Why Is Star Trek Tech so Believable? 

I think another reason Star Trek tech is inherently believable has to to with the reciprocal relationship real world technology has with Star Trek. Think of how many pieces of technology were inspired by the shows that are now common place. Society has almost been conditioned the if it shows up in Star Trek we will develop it eventually.

It's actually so believable that even Stargate SG-1 took a page from it to explain their their technobabble.

I think it helps that everything keeps breaking, not working right, and needing maintenance all the time. Deep Space 9 did such a good job of making the station feel lived in.

I think I'd add one more element to the mix: conviction. The technobabble is delivered with such serious conviction that it lends to it's credibility and thus it's believability.

The most important part is have it be just realistic enough, and also being very VERY consistent between several series Edit: And to clarify my use of "consistent" i meant that every star trek series has a jeffries tube, a warp core, a replicator, and another big factor is that you can see how the tech evolves between eras.

Internal consistency is the most important aspect imo. The instances that get criticized the most about Star Trek are those where this consistency is broken - but I'd argue that those only stand out so much because they're generally good about upholding it. Every ship has a visible propulsion system. The few times they don't, it's explicitly called out in-universe. Warp speeds exist on a certain scale. A slower ship can't catch up to a faster one. Only exception is when the difference is very small and there are some temporary enhancements that can be made - usually at risk of failure or by damaging the system. FTL tech uses subspace. Be that warp drive, communications or scanners. Same basis for the same effect. etc.

I remember back when they were making episodes for ST: TNG. The Producers would consult with scientific advisors from NASA to help with the storyline and a US Navy advisor on the military structure aboard a Vessel.

For me it seems believable primarily because of the consistency of the rules, I think it comes from my love for games where everything you can do in a game has a more or less rigid set of conditions

Deanna Troi's telepathy always seemed overpowered to me. Detecting emotions while talking to someone is one thing, but she could detect emotions down on the surface of a planet that the ship was orbiting, like long-range sensors.

I've always found trek tech believeable when it's got a nugget of actual science in it, warp drive works because antimatter power is possible, photon torpedos work because antimatter would make a powerful weapon. Subspace works because extra dimensions are a real thing. Transporters work because they address the Heisenbergs uncertainty principle. It all makes it easy to suspend diebelief and go along with it. Not to mention a good bit of technobabble with some real science words thrown in, heavy lepton interference, inverse tachyon beams, ion storms, temporal flux....it just sounds like it makes perfect sense. It's when they out right make things up that I find it hard to believe, the spore drive being the most obvious example closely followed by the explanation for the burn.

You nailed it, I think. I'd like to note that the 'new guard' (Trek'09 onwards) sometimes has trouble considering the long-term ramifications of the changes/additions they make to the technology canon: teleporting from Earth to Kronos (why use starships? or why not beam starships?), magic augment blood that cures death (why die?), spore drives that can go anywhere instantly (like Starfleet would have _actually_ stopped researching this).

You were so incredibly diplomatic and restrained when you said "this is why I have such a hard time.. with the spoor drive". Bravo

I think it's due to multiple reasons. The main reason is, as you said, partly due to what you said about having it behind layers, but I also believe it has two other factors that are just as important. One is due to the fact they do pull from real-world science. When people hear it's a thing people are actually studying, it makes it sound more believable, for it has a base in reality. The second reason I want to add is how they treat lore and technology. They are applications of concepts that people know or are information more than one person knows. I think we have a harder time believing in, say, Marvel or Star Wars because only one person knows how certain technology works, the only one that uses certain technology, and has to give technological dumps. However, in Star Trek, it is usually done in three ways. One is to explain how, by using a concept all of them know or have knowledge of (which is shown on screen) or someone done before (even if off-screen) and applying it in a way the crew and the audience can follow. Second, showing how incoperated the technology is and how quickly people not even trained to operate such technology can use it makes it more believable. Finally, having multiple people explain a subject to the more ignorant crew members to show that while it's not common knowledge, it is knowledge people would have heard about and applied in their lives. The crew accepting the explanation and asking specific questions to get more details on how it works on terms they understand just adds to the believability. The skeleton locks through the VOY transporters and the TNG Dyson Sphere.

