TNG - Heart of Glory

[Nessus]

I don't get finding it tiresome or annoying in its own right, as it's one of the major raison d'être of the genre. I'd agree that it's often misused though, and that it should not take precedent over the actual story. Ideally it should be the "high concept" inspiration for the story, rather than irrelevant window dressing or mistaken for story content all by itself (the tangent about Geordie's visor in this episode makes both these mistakes).

On an artistic level, I've gotten really tired of seeing "futuristic" stuff that pointedly isn't. This is especially a thing in "hard sci-fi", both pop-culture and literary. "Hard sci-fi" has a huge complex about labeling anything we don't already currently understand or know how to do to some degree as "unrealistic". By this standard, a non-trivial percentage of the modern world would seen "unrealistic" or "soft sci-fi" by people of only a hundred years ago. Ironically, if you want to be ACTUALLY realistic, you want to deliberately play with "out there" stuff. You risk being randomly wrong (and perhaps alienation the more grey-minded types in your audience), but you also have a higher chance of being right than you do by "playing it safe", which just insures your fictional future will resemble the actual future about as much as steampunk resembles the modern day.

Visually, I'm REALLY tired of spaceships that are supposed to be from 100+ years in the future, but still look like the stuff NASA was building in the 80s. Or "sci-fi" AFVs that are really just fictitious models of modern AFV. Or "futuristic" stuff that's deliberately designed to look like it was made with the same limitations as modern or even outdated manufacturing technology as a BS way of trying to make it look "realistic" (because all these other techs will advance, but manufacturing won't?). That stuff isn't "realistic" or "hard": it's just preemtive retro-futurism. Retro-futurism is fine if you're doing it for deliberately stylistic reasons, but using it as visual shorthand for "realism" is pretentiously wrong.

This is the sort of thing people are talking about when they complain about away teams not having something equivalent to live-streaming body cams as standard gear. Aliens did exactly that years earlier, so TNG doesn't have any excuses that don't amount to writer's cowardice. Writers avoiding stuff that obviously and logically should exist in the world they've created because they're afraid it will complicate or limit them is the same sort of lazy/cowardly/unimaginative convenience-driven inconsistency you hate.

[Beastro]

I don't get finding it tiresome or annoying in its own right, as it's one of the major raison d'être of the genre. I'd agree that it's often misused though, and that it should not take precedent over the actual story. Ideally it should be the "high concept" inspiration for the story, rather than irrelevant window dressing or mistaken for story content all by itself (the tangent about Geordie's visor in this episode makes both these mistakes).

The issue is when it becomes a treadmill where the main point is trying to predict things and then years later having it get skewered for being stupidly dated or completely off.

I can understand and appreciate honest speculation, but when it becomes that treadmill it becomes simply an obsession with "trendiness", for lack of a better word where much that has come before is derided and discarded without appreciating its place. It's something that then makes those works hard to defend because they were trying to win points playing that self-defeating game.

Trek suffers from that and how dismissive many are from whatever comes after the line they set for being dated, something I'd dispute, but then OTOH, you have the old Trek boasting about the tricorder predicting the cell phone that makes me hard to sympathize.

By this standard, a non-trivial percentage of the modern world would seen "unrealistic" or "soft sci-fi" by people of only a hundred years ago. Ironically, if you want to be ACTUALLY realistic, you want to deliberately play with "out there" stuff. You risk being randomly wrong (and perhaps alienation the more grey-minded types in your audience), but you also have a higher chance of being right than you do by "playing it safe",

My perspective is that the technological side of speculative fiction shouldn't focus on that even if it has its place. My own affinity is what impact different conditions might do to the human condition, though I don't like the technological side and prefer ones with how people would react. Like if an event happened that reduced the global population, but hit different places differently with varying lasting repercussions. How would Chinese society react if it suddenly went from being the most populous country on Earth to only a few million or less and now what in the geopolitical scope of things Lichtenstein demographically? How would neighboring countries then react to being next to a country like China that simply doesn't have the population to fill itself out with that would tempt others into encroachment. How would other countries react to other circumstances, like Canada being larger in population to the US?

Visually, I'm REALLY tired of spaceships that are supposed to be from 100+ years in the future, but still look like the stuff NASA was building in the 80s. Or "sci-fi" AFVs that are really just fictitious models of modern AFV. Or "futuristic" stuff that's deliberately designed to look like it was made with the same limitations as modern or even outdated manufacturing technology as a BS way of trying to make it look "realistic" (because all these other techs will advance, but manufacturing won't?). That stuff isn't "realistic" or "hard": it's just preemtive retro-futurism. Retro-futurism is fine if you're doing it for deliberately stylistic reasons, but using it as visual shorthand for "realism" is pretentiously wrong.

I'm the opposite as I really like form following function, especially when it comes to military stuff where fancy crap falls apart from the get go by simply not understand military realities, like.... Ive brain farted and forgot the exact term, I'll call it "bullet" trap, in tank design where surfaces allow rounds to hit and then deflect into other surfaces allowing them a second chance to penetrate, most likely into a less optimally armoured area. The Halo tank is a good example of that even if it's in a world dominated by energy weapons.

