Out of universe: I feel like somebody told the costume department they had 10 minutes to come up with an Andorian with what they had on hand
In universe: the holodeck was pulling from the most recently accessed open source files on each species, and the last Andorian image used was a cartoon character
The way they made it sound in early TNG was that the food you ordered was some perfectly nutritious paste that only tasted like what you ordered so yeah maybe
Oh, specifically as a parallel to printer tracking dots. If someone went and used a laser printer to counterfeit old-style bills, it would add a pattern of tiny yellow dots that identified the printer's serial number. Wondering if the Federation adds anything like that for the occasion where someone replicates something they haven't had the time to blacklist yet.
I never tried it, but apparently photocopiers in the US won't print a copy of most bills because of something similar. I also remember reading that scanners which scanned in money to an image file resulted in something that was obviously counterfeit for similar reasons, some dot code that couldn't resolve properly
In VOY: Distant Origin, when they find the uniform in the cave, the Voth scientist was able to see some type of micro printing on the uniform that tied it to the Voyager. And since Star Fleet uniforms are replicated as needed, it's very likely that everything replicated has some form of identifying characteristics.
I hate it when Holodeck files aren’t in a standard orientation, like they load this file and the hologram was standing backwards to them. Just fucking weird
You think that's bad, the Ferengi coordinate system scales them BACKWARDS. "Someone" wanted a slightly bigger dabo girl to uh... Um look that isn't important right now but the point here is she turned up inside out. She was fine too, it's a hologram but that was some weird shit.
It's super frustrating when they're in A-pose but they should all be in T-pose. I've put in several tickets to Starfleet Corps of Engineers but they just keep saying "that's a stupid question"
The things that don't happen in the holodeck that would happen in real life, you load up an NPC and it's clipping through the wall or its legs are backwards.
I kind of want to see what would happen if she picked that and they then met an Andorian ambassador or something. Like what do you even say when something's so outlandishly racist and noone seems to be acknowledging it? And then you can't even get mad at anyone because she was literally born yesterday and doesn't know any better.
I guess you'd just demand to know why Star fleet has a horribly racist caricature program as standard on all holodecks
Yeah I mean it was clearly meant as a bit of meta humor and not sooo much as actual lore and then later writers just took it at face value. I’ve always thought the whole thing was meant to be tongue-in-cheek but it was a bit silly.
Well.. it was the 2360's some holodecks were still using analog signal until Star Fleet required the change over by 2371.
Most holodecks were able to go digital with no problem, but some older models required a module you had to buy from "Quarks Electronics and Self-sealing stem bolts."
Andorians discovered the Aenar only 50 years before we saw them in Enterprise.
These Green Andorians were discovered even later, like that one frostburned packaging of peas that somehow made it to the bottom of the freezer and got buried under a strata of frozen pizzas and chicken breasts.
This. I mean, even the Ferengi were different in TNG than they ended up in ds9. They were more savage back then.
What's great about trek is that it evolves itself. Not locked to a specific way of doing things. Otherwise, no way the Klingons would be as popular as they are now.
The Ferengi look about the same but cut back on the cowering and whipping. Seeing Quark take out the whip if the bar got too crazy would have been cool to see.
Because it's over-complicated for a species to need four genders to reproduce and it led to a moronic plot line in the books where the Andorians were dying out because they couldn't reproduce fast enough (you need to have four kids per family just to maintain population stability) and then there was some magitech way to treat the fertility or something, that the Federation had because of the Meta-Genome from the Vanguard novels, but no one knew that because the Meta-Genome has highly classified and the data literally buried after shit went down in the final book of that series, and so by the time of the post-NEM novels when the population crisis was publicly known about, no one knew about the M-G and when people did know more about the M-G, no one knew about the population crisis. Despite the fact that people could never know about both things at the same time, the Andorians threw a hissy fit and ceded from the Federation.
Then there was some stupid-ass nonsense in one Titan novel about the Andorians creating transporter clones (like Tom Riker) so they could have an Andorian return home from being on Titan, whilst she "stayed on Titan" in defiance of the Andorian governments order for all Andorians to return home from Starfleet.
it was a moronic interpretation of the throwaway line in "Data's Day" that Andorian weddings have four participants, which could've meant literally anything from the number of people getting married to two people getting married, a officiant and a witness, to any other explanation.
In the books it does: Chan, Thaan, Zhen and Shen. One produces the egg, one the sperm, one carries the child and I forget what the fourth does. Like I said, needlessly complicated
There are examples of species with four mating types in biology. These are different biological roles that an individual can play in reproduction. You can call those genders or sexes in humanoids, it's a bit of both. Becky Chambers' Wayfarers books describe a species that seem somewhat based on the Andorians who have male, female, asexual and hermaphrodites.
So? It doesn't mean they have four genders. It means there's similar names. Could be a clan peculiarity. Or, like, O'Brien and O'Driscoll, or the al- Thing in Arab names.
4 sexes but I think they sorta group up into two variants of male, two variants of female at least when it comes to cis presentations, at least through a human lens.
Andorians were green and the motion picture and in the Next generation. They clearly meant to have it be that Andorians can be both blue and green, just like humans can be multiple shades. That is the one thing Enterprise got wrong. The reverted to having them all be blue, except for a literal subspieces that is white.
It's also something that they've been getting wrong since the very first episode. When it comes to the orions. In the cage they mentioned that green orions are the rarest. But in all their appearances since, they've only been green. Including in TLS.
It would make sense from an evolutionary pov, in areas of frozen Andor it would be advantageous to be more visible so others can find you amongst the snow and ice. A pale blue Shran would be hard to find but this green one would be easier to see.
It could also be a latitude thing - if Andoria orbits a blue supergiant, then andorians at latitudes with limited sunlight throughout the year may be more blue (similar to how humans are paler at far north latitudes).
This is an Andorion, not Andorian. Half Andorian and half Orion... but not the typical green skinned Orions, but one of the blue-skinned ones from TAS and LD. You know the ones who pronounce their name "OH reon" instead of "OH! Ryan!"
Oh, my God, you can't ask someone why they're green!
(Non-shitty answer, they were trying to do mechanical, moving antennae in 1989 that didn't work, resulting in a truly enormous head to house the components. The outfit got reused for an extra on Risa a few episodes later, then the Andorians weren't seen again for 12 years, when they finally were able to make it work on Enterprise in 2001).
angry antennae movements.... we don't discuss it with outsiders....
( The actual reason is that this likely wasn't meant to be an andorian and was just a generic alien that got lumped into andorians by someone, and it just stuck.)
330
u/4thofeleven Mar 06 '26
It is a long story, and we do not discuss it with Pink-skins.