I've been a Trekkie since I was a kid in the 80s. Watched everything up thru Enterprise. As well as All the TOS and TNG movies and several books. In one of the later seasons of Voyager Belanna Torres speaks a ton of technobabble to Capt. Janeway. I turned to my mom who was sitting next to me and said ' Belanna just spoke about 3 paragraphs of pure techno babble and I understood everything she said.'

A lot of the high tech stuff in Star Trek feels like it's there because it sounds or looks high tech.

The spore drive always gave me an nosebleed, but i could never articulate why, you did that now, thanks mate

There is a third component. Established procedures. BSG does this well. Nobody ever explains how the jump drive works, just that it has many limitations due to needing jumps to be calculated, low range per jump and needing Tylium fuel. Other than that it has even less explanation than the Spore Drive, which does much the same thing. But all the procedures leading up to the jump, like the calculation, like retracting the flight pods, like preparing all the systems for it, like counting down for it, all make it feel like a very real thing, that was very complicated and needed a lot of training to use. And it clued into some elements of its operation over time. For Star Trek I guess a good example is the transporters. The operation always has this very specific moving of these three sliders, even in TOS, that is always prominently shown and connected to the process in a relevant way, and gets retained all the way to ENT at least. It really grounded the technology as something that was very touchable. You could almost consider those things rituals. Repeated patterns of actions with a clear significance. A step by step process that clearly leads to things happening every time that its done.

I think part of the reason the explanation for the spore drive doesn't work for a lot of people is because it feels too small. Matter/antimatter reactions, we get it, that generates a lot of power, makes a big ship go fast, etc. But "the ship inhales magic mushroom dust and now it can teleport" feels too far out there. A ship teleporting feels like too big a thing to happen because of mushroom spores (honestly anything teleporting because of mushroom spores feels absurd unless maybe you're in a Super Mario game).

Sidenote: the First Hyperdrive in Star Wars basicly powered by The Force until the Corellians build one that replaced the Spacemagic parts with "mechanical" ones, sooo ist was at some point really driven by Space Magic And well, with telepathie and ESP you REALLY notice when Star Wars was written

I think another factor is Trek usually has science consultants as well, to extrapolate where current tech could end up in the future. It's how the communicators in TOS become flip phones irl eventually, and the touch screen tech from TNG eventually hits irl too. They generally don't go too far beyond the possible for most things.

I thought the spore drive is just a massive transporter, and they use the spore network to send the signal threw as it all over the universe, but can be confusing when they can go halfway into the network when saving tilly

The techno-babble in ST is often more consistent than the hacker talk in regular movies or TV shows.

I'm reminded of a comment by a showrunner (paraphrased), "You don't have to be realistic. You just need to be convincing."

I am glad you mentioned consistency. The idea is so key. Once we know what a piece of tech does and more importantly DOES NOT do you need to stay within those established rules. When that happens the audience can understand the limits of your ship and characters in every situation and buy into the worldbuilding.

another thing I think helps is that for the most parts the characters treat these as tech that's well known in universe so you don't get (often) get info-dumped on things the characters should already know nor do the characters really "speak to the audience" when they explain things. Some franchises fail on this account (and Star Trek does sometimes too, nobody is perfect after all) and over explain things in a way that sounds unnatural or sounds like they're breaking the 4th wall to explain things to audience that in-universe characters know, Star Trek avoids this for the most part.

