Trekville just couldn't conceive of a universe without some version of all the same stuff they had in TNG (or at least TOS, but mostly TNG). I don't begrudge them updating a lot of the look-and-feel stuff- I mean, after all, my living room looks more avanced than any given console of NCC-1701 in a lot of ways- but at its core the tech was just Not Supposed To Be That Advanced. Especially when you consider that, as hafoc suggested above, NCC-1701 in TOS was basically the first warp nine ship (NCC-1700 having been a test-bed construct more than anything- it never entered active service any more than NASA's shuttle Enterprise did...) representing just as great a leap forward, if not more, than NX-01. And yet it seems that NX-01... had already been there and done that in a lot of ways. Meh. c.c

[toy-dragon.livejournal.com]

My main problem with Enterprise wasn't the picky details of the technology on the series. To be honest, I have always felt that worshipping TOS canon for details like Treknology and fine points of "how things work" is deeply problematic. It was the prototype show of a whole universe, and made in the 60's. A lot of stuff was just careless writing, or writing that was forced to be stunted and clumsy by network interference (such as the stipulation that each episode stand on its own and be viewable in any order).

Enterprise's real failure was in the writers' and producers' ability to make proper use of the show's premise. They didn't just recycle some TNG-ish tech toys. They recycled EVERYTHING about later day Star Trek, because that's what they thought the mainstream viewer expected to see, and they could get away with it. It didn't matter of the NX-01 had "polarized hull plating" in name, so long as it was written in a way that changed the scenario - instead we got the same battles played out mostly by static shots of the same three bridge stations, with the same dialog like "Captain, the shields [hull plating] are at 30%!" "Divert power from the warp engines!" While everybody jiggles on the bridge to act as if the ship was shaking around.

This stuff was so old and played out, Galaxy Quest was able to lampoon to hilarious effect it years before Enterprise even existed.

There wasn't even an attempt to shake up the way Trek is filmed - while some people may think stuff like "shakey cam" and documentary style footage is cliche, it is still something never done in Star Trek. At this point, why the hell not try it? Why not try SOMETHING. Anything besides more of the same.

I suppose part of my core disappointment with Enterprise is that the packaging and some of the pre-series talk placed it not just as a prequel, but as a (still canonical) reimagining and revisualization of Star Trek that had more of a connection to the present world that everyone can relate to. Setting it in an era a bit closer to home would just be a good excuse to shoot for that. Some aspects of Enterprise even dealt with that a little, but most didn't.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm going to cover the promise of "NASA With Warp Drive" and how the show failed to deliver in a later installment.

As I said above, though, that's my big bicker -- not that the tech "wasn't canon", but that it wasn't INTERESTING -- and hewing closer to the "canon" could have made it much MORE interesting.

[hafoc.livejournal.com]

Well, my objection to the overly-advanced tech in ST-Enterprise is not so much that it's non-canon. It's that by going to TOS canon's description of earlier tech, you'd end up with a much different world with way different story lines. I guess, thinking about it, that my real disappointment is that by going to the same tech as TOS and the same universe as TOS, they set out To Explore Strange Old Worlds, to Boldly Go where Everyone's Gone since 1966. "Old and played out" indeed.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

EXACTLY!

[ebony14.livejournal.com]

But ... they already fixed Star Trek. It's called Voyage of the Star Wolf.

(Although, strictly speaking, that's fixing TNG.)