Star Trek: TOS question

[ratcreature]

I was doing an image search, and google showed me a bunch of TOS pictures in which we see them use circular slide rules. <3!

Unfortunately the page these came from was about slide rules not about Trek, so it didn't say which episode or context they were used in, and I actually haven't watched any TOS in ages, and then not even all episodes. (And in fanfic the apparently canon slide rule use seems to get fanwanked away in favor of technological progress. At least I don't think I've ever seen a TOS fanfic with slide rule use. Alas.)

But I'm sure someone on my f-list will know which episode(s?) this is. *hopeful look*









ETA: Found! The first is from Who Mourns for Adonais, the other two from The Corbomite Maneuver. Fandom is awesome.

Comments

[less_star]

Now I remember that in Apollo 13 there is a scene where the engineers in mission control use a slide rule (a linear, though). Since that movie seems so well-researched it was probably something used during those first space missions. It's such an interesting part of sci-fi how we keep bringing our own time into it.

And, yes, Spock would handle that slide rule like no-one else.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, back then computers wouldn't have been practical for ad-hoc calculations, what with being huge, expensive, and you needed to program them, and probably still with punch cards. And even after pocket calculators started, I'm fairly sure that at first they couldn't do advanced operations like logarithms and trigonometric functions. IIRC the first that could do that was a Hewlett Packard in 1972, but it was very expensive. It took until the second half of the 1970s for slide rules to become truly obsolete.

Maybe Starfleet navigators and engineers have to learn how to use slide rules to be able to calculate their course and warp formulas or such even while their electronics have crapped out on them. I mean, considering how often they seem to have trouble with the beaming and the communicators, maybe it's best that they have a low tech fallback...

[less_star]

Yeah, that would make sense. Or if they land on a low-tech world because of [plot device] and can't show off the computers because it would violate the prime directive, or something...

[sporky_rat]

Oh, you know Scotty would have his trainees learn how to repair warp drive without computer prompts, and in vacuum suits. I can see Spock and navigational trainees using slide rules!

[ratcreature]

At least you can be sure that your slide rule won't turn on you, like your SF computer might!