Headscratchers / Star Trek Science And Technology

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Human life expectancies in the future

• Occasionally we are given to expect that human life expectancies have vastly increased. Like McCoy living to be 137 years, retired but still fairly active, and the impression one generally gets that this is normal for humans, not the rare exception that a centenarian would be today. This is easy enough to believe, given the medical advances we see. Other times, however, it seems like it's not all that different — expected retirement ages don't seem to have changed that much per the later TOS films, and Dr. Crusher's grandmother's death at 100 is treated like an solid lifespan, not like a life tragically cut short when she could have lived another four decades. It's also a tad odd that turning 30 would still hold the significance Bashir ascribes to it in "Distant Voices."
  • Not that this is a problem only for humans. Consider Spock — doesn't seems to have aged a day between 2293 and 2368, but then ages quite noticeably by 2387 (must be that human DNA kicking in). Also, Worf as in the future depicted in "All Good Things" should only be in his mid-50s but is made up to look as old as Kor, Koloth and Kang, who are well over a century.
  • Trek writers often have a problem with remembering that this is supposed to be the future, as well as an often surprising lack of awareness of real-life science as well. For example, the longest-lived human on record, Jeanne Calment, died at age 122, thus establishing what is currently considered to be the maximum possible human lifespan without radical advances in medicine and/or genetic engineering. McCoy, at age 137, was actually doing only moderately better really considering the medical technology Starfleet has. Now, one possibility is that not everyone utilizes the full extent of medical life extension available. For example, Crusher's grandmother lived on a theme park colony emulating the lifestyle of the Scottish highlands. She might have eschewed artificial life extension, and lived as long as someone with her genetics would naturally. This does not explain Bashir's angst over turning 30 though, nor Picard's devastation at being the last of his family, since even in real life a man his age could still potentially father children. In the latter case it was more like he just couldn't reconcile quitting Starfleet to go raise a family and by that time the kids on starships fad had passed.
  • 30 is a psychological barrier, it is the moment that people are likely to feel that their youth is starting to fade. This has almost nothing to do with the physical effect of aging and almost everything to do with the fact that 30 is the age where you and your friends are likely to think about having children and getting married, that you're living on your own, that you are paying your own bills, that your school/college/university education has finished, that your parents begin to show their physical age etc. It is not rational, and it is certainly not logical to think such things, but trust me when I say that most people do. I don't know whether you are pre-30 or not but trust me when I say that you are likely to be no different one day.
    • I'm a little puzzled — what does this have to do with anything? A few generations ago, when people routinely married in their late teens or early 20s, the average age of first childbirth was well before 25 and the average person pursued no education after high school, 30 was absolutely not thought of as the "end of youth." Categories like "youth" and "middle age" and "elderliness" are highly fluid — they have different meanings and attached to different chronological ages in different cultural moments (and new categories, like "the teenager" in the 40s and 50s, can be invented). There is no reason to think that the way such terms are used now should adhere for centuries to come, and it is virtually impossible to image that "youth" would mean the same thing it does today in a society where people can expect to live into their 15th decade.
    • That's why I said it wasn't logical or rational to feel that way. Let me repeat: It has nothing to do with your physical age and everything to do with the fact that 30 is the metaphorical end of an era; you will never go back to school, you will never have another Spring Break, you will never again believe in Father Christmas, you will never again lose your virginity, you will never again be able to play in a Little League game again etc. So many things have been and gone forever by the time you are 30 - even if your life expectancy is 1000 you still will not be able to do or experience any of that stuff again. And that can be bloody depressing, especially if you wasted your childhood in some way.
    • Let me repeat: 30 is a treated as a "metaphorical end of an era" now. It was not in the past, and will not be in the future. Get past this egocentrism and cultural chauvinism which dictates that everyone else in the whole span of human history has to have an experience exactly the same as yours.
    • At the risk of getting into the middle of starship battle, but Bashir is a doctor. A doctor already serving in Starfleet, assigned to a remote outpost, on the border of a hostile power! One would expect him to have lamented his lost youth back when, oh, maybe he started friggin' med school! Even in the real world, today, now, people in such education-intensive professions, to say nothing of the military, tend to have long since come to terms with the end of childhood! Looking ahead to the future, thus far we have seen the opposite from other characters. Kirk, the young captain, enthusiastically blazing a trail across the galaxy, wouldn't exhibit any age-related angst until he found himself to be a (relatively) young admiral flying a desk at an age when most other Starfleet officers were still out roaming the galaxy! Riker was happily playing the field in his 30's, enjoying the adventure and the Boldly Coming that came with it, seeing the best of his career ahead of him rather than behind. Now, especially since Bashir's youth consisted of a lot of concealing the dark secret that he is an Augment, it might make more sense to lament a life he never had at all. Not the fact that he was 30, which for some other major characters was simply the exit point of being considered a newbie and the time when their lives, careers and status really took off.
    • That Bashir is personally perturbed by turning 30 requires no explanation — that's his prerogative. That he ascribes a broader cultural significance to that birthday is somewhat odder, but perhaps it's just a plain old rationalization.

Torpedo control

• Enterprise and other ships only fire one torpedo or phaser at a time. Wouldn't it be cooler and more efficient to fire multiple torpedoes and phasers at once?
  • This image disagrees with you with the torpedoes. As for the phasers, they seem to be some sort of array that combine themselves into one big shot, so why split things up when you don't need to. Or are you talking about earlier versions?
    • Budget! The Enterprise is fully capable of a crazy-ass alpha strike. Studio Paramount is much less capable of doing this more than once a season.
  • We've seen the Enterprise-D lay down some pretty heavy fire in a few times: The Survivors, Best of Both Worlds: Part I, Best of Both Worlds: Part II, and Descent showed that when the budget was available, Enterprise could be one hell of a formidable warship by firing all of its phaser banks while simultaneously launching rapid torpedo salvos. In Conundrum, we're even shown that starships aren't nearly as Point Defenseless as they appear when Enterprise off-handedly slaps down a handful of fighters without breaking stride.
  • Even factoring out the budget concerns, the fact is that up until about halfway through Voyager (towards the end of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), the ships used were all physical models, and there was only so much they could do with them. Now, with the ships all being CGI, it is easier to do glorious battles with More Dakka up to eleven.
  • This was more of an issue in TOS, where the FX budget was very tight. Also, the Constitution class Enterprise was much less advanced than 24th Century starships. Among other things it had fixed-position phaser banks, as opposed to the widely-spread arrays on the Galaxy class. The original Enterprise got refit with a double torpedo launcher in the movies. But this was still not capable of the kind of rapid fire that later generation ships could pull off.

Starship design

• Why don't the starships place warp nacelles next to each other and then place them within the superstructure of the ship as well as combining the saucer and engineering sections? This would minimize the profile of the ship (we've seen shots miss ships in the star trek universe so profile plays a significant factor in combat survival), decrease the space between power generation and machines that need the power as well as decrease the volume of space that has to be shielded. This would allows armor to protect both your warp nacelles and engineering at the same time as well. Ships like the Defiant have their warp nacelles right next to the ship so proximity to other ship components or crew is not a limiting factor. Putting everything together might not allow for easy separation but ships such as the Klingon bird of prey and Romulan ships work well without it.
  • There actually is a point where it's a TV show becomes a valid excuse when we're dealing with a franchise that A) Started in 1963 B) Enjoys its Rule of Cool and C) That design being just about as iconic as the Police box from Doctor Who.
  • It's been suggested in various non-canon material that there's an element of health-and-safety consideration in this design. There are a few Starfleet designs that have the warp nacelles integrated into the hull—the Obereth-class, the Sabre-class, the Steamrunner-class—but all of the high-powered capitol ships have the nacelles set far away from the inhabited parts of the ship.
  • Jem'Hadar battleships are very compactly designed and quite large whilst also looking pretty cool.
  • Galor Class Cardassian ships have a design like this.
  • The DS9 Technical Manual says that the warp field is more efficient if they're further out from the hull. You'll note that Cardassian ships and Klingon Birds of Prey have their warp drive within the main hull but are primarily combat oriented. Starfleet prefers efficient warp drives for speed and exploration rather than ones meant for heavy combat.
  • The Defiant would then be the exception that proves the rule: it is the first exclusively combat-oriented ship class ever made by Starfleet and therefore has its warp nacelles tucked snugly against the primary hull, removing the connecting struts which are a structural weakness. The plot point about its engines being overpowered for its size may have been Starfleet's attempt at overcoming the consequent loss in warp field efficiency, and their lack of experience with this sort of design explains why it took them longer than usual to work out the kinks.
  • Matt Jefferies explained why the nacelles were set on pylons away from the rest of the ship when he designed the Enterprise. In his view, anything powerful enough to accelerate a starship to FTL velocities would have to be very large, very powerful, and very dangerous, so the engines for this would have to be separate components from the hull and set away from the crew. Now, not all subsequent ships have followed this philosophy, but it was the original explanation for the design.
  • Also keep in mind that newer starship designs reduce the distance between saucer and engineering hulls or eliminate it entirely, such as with the Intrepid- and Sovereign-classes. Also note that with the Intrepid-class, the pylons are much shorter and thicker than they are on, say, a Galaxy-class. Starfleet does understand that compact designs work really well.
• Starfleet's standard saucer-and-nacelle layout is explained (at least semi-canonically in sources like the Next Generation Technical Manual) as being more efficient at warp speeds, and the reason why they keep getting more streamlined is because of improving understanding of subspace physics. So if this design is so good and so organic, why has nobody else in the galaxy adopted it? The only similar layouts we've seen are in some Klingon ships (which could be explained by espionage or even just observation), and early Romulan designs (as seen in Balance of Terror) that were later abandoned. Most other races don't even bother, with the extreme example being the highly-advanced Borg bricks that can outrun Federation ships without breaking a sweat. You'd think there would be some sort of convergent evolution at work, kind of like how all real-world aircraft carriers have the same general layout regardless of what country built them. I get that the Doylist answer is that we need the ships to be easy to tell apart at a glance, but is there an in-universe explanation? (One thought: it could just be chauvinism on the Federation's part, and their design isn't really as superior as they'd like to think.)

Why do they use phasers like terrible guns?

• It's been a constant, minor irritation to me that these apparently advanced civilizations employ weapons that are, to be honest, terrible. Especially in situations where lethal force (such as the battles in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) is called for, phasers seem to be much worse in practice than, say, assault rifles. Why do they never take the logical step and hold down the trigger, sweeping the gun from side to side, killing every hostile in the room?
  • Well, for one, indiscriminate shooting has a tendency to hit non-targets as well. Sure, the stun setting is there for a reason, but phasers are shown to even at low settings hurl a person backwards, which can still result in further injury, and, in extreme cases, death. Then there's also the fact that damage to the surrounding area could easily cause a collapse - take something like 'The Siege of AR-558.' Wildly waving around the phasers could have brought the whole cavern system down around their ears, killing them and destroying the valuable sensor array. And then there's the basic fact that they also end up firing from behind cover, and doing the phaser sweep leaves you exposed to those you haven't gotten to.
  • It looks like phasers are more power-hungry than disruptors for the same damage output, and multiple non-canon sources show people using a phaser for the first time (in some sense) just like that… before someone teaches them to use short bursts. So it may just be to save ammo.
  • On a related note, has Starfleet—or any military force in the franchise, for that matter—been shown to have a weapon that fills the role of a machine gun? It's been pointed out many times that, in the above mentioned Siege of AR-558, a modern machine gun could have completely suppressed that Jem'Hadar attack. I'll wager even a Jem'Hadar Super-Soldier would pee his pants at the prospect of charging through a narrow canyon through M2 crossfire.
    • Never actually seen, but implied in the TOS episode "The Omega Glory" and the thousands of Yang bodies killed by Captain Tracy and his men draining four phasers on them. Given that hand phasers don't have that much juice, the best option is that they had some kind of phaser machine gun equivalent and drained four of them for the job.
    • A couple of hand phasers on a wide beam kill setting could easily kill thousands of primitives armed with swords or muskets - rapid fire is completely unnecessary. Also if we go by the figure of four phasers killing thousands, that means that each power pack could potentially hold upwards of 500 rounds which really isn't that far-fetched for a post-warp civilization like the Federation.
    • Aside from the fact I can't recall ever seeing a phaser in wide beam setting killing people, only stunning, there's a problem with that statement: it's a pistol, and unless in the hands of extremely skilled shooters it's a short-ranged weapon for ergonomic reasons, meaning that thousands of screaming primitives would cross the distance between them and the shooters before they could take so many losses. Even a rifle equivalent would have trouble, as it would be relatively short ranged (about 200 meters). A machine gun equivalent, that is a phaser made for long-ranged sustained shooting, would on the other hand do the massacre (at least until they ran out of charge).
    • In the Voyager episode Cathexis a possessed Tuvok threatens to kill the entire bridge crew with a phaser on wide-beam, and seeing as no one bats an eyelid it is obvious that such a setting exists. Also I just went and re-watched the episode and the natives are only using bows and blades; therefore as long as Tracey had enough cover to block an arrow he could stand but a few paces away and slaughter the whole lot of them. We also outright see that his hand phaser has run out of ammo during his duel with Kirk. Finally there is the little fact that such a rapid fire phaser is never referred, shown, mentioned or alluded to ever again in the history of the franchise until Nemesis. Such a weapon simply does not exist in canon.
    • For "Cathexis", a phaser on stun setting at extremely short range can be lethal (seen on screen). On that cover, I repeat at the short range of an handgun they could just rush him in the dozens and then beat him to death with bare hands, no matter the cover. On a machine gun-equivalent never being referred, there's the fact that not only "Nemesis" did show it (as you said), but there's also the fact TNG era Starfleet has abandoned a number of useful weapons they used to have, like the mortar Kirk and his crew used in "Arena" (I know it was from the colony arsenal, but the simple fact Kirk had the training to properly place and use it means Starfleet does use them). My guess is that they had machine gun equivalents in the TOS era but the only time it would have been appropriate to use them we only got the aftermath, for some reason it was deleted from the inventory after Khitomer, and during the Dominion War (in the same period they reintroduced the assault rifle) they reintroduced the machine gun, even if they didn't get around to produce adequate numbers or train enough servants for them in time for AR-558.
    • To answer the machine gun question now that I've reviewed all instances, we have a machine gun equivalent shown once, maybe twice. The one confirmed is the aft-mounted phaser of the Argo buggy in "Nemesis", that we've seen firing short bursts, appearing right after the Dominion War. The unconfirmed one is the grenade launcher from "Into the Darkness": the prop is an actual automatic grenade launcher, but Kirk takes down its target before it can actually fire more than once so we don't know if it was meant to be an automatic weapon or not.
  • This is actually a case of phaser effectiveness decaying with each subsequent series. Viewers who watched TOS will recall that handheld phasers could be used to flood an entire room with a stun field, and the ship's phasers could stun several city blocks from orbit! This capability was largely forgotten by TNG, and the overall power of phasers steadily decreased even as their size increased. To the point that in DS9 and VOY you had Starfleet people carrying around these huge phaser rifles that, based on relative phaser power shown in TOS, ought to have been able to inflict more damage than a bombing run from a B-52 bomber, but instead acted rather like the blaster rifles in Star Wars.
    • We see the wide-beam stun setting in the Voyager episode Cathexis and we see a hand phaser tunnel through a cliff wall in the Next Generation episode Chain of Command so clearly 24th century phasers are still just as powerful as their 23rd century equivalent. The real world reasons why the Starfleet Elite never use these settings is a combination of the infamously bad writing of latter-day Star Trek and dramatic convenience - it would be pretty boring if every firefight ended in five seconds flat.
    • There is an incident that suggests that while individual phaser blasts are at least as powerful in the TNG-era as they were in the TOS-era, phaser power packs in TNG store significantly less energy overall. In TOS's "Conscious of the King" it's firmly established that a type-II phaser set to overload could cause catastrophic damage to the Enterprise if it detonated anywhere on the ship. It's such a threat, Kirk orders "double red alert"—marking the one and only time that this extreme alert condition has ever been referenced in the entire franchise. In TNG's "The Hunted," however, a phaser actually does overload in one of the Enterprise-D's Jefferies tubes, and the damage amounts to a minor inconvenience, at most. It destroys some equipment, but doesn't seem cause any visible damage to the surrounding structure at all.
    • It's interesting to note that phasers were shown to have very useful applications in TOS that were never really revisited in later series. There were several instances of Enterprise's phasers providing away teams fire support from orbit—essentially being used like very, very accurate naval artillery. In "A Piece of the Action," Enterprise even stuns a whole city block with a wide-beam phaser blast, an application which could have been very useful a number of times in the TNG-era. That "proximity burst" from "Balance of Terror" could have also been very helpful a few times, but it was never used again.

