/strek/ - Star Trek ★

>>2170 (OP)

>Space Libertarians vs Space Communists

I'm disappointed you left out Space Fascists. Dukat did nothing wrong. Bajoran deaths during the occupation were greatly exaggerated by the Federation liberators. We loved the Bajoran people, they were children under our care. The Weimar Republic, that is the Federation, days are numbered.

>>2170 (OP)

>The Federation

>Libertarians

No, they're really not.

>one world government dominated by the military

>post-scarcity fantasies (that somehow don't actually change things on a personal scale and seem to exist almost exclusively when the Federation is talking about how great it is)

>the Prime Directive. Like that whole thing.

>the needs of the many

Don't get me wrong; they've got some scattered Libertarian themes, but their basic social structure and core values are not Libertarian.

>>2191

>when the Federation is talking about how great it is

>"We've evolved beyond currency"

<A bunch of degenerates obsessed with gambling off duty

>>2170 (OP)

The Federation are in no way libertarian. They are way closer to communism than lolbergism.

>>2192

Worse still:

>claim to be morally superior to everyone

<invented a birth-control injection because the crew can't stop fucking everything with a pulse

<fuck each other

<fuck aliens

<fuck holograms

<undergo metamorphosis into non-humanoid aliens and fuck more

<no one gets married until they're 45+, if ever

How the hell did they even sustain a decent birth-rate?

>>2251

Remember all the space amish?

>>2251

Well they've magically cured all diseases and they live to be over 100, so I'd imagine you don't need much of a birth rate to keep the population up.

It's said that industrialization is the best contraceptive. As civilizations become more advanced, conditions improve and birth rates taper off while parents invest more resources into fewer children.

>>2328

>The post scarcity thing never really made much sense

I don't know. If you can drop dirt in a replicator and rearrange its molecules into a hot fudge sundae or a diamond, for example, it's hard to see why there would be any hunger or material desire in the universe. Hell, the ugliest woman on Earth could be remade in an hour into Pamela Anderson circa 1984 (to say nothing of holosuites), so sexual desire shouldn't be too hard to deal with, either. I always found Quark's desire for latinum to be a little silly, to be honest.

>>2336

Latinum is a non-replicatable material, the gold is just a container and is completely worthless compared to the latinum suspended within.

>>2340

That keeps getting chopped and changed. Apparently gold has value but it is the equivalent of ripping out the copper wiring out of building.

>>2340

>Latinum is a non-replicatable material, the gold is just a container and is completely worthless compared to the latinum suspended within.

I know. I just meant that I don't understand what he plans to do with all of it. He lives in Federation space, and I'm pretty sure the Ferrengi will end up as Federation citizens once they bend the knee.

>Apparently gold has value but it is the equivalent of ripping out the copper wiring out of building.

I recall Quark telling Morn that it's useless to the civilized galaxy but there are still some planets out there that think gold is worth something. Guess they don't use it in electronics in the future.

>>2353

I think latinum slips just have a very small amount of money in them. Like a hot sauce packet made of gold.

>>2368

>Quark will make a Ferengi government in exile

>Becomes unofficial Grand Nagus

>Retakes Constaninople from Federation invaders.

>>2368

>Guess they don't use it in electronics in the future.

Gold is a rather common element, I think in the vastness of space and ability to mine uninhabited planets and asteroids, there's just a fuck ton of it.

>>2336

That doesn't get rid of scarcity; that merely simplifies production and distribution. The system converts energy into matter, so you still have to collect enough energy to power your systems. Access to replicators is still a finite resource. Plus there are loads of things that replicators just can't make, many of which are necessary for the ship to function. At the very least, most folks complain that replicated foods are unappetizing compared to their non-replicated counterparts. The ships can only be used in one place at a time, making them scarce. If the ships weren't scarce, you wouldn't need a command structure; everybody could just do their own thing.

Energy, time, expertise, non-replicable resources; they're all still scarce and must be allocated sensibly. Without the capacity for rational economic calculation, one cannot identify their highest-valued ends.

The Great Material Continuum is actually the most sensible piece of philosophy to come out of Star Trek, so far as I've seen.

>>2423

Original crew were a frat party on an acid trip.

>>2672

>and it can't produce a living organism

I don't really understand the distinction between an replicator and a transporter. If a transporter can disassembly and reassemble a living thing than a replicator should be able to also.

Given, a transporter is using an existing pattern, but it's destroying copy A, and creating a new Copy B, at the destination. Bones is right to be paranoid, you die every time you transport and your replicant takes your place.

