there is no sense wasting a good handwave

[edenfalling]

I love writing. It is so full of weird moments of serendipity.

For example, a week or so ago while working on my still-untitled Star Trek: AOS fic, I realized I needed to insert a handwave that explained why the Red Cross was using 20th century methods to find the cause of the plague on Simplicity. Rather than rewrite the scenes wholesale, I invented a mineral compound common on that planet that gets into people's bones and distorts tricorder scans. So far, so good.

But! It turns out that I need a rationale for the pirates to try landing on the planet after they've been told about the horrible plague -- because first, they don't know it's caused by parasites, and therefore have no reason to think it won't be contagious cross-species, and secondly, there is no point in gathering a cargo of slaves if they'll all die within the week -- and it occurred to me that a mineral that distorts scanning technology? Would be the next best thing to an actual Romulan cloaking device.

Pirate fleet invasion motive is GO. *grin*

(9,175 words so far! Also, I have been taking my vague "and then some stuff happens" plot sketch and turning it into a proper scene-by-scene outline for the final sections, because those need to be a lot tighter than the earlier parts of the story. So that is good; I like having a firmer sense of where the story is going.)

Comments

[vehrec.livejournal.com]

Well, that just gave me a disturbing thought. This stuff accumulates in the bodies of the settlers, right? Which means that the richest and most readily available ore on the planet might just be the ground up bodies of said settlers.

Fortunately, minerals that distort sensor readings are fairly common in Star Trek. It's not unexpected, sensors aren't well defines and probably exploit a lot of delicate and exotic physics to work. Hell, one episode of TNG had a ship hiding in the magnetosphere of a terrestrial planet from the Enterprise.

[edenfalling]

Erk. You may have a point about the corpses. I will have to remember to have a character bring that up, at least as a hypothetical worst-case scenario.

The fuzziness of Star Trek technology can be quite useful for writers, though I do sometimes wish they'd be more consistent about their own rules, since defined and recognized limitations are also useful for creating and driving plots.

[vehrec.livejournal.com]

It works pretty well as a threat, I should think. 'If you cause trouble, you're worth more to us dead than alive.'

There were rules for TOS, and there were rules for TNG. They just weren't the same rules, and it took a while for the TOS rules to get bedded in-they spent most of the first season unsure who Enterprise even was working for! Even something as fundamental as the warp speed scale got rearranged between series, which wound up giving us seven seasons of Voyager. Thinking about the vast number of ways in which replicators would drive normal factories and farms out of business also seems to have been low on their priorities. However, given the sheer number of writers, directors and producers the shows and movies have had, I'm not surprised that the consistency of the franchise has been left blowing in the wind at times.