Scan it! Scan it again!

• Why do they always have to try scanning everything twice, once with an "increased resolution"? Doesn't anybody in Star Fleet know how to work a scanner?
  • Filler. Pure filler.
  • Or maybe it's like looking at the stars through a telescope. You take a wide angle shot to look at an entire section of the sky, find the items of interest in it, and then take more pictures with a much higher resolution focused on the interesting parts. The first scan doesn't and can't give you all the information, it's telling you what to look at with the more detailed scans.
  • Some people usually clicks "preview" to get a quick overview of the page... then selects the area he wants to scan at full resolution (say, 1200dpi). Why, how do you work a scanner?

Beware the Holodecks

• If it's so easy for the Holodeck to trap everyone inside and try to kill them, why do all these ships have them? You'd think Moriarity would only have to take over the ship once for them to get the hint.
  • Even though one presumes that word of Moriarity got back to Starfleet somehow, some guy named Felix is still allowed to create a fully sentient hologram (Vic Fontaine, from seasons 6 and 7 of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) and nobody thinks to ask What Could Possibly Go Wrong?? Sure, it's Quark's privately-owned holosuite, but Sisko and Odo have both proven able to stop Quark's more reckless behavior in previous episodes, and the Bajorans probably wouldn't want something that dangerous on their station. And what if that little Ocean's Eleven caper episode didn't go according to plan? Vic might've been friendly but those Vegas mobsters weren't.
  • Well, yeah, it'd be safer, but then they'd run out of things to do.
  • Because the Holodecks are really dang useful. They aren't just glorified recreation rooms, they can do everything from highly realistic combat simulations to crime scene investigations. Even if they do sometimes malfunction, removing such a powerful and versatile tool from a starship would put the crew at a distinct disadvantage.
    • But even if its useful for pragmatic purposes, why on Earth allow something so dangerous to be used for recreation? Also, who would ever use it?
    • On Deep Space Nine they don't have Starfleet holodecks, just the privately owned holosuites. They never use it for official purposes at all; it's strictly for recreation. They did use it for business in "The Magnificent Ferengi," but that wasn't a Starfleet mission, it was a private expedition led by the owner of the holosuite.
    • But didn't Deep Space Nine's holosuites malfunction much less than the ones on the Enterprise? In fact, didn't it only happen once, and that was a result of something going wrong with the transporter. Also, O'Brien joked about how no one could keep the Enterprise's holodecks working right, implying that the the Enterprise's holodecks were unusually prone to failure.
    • Possibly because Starfleet is a moneyless Utopia, they don't worry about getting sued. Quark, coming from the ultra capitalist Ferengi society has to make sure his holodecks actually work or face massive lawsuits. Chalk one up for capitalism!
    • Are you kidding? "Computer! 100 incredibly busty/hung beautiful/handsome women/men! In a giant pool of Jello! And they all want to jump me bones and aren't jealous of the other people!" Yeah, nobody would want to use that at all.
    • In theory, holodecks have safeties. And, in those shows where holodecks are legal and common, we see that everyone uses them. There are even children's holodeck programs. And Quark has a side-business renting holodeck space.
    • In many ways, this is a change in premise. The pilot and first season of TNG made it clear that they were fairly new, at least on starships. Picard had clearly never been in one prior to his first Dexter adventure.
    • In theory, holodecks work nearly flawlessly... It's just that we only usually see the times it malfunctioned.
    • Basically, we DO only see them when they malfunction. And it should be noted that just because they malfunction, doesn't mean they aren't more useful than dangerous, cars being the standard example here. Half the time, malfunctions are caused by Negative Space Wedgies and explosions only experienced in certain ships. They sneak up on the Enterprise and cause malfunctions before the deck can be emptied.
    • We see them functioning normally on a regular basis. We only see episodes entirely about them when they malfunction.
    • Not every holodeck episode is a broken holodeck episode: "Manhunt," all three Vic Fontaine episodes, "Take Me Out to the Holosuite," "Fair Haven." In that last one, the holodeck broke in the end, but that wasn't the point of the episode.
    • Oh, and the ENT finale.
    • Given the multiple duty schedules, it's probable the holodecks are running close to 24/7 on the Enterprise. If they've only malfunctioned a handful of times, often due to alien interference, it would be less "we must get rid of this deathtrap" and more "you must sign this waiver."
  • Firstly, the times where the holodeck malfunctions or do something unusual are the easiest ways of making them actually interesting from a story perspective. Secondly, things are likely to malfunction when you're on a starship encountering dangerous situations exposing ships' systems to damage. Thirdly, things like Moriarity occur when things are done with the holodeck computers (or, in the case of "A Fistful of Datas", the ship's computer) beyond their intended design. Moriarity became self-aware because Data needed a challenge... but the holodeck was designed with human entertainment in mind. "A Fistful of Datas" occurred due to computer malfunction when they tried to link Data to the ship's systems... an experiment the ship's systems were not designed for, with unforeseen consequences.
• More of an issue than malfuntions is why it's never possible to provide an easy fix. Even if turning the power off isn't an option (and why the f+++ is that never possible?! That should be the first option!), it should be possible to use the transporters to beam people out.

All I Need Is My Holodeck

• On this subject, can someone tell me why the Holodeck wasn't the last invention ever? They have replicators, they have holodecks, it's like the Internet taken to its logical extreme, with actual food sources built into the wall. Doesn't that pretty much end society?
  • How many people can seriously go a week on the Internet without DOING something? Get a mini fridge, fill it with a week of food, block out a week, and see how long you can last. There are some people who spend their lives in the holodeck, but most people want to go outside and talk to people occasionally. One thing about holodecks is, until very recently, holopeople were not nearly as interesting as real people. We've watched the invention of sentient holofolks, and the field testing of holocommunication. Everything else is just a decent simulation.
    • Alternatively, half of society IS in the holodeck, which is why we only see extroverts.
  • Wasn't an unhealthy holodeck obsession one of Lt. Barclay's many, many diagnosed mental or physical ailments? If it's an actual diagnosis, presumably that's something that future psychiatrists are responsible for treating.
    • True. Geordi says to Barclay "You're going to be able to write the book on holodiction," as if this is a well-known neologism and an established phenomenon.
  • The closest we've come to seeing this was Nog after his leg got shot off, and that was the result of an extreme psychological situation. I'm willing to bet that most people in the Federation have extreme self-control. Even today, there are people who know when to turn off the Xbox and return to the real world.
• The holodecks we see in the show are stand-alone systems on starships or stations. For planet-bound systems, it might be a simple matter to link multiple holodecks together, running the same program. Imagine an MMORPG you could *literally* live in, 24/7, eating and sleeping in your player housing when not out questing or socializing with your guild in the tavern. Depending on how much access private citizens have to holodecks and how their use is legislated/restricted, there is a possibility that holo-addiction is a huge social issue.
  • I've heard this argument about how the existence of replicators and holodecks would make everybody just sit around and playing in holodecks and replicating food until our species died out because we'd have no motivation to invent or really do anything else. However, one thing I've noticed about whoever makes this argument seems to forget several facts about how technology works and human nature when they say things like that. For one thing, if we invented holodecks and replicators, regardless of the science behind them those holodecks and replicators HAVE to be fueled by something, and they will expend more energy operating than they can produce, so we will have to go out to find more of whatever makes replicators and holodecks work, and there's only going to be so much on Earth, so we'll have to head out into the stars to get more, which means we'll have to invent more tech to deal with the obstacles in our way. That, and the fact that even if the replicators and holodecks produce 100% realistic characters and objects, can replicate anything, and are entirely self sufficient, (which would take a lot of time and effort to get the both of them there if it's even possible) we will still need to constantly create more and more new stories and characters for the holodeck to create and more types of food and other objects for the replicators to make, if only to avert boredom. He may be from Stargate and not Star Trek, but Daniel Jackson sums it up quite well:
    Jackson: Imagine you were stuck in a room for a thousand years with only a TV, a VCR, and 5 movies, how long could you watch them over and over again until you were bored silly?
    • Except a holodeck isn't a locked room, a tv, a VCR, and five movies. It's a fully immersive virtual world that is infinitely variable and infinitely customizable. For your analogy to work you would have to assume that instead of being locked in a room with only 5 movies to watch, you were locked in a room with infinity movies to watch. All of them with the most spectacular resolution and realistic special effects you can imagine and with fully interactive characters that you can talk to and hang out with. Hell, you could BE the star of every movie if you wanted to. You could bag any Hollywood Hottie/Hunk anytime, anywhere, anyway you wanted. You could even create your own movies. You could even spend years rewriting every movie that disappointed you and then watch your new creation play out before your very eyes. And you could (potentially) share your newly written creations with other people around the world, who would in turn share their creations with you. Would some people get bored with that? Maybe. But then, it's entirely possible for some people to recreationally snort crack cocaine and never become addicted. You're right about one thing, though. Holodecks and replicators do need fuel to keep running. But, think about this for a second. Does that really sound like a bright future to you? An entire civilization that lives only to keep their holodecks and replicators working?
  • My theory? Based on Janeway's reaction to realizing she was beginning to fall in love with a holographic character in one episode, what keeps a lot of people from getting addicted is getting bored with having every little thing their way. As she points out, the problem with having a relationship with any holodeck character is that there's no challenge; if the character has some annoying habit or isn't interested in you quite the way you want, you just say a few words to the computer and suddenly the character accommodates your every whim. In other words, It's Easy, So It Sucks!. If you could be on the holodeck all day every day, you'd eventually get bored with having every little thing your way in every situation.
    • Except it's entirely possible to share holodecks with other, flesh and blood people, and they're used for that purpose frequently in the series, with the holodeck simply creating the environment people interact in.
  • Social values dictating that the holodeck is "fantasy" that should not interfere with "real life".
  • With respect I think the OP attributing 20th-21st century values on to the enlightened 24th century humans. Go back and listen to a good portion of Picard's speeches; they work to better themselves and others, further the course of science and to explore space. In other words Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future of humanity. 24th century humans don't want to spend their lives in a meaningless fantasy world, the idea to them is complete lunacy. Their reactions to Reg Barclay in his first episode are prove enough of that.
  • None of this even touches on the ethics of treating holodeck characters as disposable toys after it gradually becomes clear that all that's needed for them to come to life is to be left running for a while. None of the future enlightened humans seem to care enough to stop making holodeck characters for fun.
    • It would appear it requires very special circumstances for a holodeck character to become sentient (a specific, if misdirected command in Moriarty's case, and the Doctor was always designed to be self-aware, it just stretched further than planned). You could leave the average character running indefinitely and it would never exceed the parameters of its programming.

Your Consoles A'Splode!

• Why is every control panel on the Enterprise packed with explosives? Surely getting hit with a torpedo shouldn't cause the consoles to explode? And even if they have to use explosive panels, wouldn't a fuse or circuit breaker be a useful addition? Also, since the ship is apparently still fully controllable after the panels explode, what purpose do they serve?
  • The first two questions: Because it Looks Cool. (Actually, of course, as you and many others have noticed, it looks pretty ruddy dumb...but random explosions have been action-adventure visual shorthand for "OK, we're in big trouble now!" since long before computers were invented.) The third: Most of those control panels are 'science stations' or similar, dedicated to the gathering of data and reporting on status rather than actually running the ship.
  • Because most of the action centers on the bridge, and having bridge consoles explode is the only way to pose a mortal threat to the bridge crew without causing massive damage to the ship. Without exploding bridge consoles, the only way for them to establish that an enemy attack is dangerous would be to show random Red Shirts getting killed. And they do enough of that already.
  • Because they're powered by plasma instead of solid wires. Think of it as steam IN SPACE: one malfunctioning valve sends pressure spikes across the ship.
  • This is a type of Adaptation Decay. The first case of a console freaking out in Star Trek was in the seventh Original Series episode, where they fight a Romulan starship. There, the console shorted out, but it was pretty much just a standard electrical fire. Spock got things under control soon enough. But over time, the idea of bridge console fires and explosions got out of hand, until you wind up with control panels packed with C4.
    • The trip to the energy barrier in the second pilot damaged a bridge console so badly soon-to-be Red Shirt Kelso had to scrounge replacement parts from the Automated Lithium Cracking Station.
    • Also, Sulu is badly injured when the helm console explodes in "The City on the Edge of Forever."
  • Also, in the new movie, they have fixed this. Every time the ship is damaged, rather then seeing something on the bridge explode, we see something in engineering blow up instead, which makes a bit more sense.
    • They'd do that on TNG too any time things got Really Bad. For example in the Best of Both Worlds part I, after a few solid hits and some minor console explosions, the Enterprise takes a really bad hit and we cut down to Main Engineering to see Geordi evacuating the warp core room amidst all sorts of busted pipes spraying steam or whatever the hell it is.
  • Because that's how the Adam Savage-Jamie Hyneman Console Engineering Building puts 'em together?
• I could be wrong, but as I recall the whole exploding consoles thing started when Saavik was taking the Kobayashi Maru test. In universe the simulator was just the bridge so the panels were rigged to explode harmlessly in response to the 'damage' the simulated Enterprise was taking from the Klingons as a indicator of the catastrophic nature of the damage and the casualties, essentially the consoles exploded and the bridge crew 'died' as a representation of the simulated battle damage and casualties. Unfortunately this escaped from simulated starship bridges where it made sense and 'real' starships started to ape this in combat, hence Made of Explodium consoles.