A replicator should be able to store a generic life-form pattern for a cat, and be able to replicate a cat, it simply needs required raw materials. Replicators by description of function and capability can convert most elements into others.

Transporters also seem like they'd make awesomely terrifying weapons. Catch your foe with his shields down and beam all his men into the cold of space, weaken the shields or frequency match to get through, only need a partial lock, we don't need a successful transport, just enough of one to rip you into bits. - GoreTrek.

>>2683

The way the transporter works is that the target exists at both locations at the same time passing through the pattern buffer as a mid-point until transport is complete. Storing someone within the pattern buffer requires a lot of space or really good jury rigging, and even then your transport pattern will start to deteriorate over time. This is not recommended.

>>2683

>>2685 Points out something really good in that the pattern buffer deteriorates overtime.

>Given, a transporter is using an existing pattern, but it's destroying copy A, and creating a new Copy B, at the destination

>you die every time you transport and your replicant takes your place.

This isn't entirely accurate. A person in the transporter doesn't ever lose consciousness. The science of the transporter isn't ever fully explained on the show but it doesn't work through cloning. Cloning is possible in the Trek multiverse but it's done fairly differently.

>A replicator should be able to store a generic life-form pattern for a cat

It's also explained that the replicator has problems replicating really complicated things. Like Doctor Crusher says at one point in TNG that they wouldn't be able to replicate Romulan ribosomes because of the complex structure. It also consumes more power incrementally depending on the complexity. Like Paris on Voyager mentions that it took a week's worth of replicator rations to replicate a clarinet.

It's also much easier to use hologram matter to create something via the holodeck that is an illusion kept together via emitters

>Transporters also seem like they'd make awesomely terrifying weapons

sssomewhat. The transporters have a drawback in that you can only transport a certain number of people at one time. Meaning if a ship has like 70 crewmen it can take an hour to beam all of them. There was an episode of TNG in particular where the Enterprise needed to buy time so they could beam off all of the colonists off his planet that was about to explode

>Catch your foe with his shields down and beam all his men into the cold of space

Once the shields are down it's fairly trivial to cut through the hull of the ship or disable life support entirely. Beaming the crew off the ship is much more complicated in comparison. Usually they get the crew to surrender since in the Federation's case it's in pretty poor taste to do something like that and in the Klingons/Romulan's case it's more valuable to keep the crew alive generally.

>weaken the shields or frequency match to get through

I somewhat doubt that figuring out the shield frequency is a trivial task. Usually in the show when it happens it's due to something specific like the USS Equinox swapping their EMH and being told what it was from him.

>>2688

>Meaning if a ship has like 70 crewmen it can take an hour to beam all of them.

This is far from Canon though, there were many episode and moments from the movies where they evacuate people in large numbers in short amounts of time. I remember them using the cargobay transporters cause they could bring more people at the same time. Like Scotty in Generations beaming 200 people off those ships caught in the rift in a matter of a minute.

>>2663

Thank you

>>2499

> Are you saying that not everyone has one?

I'm saying that no matter how many replicators there are, there's still a finite number of them and only one person can use one at a time. There's only so much replicator time to go around.

>I would blame that more on the imagination of the writers than the actual state of things.

It's canon that anything sufficiently complicated, as well as certain materials, simply cannot be replicated. A lot of their equipment is probably designed to be easily replicated, but many parts needed for ships to function rely on materials which cannot be replicated or components which are too complex. Dilithium, for example, is not replicable, and every warp-capable craft in most civilizations relies on it for their power production.

>Energy: the warp core should be generating more than enough of that

"Enough" is still a finite amount. They can't generate infinite energy, and they can and do run out.

>Expertise: There's plenty of that on a starship.

Again; "plenty" is not "infinite". Any time a subject matter expert has to put off one project to prioritize another, they are demonstrating the scarcity of expertise. Any time they say "I could use another pair of hands in Engineering/Sickbay", they are expressing a demand for increased availability of expertise.

Scarcity is the economic idea that there is only a finite amount of something; not that there isn't enough of it. No matter how much energy/time/expertise they have, they still must choose and prioritize the ends to which it is applied. It is still fundamentally scarce, just like everything else that exists.

>Non-replicable resources: Now here's where I'm in the unknown. What can't be replicated?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicator_%28Star_Trek%29

"A replicator can create any inanimate matter, as long as the desired molecular structure is on file, but it cannot create antimatter, dilithium, latinum, or a living organism of any kind; in the case of living organisms, non-canon works such as the Star Trek: the Next Generation Technical Manual state that, though the replicators use a form of transporter technology, it's at such a low resolution that creating living tissue is a physical impossibility."

