I think the most famous/beloved/notorious version of this is the guy in Star Wars running around with a completely unaltered off the shelf ice cream maker.
I just found that link through Google, but that is apparently a whole subreddit devoted to this type of use of modern objects getting repurposed as some fantastical movie/TV props.
Sure looks like an electric ice cream maker but it's not the exact model pictured. Look at the pattern of vents on top of the motor, how far the "arms" overhang the pot, and the thickness of the pot lip for example. ;)
My favorite example is in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, where one of Captain Pike's hobbies is cooking. Real cooking with fresh ingredients, not replicated food.
Pike grew up on a ranch in Montana, where his family used Lodge cast iron pans. Cast iron isn't perfect for cooking - the heat distribution is mediocre - but one thing you can say about it is that it will outlive you.
Even if it gets rusty from neglect, you can sand it down, re-season it, and it will be as good as new!
I don't know if they make it explicit in the show, but I have a feeling that Captain Pike's pans were handed down from generation to generation, so naturally he brought his family's old cast iron pans with him on the Enterprise.
My mother-in-law (from Alabama) recently gifted me all _her_ grandmother's cast iron (my wife can't cook). I hope they get passed down for a few more generations!
This is the dream, cast iron pans well seasoned and looked after will last practically forever and are a joy to cook with. Heck, even poorly looked after pans can usually be brought back to a long and delicious life. I envy you!
IIRC, the doctor grows the fresh ingredients for Pike. There's a recent episode where he goes to meet the doctor (for other reasons I think) and he gives Pike some fresh greens. So essentially many tiny green houses.
The Galactica miniseries had a scene near the beginning with a futuristic looking alarm clock on a nightstand. I had that exact same alarm clock, as it was given as a cheapo christmas present to all the student employees in my department at the university.
FWIW Star Wars is set a long time ago, not in the future ;)
I've always liked to imagine any similarities between Star Wars and humanity on Earth is because Star Wars is set so indeterminately long ago that it seems 'plausible' that Star Wars is all really true, and if we build the right telescope and point it at the right galaxy, perhaps we can watch the Rebels fight the Empire IRL!
Maybe it depicts a part of this galaxy history. I like to believe that work of art that touches us, stay in our memory, has some truth into it that fascinate us.
We are strongly led to believe we are alone in the universe, and that we are the first human like specie in the whole universe and our solar system to ever have existed. Believing otherwise is pure heresy. What is left for us to contact part of the world that we know exist but that "can't be real because that would be heresy" ?
In The Expanse, a painted Ikea "washcloth hanger" that looks like an octopus is actually a game for special childrens. Also a 3d connexion space mouse is used to control the rocci. I kind of hate spotting them tho.
The Expanse used a ton of off-the-shelf props; most of them were used cleverly enough that they didn't stand out too badly. My personal favorite was a couple of laptop coolers used as "vents" in a maintenance passage: https://i.redd.it/rn2iac41t8h51.jpg
One of the real skills of commercial model and prop making is know all the corners you can cut, and things you can reuse.
To take an example from Aliens, the ship is only seen from one side, so the model only has one finished painted side, and the interior sets scavenge loads of bits and pieces from computer cases and whatever.
You also shouldn’t underestimate the tradition of hiding Easter eggs in models and sets.
> Also a 3d connexion space mouse is used to control the rocci.
Did you know that the SpaceMouse got developed by the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt) as DLR SpaceMouse for controlling robot arms in space?
As I looked through the shots of the chairs in the episodes, I noticed that the old shows had some wild lighting: sometimes like a Halloween set, sometimes like a task light was just set up on a tripod next to the camera, and sometimes like a cube farm. The new shows all seem to go for web developer's / Twitch streamer's dungeon with no overhead lighting, wall-mounted spotlights, and RGB rim lights everywhere.
Arg! I can't find it now but a while back I read an amazing article discussing the set design on the original series; particularly for the alien planets. From what I recall, their overall assessment was that the set designers used strong color design and bold shapes to compensate for their lack of budget. In that respect, while later entries in the series had much "better" sets, TOS had the strongest aesthetic.
