5 ms·

Or my favorite order never heard on the bridge of Enterprise "nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure". Fine, often it would go against the ethos of wh

Or my favorite order never heard on the bridge of Enterprise "nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure". Fine, often it would go against the ethos of what they are trying to do. But sometimes, they could have beamed home the away team and proceeded to rain fiery death from above with photon torpedoes or whatever.

krapp 7y ago
They have phasers with enough power to boil the oceans of a planet, and torpedoes that can travel faster than light. Yet every conflict takes place at extremely close proximity, often on the same plane, as if they were ships in the age of sail. They have force fields with a critical flaw (harmonic resonance means any energy weapon using the same frequency as the shields can just shoot right through them) but whenever this is even mentioned, the shields have to be re-adjusted manually. Unauthorized people can appear on the ship, and crew can vanish from the ship, and the computer either doesn't notice, or does and never alerts anyone or activates any sort of countermeasures. The first officer can be sucked into a pocket universe and have his organs rearranged by non-Euclidean bug monsters and no one will ever know unless they happen to ask the computer where Riker is at the moment. It's been established that transporter buffers can be used to "back up" a person, even long term (in the TNG episode "Relics," Scotty is discovered having stored himself in a transporter buffer for decades with no ill effect.) Replicators can't do latinum and living tissue, but they work by literally converting energy into matter and assembling it into something atom by atom. At that resolution, there's no difference between anything and anything else, so there's no reason why replicators shouldn't be able to replicate anything. The former two items, along with the holodeck (which can create sentient life on request, BTW) should guarantee that no Federation citizen ever truly ages or dies, or even ever has to exist in a physical body. The Federation should be a post-human, post-singularity society. Yet for "plot reasons," none of these glitches (like the transporters being able to clone people simply by refracting the transporter beam) are ever harnessed for their real potential.
- Freak_NL 7y ago
  Star Trek: TNG made a teenage me wonder why starships encountering each other always appeared to have matched their orientations. Was there some kind of prearranged signal? A diplomatic code adhered to even by enemies? Just a general preference on all sides concerned preventing headaches and vague unheimlich feelings of discomfort? So many questions… If I was harassing the federation I would keep my ship at an awkward angle relative to theirs at all times just to keep them on edge. I was totally fine with the other plot holes though.
  - russellbeattie 7y ago
    That just needs a few lines of plot glue to fix that problem! Like, "Warp drives need to be oriented parallel to the ecliptic plane of surrounding celestial bodies to best calculate navigation and maximize their space bending effect. Naturally, ships keep this orientation at all times just in case."
  - pp19dd 7y ago
    Don't think it was necessarily a plot hole, albeit after the fact. Plenty of sci fi authors have taken similar approaches throughout the years. The idea is that in a spiral galaxy the natural tendency would be to stick with the orientation that matched the galactic plane along the right-handed spin (to determine up vs down) and some authors have even extended naval directional signals into space. This is from The Lost Fleet: "Within a solar system, directional references were always made to the world outside a ship so other ships could understand them. Anything above the plane of the system was up, anything below it down. The direction toward the sun was right, or starboard, (or even 'starward' as some urged), while the direction away from the sun was left, or port."
    - mcguire 7y ago
      "The direction toward the sun was right, or starboard, (or even 'starward' as some urged), while the direction away from the sun was left, or port."" Ehh. Ahh. "Port" and "starboard" should be relative to the bow/stern axis of the ship. Otherwise you'll have a hard time finding the head.
- _Microft 7y ago
  Don't forget that they do not have auto-aiming for their phasers and despite their advanced photonic torpedos, these are usually not homing either. (It might be that the Defiant's phasers, which were shooting these bolts instead of the continuous beams, were auto-aimed) (Don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved Star Trek. TNG and DS9 in particular).
  - krapp 7y ago
    Their torpedoes don't even have to be "homing." It should be possible for them to have onboard AIs smart enough to allow them to develop complex strategies, use swarming tactics, evasion, etc.
    - NickNameNick 7y ago
      Would it be ethical in trek to build an AI whose sole purpose was to commit suicide? John Carpenter's Dark Star covers this a little, but mainly for laughs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Star_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Star_(film)
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    In my headcanon, the somewhat low accuracy of weaponry in Star Trek even at close range is explained by ridiculous amounts of trek-tech electronic warfare going on. Every ship emits enough jamming, sensor ghosts, fake warp fields, whatnot, to keep enemies' computers busy trying to make sense of it. At long range you're guaranteed to not hit anything, so ships have to fight pretty close - which explains the ranges we see on-screen.
- ghaff 7y ago
  Larry Niven once wrote, in either an intro or separate essay, about the problems associated with building universes where you introduce extremely powerful technologies. As time goes on, it gets harder and harder to write around why $TECH can't be used to solve almost arbitrary problem.
  - mcguire 7y ago
    He's got another about why sci-fi mysteries are hard, too.
- HankB99 7y ago
  I've always been a bit disappointed in the weapons available far into the future. I tried watching one series and the opening scene involved good guys shooting at bad guys and hiding behind boulders and such. It just looked so much like the conflict sequence in High Noon. I couldn't watch further. And they still suffered from the "good guy bullets" vs. "bad guy bullets" phenomenon. A good guy can run unscathed (or with superficial wounds, at worst) through a hail of "bad guy bullets." Then they turn and fire three "good guy bullets" and five bad guys drop. Even my current favorite "The Expanse" has a lot of human aimed weapons. I expect that in the future that any weapons that fire a projectile would have an aiming system that would put the projectile dead on the target unless the target can take evasive action once a ballistic projectile is in flight. But really, I'd expect projectiles to be replaced by directed energy weapons by then. Maybe Star Trek gets that right with Phasors. Do Phasors ever miss? (Check that - should be Phasers. Phasors are weapons used by college math and physics professors.)