Plus I also outright love late 70s/80s Sci-Fi utilitarian aesthetics like the interiors of Alien simply due to how much I love a lot of styles and aesthetics from that era.

I will saw we all have our affinities and interests and creators do as well. I wouldn't want all Sci-Fi to be reduced down to the minute details of military technology for the same reasons I wouldn't want things in Trek, like the holodeck, to have to go into and obsess over the implications of such tech and the hedonistic escapism that we know people would dabble into with it.

This is the sort of thing people are talking about when they complain about away teams not having something equivalent to live-streaming body cams as standard gear. Aliens did exactly that years earlier, so TNG doesn't have any excuses that don't amount to writer's cowardice. Writers avoiding stuff that obviously and logically should exist in the world they've created because they're afraid it will complicate or limit them is the same sort of lazy/cowardly/unimaginative convenience-driven inconsistency you hate.

I don't have that issue, and I think we can agree fiction shouldn't be a severely Darwinian thing where things have to be put in because someone else has already done them before and they already work. I think the issue with something like the Away Teams is how important they are to Trek. They are in every series and having glaring problems about them is worse than minor stuff, especially when the reoccurring drama comes from those problems not being addressed (I'm looking at how safe transporters are claimed to be, yet their constant freakish problems are ignored instead of giving everyone pause as how much they should be used for non-critical reasons).

[Nessus]

The issue is when it becomes a treadmill where the main point is trying to predict things and then years later having it get skewered for being stupidly dated or completely off.

I get what you mean, and totally agree. Not everything has to be predictive by a long shot, and "failed" predictions can be functionally identical to stylized or deliberately fantastical elements, so it's often simpler (and more enjoyable) to embrace them as such rather than treat them as "mistakes" to be corrected. For example: I think Discovery's obsession with retconning the technology of TOS is deeply misguided, as while that technology can be considered a failure of prediction, it can also be embraced as retro-future stylization, OR justified in universe by embracing the original 1990s/2000s "future" history in TOS as just alternate history sci-fi. ESPECIALLY given how successfully the Kelvin timeline played the retro-future style card, and how Discovery itself frequently does that as well (making it seem a bit schizophrenic in intent).

I think on a lot of this, we're actually thinking in compatible ways, if not agreeing. We're just maybe talking past each other a bit.

My own affinity is what impact different conditions might do to the human condition, though I don't like the technological side and prefer ones with how people would react.

Absolutely agree on the first half of that view. I think a BIG part of the purpose and art of both sci-fi and fantasy is exploiting non-real scenarios to find/create dramatic structures that wouldn't be possible in the "realistic fiction" genres.

As such I personally tend to find allegorical sci-fi (or fantasy) a waste of the setting, and boring. And I particularly dislike forms of unrealism that exist solely to make an exotic thing more familiar ("space is an ocean" tropes, for example) My issue is not that they're unrealistic, but rather that the creators are trying to run from or iron away the very reasons for using such exotic elements in the first place.

On the second half, I think that ties into how "prediction" should be used, vs how it is often misused. Part of the function of sci-fi is hashing out problems with new or hypothetical technology before we run into them IRL. This stuff often seems corny and ham-fisted after the fact, but I think that's in no small part because by the time those technologies became a reality, we'd already gotten used to those sci-fi hypotheticals enough to make the predicted problems old news instead of a surprise, if not avoided entirely. It's like the Sienfeld effect applied from fiction to real life. Which means the sci-fi actually did it's job successfully, and unfortunately became obsolete as a result.

I'm the opposite as I really like form following function, especially when it comes to military stuff where fancy crap falls apart from the get go by simply not understand military realities...

Ah, I think you misunderstand what I meant. I agree with you on "form follows function", and am annoyed by the same things. My favorite bugbear with sci-fi tanks is deliberately tall silhouettes (HALO is also a big offender with that). A more general sci-fi pet peeve of mine is corridors with exotically impractical cross sections (EXTREMELY common in sci-fi space ships), and floors with aggressive relief detail that would be a PITA to walk on or push something on wheels across (extremely common in art, but rare in film/TV, as the practical needs of filming itself tend to police it).

What I was trying to get at specifically is that manufacturing tech has a HUGE influence on how things look, and sci-fi artists tend to overlook the fact that manufacturing advances like anything else.

In terms of tanks what that means is, for example, I'd expect future tanks to incorporate less and less sheet and tube style construction over time. Computer generative design would mean a gradual return to curves, but with a much more organic complexity than on the curved tanks of old, as engineering software would be able to model the optimal surface angle for every square inch (much as they currently do for radar reflection angles on advanced aircraft). Simultaneously, those parts would become more economical to manufacture as material sciences and manufacturing methods advanced. They might never become AS cheap as sheet and tube stock (though economies of scale mean they can, if they become more in demand), but they don't have to. They only have to be cheap enough to change the point of diminishing returns, at which point, competition makes them as necessary as anything else that previously went through the same transition.