> From what I recall, their overall assessment was that the set designers used strong color design and bold shapes to compensate for their lack of budget.
I thought it was specifically because of (1) the color film process used at the time required it for faithful (-ish) reproduction, and (2) the need to make something that looked good on both black and white and color TVs, as lots of people were still using black and white.
It's also just an artistic design choice. They tried very hard to make things look "alien" and "otherwordly" as much as possible, ranging from the set design to the costumes to the music to Starfleet sideburns.
For example sky can be any colour except blue, and doors can open every which way (except downwards, because that would require digging a hole in the set) and they make all sorts of sounds – as long as they're not "just" doors (they're "alien" doors!) They used those awkward holsters for phasers because pockets looked too "common".
Other more technical factors probably played a factor as well, but this also worked two ways and limited creativity: IIRC the origin skin colour for Vulcans was supposed to be red, but was changed to the off-white because the red didn't work on B&W.
Another thing I read somewhere (not sure if it's true) is that TOS used a lot of wacky colors because color TVs were new then, and so they were trying to get more people to watch the show by making it a bit of a showcase, much like "Planet Earth" was popular when FHD TVs were new because it showed the real potential of the technology.
As to the latter, my mom watched it on B&W originally, and then when it was rerun she had a color TV and was astonished that the skies on the alien planets weren't blue!
The original Star Trek sets made a lot of use of gobos, patterned metal shadow casters placed in front of lights. You can see some uses of them in pictures here:
and you can take the above tour and see them in use yourself. They were made of metal because the lights were hot. Some sources for them, if you want to play with your own, are old metal pot holders and small cast iron table tops. They usually welded a rod to them to attach them to the light fixtures using standard lighting rod clamps so they'd be stable. Cast iron is heavy, aluminum pot holders are preferred and they disippate heat better.
Lighting in black and white movies was much more important where you didn't have the additional dimension of color. My understanding was the Star Trek lighting team came with black and white experience.
Not exactly the same, but I love the actor's "lighting" in old German expressionist silent films. Often, instead of using actual lighting, shadows and highlights were applied to actor's faces manually using makeup.
If anyone wants to take a look, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has some great examples.
The networks were just switching to color en masse around the time that Star Trek came out and the penetration of color TVs was still pretty low--well under 50%.
Where I came from, although most families had a colo[u]r primary tv, if there were any secondary tvs (kitchen, bedroom,...) those were b&w up until around 1985.
This is accurate. When I was growing up in the early 80s I loved Star Trek. We had 4 TVs but only one of them was color. That was reserved for my Dad (who hated Star Trek, but loved football). I grew up watching the original series on Black and White... and the lighting was quite perfect for that, even if it was pretty mauve and absurd in color. Also worth noting that the color TVs at the time tended to be very low contrast compared to what we have now. So heightening the shadows and highlights made perfect sense.
As a side note, my mom was an accountant at Paramount who handled residuals for Shatner, et al. She briefly dated Harlan Ellison before marrying my father, which might have explained his aversion to Star Trek and my banishment to the Black and White TVs while watching it. (When I was twelve or thirteen and got really into Ellison's fiction, she got alarmed and told me Harlan was "a creep" and left it there).
The upshot was I got to go onto the TNG set when I was a kid... which was both wildly exciting and sort of disappointing as it wasn't an actual starship. All I wanted was to be Wesley Crusher.
But yeah, we watched TOS in b&w.
[edit] even funnier side note, I used to tape Star Trek TOS on reruns while I was at school so I could watch it later on the color tv. I had figured out how to work the VCR timer by the time I was 11 or so. But there weren't any blank VHS tapes lying around. My dad had a collection of 100 or so tapes of movies from TV, with commercials and everything. Down near the bottom of the stacks were a bunch of tapes labeled "dirty movies 3,4,5" which I thought just meant they were bad recordings. So I was like, I can record over those, they won't notice.
