[dylan604]

along the same line of applying modern day to older shows, I recently re-watched Stargate Atlantis. I found it amusing that with all of the futuristic tech, McKay still carried around a bulky laptop. Even the original Star Trek minimized the computer to a hand held device. The prop team kind of failed in SG:Atlantis on this one to me. How much easier would their off world adventures been with a tablet or other smaller futuristic compute device?

[actionfromafar]

OTOH it was kind of cool to have a more "realistic" take of what would probably happen if the US military merged with Alien tech. Contemporary tools would be used next to new gadgets.

[dylan604]

For SG:1 sure. For SG:Atlantis, they had access to all of the ancient's tech.

[ben_w]

They had access to a lot of Ancient artefacts which they didn't really understand; despite many oddities that came to mind since first watching it, I think it would still fit the setting that they didn't know how to get the Ancient's 3D printers (or whatever) to spit out better hardware — if they could make it spit out more hardware on demand, even if they "could only find one file to print", it would radically change the show.

This also means there was no way for either SG-1 or Atlantis to sensibly continue past the SG-1 finale, when they got Asgard replicators and all the instruction manuals for them… and that Star Trek TNG onwards is best done without thinking too hard about the implications of almost any of the tech they demonstrate.

[themaninthedark]

I really didn't like the direction that SG-1 and Atlantis took.

There was a novel that took place after the movie that depicted Hathor coming back and trying to take over with a simultaneous plot of the US trying to extract resources from Abydos. I though it was really we done and wished that SG-1 used it as the starting point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_literature

[ben_w]

I can sympathise with that; while I enjoyed both, they were a radical departure from the source material and non-trivial departure from the SG-1 pilot (which I only learned recently was initially a made-for-TV film).

[crooked-v]

A made-for-TV film for Showtime, at that, which is why the pilot has nudity and an R rating and the rest of the series pivots into more family-friendly territory.

[mrgoldenbrown]

STar Trek's handheld computers never made sense to me, unless they have some crazy good AI that does all the work for you based on vague inputs. How do you input anything like code quickly on such a tiny screen?

[Izkata]

In DS9, once Jake Sisko gets into writing he's often seen using his PADD with a stylus. It is possible to enter text without the stylus using the controls at the bottom (Bashir enters "GO AWAY" for Dax in one episode when she interrupts him flirting with someone else), but it's apparently cumbersome enough that it's not normally used like that.

[dylan604]

how much code do you enter into a mobile device? these aren't the devices to do that with. they just run apps that serve the purpose at hand dictated by the script.

when ever you want to send a text, you don't enter the code for that. neither did anyone on an away team that needed to take air samples, or scan someone's health.

seems like you had an idea not fully thought out

[Izkata]

> neither did anyone on an away team that needed to take air samples, or scan someone's health.

You're thinking of tricorders[0], GP is talking about PADDs[1]. Tricorders are mostly read-only sensors that need to be pre-configured (with some ability to switch between configurations during use), while PADDs are basically modern tablets with some physical inputs around the screen.

[0] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tricorder

[1] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Personal_Access_Display...