Starfleet Jedi

Discovery is like an irritating rash on the ass of Star Trek. I'd like to see it retconned as a terrible in universe holo fiction or something that everyone makes fun of. Using sonar to find cloaked ships in space? WTF.

Sideswipe wrote: ↑

Sat Dec 28, 2019 2:11 am

Discovery is like an irritating rash on the ass of Star Trek. I'd like to see it retconned as a terrible in universe holo fiction or something that everyone makes fun of. Using sonar to find cloaked ships in space? WTF.

Oof. I know TOS had a lot of naval and submarine themed aspects, like the sonar ping sound effect and such, and of course there was the sonic cannons from Taste of Armageddon, but it wasn't all that bad. I thought show runners were supposed to smooth things out, it almost appears these days as though writers are going out of their way to exacerbate plot holes.

Well, I haven't been following too close lately, but as I understand Discovery made a major timeline/parallel universe jump, maybe it can be written off that way.

Sideswipe wrote: ↑

Sat Dec 28, 2019 2:11 am

Discovery is like an irritating rash on the ass of Star Trek. I'd like to see it retconned as a terrible in universe holo fiction or something that everyone makes fun of. Using sonar to find cloaked ships in space? WTF.

Far be it from me to pooh-pooh a good thrashing of STD, but, in fairness, the attack on the sonar bit is unfair. It was an analogy for an explicitly electromagnetic signal that an interplanetary organization intended to use to detect cloaked ships light-years away.

Apparently radar was an unknown to them, and the whole EM-is-lightspeed thing.

Ya know, this kinda reminds me of how people used to thrash Voyager for its inane concepts like.... punching through a black hole's event horizon like it's made of matter ("Parallax"), or warp 10 causing people to turn into amphibians ("Threshold"), or the idea of a ghost saying there's no afterlife ("Mortal Coil"), and I'm sure I'm just scratching the surface.

There's goofy fake-science stuff ("Threshold") and there's bad or at least questionable treatments of real, but arguably esoteric, science (the event horizon thing).

Both of those are at least somewhat forgivable, the latter especially in the pre-Google age and with more esoteric topics, though I am sure all of us have joined in the cottage industry of pooh-poohing something the layman would never catch while firmly upon our high horses.

Then there's stuff that even a half-wit transported in from 1950 would call BS on . . . the Ford truck starting up in "The 37's" (and picking up AM radio) comes to mind.

Alternately, at times bad writers will also make characters seem dumb to explain basic science to the audience. Enterprise did that in "Shuttlepod One" by having Trip seem ignorant of the vast distances of space. Frankly, that was an assumption of audience stupidity that went too far.

All of these are bad sci-fi writing, though the latter is just bad writing if the science is right otherwise.

Discovery's sonar bit basically did all of those things at the same time. They assumed the audience had a basic ignorance of radar, to the point of needing to use sonar as an analogy (though I can hardly fathom how someone ignorant of radar would know sonar, but whatever). Then they had a noisy planet transmit its noise to space via crystal doohickeys in the EM spectrum (fortunately not turning people who heard it into salamanders or Braga-esque Threshold-the-show evildoers). Then they had that radio or similar signal be known as a cloak-beater (how?) and the whole plot required a team modify it to do so quadrant-wide.

Given the sci-fi setting, a basic inability to grasp lightspeed as is so often shown by the series is very bad.

Your mileage may vary, of course. But, to my mind, such epic fail is hardly forgivable, especially in the modern age.

Having done some research into it.... it seems that they were implying that they could send the signal to other ships throughout the fleet via subspace communications. This is a bit of a stretch.... but it's the only way I could think of that makes sense.

That being said... this ISN'T the first time an "EM-based Sonar" thing has appeared in Trek. The Motion Picture gave us.... "Photic sonar":
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Photic_sonar

(At least, I ASSUME it was EM-based, going off the name "photic", and how similar it sounds to "photon".)

That's just lidar or similar, which makes sense as a short range scanning technique.

Converting the EM signal to subspace makes even less sense. That would be like posting a video of lidar to Youtube and expecting to scan your yard with it.

Edit: Where did the info on subspace conversion come from? I see no evidence of it in the transcript. It sent a massive EM signal that everyone picked up.

https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.u ... ode=s01e08

Perhaps I wasn't being clear. What I meant, was that since subspace communication involves sending EM signals through subspace as opposed to normal space, thus allowing them to travel at FTL speeds, they'd use Discovery's comm systems to broadcast Pahvo's signal to the rest of Starfleet via the subspace radio systems.

Subspace radio has never been suggested to be an EM radio signal with some sort of subspace gofasterizer added, to my knowledge.

Not trying to be a pest, but where did you get that idea?

Additionally, what possible utility could rebroadcasting the signal serve? If they could transmit it, they wouldn't need the Pahvan transmitter.

The nature of subspace communications was listed on an Okudagram in TNG's "The Ensigns of Command", IIRC, which, AFAIK, are still canon unless they're obviously jokes or contradicted by dialogue.

And the Federation DOES maintain subspace communications relays to compensate for signal degradation in said signals and to rebroadcast them.

And doing some more research into the Pahvan transmitter.... it could send the signal on subspace bands.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Pahvan_transmitter

So really, the whole thing was just extrapolation from an Okudagram.

That's a helluva extrapolation from the same line that includes "telephone tag".

Specifically, the serious-seeming part of the line reads "[...] normal EM spectrum communication, subspace EM communication, face-to-face meeting [...]".

However, Geordi in "The Loss" references "picking up frequencies across the entire electromagnetic and lower subspace spectrum", which seems contrary to that throwaway tiny text in a largely-silly Okudagram. Besides which, your assertion about what subspace radio is based on merely the term "subspace EM" is quite a leap.

Back to the point, though, conversion and retransmission naturally includes transmission. If the signal can be transmitted by Starfleet, then they don't need the Pahvan transmitter.

As for the Pahvan transmitter going subspace, yes it did do that eventually, after initially ramping up the power tremendously and sending out a massive EM wave. Then it sent a new signal on two subspace bands only . . . Fed and Kling. This was presumably per info they acquired from tapping into Saru. There is no indication of subspace before that.

2046 wrote: ↑

Mon Dec 30, 2019 11:30 pm

Sideswipe wrote: ↑

Sat Dec 28, 2019 2:11 am

Discovery is like an irritating rash on the ass of Star Trek. I'd like to see it retconned as a terrible in universe holo fiction or something that everyone makes fun of. Using sonar to find cloaked ships in space? WTF.

Far be it from me to pooh-pooh a good thrashing of STD, but, in fairness, the attack on the sonar bit is unfair. It was an analogy for an explicitly electromagnetic signal that an interplanetary organization intended to use to detect cloaked ships light-years away.

Apparently radar was an unknown to them, and the whole EM-is-lightspeed thing.

I stand corrected then. It's been a while since I saw the episode but I seem to remember them literally attempting to use sonar from a tower on a planet in season 1.