Star Trek: stuff that grinds my gears...

DavidS

Sr Member
Let me preface this by saying that I LOVE Star Trek. REAL trek that is...
I grew up on TNG while also watching reruns of TOS and of course all of the movies...
I never cared for DS9 when it came on but have more recently come to appreciate it as some of Trek's finest hour. Never much cared for VOY however it has it's moments and I find myself watching it (thanks to Netflix). Enterprise was surprisingly good but died a tragic death
.....and then along came JJ Abrams....
While the NuTrek is at the very least entertaining, I find myself not being able To enjoy them for the very most basic reasons.

People sometimes compare ST to Star Wars. The biggest difference is that SW has "the force" IE MAGIC. It's a plot device that allows this throw away narrative element that simplifies explanation.
Star Trek on the other hand had always been science based. Even if that science was fictional, it still stuck by rules (even if they did fluctuate slightly sometimes).
NuTrek just blew that away. Now suddenly we have starships that can A) be built in a planetary atmosphere B)re-enter a planetary atmosphere and then most absurdly C) be submerged in an ocean body! Hello JJ! Don't you know what inertial dampeners are!?! Read your tech manual!
But again that is just one minor thing wrong with NuTrek and is not the purpose of this thread. No, I do however want to discuss the logical decisions that take place in some of the realTrek.

For example. I was recently watching ST Generations:

-why is it every time you have modify the main deflector to emit an inverse save our ass pulse, that you have to go to "you're probably going to die" deck and climb monkey bars to get to the playing cards in the colored slots that modify it? You would think on such an advanced ship that there would just be a little toggle button next to the NOS button or something .....

-in Generations, it's pretty obvious they just wanted to blow up the Ent D. This ship has been through more stuff than any ship and gets bested by "a twenty year old" ship that was "retired due to defective plasma coils"
So ok I will go ahead and grant you that the Durass sisters elaborate plan of modifying Geordi's visor works. So why did they not immediately remodulate the shield frequency as soon as they realized the shields were compromised? Why do they turn and angle the ship away from the attacking vessel? Why not unleash a volley of photon torpedoes and fire phasers in attack pattern Picard-foxtrot union? They are the "Federation Flagship!?!

Let's back up a minute...
- so... Cloaking technology has been around since at least the 2100s.... And 100 years prior to ST:G in ST: The undiscovered country, A freakin communications officer with no experience or training in cloaking theory figured out that you can track a cloaked ship cause "the things gotta have a tailpipe" ( wait, does this mean that combustion engines are still in use in the 23rd century enough that everyone would catch her reference ? I digress..)
Therefore why aren't the sensors on the FLAGSHIP automatically calibrated to scan for a cloaked ship ? Why do they STILL get surprised by this obvious antiquated tech?

-in all of the TNG movies , Picard is the last action hero... So when it comes time to get him alone for some heroics, a perfectly convenient plot device occurs. The old defective Klingon ship decloaks right in front of the FLAGSHIP. And as we all know, the shields must have been down because Soran immediately transports to the surface of an (already previously discussed uninhibited planet). So instead of
A) scanning the entire planet for a humanoid life form ( he should be the only one)
Or
b
B) scanning the whole planet for ANY technology (should be the only tech)
They realize that any missile fired from the planet will take like... 13 seconds to reach the sun (by my calculations that thing would be moving at about warp factor 73)
Which would be fine but our recently promoted Lt Cmdr Worf needs like 15 seconds to lock on.... Cause umm... Yeh...

The solution ? Ahnold Picardineggar decides to do a prisoner exchange for Georgi. But first wants to have a little chit chat with Soran to which the Durass sisters agree to do out of the goodness of their hearts.
Then we see Picard (wearing a commbadge) transport away and Georgi transport in.
Then something odd happens. See, Star Trek is always nice enough to color code the transporter effects for the different species. The federation is always white-ish and the Klingons are red. So when Picard materializes (without a commbadge WTF?) it's a white effect!?!
You mean he beamed STRAIGHT to where the bad guy is? Why? They had the coordinates to transport. Why not just pummel the entire area with photon torpedoes from orbit them vaporize the Klingon ship for good measure ?


I digress.....

The writing on the show was so tight for the most part and continuity was followed fairly well. I have never understood why it got sloppy in the movies.

So come on! Make me feel normal ! Am I the only one that notices these details?



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I quite liked the JJ films. They did what most Trek films couldn't, they entertained. And restored interest in a mostly dead franchise.

Look at Trek in cinema's record....half the stuff they produced and released was garbage. The public knew this, and that's reflected in the terrible grosses culminating in Nemesis only pulling in about 43 million.....

Things i hate about Trek are describing everything as an "array". I hate that deflectors can be repurposed as other things, i hate rotating phaser/shield frequencies.....i hate TNG Klingons who are brutish, stupid, dogmatic asshats that should never have got into space because they were so busy killing each other and wittering on about honour, and shouting a lot .