Losing My Communicator

• In the Original Series, Kirk and company would constantly get their communicators taken away. This, along with transporter malfunction and "interference" were dramatic ways of keeping them being saved with a quick "Beam Me Up, Scotty!". However in Patterns of Force, they introduced the extremely useful subcutaneous transponder whose purpose was to be able to lock onto the landing party if they were out of communication. In the episode, this was rendered null and void because Kirk didn't feel like faking another stomach cramp to make his escape. Instead, he and Spock used them to turn a light bulb into a laser. My question is why this little piece of technology has never been used since?
  • Perhaps it is, but it wasn't as useful later. Notice that NextGen ships usually know where any crew member is at any time. Anyway, without communication, you can't tell if the landing party wants to leave.
    • The whole point was it was to be used if they were unable to communicate with them. In other words, "If you can't contact us, assume we're in trouble and get us out of there." It's not applicable to all episodes but there are plenty of examples where it would have been.
    • Point: Ships only know where the comm badge is at any time, not the crew member.
    • It's actually fairly easy to use a transponder to broadcast a distress signal—in fact, it's something we do today. In civil aviation, there are three transponder codes that flight crews can use to indicate an emergency situation—even when the aircraft's other communication equipment has failed. By squawking a specific code, a pilot can tell anyone who's paying attention—especially air traffic control and other aircraft—that they've been hijacked, that their radio has failed, or that there's an unspecified general emergency that threatens the safe operation of the aircraft (mechanical failure, medical emergency, etc.). As long as a member of an away team has a way of altering the signal their transponder is broadcasting, he or she could use it to send a discreet mayday or indicate that they need to be beamed out.
  • Wasn't something like that a minor plot point in Nemesis? Including part of the Dramatic Heroic Sacrifice scene at the end?
  • Maybe they were issued, but didn't tend to actually work very well? Like 'here, have this transponder - nine times out of ten it craps out, but on the off chance it doesn't, it'll be pretty useful'?
• Neelix lampshades this in an novel - after the away team including him, Tuvok and the Captain are imprisoned he produces a phaser hidden in the heel of his boot and when asked if also has a communicator (their combadges having been removed) exasperatedly replies in the negative and asks why Starfleet doesn't just implant them into all personnel - their medical technology is good enough. Another novel with sequences set in an alternate future has Data using a built in communicator and if I remember correctly this is now standard practice for all Starfleet personnel.
  • Implanted communicators are only useful if the opposition doesn't suspect you might have them. If they do suspect, they have a lot less reason to keep your captured crew members alive at all.

Transporters Got No Hard Drives?

• If someone is dying of an incurable illness, why let them die? All you have to do is store them in a transporter and reassemble them once a cure is found. Equally, I love when they have to beam a severely injured person to sickbay, the medical staff runs around and acts like an ambulance is in-bound. Well, there's no reason for that. An injured person can be stored in the transporter and reassembled, perhaps weeks later, when the medical staff is ready to work on him. Therefore, all the Star Trek "ER" scenes are absurd. As long as transporters are around, there should never be more than one patient in the ER at once.
  • Case in point - Transporters come with biofilters that can apparently screen out viruses and other nasties...
  • People can't be stored in the transporter for weeks safely. (Although if someone can be stored for decades with a 50% failure rate, like Scotty and the other guy, logically a week should have about a 0.001% failure rate, which is probably worth it simply to set up the surgical room in advance.) However, that doesn't change the fact they can be stored for hours just fine, and thus scenes like what happened with the Doctor above, where two patients show up at exactly the same time and one is left to die while the other is treated, shouldn't happen. Especially since, IIRC, they were both beamed into sickbay. You'd think the transporter operator would store them and dole them out whenever the doctor asked for them.
    • Keep in mind that Scotty had to pull off a lot of jury rigged Applied Phlebotinum to make his suspended animation trick work. Most of the time, if the transporter chief doesn't either complete the transport or send them back within a matter of seconds, they're dead. Of course, this doesn't explain why things didn't change once they'd found out how Scotty made it work.
    • Worse yet: we know they have stasis fields, so why don't they have a nice, medical stasis room, beam the extra casualties there, and then beam them out when there's room on the table? It's not like being beamed is equivalent to the normal problem with moving highly injured folks.
  • Of course the fact that their bodies can be stored in the holodeck is even worse, Fridge Logic-wise. I'm pretty sure the holodeck can duplicate characters. So stick their bodies, without their minds, in there, work on them, if you save them, beam them out, if you don't, work from a backup of their body. Even if you only get an hour or so before their 'pattern degrades', it's still safer.
    • They probably don't do that because they're afraid of Professor Moriarity, Minuette, or even program Riker 6.
    • Actually the Doctor does something similar to this in the Voyager episode, "Lifesigns" (2x19)
  • This always bugged me too. Especially this: if you're beaming someone up with horribly life-threatening wounds, you're completely disassembling them and reassembling them on the transporter pad atom by atom. Well, why not simply reassemble them WITHOUT all the horribly life-threatening wounds? If fact, you could create a literal fountain of youth if you decided to reassemble them so they were physically much younger (like in TNG: "Rascals"), though maybe a little bit older, like 18 or 21.
    • Because seen from a molecular level, most organisms are extremely complex. It's one thing to dis- and then reassemble something after a template, but actively changing things? The results could be Nightmare Fuel.
• Indeed, the transporters seem not to have anything like our hard drives, though they do have a kind of storage. To do some Wild Mass Guessing, I'm thinking that the Duotronic and Isolinear technology they mention using in the future are actually greatly sophisticated versions of our analogue technology. While the exact nature of these new technologies is never detailed (because they're Phlebotinum, after all), I'm thinking that since transporters work with material down to the quantum level (with its Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle), they are unable to quantify the objects and people they transport as data; those storage buffers are more like a tape or an old LP than any kind of digital disc or hard drive; as such, a high-quality pattern buffer (such as the one storing Scotty and his doomed comrade) might be able to maintain the integrity of a stored pattern for a very long time the way a golden LP can store a sound pattern for eons, whereas a somewhat cheaper and lower-quality buffer can only store it for a short while the way a vinyl LP might only store a sound pattern for several decades. (The Cardassians who built the transporters on Deep Space Nine, for instance, seemed to value any given technology's immediate effectiveness over its long-term efficiency, so theirs was probably a lower-quality pattern buffer.)
  
  Whatever the buffer's quality might be, however, the pattern would degrade with each attempt at materialization just as an old LP's sound quality degrades a bit each time it's played. Considering the horrific things the misplacing of just a few molecules could do to people at the cellular level (such as puncturing their cell membranes or shattering their DNA), such degradation would make it virtually impossible to keep a humanoid "on file" for more than one or two attempts at re-materialization before he or she (or it) would be unrecoverable. "Save points" for humanoids are therefore highly unreliable and only used as a last resort as in Scotty's case.
• This kind of broaches a question about medicine and transporters: There have been a number of instances (The Enemy Within, Lonely Among Us, Unnatural selection, et al.), in which the transporter has been used to cure various afflictions. In Unnatural Selection, a major plot point involves the crew frantically searching the ship for a sample of Dr. Pulaski's DNA because she doesn't have a transporter record on file; planning to use it to restore her body to the state it was in before she became ill. If they can use the transporter like this, shouldn't it be a virtual panacea for everyone who has a transporter pattern filed away? Why don't they use the transporters to treat everything from a broken bones to ebola?

Super-Special Holodeck Batteries?

• Here's one - why do the holodecks run on a different and incompatible power source than the rest of the ship? Voyager sometimes barely had enough power to keep the lights on and the air recycling, but there was plenty of juice for Tom Paris to play "Captain Proton". And even with that, you're telling me nobody in Starfleet has figured out how to fix this problem? I mean, Voyager's crew built a quantum slipstream drive from scratch and yet can't make a converter to turn holodeck power into ship power?
  • That was a Voodoo Shark to explain why they could let the writers play with the Holodeck when they were otherwise rationing power, especially replicator power. Their power troubles eased off after a while... your call whether that made it better or worse.
  • Possibly unintended Fridge Brilliance - with so many holodeck disasters such as Moriarity any whatnot in the past, the incompatible power source may have been a deliberate move on Starfleet's end so that power to the holodeck could be cut off immediately if necessary, without any rogue programs being able to divert power from another part of the ship in order to sustain themselves. The real problem could be less converting the power than overriding whatever system was put in place to keep the power source separate from the rest of the ship's systems. What's more confusing is that the EMH doesn't run on the same juice, or if he does, why they don't ration holodeck usage anyway so that they don't burn through his time too quickly.
  • I think the official explanation they came up with is that Ferengi have what's effectively exclusive rights to distribute holodeck technology, meaning that while it's installed on Federation starships regularly, every time they do it's because some Ferengi contracted it, probably for that entire class of starships or for a certain period of time. (Which explains why the holodeck looks different in every show.) It using an entirely separate and incompatible power source is probably a deliberate thing on the Ferengi's part... they probably see it as protecting their monopoly, and the Federation likely puts up with it because they made a treaty with the Ferengi at some point agreeing not to develop independent holodeck systems.

Unbeatable Cloaking Devices?

• Why is it that, 28 years after the Romulan Cloaking Device was discovered and reported by James Kirk, Starfleet still didn't have any countermeasures? During "Undiscovered Country," Spock and McCoy should not have had to jury-rig a torpedo to track the Klingon ship. Such devices should be standard. Sure, there's "Rule of Drama" and and what have you, but come on: Starfleet is responsible for protecting the Federation. One of its main enemies has a device that makes its ships invisible to the naked eye. They pass that device to Starfleet's other main enemy. And yet, Starfleet does nothing about it. Starfleet should have had countermeasures in place within a couple of years.
  • 1)To paraphrase Reed Richards: What makes you think they haven't tried and just couldn't?
    2) I imagine it's pretty hard to counter technology when agreed not to pursue your own version. It's like agreeing not to pursue radar technology and trying to perfect jamming and stealth tech.
  • They wouldn't even need to counter the technology. A cloaked starship may be essentially invisible, but it is still there. It still has mass, and it still moves through space. It still gives off exhaust emissions of some sort as it moves. It is still generating all sorts of energy. It might even have a magnetic signature. There are all sorts of ways they could hit it without having to take a wild ass guess, or having to Jury-rig a torpedo at the last minute. I know this way is more dramatic, but it just seems to me that Starfleet dropped the ball. It's just not well-thought out, in my view.
  • I recall reading in one of the books that the treaty between the Federation and the Romulans forbade the Federation from building their own cloaking devices.
  • I believe the episode with Riker's old ship, which hides by phasing inside of stuff... with predictable results... mentions that ALL cloaking technology for the Feddies is disallowed by treaty; the Klingons, not being bound by that treaty, have their cloaks. The treaty was a pretty big plot-point in Deep Space 9, with the Defiant.
  • Also, maybe they did, and in response the Klingons & Romulans improved their cloaking technology.
  • This non-canon website suggests that the additional mass of the Enterprise-B's engineering section houses a more powerful sensor array and targeting system designed to counter the type of Klingon bird-of-prey that so ravaged the Enterprise-A. Firing while cloaked was no longer a viable strategy. As for countering cloaking technology in general, one would assume that just like anything else there's escalation: they make stronger weapons so we make stronger shields, we make better sensors so they make better cloaks. And while the first cloaking devices might have just been invisible on the EM spectrum, later models hide pretty much all traces of a ship. Plus, stealth planes now still have mass, heat, velocity, magnetic signatures and still have SOME radar reflection but unless you're close enough to touch the plane, you're pretty much looking for a honeybee a mile in the air going 500MPH. Star Trek cloaks are never wholly foolproof but they usually require you to be pretty close to detect them, like in The Undiscovered Country where Chang's ship is so close to the Enterprise that Spock thinks its radiation signature is coming from their own ship.
  • Technology Marches On. We've seen them on-screen develop tactics to outwit the cloaking devices (Off hand, the Dominion had ways of detecting the Defiant when cloaked). The answer to finding ways to get around the cloak? Create a better cloak. It's clearly a useful technology, so instead of tossing it aside once a countermeasure is developed, they make a counter to the countermeasure.
  • In other words, it's an arms race.
  • Pretty much. As another example, in the Voyager episode "Prophecy", Voyager is attacked by a century-old Klingon battlecruiser. Because the cloaking device is antiquated as well, the crew is able to find the ship within a minute of being attacked.
  • This is actually shown on screen. When the cloaking device first appears in Balance of Terror, Spock is able to pick up the Romulan ship pretty easily, and the cloaking device affects the Romulan sensors enough that they can't easily detect the Enterprise. When the cloak makes its second appearance in The Enterprise Incident, it's been improved to be all but undetectable, and the whole point of the episode is to steal the new, improved cloaking device so the Starfleet eggheads can figure out a counter. Spock and the Romulan Commander even have a short discussion at the end of the episode about how the Romulans will soon learn to see through their own cloaks, and Spock replies that "military secrets are the most fleeting." Come Star Trek VI, and we have a Klingon ship that can fire while cloaked, which is supposed to be impossible, and yet Klingon ships from Next Gen cannot, with the Hand Wave that Starfleet found a way to negate that advantage. . . which they did, in the very film this new ship first appeared. In addition to no ship firing while cloaked (until the Scimitar in Nemesis) no one ever uses the "track the cloaked ship's plasma emissions" trick ever again, so it can be assumed that cloaking devices got good enough to mask the emissions, at the cost of once again not being able to power weapons while cloaked. In short, it's pretty well established that cloaking and sensor technologies are always changing, but those details are unimportant to all but the nerdiest of viewers, so they're glossed over for the sake of a 45-minute episode runtime.

Nature Abhors a Vacuum

Exposure to the vacuum of space will kill you instantly. There are many ways of doing so: asphyxiation, the sudden drop in air pressure forcing everything in your body to push out to reestablish equilibrium, sudden exposure to temperatures of three degrees Kelvin. Hell, we all know that the very, very mild cousins of any of these will be deadly even within the Earth's atmosphere; why else would our airplanes be airtight and include oxygen masks in their emergency equipment?

Yet in Trek vacuum exposure is survivable as long as you're holding onto something that's bolted down. If you're not you'll blow out the airlock and that can kill you, but if you're holding onto something you'll be just dandy. Take the Borg: First Chakotay in "Scorpion" and again Archer in "Regeneration" kill of a whole boatload of them by sealing sections that they're in and popping open the airlock. Dead. But in First Contact they walk around on the outside of the ship without EV suits—and when the redshirt that Picard and Worf take out there with them gets assimilated, he can have the mask of his helmet broken and survive. What sets these Borg apart seems to be that they've magnetized their feet, so they're anchored. Keep in mind that the whole plot of that movie hinged on the fact that destroying the biological component of a drone would leave the technological component unable to function. So the takeaway message is clear: As long as you're anchored, you'll live.