As a writer I’ve realized what draws people in and pushes them away from universes like Lotr, Star Trek, Warcraft, etc. The biggest things are consistency and grounding. When a story follows consistent rules and behaviors, the suspension of disbelief stays low and the IP is enjoyable; when an orphan with no training can best a sith knight with years of training over the course of a minute, people leave your work by the millions. Grounding is what draws us in: why is it relatable? The environment, the struggle, the people? The better explained and detailed it is, the easier it is to stay connected, and when those elements are called into question during the story, the audience is as eager to resolve it as the characters. This is why overpowered characters are almost always boring and uninteresting, as are characters that never make mistakes or do anything wrong. Star Trek grounds itself in an above average capacity and has average consistency. It was higher but thanks to the constant push to produce content for the universe those values keep dropping over the last 20 years. This is only my opinion, of course. Spectacle is not an appropriate compensator for story-accurate story development. Case-in-point: Discovery season 2 end battle versus DS9 fight to defend mine-laying at wormhole, season 5 ending. Discovery felt lazy, too much was on screen, along with an unlikely response to the situation. An AI is trying to take over and they’re sending several ships to hunt us down? Don’t contact Starfleet or other ships for help, of which, canonically, there are thousands in the territory by this point. No, better to clutter the screen with easily targeted and destroyed minor vehicles that distract from the importance of what’s happening. DS9: when’s Starfleet sending help? Oh they’re busy with something important and can’t spare ships, that sounds unlikely but at least it’s addressed. So we can defend the Defiant on our own? Maybe, but if we don’t, the entire quadrant is at risk. We do have improved shields that the Dominion and Cardassians don’t realize we’ve developed, and the Rotarran is hiding nearby to ensure it ambushes any attackers. The minefield is setup, how do we win this battle? ...oh, we’re leaving the station? ...When are we coming back home? Night versus Day.

Even voy which has trechnobable in 60% of its dialog, (it feels like it at least), is just consistent enough and uses enough real-world science to make it believable

As a man of science myself, I think a huge part was that the script writers would literally write [Insert Technobabble] in some places, and get consultants with physics, chemistry, or medical backgrounds to fill in the blanks. Using real terms, real theory's, etc. really creates a layer of immersion that hasn't often been matched.

That internal consistency is the key for me. So, if someone says "Chronotons" you know there's some time stuff going on. Also the best episodes don't rely on technobabble as a solution. It's fine if technobabble instigates the plot, as long as it doesn't *resolve* the problem.

This layering is one of my favorite things about Trek. It's always disappointing to peel back the layers and find nonsense. But when you peel back the layers of Trek you find lovingly-crafted technical manuals and beautiful schematics. The great designers like Sternbach, Probert and Eaves clearly designed their ships, props and sets with the fictional science and design lineages in mind. The ships didn't just have to look cool or scary, they had to look RIGHT in the technological and cultural context already established. That kind of passion and craftsmanship is a rare thing. As a visual person, that's why the tech feels believable to me.

This is actually one of the things I love about Star Trek, most other sci-fi franchises don't even bother trying to explain anything, and where Star Wars has been amazing at building the Star Wars universe creating backstories that cover thousands of years, and setting in stone what's canon and what's not because the people behind it know that's what their fans really care about. Star Trek has just now in the last ten+ years really started to really decide what's canon and what's not partly I think because of the J.J. Abrams movies and the need to show how they coexist with everything before them, but what the people behind Star Trek have done better than anyone else mainly because they know their fans care is the science of the Star Trek universe and putting out the technical manuals. The level of detail they put into them is amazing. I truly believe if it was currently possible to build on the scale of a starship like the Enterprise that you could use the blueprints in the manuals to do it.

Haven’t played it myself, but a lot of ships I’ve seen in Star Citizen convey this super convincing and almost tactile impression. I think they look even more real than what Star Trek delivers, but it also feels much close to out time than the golden age of Trek.

The cool thing about all the layers is they actually become part of the writing and stories, they aren't just an explanation in a reference book for ultra nerds somewhere. The downside of this is when a series or movie ignores some of these established rules, it becomes way more of an issue.

Long ago in the TOS times I asked similar questions. I found out Gene actually talked to NASA and other scientists asking them what might be possible. Since then I have always kept that thought that - who knows it might happen. After all look at cell phones and tablets :D

This was excellent Rick. I love your videos and I'm always excited to see you have another Star Trek video delving into ships and technologies.

Excellent video! ⭐️ I totally agree with you. When you ask someone “How does the Heisenberg compensator work?” and they answer “Very well,” you want to know that they’re laughing with you not at you. Trek’s tongue is always in its cheek. Everything is true, “Especially the lies.”

