It just popped up in my mind.
- You could decorate any room as you like. You don’t even need to step out of it most of the times.
- Other people can be projected inside it like Voyager’s doctor.
- Also rooms could be much smaller. They only need to be big enough a human(oid) can fit inside.
- In emergency cases most holograms can be shut off to match increased energy demands by weapons and shields. You only really need seating/bed and a (non-exploding) console screen.
- Much of the specialized rooms like a bar, med bay, etc. won’t be needed anymore as a holodeck can imitate all of them.
It irritated me a bit that a Discovery gets fancy floating warp nacelles but holodecks are… wait, does Discovery has a holodeck? I don’t remember seeing one.
This is a fun thought experiment and I’m kind of surprised Discovery didn’t do something like this with holodeck tech in the “future” since the writers weren’t afraid to do other tech-taken-to-natural-conclusion like tiny phaser transporters (or whatever those were).
Semi-related but I always thought it would be cool to see a Star Trek future where things have advanced so far that it would appear to someone like Picard like he and the Enterprise appeared to the Mintakans.
This is a fun thought experiment and I’m kind of surprised Discovery didn’t do something like this with holodeck tech in the “future” since the writers weren’t afraid to do other tech-taken-to-natural-conclusion like tiny phaser transporters (or whatever those were).
They kinda did, they just didn’t go into detail. There were ships that were made entirely of holodeck at the new federation headquarters in discovery season 3ish, we just never got beyond being mentioned briefly and people going ‘Oh, thats cool’.
a Star Trek future where things have advanced so far that it would appear to someone like Picard like he and the Enterprise appeared to the Mintakans.
This was my major gripe with the 900+ year jump in Disco. The premise of TOS is that 300 years from now, we have developed warp speed, transporters and evolved past scarcity.
In the 32nd Century of Discovery… looks like shoulder pads are back? 🤷
I got a strong impression that the future of the Federation we saw in Disco was specifically built around the values of keeping “humanity” (and inalienable species) at the center of everything.
wait, does Discovery has a holodeck?
They actually seem to have what you’re describing, more or less - Burnham was able to run complete holosimulations in her quarters.
As people said, the Holodeck uses a lot of energy, “Homeward” is an episode who show this.
Maybe they are and nobody has realised 🤯
Probably because it’d be too expensive and I’m not talking about money
Power?
Not everyone wants to sleep in a death trap.
Computer, set quarters to stun.
I’d say the biggest reason is energy, like everyone else. But also, being able to make your room into any fantasy scenario you want would probably lead to problems with adjusting to everyday life. They don’t need a whole ship full of Barclays screwing up at their job.
In emergency cases most holograms can be shut off to match increased energy demands by weapons and shields.
Disengage the safety protocols and suddenly you’ve got weapons and shield emitters than ought to work just as well as their material counterparts, but can’t be damaged (or any damage can be instantly reset). We know that holograms can be projected into space so the only limitation would be the range of the holoemitters.
Hey now if we’re using the practical applications of the tech then the warp field emitters could be used to simply tear ships in half with as much or less energy than it takes to move the ship in the first place, or cause planetary cores to collapse into micro black holes, or create an inverted artifical event horizon around the ship making it physically impossible for weapons fire to pass through it because the direction of ‘through’ simply no longer exists.
Prodigy has holoemitters on every deck and is able to reconfigure the bridge using them. It is possible but they just need a reason.
I imagine they prefer to be grounded in reality, as over-use of the holodeck is shameful.
Hey! You leave Barclay alone!
I always leave the Brocolli alone. :-)
I thought the same. It helps to watch the first episode of the next generation. Will talks to wesely about it and its a rare thing at that time and sounds like it takes a lot of resources. Later episodes the holodeck using a lot of power comes up. People have to sign up for them and I took it there is no point in making more holodeck rooms than is prudent for the amount of power they draw just for leisure (mostly) activities. All the rooms have replicators but if someone was running it constantly it would become quite the power drain and we see in voyager that with no source of resupply have to ration replicators (although curiously I don’t recall them rationing the holodecks, but maybe they did). As far as discovery in the future you see the energy issues and they use that programmable matter which I think is supposed to be more energy efficient.
They hand waved away the holodeck power thing in Voyager by days something along the lines of it is a different type of power that wasn’t worth trying to convert to normal power for some reason. Basically just another Voyager excuse to ignore the premises of the show unless they happen to be bored that day.
yeah its funny because the way I understand it the holodeck uses a compination of holgrams, tractor beam type thing, and replicator tech. Feels like in their situation a competent engineer could get it utilized for the more important just replication or heck they are always rerouting power. they can’t do that???
I thought after s2 of Discovery, something exactly like that was already a thing?
Or am I misremembering, it’s been a while.
They didn’t go into depth at all, don’t believe we even have one with a name, but they talked about seeing federation ships made entirely of ‘holographic containment walls’ in Discovery Season 3. Pretty sure it was when they first arrived at federation headquarters in the future.
There was also that ship in insurrection where it was just one giant holodeck, but still existing inside a regular ship. The concept just hasn’t made it into something that’s broadly popular in the mainstream trek fandom.
Good catch, I’d completely forgotten about that line:
Some of these hulls are organic. Some…some are completely comprised of holographic-containment walls.
I remember a line in at least one episode that claimed holodecks consume so much power, they run on their own independent power system and aren’t connected to the warp core.
Can’t remember which episode it was, but it was likely one of the two parters where the Hirogen take over Voyager and have the WW2 sim.
only as separate as the plot demands, sometimes it’s more interconnected
This was an excuse to allow Voyager to use the holodeck, which would have been an extravagant waste of power otherwise.
The Enterprise D holodeck ran from ships power, as shown in “Booby Trap”.
