Plotting is well underway and it’s interesting to see where they’ve landed. For as much as I always loved the glossy world of Trek, I can’t say it’s how I see the future. It’s grittier than that. I also never understood why any spaceship would resemble a naval ship – I mean, space is a three-dimensional world and who in their right mind would put the bridge at the top of the ship where it could be blown away. More to the point, just why is that the top of the ship – what exactly is right side up in space?
I love Roddenberry’s vision of the future – one where we all respected one another for our differences rather than resort to fighting over them as we usually do. Roddenberry was an optimist and an altruist. Mankind loves to make fine distinctions and then become offended.
In this vision the future has Navigators, Bombardiers, humans, aliens, enemies and ships that live much like Steve did. Our crew have two objectives:
1) Find those snarky aliens and kill ’em.
2) Enlist other victims and find those snarky aliens and kill ’em.
Hmm, maybe they’ve only got the one mission. 🙂
The other thing that drives me nuts about spaceships is why they have windows. Space is big, but the view sucks. I mean, just how often does anyone want to stare out of a window at a big black of nothingness? It’s not as if it’s going to light up the room, if anything it might lose valuable heat! Which leads to the next issue – why do spaceships always have levels with gravity and swishy doors? Surely that’s a waste of power? A smart crew are more likely to hide deep inside of the ship and use cameras and radar to track their surroundings.
That leads me to weapons. Ships are fragile in space. The ship itself might withstand quite a few blows providing it’s solid enough, but the crew are dead meat if it loses power or environmentals (another reason not to have levels, gravity and swishy doors). Any projectile punched out with enough force will do a lot of damage. There’s no friction in space!
Then there’s that old problem of how we can communicate with alien species. The Babel fish would be very useful, but let’s assume we don’t have one. The best we can probably do is an AI device that learns as it goes and translates.
Bacteria and viruses would be a very interesting problem between species. If you’ve lived around the world as I have, then you quickly learn that your immune system only deals with what it knows. Every time I live in another country, I’m sick for several years while I build up antibodies for local variances of standard illnesses. Imagine how tough that’ll be to deal with on an alien planet.
I could go on, but I’ll stop here. I have a notebook – good old-fashioned paper and pen – and I’m building a universe and scenarios. I’ll start writing shortly, but I need to see this future to tell you about it. Man didn’t stand down after the alien invasion, if anything they got angrier. I like these guys…they’ve got a plan and they’re single-minded.
I plan to get book one of Bombardier out in July so stay tuned. I’ll keep you posted!