What are some of the biggest continuity errors in Star Trek?

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• kieron115@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

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  • StarvingMartist@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Looks good to me

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  • HubertManne@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    ok but the tos example was just that they found harry muds ship adrift in space.

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• GraniteM@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  It’s not a continuity error as such, but I’m a big fan of all the technologies that by rights should have completely upended galactic civilization but then just get forgotten.

  The Genesis device should be an appalling superweapon that would change the face of war.

  And then those missiles from Generations that can kill an entire solar system should, too.

  And the time on TNG that they stumbled on a weird transporter trick that could make it so no one would ever need to die of old age ever again.

  And the Tribble blood that cures death.

  And so forth.

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  • haverholm@kbin.earth ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Don't forget Doctor Giger's Cellular Regeneration and Entertainment Chamber!

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  • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Presumably every warp capable species would have the ability to construct a few thousand hydrogen bombs (or weapons even more powerful) so would have the capability of wiping out life on a planet if they wanted to. So the Genesis device wouldn’t be a thing that would change the face of war, the problem was that a crazy person had such a weapon.

    Though Star Trek is kinda hand wavy around nuclear weapons in general… maybe photon torpedoes are more powerful than an H-Bomb? But it doesn’t feel that way. At any rate, Starfleet, the Klingons, Romulans, etc. all have technology to wipe out a planet because we have that technology in the present day. They just don’t do that I guess? To me that’s the real continuity error.

    And the time on TNG that they stumbled on a weird transporter trick that could make it so no one would ever need to die of old age ever again.

    Another time a transporter accident led to a copy of Riker (with all of his memories) both on the ship and on the planet. You could recreate those conditions and create endless copies of people. The Federation wouldn’t do that because of morals and stuff, but the Dominion wouldn’t give a shit. They could have their best squad of Jem Hader stand on a transporter pad and beam down endless copies of them down onto a planet. They’re cloning people anyway, so why not take it to the next level?

    The transporter is just endless continuity problems. Shields are down, oh no they’re beaming over boarding parties! Why are they doing that instead of using the transporting the crew of the enemy ship into their brig (if they’re good guys) or into space (if they’re bad guys)?

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    • grozzle@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      I can suggest an explanation - conservation of mass/ energy.

      let’s assume that Lt Riker’s ship had to use up at least 40kg of antimatter (and 40kg of matter, but that’s cheap) to generate the energy for that transporter operation that produced a whole extra 80kg Riker.

      that’s a bare minimum with perfectly efficient engines and transporters, so it was probably well over 70kg of antimatter.

      the Dominion decides that a few years of growing and training new troops is far less expensive than spending so much antimatter.

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  • HubertManne@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    you ever read bad space. he has a great one where they have something like a transporter so they start remaking everything but the brain to a younger pattern.

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    • Trigger2_2000@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

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• Vanth@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Klingons look very different through the various shows. And more than just costuming progress of the time.

  TOS: Image

  TNG-era, the one I think most people would think of: Image

  Discovery: Image

  And the latest show, Academy, reverts back to TNG-era style Klingons.

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  • backalleycoyote@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

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  • lectricleopard@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Is the cannon explanation for tos to tng change being a skin disease or something that has infected the whole population?

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    • Kwdg@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      No that is actually somewhat the explanation why they look more human. It is explained in Enterprise, the Klingons try to create some super soldier serum, but that kills them. Phlox helps them create a cure, but that makes them look more humanoid. I think at the end of the episode they say that it might take centuries to revert this effect

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    • themoken@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Enterprise established it as a result of Klingons experimenting with human augment DNA and it getting out of hand. It probably didn’t need to be addressed in universe, but I thought it was a fun retcon.

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  • RamenJunkie@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Well, at least continuity wise, the Discovery thing works. Because of these shows, it wpukd be Disco -> TOS -> TNG -> Academy

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• haverholm@kbin.earth ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I'm watching VOY at the moment, and it makes no sense how Seven of Nine's parents would have made contact with and been assimilated by the Borg, decades before Q threw the Enterprise-D across the galaxy to make (what we assumed to be) first contact with them.

  In "Q who", meeting the Borg is portrayed like blood in the water — now they have learned of the Federation, they will not stop until you are assimilated. Except oh wait, they did assimilate those three humans several years before, so they would have already known about the Federation.

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  • ValueSubtracted@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Even TNG is weird about that, since their method of attacking colonies is called out as being identical to the attacks along the Neutral Zone at the end of season one, so the Borg had been operating in the Federation and Romulans’ back yards for a while.

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    • haverholm@kbin.earth ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Yyyyeahhhh... 😬 That's not exactly planned out.

