concrete_babyWhy the galactic barrier and transporters don’t match real science, and why warp drive might
Durran Durrandon@concrete_baby Today, I learned that Star Trek ALSO has a galactic barrier. Not hear even, I was catching up on Discovery earlier. So now I am coming across Star Trek's galactic barrier twice, for the first time, on the same day. (Though, I must have seen it referenced on TOS at a some point.)
porthosI kind of love the galactic barrier in how weird and obviously differing from our reality it is, scifi shows don't need to make their universes behave the way ours does.
I realllllly loved the discovery episode where they went out the galactic barrier, it was just so damn weird.
As long as the characters behave with a scientific frame of mind, it doesn't really matter if the physics of star trek are absurd. It doesn't matter if the calculations do or don't add up for some fantasy tech in star trek, it matters how characters interact with the unknown and approach trying to understand (where the heart of science really lives). The 4th season of Discovery did an amazing job with this in my opinion, it was cool to see the crew sent to meet with 10-C stumbling through the logic of trying to figure out a way to make contact (or even WHAT 10-C was before they found them).
@porthos I'm not objecting to it. The point of Star Trek isn't realism. It was just weird to see the same device used in both universes.
I’m confused, which is the other universe?
@FormerGameDev Star Wars has the same thing, a barrier at the edge of the galaxy that prevents hyper space travel.
oooh… introduced in Rise, apparently to explain why they needed to have fancy devices to pinpoint how to get to things. I thought it was just because they legit didn’t know where these places were, rather than that they had no direct path.
@FormerGameDev Introduced probably with novelizations in the 80's, so still long after TOS, but it never really appears outside of novels until Rise. This stuff that blocks hyperspace travel at the edge of the galaxy is found through out the galaxy as well, which is why they have to have well charted hyperspace routes. I think Rise is the first movie where they mention hyper space lanes as well, which sounds contrived the first time you hear it, but finding new routes is actually very risky.
yeah this doesn’t really sound like a … barrier… per se, but just a zone of space that is not safe to travel at light speed through. Whereas in Trek, it actively prevents people from entering/exiting the galaxy.
Correct. The "barrier" in Star Wars is a mess of hyperspace disturbances that prevent safe navigation. Ancient Jedi and Sith found ways through using the Force, and using the relics they stored these routes in ("wayfinders") is the only way to traverse it.
@FormerGameDev Well, it's called the galactic barrier and it makes practical travel outside of the galaxy impossible, since you would need to travel faster than light speed to get anywhere, but no it isn't as hard and fast of a barrier as in Trek.