And it happens to our heroes all the time. In TNG's "Disaster," Crusher rattles off a list of negative health effects that vacuum exposure will cause, but none of them include instant death. A few seconds' exposure for Archer in "Augments" takes him out of commission for the rest of the episode, but in other episodes, like "Dramatis Personae" and "Deadlock," everyone's fine as soon as the hatch is sealed. We hear people threatening to beam people into space or throw them out the airlock, but even when we see it, the only thing apparently wrong with them is that they've been blown way out into the cosmos. (And by the way, when you're watching a battle scene, notice that a preferred way of saying "This ship is screwed" is to have some crew members blown out a hull breach.) As long as you're staying physically connected to something that's anchored down in or on the ship, relax! I'm half-surprised they didn't offer balcony seating in Ten Forward.

• You can actually survive a surprisingly long time in vacuum, with training/preparation. How many examples do we have of people who were exposed more than half a minute without ill effect? It's prettied up somewhat for the story, but the longest outgassing I can think of is in "Disaster," and after they get the air reestablished, the next time we see them is after medical treatment.
• Exposure to the cold of space is hardly instantly fatal, as there is no convection.
• This only accounts for the Borg, but: Star Trek has invisible atmospheric force fields as a staple, so if you're not scared of power failure you probably don't need a space suit. The ones on the outside of the hull presumably had something like this built in. No idea why the ones in Regeneration and Scorpion wouldn't have it though. In fact, you'd expect the Borg not to care much about air or pressure either, but...
  • What necessarily means that dumping those Borg out the airlock was an insta-kill? It simply got them off the ship, and it doesn't take much on the part of the ship to get far enough away that those drones couldn't survive a trip to get back to it - not only is space BIG, but these are ships capable of faster than light travel. Of course, if the ship IS in motion, then the fact that organic bodies weren't meant to travel at FTL speeds WOULD be an insta-kill, but it's not because of the vacuum of space.

Superspeed Evolution

• The Rigel system is home to several alien species, despite the fact that Rigel itself is a B-type star. Those stars only have a lifespan of less than 400 million years.
  • Are they explicitly indigenous? The Expanded Universe asserts that "Rigelians" are another offshoot of the Vulcans; like the Romulans but less warlike.
    • The canonical basis for the Vulcan/Rigelian link is the reference in "Journey to Babel" that they have similar blood chemistries. It's not clear if that makes them an offshoot like the Romulans or some case of convergent evolution like the Mintakans seem to be. But the other 'Rigelians', the ones from "The Cage," seem to be native to Rigel in any event.

The Uses and Misuses of the Metric System

• Star Trek as a whole has a strange relationship with the metric system. TOS wavers between metric and imperial measurements seemingly at random. TNG seems committed to the notion that the metric system prevails in the future, but sometimes the writers get the details hilariously wrong. In "Attached," Crusher and Picard act like going two kilometers to the Kes border is a significant distance. In "Gambit, Part II," Picard is described as being about two meters tall — which would make him a man Michael Jordan would look up to!
  • Possibly referenced in Star Trek: Nemesis. Shinzon (Picard's clone) says "I had hoped I'd hit two meters." Picard responds "as had I."
• Also, in "What You Leave Behind," Sisko states: "The Dominion is beaten and they know it, but they're going to make us pay for every kilometer of the planet." Considering that a kilometer is a measure of distance and not area, it's hard to make that make sense — granted, it would have been awkward for him to say "square kilometer" instead.
  • It's just a figure of speech, he's referencing the phrase "make them pay for every inch", as quoted on the Last Stand page.
• He could have said 'hectare', which is a more common way of measuring plots of land.
  • But one which the vast majority of people, who have never had to measure a square unit of landscape, would not be familiar with.

Lifesigns

• Here's a genuine headscratcher present across all of the multiple series: what the heck are life signs? How can you scan for something as nebulous and ill-defined as "life"? And how come the scan normally returns only intelligent life rather than every animal, plant, single-celled organism, etc.?
  • They have different ways of scanning for life and sometimes they have to alter their scans to be a bit more precise. Sometimes they can't read human lifesigns to locate a lost away team so they scan for Vulcan lifesigns instead. It's not perfect—like when the Reliant mistook the crew of the Botany Bay for "pre-animate matter"—but they can usually adjust their scans from broad to specific depending on the needs of the mission. As for why they normally pick up intelligent life, they often scan for humanoid life forms so it be as simple as "Is it alive and shaped like us?" Another more outlandish WMG would be some real-life technobabble: according to physicists like Eugene Wigner the simple fact of being a conscious being influences reality. Since the "Schrödinger's cat" thought experiment requires a conscious being to make the cat either dead or alive, maybe Star Trek uses quantum scanners to detect wave function collapse, which would be a telltale sign of some form of consciousness.
  • If your sensors are strong enough, it wouldn't actually be that hard. You look for a mass of interconnected heat with both the rhythm of a heart near the first heat center and a secondary heat center where the brain should be.
    • Yet when they first encounter the Borg, they fail to detect lifesigns from them, and the Borg presumably have hearts and brains.
    • Maybe the Borg are really well insulated?
    • Or possibly all the machinery and computer stuff integrated into a Borg drone obscures the body heat, pulse, etcetera.
    • Possibly I'm misremembering, but I seem to remember the Borg only showing life signs when they weren't physically connected to their cube (Borg are certainly detectable in First Contact, but the Federation might just have upgraded their tech by then) - if I'm right, this would imply the lifesign sensors scan for distinct neural patterns, and linking your brain directly to a Borg cube makes the sensors think you're just part of the cube's computer. (The test of this would be if lifesign sensors detect Data or Lore as life forms - does this ever happen?)
    • In the episode Brothers the Enterprise was incapable of detecting Data and Lore specifically because they are machines and not people. It is worth pointing out that much regarding the Borg was retconned after Q Who, my favourite being the regenerative hull that clearly no longer exists by First Contact.

Genetically engineered half-humans

• A fairly big point in star trek is genetic engineering being highly, highly illegal. Yet, genetic engineering is necessary to produce half-human (or other) hybrids, which is fully accepted. But no one ever brings this up. And it also presents a massive loophole for everyone who wants to circumvent the anti-genetic engineering law. Why would Bashir's parents do it the illegal way if they could have just combined their son with alien DNA instead?
  • It's not genetic engineering that's illegal, it's genetic augmentation. Genetic treatments to fix birth defects are fine, and probably cross-species mixing are also fine, but making a Space Marine is not. Also, mixing in alien DNA after the kid is born is probably going to be very, very difficult.
    • Sort of makes one wonder how the genetic engineering project underway in "Unnatural Selection" is legal, given what we later learn about Federation laws. In retrospect, Dr. Kingsley's line that the children were, "Not engineered, created" seems like she's using semantics to explain just how their work is legal.
    • It was legal because it was an episode done during a writer's strike that used an old, unused original series script with slight adaptations. It can probably be safely consigned to discontinuity since it's never, ever referenced again.
    • That was "The Child," not "Unnatural Selection."
  • Feel free to correct me, I can only recall one reference (in Enterprise) to genetic engineering being required to make a hybrid baby. It makes sense, but there are too many hybrids who were clearly the product of accidental pregnancies to assume that this is the case all the time (Tora Ziyal comes right to mind).
    • When Worf and Jadzia were discussing having children, Jadzia went to Dr. Bashir to get some sort of medical procedure done to make it a possibility. The episode doesn't say outright whether genetic engineering but it might've been, or it might not have been. Also, regarding hybrids at least in the case of Bajorans and Cardassians, there is a discussion on the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine page about how those two races had been interacting for millennia and neither had a taboo against genetic engineering, so it's possible that, either through natural or artificial sources, the two species were interfertile (who knows if their offspring would've been, though; since we never saw Ziyal or any other Bajoran/Cardassian have kids it's a matter of speculation). With humans, was there ever any hybrid we see that was explicitly an illegitimate or at least unplanned child? I can think of at least one (Alexander), suggesting that, as ludicrous as it may sound, maybe the major Alpha Quadrant races are interfertile in the Star Trek universe, possibly having something to do with the "shared DNA" mess from the TNG episode "The Chase". In that case, genetic engineering has nothing to do with producing hybrids, and therefore they wouldn't violate humanity's genetic engineering taboo.

Holo-program production times

How is everyone able to create new holo-programs at the speed that they do? In many episodes, like Tom Paris in author, author, it is implied people write holo-programs in a matter of hours. But those things have a ridiculous amount of complexity, and I doubt that every single model or person could have been pre-programmed, given the versatility in creating these things. It's simply absurd how little time it apparently takes to write a program.

• Part of it is a lot of automation. The example you reference, Tom's edit of Photons Be Free, is also implied to be just one or two scenes, which are half ripped off from the Doctor's work and half jammed together with something comparable to RPG Maker. Most holonovels are implied to take at least weeks. Individual Captain Proton episodes seem to take that long to make. Tom's Photons Be Free scene is probably heavily railroaded through the narrative he wants to write, as is the original PBF, because the Doctor is a hack. As for the character models, they're living in a world where people are scanned on the quantum level, taken apart in one place and put back together in another several times a week. Doesn't take much time to say "access transporter records for Crewman Doe and apply physical parameters to Character Jones."
• I was referring more to, say, the Talaxian resort model Neelix creates rather than the model of a person. Voyager never went to that place, nor has any other federation spaceship, so they wouldn't have the advanced scans. Yet Neelix is able to freely replicate the entire resort. Also, railroading would actually take more work than a open world in a sufficiently advanced engine; you would need to set up all the triggers rather than just inserting characters and locations. The closest proximation of this in current times seems to be editors or modding utilities for computer games, and even those that are simple to work with would take a lot more time to create a similar scenario.
• Lots of stock textures and fantastic natural-language voice control. That's not even a story, so it doesn't need narrative input. You can just say "I want a bartender behind the bar, and a surf instructor by the beach." If you don't like the stock appearances and personalities, you can say "no, more like this...". As I recall, he wasn't reproducing the staff in much detail, just the location. He probably spoke the whole thing into existence like how the TNG crew reconstructed the alien lab in "Schisms": "Show me a table. No, a metal table. No, this height..."
  • But with any custom objects, that would take a ridiculous amount of time. Again, the bar was a place voyager never visited, so the computer wouldn't know what anything looked like.
    • Given that the ship archives seem to hold ridiculous amounts of information about a wide range of things, it's not at all unreasonable that relatively detailed information about the bar (on Earth, regularly visited by Starfleet cadets and therefore a part of Starfleet culture) would be included simply For One Hundred Percent Completionism (it wouldn't be the most obscure thing by a long shot).
    • Even in the case of the Talaxian resort Neelix programs, just because Voyager never visited it, who's to say Neelix couldn't feed the computer information about it in other ways? Could be pictures, video footage, something of the sort, from which the computer then extrapolates textures, dimensions and other program elements, which Neelix can then tweak to get details right.
    • With the wonders of twenty-first century technology we can reconstruct 3D scenes from still camera frames. Considering that the Voyager crew are armed with holo-cameras (whatever those are) and tricorders, it's highly likely that holonovel authoring software can so something similar, but at much better accuracy and capturing more detail (including things like sounds and materials).
  • Maybe the most egregious case of this is in "Unification Part II" where Data, using an unfamiliar Romulan system, is able to whip up a fully realistic hologram of Commander Riker and two other Starfleet officers, seemingly in no time flat. The only flaw is that he doesn't get Riker's hair right! Okay, it is Data, but it stretches belief in any case.
    • To be fair, the Romulans likely had images of the security officers and Riker from both intelligence reports and recording their visual conversations with Starfleet vessels. Since this was Sela's office, Data could have gotten access to these images and create the holograms in a hurry. Also, the holograms didn't do much, so creating the program wouldn't be that hard for Data. As for Riker's beard, maybe Data was only able to access older images of Riker during the time he had, so he needed to add the beard in a hurry.

Why did they invent synthehol?

Alcoholic beverages are a cultural staple of humanity and have been so for thousands of years. Then along comes synthehol, a chemical substitute for alcohol that most people seem to think tastes worse than alcohol and is seemingly incapable of giving you a buzz. Now sure, there are plenty of times when you don't want to be impaired by alcohol, but there are plenty of other drinks you can have in those situations. Are we supposed to believe that while in the 23rd century people still enjoyed getting drunk but by the 24th century they're so squeaky clean that they're going to come down to Ten Forward after a hard day of saving the galaxy and enjoy a glass of nonalcoholic scotch just for the taste?

• There's a novel in the EU that proposes that synthehol does give you a buzz, it's just an easily-shaken buzz, so when Red Alert sounds, you can rub your eyes or whatever and be crystal clear at your post. Also don't forget the main selling point, no hangovers, no addiction.
  • This explanation seems to be borne out in canon too. Data tells Scotty: "It simulates the appearance, taste and smell of alcohol, but the intoxicating affects can be easily dismissed." That's not the same thing as saying that it is not intoxicating, the way 0-alcohol beer is.
• Another question about synthehol — a few early TNG novels were weirdly consistent in claiming that synthehol was invented by the Ferengi, including a "To the Ferengi!" toast when you knock back some of it. Where the heck did this scrap of lore come from? Was it part of the TNG bible that never actually made it into an episode?
• The only person who ever expressed distaste with synthehol (aside from the Klingons) was Scotty, who was very much used to having the real deal on hand (remember, the Enterprise once greeted the Klingon Chancellor with Romulan Ale that they just 'happened' to have on board. Also, given that there is every chance of a battle or a Negative Space W Edgie at any time, its a bad idea for 1/3 of the crew (those off duty) to be blitzed. Think of it as the equivalent of NA beer given to service members in combat zones: it simulates the taste and aids in morale and relaxation without the side effects that could impair mission capability.
  • Deep Space 9 seemed to get along just fine with its Chief Medical Officer, Chief of Operations, and Strategic Operations Officer periodically drunk on their off hours. It's really unlikely that having actual alcoholic beverages would lead to a third of the crew at any given time too intoxicated to perform their duty.
  • "Apocalypse Rising" makes reference to anti-intoxicant, as well.
  • Deep Space 9 is a space station, meaning that the station, being kept in one place, can monitor for threats approaching and the crew can take the appropriate preparations, which would probably include a way to sober up personnel instantly (the above mentioned anti-intoxicants, as well as the fact that they have shown various ways of clearing poisons from a person's body almost instantly with a single injection). On a ship like the Enterprise the crew is always flying towards the danger at Warp 9, so they need to be ready at all times.
    • Being a space station doesn't change the fact they need to be ready on a moment's notice. There could be terrorists or saboteurs, the Dominion coming out of the Wormhole, Cardassians a short distance from Bajor and DS9, or even just a medical emergency on one of the many transports going to and from the station. If the Enterprise can scan nebulae, broker trade deals, and survey planets with children and civilians onboard, it can do so with a handful of off-duty crew having an alcoholic beverage. It may be that alcohol is not allowed to be served while on combat missions or in certain regions of space like along the Neutral Zone or Cardassian DMZ.
    • Exactly. While I have no insights into real life militaries, I would gather they are much the same situation: important people can indeed be incapacitated from time to time, because the chain of command allows for redundancy. If it seems otherwise, it's because of Star Trek's bad case of The Main Characters Do Everything.