I hate that there's no money in the future, then there IS, then there's valuable metals.....ugh......i hate Ferengi.....

I hate positronic and neural net with a passion.

However, i do like some of the space ships.

Rich
 
I'm currently finishing season six of TNG (first watch) and haven't seen the Trek films past III. I did just notice that apparently nothing better than scissors has been developed for cutting hair in the future, I figured they have a phaser/flowbie by then. :) I like the Klingons, but have serious doubts they would have even mastered aviation much less space travel. :lol
 
Lets back up a minute...
- so... Cloaking technology has been around since at least the 2100s.... And 100 years prior to ST:G in ST: The undiscovered country, A freakin communications officer with no experience or training in cloaking theory figured out that you can track a cloaked ship cause "the things gotta have a tailpipe" ( wait, does this mean that combustion engines are still in use in the 23rd century enough that everyone would catch her reference ? I digress..)
Therefore why aren't the sensors on the FLAGSHIP automatically calibrated to scan for a cloaked ship ? Why do they STILL get surprised by this obvious antiquated tech?

On that point with Uhura in Star Trek 6. During the later stages of production, William Shatner demanded that the battle with the cloaked Bird of Prey be changed. Why? Because originally, Sulu was supposed to be the one coming in to save the day. If you recall from his Captain's Log in the film's opening...

Sulu: After three years I've concluded my first assignment as master of this vessel, cataloguing gaseous planetary anomalies in the Beta Quadrant​

And yet when it comes to the final battle...

Uhura: Well, what about all that equipment we're carrying to catalogue gaseous anomalies?​

Yep. The only ship that was established to be carrying this kind of equipment was the Excelsior, but in the end it's the Enterprise that magically has the equipment while the Excelsior just sits being shot at.

In regards to cloaking devices and not having the capability of detecting them... Yeah, it's a mixed bag. One could argue that the Klingons saw the flaws in the cloaking design and made adjustments, but that would imply that the Klingons are so technologically superior to everyone in the Federation. Kind of hard to believe in and of itself when later on their entire cultural behavior is built around being a warrior and dying with honor. Makes all the sense in the world why you would have the Romulans being A-OK with Klingons having cloaking devices yet enforce a treaty of the Federation barring them from even developing one of their own.

Also, isn't it kind of funny that for a super perfect human society that prides itself on eliminating want, possessions and money that they'll actually label one of their ships as a "flagship"? It's one thing to call your ship the most advanced ship in the fleet, but to openly declare it the flagship of the whole Federation just reeks of hierarchy arrogance. Picard flat out says this when he's waiting to confront that century old Bird of Prey design.

Picard: Maybe they're just trying to decide whether a twenty year-old Klingon Bird-of-Prey can be a match for the Federation flagship.​

Results of said match-up... TIE
 
The whole thing about Klingons having cloaking devices has never been explained canonically but behind the scenes it's been mentioned for years that for a while during TOS that the Klingons & Romulans were friendly with each other if not exactly allies and had tech exchanges. I believe that the Romulans got warp technology and some D7s and the Klingons got cloaking and (presumably) the Bird of Prey class of ships. Having had the tech for as long as they have I don't find it that much of a stretch to believe that they either made some tweaks to the tech or got help from the Romulans at some point between ST VI & TNG. What's really hard to believe is that the Klingons actually use cloaking devices at all given all of their talk about honor and all that, how much honor can there be in using a cloaking device to sneak in on your opponent undetected? Seems to me it runs counter to their warrior ethos about honorable combat and all that.
 
I always assumed the brutish Klingons (I know, not ALL of them are warriors) stole the cloaking technology from someone else (Romulans?) and did not develop it themselves, but use it the way a hunter uses camoflage. A hunter doesn't view it as unhonorable to disguise himself for the sake of the prey (sounds very Hirogen, I know) Also you can't assume the human ethics of cloaking=cowardice is the same in the Klingon psyche; perhaps they see it as honorably strategic?
 
Problem with giving the Klingons cloaking technology is that it greatly reduced the relevance of the Romulans by a large margin. When you have Klingons using cloaking devices for so long, seeing a Romulan ship decloak just brings about a large "meh" because we've seen it already. It also didn't help that both the Romulan and Klingon ships are both green in color.

Riceball said:
What's really hard to believe is that the Klingons actually use cloaking devices at all given all of their talk about honor and all that, how much honor can there be in using a cloaking device to sneak in on your opponent undetected? Seems to me it runs counter to their warrior ethos about honorable combat and all that.

This was actually addressed in the Deep Space Nine Season Four opener "Way of the Warrior".

