Category: ideas

My ideas on Star Trek

Posted on by Michael Harley

Anybody who knows me, knows that I’m a huge Star Trek fan. I watched most of TNG when it aired and re-watched all seven seasons last summer. I then watched all the TNG movies. This summer, I watched all seven seasons of Voyager and enjoyed it immensely.  Currently, I’m watching DS9 and am in season 3.

I love Star Trek but as a nerd I believe the Federation should immediately start implementing these changes to their SOP.

Implement Drones

MkWyu

Holy fuck you guys, the idea that a ship would send down THE ENTIRE SENIOR STAFF on an away mission is just completely and utterly ridiculous. I know it makes for good TV but why not send down some advanced drones? All the people do is stand around with stupid tricorders anyway. Build tricorders right into the drones and beam the drones down. Beam 10 drones down! Have different types of drones and do different types of things! Once the drones have done their thing, send down the red shirts in power armor!

Implement Power Armor

MJOLNIR_Recon

I know the Federation is peaceful and has a mission of exploration and cooperation but there’s lots of races in space that are not. They want to fight you and take your shit. I’ve seen many episodes across all three series of Star Trek where red shirts are fighting against alien invaders or fighting on a planet or fighting on an alien ship with their basic little uniforms and phase rifles. Imagine being able to have those encounters in tactical power armor, all interfaced and connected with it’s own AI built in, aka Halo. You could do all sorts of interesting stuff too, like implement site to site transporters directly into the suits. Fighting against Borg drones while wearing tactical power armor would make a big difference!

Improve Ship AI

2a7e7a4043bbd72202b3cf4a9fada71cThere are several episodes in both TNG and Voyager where the biologicals were completely incapacitated for some reason or another. If it weren’t for characters like Data or the Holo Doctor, the ships would have been lost or destroyed completely. Imagine if the ship’s computer had an upgraded AI so that the ship could act in place of Data or the Holo Doctor to save itself and the crew from annihilation.

Develop Actual War Ships

USS_Defiant_firing_phaser_cannonsAgain, I know that the Federations mission is one of exploration and peace but many races are war like. The Federation made some progress by the Defiant class ships but it had some flaws. Finish development and mass produce the things. Call them “escort” ships if you must but I’m sure the Federation could create some great combat ships.

I sincerely believe that if the Federation implemented these changes, it would help with successfully completing their missions and make the Federation more formidable.

Boston Marathon: What if all personnel had gps enabled, personal dvrs?

Posted on by Michael Harley

In the wake of the bombings at the Boston Marathon I’ve been listening to the radio and reading about the bombings. One of the early reports described how one of the bombs was pretty close to a security guard who was scanning the crowd. If the bomber didn’t look suspicious  then there’s no reason for the security guard to remember the bomber at all so I’m not trying to fault the guard.

But what if all security personnel at the event wore a Google glass type device that recorded everything during their shift? What if these devices were GPS enabled and all of the video was download into a server and that data could then be datamined? For instance, show me all video from all devices that occured between 1:00pm and 3:00pm at coordinate X.

This nerdy idea has been bouncing around in my head for a few days and I hope typing it out will make it stop. 😉

Future Police

Posted on by Michael Harley
Oregon State Police (AJM NWPD)
Oregon State Police (AJM NWPD) by AJM STUDIOS, on Flickr

So I have this killer commute which affords me the chance to listen to lots of talk radio, audio books and to day dream about stuff. My imagination has been cultivating this idea about/for the police department. What if each squad car was this passive sensor out in the world? By that I mean, what if each police car was equipped with cameras and were sophisticated enough to automatically read every license plate that the cameras could see and to log those plates with a time and location? If you take this idea a step further, you could even have the system perform a quick check to see if that particular plate or car is reported as stolen or if the registered owner of the vehicle is wanted for anything. This system would work without any intervention from the officer in the car. If the system came up with a stolen car based on a license plate it scanned, the system would alert the officer and he could proceed from there.

I wonder if this could also help in investigations? Imagine a suspected killer being investigated… an investigator could look up the suspect in the system and it’s possible that the killers car was scanned by a police officer on routine patrol just a block from a crime scene on the night of the murder.

I realize that this has all sorts of problems from a privacy perspective and is pretty big brotherish but that’s a detail; I’m an idea guy. 😉