That replicated crap

• How exactly does food taste blander or worse in any way when replicated (as Eddington complains, for example)? Does the technology completely copy matter or not? If so, why wouldn't they create the stored file from the freshest, most organic, most traditionally grown tomato they could find, and every replicated tomato would taste just as good. If not, then what exactly is replication? Not reproducing the object molecule for molecule, apparently. Also, how can there be a substance that can't be replicated (latinum)? Why not?
  • It seems to be more like the difference between food that has been prepared fresh and something that was just tossed in the microwave and nuked. The fresh prepared food will almost always be more pleasing to the palate than a microwave dinner and, just as there are people who can tell now if something is fresh, reheated, or microwaved, there are people who's palates are sensitive enough that they can taste that the replicated food isn't 'fresh'. As for latinum and other things that can't be replicated, it stands to reason that it can be replicated, but that latinum has some special chemical property that can't be recreated with the computer, or some other way of detecting that it isn't genuine, just like now there are many ways to catch counterfeit money.
    • Well, the reason people can tell the difference between fresh and microwaved dinners is because the two are quite different chemically. If replication does really copy things molecule for molecule, then it should be impossible to tell the difference between a fresh dinner and the replication of a fresh dinner. Palates *can't* be that sensitive because palates can only detect molecular patterns. The analogy is more like being able to tell from reading a PDF file if your computer's accessing the hard drive that file was first saved to. As for the latinum, that's possible, but it raises further questions about how replication works (or doesn't work).
  • Might just be a mental thing. People assume that fresh tastes better than replicated, so their brains somehow fool their taste buds into thinking it's inferior. Like if you eat green ketchup; for most people who see it first, it tastes weird, even though it's exactly the same as the red variety otherwise. There is also a perception, that "real" things are better than "artificial" ones. For example, in the real world diamonds can be manufactured, since they are nothing more than crystallized carbon. But many people prefer natural diamonds in jewelry (especially engagement rings) even though the manufactured kind often have fewer flaws, because natural ones are perceived as "real" while artificial ones are considered to be "fake", and thus have lower perceived value.
  • With the latinum, I figure it can be replicated, just at too great a cost in resources to be feasible. Several episodes hinted that replicators are basically hooked up to matter banks full of common elements. If you want to produce some of the more exotic elements, you presumably have to use some form of nuclear fusion which is very energy-intensive to do so. This makes it very similar to a hot fusion process we have for turning lead into gold right now; which nobody uses for this purpose, however, since the amount of gold it produces in return for all the energy poured into it is too trifling to be at all profitable. The Ferengi presumably picked latinum to be their new currency when it became obvious it was one of these truly rare elements that could never be inflated and would therefore never lose value.
    • The novel Balance of Power asserts that latinum can't be replicated and clarifies that as the reason it's used as currency, aside from its rarity. Trying to do so causes an error because there's just some part of its molecular structure that the replication process can't deal with. Putting gold-pressed latinum (of which only a tiny part is actually latinum) into a replicator to be reproduced actually spits out a substance called chauseum, a somewhat similar but still easily visually distinct substance. (Chauseum is apparently still very popular as something to make jewelry and watches and whatnot out of, essentially being seen as a slight step up from gold since it's still slightly closer to latinum.)
  • It may be that the replicated meals are all exactly the same, having been originally scanned from the best example of that dish they could prepare. Every time you order it, it's exactly the same with no difference at all in saltiness, texture, portion, whatever. And they'll probably have had the recipes meant to be as universally appealing as possible so if you like your chili to have a bit more spice then you're kinda out of luck. With all that in mind it's not so surprising that you'd start to crave the subtle changes in a dish that's made from scratch.
    • This explanation is brilliant and convincing. Replicators should indeed leave out the random and the particular in favor of standardization.
    • I like it in general. Of course it has to work at the genetic level too, because we know that sometimes the crew replicates raw ingredients and cooks with those, and Eddington complains that even those aren't up to par. So people crave small genetic variations in tomatoes and other raw ingredients too. This doesn't work for Danilo's complaint in TNG's "Up The Long Ladder" when he tastes replicated whiskey for the first time and complains that it "has no bite" (he couldn't have been tired of it already); but he was prejudiced against replicated food from the start, so the mental thing could kick in there. (And he did like the replicated Klingon drink Chech'tluth.)
    • There's whiskey and there's whiskey (not to mention whisky). It's possible (likely) that Danilo simply didn't like the particular kind he was given. Maybe it's set to produce Jack Daniels by default. Wouldn't blame him.
    • It's also possible that Eddington's complaint was specific to the Cardassian replicators on Deep Space 9, which might not be as good at replicating produce as the Starfleet models.
    • I believe he actually makes this comment on a runabout.
    • He was in fact making the comment about a very basic form of pre-prepared and pre-assembled meal that Sisko orders him which looks a lot like one of the TV dinners mentioned earlier in this headscratcher. Sisko obviously didn't care to replicate him the good stuff, even if the replicator had the good stuff on file.

Files can't be copied, only moved

I've seen this in a few TV series but it stands out the most here- writers seem clueless to the functionality of computers, especially when it comes to files and data backup.

Files are constantly moved around as if they were hard copy paper prints. Take a file from the ship's computer and it's suddenly gone. The ability to copy files doesn't seem to exist. The crew often detects files have been accessed because said files are magically gone.

Isn't this just a bit unbelievable even by the standards of when the show was written? This doesn't even seem to be a major issue in the 1960s episodes, but is common throughout the TNG/DS9/VOY era when DOS and Windows were already around and file copying was already a capability. Making copies of floppy discs was already a major issue for software piracy in the 80s, yet in Trek's rules, the ability doesn't seem to exist. Jadzia wants to borrow a few isolinear rods from Worf containing Klingon opera recordings, and he whines about getting them back, rather than just making new copies, or hell, playing said files from the federation archives.

I know the idea of copyrights do exist amidst a few non-Federation cultures but the Federation doesn't uphold it within the Federation, and it seems many things that should be in a free historical archive available to anyone are still inaccessible because no one understands the concept of copying a file.

Strangely, the DO manage to suddenly realize how to copy files when data makes a backup of his memories in B4's brain. Lucky for him the rules of file copying were observed here, otherwise he'd be in B4's body and Data would be an empty shell.

• Allowing this sort of thing makes it a whoooooole lot more difficult (and interesting, but eh, effort) to write AI characters.

Why are there no AI operated starships?

• In The Next Generation, Voyager and Deep Space 9 we see that the Federation can create AI holodeck characters who are capable of learning and independent judgement. Why, then, aren't A.I.s put in charge of flying starships? Even if the bigger ships with more complex missions (like the Enterprise) still need the experience and intuition of real people, you'd think AI operated ships would be perfect for simpler tasks like reconnaissance or bombing enemy bases? Yet it always seem to be the main characters who end up doing these. Presumably the Federation could've saved countless lives in cases like the Dominion War or the Battle of Wolf 359, if they'd used A.I.s instead of organic crews.
  • The first starship that we know of that had holo-emitters outside of the holodeck and sickbay was the USS Prometheus launched in 2374 - the Dominion war ended in 2375 so it was much too late to utilize semi-intelligent holograms in battle. Remember that fully interactive holograms are only about ten years old going by Picard and Riker's amazed reactions to the Minuet hologram in season one. Incidentally standard Federation holograms have the illusion of free will and independent judgement, they are not AI in the truest sense - think of them like video game characters taken to the next level. That is why Data, Moriarity and the Doctor are so unique because they have reached a level of sapience approaching or equal to a human. So yes, whilst you could program one for simple tasks like running freight, actual command would be beyond what you would willingly trust a hologram with. The technology is clearly getting there though.
    • The starships don't necessary have to be equipped with a holographic crew... Why not just build ships that are directly run by their computers? If the computers can run the sort of extremely complex, self-adjusting simulations that holodeck plays require, surely they could be programmed to do stuff like reconnaissance flights? Hell, non-manned flying ships are already being developed today, why don't they have them in the 24th century?
    • I wouldn't be surprised if they are afraid to take the chance. The M5 computer in the Original series was basically this and it ended up nearly destroying a small fleet of starships when it malfunctioned. It could be argued that a hundred years is a long time to hold a grudge but then the Federation have been holding a grudge against genetic engineering since the mid-1990's so it has a basis in canon.
    • Not to mention the time Data hijacked the Enterprise because of some hidden code, or all the other times a computer went wrong or was hacked. There are plenty of powers in the Alpha Quadrant with ability to hack Federation Computers, so it is not analogous to the current situation where the people we are using drones against cannot hack them out of the sky. I could understand them being careful about handing over complete control. You'd want at least a capable skeleton crew on one just in case. Also, the primary jobs of most Starships are carrying people who want to enjoy the universe and study it first hand. Combat and security is a non-primary objective, exploration and self-actualization is.
    • There may also be legalistic grounds for needing actual people on board a starship, that aren't quite so high-minded. A fully-automated ship would be classified as a probe, not a Starfleet vessel per se, and it probably can't be authorized to do things like open diplomatic relations, accept an adversary's surrender, deliver an ultimatum, or establish a claim upon natural resources in the Federation's name.

Easily Hackable Computers/No Security Software or User Permission Levels?

• Seen more in the later series and movies but why is it that every Federation starship's computers can be easily hacked, overridden or otherwise subverted in some way even by alien species who may not be familiar with the layout of the interface. And why is it that they can seem to do this from any terminal on the ship to go as far as to lock out other more critical terminals? I lost count of the number of times the monster of the week or the traitor or negative space wedgie some how takes control of the entirety of the ship's most important systems...via a small side terminal in the mess hall or in a random corridor or even the holodeck. Has Starfleet not heard of security software or user permission levels? In real life, I'm sure the entertainment system on a warship would not give access to the on board weaponry.
  • Chalk it up to cultural blindspot. The Federation's philosophy is that people can be trusted, in fact we've seen several times that paranoia and mistrust are one of the Federation's biggest hot-buttons^note understandable in a group of planets that were formed in the wake of their own planetary apocalypses borne of mistrust and paranoia, that mistrust should be the most mistrusted thing. Most people within the Federation are actually trustworthy and intelligent people (read:boring) who do nothing to attract 45 minutes worth of drama. So in a society which holds that everyone can be trusted, and is full of trustworthy people, they have their default settings for everything be open because they don't see it as a major problem.
  • I can accept that a cultural blindspot may be to blame. But that doesn't explain why they don't implement more stringent safety measures in later series and moves given the repeated security breaches caused by, if not their own traitors then other species on board. On a related note, how do Starfleet personnel know how to subvert the computers on alien species terminals anyway, especially in Voyager when they either haven't encountered the species before. Do all computers operate on a common GUI layout?
  • As regards the ease of hacking, it was actually a minor plot point in an early episode of TNG (The Neutral Zone) that Starfleet had become so laid-back it didn't even have locks on the doors to the bridge. Presumably they started shaping up a bit after the various shocks they received during the series.
  • As regards the accessibility of command systems from any terminal on the ship, this makes perfect sense as they're all just terminals of a single distributed computer system, not standalone devices. This is actually a rare good design decision on the part of Starfleet - if the Borg surprise attack while the captain is in the mess hall and blow out the decks between there and the bridge, you'd better hope that the ship can be piloted from the bar! (the fact that anyone else can apparently also pilot the ship from the bar is an authentication problem)

Why can some things be transported but not replicated?

• A common theme for certain plot-significant items is that they cannot be replicated and thus must be obtained via other means. However, those same impossible-to-replicate items are then often shown being casually transported as if it were no big deal. Replicators are just a derivation from transporter technology, predicated on the idea that if you can store the pattern of an object, you can make a copy of it. Yet when Rule of Drama dictates it, certain items just cannot be replicated, even if they are shown being transported.
  • The selective aversion of this has been demonstrated to extend all the way up to replicating entire human beings (TNG: "Second Chances") in cases of transporter operators getting creative with beaming techniques.
  • The commodity currency latinum, mostly mentioned in DS9, supposedly cannot be replicated, but can be transported.
  • In VOY: "The Omega Directive", it is revealed that both the Federation and the Borg experimented with creating the Omega Molecule, but neither had succeeded in creating one and keeping it stable for so much as a single second. However, when an unnamed, pre-warp, alien civilization in the Delta Quadrant created 200,000,000 of them and managed to keep them somewhat contained and stable, Voyager was able to site-to-site transport the entire lot of them right out of their containment field and into a device on the ship designed to safely break them down!
• There's a significant difference between taking something to move it from one place to another and creating it from scratch. Even if you have a template, you still have to pull the raw materials from somewhere. Maybe a replicator works best when it's transporting like with like (that is, it's really easy to turn iron to steel, or to form an iron cup) but it has real difficulty and is far more energy intensive when applying that same iron to fortify your breakfast cereal (and so it tastes worse). Creating theoretical particles, then, is a whole order of magnitude harder - you have to strip the protons, neutrons, and electrons from the original source material and re-arrange them in a stable pattern that's completely different. That sounds ... explosive. Or, worse, radioactive.
  • Contradicted in canon. Picard's explanation was that they had discovered that matter and energy are interchangeable (which is in fact true even in the real world). Atoms are nothing more than arrangements of protons, electrons and usually neutrons. This was dramatically demonstrated by what was essentially the replication of an exact copy of Will Riker. It has also been stated that the transporter does not have to rematerialize matter that it transports, it can allow it to remain as energy. Likewise, mass can seemingly come from or go to nowhere, as when Picard, Guinan, Ro and Keiko got de-aged to pre-teens. So even very complex manipulations of sub-atomic particles are possible (when the plot requires it).

Why are there no computer avatars?