This is an element of why I feel new Trek has some consistency issues. Discovery had the psychic space child tantrum near magic rocks kill millions of people and the Turbo Lift void. Though I think I'm bugged more by how large rocks are an issue for Discovery's shields in one episode of Disovery, and then shields in an episode of Strange New Worlds can handle putting the ship inside a brown dwarf without a slight issue with the air conditioning. I'm still bugged by S2 of Picard having Wesley Crusher say that the Universe is constantly nudged onto a timeline of his groups preference, and even more so that the time line they preferred is the one with the Burn :/

The tech is believable, but their limited use of it and their lack of safety and security is not!

There really should have been a shout-out in the video for James Doohan bugging the first season TOS writers to start from a place where "this specific part of the engine is broken" rather than just "it will take six hours to get engines back".

Love this video. I had never thought about your layers of technobable explaination, but that makes a lot of sense.

This is the most important Star Trek video you have made yet. You have explained simply the idea that makes trek work. This should be required watching for anyone working on the new shows.

What helps me believe some of it, is how much of it is actually happening around us, cell phones and the like, I mean what you went over helps too, but it's not hard to believe the rest of it, when you can look around and everyone has at least one of TOS's communicators, lol.

This is a fantastic video for any writer to watch. It doesn't matter if it is books, shows, movies, or games, world building has a huge impact on the popularity of a story. I think most people underestimate how important it is. I wish I could show this to every writer out there.

Well done, Rick! Cranking the Geek-O-Meter up to 11! Loved it!

Really been a fan of your vids for a couple years now sir, be they class breakdowns, legacy videos or the Story Series of STO. Keep up the great work Ric!

I interviewed for a job as a service technician at a very young 3D Printer company 26 years ago, and during the interview with the CTO he asked me where I thought this company & technology would be in the future, well, lets just say the Star Trek Fan in me spoke up without thinking with "well sir, in the future when the Captian asked for a cup of Earl Grey Hot at the replicator I hope it will have our company logo". I then thought I blew the interview once my brain kicked in and thought "WTF did you just say?". well the CTO sat there for what seemed like an eternity before saying "I ask that question to every candidate and your answer was the most positive & futuristic answer I ever got, I like your vision, when can you start?" I'm still working for them today and with our Direct metal printing and now biological printing we are still a long way off from replicators but much closer.

Apart from fictional technologies, what is often left under-explained is that many FTL ways of travel is only mathmatically FTL, ie. divide distance by time, instead of an object (spaceship) physically moving faster than the speed of light. Quantum entanglement, as you briefly touched on, together with folding space, are perhaps the best examples of this.

It's fine that most saifi don't dive too deeply into how things work. Most people don't know how the internal combustion engine in their car works and they're okay with that

The care given to reasonably explaining and staying consistent with the in universe technology is one reason I became a Trek fan as a kid, and that lack of care and creativity is why I hate everything from Secret Hideout.

The spore drive shenanigans visually seems to be like deus ex machina above the standard warp drive.

"Believable" and "consistent" are not terms I would use to describe Star Trek technology. The term "technobabble" emerged from TNG for a reason. I don't consider that to be a deal-breaker when it comes to enjoying the stories. A given episode is generally internally consistent enough for whatever magic governs a phaser or transporter this time around to make sense in the context of that episode, and having whizbang sci-fi tech like teleporters and brightly colored beam guns is part of the aesthetic. The fact that those systems will rely on similar but different rules a couple plot arcs from now (and they worked a bit differently last season) doesn't really change the characters, and those are where Trek really shines anyway. Seeing the clever captain and brave crew facing interesting villains and dangerous phenomena is what makes Trek compelling; the photon torpedoes and warp cores are almost incidental. Trek deserves its place as a trendsetter in sci-fi. But the tech the characters use is... Not what I'd bank on to sell the setting.

Huh, your three-step breakdown of the Spore Drive helps explain why, even though I love when there's a lot of detail to unpack in a sci-fi element, I'm usually good with just one or two layers of explanation. I _like_ knowing how certain techs are supported, but once I get the "What" and the first "How," I usually don't care that much unless I've fallen in love with the show. It's like the G-Diffuser System on the Arwing -- I was fine with "it allows the Arwing to perform otherwise impossible maneuvers in-atmosphere" but I know way more about it than that.

