Star Trek: stuff that grinds my gears...

I have no problem with warp as a concept, its just that for the ghost image of the ship to still be visible that long the ship would have had to come about ten times as far away as the moon is from earth,
 
Early on I realized there's a certain canon of contrivance that a ST viewer needs to accept:

American English, British English and mental telepathy are the common language in the known and unknown universe.
Conveniently, mental telepathy sounds just like American English or British English.

98% of alien races, no matter how exotic or foreign, look like human actors with a layer of simple facial prosthetics, putty and paint. You would think at least an alien from a different gravitational strength could be dramatically more lanky or stocky with a different skeletal structure. But it seems that everyone is right at home at 1G.
I don't think it''s an oversight nor an issue of budget. I think it's already a part of basic Star Trek aesthetic. If ST was populated with aliens of all shapes and sizes it would not look like ST anymore.

Cocktail Parties - ST uses the social gathering (conference, party ...) as a plot device for informal dialogue between parties that wouldn't otherwise assemble in the depths of space. It's a useful device but the "Journey to Babel"-type gatherings is a staple of the ST universe. Irritates me just a little because it's an obvious contrivance. Deep Space 9 is an entire series based on this device.

Feds are morally superior to most new races. Mainly I'm talking about the first season of TNG which was enough to change me from an active viewer to passive viewer.

It seems the core characters are at the center of every single major political and scientific event in the galaxy. It just makes the ST universe seem small.
 
It seems the core characters are at the center of every single major political and scientific event in the galaxy. It just makes the ST universe seem small.

How about the only ship that can ever do something important always tends to be called Enterprise? For me, that was the biggest reason I never got into "Enterprise". They were flat-out embracing the notion.
 
I have no problem with warp as a concept, its just that for the ghost image of the ship to still be visible that long the ship would have had to come about ten times as far away as the moon is from earth,

Not too wade too deep into this, but I've always assumed that what they show us on the screen of two ships 100 yards away is just bending reality in order to get em both on screen.


In any real encounter between ships of that type there would be no reason they would ever be that close. In a ship that's moving 3 million miles per minute even at impulse, fighting at all in naked eye range would be absurd.
 
Well that's it in a nutshell isnt it?

Without both ships in visual range there is no Picard Maneuver, and if both are in visual range the thing just dosnt work.
 
Here's a video of the Picard Maneuver from the Star Trek Onmipedia CD released back in the 1900's. First part shows the battle from the Stargazer's perspective, while the second shows the battle from the Ferengi point of view.

 
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Not only are the cast and crew involved in every single major political and scientific event in the galaxy, but they also seem to routinely disobey direct orders, violate the prime objective and have totaled at least half a dozen starships under their command.
 
On a new tv series: Contemporary, successful TV series are far away from TNG. Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead. They're dark, they're gritty, strong character development, mature topics. I want to see a series like this set in the Klingon Empire facing a new civil war. Star Trek has designed this race of brutal, fearless warriors with their strong honor codex, the high council as government, rich lore and religion like Khaless etc. and even developed a new language and they simply don't use all this. I'm not saying no more starfleet, just try to give viewers something new instead of the new lousy starship that feels like somehting you've already seen 4 times.

i think it would be intesting idea too to make a totaly new series about races like the klingon. i am thinking for quite a while it would be rather cool how the borg developed into what they are. maybe star trek series from human/starfleet point of view is already to much done and all will be repeat of earlier stuff to much.

humanoid race like the borg accidently or not, get into technology of the nano probes and start a ravaging campaign to perfection. to me that sounds interesting to see.
 
Wanna know something that not only grinds my gears, but straight up pisses me off about star trek ???

I was online looking up Worfs history, because I started season 4 of DS9 and he was a new character to the station. So I know Dax and Him get married or whatever, but then I saw…..

Wait for it…….






DAX DIES !!!!!!

WTF ? !!!!!!!!!!!!