      Also, the idea that Borg are fine with other beings running around their ships as long as you don't point a phaser at them, or other aggressive gesturing I suppose. That's out the window by the time of VOY "Dark frontier", Janeway and Tuvok are carrying phaser rifles at the ready all around the Borg sphere.

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    • kieron115@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Weren’t the Borg originally meant to be those worm-parasite things?

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  • HubertManne@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Didn’t her parent seek out the borg? I am more confused on why the borg would send a drone from the alpha quadrant to the delta quadrant.

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    • haverholm@kbin.earth ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Yeah, they went on their research expedition because apparently rumours about those weird transhumanist Swedes had already reached the Federation? Again, 18-20 years before "Q who"... The timeline is messed up, even before we consider time travel.

      Edit: spelled "weird" weird.

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• SatyrSack@quokk.au ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  The warp scale changed. The Enterprise exceeded warp 10 several times in the Original Series. Then that infamous episode of Voyager claims that warp 10 is a theoretical limit which is difficult to reach and literally impossible to exceed.

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  • haverholm@kbin.earth ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Scotty was simply that good at tweaking the engines. That, or the crew were just playing to Kirk's ego, pretending to go super fast à la "this amp goes to 11” while they trundled along at warp 7.

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    • SatyrSack@quokk.au ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Moving at 10+ in TOS was always due to some alien influence or something. The Enterprise engines were definitely not capable of those speeds under normal conditions.

      With that said, in TOS, warp 10+ is just “you are moving really fast”. But in VOY, warp 10 is “you are literally occupying every point in space simultaneously” and there is nothing past warp 10. It is a complete reimagining of the ceiling to warp speed. In TOS, it seemed there was no theoretical maximum warp speed, just like how there is no theoretical maximum to kilometers per hour. But by VOY, warp was capped at 10, and once you reached that speed, you became a salamander because reasons.

      The best fan explanation for the retcon that I have seen to justify why the scale appears to differ in-universe is that they are genuinely different units. That at some time between TOS/VOY, scientists made some new breakthrough in their understanding of warp mechanics and discovered that there actually was a ceiling to warp speed. As such, they decided to change the standard warp units, making “warp 10” this new ceiling and everything else is just a fraction of that. According to this logic, when Scotty says “Wow, we are traveling at warp 30!” he is speaking in TOS-era warp units, which might translate to just something like “warp 8” in VOY-era units.

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  • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    This my head canon… In the movies they were working on transwarp drive on the Excelsior. The warp factor on transwarp drives is different from a regular TOS warp drive.

    When Sulu put the hammer down on the Excelsior in ST VI, it proved that transwarp was just way better than regular warp drive. For whatever reason they couldn’t make transwarp work on the Constitution class so most of them were decommissioned.

    By the time of TNG, pretty much everything is transwarp, so no one bothers calling it that ,they just call it warp drive since it became the standard. The transwarp factor is used everywhere, but everyone just calls it warp factor.

    So it’s kinda like a change from imperial to metric units.

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  • Summzashi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    The warp scale did indeed change. I Actually seem to remember that was adressed in TNG.

    Also the stardate naming convention changed after TOS.

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• grue@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  The 2009 movie. Just, like, the whole thing.

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  • rob_t_firefly@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    This would be the same continuity in which magic villain blood is found to be the cure for actual death, and they use it once and then never speak of it again.

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  • HubertManne@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    maybe its closer to the mmo universe where everyone goes from just graduating the academy as a ensign to being made leuitenant but given a command as part of it.

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  • ClipperDefiance@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    This could be argued to be a thing related to the split from the original timeline, but the Kelvin version of Chekov is born four years earlier than his original timeline counterpart.

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    • RamenJunkie@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      The one that gets me me, and its a bit of a “its different” complaint. Apparently the interior designer for the original Enterprise was Vukcan, because its all white and huge.

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• bigbangdangler@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Not a continuity error specifically, but this has always irked me: In STIV, Kirk says that he and Spock are headed “back to San Francisco”, presumably from Sausalito. But anyone with a passing knowledge of geography can see from the position of the bridge behind them that they are, in that moment, standing in San Francisco. In fact, you can see Sausalito across the bay behind them.

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  • charonn0@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    PSA: There’s a special screening of Star Trek IV in San Francisco on June 13 to honor the 40th anniversary. Nick Meyer (writer/producer on IV) will be there.

    www.voguemovies.com/nicholas-meyer

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  • CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I rewatched this movie recently and noticed this as well! Still one of my favorites.

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    • bigbangdangler@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Oh yes, definitely one of the greats!

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• unit327@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Voyager fired 123 of its 38 photon torpedos www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIGxMENwq1k

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  • Doomsider@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Nu uh, the casing can be replicated and the anti matter can be siphoned from the ships engines.