Can we talk about how warp drive has changed? During old trek, and before the Alcubierre warp drive, the way warp drive worked was by using subspace. The warp bubble would phase the ship with subspace, thus reducing the ships apparent mass, allowing for FTL. If you watch certain episodes of TNG or even voyager, they even make references to this. But ever since Alcubierre's warp drive theory became commonly known both the fandom and the modern shows all imply that's how warp drive works. Which is fine, but I'm confused on where subspace fits into the equation now.

Thank you for the videos! I wish STO either added story content quicker or added a means to replay the various story arcs to provide fresh content for your excellent series.

I can only imagine that we have to be a Type II or Type III civilization of the Kardashev Scale to finally get Star Trek techs.

I think part of it is down to aesthetics as well. Treknology maps pretty much exactly to what the brains of 20th/21st-century people think that advanced technology *should* look like: crisp, clean lines, glass and steel and polymers, things that light-up and make distinctive noises. It makes it feel real.

Stargate sg1 starts off with mp5s and Kevlar and ends with particle weapons and space superiority fighters and it all makes sense

That's why I love Star trek so much because the do there best to explain how the technology works and make it as believable as possible.

That was an excellent video man, really well put!

Trek-Tech works because it doesn't just reply on the "space magic" principle to make it happen. There is some grounding (no matter how limited or slight) in real-world science, and there is marvellous consistency between episodes and series when it comes to technobabble and the development/evolution of the tech.

No no no, it's the other way around with warp drive. Alcubierre apparently literally send an email to Shattner that his warp drive was inspired by star trek. He also refers to "the warp drive in science fiction" in his paper. The warp drive was, thus, pretty much invented in star trek and is now worked on in the real world - NOT the other way around!

I've heard of this idea of only needing up to 3 layers of explanation for a lore decision, to be satisfactory. A classic post is one that explains "Why don't the vampires use the sewer systems to travel around the town?" A: Because there are giant alligators. Q. Why are there giant alligators and how do they survive down there? A. There's a group of nuns that keep them fed and protected. Q. Where did the NUNS COME FROM? A. The nuns use the alligators to protect the town from the vampire menace. Duh. Anything beyond that is just over thinking it.

You explained it perfectly. That's also why when they introduce something like the Q, they shouldn't explore it too much because, as it is outside our comprehension and outside the realm of believable technobabble, it should remain in the dark to preserve the mystery. (although, as someone generally curious, I still want an answer and the attempt is still commandable to a point, Klingon appearance explained in Enterprise was perfectly fine to me despite the obvious "we could have acknowledge the budget was a thing in the 60s and got away with that, the ballsy way". As for the Q, as Picard once stated: "I refuse to believe that the universe was THAT badly designed." so the Q have to come from somewhere, they can't come from nothing and they have to have some limitations, only blinded by their arrogance, so my take on the Q is that they are NEAR omibpotent beings, but they can't be truly omnipotent, otherwise they would have created reality itself, which is clearly not the case. The closest explanation that I could find is that they are ascended beings... like the Ancients in Stargate.

Now I think about it, the furturistic white kind of reminds me of sophisticated white and grey colors of an airport.

There is a lot of talk about “consistency” in the comments but I think a part that goes understated in regards to the believability of Star Trek tech is when it breaks an established rule or two here or there as a means of advancing a narrative and further enriching the universe. These events are usually referenced as a kind of breakthrough moment of discovery. Scotty would state in an episode that he can’t just break the laws of physics, would proceed to break that law of physics through some ingenious deus ex machina, and future trek shows would use it as a reference to deal with contemporary problems. It’s not dissimilar to how experimentation breaks some ignorant assumptions we make about what we feel are fairly well grounded scientific explanations in the real world.

This has crystallised a lot of ideas I’ve had while discussing some of these topics with people. Especially the layers of mechanics ultimately leading to “because we said so”, as I realised there’s still no definitive answer as to whether a warp coil alone can warp space or if you always need dilithium plasma to do it. Ultimately both have been said to have subspace components and it’s fiction and doesn’t really matter. But that’s when I started to think, this isn’t as well thought out as it seems on the surface and they just have a lot of interlocking smoke and mirrors to keep it looking fairly plausible without much digging. It’s still fun to talk about though.

