Star Trek communicator question

salm · Post by **salm** » 2004-10-09 07:11am

if i got that correctly the communicators pinned to all the picards, rikers and crushers are the devices which enable the enterprise to locate them because they send off some signal.

in some episodes we see that some guy from the enterprise puts his/her communicator on an alien/object/whatever in order to make it recognizable by the beamer.

furthermore it´s the only way for the feds to communicate if they´re on a mission on a planet or something like that and it also serves as translator.

isn´t it fucking stupid to put this incredibly important device which might be necessary for getting back or surviving other situations on a fucking little pin on the breast part of your suit where every enemy can just rip it off or where you can lose it by accident?
i mean it would be a lot smarter to sow it up into the fabric of the suit itself, or even implement it into the wearer with surgeries?

(sorry if that´s an old question, i don´t frequent this forum)

Patrick Degan · Post by **Patrick Degan** » 2004-10-09 08:46am

The combadge is part and parcel with what appears to be an obsession of form over function in the TNG era, though the potential for it's loss or damage is no greater than in the TOS era with its standard-issue communicator. In "Who Watches The Watchers", it was shown that subcutaneous communicators could be implanted in the body for landing missions in which disguise precludes the carrying of anything even remotely anachonistic to the natives, while in the TOS episode "Patterns Of Force", Kirk and Spock had transponders implanted into them which simply emitted a locator signal for the Enterprise to lock onto if they lost their communicators.

In TOS, however, there were incidents where the landing party lost their communicators or they were disassembled or damaged, yet they either adapted local broadcast devices to be able to contact the ship or managed to make a working communicator out of the parts of the disassembled or damaged units.

Sokartawi · Post by **Sokartawi** » 2004-10-09 10:00am

I find it humorous that in one VGR episode Janeway and one other crew member got their communicators and other gadgets taken away yet could still communicate with the locals

Don't know episode name but was the time-travel one where they ran into a planet where a disaster had happened because their powerrelays planetwide exploded, and Janeway and some other person got sucked back in time while they wandered around there, and it turned out the rescue-attempt from Voyager was the cause of the accident, which was prevented, and the big reset switch did it's job once again.

Sir Sirius · Post by **Sir Sirius** » 2004-10-09 10:32am

Do communicators serve as universal translators? As Sokartawi pointed out there have been episodes where the crew have lost their communicators and were still able to communicate with aliens.

Oh, and when Quark's, Rom's and Nog's universal translators ceased to function in DS9:"Little Green Men" they started banging their heads and ears in effort to fix them, so at least Ferengi UTs are implants of some kind.

Patrick Degan · Post by **Patrick Degan** » 2004-10-09 11:02am

Sir Sirius wrote:Do communicators serve as universal translators? As Sokartawi pointed out there have been episodes where the crew have lost their communicators and were still able to communicate with aliens.

In TOS, a seperate device was required, whereas in the TNG-era it appears to be a built-in componnent of the combadge. Perhaps during that time period, a UT-implant was developed.

JME2 · Post by **JME2** » 2004-10-09 01:59pm

I always thought that the Universal Translators were built into the television; how else could all of Trek's alien races be speaking English?

Enola Straight · Post by **Enola Straight** » 2004-10-09 02:06pm

In the VOY ep "The 37's" (the one with Amelia Earhart) the humans revived from the stasis units were astonished that each of the others were apparently speaking the native language of the listener; i.e. the Imperial Japanese officer wondered why the caucasians and afro-americans were speaking japanese.

Janeway announces that the feat was possible due to the universal translator, as she gestures toward her commbadge.

Jon · Post by **Jon** » 2004-10-10 07:34am

That was an incredibly stupid episode, they didnt make it seem plausible, the japanese guy made out he could actually see and hear the others speaking his language, not hear them speak there own language and hear the translated version coming from the commbadge.

Meh.