These "predictions" are based on real world technologies and trends existing now. More organic or eventually even biomechanoid looking (not in the Gieger sense, but in the sense of components and shapes being generally made to dovetail much more closely and fluidly) future tanks are a more "safe" prediction than, say, rail guns, but they tend to be treated as "less hard" sci-fi by pop culture because they result in something that looks more exotic. Pop culture's idea of "realism' as an aesthetic is more about an impressionistic feeling of familiarity than it is about actual conceptual realism.

On the flip side, multi-purpose spaces like rooms and hallways, as well as their volumetric inverses of furniture and storage containers will become more cleanly rectangular, not less, to the max degree that they can, as manufacturing and material limitations that force them to be other shapes are reduced. Because for those things, rectangular is the functionally optimal shape, as defined by tessellation. Excepting, of course, luxury designs. Again: pop culture gets it backward here: trying to signpost "advanced technology" by focusing on broad yet crude exotic shapes. Shapes that are forced to be exotic will eventually be more organic than angular, while shapes that are not forced to be exotic will be more cleanly square (again: barring actual decoration).

To reflect that back on my spacecraft example: current and past space program hardware gets a lot of its distinctive look from the way it's made. Most of it is fabricated the way one-off prototypes are made, rather than the way mass manufactured goods are made. It's actually as much an economy of scale thing as a tech level thing, and both of those are becoming faster moving targets right now. Between computer generative engineering and the advancement of 3D printing and similar technologies, the insides of spaceships 100 years from now will look more like "After Earth" than "The Expanse", despite the latter's technology likely being functionally much more accurate on an abstract level (and also being a better story with better characters). And in 100 years our robots are probably going to end up looking more like the Sentinal from the beginning of "Days of Future Past" than anything out of Gundam or Terminator.

Plus I also outright love late 70s/80s Sci-Fi utilitarian aesthetics like the interiors of Alien simply due to how much I love a lot of styles and aesthetics from that era.

Yup. Me Too. That''s the stuff I grew up on, and one of the few things I feel legit nostalgic love for (I'm not a very nostalgia driven person, unlike many of my age/generation it often seems). As I said: retro-futuristic as an art style is entirely valid. My only beef is when people conflate it with realism, not with the actually look or feel of any of it.

I will saw we all have our affinities and interests and creators do as well. I wouldn't want all Sci-Fi to be reduced down to the minute details of military technology for the same reasons I wouldn't want things in Trek, like the holodeck, to have to go into and obsess over the implications of such tech and the hedonistic escapism that we know people would dabble into with it.

IMO the underutilized beauty of it is that these things don't have to conflict. When it's written right, the technical details are embedded such that they communicate efficiently or are not in the way of escapism. You don't have to stop the plot to explain the holodeck when you can imply the explanation through visual design or even just a couple of key wordings at naturalistic moments. Good writers and artists can be measured by their ability to put a lot of bandwidth into their work for those with the inclination to look. We already hold up this ideal when it comes to layered themes and arcs, so other types of information can be handled the same way.

I don't have that issue, and I think we can agree fiction shouldn't be a severely Darwinian thing where things have to be put in because someone else has already done them before and they already work...

True. I'm just saying that those sorts of tech things have their roots in the same writers' convenience logic as the stuff that bugs you. If it's fair for you to roll your eyes at them for caring about the tech stuff, it's fair for them to roll their eyes at you for caring about he social stuff. Both are cases of the writers deciding they'd rather keep things shallow and handwavy than actually think through the world or situation they're creating. If a viewer can deconstruct what the writer's created in just a couple minutes of light idle thought, that probably indicates the writer gave it even less thought.

There are reasonable limits to how deeply a writer can be expected to go, of course, but, well, if a writer/artist want to impress their audience like that audience want to be impressed, they can't just slack off and then blame said audience for "thinking too hard" just because they thought about it literally at all.

[Scififan]

I remembered that scene where they were assembling a weapon from the odd bits on their uniforms. Man, wouldn't it be awkward if one of them as like:

"Oh, sorry guys, I left the emitter heads in my other pants back on the ship."

I remember Londo from Babylon 5 doing this as well.

[Beastro]

In terms of tanks what that means is, for example, I'd expect future tanks to incorporate less and less sheet and tube style construction over time. Computer generative design would mean a gradual return to curves, but with a much more organic complexity than on the curved tanks of old, as engineering software would be able to model the optimal surface angle for every square inch (much as they currently do for radar reflection angles on advanced aircraft). Simultaneously, those parts would become more economical to manufacture as material sciences and manufacturing methods advanced. They might never become AS cheap as sheet and tube stock (though economies of scale mean they can, if they become more in demand), but they don't have to. They only have to be cheap enough to change the point of diminishing returns, at which point, competition makes them as necessary as anything else that previously went through the same transition.

Ok, I get you.

Thanks for the explanation of where you're coming from.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

So, does the Klingon yell after someone dies seem kind of hammy?

Seems just a little amusing that they had to make that a regular thing for Worf later on when it seems conceived just as a season 1 gaf.

[Deledrius]

So, does the Klingon yell after someone dies seem kind of hammy?

Seems just a little amusing that they had to make that a regular thing for Worf later on when it seems conceived just as a season 1 gaf.

Definitely Early Installment Weirdness that got carried on as cultural canon.