  - hef19898 7y ago
    Besides The Expanse, which gets a lot of the technical implications on space battle right, there are some other examples. One that comes to mind would be Aerotech, the aerospace rule set from Classic battletech. hard to play as a table top, but in space it works with vectors, thrust and accelaration. And orientation of craft in space. You can even realative speed at the beginning of a scenarion in different vectors. As I said, hard to keep track off but quite realistic. Another, non-game example of where weapons tech can take you, is Perry Rhoadan. german science fiction started in the 60s. Perry Rhoadan becomes immortal and leads humanity, and for periods the whole galaxy, for thousands of years. There you see actual technological progress, often stolen from other races. It leads to a point where a deus ex was used by authors to reign it back in (hyperspace resistance increased rendering everything too advanced useless). Point is, at the height of it, single shot starship weapons had aroud 2,000 GT TNT equivalent of energy, ships carried a lot of them which had and could be aimed at almost light speed to single point (in the physical sense as they had multilayered shields that could only be penetrated by point-fire, every "point" of the shiled had the same strength). i only wondered how ground combat would look like, as the battle armor and robots carried the same tech. I would assume a city would be reduced to sub-atomar dust within the first 10 minutes of an engangement or so. but from a technical point of view it made sense, same for power generation and computers (even if computers also got the actual processing power development wrong). Nice thing, they used real world ISO units for the most part, not like start trek which just throwns around units to sound scientific. Some ship examples: Accelaration: up to 980 km/sec^2, overlight factor up to 60 million, energy directly from hyperspace. So you can see why that, from an authors perspective, had to be rained in. when travel to the next couple of galaxies can be done in a private yacht, things get a little bit to crazy. EDIT: Typos, a lot... Sorry for that!
- mcguire 7y ago
  "It's been established that transporter buffers can be used to "back up" a person, even long term (in the TNG episode "Relics," Scotty is discovered having stored himself in a transporter buffer for decades with no ill effect.)" Well, teck-nik-ally,... Didn't another officer enter the transporter with Scott but not survive the process?
  - krapp 7y ago
    >Didn't another officer enter the transporter with Scott but not survive the process? I don't remember, but it's still feasible in-universe. Transporter accidents happen anyway.
- carapace 7y ago
  Artificial gravity & anti-gravity. Inertial dampeners that work well enough to prevent everyone being turned to jelly by accelerations but leak enough to toss people around the bridge. Disintegration rays that somehow know to stop disintegration at the soles of boots. The floor never gets disintegrated. Time travel. For better or worse, Star Trek is teleplay.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Given the strength of Trek weaponry, one photon would do. I remember reading somewhere that a standard photon torpedo carried 1.5 kg of antimatter on board, which is yield-equivalent to a Tsar bomba (almost 60 megaton). However, phasers could have been easily used for close air support, even from orbit - AFAIR Enterprise-D used them once as surgical tools for geoengineering. Most episodes seem to script around the need for air support, but I remember one case where it was at least acknowledged on-screen - one DS9 episode had a ground assault at an enemy position to destroy a under-repair gateway in it, and it was said early on that the surrounding building was strong enough that a torpedo strike from orbit would not necessarily destroy the target. Edit: My personal favorite case of missed opportunity is the use of transporters to beam armed torpedoes directly onto enemy ships. It was used once in a Voyager episode. It's an obvious, but sadly plot-killing tactic, that hasn't been sufficiently hand-waved away in the lore, so one has to wonder why nobody uses it. The StarGate series actually took that option seriously (the series was much smarter when it came to combat). In it, to the dismay of the species that provided humans with transporters, human ships often beamed nuclear warheads onto unsuspecting enemy vessels, achieving seemingly impossible victories.
- mcguire 7y ago
  "My personal favorite case of missed opportunity is the use of transporters to beam armed torpedoes directly onto enemy ships. It was used once in a Voyager episode. It's an obvious, but sadly plot-killing tactic, that hasn't been sufficiently hand-waved away in the lore, so one has to wonder why nobody uses it." Akshually... Transporters cannot penetrate shield, usually either incoming or outgoing. Usually.
  - krapp 7y ago
    Akshually... it depends on the writer, series and episode. The shields have the fatal flaw that anything operating at the same frequency can go right through them, including a transporter beam. That's come up as a plot point more than once.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > Transporters cannot penetrate shield, usually either incoming or outgoing. Usually. Except when they can, due to frequency matching, "technology generation" mismatch between shields and transporters, and countless of other one-off workarounds that happened. Think of every episode in which the Enterprise/Defiant/Voyager was boarded while in combat. But even when considering the regular case of shields blocking incoming and outgoing transport, there's plenty of opportunities to use transporters offensively. They could be used as surprise first strike weapon to initiate hostilities by immediately taking enemy ship out. They could be used to finish off an enemy in a one-to-one fight. They could be used in coordinated fashion in fleet battles, where whenever an enemy ship loses shields, one ship drops their own shields and transports some photons over while other ships cover the vulnerable friend from immediate fire. Etc. All in all, there are plenty of opportunities for offensive transporter use which were never explored in the series.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
zipwitch 7y ago
In the good old days, of usenet, James D. Nicoll had a signature that read: "Frankly, Captain, I feel interstellar diplomacy is out of our depth." "Ah, hence the nuclear weapons."