My dad apparently tried to play his porn tapes and found a bunch of star trek videos and came to my bedroom in a rage, but then couldn't explain to me why "dirty movies" didn't mean "bad VHS recordings". Took me awhile to figure out since I'd never actually watched whatever was on the tapes first ;)
Even later! My grandparents still had a black and white "portable" in the kitchen in the early 90s. My friend (who was wealthy) still had a black a white portable that my friend's sister would watch soap operas on in the mid-90s.
We had a B&W portable that lived on top of the refrigerator but was dragged into the dining room to watch Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy for weeknight dinners. The TV itself was from the 70s, but we were still using it in the early and mid 90s. It still had paint dried on its case from when my parents watched it while painting the rooms of the house.
I notice in old James Bond movies (and others) the lighting was rather simplistic. A big spotlight casting harsh shadows on the walls behind the main actors that don't make any sense if you stop to think about it. It seems more thought / technique is put into lighting design these days and it's probably better, though of course our current age has its own cliches (the Twitch dungeon style for example)
My son and I just watched our way through the Bond movies, and I remember this exactly. Was it “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” or one of the later Roger Moore gigs? I remember that one in particular was lit and shot exceptionally poorly.
This isn’t a matter of time period, it’s skill and attention. At the time of the Bond films it was well-known how to do good lighting, and people had been doing it for decades. Contrast the crappy Bond films with any beautiful old movie, like “The Third Man” or “Citizen Kane,” still legendary for great cinematography.
Someone in the props department had a massive furniture budget. I love it.
It reminds me how the "chair" is one of those objects supposedly so hard to classify for things like machines, a little easier for humans. Although may of these designs cause even my brain to struggle with, "Is that a chair?" Some reminded me of the Wood Allen bit from Sleeper:
One of the benefits of Hollywood is rental and studio stock. Many of these sets are one-off or occasional, and the furniture would return after the shoot.
I was asked to build an electronic prop for a movie once and the strangest question to me was "how do we return it to you?"
Made no sense to me: you're paying me to build you a custom object, why would I want it back? Until I realized that so much stuff in movies is just rented: they wouldn't even have a place to store it after the production is over.
I read that one of HBO MAX’s key advantages over Netflix is that WB has a century worth of costumes and props in the archive that are available and catalogued for any new production. Whereas Netflix shows pretty much throw away everything when a shoot is done.
In the old studio days when they were cranking out a lot of films--many of which were probably fairly similar in style (e.g. Westerns)--it probably made more sense. I assume Netflix is mostly just writing checks to independent production companies. There's an overhead to storing and cataloging a bunch of props and I'm guessing there isn't a lot of return for Netflix to do so.
This is also a long standing production strategy for Star Trek.
One of the reasons the original series had so many episodes where they went to a planet that was just like Earth in some specific time period was the availability of props, costumes, and even sets. Entire episodes were written around this conceit: there's the episode where they land on a Nazi planet, the episode where they land on a Roman Empire planet, another episode where they meet an alien who turns out to be the literal Greek god Apollo, an episode where they land on the planet of the Prohibition-era mobsters, and an OK Corral episode just to name a few. From TNG onwards, the holodeck was used for similar purposes.
this is sort of dying. there are only one or two major prop houses still running. Sony just shut theirs down and they were one of the last studios to have their own prop warehouse. several specialty shops remain, but they seem much more limited in selection.
Less so than you may think, at least for the initial run for the show. Most mid-century modern furniture was designed to be cheap enough for the middle class/upper-middle class (although the show did tend to use more-expensive leather variants), which brought it relatively wide popularity. That popularity would later cause an increase in price as they became notable objects.
Together, DS9 and Babylon 5 are rightfully credited with innovating the long form series. What the kids today might call "binge worthy."
Their story arcs were known from the outset. Each (main) character has their own hero's journey and side quests. Both had satisfying endings.
Also, officially, Capt Sisko is the GOAT. With Capt Janeway placing a strong 2nd. Though Capt Pike (Strange New Worlds) is quite promising, but only time will tell.