• Bruce Maddox's dream in Measure of a Man was to create an army of disposable androids, and to do this, he needs to dissemble Data. Now, ethical considerations aside, the idea itself is brilliant. An android can work longer, harder, faster, further and better than almost any humanoid species in the galaxy. One of the arguments he uses for this is to point out just how much of a benefit Data's considerable abilities have been to the Enterprise, and how great it would be for every ship to have its own Data on board. However, in a civilization that has the technology to create holograms of such intelligence, creativity, interactivity and skill as the Doctor or Vic Fontaine, what is stopping every starship and space station in the Federation having a computer avatar on their bridge? At the very least it would be a significant improvement over the plodding, dry and uncreative computer voice that is often extremely unhelpful. And as a hologram in many ways is even hardier than an android as the only way to injure one is to take out the holo-emitter (which we know can be projected over a very wide area) the whole idea of a disposable mass-produced race of androids has been rendered obsolete anyway. There really is no reason whatsoever that this shouldn't have at least partly happened by the end of the series.
  • Because when you make a machine to do the job of a man, you take something away from the man. For a series that's praised for championing science and technological progress it, like a lot of sci-fi, is surprisingly luddite in its views on that there is a line that technology shouldn't cross.
  • Because it wouldn't be an improvement. There are two options: 1) the avatars are powered by "dumb AI" and are just a humanoid interface for the console. This actively hurts usability in literally every way, so is totally inappropriate for a command centre; 2) the avatars are powered by "smart AI" - in which case, they are the controlling officer, and there's no need for a console (and thus, again, no need for an avatar - or a bridge!). Either way you hit one of the problematic issues with harder sci-fi that leads to series adopting rules like the one above (that realistic application of technology results in no story to tell, or at least not the one the author wanted).

Stardates

• So little makes sense about Stardates that it's almost not worth getting into it (try to figure out, for example, how "Second Sight" (Stardate 47329.4) is the fourth anniversary of the Wolf 359 Massacre (c. 43989.1)). And indeed, their original function was to keep the timeline appropriately vague — it was TWOK before they firmly establish a 23rd century setting. My question is, what advantage do they have over system of dates we use today? In "The Neutral Zone," Data identifies the current year to the unfrozen 20th century folks as 2364 "By your calendar," as if the Gregorian Calendar is a thing of the past. Yet plenty of other times, four digit years get used as if this is still current practice (for a random example, in "Q2" Icheb identifies Kirk's five-year mission as ending in 2270). The character profiles we see in "Conundrum" list character's birth years per the Gregorian Calendar. Sometimes, including in Enterprise, it is implied that Stardates are of alien origins and not only used by humans... but one wonders what they're based upon and how everyone decided to agree to use them.
  • On Earth, it is 2379th year of the Gregorian calendar introduced in 1582, which itself was a refinement of the Julian calendar introduced in 45 BC, which was itself a reform of the Roman calendar, which superseded several over calendars such as the Alexandrian calendar, the lunar calendar and the Egyptian calendar. And that is leaving out all of the other calendars throughout history from different civilizations that were either conquered or wiped out. Do you see how complicated that all is? All of those dozens of calendars throughout the history of one planet? Now imagine what happened when the Federation was founded and we were suddenly deluged with the calendars of hundreds of other planets. How could we possibly dictate that the Gregorian calendar was in any way superior to the (most likely) highly logical system used by the Vulcans that claimed it in fact to be the year 256.8.97 of the fifteenth month? Stardates, that's how. A universal system for the entire Federation agreed upon by everyone that cancelled out any planetary dating system and instead went with some form of galactic time that encompassed everyone. I'm guessing that the continued use of the Gregorian calendar has everything to do with the fact that Starfleet HQ is based on Earth.
    • Any system of dating is arbitrary, yes, and no part of my post advocated that Earth should impose the Gregorian calendar on others. The question I posed was "what advantage do they have over system of dates we use today?", to which your answer appears to be, "Well it probably is superior!" — which is not only not an answer, but is a lazy dismissal. Also, I see no evidence that the Vulcans invented Stardates (the Xindi used them before they had substantial contact with the Vulcans).
    • It is superior only in that it is inclusive and it takes planetary time out of the equation which would be irrelevant to everyone else in the galaxy not on Earth.
    • No doubt that's the concept, but the fact that by the TNG era they've decided that 1000 units are equivalent to a year on Earth suggests that they are indeed connected with planetary time. The Abrams films makes it worse, since they use Stardates like 2258.42 which literally must correspond to year-date on the Gregorian calendar or something very much like it. The bafflingly random combinations of numbers of TOS are actually kind of preferable.

Use the EMH as an AI ship or at least a starship captain

• The EMH from Voyager seems to be eager to adopt a command role in a starship (he even seems regretful to relinquish this role in an episode). He is loyal to the Federation and as innovative a thinker as any of the crew (he sometimes comes up with the technobabble solution). He is shown to mainly be limited by the program uploaded into him, much like a person needs training in an area (he helped pull off a ruse when he had a command program uploaded into him). The Federation is interested in developing an AI run starship such as the M5 computer. The doctor would like this solution, why don't they upload his program into the ship's main computer with every possible program uploaded and have him run the whole ship? Even if he doesn't excel at particular areas, it would at least significantly reduce the crew needed. With the aid of interactive holograms (on Voyager he can lift and move things) such as himself which are simultaneously controlled by him, they could operate without other staff in sickbay. He could control all or most of the command functions from within the computer. If he is able, he could run engineering with the computer controlled holograms or with a skeleton staff. It would create a formidable ship. If no crew are needed then it would be immune to atmosphere loss, have no internal hallways big enough for boarding parties to enter (holograms can take a variety of shapes, this also helps with construction) and not worry about inertial dampeners, possibly pulling off maneuvers like a Romulan Drone ship. If he is able to be replicated then you could create many of these ships.
• This wouldn't violate the Federations no warship rule. Just call it can autonomous exploration ship or escort ship.
  • No reason it couldn't happen. The Federation just happens to be really behind on AI ethics, they only acknowledged the sapient rights of an android in 2365, for crying out loud!
  • Given that this was pretty much the entire plot of Message in a Bottle, there's definitely no technical obstacle. The Federation's cultural problems, on the other hand... Actually the episode goes even further: with no crew you wouldn't need the EMH personality program at all, as the Starfish Alien that is the ship's main AI can do literally everything by itself anyway.

Life Support Belts Out of Style?

• I suppose we'll never know the answer to this, but... how come we've gone from spacesuits to "life support belts"; around Kirk's time... but afterwards, back to spacesuits?
  • Of course, as I write this, all the many, many times their supposedly foolproof gadgets broke down for various reasons come to mind. Chances are, a few too many life support belts shorted out when a Negative Space Wedgie sneezed.
  • Gene Roddenberry declared Star Trek: The Animated Series (in which the life support belts appeared) to be non-canonical. That's why the belts weren't in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
• If a belt can provide life support, an entire suit can provide much MORE life support. When it comes to living, I want backup systems!
• The FASA RPG explained this by any hit inflicting over 10 points of damage would render the belt useless. This is one good punch or a grazing shot from any energy weapon.

Starfleet's Run By Reed Richards?

• Why can't anyone in Star Trek ever seem to take their technology and use it in remotely intelligent ways? After the episodes with the extra Riker and the return of Scotty, for example, you'd think that transporters would be retrofitted to be save points. The Borg - why do they send giant obvious ships, instead of small subtle ships with drones built to blend in with the natives, and get everybody at once, by releasing nanoprobes into the atmosphere, or at least convert key personnel, so as to undercut defenses and have all the important data, like Friend-Or-Foe identification, and shut-down codes BEFORE they start the fight. So much technology, so few people actually using it remotely intelligently.
  • The extra Riker created the same individual twice. Assuming it could be replicated, and they successfully accomplished it, it would be ridiculously immoral to actually do so. Scotty is a different case—he created a "save point," as you call it, but a) he couldn't get himself out, b) he couldn't do anything while inside it, and c) it didn't actually work—the other person locked in the transporter buffer degraded too much to be restored.
    • That, and having a 'save point' of you doesn't make the original any less dead. From a purely military standpoint the ability to photocopy a human is useful, but in practice that's the sort of thing that results in mutiny or military coup — there's a not unreasonable fear you'd be used as a Red Shirt.
  • The Borg aren't necessarily trying to conquer the Federation. Think about it: any conquered Federation territory would be too far to reinforce without transwarp and there's tons of non-Borg space in the Delta Quadrant, so why go after Earth for territory? There's tons of more advanced cultures in the Delta Quadrant, and the Borg have anything they could already want from the Federation through the Enterprise and the Neutral Zone outposts. The only plausible explanation for why they'd attack Earth in the first place is that they'd want to prepare them to be assimilated in a few decades or centuries, like with Species 116.
  • The Borg don't care. The Borg aren't Yeerks, subtly infiltrating society in order to conquer them before they're even aware of it. They're a force. If they lose a few vessels, if they lose a few drones, no big deal. There are more. There are always more. Which is why they're effective villains. They're as malicious and as dangerous as a hurricane.
    • Actually, in Dark Frontiers, when Seven and the Borg Queen are chit chatting, the Queen suggests a method of dispersing nanobots into a planet's atmosphere as a means of subtle assimilation. Given that in Scorpion Seven proposes a multi-gigatonne weapon that could spread the 8472 killing nanobots over LIGHTYEARS. You'd think that would be pretty handy.
    • She wanted to do that nanobots in the atmosphere thing because they'd had two straight-up invasions fail. They would have happily kept sending cubes against the fleet if each one had brought them a little closer to their goal, but the complete and utter lack of progress led them to want to try other things. (Though why "other things" didn't start with "Let's send five hundred cubes through this handy-dandy transwarp corridor we've never gotten around to using" is a valid question.)
  • Why rely so heavily on assimilation? Why not clone new drones with the desired combination of traits?
    • They would stagnate. The Borg know that they don't innovate, they merely add "biological and technological distinctiveness" to the Collective. Even their upgrades that they develop upon being introduced to new and interesting ways to destroy them is a technology stolen from another species. There is no species they could create that would be "perfect" enough for Borg sensibilities.
    • Except they do innovate, and have done so in most every major appearance in the franchise. To quote Riker, "They have the ability to analyze and adapt.” For several examples, look no further than Star Trek: First Contact, and their series of bat-shit crazy contingency plans—several of which are improvised on the spot. Frontal assault on Earth fails? Send an auxiliary vessel into the past to shell the site of Earth’s first warp flight and Ret-Gone Federation resistance. Enterprise unexpectedly follows them into the past? Beam a small contingent of drones aboard the ship as it curb stomps the sphere. Making slower progress than expected in assimilating Enterprise? Turn the ship’s main deflector dish into a beacon to contact the Collective and get reinforcements. Data locks you out of the main computer with an unbreakable encryption protocol? Capture him, and proceed to figuratively (and possibly literally?) seduce him to our side by offering him the chance to achieve his dream of becoming more human. Suffice to say, you don’t graft living tissue to an android’s body in a bizarre plan to manipulate him into giving you computer access if you lack creativity and imagination.
    • Also, they do clone, or breed in vitro, new drones-to-be; at least, that was the implication of the "nursery" scene in their first appearance. Assimilating adults is just faster, and adds new information.
    • An implication drawn by the characters with less than thirty seconds of visual observation. Probably safe to say they could have misunderstood what was going on in that room.

Why Don't Ya Just Beam Him?

• When site to site, or point to point transports have been demonstrated in multiple series, why have we never seen the following scenario:
  Hostile Boarding Party Member appears on Federation vessel. Random Federation Crew member: "Computer, execute Defense Protocol Epsilon 7 Alpha." Hostile Boarding Party Member reappears in space. Or, Weapon appears in every Federation Crew member's hand. Or, Federation Crew member disappears to safety. Or, Hostile Boarding Party Member's heart appears a meter to the left of Hostile Boarding Party Member. In short, why do they not have set protocols to arm and distribute the crew strategically via the transporter?
  • Site-to-site transporting is extremely power-intensive. Not to mention that the targeted crewman would have to be standing perfectly still or else the phaser would end up transported into their body by mistake.
    • The transporter-to-the-brig idea above is much more convenient, especially if you custom make the brig to have a transporter pad built in. Then it becomes point-to-pad, not point-to-point. Confiscating prisoner weapons? It's canon that a transporter can be preset to selectively choose what to transport, so that's no issue. (one running gag in any Academy-Days storyline is cadets infiltrating the transporter room immediately before its use by an intended victim, and setting it to not transport anything matching the molecular structure of nylon, rayon, or other common synthetic fibers found in cadet uniforms. Cue the victim appearing at his destination in falling-apart rags if not outright naked.). You can make that "transporter-to-the-escape-pod" if you prefer to run away from a fight.
  • Probably because a transporter lock has been shown to be blocked so easily it's surprising carrying around a piece of tissue paper wouldn't be all that a boarding party would need to prevent exactly what tactic. Anyone who is going to send a party to personally board a ship instead of just having it blasted would ensure that the transporters of the ship they are boarding isn't going to work on them before they even began, especially if they do it routinely.

Those Ships Need Seat Belts!

• Why are there no seat belts on the Bridge? They get knocked around often enough that you'd think some sort of restraining device would be only logical.
  • This is addressed in a deleted scene/alternate ending to Nemesis where Picard is shown some new features they've installed on the bridge, including a seat belt. Picard's response is along the lines of, "It's about time!"
  • A couple reasons, two Watsonian, one Doylian. Firstly, TOS, which introduced having characters fly around the bridge to increase tension, came out in the 60's when seatbelts were nowhere near as widespread or considered as neccesary in the cars the writers had the most expirience with, so this could fall under the Grandfather Clause. Plus, like the exploding consoles, plain old Rule of Drama. Also, it makes some in-universe sense, at least conceptually: a ride in a starship, even during takeoff and landing, is riduculously smooth, and crew members have to do a lot of walking around even for their normal jobs, so having to put on and take off a seatbelt everytime you need to check wiring somewhere (which is part of the bridge team's job description because The Main Characters Do Everything) might seem unnecesary, especially since, logically, a normal seatbelt wouldn't help in the kind of crashes a starship is likely to get into. After over a century of being thrashed by the klingons and romulans though, you'd think engineering would wise up, which was Picard's point, and something that's apparently happened sooner in the new timeline.

Holographic Doctors Ain't Got No Soul?