    Source: Star Trek Adventures

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    • rob_t_firefly@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      That’s also how it works in the recent game where you replay Voyager’s journey. You just have your engineers research photon torpedo building, and then doing so uses up a portion of your normal tech resources.

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• MalikMuaddibSoong@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Warp 10 and salamanders. Great examples 👌

  But what about TNG 7x09, the one where we learn that warp travel damages subspace and that a warp speed limit is the solution?

  Later, the Federation Council issues a new directive limiting all Federation vessels to a speed of warp five except in extreme emergencies.

  Laughs in Janeway

  en.wikipedia.org/…/Force_of_Nature_(Star_Trek:_Th…

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  • directive0@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Isnt the warp speed limit part of the in universe reason that Voyager has new variable nacelle geometry?

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    • MalikMuaddibSoong@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      I had no idea they were related, but apparently they were (thanks 😉). But that too was soon retconned:

      According to comments by Michael and Denise Okuda, when mentioning of the speed limit was abandoned a few years after “Force of Nature”, it was assumed that newer ships, such as the USS Voyager and USS Defiant, had improved environmentally friendly warp drive systems, that did not cause damage to the spatial continuum.

      …fandom.com/…/Variable_geometry_pylon

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  • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    But what about TNG 7x09, the one where we learn that warp travel damages subspace and that a warp speed limit is the solution?

    That was an analogy for Global Warming. The government issued a big proclamation but never actually did any real action about it.

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  • HubertManne@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    janeway? I don’t think ships stranded so far they are unlikely to get back are going to be obeying speed edicts. the whole setup is an extreme emergency.

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• adarza@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  you mean like new zealand missing in first contact?

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  • ValueSubtracted@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Obviously you’re going to cloak the facility where you keep your most hardened criminals.

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    • adarza@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      elsewhere in the film, new zealand is on a map shown on a display.

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  • charonn0@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I contend that it is not actually missing, it’s just not visible from that perspective. When I recreate the shot in Google Earth only the extreme north tip of New Zealand is actually visible:

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    • Munkisquisher@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      There’s a lot north of Auckland, its a 5 and a half hour drive to Cape Reinga

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• ValueSubtracted@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I enjoyed a couple of seasons of Ben Sisko’s heavily-implied-to-be-dead dad.

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  • Einskjaldi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    How’s that?

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    • ValueSubtracted@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      It’s all in past tense until he shows up in the flesh.

      “Emissary”: How about letting me cook dinner for you tonight? My father was a gourmet chef. I will make for you his famous aubergine stew.

      “A Man Alone”: Every night in my house, my dad insisted that we have supper together as a family. He would try out his new recipes on us. He used to call us his test tasters.

      “The Alternate”: When my father became ill, I can remember how small and weak he looked lying there in the bed. He’d been so strong, so independent. It always seemed to me there was nothing that he couldn’t do. But in the end, I realised that there was nothing that he could do, and nothing I could do to help him.

      “Paradise”: Well, my father was a chef. He grew all his own vegetables. My brothers and I were sent out to the gardens every day.

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    • EarMaster@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      I think he refers to the first season of DS9 where it was never explicitly mentioned that Joseph Sisko is well and alive (but neither was the opposite). He first appeared in season 4. He just doesn’t exist before that.

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• Solumbran@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  The church in Discovery.

  I am convinced that they put it there without having an explanation yet, then forgot they did it when they made the explanation.

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  • themoken@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Ugh, Discovery just made no sense in a million ways. My (least) favorite is how Control was sentient AI like a century before Data was a thing, or even M-5. That and every time Section 31 was acknowledged as Starfleet black ops instead of a rogue agency of assholes.

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    • Solumbran@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Let’s not forget the part where they want to go in the future to stop control because they think they can’t destroy it, then control gets destroyed, then they go in the future anyway.

      Also, I don’t think any star trek depicted section 31 in a way that didn’t make the show worse, but Discovery really went the extra mile

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  • haverholm@kbin.earth ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    What? It was explained that the church and the people in it were yanked from certain destruction in WWIII to Terralysium by the red angel. It is spelled out in the season arc.

    You don't like Disco, fine. But your lack of attention to the story is not the show's fault.

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    • Solumbran@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      The red angel, who is supposed to be either Burnham or her mother, and neither of them had a reason to go back in time to save a random church, and teleport it to a random planet. Also absolutely no mention of how they would achieve such a thing.

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• EarMaster@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Deep Space Nine is supposed to host up to 7000 lifeforms, but the infirmary is tiny and has three biobeds max.

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• aldhissla@piefed.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  So how big are DS9 and the Defiant actually? The scales were all over the place.

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  • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    The Defiant is big enough for a runabout to easily fly around inside of it.

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    • aldhissla@piefed.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      And if Honey, I didn’t shrink the kids?

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