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Author: eowynjedi

Jul 7th 2013 at 8:01:51 PM

Point taken on Data, but I think it still counts as technological advancement if humans learn the technology from someone else, as with the tractor beams, and the food resequence/hull plating still applies. (Though I admit that SF Debris' criticism of the "old technology" is pretty spot-on when it comes to armor v. shields.)  Warp drives go from a top speed of 5 to a top speed of whatever-Scotty-says-it-can't-go in a hundred years, though the "warp equation" the writers used was recalculated between TOS and TNG if I recall right. Warp 5 itself was a huge improvement over the previous top speed of 2, which took place within 80 years of the first warp flight and without much Vulcan help. And since moving at the speed of plot is so ubiquitous, I think it can still be taken as a visual indicator that the technology has improved. It's just not relevant in most situations to technobabble about the differences between the ''Enterprise-D'' warp core and the one on the ''Defiant''; we can take the visual clues or the characters' word that biogel packs are better, even if we don't know the technical details. But that also brings up the question of whether or not an InformedAttribute can avert the trope.

Holotechnology is also a notable improvement because it's not only used for entertainment or that one-off 3D projector thing; they also developed the EMH during DS9 and it became a standard feature on starships. A quasi-sentient, computer-generated medical expert that has the potential (with a lot of juryrigging, admittedly) to become fully sentient is a fairly significant achievement.

Another computer improvement is that I seem to remember Kirk's crew sticking floppy disks / memory card things into the computer for situations other than the proto-replicators sometimes, and subsequent series tended to use little glass chips or data rods instead, though again it depends if a floppy disk -> USB level of improvement is enough to not count for the trope.