• Starting with the EMH on Voyager, and continuing with Vic Fontaine on Deep Space Nine (or maybe it's the other way around, I don't remember), we see that self-aware holograms are starting to become, if not commonplace, then at least not totally unheard of. This raises a huge issue: Doesn't the creation of self-aware computer programs to do your bidding more or less amount to slavery? Think about it. The EMH and Vic are both fully aware that they're holograms, yet neither (at least initially) is allowed to do anything except perform whatever function they were designed to do. Only the Doctor seems to see a problem with this; he complains all the time that crew members talk right past him as if he's not there, forget to turn him off before leaving sick bay, and any number of other indignities. Did nobody think about this when the idea of giving holograms consciousness was first floated? More to the point, what happened to the much-touted evolved sensibilities that the Federation is supposed to embody? Data was specifically stated to be a conscious, free being despite being artificially created rather than born; why doesn't anyone extend the same courtesy to holograms until they're beat over the head with it? Hell, the EMH program was even repurposed to produce menial laborers; if that doesn't scream Unfortunate Implications, I don't know what does.
  • Bear in mind that no EMH was ever supposed to be self-aware, the Doctor becoming so was an accident, and as the crew come to understand that he has become self-aware, they start to allow him time off, to upgrade his program with other abilities, and so on. The end of "Author, Author" is problematic, though, because it implies that all the menial labour holograms have become something close to people, which would make it slavery, and it doesn't make sense anyway: the Doctor becoming sapient was a result of a combination of the crew overcomplicating his program by trying to get him to do much more than he was supposed to be able to, and the fact that he was left on for far too long. The menial labour holograms, by contrast, were presumably reprogrammed for a very simple task, and not left on for extended periods of time. They shouldn't really have gained sapience.
    • Nope. The Doctor knew from the beginning that he was a hologram, and it was in the very first season that he started complaining about being mistreated by the crew. So the original point still stands. Plus, you still haven't addressed the problem of Vic Fontaine, who also knew he was a hologram; he just didn't complain about it because the crew treated him relatively well. The closest he came was when Nog was using the Holosuite as his rehabilitation facility, and Vic complained that he wasn't used to being on 24/7 (or whatever the hell clock they used on Deep Space Nine), and even then he didn't seem to hold it against Nog.
    • We're getting into P-zombie issues at this point, though. The Doctor said he was a hologram and complained about the crew, but a computer could be programmed to say "I'm a computer, and you guys suck" without being sentient. It's later revealed that the Doctor's program was mimicking his creator Dr. Zimmerman at first, and only later started branching off into things Zimmerman wouldn't have approved of, like raising a family and singing opera. So even though a hologram's saying things that make him sound sentient, that could just be a very advanced but still mindless AI running a "what would this character do" simulation. Though now we're getting into solipsism and the question of how to prove that anyone's really sentient at all, which is the kind of philosophical nightmares the Federation's probably trying not to get legally sucked into (which is likely why the court in "Author Author" ruled that the Doctor can be an author while specifying that the ruling does not necessarily mean he's sentient). On the other hand, they'll have to deal with it sooner or later...
    • What bugs me is the idea of sentient holograms in general, going all the way back to Moriarity. It's not that these weren't great characters and some great stories, but it just raises too many issues. First of all, there's Data. Data is made out to be this very unique, highly sophisticated android, the product of one man's entire life's work; a truly sentient form of artificial life. Data is something so special that top researchers can't duplicate him. But then the holodeck accidentally succeeds in creating an artificial life form more sophisticated than Data, with a full range of emotion and personality, who then goes on to create another program like himself. This very idea completely undermines Data's uniqueness. Secondly, consider that the holodeck is a part of the ship's computer, and all holodeck programs are stored there. So now we're suggesting that the Enterprise itself is capable of creating multiple living entities by itself, within itself. Doesn't it stand to reason that the Enterprise itself is capable of sentience? And thirdly, this bugs me because by the time we get to Author, Author (if you even count Voyager, which you shouldn't) we're now dealing with the issue of Hologram rights. This was just one of those things that I think got out of hand in Star Trek. Suddenly there's an entire race of accidentally created lifeforms. It just stretches my suspension of disbelief too far. One of the fundamental problems with Star Trek is that if you consider every episode, there's always some idea or piece of technology lying around that the characters never consider, like the way the transporter could essentially solve every single problem if you really think about it.
• It seems generally accepted that Vic Fontaine is a person; he certainly doesn't seem to operate by the normal hologram rules, what with the ability to turn himself on when he's been turned off. Okay, maybe he gained some measure if sentience, if not sapience, over time. But then, when the hidden Mafia subplot in his holosuite program switches on, the author of the program simply refuses to restore the status quo. First, if Vic is a person, isn't that reckless endangerment? And second, isn't that godawful customer service, refusing to disable an unwanted "feature" completely unrelated and in fact contrary to the purpose for which the program was purchased (to be a simple casino lounge)?
  • I think the possibility of simply resetting the program was brought up in that episode. However, that would also have erased Vic's memory from an unspecified period of time which is why they decided to play by the program's rules.
  • For the record, they never actually said in the episode that the safeties were disabled when the jack-in-the-box kicked in, so it's quite possible that the DS9 crew were never in any danger at all during their big heist. The only one in danger was Vic himself, and Bashir could always reset the program and bring Vic back if he had to, but that would have reset Vic's memory too. And perhaps...that was the entire purpose. Perhaps Felix was trying to open people's eyes about holographic rights by creating this sentient program, getting people attached to it, and then putting that program in danger. Suddenly the crew is willing to enact a complex plan, possibly even risking life and limb, to get rid of the jack-in-the-box. And not because they don't like the Mafia subplot, but because they want to help Vic. All of a sudden they realize they've stopped thinking about Vic as "just another hologram" and started thinking of him as a real person. And once they realize that, maybe they start looking at some of their other favorite holo-characters a little bit differently...
• Tangential question, why use holograms for emergency medical procedures, and not, say, physical robots? A deactivated robot would take up little space (a cupboard the size of a Borg alcove would do), carry its own power supply (allowing it to work anywhere on the ship), and have some off-line memory storage in case all power was lost.

The end of all life

• How hard is it to destroy all life on a planet? Hard, you'd say: after all, the large combined Romulan/Cardassian fleet in "The Die is Cast" planned to destroy the Founder's home world by bombarding its crust for an hour, and the Klingons committed their fleet to destroying the tribble home world. But this clashes with "The Chase," in which Nu'Daq destroys all life (as in: all life, not even any bacteria remaining) on Indri VIII, using a "plasma reaction." One ship does this, unseen, nobody knowing about it until it's too late. If wiping out all life on a planet is that easy, it's a wonder that some of the more duplicitous of the alien races don't do this all the time. True, it wouldn't be good if you want a planet to be useful real estate afterwards, but it'd be a great way to wipe out enemy base or home world (imagine if the Breen had opted to do this to Earth, for example).
  • It's probably a matter of how well that planet's inhabitants are equipped to discover and fight back against such a weapon. Total planetary destruction has always been a threat in Star Trek. Several people have already pointed out that the Genesis Torpedo from the Star Trek movies in Kirk's time could still serve as a planet-wrecker after it proved too unstable for its original purpose, which is why the Klingons were not too happy to see the Federation having it. Species 8472 from Star Trek: Voyager managed to smash an entire Borg planet into rubble with some coordinated firing from their bio-ships, and Neelix's backstory involved the Talaxians having had everyone on one of their moons nuked into oblivion with something called the Metryon Cascade. Even in Archer's time, the planet-busting Xindi were a completely credible threat to Earth, while over in the Mirror Universe a Constitution-class ship from just a hundred years into the future was a credible threat that could wipe out Earth's cities with its photon torpedoes. Arguably, Nu'Daq probably just got lucky. The Breen would have a harder time catching Earth napping later with the Dominion War in full swing, and Starfleet was undoubtedly hard at work coming up with counter-measures to every such potential attack. There's also the potential for Mutually Assured Destruction, which is part of why, despite some of our own unscrupulous peoples in their unscrupulous nations, we haven't exercised the capacity for wiping out each other's countries that we already have right now.
  • I think you're misremembering what happened in "The Chase". What Nu'Daq did was destroy the atmosphere of the planet. Obviously that would kill the vast majority of life-forms on that planet, but that's hardly the same as complete sterilization. And what the Cardassians and Romulans tried to do in "The Die Is Cast" was completely destroy the planet, not merely wipe out all life on it. They wanted to blast away the crust and the mantle, and I suppose if they had time they would have destroyed what was left after that as well. I don't know about you but that sounds like the sort of thing that would take a lot more time and effort than a mere "plasma reaction".
    • The fact that Nu'Daq set out to (and succeeded at) sterilizing the planet is a plot point; he was doing it to make sure nobody else could get the piece of the DNA-puzzle after him. It's unambiguous:
    Data: All life on the planet is being destroyed, sir.
    Riker: Why would anyone want to destroy all the life on an uninhabited, neutral planet with no strategic importance whatsoever?
    and later:
    Picard: I believe that one of you has a fragment from Indri Eight.
    Nu'Daq: Yes. And there will be no other samples from Indri Eight.
    Ocett: What is that supposed to mean?
    Picard: He destroyed the biosphere of the planet after he had taken the sample.
    Ocett: Typical Klingon thinking. Take what you want and destroy the rest.
    • Actually it is kind of ambiguous. If the Enterprise came upon a ship that had been attacked by space pirates who murdered everyone on board, would you fault them for saying the pirates "wiped out" or "killed every living thing" on the ship even though there are probably still bacteria and other microorganisms hanging around? Nu'Daq rendered the planet uninhabitable and killed every flora and fauna that could be used to take a DNA sample. That much is indisputable. But whether that's the same thing as "complete sterilization" is another matter. Considering his obsession with absolute precision, I think if Data had meant to say "the planet is completely sterilized" he would have.
    • Sterilization refers to the elimination of microbial life. DNA is contained in microbial life. The Enterprise is unable to collect any DNA from the planet after what Nu'Daq did to it. Q.E.D., what he did to it counts as sterilizing the planet. If there is ever a case for which "killed every living thing" and "complete sterilization" certainly coincide, this is it (for instance, the Cardassians and Romulans wouldn't have cared much about whether they kill microbes on the Changeling home world — Nu'Daq's whole point is killing everything down to the last microbe). But this distinction is a minor issue compared to the bigger point: what Nu'Daq does seems to be far too easy. The only thing I can think is that the when the Enterprise arrives as the "plasma reaction" is underway (soon to be accompanied by a dramatic special effect), and we don't know how long it took to that point — could be that it was a fairly slow process and they are just seeing its crescendo.

How their circadian clocks don't get screw up?

• Ok, here’s the thing: We all have something call the circadian rhythm which allows our brains to know what time is it and when to sleep. This depends in great deal on environmental lighting. If space ships have the same lighting all the time people would start suffering from a series of mental disorders and health issues. Yes, they turn off the lights in their rooms to sleep, but that’s not enough, your brain need to have different lightings during the day in order to function correctly. A lighting that make you feel that is clearly morning, afternoon and night. During whatever timeslot they choose as “nighttime” the lighting has to be very low and very high during the morning period, but in the series we see them having always the same lighting all the time, except when they go to sleep inside their rooms. In that scenario several problems like fatigue, diabetes, obesity and different sleep disorders would affect the crew. In fact current spacecrafts mimic the 24 hours lighting in favor of the astronauts’ health.
  • I'm certain that Voyager dimmed the lights at night, at least in the later seasons when Harry Kim was commanding the night shift. Which implies to me that every ship does, it just doesn't seem like it because this is a very old franchise that has suffered greatly in places from its low budget and dated studio filming techniques.
    • We see the changeover from the night to day shift in TNG in "Data's Day." Of course, it raises the question of why the problems that face the crew overwhelmingly happen during the "day."
    • Because that's when the alpha shift is, which is the one the main characters are on, and they're called the main characters for a reason: we tuned in to watch them deal with this week's negative space wedgie, not a bunch of "Who?"s from the gamma shift.
    • Well, you could easily have the main characters acting to deal with a crisis during the "night" period, even if it's outside of their usual shifts — that's what crises are about. I suspect it's more that the writing and production staff just had no interest in the whole concept of maintaining "day" and "night" with different lighting on a starship, which has the potential to confuse viewers even though it makes a certain amount of sense.

Picard's No Solid Snake

• Where do people on Star Trek learn their infiltration skills? Whenever anyone sneaks into a facility, or up on someone, they have no silenced weapons, night vision goggles, flash grenades, or, in case things get real messy, combat knives. If a guard accidentally discovers them, they don't silently put a bullet in his head or slit his throat. Instead, they take him out, from a distance, with a glowing, noisy beam of plasma. In Star Trek VI, the Undiscovered Country, for example, a sniper tries to take out the president (or kung fu master). The assassin fails but still. No self-respecting sniper would fire at a target with a noisy, glowing beam of plasma that can be traced back to the sniper's position. Every Star Trek show does this. When they're scoping tangos, they don't do it through rifle scopes. Hell, they usually don't have rifles to begin with. Usually, the only ordinance that they carry with them is their dustbusters which shoot noisy, glowing beams of plasma. Now, the Federation has a code against killing with hand weapons. Phasers are almost always set to stun, even if the other guy has a supernova disruptor pointed at them. But come on!
  • A couple points: First, when they have rifles, they don't need an optical scope, they have sensors and a display screen tied into a computer assist that lets them fire off-axis. Second, that I recall, when Starfleet crew were sneaking around, they beat down/nerve pinched/sedated opposition far more often than they used phasers. (I do, though, agree that knives would have been very helpful.) Third, Colonel West's scheme in STVI, with his Klingon disguise, would only have worked if he was seen—you can't blame someone you can't (mis)identify. Following from this, he likely didn't intend to survive; if the imposture was to be maintained, suicide by disintegration would have been far more practical than evading capture after being spotted.
    • Incidentally, there are a couple of notable exceptions. Janeway packed a Ka-Bar in "Macrocosm" (Seriously, it was an honest-to-goodness Ka-Bar Combat Knife). She retrieved it from an equipment locker aboard Voyager, implying that combat knives are, in fact, standard-issue aboard Starfleet ships, but nobody ever uses them. Later, in Star Trek: Enterprise, MACOs carry metallic side-handle stun batons. It's a really bizarre choice for an infantry weapon, but they do manage to come in handy on more than one occasion.
  • Because the Star Trek universe is populated by idiots who have never heard of the concept of "combined arms".
  • Degradation of warfare mentality due to a shift in combat norms. Most warp-capable species do the majority of their fighting via ship-to-ship combat, having found more enemies out in space than on their own worlds. Consequently, they don't employ snipers as often, and so have forgotten/neglected a lot of the applicable tactics for them.

Why don't they handle beaming cargo more efficiently?

• Whenever we see cargo being transported on board, usually it's a crate about the size of a beer cooler being beamed to the personnel transport pad. Wouldn't it make more sense to have transporter pads large enough to handle big cargo containers in the hold (and maybe move them with small tractor beams)? This is especially odd in Star Trek: Enterprise where the transport beams are a new technology and we are told they are mainly used to transport cargo for safety reasons. And then, the first we see it in use is with a pad about the right size for a person, used to beam in one of those small crates!
  • The Enterprise D had cargo transporters and tractor beams to move things around in the cargo bays. Small items carried with a person are transported on the personnel transporter pad and large pallets of stuff are transported to the cargo bays. With Enterprise the transporter was probably as big as they could make it, and that just happened to be big enough for a person. And if they needed those parts immediately then there was no point in waiting until another set of crates arrived so they could all be transported together.