krapp 7y ago

They have phasers with enough power to boil the oceans of a planet, and torpedoes that can travel faster than light. Yet every conflict takes place at extremely close proximity, often on the same plane, as if they were ships in the age of sail. They have force fields with a critical flaw (harmonic resonance means any energy weapon using the same frequency as the shields can just shoot right through them) but whenever this is even mentioned, the shields have to be re-adjusted manually. Unauthorized people can appear on the ship, and crew can vanish from the ship, and the computer either doesn't notice, or does and never alerts anyone or activates any sort of countermeasures. The first officer can be sucked into a pocket universe and have his organs rearranged by non-Euclidean bug monsters and no one will ever know unless they happen to ask the computer where Riker is at the moment. It's been established that transporter buffers can be used to "back up" a person, even long term (in the TNG episode "Relics," Scotty is discovered having stored himself in a transporter buffer for decades with no ill effect.) Replicators can't do latinum and living tissue, but they work by literally converting energy into matter and assembling it into something atom by atom. At that resolution, there's no difference between anything and anything else, so there's no reason why replicators shouldn't be able to replicate anything. The former two items, along with the holodeck (which can create sentient life on request, BTW) should guarantee that no Federation citizen ever truly ages or dies, or even ever has to exist in a physical body. The Federation should be a post-human, post-singularity society. Yet for "plot reasons," none of these glitches (like the transporters being able to clone people simply by refracting the transporter beam) are ever harnessed for their real potential.