Let's not get too wild here. The season seven TNG episodes with the element of the week and Voyager's triaxilating everything once 7 of 9 joined did plenty to do their damnedest to test our suspension of disbelief.

A marshmallow dispenser is just crazy. But a marshmellon dispenser that is genius!

I think a large part of making the technology believable is simply making it not overpowered. If the characters have a technology so powerful that it can accomplish their goals with relative ease, that makes it not believable. If, however, the characters have to understand how their technology works, and they have to use it in a way that they find challenging, that makes the story compelling, and the compelling story makes the technology more believable.

Honestly I do really 'buy in' to trek's tech and a lot of the comments have good reasons why too, but the least believable thing that remains in trek as a whole, at least for me, are the bridges on ships, their location and being so exposed. There isn't really a good reason or explanation for it. I *have* however played a game before that took all of it's inspiration for ships and tech from trek and the way they did it there seemed to make more sense- main bridges were deck one, top front of the ship for ceremonial, historical reasons and *also* because on either side of the bridge was the captain's ready room and a conference room both of which had real actual windows to look forward out of, which is just about the only practical reason I can think of why you'd want a bridge there specifically- we do get quite sentimental about seeing stuff 'for real'. The rest of the time we had a battle bridge that was located literally in the centre of the ship which was the primary bridge used for anything non exploration or ceremony based, and it was just as large as the 'main bridge'. Having that feeling of going to the 'top' of the ship to "deck one" and it being directly connected to the turbo lifts for convenience does seem to make sense from a 'feelings' point of view, but not from a practical one. Thus it always made the most sense to me that the 'battle bridge' should be just as big as the 'main' one, if not bigger, just like CICs are on ships today but to an even bigger extreme since there is even less use for seeing visually.

Thank you again Rick. For all you're hard work.

I think you brought up a lot of good points and your tips are very helpful for anyone creating their own sci-fi universes to craft stories within.

Watching Skallagrim? He did a video on verisimilitude himself earlier. I love verisimilitude in my sci-fi, that small amount of realism act as a bridge that brings you into the world

I always appreciated that Star Trek at least tries to explain things. It actually makes it more believable for me when something doesn’t have an explanation. How does telepathy work? “We don’t know”, is a perfectly reasonable answer to that. If enough things have an answer than it is more believable when something doesn’t. They don’t know everything and that’s ok. At least the audience knows that they’re trying to find out.

Rally insightful, nice work :)

In 1976 Norman Spinrad coined the term “rubber science” for what we call Treknobabble. According to him, it exists basically for readers to hang their Willing Suspension Of Disbelief from. It has to be within the realm of the possible *as far as the layman reader is concerned* and all uses and modifications of it have to be consistent with each other. He used it to describe any fictional science in SF from the “super science” of the OG space operas to that of Star Trek. Your analysis holds up pretty well for Str Trek but I’ll point out that the OG space opera authors would often begin with a scientific effect that simply wasn’t real and write a story around it, sometimes successfully from a literary standpoint. In those cases your analytic points would come in reverse order. For example: Suppose it was possible to partially suppress the inertial mass of matter within a defined volume without killing living things within that volume. Then, you could build spacecraft capable of reaching very large fractions of the speed of light without having to carry ridiculous amounts of fuel. Further suppose that inertial mass could be completely suppressed, again without killing anything. Then, your ships could exceed the speed of light by very large margins. That allows galaxy-spanning drama involving huge space battles, interstellar politics, and no small amount of romance. That’s more or less the story of E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Bergenholm Drive which allowed him to write the Lensman series.

