That also disabled the transporter, which is a convenient way to get into stories, but also makes it easy to get out of stories.
Somebody somewhere must have done a PhD thesis on the way that cell phones have changed storytelling in TV and movies. I'd actually kinda like to read that.
A quick Google turns up:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254345825_Mobile_Ph...
Transporters: Originally designed to save on tedious shuttle launches and landings and, most importantly, footage, these would utterly rewrite medicine, aging, manufacturing, and so on. Notice in many high adventure films, the dinghy, the shuttle's ancestor, is often ignored.
Artificial Gravity/Inertial Dampeners: We want our ship to be under our boots, and occasionally slosh around when we are enduring space weather. Casual mastery of the force of gravity so we can have an ion storm to knock us about.
Faster-Than-Light: Aside from that messy causality business, real FTL would make the concept of territories quite fuzzy. Sure, you could draw lines on your star charts, but given that someone could zip a few dozen light years in and attack your capitol planet, it's just not the same.
I could go on and on about this, but a lot of this space opera harkens back to a time when governments would just have to trust that some captain or governor was a reasonable person to have in charge because messages back and forth would take so very long.
Star Trek avoids this one by just completely ignoring the lightspeed barrier with handwavy "subspace" technobabble. They can communicate, detect, and track objects moving FTL with as much (or more) ease as done with radio tracking slow moving objects today.
They've been really inconsistent about it. For a while, communicating through subspace was not quite as long as travel, but it was still a non-zero amount of time. Now, communication seems to be via ansible, and the less said about the wildly varying rates of travel, the better.
Surely this one was much more about those "reasons of budget and convenience"? Star Trek couldn't afford non-styrofoam rocks, I can't see them stretching to filming all bridge scenes on the Vomit Comet or building a 2001-style rotational set.
I'm more interested in how it would rewrite the rules of war. If you can transport a nuke (or even a strike team) directly into your enemy's headquarters, wars end faster with less widespread destruction.
Until you develop no-transport fields but now you've just created massive dead zones which - in themselves - highlight key points of interest to investigate and/or target.
Then you have to deploy LARGE scale (think city wide or bigger) no-transport fields or lots of smaller fields to obfuscate the high value targets.
But regardless, you still need normal shields because teleporting a nuke just outside the zone and letting it drop in is just as effective.
And all of that still ignores conservation of mass.. the physical material has to come from somewhere.
I thought that was a clever use of transporter tech.
Extended canon Star Trek has references to both (a) feedstock material storage, with big blocks or tanks of elementally pure materials that get shaved off and recombobulated as necessary by the replicators, and (b) synthesis of elements from pure energy on demand, though usually with the preference of the first method over the second because it's far, far less demanding on all the systems involved to just move atoms around.
It doesn't work when they use a transporter to go to a desolate planet.
Large portions of the web comic are involved with how it completely rewrites the rules of politics and war, with and without review techniques designed to create interdiction zones.
Cumals.
You can give everyone as much food as they want (and we already do!), but you can't eliminate scarcity.
A cumal is the unit in which medieval Irish monetary values are denominated. It is also the medieval Irish term for a female slave; the unit is notionally equal to the value of one such.
The point of answering the question in a historical currency is to emphasize that this question is easy to answer by simply thinking "what have been some well-known historical currencies?"
People trade in materials, tools, food, livestock, and women.
More seriously, the basic answer for the Federation in particular would be "amounts of energy". Voyager uses exactly that, with minor but consistent references to 'replicator rations' because they're limiting the total energy usage of the ship.
One was a businessman who was excited to see how much the stock portfolio he had put together as a long term trust had fared. Picard had to gently explain to him wealth and money were no longer a thing.
Of course the Picard series itself then thoroughly destroys that thought by going on and on about money.
And that unlimited energy has led them to a post scarcity, post money utopia, though that scenario seems to have been withdrawn a little in Picard.
Edit: Why would someone, say the Romulans, do that? Well, Starfleet doesn't establish contact, or invite a planet, because of some on going war or a non-unified government or no FTL tech. The Romulans step in, side with one party. They provide technology and weapons, they unite the planet as an "ally" or theirs. And now they have a new planet and systek to exploit, to use a base. Legally, and even better the Federation canot intervene. Rinse and repeat everytime Starfleet side steps a planet in a strategically important position. Do so over a couple of decades. You see were I am going, right?
