Hi! After reading opinions for a long time, I’ve realized that some episodes are quite controversial nowadays. For example, Star Trek: Voyager Season 4, Episode 17, “Retrospect,” has been compared to the #MeToo movement, with some people criticizing how it “handles rape culture unevenly” (as one IMDb review puts it).
This got me thinking: What other things do you feel Star Trek make wrong?
When being a “space military”, Starfleet is shockingly bad at being a “space military”.
Observe:
In the episode, Siege of AR-558, the Feds are defending a subspace relay behind cover, in an entrenched position with only one approach through a choke point and are getting the absolute SHIT kicked out of them. THIS IS A SOLVED PROBLEM. We solved it in the 19th century. The solution is a machine gun. Hell, put a specialized micro replicator that just makes bullets in place of the magazine and you essentially have an infinite ammo cheat.
In the episode A Fistful of Datas, Worf jury rigs a personal shield to deflect bullets. Awesome. Why is this not standard issue?
Why is the bridge, the nerve center of the ship, put on the top center of the saucer where it can be easily targeted and blown up?
Why does no one have pockets after the 22nd century?
In their defence, they explicitly say they are not space military. Everyone else just treats them as such. Just because they’ve got exploration cruisers armed like warships.
It’s not any more or less explodable than the rest of the ship. But we do see a good reason. The main screens on the bridge are physical on most ships. So if the master computer fails, they don’t lose visibility completely.
Only if you can power it, and if you can afford to power a replicator, chances are, you can power a phaser enough to be useful, and they’re far more versatile devices.
A regular gun using bullets is just a wasteful toy by comparison.
If anything, there’s the question if why they didn’t just run their phasers at wide beam, and deal with it that way.
There’s no good point. From memory, Worf has to dismantle his badge for it, and it doesn’t last for very long.
Most people just don’t go down where there are bullets flying, and most civilisations use energy weapons like laser cannons.
If bullets were more common, they probably would have them. Similar to why the Borg don’t block bullets with their shields.
Why have pockets if you can have everyone look like they’re in wetsuits? It’s like why no-one has first aid kits, or emergency supplies on them. Who has time for sensibility if you can have the ✨Aesthetique✨?
It’s worth mentioning they also had a battle bridge, that was buried away inside the ship. I accept them not using it much as a conceit to television (and set costs).
Given that enterprise was foremost a ship of exploration and diplomacy, and how many aliens ended up visiting the bridge. Having a “public” bridge and a battle bridge would make sense.
On AR-558 they’d been run down and were running out. Any heavy weapons they brought had been damaged or expired.
They’re not standard due to the lack of people firing bullets.
Because it’s not easily targeted, I don’t recall anyone deliberately targeting a bridge? Also there’s much more tempting targets and the non-military advantages outweigh the military disadvantages. All the same arguments about why humans have their brains and eyes all up on display rather than burried behind a case of bones!
No idea about the pockets thing. Probably because they’re not motivated by the acquisition of things they don’t think about places to put their things?
The number of creative solutions that are devised and then forgotten are too numerous to count. Occasionally there will be a call back to the solution for the diehard fans but I feel like its rare.
I eventually remember that it is what it is. It’s not a hard SciFi setting. The solution is often a bunch of science-sounding words and the deflector dish.
I may be a little fuzzy on the official version of how replicators work. Do they not need feedstock?
I’ve always kind of assumed that they were basically transporters, pulling raw materials out of storage to be materialized as the requested thing. And the similarity in the special effects for the two seems to support that.
Either way, I can’t help but think that an emplaced continuous-fire beam weapon would be more energy efficient and less prone to failure than a replicator-fed slugthrower.
Replicators use a base of neutral material that the system finds easy to use for turning into other stuff. For this kind of specialized application you might use materials close to the end result lowering the energy usage to extend the life of the unit. In DS9 they had self replicating mines that were networked so that the surrounding mines would replicate a detonated mine using the material of the detonated mine.
The real problem is shields. A slugthrower would be completely negated by a personal shield. Against a beam weapon it depends on how much energy it can absorb per second vs. what the beam can shoot.