Boarding Party Massacre

• Given the amount of control over the environment that we see on starships, it beggars belief that any hostile boarding party could ever seize one... yet they do with some regularity. As people have suggested elsewhere, if somebody beams on, beam them back. Or beam them to the brig. Or if you're feeling nasty, decorporalize them and leave them that way. Transporter not working? Turn off the lights. Turn off the heat. Turn off the gravity... or ramp it way up. Drop force fields wherever you feel like it. Worst comes to worst: open an airlock. Some of these strategies would be more drastic and risk more collateral damage than others, but the point is that there should be about a billion strategies to stop or at least slow down intruders, yet in episodes like "Rascals," "Basics, Part I" and too many others to count, our heroes just lean back as the bad guys waltz in.
  • Beaming has to deal with the fact you would have to drop your shields, and if you beam out the boarding party the enemy ships with antimatter warheads knows they have no reason to torpedo you while you have no shields. For the rest... Rule of Cool.
    • Having the shields up does not mean your transporters suddenly stop working — you can still beam people within your ship (or decorporalize them altogether).

Supersize Those Starships

• Sure, the starships in Star Trek look awesome, but is there any logistical reason why they have to be so huge? What are all those personnel for, anyway?
  • Not an exhaustive answer but, apart from the Defiant class, Starfleet general policy has always been not to build dedicated warships. Instead, every starship is designed as some kind of flying city, with an emphasis on scientific research.
  • In TOS, various claims are made that the facilities on board the Enterprise alone pretty much match anything available at a starbase, that the ship can wipe out an entire planet easily, and that the dilithium crystals were virtually inexhaustible as long as you weren't stressing the ship. Really, the ship often does provide a technological solution to Kirk's risky god-defeating habit; it was supposed to be the limitless pinnacle of imaginable human accomplishment. Therefore, the large ship makes a bit of sense... a lot of inspiration was taken from WWII-era U.S. naval ships in the design (Jeffries designed the TOS bridge to be kind of spartan) and sheer prodigiousness of the power a "starship" packs. And even though "starships" are supposed to be the biggest and baddest machines available to humans, the complement of the NCC-1701 doesn't come close to its 19th-21st century equivalents. The Enterprise-D does, it should be noted, but still cuts it on the small side compared to, say, a nuclear aircraft carrier (not a fair comparison because the Enterprise is more like a battleship than a carrier, which needs more crew to take care of the planes, but Star Trek IV did it first so nyeh nyeh).
    You have to bear in mind that a lot of these things were designed with the idea that Space Is an Ocean. For actual warships in real life, there is a lot of redundancy required so that parts of the crew can take shifts (sleep), and so parts of the crew can die in a war situation without leaving the ship helpless in any one of its capacities. And there are also a lot of things that require crew to keep an eye on, too; any given part of a ship might keep one to several people busy non-stop if the ship's operation demands it. Add a command structure on top of that. That's how you get the huge complements on ships with a wide field of capabilities—many of those capabilities will have specialists, and then there's necessary redundancy.
  • There's also something to be said for the psychological effect that a huge capital ship has on both friends and enemies whenever Starfleet wants to show the flag. To Federation citizens and allies, a behemoth like an Ambassador, Sovereign, or Galaxy-class starship rolling into town sends the message "Starfleet is here, and your problems are over." Enemies, on the other hand, get the message "Starfleet is here. Don't even think about starting any trouble." By the 24^th Century, Romulans seem to subscribe to that idea, as well; making the D'deridex-class warbird about twice the size of Starfleet's Galaxy-class; which is part of the reason that the universal reaction to a D'deridex de-cloaking anywhere in the vicinity is 'Oh, Crap!'
  • Also keep in mind that not all new starships are bigger and badder. Intrepid-class ships, for example, are smaller and more efficient. Starfleet uses both big and small ships depending on what's needed, just like any navy.

Time Cops Are Useless

• Remember those various groups of Time Police that kept on showing up in Voyager and Enterprise (and that Deep Space Nine tribble episode) to ensure that history didn't get changed? Um... where were they?
  • The rules of Time Travel vary. In some cases a self-confirming loop is created, such as in Time's Arrow, when discovering Data's head causes them to go back in time and leave Data's head there, enabling their relative past selves to discover it. Obviously though, in other cases there seems to be a risk of altering/damaging the timeline, or else why would they bother 'protecting' it? It's logical to suppose that the various factions can distinguish between the rules at play and only interfere when needed to.
  • They show up when a temporal incursion will change their timeline. For whatever reason, this temporal incursion created a new timeline not in line with previous canon. In essence if there are Time Cops in this world, all these events are what happened, to them. (The real world reason it created a second timeline was so they could, in essence, do a reboot but leave the old timeline intact.)
  • This question is vague and difficult to answer. It really depends on the circumstances. Time Cops in Star Trek are not omniscient demigods. Quite the opposite, in fact. You think space is big? Try adding time into the mix. That's an awfully big jurisdiction to police. So if you're wondering why the Department of Temporal Investigations (the guys from DS9) didn't do anything to prevent, say, the Defiant from going back in time to tribble town, or the Borg from assimilating pre-warp Earth, or Sisko from taking Gabriel Bell's place, the answer is actually quite simple: because they had no way of knowing any of these things were going to happen. Time cops from the future (Daniels from ENT, Braxton from VOY) have better knowledge of temporal physics and technology, but it's not a coincidence that they only show up when they need to fix something that affects them. The Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations novels go into great depth about this.

We've Been Boarded! Oh well...

• Any time a starship gets boarded, it annoys the heck out of me. Only occasionally do they use force fields. Also, couldn't they evacuate those areas and shut off life support or something? Or maybe shut the turbolift to the bridge? Or beam them into space (or if that's not cool) into the brig? The amount of times where intruders (or really anyone) can just walk in on the bridge like that is hilarious. And also, I noticed security never ever runs. They just walk there.
  • Shutting off life support to a whole deck wouldn't instantly suck all the air and heat out of the area (unless it's the main bridge or an area with an exterior door like the shuttlebay). Even when it has happened elsewhere on the ship, it takes hours to get to the point where it would be incapable of supporting life. As for beaming them into the brig - having a holding cell that you can beam people into and out of would kinda defeat the purpose of having one in the first place. I mean, any ship that can get close enough could just beam the prisoner off.
    • Transporters can be blocked, scrambled and jammed with trivial ease, so just keep some low-level jammers around the brig unless you're moving prisoners around. Hell, if I were designing a brig for ST (or any universe with teleportation tech for that matter), I'd build it so you can only get in and out via transporters. Good luck breaking out when there's no door.
    • Shutting off life support might not instantly kill everyone who wasn't in a spacesuit, but trapping the boarders in a forcefield and sucking their air out sure would. So would adjusting the temperature to a level of unendurable heat or cold. Then there's the option of pumping poison or knockout gas into that section. Given that the Enterprise has a fire control system that works by setting up a forcefield around the fire that kind of thing should be pretty easy. Then we have the canon tactic of turning up the gravity in one section so high your opponent can't stand up from Enterprise: In A Mirror Darkly. There are tons of nasty things you could do to any (living, organic) hostile fool enough to board your ship without a space suit with Star Trek technology, but for some reason hardly anybody ever seems to do them.
    • When Data shut down Bridge life-support in "Brothers", he had to bypass multiple independent safety systems to do it. Considering how easy it is to take over or corrupt Federation computer software, the risks aren't worth the rewards.
  • What about, say, increasing the gravity in a section? You could even have safeties in place so that the gravity can be increased beyond the ability of a boarding party to operate as an effective fighting force, but well short of the point where short exposure would cause serious permanent health effects. I'm not sure where the respective thresholds are exactly, but I'd imagine five or six G-forces would do the trick. Then the redshirts stand just beyond the affected areas and stun the intruders, who are too busy trying to stay on their feet even to think about returning fire. Then as soon as everyone's been neutralized, you restore the regular gravity to be extra-sure there are no lasting effects on the people you've trapped.
    • If it's Deep Space Nine or ENT, and we're fighting the enemy like we mean it, make it fifty G's instead of five, record the boarding party going splat, and send the video to the deceased enemies' superiors with instructions not to fuck with Starfleet.
    • Used in William Shatner's "Totality" trilogy. The alien beings from the invading "Totality" are made of Dark Matter, and don't really like gravity fields. They can barely stand one G, and disintegrate under higher weights. As they can impersonate people similarly to the Founders, Starfleet quickly institutes a policy of regularly turning up the gravity all over the ship, and keeping officers' quarters constantly on high.
  • Also, you can play with temperature. Humans can function just fine at temperatures well below those at which Klingons curl up into shivering balls. Since Klingons are humans' greatest enemies in TOS, the movies, and a season of Deep Space Nine, you'd think they'd have used it to their advantage once or twice. The same thing would work on Cardassians, too; they're comfortable at temperatures which are too warm for most other species, even non-humanoids like the Founders. So chances are they wouldn't be able to fight effectively if they boarded Deep Space Nine and O'Brien lowered the temperature to, say, 273 K (the freezing point of water).

Send Out the Clones

• Why is the Federation filled with luddites? How can such an advanced society be so hung up about clones and genetic engineering? Whenever a genetically engineered or cloned person appears, the Enterprise crew reacts with awe and dread. Sometimes, the appearance of a clone warrants a commercial break.
  • The Star Trek universe had some very bad experiences with gene engineering. The first large-scale effort unleashed a wave of augments that took over a fourth of the planet in the mid-80s and until the mid-90s, and the results were devastating... whenever the canon remembers them. Klingon attempts at genetic engineering on similar lines resulted in a plague that nearly killed off their entire species. Military technology enhancement projects or cloning likewise tend to have rather nasty results, presumably with the local universe (or at least Federation scientists) being predisposed to such issues. This has driven those fields to the edges of space and pseudoscience, with the resulting increase in similar mistakes and further enforced prejudices. The Federation Counsel is also a rather humans-only club, so they seem to suffer from a degree of Frankenstein syndrome.
    • That's not even mentioning when TNG episode with the genetically engineered uberkinder who had immune systems so effective, they killed normal people...
  • Wait, what? What on Earth gave you the impression that the Federation, the people who put touch screens on a pair of barbells, are in any way "luddites"?
  • The problem with cloning and genetic engineering seems to be more of a fear of the past. As they said in one episode, "For every Julian Bashir, there's a Khan Singh waiting in the wings." Given the abysmal catastrophes that cloning and genetic engineering have created in the past, no one wants to take the chance again.

  • But all of this emphasizes the Earth Is the Center of the Universe trope. The Eugenics Wars happened before humanity developed warp capability and were limited exclusively to Earth. The botched attempt to create Klingon Augments was an example of taking science that was already known to have bugs waiting to be fixed and injudiciously trying to implement it on a short timetable. None of this explains why the numerous other Federation species would have a ban on cloning and/or genetic engineering other than to accommodate human paranoia about it. On the other hand, some Federation species (e.g. Vulcans) have a suspiciously high number of very valuable adaptations. Is this because they found a little genetic fine-tuning "logical"? It would certainly account for why they are telepathic when Romulans do not appear to be. Betazoids are also suspicious, because their telepathy is just awesome (it works at really long range), which could leave one wondering why they even have the ability to speak vocally at all (after all, the Cairn can't). If their telepathy evolved very recently in their history, and their not-so-distant ancestors were not telepathic, that would explain why they can speak. But traits like that rarely spread through an entire species gene pool without either a lot of generations, or else artificial intervention.
  • It also raises the question of just what they're scared of in genetically enhanced people - Julian Bashir learns faster than normal humans and has better hand-eye coordination. Khan learns fast and has super-strength. This apparently makes them especially dangerous to normal humans. Vulcans and Klingons are stronger than humans, Vulcans and Betazoids are telepathic, Trill carry all the knowledge and experience of their past lives, but no one's scared of them. It can't be a problem with making "better" humans because that should also apply to humans having children with superhuman aliens and to giving Geordi a VISOR with a wider range of vision than human eyes. It can't be purely a fear of science either - Data has superhuman strength, coordination, learning and thinking speeds, and is potentially immortal, but no one's scared of him; they just argue over whether or not he's sapient. What's so special about genetic engineering?
  • Klingons and Vulcans do not have the possibility of becoming the masters of humanity. Besides judging by most Augments we know, is not only the superior strength and intelligence, is that they are mentally unstable and with anti-social tendencies.
    • Why don't Klingons and Vulcans have the possibility of becoming masters of humanity? The Klingons even tried - they were the enemy of the entire Federation in TOS. But after the Khitomer Accords were signed, no one had a problem with them.
    • Well, even if they can or not, humans can't do anything about it as there's no way to exterminate Klingons and Vulcans, but they do can avoid the existence of Augments all together by banning genetic manipulation.
    • Wait, you're arguing that if they had the chance, humans would go full-on Warhammer 40,000 and genocide everyone else?
    • Previous poster here. I don't get the reference because I only know about Warhammer by name, but no, my point that even if there are humans who distrust aliens for their power they can do much about it, but they do can control their own population.

Federation Armor

• Why doesn't anyone in the Federation wear armor, even if just in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which is military based? It wouldn't cost that much to put in the series, just a spray painted helmet or recycled and recolored paintball armor set should do the job for devoted combat infantry such as in the siege of AR-558. Even if phasers can't be blocked by any armor the Federation can make they could prove useful against blades which are often used during battles. It would be pretty cool to see during the series.
  • Same reason the phasers don't have sights and are about as ergonomic as a bat'leth.
  • Just to expand the above: the Kirk-era Starfleet did issue armor to security guards (and presumably marines); we see it in the films. This was the same era that also had actual rifles and pistols, uniforms that looked like uniforms, and no civilians on board. Times change. Half of the problem with the entire Dominion war was that it was being waged by a side that had forgotten most of the basics of combat, over preceding decades of peace mixed with overwhelming superior firepower - it would be baffling if the defenders at AR-558 had been properly trained and/or equipped.
  • Meta-reason: Cost for props. In Star Trek Online and Star Trek: Elite Force, they have personal shielding, because it's probably easier to make CG models of armor. They have armor in the movies because of the higher budget.
  • Starfleet battle dress, which we've seen on at least two occasions in DS9, seems to be made of a thick, rubber-like material. The garments offer no protection from disruptor fire—both Klingon and Dominion energy weapons have been shown to burn right through them—but they must serve some purpose if Starfleet issues them to its grunts. I'd speculate that these uniforms are Starfleet body armor, and that they offer some measure of protection against shell fragments, bladed weapons, and other kinetic trauma. No clue as to why troops fighting the Dominion don't have helmets, though.
  • I'd say that it's simply that beam weapons in general will go directly through most materials one could make body armor out of and the technology to make shields portable enough to be practical didn't exist until the STO era. Maybe Voyager gave it to the rest of the Federation when they got back?
    • Worf built a one-shot shield generator out of a combadge and a telegraph in Fistful of Datas.
    • Important word there, "one shot", and it only had to hold up to at most a couple of (very slow) physical projectiles, not a highly condensed energy beam.
    • Sure, but it demonstrates that personal shields are possible in principle and could probably be done much better under better conditions.

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