They really seemed to make every race encountered to be a relatively peaceful semi-utopian culture.
Edit: For some reason, every non-FTL civization Star Trek just seems to be ignored by everyone. Heck, even the Dominion ignored them in their empire building...
That's authors so: In the Star Wars Legends EU there are the Ssi'ruuk. A species from the edge of the universe harvesting other lifeforms, litterally, for power generation. Throughout the books about them, the fact they could go on a spree of exterminating each and every primitive species they encounter is never mentioned or even hinted at. Nor is the fact, that with a bare 6 systems under their control, and inferior ships and tech, they should be one punitive expedition away from extinction themselves.
Are they all some starfleet officers toiling for decades on off-chance that one day they might get job on a vessel? The ages of people on show don't present that...
The whole post-scarity kinda really breaks down when you start to look at edges. As society would not be effectively be able to keep up the production at least not as shown in shows...
Now, if you want an Enterprise like personal spaceship, you probably are much better of being part of the Q continuum than the human race, scarcity wise.
IIRC, in Star Trek, the replicator does not convert energy into needed material: it simply reorganizes existing molecules into a new form.
So, for instance, you can't use it to make yourself a bunch of gold: you could use it to convert a bunch of gold jewelry into gold bars, or vice-versa, but you would need some actual gold. It won't convert lead into gold. I think I heard or read somewhere in the lore (maybe non-canon) that the food replicators needed supplies of biochemical ingredients to use for making food. They could get that from various places, including breaking down the waste of the crewmembers, but they couldn't just conjure food out of nothing using pure energy.
Also, the holodeck: Not only can the ship computers run multiple, basically self-aware General AI characters in parallel, it can also extent space beyond the confines of the decks physical dimensions. Pretty amazing tech, no idea why they don't use it to build the interior of all their ships, after all it also has superior environmental controls.
Prime example would be the X-Files. IIRC in the first season they had no cell phones yet.
- Do computers exist? Does everyone have a computer? Is the idea of searching the web a novel thing? - Do they have cell phones? Are they smartphones? - And now the new one, are they mentioning LLMs in some way?
Like one thing that really dates The Expanse imo is the complete lack of AI technology in the books/movies. It was probably an artistic choice, but it's completely unbelievable now in a way that wasn't a problem 4 years ago.
Edit: added NOT
The gag is it takes seemingly forever for it to print all the data about the employee to paper, while Columbia fidgets and waits awkwardly to finish, repeatedly asking if there’s a faster way to get the information.
New tech at the time was often a plot point of the show, like using call recordings to fake the murderers location at the time of the murder, editing video surveillance, etc.
Edit: Another great example of how computers are used is Perry Rhodan (a German SciFi series going since the 60s, and a rather good one). There, in books written up tobthe 70s, they have positronic computers (and other tech that beats everything Star Trek, Star Wars or any other sci fi universe I know has), and computers are still used with punch cards and stripe print outs. Even the ones salvaged from civilisation being millenias ahead tech-wise compared to humans. Pretty funny detail.
This also means there was no way for either SG-1 or Atlantis to sensibly continue past the SG-1 finale, when they got Asgard replicators and all the instruction manuals for them… and that Star Trek TNG onwards is best done without thinking too hard about the implications of almost any of the tech they demonstrate.
There was a novel that took place after the movie that depicted Hathor coming back and trying to take over with a simultaneous plot of the US trying to extract resources from Abydos. I though it was really we done and wished that SG-1 used it as the starting point.
when ever you want to send a text, you don't enter the code for that. neither did anyone on an away team that needed to take air samples, or scan someone's health.
seems like you had an idea not fully thought out
You're thinking of tricorders[0], GP is talking about PADDs[1]. Tricorders are mostly read-only sensors that need to be pre-configured (with some ability to switch between configurations during use), while PADDs are basically modern tablets with some physical inputs around the screen.
[0] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tricorder
[1] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Personal_Access_Display...
Can writers plot a story in any given milieu? Yes. Sometimes they do seem lazy.
Buffy is more vulnerable to gunfire than the vampires are, but she's not vulnerable in the way that a human would be. She is a supernatural force just like the vampires are.
This is only called out in a few episodes; it seems that the writers would mostly prefer that you forget. But compare e.g. her meeting with Glory in season 5, where the two of them get into a fistfight, and after trading a few punches Glory realizes that a human would have been dead by now.
plot armor
noun
used to refer to the phenomenon in fiction whereby the main character is allowed to survive dangerous situations because they are needed for the plot to continue.