Whereas Voyager has most of my most favorite episodes, esp wrt Ensign Kim, DS9's characters are legend, esp Quark. I couldn't pick a favorite DS9 character (or story), even on pain of death, because I cherish them all equally.
DS9 was both darker and more serialized than the other Trek shows. Like TNG (although perhaps not as extremely so) it also didn't really have the strongest start. Personally I think it's in the top one or two Trek series overall but it is distinct from the others.
For anyone who hasn't seen it, before you get confused: First contact with the Dominion is made at the end of Season 2, though they are mentioned earlier than that. It's mostly character and setting building until then. Relations are tense for a few seasons, and hot war doesn't actually break out until Season 5 or 6. Series ran for 7 seasons.
And yes, this is the same Dominion War that was referenced in the last season of the Picard series.
I am the only Star Trek fan I know who was not a big fan of the dominion war arc. I really liked some of the later season episodes, but the arc itself was a bit of a letdown.
OTOH, DS9 is the only Star Trek that my wife will willingly watch with me; she finds the others too campy. As another data-point she likes the dominion war arc as much or more than B5, which was her favorite sci-fi series previously.
Now that episode I loved, but the parts I liked would have worked just fine in a TOS-style episode where the same 4 characters are captured by <some random species we've never heard of>.
It makes a lot of sense to realize that DS9 was direct competition to B5, which was being produced and aired at the same time. That’s why DS9 is so different from other Trek. It was trying to be or beat what Babylon 5 achieved.
Even saying that though, I don’t think you can say one is better than the other. I can see why your wife likes them both though.
> It makes a lot of sense to realize that DS9 was direct competition to B5, which was being produced and aired at the same time
I know; they were even aired in the same timeslot (IIRC Wednesdays at 7) where I lived, and I had a prior engagement on Wednesday nights and only one VCR, so I had to pick which one to record. I settled on B5.
I didn't watch all of DS9 until it was on Netflix.
Brooks turned in a stellar performance in that episode, and everybody else (including my wife), seems to love it, but it would not rank among my 10 personal favorite DS9 episodes.
You're not alone, though maybe not for my reasons. The Next Generation's writers and directors protested the utopia that Gene Roddenberry had built in his mind, but I really appreciated the camaraderie and collaboration present within the characters. Deep Space Nine seemed to me to be a betrayal of the universe that TNG had prepared. I thought DS9 seemed very interesting as its own series, but it wasn't what I wanted as a fan of Star Trek.
I'm surprised they don't seem to have an entry for one of the more recognizable mug from Star Trek - the one they drank coffee from on the Defiant in Star Trek: DS9. It was present in many episodes of the Dominion War arc.
The mug itself (a Thermos mug from the 90s) is an absolute pain to find anywhere, but I've managed to secure two of them last year (with shipping prices that would embarrass even a Ferengi) and did the necessary conversions:
I gave one out as a gift, the other I've been using every day for over a year now. Got so used to it, I don't know how I'll ever be able to replace it.
I cannot fathom how someone has the attention to analyze these shows to note the chairs being used. Frankly, the Stokke Globe Garden is so far in the background of the Lower Decks screen capture that I can't understand how someone picked up on it.
Usually it’s a group of people who do so to receive social credit from each other on a successful entry. Us humans are designed to do all sorts of unpleasant weird shit for social credit.
ST has a warehouse full of that stuff. Pictures, actual props, inventory lists and who to rent from, and original purchase orders. It is pretty detailed what they have access to for star trek especially after TNG. There are a few youtube vids where they show a very small sampling of what they have. Now some of the ToS stuff is more reliant on fan info. As a lot was cleared out in the 70s/80s for space for other things. A show like lower decks is all nostalgia type items so they are probably going thru that stuff very heavily.
I wondered if that was a part of it, but this particular Lower Decks entry makes me wonder. It seems like an amazing level of consistency between very different forms of production.
On the other hand, I suppose there could be a "Chairs of Star Trek" design handbook within the organization. This would be under the "Weird Shit" section.
Lower Decks is made by people who really care about the franchise. Chairs are just one small example, they get all the small things right to obsessive degree.
