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Author: girlyboy

Jul 7th 2013 at 7:34:40 PM

Voyager's gelpacks didn't really seem to change anything in practice, except for one episode where they got "sick," if I recall right... Data is, if anything, an ''example'' of stasis -- he was a unique prototype, basically, and Starfleet did not have the technology to replicate him successfully (which is why they wanted to take him apart in that episode where he first defended his legal rights). Data tried building an android himself, once, and could not achieve it either -- his daughter eventually died. And remember, Starfleet did encounter working androids in a couple of TOS episodes! I don't think there was anything stopping them from studying the androids on Mudd's planet, at least, and those seemed only somewhat less sophisticated than Data... And while there were visual differences between how the warp drives looked, in effect they all did the same thing and worked the same way, and ships always seemed to move [[TravelingAtTheSpeedOfPlot at the speed of plot]], anyway...

And as for the Enterprise era... Again, if anything, it's even more stasis. Their transporters may have been limited, but they still existed, and in practice worked about as well as those from later eras. And Starfleet didn't have tractor beams, but the Vulcans did... Pretty much all tech improvement seemed to be TheSameButMore, and usually with only limited effects on the actual storylines...

But yeah... I am not sure at which point this trope starts applying. Intuitively, I have the feeling that "realistically" things should have changed ''a lot'' more between the various Star Trek series in terms of technology, but of course there's no actual real-life basis for wondering about this. The fact that ''in practice'' the technology seemed to be essentially the same does seem significant, however -- intuitively, this trope surely applies when it seems like all the technology was already invented in one instalment of a work, and we never see anything genuinely new in other instalments set in different times... On the other hand, the fact that ''some'' limited changes did take place certainly seems worth noting as well.