In The Original Series in the 60s, people had no idea what the future would look like or what technology would look like. In one of the early episodes, they had a paper print out machine on the bridge that looked like a fax machine, which was considered futuristic in the 1960s.
Like the example of the Enterprise fax machine, what technology or system do you think are we displaying in the current Star Trek shows that will show how dated we will become in the future?
Direct-fire ship-to-ship weapons. Modern war is more and more about missiles, drones, etc. I think in the future the idea of ships coming near each-other and shooting directly will seem really old-fashioned, even if they are using space lasers.
I’ve heard that discussion before in past forums and you are right … even ship to ship battles probably won’t exist. It will most likely be space lasers, shot from locations millions of kilometers or light years away from one another, maybe not even from a ship but from a planet or a moon or some station that never moves … a random enemy ship will just be sitting in space and BAM! they get hit without warning by a blast of radiation or weapon of some sort that came in at light speed and no warning.
The modern Star Trek theatrics of a space battle of big ships flying around one another shooting lasers and weapons will look to us how we see submarine battles in World War II
Virtually all sci-fi involving ships fighting in space uses a World War 2 aesthetic. Star Wars, especially. “Fighter” ships that fire “laser cannons” that travel in the direction of the flight of the ship is right out of how WWII fighters worked. Bigger ships with guys in turrets trying to shoot at those fighters, that’s right out of how WWII bombers like the B-17 defended themselves. Space stations or huge capital ships firing really big guns, that’s just like flak cannons in WWII.
Star Trek is a bit different especially because phasers are very fast (but not light speed). But they do ship-to-ship combat a bit like battleships shooting directly at other battleships. Sure, they have photon torpedoes, but they seem to be rarely used and they fire one at a time. And again, “torpedoes” are a very WWII weapon.
Virtually every other sci-fi show or movie does something similar: Stargate, Babylon 5 (at least they do space-inertia properly though), Farscape, Battlestar Galactica, etc. The only one that seemed a bit realistic was The Expanse, where a lot of things happened well beyond visual range, and guns were mostly about point-defense from incoming missiles.
As for what realistic distant future space combat would be like, it’s really an interesting concept. In some ways it’s like submarine combat in that there’s no horizon, things don’t need to spend energy to remain “floating” in place, and there’s essentially no chance of outmaneuvering weapons. OTOH, one of the defining features of submarine combat is stealth, and in space it’s much, much harder to hide. So, it would probably be about attempting to hide while using decoys. And, probably using remotely controlled weapons platforms that used lasers to try to smoke something detected at many light-minutes distance.
Like, instead of an armored battleship duking it out with another armored battleship, you’d probably have a command capsule that was as small and as stealthy as possible. It would communicate with scanning and weapons platforms using some kind of tech that wasn’t detectable at range, like using lasers instead of radio, or maybe even using a very long cable. But, definitely no radios because they broadcast too widely. Any active scanning would make the scanner a target, so there wouldn’t be anything valuable on the scanning source. You might even make it so that the radar / lidar emitter was separate from the receivers so that when the emitter was smoked, you didn’t lose the detectors too. Any weapons platforms would also be immediately targeted as soon as they started firing, so you’d either use a launcher that was disposable as soon as it finished launching, or a nearly disposable laser turret type thing that you’d expect to be destroyed almost as soon as it started shooting. But, I think the biggest focus would be on decoys. In the ocean you can just hide in all the background noise from the ocean. In space, you’d have to make your own background noise.