There's also the fact that even the Federation had laboratories where certain substances would be synthesized without replicators (which would be necessary if replicators could do the job) and they routinely traded for various pieces of standard ship equipment (again, unnecessary if replicators could do the job).

>>2672

>There's actually only a very small list of things that replicators can't produce.

As far as lists that people have compiled go, sure. However, if you were to follow through the series and make a note every time they said they couldn't replicate something (or that they would use other, more time- and labor-intensive means to produce it despite having access to replicators), then that list would be much larger. They're actually pretty inconsistent about it, since sometimes they can replicate a spine and other times they can't replicate particular enzymes or something.

>Additionally on Federation starships they describe that replicators have safeties built in.

That wasn't under discussion, and I'm not arguing against that.

>Antimatter and dilithium crystals are required for the warp drive but almost everything else can easily be replicated.

Then why (off the top of my head) did numerous Federation ships need to trade for pieces of equipment in the show? In DS9 (7x06; Treachery, Faith, and the Great River) there was a complex multi-stage barter between various ships for a graviton stabilizer, an induction modulator, and a phaser emitter. Federation ships have industrial replicators on-board. It would make no sense for them to be trading for these things if they could replicate them on their own. Hell, the central conflict of that episode could have been resolved with a trip to the replicators. Clearly, the limits of replicators are significant and expansive as a matter of canon. These aren't trivial peripheral systems, either; that equipment is profoundly important to the operation of a ship.

>This tends to be seen as more of a joke or something people claim to notice.

There are a few scenes throughout the franchise where somebody sits down to a replicated meal expecting to enjoy it and finding it inadequate. The fact that they didn't have an episode dedicated to explaining it doesn't undermine the ubiquity of the fact.

> Like only Scotty was able to notice the scotch he was drinking wasn't real alcohol because he's a drunk.

Only Scotty was able to notice because everybody else was accustomed to synthehol. They'd been serving with the stuff for years, and he'd just been pulled out of transporter stasis with fresh memories of real booze. This particular sub-point is a bit of a wash, because synthehol is a deliberately different substance, not an attempt at replicating genuine alcohol.

>Also replicators are available mostly everywhere

Again, that wasn't my point. My point is that they are a finite resource, even if they're available in great abundance. No matter how many of them there are, they are still scarce in an economic sense, and they still rely on resources which are also scarce. Having a lot of something does not obviate the scarcity of that thing, nor the need for rationally allocating it. No matter how much of your resources your society has, if you cannot perform rational economic calculations, you will inevitably encounter shortages of some things and surpluses of others, and this unavoidable reality plays out even in the fiction which purports to have eliminated that concern.

>>2722

>which would be necessary

which would not be necessary…

Sure is a lot of autism in this thread you make me proud anons

>>2336

>sexual desire shouldn't be too hard to deal with

Everyone's fetishes are just going to get more and more extreme.

>>2780

>Star Trek is inherently SJW

By Damar's Kanar, how wrong can someone be? SJW's would have a spergfit if they actually bothered to watch Trek. Anyone who actually has bothered to watch the series and properly analyses the shows would know Trek is actually redpilled on a lot of issues.

>>2780

>steark is sjw

When are you going to stop being retard tumbler.

>>2782

>SJW

>lefty

Going a little bit out of subject, but; At this point i'm not even sure if the sjw are even leftty or something that's just from the left, because i have seen the same crap from the right and before sjw term existed, it's a misconception that anyone or anything to the left is sjw that leads to shit like this >>2780

I still laugh to this day when fox new and others said that obamacare was socialist or communist.

Not like left and right is just a and b crap that does not exist and is in everyone head now, while just being a stereotype of philosophy and opinions being shitted out with the horseshoe theory tho.

>>2792

anon pls stop, you're being like >>2780 at this point.

If star trek is anything, the federation is cosmopolitanism in it's base level at least.

>>2731

>>2769

>you make me proud anons

May your kids be blessed with autism, just like how autism blessed you.

Embrace the autism.

If in terms of US dollars In the function of labor time required to produce and the cost. Your feeding and powering the city of los angelas for 200 dollars a month and if someone wants a new house they can build it themselves from replicated materials or call the local government for a new house for 0.00000000001 cent. Those are what i see the prices for replication on a planet are close to nothing. If it costs next to nothing to feed your population house them and clothe them. What happens to a economy? What happens to someone when they do not have to worry about managing those problems of scarcity? Well in rat park experiments you can be happy productive and work towards the desires for improvement you want. I'm not a communist or a socialist but I can see a society becoming that from capitalism when Resources for feeding/housing/power become nil. I would take quark running Americas banks instead of the current shit though.