I do want to know why the Federation seem to make all their tech out of pure Explodium. :)

Good analysis, Rick. The layers of comprehension apply not only to the fictional realm of Star Trek, but to the average person's knowledge of how basic devices function in the real world. For example, devices such as cars, microwave ovens, and ball point pens require specialized knowledge to create, but only a superficial knowledge to operate; in each of these examples, most people who could use the device wouldn't be tasked with repairing it, even if their knowledge extends to the second layer of "how does that work?" Not only do the layers of Trek technology mimic our understanding of the real world, but also characters in Trek are, by definition, often experts in some aspect of the technology, allowing for the drip-feeding effect of explaining in-universe to other characters who are not conversant with the minutiae. Thus the characters' acceptance of the explanations given encourages the audience's credulity to extend to the plot point in a reasonable manner.

Reminds me of Sanderson’s Laws of Magic, just replace magic with technology. An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic / technology is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic/ technology.

Great vid Rick. You are also a master of world building. Love your stuff.

Amazing timing or the release, as i am going to try to answer this question too. At my University, i participate in a class, where we try to get to know how science is broadcasted in a way as it entertains people, while beeing accurate. Therefore, i am going to give a talk about Star Trek and how science is portaited there. Your Video is a great source for that. Allthough, according to the sources i have read so far, Star Trek is also asumed to be a social fiction. This means that the franchise combines the aspects of technologie with the social circumstances. Like, what kind of technologie is it and how does it benefit peoples needs? And how these people behave paralel to the technologie? Furthermore, the Show functions as a projection of human behavior and problems, which leads to the possibility to reflect on ongoing problems like war or destruction of the enviorment. My Sources: Quelle: Wenger, Christian: Jenseits der Sterne. Gemeinschaft und Identität in Fankulturen - Zur Konstitution des Star Trek-Fandoms. Bielefeld, 2006 and Quelle: Richter, Thomas: STAR TREK und die Wissenschaften: Der Weltraum, das Raumschiff, die Abenteuer… In: Rogotzki, Nina; Richter, Thomas; Brandt, Helga et al. [Hrsg.] Kiel, 2009, S.11 - S.16 (I know its in german, but i was to lazy to translate it.)

As a physics nerd and a sci-fi nerd, I have long since accepted that sci-fi tech will always have a place where you have to invoke "well just because" but I'm fine so long as the obvious and major problems are addressed. So long as the writer shows that they thought about it a little. Like with transporters, they couldn't ever work in the real world because of the uncertainty principle. So they came up with a compensator, how does it work? I don't really care, you showed that you thought about it and that's enough for me.

Magic A is Magic A. The consistency over decades. Star Trek is an inhabited universe and for the most part all the creators who have come along have participated in and respected the rules that came before. Or as Kirk said, "You have to know, why things work on a starship." Star Trek also has a history of respecting its viewers' intelligence. They know we can keep up. I think that's also why I have so much affection for another Sci Fi universe that inherited much from Star Trek, Mass Effect. The Codex is a rich wonderful guide to the universe that made everything feel lived in and tactile. They established their rules and made sure that it all fit together.

I love that the tech behind Star Trek has all of those layers, if you look into the tech manuals and other sources, as well as what we see on screen. It does make it more believable to me. But I still have the same question about warp drive: How did Zeph get antimatter to power the Phoenix? Or di-lithium crystals, for that matter. Did he find it in Montana? Did that missile that he converted into a space ship have an antimatter warhead? If so, the earth would have been in pieces if they used such weapons in WW3. My guess is that warp drive can be powered in different ways, from something as old fashion as a fission power plant (which he could have built from the warhead, and also explains the radiation that killed all of those people in the launch tube), fusion power, though I doubt we'd have a mini fusion plant in 2063, and, of course, antimatter. As well as the Romulans who use a artificial singularity to generate power (and gives proof you don't need antimatter in canon). The Phoenix probably had a fission power pack system similar to the ones we put on long range space probes. Which is one of the reasons it could just make warp one, the other being less advanced warp coils, plus no di-lithium. Once humanity teamed up with the Vulcans, they got advanced power plants - though why the Vulcans would give earth antimatter tech is something I don't understand, unless they figured we would make a good ally in the long term.

"The Mycelial Network"

As well as your reasons Rick, I always thought that the tech was also loosely supported by current established theories in Newtonian, Einsteinian and Quantum physics. Great subject to discuss.👏💯

So many neat ideas about future tech in Star Trek, then there is warp 10, which turns you into a salamander...