Freak_NL 7y ago
Star Trek: TNG made a teenage me wonder why starships encountering each other always appeared to have matched their orientations. Was there some kind of prearranged signal? A diplomatic code adhered to even by enemies? Just a general preference on all sides concerned preventing headaches and vague unheimlich feelings of discomfort? So many questions… If I was harassing the federation I would keep my ship at an awkward angle relative to theirs at all times just to keep them on edge. I was totally fine with the other plot holes though.
- russellbeattie 7y ago
  That just needs a few lines of plot glue to fix that problem! Like, "Warp drives need to be oriented parallel to the ecliptic plane of surrounding celestial bodies to best calculate navigation and maximize their space bending effect. Naturally, ships keep this orientation at all times just in case."
- pp19dd 7y ago
  Don't think it was necessarily a plot hole, albeit after the fact. Plenty of sci fi authors have taken similar approaches throughout the years. The idea is that in a spiral galaxy the natural tendency would be to stick with the orientation that matched the galactic plane along the right-handed spin (to determine up vs down) and some authors have even extended naval directional signals into space. This is from The Lost Fleet: "Within a solar system, directional references were always made to the world outside a ship so other ships could understand them. Anything above the plane of the system was up, anything below it down. The direction toward the sun was right, or starboard, (or even 'starward' as some urged), while the direction away from the sun was left, or port."
  - mcguire 7y ago
    "The direction toward the sun was right, or starboard, (or even 'starward' as some urged), while the direction away from the sun was left, or port."" Ehh. Ahh. "Port" and "starboard" should be relative to the bow/stern axis of the ship. Otherwise you'll have a hard time finding the head.
_Microft 7y ago
Don't forget that they do not have auto-aiming for their phasers and despite their advanced photonic torpedos, these are usually not homing either. (It might be that the Defiant's phasers, which were shooting these bolts instead of the continuous beams, were auto-aimed) (Don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved Star Trek. TNG and DS9 in particular).
- krapp 7y ago
  Their torpedoes don't even have to be "homing." It should be possible for them to have onboard AIs smart enough to allow them to develop complex strategies, use swarming tactics, evasion, etc.
  - NickNameNick 7y ago
    Would it be ethical in trek to build an AI whose sole purpose was to commit suicide? John Carpenter's Dark Star covers this a little, but mainly for laughs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Star_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Star_(film)
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  In my headcanon, the somewhat low accuracy of weaponry in Star Trek even at close range is explained by ridiculous amounts of trek-tech electronic warfare going on. Every ship emits enough jamming, sensor ghosts, fake warp fields, whatnot, to keep enemies' computers busy trying to make sense of it. At long range you're guaranteed to not hit anything, so ships have to fight pretty close - which explains the ranges we see on-screen.
ghaff 7y ago
Larry Niven once wrote, in either an intro or separate essay, about the problems associated with building universes where you introduce extremely powerful technologies. As time goes on, it gets harder and harder to write around why $TECH can't be used to solve almost arbitrary problem.
- mcguire 7y ago
  He's got another about why sci-fi mysteries are hard, too.
HankB99 7y ago
I've always been a bit disappointed in the weapons available far into the future. I tried watching one series and the opening scene involved good guys shooting at bad guys and hiding behind boulders and such. It just looked so much like the conflict sequence in High Noon. I couldn't watch further. And they still suffered from the "good guy bullets" vs. "bad guy bullets" phenomenon. A good guy can run unscathed (or with superficial wounds, at worst) through a hail of "bad guy bullets." Then they turn and fire three "good guy bullets" and five bad guys drop. Even my current favorite "The Expanse" has a lot of human aimed weapons. I expect that in the future that any weapons that fire a projectile would have an aiming system that would put the projectile dead on the target unless the target can take evasive action once a ballistic projectile is in flight. But really, I'd expect projectiles to be replaced by directed energy weapons by then. Maybe Star Trek gets that right with Phasors. Do Phasors ever miss? (Check that - should be Phasers. Phasors are weapons used by college math and physics professors.)
- hef19898 7y ago
  Besides The Expanse, which gets a lot of the technical implications on space battle right, there are some other examples. One that comes to mind would be Aerotech, the aerospace rule set from Classic battletech. hard to play as a table top, but in space it works with vectors, thrust and accelaration. And orientation of craft in space. You can even realative speed at the beginning of a scenarion in different vectors. As I said, hard to keep track off but quite realistic. Another, non-game example of where weapons tech can take you, is Perry Rhoadan. german science fiction started in the 60s. Perry Rhoadan becomes immortal and leads humanity, and for periods the whole galaxy, for thousands of years. There you see actual technological progress, often stolen from other races. It leads to a point where a deus ex was used by authors to reign it back in (hyperspace resistance increased rendering everything too advanced useless). Point is, at the height of it, single shot starship weapons had aroud 2,000 GT TNT equivalent of energy, ships carried a lot of them which had and could be aimed at almost light speed to single point (in the physical sense as they had multilayered shields that could only be penetrated by point-fire, every "point" of the shiled had the same strength). i only wondered how ground combat would look like, as the battle armor and robots carried the same tech. I would assume a city would be reduced to sub-atomar dust within the first 10 minutes of an engangement or so. but from a technical point of view it made sense, same for power generation and computers (even if computers also got the actual processing power development wrong). Nice thing, they used real world ISO units for the most part, not like start trek which just throwns around units to sound scientific. Some ship examples: Accelaration: up to 980 km/sec^2, overlight factor up to 60 million, energy directly from hyperspace. So you can see why that, from an authors perspective, had to be rained in. when travel to the next couple of galaxies can be done in a private yacht, things get a little bit to crazy. EDIT: Typos, a lot... Sorry for that!
mcguire 7y ago
"It's been established that transporter buffers can be used to "back up" a person, even long term (in the TNG episode "Relics," Scotty is discovered having stored himself in a transporter buffer for decades with no ill effect.)" Well, teck-nik-ally,... Didn't another officer enter the transporter with Scott but not survive the process?
- krapp 7y ago
  >Didn't another officer enter the transporter with Scott but not survive the process? I don't remember, but it's still feasible in-universe. Transporter accidents happen anyway.
carapace 7y ago
Artificial gravity & anti-gravity. Inertial dampeners that work well enough to prevent everyone being turned to jelly by accelerations but leak enough to toss people around the bridge. Disintegration rays that somehow know to stop disintegration at the soles of boots. The floor never gets disintegrated. Time travel. For better or worse, Star Trek is teleplay.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