>>3243

There are several economic fallacies involved here. I get that my tone isn't always the warmest, but please be assured that this isn't against you in particular; I hear these sorts of things all the time and it's very difficult to pick apart what someone is saying in text without coming across like a prick. Just remember that I mean no disrespect as you read on:

>If in terms of US dollars In the function of labor time required to produce and the cost.

You really can't properly describe economic outputs in this way. Prices only hold meaning if and because of the subjective value people ascribe to what they are exchanging. Trying to compute outputs purely in terms of labor time and cost renders rational economic calculation impossible, because it disregards the fundamental nature of value.

>Your feeding and powering the city of los angelas for 200 dollars a month

>a new house for 0.00000000001 cent

>Those are what i see the prices for replication on a planet are close to nothing.

As a fiat currency, it makes little economic difference to move the decimal place around like that. You could make that $2 to feed Los Angeles and $0.000000000000001 for a house, or $2,000,000,000,000,000 to feed Los Angeles and $1 to build a house, or $2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to feed Los Angeles and $1,000,000,000 for a house, and other than the convenience of moving the physical currency around, no practical difference has been achieved. What matters is how readily people can acquire the goods and services they want, and that's a lot more complicated than just having machines that can make them. Hypothetically, if a genie granted everyone a personal replicator and magically infinite power to make whatever they wanted, and replicators had no limits, then a lot of exchange would become irrelevant, but people would still have to rationally allocate their time and space. That's leaving aside that such technology isn't just beyond our reach; it isn't just in violation of the laws of physics; it's also utterly devoid of any coherent sense in how or why such a thing might come to be even if it were possible. The incentives to produce such an existence just don't add up.

>What happens to someone when they do not have to worry about managing those problems of scarcity?

We'll never have to find out, because it's inherent in the nature of the universe.

>Well in rat park experiments you can be happy productive and work towards the desires for improvement you want.

Everything I've heard about those experiments was the exact opposite of what you've said:

http://io9.gizmodo.com/how-rats-turned-their-private-paradise-into-a-terrifyin-1687584457

This was just the first link I found. I'm sure there's more scholarly reporting on this, but I figure we're being somewhat informal here.

>I would take quark running Americas banks instead of the current shit though.

That we agree on. His cartoonish greed would either inform his enlightened self-interest, or make his corruption obvious enough that people would have a hard time pretending the central bank wasn't a criminal enterprise.

Sage because I'm autistically prattling on about economics on a Star Trek board.

>>3249

>io9

Don't give those faggots clicks.

>>3256

>Fuck those things.

Absolutely.

>"Bajor is starving, and we're a race of farmers, Major Kira. You done fucked up."

No, she didn't. If Bajor is starving, the last fucking thing Bajor needs is billions of creepy fucks contaminating their air and water with flaps of skin. Not to mention chewing, greedy mouths, or did those "farmers" forget that crops don't just spring up in a week? Bajor made the right move. I just wish the western countries of Earth had had the same fucking foresight.

>>3257

I've never heard of them before. They were just the first link that came up on the subject. What's their deal?

>>3291

I thought Gawker were no more?

>>2722

Well, they probably have almost unlimited energy. You can't replicate dilithium but you can replicate uranium and plutonium. Just set up a chamber to use that and spent dilithium for recrystalization and you can go to town for quite some time. Especially in the TNG era, Spock could get a system working fast in a TMP-era Bird of Prey so with 24th century tech it wouldn't be much trouble.

>>4606

They got scooped up by a bigger company, but they've been on life support ever since the Hulkster slammed them.

>>4606

They belong to Univision now.

>>2705

IIRC, cargo transporters have a lower resolution, so it's not advisable to transport something alive through them. You can in an emergency, when it's a choice between certain death and potential brain or cell damage.

>>4614

Maybe if the bottom ship was in the Mirror Universe.

>>2396

Is gold actually nonreplicable? I always assumed it was.

>>10390

Gold is replicateable, which is why it's worthless in the future. Latinum is not, which is why it still has value.

>>10390

>>10409

What do other races use for their currency I wonder?

>>2782

Even TNG pointed out that racemixing was bad that led to handicapped children rejected by the societies of both parents.

>>10638

Tribbles, Orion Slave Girls, Hasperat, Flute Music.