Nothing touches The Expanse for being believable. But Star Trek has always been close behind, just because of how consistent it is throughout the canon.

I like that it's "like real life unless noted". Another good example is Gundam and the Minovsky particle. What is the Minovsky particle? It's a byproduct of nuclear fusion that expands in a lattice and disrupts electromagnetic waves, preventing long range radio communication, constantly giving an emp-like effect to circuits, and eventually dissipating visible light. You can shield against it, but it's relatively heavy. So long range guided missiles don't work, lasers eventually dissipate, long distance targeting is basically impossible, and it also has some implications for beam weapons being possible (apparently). Sure seams like a good excuse as to why giant robots that carry big guns and energy swords are feasibly dogfighting in universe rather than just laser, railgun, or missiling people from the opposite orbit. Except G-Gundam. I mean it's awesome, but it's whole reason for existence is "what if giant fighting robots had mystical kung-fu magic?"

I'm a sucker for good world building and love delving into the lore of fictional universes. Probably why I'm a fan of this channel.

Pretty awsome and deadly lazer weopons from big to small.

I think a big reason that Trek tech is so believable is because a lot of the devices are actual solutions to rather large problems we face today. Replicators can prvode an infinite supply of food, and transporters solve short range movement rather easily

another faction is from TOS to ENG there was a focuses on have characters normalize common technology, sometime actors where ask to imagine themself in setting and improvise what they think would be normal.

Going along with your layers idea: it helps that Star Trek usually devotes episodes to explore a particular technology in each series. Something goes wrong with the warp engine, or the replicators, or the... holodeck 😑 that requires the characters to explain the details of that technology in order to resolve the story. So the viewer gets to learn how it does work, but (more importantly?) how it DOESN'T work.

I believe that you are on point with everything that you mentioned in your video. However i also think, at least in my case, that what makes Star Trek so great for me is that it has the layers as you mentioned , but they are not afraid to dabble with concepts and theories that are almost unbelievable to us average citizens of the "Dark Ages" as McCoy once called our 21st century existence.

This was a really good episode and highlights one of the best aspects of the franchise. Just last night while watching an episode of VOY my gf asked "How do they recharge the ship" And star treks rules are sufficiently consistent that i was actually able to answer her question reasonably easily It Did however highlight for me the fact that the supply of Antimatter aboard voyager was never highlighted as an issue, Only the quality available compared to local species' Leading me to conclude that Starfleet ships can either Generate sufficient quantities with relative ease, OR has a high yield process of finding and purifying it in the field

It's because the transporters have Heisenberg compensators.. and because when the port injectors are down you can always bypass the primary EPS conduits and reroute auxiliary power through the main deflector.

Great video Dude!

I think it's because that 4th layer is usually easily hand wavered by a simple explanation that we can all grasp - it's several hundred years into the future. If we knew how to make a warp drive now, we would. It's easier to suspend disbelief if you tell me we've solved the problem of the (practically) near infinite energy requirements of generating a stable warp field that cannot be solved with any knowledge we currently have. That's believable enough to suspend disbelief enough to enjoy the story and become emersed in a world where people already understand this and how it works. 200 years ago an internal combustion engine was fantasy, now a skilled trader can talk with a similar level of techno bable about my car and they demonstrate they know what they mean by fixing it at a similar cost to any other garage. This is enough for me to entrust my relied upon transport to, so if it can be simulated with sufficient consistency, I'm convinced enough to enjoy a TV show. Which Star Trek manages to achieve.

Mycelial network is similar to dilithium crystals as in both exists in multiple subspace domains at the same time. Just like it's possible to travel between parallel universes, it's possible to travel between subspace domains. Each universe or subspace domain has intrinsic frequency which makes them mostly invisible to other universes and subspace domains. Travelling between them involves phase shift in molecular structure of any creature or object. The intrinsic frequency is similar to function of holograms where the image is only visible when viewed at certain angle. Because everything still exists in same _space_ but not same absolute time, things in one universe or subspace domain can affect others, but most people don't notice anything unless the space-time distance is small enough.