Worf: Sir, I strongly recommend against that. It is likely there are cloaked Klingon warships in the vicinity, lying in wait.
Bashir: Well that doesn't sound very honorable to me.
Worf: In war, there is nothing more honourable than victory.​

There's the Klingon Honor System at work. It doesn't matter what you do just as long as you win.
 
Why doesn't everyone fly around with shields up all the time? They seem to get attacked every episode so you'd think they'd take some precautions against having the inhabitants of some section of the ship sucked out into space.
 
I have never liked the lumpy headed Klingons and they got even worse in TNG with the whole "proud warrior" thing. I agree that I don't see them getting outside of their own atmosphere unless they somehow found out there were aliens out there that needed killing because they do not seem to value science or scientists.

As for the Enterprise being blown up in Generations, I remember hearing at the time it was because the bridge set was designed for standard definition TV and they wanted a new one for the movies. So they then proceeded to blow the ship up in almost every movie.:confused
 
Enterprise Incident (TOS) Romulans where using leased Klingon D7's in trade for the cloaking tech.
Similar to the US leasing to GB, USSR in WW2.

Also think of Klingons using cloak like the Germans using U-Boots, same with the Romulan's.
Balance of Terror was a space version of Enemy Below.
 
I still say that cloaking doesn't fit in with the whole honorable/proud warrior ethos that they've developed for the Klingons. To me a Klingon warrior goes into combat proudly announcing their presence or at the very least uses skill and the natural environment to conceal their approach and not rely on cloaking to hide them in plain sight. Regardless, I have to actually agree with Jeyl on this one in that the (over)use of cloaking by the Klingons kind of marginalized the Romulans as a character species along with one of their prime advantages over their opponents. What they probably should have done in TNG was to limit the cloaking used by the Klingons to the Bird of Preys since they're supposed to be scout ships and it would make sense (even for a Klingon) for them to cloak but keep their larger ships without cloaking perhaps even saying that it's difficult to effectively cloak a ship much larger than a BoP due to energy consumption and what not which would make Romulan Warbirds more impressive since they're so large and can cloak, it would also help to explain their odd design by saying that all that negative space in their design is to minimize overall mass which helps with cloaking something so large.
 
Speaking of bridges...
I was recently watching First Contact which is a EXCELLENT movie, the whole deal with the new Enterprise is odd...
The ship exterior looks great but everything inside just feels so much cheaper than the D.

The bridge layout looks confined and more similar to the older design bridges. The D bridge was so ergonomical and large
Seems like a step back. Not forward

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When it comes to "grinding my gears" in the Trek verse, Generations is a big issue with me. Now I can understand some Trek movies just are not good but that happens with any multi movie franchise. I can live with that. I also do not get wrapped up in the technology or time travel issues. I just write it off as technology that exists that we in our era do not fully understand so if it works out a certain way, it's not bad writing, it's our lack of understanding, I just accept that it works.

I do agree on the point about the obvious ploy to destroy the Enterprise D for the sake of bringing a new ship into the franchise. The destruction of the ENT-D bothered me more walking out of the theater than Kirk's death. The ENT-D deserved better.

But to my big issue,,, It's about a poor choice that just does not make any sense except to twist and pull the story into a certain direction.

If you are stuck in the ribbon and have the ability to travel to any time and any place so that you can keep and event from happening, why would you choose to go back to a mere few minutes in a situation that makes you still fight it out. Why not go back in time a week, call you brother, warn him about the fire. Then when you first see Soran, just throw him in the brig, stun his ass, whatever. Done and done.
 
Speaking of bridges...
I was recently watching First Contact which is a EXCELLENT movie..

I used to feel that way, but then I realized that if Borg can time travel, why not keep doing it till you reach your objective. A Borg ship could easily enter a time vortex in their own space or somewhere that some Federation ship could not follow them, travel to old earth, and take over the planet.
 
Why doesn't everyone fly around with shields up all the time? They seem to get attacked every episode so you'd think they'd take some precautions against having the inhabitants of some section of the ship sucked out into space.

Simple reason.

Decker: Recommend defensive posture Captain. Screens and shields.
Kirk: No, Mr. Decker. That could also be misinterpreted as hostile.​

That's a pretty safe assumption. The deflector array is what's supposed to protect your ship from objects that could damage your ship while shields are something that protects you from enemy attacks. If your shields were on all the time, it'd be like walking around with a fully exposed bullet proof vest.
 
Jeyl fair enough.

Here's another one. Why do all star ship designers build their consoles out of the most explosive stuff they can find?

Also, why do they eject the damn warp core so much?
 
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So much? IIRC the Enterprise did it once and Voyager did it once.

I may be hazy on what exactly it was but they always seemed to be ejecting something.

I was just thinking, how long does it takes to get to the rear of the ship to the front? Do they have horizontal elevators/shuttle buses?
 
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