>Read the entire thread

>Nobody posted vid related yet

>>12960

>Johnson

>Libertarian

closed it after that

>>2254

>It's said that industrialization is the best contraceptive. As civilizations become more advanced, conditions improve and birth rates taper off while parents invest more resources into fewer children.

Except that wasn't true. Industrialization led to massive expansion of Western populations, right up until the World Wars and the Spanish Flu….after that it stopped for some odd reason.

>>2251

Its been 500 years. The vast majority of women who don't want to breed or only did it for economic/social necessity just didn't breed. Widescale birth control adds in the factor of conscious desire whereas before, simple fecundity and available resources was all the mattered.

Like honestly? These decades of feminism and widescale sluttery and birth control and opting out of marriage and families would be great if it wasn't accompanied by massive shitskin invasion.

There would be a population bulge, then decline, then eventual leveling out. Then the largest generations of feminists and anti natal men would be dead, the 1st one of people who completely disregard it as it isn't necessary, the 2nd ones who follow them out of beleiving thier excuses and propaganda, and the 3rd group that falls for the convenience and propaganda.

Eliminate blacks and spics and American voting doesn't change from 1950 to 2000, but after then, the country never moves Left again and starts inching back towards the Right. And then we would have to wait just a few more decades and Leftism would be dead, failure to breed.

Europe would have had something similar, but well. The wars, the plagues, and the occupations afterwards.

>>2499

You realize you're trying to add canonization to a television show that only lasted like 5 seasons and was cancled? This whole board. Holy hell.

>>2191

One of my favorite things about the movies was that it flipped it so that "the needs of the many" became "the needs of the one" which fit with the society that made Star Trek instead of the society that never could have made Star Trek.

>>12967

Eh, they've got to grade it for the normies.

A general response to transporters. That one episode with the terrorist using alternate dimension teleporter is more real then actual star trek teleporter tech.

I loved stargate ftl because it felt new and diffrent' like farscape starburst. The starburst felt alive and quick A mind and energy bursting through the barriers between time and space. not something that could be done with just raw technology but requiring thought.

>>12960

Star Trek: /pol/ edition would just be an edit of Cardassians blowing shit up.

>>13106

>Star Trek: /pol/ edition

Someone needs to make this.

>>13145

There already is where do you think you are?

>>13149

I just thought this was "Star Trek, sensible/non-utopian edition".

>>13154

There's a meme going around. Don't worry about it.

Star Trek has some very conservative values especially in regards to family and duty. Also it doesn't seem to like multiculturalism that much. It's about respecting other cultures and allowing them to flourish, not forcefully assimilating them and allowing one to flourish at the expense of another.

>>16639

Hop lel.

>>17735

What's the third one from? That looks comfy af.

>>2780

>Everything on the left is SJW

Anon stop it.

>>2780

ENT is the least SJW Trek by far. It even makes TOS look lefty, but people still hate it.

>>17750

>USSR pilot-cosmonauts at TV studio.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RIAN_archive_879591_USSR_pilot-cosmonauts_at_TV_studio.jpg

This is all i could find.

>>17750

Jay Leno

>>2353

You mean when the Ferengi came to Earth in the 1940s?

I think they wanted gold because they knew it had value on the planet where they had crashed, out in the galaxy it was probably mostly worthless.

>>17735

Is Starfleet really a good representation of society? Most people on Earth aren't in Starfleet just as most Americans are not in the military. The show focuses on star ships because it's called Star Trek, not Future Lives, I think trying to imagine what Federation culture is like based on glimpses from a show that takes place on a ship crewed by people who explore their frontier is myopic, but I understand because you have few other references.

>>18125

There is one episode of Voyager where Harry Kim is transported back to earth due to time disturbance bollocks and you get a peak of life on earth. Can't remember much apart from the fact his local café owner does it out of his own will and there is no currency exchange (so again, gommunisms).

>>18131

>there is no currency exchange (so again, gommunisms).

I know I remember hearing a few references to Federation credits. Maybe citizens on developed worlds within the Federation don't need money but this is how their government conducts business with outsiders.

If I owned a restaurant on Earth I'd want to go bigly and expand into the galaxy as a franchise, because of this I would demand payment in credits, no freebies even for local citizens.

>>18124

Quark mentioned that while gold was worthless in the galaxy at large, there was a few culture he could sell it off to. We need a Ferengi Question and Answer giving us a lecture on the economies of the galaxy

>>18134

Found the Ferengi.

Tbf Fed citizens do leave and become merchants like super fit archaeology lady.