Not only was she my favorite character but I never even got to the episode Tears of the Prophets where she does die " supposedly by Gul Dukat, and it completely spoiled it for me

its a day till christmas,and I'm still upset about it when I found out a few days ago

LLAP ;(

Cole
 
Ohhh, I did not know that, I am new to the show and wasn't even alive in the 90s when it originally aired. And I also later found out that Ezri replaces her so your right she does not technically die since she is a trill, either way upsetting, but like you said it did air 17 years or so ago so I can't complain, Merry Christmas !!!!!
 
With Next Generation, everyone (okay, maybe not Barclay) was such a type-A workaholic, ladder-climbing type that I simply didn't buy into it from the perspective of a former military officer (I was an Army Captain when I got out).
Could you imagine the annual evaluation process to make rank in an organization like that? If you hadn't saved at least a dozen planets, you'd never get promoted! With peers like that, any infraction (or even perception of such from your rating chain) of any kind, no matter how slight, would end your career right there.
the old Trek showed what I always felt was a far more realistic military body, where people were... people. In STNG, I simply didn't see that at all.
 
With Next Generation, everyone (okay, maybe not Barclay) was such a type-A workaholic, ladder-climbing type that I simply didn't buy into it from the perspective of a former military officer (I was an Army Captain when I got out).
Could you imagine the annual evaluation process to make rank in an organization like that? If you hadn't saved at least a dozen planets, you'd never get promoted! With peers like that, any infraction (or even perception of such from your rating chain) of any kind, no matter how slight, would end your career right there.
the old Trek showed what I always felt was a far more realistic military body, where people were... people. In STNG, I simply didn't see that at all.

That same thing used to bother me, but then I realized something... The Enterprise was the flagship of the Federation. It was the one that exemplified what Starfleet meant. It was where ambassadors came to visit, royalty, all that stuff. Getting a posting to the Enterprise was a career-making assignment. Naturally, you'd want to crew it with the best of the best.

So to me, the crew of the Enterprise D and E were atypical of what you would find in Starfleet. I believe that the rest of Starfleet was just as varied in crew standards as anywhere else.
 
That same thing used to bother me, but then I realized something... The Enterprise was the flagship of the Federation. It was the one that exemplified what Starfleet meant. It was where ambassadors came to visit, royalty, all that stuff. Getting a posting to the Enterprise was a career-making assignment. Naturally, you'd want to crew it with the best of the best.

So to me, the crew of the Enterprise D and E were atypical of what you would find in Starfleet. I believe that the rest of Starfleet was just as varied in crew standards as anywhere else.
Fair enough, but where were the 'so-so' starships and crews? In the NG universe, I never recall seeing any of them.
 
Fair enough, but where were the 'so-so' starships and crews? In the NG universe, I never recall seeing any of them.

They dealt with that in ds9...which is one reason I liked that show so much. You did see federation officers who were corrupt, dishonest, lazy...

but not just that, they also strait up said, with characters like Jake, than unless you're type A, there's really no point to joining star fleet. Food and place to live are free to all humans, as is travel.

plus there's any number of ways to make a living that aren't as demanding. It's not like our society where people might join as a ticket out of poverty. For them, joining star fleet ONLY makes sense if you actually want it, and even then it's competitive to get in. So a few lazy types might get through, but for the most part, if you're not driven, you have about a thousand better options than Star Fleet.
 
So when everything is free and noone gets paid, who volunteers to ublock toilets?

Believe it or not, also answered in DS9. Rom volunteers for sanitation duty more than once. Apparently, after working for Quark for years, it's actually a step up.
 
Fair enough, but where were the 'so-so' starships and crews? In the NG universe, I never recall seeing any of them.

One example... TNG season 3, "Tin Man". They rendezvous with Riker's previous posting, the Excelsior-class Hood. Captain DeSoto asks Will if he's getting soft and comments on them getting all the cool assignments. "Me, I just haul my butt back and forth between starbases..." He, and Ben Maxwell, and Ed Jellico were all wonderfully human.

--Jonah
 
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