A friend of mine has that chair or a copy of it. I'll ask if it's original.
It's a tall chair and one must climb it, then you can look at the other people from above. Not uncomfortable but not comfortable too. We call it the Klingon Chair.
In a world where "inertial dampeners" exist and making invisible forcefields is pedestrian, physical seatbelts aren't terribly important. If inertial dampeners outright fail in a spacecraft designed for them you can expect to be reduced to a souplike homogenate whether you're wearing a seatbelt or not.
People get tossed out of their seats every other episode in star trek. I'm sure I've seen multiple "medical team to the bridge"s due to someone getting knocked loose by the ship shaking and hitting their head on a console.
That and in the future we'll apparently forget everything we ever learned about electrical codes and the proper way to build things so they don't spark and catch fire at the slightest provocation.
I actually saw a reasonable explanation for this once: battleshort[1].
That is, sometimes equipment has its fuses bypassed because under battle conditions it is better to have the equipment working in a dangerous state, than not working at all.
So when the ship goes to red alert all the major systems are automatically put in battleshort mode. So a couple of ensigns die rather then the weapons stop working because a fuse blew.
Also, Star Trek uses a plasma grid to distribute energy, not simple electrical lines. I think I remember reading somewhere (this may have been fan theory) the sparks flying off are a pressure-release so it doesn't just straight explode.
That is a very old-school approach so. But it could be an in-uniberse explanation. Overall so, Federation, and Star Trek equipment in general, just seems so incredibly unsafe. Very easy to jury-rigg repairs and modify it so, especially the shield generators!
Course, given the accelerations in Star Trek you are red smudge without them anyway. But then there is all the flowing around around the bridge, engineering, everytime a ship is hit... Maybe a seatbelt wouod have helped!
Or some space space suits, proper footware for away missions. Alongside clothing...
Starfleet is the Federation's solution to the existence of type-A personalities, giving them something exciting and challenging to do in order to prevent them from screwing up the socialist utopia for everyone else. All Starfleet technology is optimized not for efficiency, but for excitement; giving Starfleet personnel brushes with danger, interesting puzzles to solve, and opportunities to improvise and collaborate. Wouldn't surprise me if the inertial dampeners on the bridge are specifically tuned to toss people around a bit during battles to make them more immersive and raise the stakes. Why else would computer terminals spontaneously explode when the shields take a hit?
Appears to be missing the painfully bog-standard office roller chair used in the center of the court in the courtroom episode of TNG where Data needs to plead with Starfleet not to be disassembled for research.
It might be on there, it’s a huge list, but I could not find it.
Sure looks like what I was remembering! The listed `TNG: "The Drumhead"` also sure looks like the courtroom I remember but is not the episode I was referring to. I may have been remembering the wrong courtroom episode, I was thinking it was from “Measure of a Man” but all my Googling only shows red more interesting chairs in that episode.
I’ll need to do some digging through the episode when I’m out of this meeting!
I remember my suspension of disbelief being challenged in Star Trek TNG (my favorite) when they started using my Dansk cutlery and also my crystal highball glasses! What are the odds?
We have a bunch of those. A local grocery store used them for deliveries a long time ago and I guess they didn't want them back because we probably accumulated a dozen or so. They are surprisingly well built and held up well to being in the sun for 15 years.
I've had a tan one since I was a kid. I know we had it by the late '80s, dunno exactly when my parents got it. It shows no signs of wearing out, at least 35 years and a bunch of moves (plus some hard use—it wasn't just a toy box when I was a kid, but a toy itself! And a table, and a chair...) later.
If the new ones are still made like that, I'd love a few more at that price. But I have a feeling the plastic's been CAD'd down to as thin as possible to meet some minimum spec, like with everything else.
[EDIT] Oh, mine's slightly different: the handles aren't a molded element of the outside, but holes through the box itself, with finger-shaped curves. They're great, very secure to hold, though that does mean small stuff can fall out, and they can be tricky if the thing's packed too full.
I would guess that at least for the most used chairs, like the Captain's chair and the other chairs on the bridge, they had an overall look they were going for on those sets and picked chairs specifically for that.
