07-16-2018, 09:26 PM | #1 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
|
What TL is the original Star Trek?
The TL of original Star Trek came up in another thread, so I was curious what everyone thought the TL of the original Star Trek TV was? I think that it is TL (7+5)^ with elements of safetech. The technology looks like what a mid-TL 7 society would expect future society to be, but they possessed a number of incredibly advanced technologies. Let us look at them for a moment:
1) They possessed pills that could regrow missing organs in minutes, which represents the equivalent of a mature TL 12 biotechnology. 2) They possessed disintigrators (also known as phasors), which are a TL 12^ weapon in Ultra-Tech. 3) They possessed force screens that offered complete immunity to lasers, with performance equal to the TL 12^ technology in Spaceships. 4) They incredibly efficient antimatter technology that was the equivalent to the TL 12^ antimatter reactors found in Spaceships. 5) Their civilization developed and then abandoned the equivalent of TL 12 genetic engineering by the 1990s because they found it to be too dangerous for a civilized society to deal with (they seemed to have kept a number of more utilitarian biotechnologies though). Now, I know that there are a lot of original Star Trek technologies that are just TL^ because they are beyond our understanding, but I think that what we see in the original Star Trek is overall a TL (7+5)^ society with safetech. What do you think? |
07-16-2018, 09:45 PM | #2 | ||
Join Date: Dec 2007
|
Re: What TL is the original Star Trek?
Quote:
Quote:
Last edited by David Johnston2; 07-16-2018 at 09:49 PM. |
||
07-16-2018, 11:02 PM | #3 | |||
Join Date: Feb 2005
|
Re: What TL is the original Star Trek?
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
TOS computer technology is a little off but I chalk it up to the computing power required to balance the warp field, navigate and generate firing solutions for weapons moving at and firing at targets moving may times faster than light. |
|||
07-16-2018, 11:24 PM | #4 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: On the road again...
|
Re: What TL is the original Star Trek?
I would be more inclined to say that the ST:TOS/TAS era is closer to TL10^ with some limited TL12^ devices in widespread use. They have some emergent superscience, but the rest of the technology appears closer to TL10 at first glance than TL12, IMO.
That's not counting the discrepancies between TOS and the TOS-cast movies. (For example, at some point between the ST:TOS episode "The Trouble With Tribbles" - which made explicit mention of "credits" as a form of currency - and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the Federation stopped using money....) How much of that we can chalk up to special effects improving (and Roddenberry shrugging off his producers to become one himself) between the late '60s and the early '80s, and how much is meant to be taken as-seen in the time between the two time frames is a matter of contention.
__________________
"Life ... is an Oreo cookie." - J'onn J'onzz, 1991 "But mom, I don't wanna go back in the dungeon!" The GURPS Marvel Universe Reboot Project A-G, H-R, and S-Z, and its not-a-wiki-really web adaptation. Ranoc, a Muskets-and-Magery Renaissance Fantasy Setting |
07-16-2018, 11:29 PM | #5 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
|
Re: What TL is the original Star Trek?
Antimatter reactors are TL10 in Spaceships. TL12^ gives total conversion with unlimited endurance and so concern of it blowing up, which doesn't match my memory of TOS Startrek.
__________________
Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
07-16-2018, 11:34 PM | #6 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
|
Re: What TL is the original Star Trek?
What does GURPS Prime Directive (4e) say it is? While Prime Directive technically isn't Star Trek, I've found that it's arguably more faithful to the original series than anything that's come out of Paramount, CBS, etc. since before Star Trek: the Motion Picture.
|
07-16-2018, 11:38 PM | #7 | ||
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
|
Re: What TL is the original Star Trek?
Quote:
Quote:
If the Enterprise had had mature TL8 computers it would have had not just one big ship's computer doing whatever it did, but at least a smart terminal at every duty station, and likely a smaller smart computer in every communicator and tricorder. I will grant that their communicators and tricorders do plausibly foreshadow TL8 (in part because the architects of TL8 were Trekkies). But the original series didn't begin to envision ubiquitous computing. We are shown that Spock could download visual images from his tricorder with an apparatus made up of vacuum tubes and a small CRT (itself probably anachronistic); that hardly makes sense if you are thinking the data were stored as a digital video file. I think that you're thinking of original Trek capabilities in terms of what you imagine behind the scenes as necessary to achieve their capabilities, based on your experience as a TL8 person; not in terms of what is actually said in dialogue or shown on the screen.
__________________
Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
||
07-17-2018, 12:16 AM | #8 |
Join Date: Dec 2007
|
Re: What TL is the original Star Trek?
That Star Trek couldn't predict exactly what TL 8 would look like doesn't make it TL 7.
|
07-17-2018, 12:38 AM | #10 |
Untagged
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
|
Re: What TL is the original Star Trek?
By that logic, every fictional future conceived of now would be TL 8+X. We can't make a TL 9 setting, because it would require things we don't know about the future.
__________________
Beware, poor communication skills. No offense intended. If offended, it just means that I failed my writing skill check. |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|