Handheld devices, networking and storage technology are all shit in the Star Trek universe. At least in the Federation. Haircare technology (Jordy again) is also woefully lacking. Also, if the ship has such good voice control, why do they have such 'supermarket' style keypads? And why do the monitors flicker like they are neon tubes (well... I know they ARE in real life, but I was trying not to break the fourth wall). And why do people take costumes and sports equipment to the holodeck? And why, when anyone fucks with the main computer, do they not have reliable logs - always one crappy bit of CCTV at best. Doh! At least they aren't using any flavour of Windows, so it's not totally unrealistic (presumably they've offloaded the software along with the ethics to the Borg). Why are there flashing lights in Data's head? There are millions of other things (like, how can any even slightly non-humanoid creature use a Jeffry's Tube? Why do all ships travel the same "way up"?) but they can wait.

(This node reminds me of a PVP strip : "There's no crying on Star Trek!" "But I've got period pain..." "There's no menstruating on Star Trek!")

2 words for you all, Seat belts

Every time a ship gets fired upon every person on the bridge gets bumped around, some even thrown from their seats onto the ground. How hard could a restraining belt be to fit?

C'mon, now, they did pretty good, considering thay spent a long time recovering from the Third World War or Eugenics War or whatever it was called (varies by episode and series). Look at the original Enterprise with the steam pipes sticking out of the walls ... clearly Kirk's USS Enterprise is in the first generation of electrically powered starships. Imagine Kirk's previous ship, the USS Farragut ... red-shirt ensigns down in engineering shovelling tri-anthracite coal into the warp furnaces ...

But give credit where it's due. Inventions such as the Captain's log system's dramaticam, in itself, balance against the curious lack of circuit breakers on the bridge.

A general trend in SF series and movie computers is the lack of a backup facility.

Definitely one of the most important things in any kind of professional data processing, the need for externally storable backups is unlikely to be superseded by any advance in technology.

A typical Voyager sequence involving The Doctor often involves problems with his program - which, of course cannot be restored from backup, there is none. (Later in the show, some kind of hardcore hacking restores full functionality - still, it seems to be a waste of manpower.

My comment on this matter is closely related to what McSnarf said about Voyager's EMH (The Doctor). This has been bothering me for years. In all the mindblowing advances in computer technology, they handle all their important data transfer via the cut-and-paste method. They have no copy!

In one episode of Voyager, the Doctor's program got corrupted by all the little "personality subroutines" that they had added. But, never fear, they had an EMH-diagnostic program that looked and talked exactly like him. So, what was their solution? They grafted the neural matrix of the diagnostic program onto the doctor, restoring his functionality, and in the process destroying their only EMH-diagnostic.

Now, did i miss something here? Why did they not just tell the computer to take the data that represented the "brain" of the diagnostic program, and copy it to another part of the computer? In the very least, i'd think they could at least replicate a copy of the storage medium that contained this information.

I also remember there being an episode of DS9 that had some problem that could have been solved much easier had they just made a COPY of some relevant data.

I don't think that technology was really lost between now and Star Trek. The technology is still intact. What we lost was our common sense. Look at Voyager for instance. This ship obviously has a COPY of the entire database of human knowlege, becuase the ship's computer has access to it even when they out of communications range with every other Federation computer in the galaxy. They can store the entirety of recorded human knowlege in an object the size of a human head (re: Data and his skull full of LED's), so there should be a small shoebox with a backup of their database stuck in a few random equipment lockers throughout every Federation ship. I assume these things could be mass-produced fairly cheaply based on the fact that Dr. Soong threw together a few of them in his basement lab.

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