History Headscratchers / StarTrekFirstContact

* That scene where they show that there's no glass in the windows. The ones that look out into '''SPACE!!''' Were the ship's designers ''trying'' to kill the crew? Or had they never heard of the magic words, "power failure"?? And even if the window force fields have triple backup power supplies, it's still an incredibly wasteful use of power, especially considering the sheer number of windows on the ''Enterprise.'' Why not just cover them with a nice thick sheet of transparent {{Phlebotinum}}, then you could use all that nice extra energy to boost your sensors, power another phaser, run five thousand cappuccino makers at one -- the possibilities are endless.
** It wasn't a window, it was a hatch ([[SFDebris for mad officers to piss on sacred landmarks from orbit through if their dogs died]]) that Picard opened. It had a nice chunky door over it. The actual windows are, as you propose, transparent aluminum sections of the hull.

* Why would they introduce the Borg Queen, have characters try to ask questions meant to explain her existence, only for her to duck the questions? Picard asks how she could have survived after "The Best of Both Worlds", to which the Queen answers "You think in such three-dimensional terms..."? WHAT THE HELL DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?! This isn't like ''StarTrekII'', where three-dimensional thinking actually is a plot point. Why couldn't they simply have her say something like "Only my body was lost."? I guess there's only one other explanation: BadWriting.

** It's important to remember the distinction between being in space and being in orbit. "In space" simply means you're up very high and there's no air. In orbit means you're moving fast enough that gravity can't pull you down fast enough to hit the ground. It's quite possible to have one without the other: amateur rockets can get into space, but without sufficient velocity they come right back down; airless planets (or even underground tunnels on Earth kept in a vacuum) could theoretically have a ship in orbit close enough to reach out and touch the ground. ICBM rockets like the one that the ''Phoenix'' was built from have enough delta-v to get to space, but not enough to reach orbital velocity (that's why they're called ''ballistic'' missiles. The math behind their flight path is more-or-less the same as artillery or even throwing a ball). Without those insane multi-kps speeds, reentry isn't as big a deal. In fact it's been done by a guy in just a spacesuit and staged parachutes, no heat shield needed. Likely the ''Phoenix'' was designed so that it would go up, do it's warp thing, and then come back down at a comparatively sedate velocity.

** It's important to remember the distinction between being in space and being in orbit. "In space" simply means you're up very high and there's no air. In orbit means you're moving fast enough that gravity can't pull you down fast enough to hit the ground. It's quite possible to have one without the other: amateur rockets can get into space, but without sufficient velocity they come right back down; airless planets (or even underground tunnels on Earth kept in a vacuum) could theoretically have a ship in orbit close enough to reach out and touch the ground. ICBM rockets like the one that the ''Phoenix'' was built from have enough delta-v to get to space, but not enough to reach orbital velocity. Without those insane multi-kps speed, reentry isn't so big a deal. In fact it's been done by a guy in just a spacesuit and staged parachutes, no heat shield needed. Likely the ''Phoenix'' was designed so that it would go up, do it's warp thing, and then come back down, never having achieved escape or orbital velocity (warp speed doesn't translate to real velocity).

** Act like an Apollo capsule -- have the cockpit module detach, with a heat shield behind it, then reenter and let parachutes provide the drag to stop. Alternately, if the engines are powerful enough (and the ship is structurally sound enough) it might be able to land under powered flight. Or maybe Picard and Data gave them a lift and beamed the whole ship back to the surface from the ''Enterprise'' -- really, can they do any more damage to the timeline after suddenly crowding the encampment with a small army of engineers and bragging far and wide about Cochrane's future exploits?

** Alternatively, maybe the technology to create the vortex was very hard to get right, the Borg could only successfully install it on one sphere and they weren't even sure it would work yet. The whole battle at the beginning was a XanatosGambit (ironically, [[Gargoyles Jonathan Frakes]] directed First Contact) -- send a cube, assimilate Earth if you can, and if you can't, here's a sphere that can get past what remains of Earth's defenses and go back in time instead. The sphere was probably Plan B, to be used if the single-cube strategy failed.

* How did the Phoenix get back down to Earth after they finished the warp test? The thing didn't even look like it could survive reentry, let alone land after taking off.
** Parachutes?

** It's one of the Borg's primary flaws: They may be an immense and collective intelligence, but they're driven by a single urge that they blindly follow: consume. They're much like the [[Starcraft Zerg]] except much more formalized and electronic. The Zerg are a massive Hive Mind, but even the highly intelligent Overmind was driven by a single urge to consume anything in their path. The Borg haven't done so because, quite simply, they didn't think of it until the last moment, when the collective that was so eagerly pursuing its objective through conventional means had to think VERY radically, much like [[Terminator Skynet]].

* How did the Phoenix get back down to Earth after they finished the warp test? The thing didn't even look like it could survive reentry, let alone land after taking off.

** Moreover, since the Borg were apparently willing to alter their own history (not just the alpha quadrant’s) by making contact with their earlier selves in the delta quadrant, why don’t they do that all the time?

** It's just a WMG, but I got the feeling that Cochrane likely ''was'' a brilliant scientist before World War 3, and he'd developed the theory and plans at a university or research center. Then the bombs dropped, the world went to hell, and he turned into an alcoholic wreck as a result. But then he started thinking about that old warp field theory he came up with, and he decided (probably with Lily dragging him kicking and screaming) to cobble together an engine and see if it'd really work. If that's the case, then the answer's more like "all of the above", with the shanty town being the basement for the mad scientist, who used to be a well-funded researcher.

** It's just a WMG, but I got the feeling that Cochrane likely ''was'' a brilliant scientist before World War 3, and he'd developed the theory and plans at a university or research center. Then the bombs dropped, the world went to hell, and he turned into an alcoholic wreck as a result. But then he started thinking about that old warp field theory he came up, with and (probably with Lily dragging him kicking and screaming each step of the way) he decided to cobble together an engine and see if it'd really work. If that's the case, then the answer's more like "all of the above", with the shanty town being the basement for the mad scientist, who used to be a well-funded researcher.