Given the strength of Trek weaponry, one photon would do. I remember reading somewhere that a standard photon torpedo carried 1.5 kg of antimatter on board, which is yield-equivalent to a Tsar bomba (almost 60 megaton). However, phasers could have been easily used for close air support, even from orbit - AFAIR Enterprise-D used them once as surgical tools for geoengineering. Most episodes seem to script around the need for air support, but I remember one case where it was at least acknowledged on-screen - one DS9 episode had a ground assault at an enemy position to destroy a under-repair gateway in it, and it was said early on that the surrounding building was strong enough that a torpedo strike from orbit would not necessarily destroy the target. Edit: My personal favorite case of missed opportunity is the use of transporters to beam armed torpedoes directly onto enemy ships. It was used once in a Voyager episode. It's an obvious, but sadly plot-killing tactic, that hasn't been sufficiently hand-waved away in the lore, so one has to wonder why nobody uses it. The StarGate series actually took that option seriously (the series was much smarter when it came to combat). In it, to the dismay of the species that provided humans with transporters, human ships often beamed nuclear warheads onto unsuspecting enemy vessels, achieving seemingly impossible victories.

mcguire 7y ago
"My personal favorite case of missed opportunity is the use of transporters to beam armed torpedoes directly onto enemy ships. It was used once in a Voyager episode. It's an obvious, but sadly plot-killing tactic, that hasn't been sufficiently hand-waved away in the lore, so one has to wonder why nobody uses it." Akshually... Transporters cannot penetrate shield, usually either incoming or outgoing. Usually.
- krapp 7y ago
  Akshually... it depends on the writer, series and episode. The shields have the fatal flaw that anything operating at the same frequency can go right through them, including a transporter beam. That's come up as a plot point more than once.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > Transporters cannot penetrate shield, usually either incoming or outgoing. Usually. Except when they can, due to frequency matching, "technology generation" mismatch between shields and transporters, and countless of other one-off workarounds that happened. Think of every episode in which the Enterprise/Defiant/Voyager was boarded while in combat. But even when considering the regular case of shields blocking incoming and outgoing transport, there's plenty of opportunities to use transporters offensively. They could be used as surprise first strike weapon to initiate hostilities by immediately taking enemy ship out. They could be used to finish off an enemy in a one-to-one fight. They could be used in coordinated fashion in fleet battles, where whenever an enemy ship loses shields, one ship drops their own shields and transports some photons over while other ships cover the vulnerable friend from immediate fire. Etc. All in all, there are plenty of opportunities for offensive transporter use which were never explored in the series.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

zipwitch 7y ago

In the good old days, of usenet, James D. Nicoll had a signature that read: "Frankly, Captain, I feel interstellar diplomacy is out of our depth." "Ah, hence the nuclear weapons."