Did they also do that for all those other chairs, or if they needed to have say a meeting take place on some new planet with a new race and needed 5 chairs did they just send someone off with instructions to go round up 5 identical chairs, maybe adding that they should look futuristic or something like that?
Did they have chair rules, like this species likes round chairs and that species likes angular chairs?
Mostly, the meetings didn't happen on the planets, instead the aliens came onto the Enterprise - so they were using the existing sets and chairs rather than building and buying new ones every week.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Chair is a timeless classic and it could very plausibly be in a future Earth home, as could any Mies van der Rohe design. It'd be worth a small fortune in that condition. The Emeco Navy Chair is another one that could plausibly appear in a future Earth setting. Putting the Goodform Model 2123 in the offices of the alternate future/past in "Assignment: Earth" is a nice touch.
I have a hard time believing anything from IKEA not have fallen apart in a couple of centuries.
I've made one myself. Securing the Thermos is a challenge, but it is possible. I bought two from some small online store in Canada a year ago. There was also someone selling them in India, IIRC, and a vendor in New York. Decals you can buy on eBay - there's apparently a seller that specializes in selling vinyl decals from Star Trek and other franchises. The recipe is simple:
- Get rid of the Thermos logo (surprisingly, the weird Internet advice to rub it off with sugar turns out to be 100% correct);
This is a good book about the influence of midcentury modern design on TOS specifically, including interviews with the production crew and specifics on all the commercial items the authors were able to track down.
I was literally asking my wife last Thursday “Do people actually use arm rests? What are they for besides getting hooked on stuff?” I was talking desk chairs specifically.
Apparently some people do!
I have an exceptionally tall torso and normal arms though so it’s quite rare for my elbow to actually reach an arm rest.
In my experience arms on a desk chair just get in the way of it fitting under the desk, especially when not sitting in it. When I am sitting in it my arms are on the desk.
For me it’s the opposite, the arm rests are usually too high for my elbows not to hit them when I relax my shoulders. When looking for a new office chair, there were only very few having arm rests that could be adjusted low enough for me.
Supposedly this "maneuver" was due to a combination of the early seasons using spandex and the actor having back issues (because they sized the costumes too small).
The version of the story I remember is that Jonathan Frakes had a bad back because he used to work as a mover before he made it as an actor. But the costumes almost certainly didn't help matters.
Being 6'3" (190cm) probably made it a whole lot easier to do that, too.
Also I think the last scene in that youtube link is from the 7th season (looks like the admiral from The Pegasus) so I'd hope any uniform issues would be fixed by then.
Apparently, in the future people don't need or want to rest their arms.
By itself, this is uncharacteristically dystopian for Star Trek because it suggests people will relax so much less that arm rests are unnecessary. Strange because Star Trek usually presents a more optimistic picture of the future.
Not having arm rests is hardly dystopian. The chair I've used for approximately a decade now came with arm rests, but I chose not to install them, because they just get in the way and provide only negligible benefits. There are many other ways to rest your arms: on the table, on your legs, by crossing your arms, etc.
Starfleet is supposed to be filled with the most intrinsically motivated, hard-working, determined, smartest people in the Federation. For every Starfleet officer there are probably 100 people on Earth taking it easy and enjoying their post-scarcity utopia, but some people are just not wired that way.
I mean, there's an entire TNG episode about how Picard begrudgingly takes a vacation on the tropical "pleasure planet" of Risa and is completely miserable until he gets caught up in a wacky Indiana Jones type adventure. And an entire DS9 episode where Worf goes to Risa and decides he'd rather help some nutjobs sabotage the weather control system. These are not people who like to relax!
I guess it is only a design choice. Not so sure about the positive outlook so. The federation is militaristic to the point of the military, Starfleet, running diplomacy. And the objectively bad stuff starfleet does, the prime directive for examole can amount to genocide by negligence, is done in the name of moral superiority. Throw in some hero worshipping and personality cult, after all rules only apply to certain people, never the heros... The Klingons are welcome allies, despite all the shit they did during the various wars with the federation, while the Romulans are the evil, honorless villains... Reading between the lines, there is a lot of cold war stuff in the universe going on.