"I do think that he can't die since the inevitable plot armor is far too thick"
> But compare e.g. her meeting with Glory in season 5, where the two of them get into a fistfight, and after trading a few punches Glory realizes that a human would have been dead by now.
That being said, you were a bit uncharitable near the end:
> Do you just wander around the internet posting random links in random places?
I think this was a bit of an unfair characterization of my original comment, and veers close to being against HN guidelines by assuming bad faith, and if you look at my comment and submission history I think you’ll find that I don’t in fact do this.
>> But compare e.g. her meeting with Glory in season 5, where the two of them get into a fistfight, and after trading a few punches Glory realizes that a human would have been dead by now.
You have yet to describe what the connection is between your comment and mine. Plot armor describes people doing things they can't do, and not suffering the consequences because that would be a boring story.
What's the connection to people doing things that require the supernatural powers they are explicitly characterized as having?
E.g. a superhero whose power is having impenetrable skin surviving a hail of bullets isn’t plot armour - it’s an explained part of the story. A character survived because of their nature as a character.
Plot armour would be a hero who does not have any particular resistance to bullets running through a hail of gunfire and surviving. It’s an extremely improbable outcome which ruins suspension of disbelief. The only reasonable explanation is that the character survived because the writers wanted to keep them alive. That’s plot armour.
noun
used to refer to the phenomenon in fiction whereby the main character is allowed to survive dangerous situations because they are needed for the plot to continue.
> A character’s explained powers saving them isn’t plot armour, it’s just armour.
> because they are needed for the plot to continue.
ie. A character should die in this situation but survives because their death would be inconvenient for the writer.
A character surviving because of a predefined power is consistent with the fiction. They didn’t survive out of the writer’s necessity but because they had already been written as someone who can survive such a situation. That’s competent writing.
You’re trying to define plot armour as just… any character surviving a dangerous situation? That makes the term completely meaningless. It’s meant to denote bad, lazy writing whereby an important character improbably survives despite it not being justified by the rest of the fiction.
Additionally, from the very TVTropes article you linked:
> “Plot Armor is when a main character's life and health are safeguarded by the fact that he's the one person (or one of several) who can't be removed from the story. Therefore, whenever Bob is in a situation where he could be killed (or at the least very seriously injured), he comes out unharmed with no logical, In-Universe explanation.”
A character’s survival being well justified in-universe makes it not plot armour.
The original post we’re both replying to referred to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who is literally the main character of the series. I’m not sure if you’re speaking generally, but I’d say that her powers are not well justified in-universe, to the degree that even supernatural beings in her narrative setting are flabbergasted at her hardiness. I stand by my statement that she definitely has plot armor, as the show is literally named after her.
Buffy having a high survivability is pretty consistent with her defined powers (general resistance to harm, fighting abilities, accelerated healing). It’s not enough to just say she survives fighting monsters.
A good example of clear plot armour in Buffy is the named vampire characters. The random baddies disintegrate the second they’re touched by sunlight whereas Spike survives stretches of sunlight multiple times. This violates the established rules of the fiction for the sake of protecting an important character.
Another example is the rest of the gang of kids managing to survive fighting vampires on their own without Buffy. Early on they have no established powers and while the various monsters are demonstrated to be tough to take down even by someone with superpowers.
So we agree that main characters have plot armor?
I never said that main characters necessarily have plot armor, just that when MCs survive events that beggars belief for the viewer, they do. The perception of the existence of plot armor for any particular character in a work broadly or in a given context in a larger work is a subjective distinction, and varies by viewer, their perspective, interpretation of the setting, the character’s powers, how compelling the writing is, and suspension of disbelief or lack thereof.
Your argument feels like you’re gaslighting me for disagreeing with you about differing perceptions about such subjective distinctions, then using that disagreement to find fault with what is actually a difference of opinion, while characterizing it as me supposedly misunderstanding how the subjective concept of plot armor works, when in actuality we agree on how plot armor works, we just disagree with whether or not a specific character has it or not. But that’s the very nature of the subjectivity of plot armor.
Of course you’re free to disagree, I never said you couldn’t, and that’s part of the fun of fandom. Just because I think Buffy has plot armor, and you don’t, doesn’t mean that one of us necessarily misunderstands the concept of plot armor, Buffy as a character, or the show and its narrative setting, in my view.