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.
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
Maybe they are and nobody has realised 🤯
High energy use. Anytime the power goes out or gets diverted to other systems, you’d lose your bed, etc.
It’s also possible that the holodeck re-creations of things aren’t as realistic feeling as they look. It’s an illusion after all. So maybe a lot of it is just designed to fool the mind, not be comfortable/realistic.
Yep except that episode when Moriarty tapped them inside a holodeck and everybody was unable to tell it it wasn’t the real thing
As people said, the Holodeck uses a lot of energy, “Homeward” is an episode who show this.
Expensive?
According to Picard in the Movie First Contact money doesn’t exist anymore. I guess those latinum bars are only used by Ferengies, in border systems and outside the Federation.
That doesn’t mean there’s nothing that measures expense. The Federation might have a lot of available resources but they can’t be infinite.
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.
- Energy. In TNG, the holodecks burn a lot of energy. Can’t imagine what would happen if you turned every room into one.
- The holodeck isn’t a Tardis. The space inside the holodeck is an illusion created by the room. The room can make the space look infinite, and the floor can function as a hard-light treadmill that let’s you explore that infinite space, but the room still needs to be large enough to accommodate all the real-world things in it. That’s why they’re so large in TNG and Voyager. Holo-quarters would still need to be roughly the size of regular quarters.
- Same problem with the bar. Sure, you could make anyone’s quarters look like Ten Forward, but if your quarters fit 3 people, that’s how many people can drink there.
- The sickbay would still be essential because the problem isn’t medical equipment, it’s staff. Unless you’re going to have the medical staff running all over the ship making house calls, having that staff in a centralized location and having the crew come to them just makes more sense, especially in an emergency. Emergencies are also why that equipment should never be holographic. If the ship is under attack, the last thing you want is sickbay disappearing because of a phaser hit or having to turn off the medical equipment to power the sheilds.
- Some episodes and movies show ships that are essentially flying holodecks. Energy doesn’t seems to be a problem.
- That’s the point: You don’t need real-world things. The reason the holodeck is so large is to accommodate dozens of people at the same time.
- Some kind of multiplayer function across several holodecks should be possible.
- You either have a holodoctor for everyone who needs one or the few medical practitioners see a holo of their patient on which they operate. The holoroom the patient is in then replicates what the doctors are doing.
1 the things that have extra holodecks that I’ve seen are just space stations, which can have larger power stations. The ship in insurrection was purpose built to trick people into thinking it was their small village that they don’t leave often. It can have all the power it needs dedicated to the holodeck and be slow with a Son’a escort for protection.
2 with you on that one.
3 also with you on this one. It just makes sense. Two people on opposite sides of the system could have dinner together in a holodeck. Easiest sell in the world after the holodeck itself.
4 the only issue I have with medical areas being holodecks is how often we see power issues in star trek. If they lose power, no med bay, no holo-docs. But if you’re already doing it, I see no reason there can’t be all the holographic doctors you need, and if the entire interior of the ship is filled with holo-emmitters then the EMH isn’t an issue.
For the record, I’m with you. I think by the end of the 2380s they should definitely be having entire swathes of ships dedicated to holographic rooms.
In Voyager, The USS Prometheus had holo-emmitters all over, so the EMH was able to walk around and take the ship back from romulans.
Incidentally I was listening to some Certifiably Ingame ship breakdowns and they touched on a ship that has holographic interiors for a lot of spaces, but since I was falling asleep at the time I am unsure which ship it is. I’m trying to peruse the Playlist to see if anything looks familiar.
There was the VOY episode where the hirogen had converted alot of voyager over to holodecks to hunt the crew. The WW2 and klingon settings. The left Kim around to keep it running. Wasn’t that a huge drain on all the other systems?
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???
Prodigy has holoemitters on every deck and is able to reconfigure the bridge using them. It is possible but they just need a reason.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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? 🤷
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’.
When holodecks were introduced in TNG, they were presented as brand-new bleeding-edge technology that the characters had never even heard of before. This was reinforced by the fact that they almost immediately got a major update from the Bynars and also had a bunch of weird bugs and glitches to deal with.
Voyager, which was only a few years newer, had an obviously more advanced holographic system, with emitters in sickbay and whatnot.
IIRC, other, even newer, ships had holoemitters all over the ship. Clearly, the technology was rapidly advancing and proliferating in the TNG era.
As for Discovery nonsense, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Take out a single hollow relay and the whole ship goes down lol