> The federation is militaristic to the point of the military, Starfleet, running diplomacy.
Starfleet, despite the ranks, authority structure, style of discipline, use of “courts-martial”, and the fact it fights wars, is not, as Starfleet personnel are eager to point out, a military force. Also, usually, Starfleet doesn't run diplomacy, they provide transport for diplomats.
They do sometimes fill in when the transported diplomats become unavailable, when an emergent needs happens without time to dispatch a diplomat, or when an individual Starfleet officer is requested by tbe parties to a dispute (where the Federation is a neutral mediator) or the other party (where the Federation is a party), but all of those are implicitly exceptional events that disproportionately happen to the particular officers on whom the franchise focuses.
If quacks like a duck, it is a duck. Starfleet is a navy, one that has a way to high share of officers, nowhere near enough NCOs and enlisted men and a worrying tendency of carrying dependents and civilians into combat, but a navy still.
Regarding diplomacy:
- Kithomer Accords, re-established between Cpt. Sisko and Chancellor Gowron, the first accords were Picard's job (could be wrong about that)
- everything Bajor related, despite the planet being the most strategic important one in the Alpha Quadrant there was never an official embassy mentioned, everything was run by Sisko
- the Alliance with the Romulans during the Dominion war, again by Sisko and this Admiral
- the ultimate peace treaty between the Dominion and the Federation
- every first contact mission (understandable, Starfleet is the exploration arm of the Federation with a clear charter here) but also every follow-up mission (see Lower Decks)
Just from top of my head, all major diplomatic treaties have been negotiated by Starfleet personell. In a sensey Starfleet is a state-within-a-state, running crucial functions of the larger state with little to no oversight.
Everything not shown on screen, or explained / hinted at, is not necessarily canon.
The "not a military" lines in early TNG are, while intended to reflect Gene's somewhat out there vision of an evolved Federation, so obviously wrong in the context of later material that the only coherent way to handle them is to either chuck them from canon, or to treat them as a bit of in-universe exaggeration and semantics wrangling that gets proven completely wrong by the time of Wolf 359.
Ah, the battle of Wolf 359! Were somehow Starfleet failed to evacuate civilians from the exploration ships they sent into battle! Completely reasonable, if you ask me.
I assume there is a misspelling one place or another there, but, yes, much of that introductory paragraph was pointing out that fairly canonically Starfleet (or, extracanonically, Star Trek's creators) are in deep denial about the nature of Starfleet.
> Kithomer Accords, re-established between Cpt. Sisko and Chancellor Gowron, the first accords were Picard's job (could be wrong about that)
The First Khitomer Accords were negotiated between the civilian leadership of the Federation and the Klingon Empire in the wake of the disaster created by the explosion of Praxis; there was a conspiracy involving the highest levels of both Starfleet (led by Admiral Cartwright, the CinC Starfleet) and the Klingon military (led by General Chang [0]) to sabotage the negotiations, foiled by (among others) the crew of the about-to-be-decommissioned USS Enterprise-A under Captain Kirk, after he was rescued by his crew from his imprisonment on Rura Penthe, having been framed by the conspirators for the murder of the Klingon Chancellor Gorkon, who the Enterprise was to be escorting to the negotiations originally planned to be on Earth, which were secretly rescheduled and moved to Khitomer after Gorkon's assassination. (Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)
> everything Bajor related, despite the planet being the most strategic important one in the Alpha Quadrant there was never an official embassy mentioned, everything was run by Sisko
Sisko's adoption by the Bajoran religion as the Emissary of the Prophets was frequently referred to as an issue with forced Starfleet and the Federation more broadly to deal with Bajor other than the way they would prefer to.
> - the ultimate peace treaty between the Dominion and the Federation
The Treaty of Bajor was very much setup (while the substantive content was not at all similar) to be an analog of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, signed for the US by Gen. MacArthur. (To the point of Admiral Ross directly quoting MacArthur.)
> Just from top of my head, all major diplomatic treaties have been negotiated by Starfleet personell.
Clearly not, aside from the Khitomer accords, just a couple examples of many: In "Journey to Babel" (TOS), the Enterprise is transporting ambassadors from several Federation worlds to a conference on the admission of Coridian to the federation; the Treaty of Alliance between the Klingons and the Federation had Ambassador Sarek of Vulcan as the lead Federation diplomat, referenced in "Sarek" (TNG), etc.
[0] A clearly senior military officer described by Chancellor Gorkon as "my chief of staff", but I don't think its clear whether he was the Chancellor's CoS in a sense analogous to the White House Chief of Staff to a US President or whether his role was as a military CoS, or whether the distinction between the roles is foreign to the Klingon system of the time.
I fixed the typo in my forst sentence... Seriously, who put the "I" so close to the "U" on a keyboard?
Ah, I never watched TOS much, I had some vague, and obviousoy wrong, memory aeound Picard's and Woef's involvement leading to a treaty between the Federation and the Klingons.
Agree on the denial part, especially the authors. It shows in little stuff, like episodes in which Starfleet would extradite one of their officers to a nation they are at war with, no thought about any other function than officers...
I still love it, especially DS9. But there are some aspects that just rubb me the wrong way now that didn't bother me back the day.
> Ah, I never watched TOS much, I had some vague, and obviousoy wrong, memory aeound Picard's and Woef's involvement leading to a treaty between the Federation and the Klingons.
IIRC, and I'd have to research the details, but the existing Treaty of Alliance between the Federation and the Klingon Empire (something much later than the Khitomer Accords, back-figured from other references to be ca. 10-20 years pre-TNG, IIRC) and the need to save it was used as leverage to get Picard involved as Arbiter of the Succession, and so tied into that whole Picard/Worf storyline.
Good thing members of Starfleet have excellent medical benefits, because 90% of these chairs look like they'd give you an instant case of sciatica within minutes after sitting in them.
Marginal nitpick: The image for the Artifort F549 Tulip Midi shows Pierre Paulin's Little Tulip, 1965 for Artifort. The stills, however, do show the Tulip Midi.
I just visited the Vitra Design Campus on Monday! It was a pretty awesome experience and I'm sure a of these chairs are in their overall collection too.
Mentioned elsewhere, but the Hag Capisco is a great chair. Sadly it has risen in price and isn't a particularly good value anymore, but is a cool piece of furniture nonetheless.
This! This is what I want from the internet. Obsessively complete lists that seem unnecessary at a glance but will actually one day help you settle some weird argument or issue.
I remember quite vividly a Geocities page that had wiring diagrams for a ton of Realistic brand CB radios my friend and I used to build an adapter for the DIN microphone.
No, nothing of that sort. I've got a couple websites still up with content back to the early aughts but they kind of just transformed into blogs as the years went on.
One thing I really love about Strange New Worlds is that they finally realized that fans love the beautiful, comfortable looking ships of the earlier series.
For a solid decade it was like all Star Trek ships felt like some "alternate timeline" from Next Generation in which the Federation is an endless war, and the ships are all dim and militaristic.
A huge part of the show was about exploration. And doing it in style. I love that about Strange New Worlds. It has captured a lot of great elements — another notable mention being the more episodic nature, and a return to more diplomatic narratives.
Despite Lower Decks' jokes and loose adherence to any "hardness" of its sci-fi, I've found it to be one of the most casually optimistic of any star trek in a long time. The first few episodes are a bit rough, but I actually really enjoy it now.
I bailed partway into the first or second episode I think. I've heard it's good trek though.
Is it like the Orville where it tones down the comedy a bit later on? Orville felt like a parody of trek for the first few episodes, then just became trek for the rest of its runtime.
- In Luke's home in Star Wars IV there's a lot of Tupperware - https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2014/02/in-praise-of-t...
- In Alien, Ripley drinks from a Tupperware mug - https://twitter.com/EverRotating/status/1156650673972363264