Never to be seen/heard from/used again

[topcat]

various weapons from the various series....
TNG
1. one episode the D had to retrieve a human child taken captive by an alien human like race that liked heavy metal. The alien ships each had a giant missile half the size of the Ds warp nacells slung under X shaped wings I believe.
2. the Vulcan mind weapon that used your own angry thoughts against you by melting your brain
3. Soarns probe weapon

Voyager
1. the energy pulse cannon that voyager bought for 150 isolinear chips. Weapons dealer was killed because he ran from them after 7 claimed he stole nanites from her

2. one episode in an early season, they had to save a shuttle craft and its crew from being directed to an imaginary voyager/universe. They emitted a energy beam from the secondary forward deflector. The defectlor was described as being an energy weapon based on geordies anti borg deflector weapon

3. cardasian torpedo pod.

4. cardasian torpedo pod had the ability to disable voyager by sending an anti matter pulse throught a phaser/energy transfer beam.

 

[The Wormhole]

3. Soarns probe weapon

Since both it and its encrypted schematics were destroyed and Soran himself was killed there's a very good reason we never saw it again.

 

[topcat]

on screen sorans probe was just addressed as a long range photon torpedo casing probe with a tri lithium bomb....

7. Tri Cobalt Devices. Seriously, the dominion is just a week away from over running the entire quadrant and instead of tossing tri cobalt devices left and right.... you build a Miranda based akira class knock off.....

 

[TheAdmiralty]

Future Guy.

I have long maintained that Future Guy was Brannon Braga coming from the future to try and make the show more interesting to keep it from getting canceled.

 

[TheAdmiralty]

Why didn't they just replicate Tommy guns every time the Borg showed up like that one scene in First Contact? It makes sense that they wouldn't be able to adapt to projectile weapons (as opposed to energy weapons) in the same way they can't adapt to Worf's Bat'leth

 

[UnknownSample]

If bullets are too much for ordinary Borg shielding, the Federation should drop energy weapons and go back to missiles.

 

[Paradise City]

The subspace transporter that Bok uses in the 7th season episode Bloodlines. Apparently it can circumvent shielding. The Feds thought it too unstable to use, Bok, apparently on his own, gets it up and running though.

 

[The Wormhole]

If bullets are too much for ordinary Borg shielding, the Federation should drop energy weapons and go back to missiles.

Or at the very least, that gun that can beam bullets on DS9 should have been a lot more in-demand.

 

[Griffeytrek]

The Equinox survivors. They were demoted and never heard or talked about again.

Janeway assigned them to "help" Neelix in the kitchen. Protein is Protein after all. And Janeway can't abide witnesses.

The self-replicating,adaptive killer drones.
No,not the Borg...the "arsenal of freedom" ones.(they could've come in handy).

You know, referencing those would have made DS9's Self Replicacting Magic Minefield make a helluva lot more sense.

It's interesting that technological or genetic augmentation of the human body doesn't really have any place in Trek, when futurists and other works of speculative fiction kind of take it for granted that it will be an everyday thing.

Kor

That actually does make sense, and is addressed in a few of the series, just subtly. It's the long term fallout from and cultural disdain for such things following the era of Khan and the Eugenics War. Similarly Trek's earth or humans have a clear disdain for more traditional robotics at least where it might replace human effort or achievement. One of the original Rodenberry rules was no classic style SF robots. All we ever see are Androids (we will get to them in a minute.) And let's not forget the shear prejudices Data often faced.

This is not to say Trek was against technological replacements for medical purposes. See Picards Heart, Geordi's Visor and Nog's Leg as clear examples. Just that such technology be used to make a person whole, not enhance beyond expected norms.

Which brings us to the other elephant in the room, Androids. TNG acts like Data is this unique thing. Yet TOS encountered entire races of Androids. Perfect mechanical copies of humans down to almost the cellular level. And then we saw that the Federation, or at least some individuals had the ability to not only create such, but transfer memories or consciousness to them. Heck it may be speculated that Dr. Noonian Soong himself was not human, but anAndroid of one of those alien extractions. ( ok not from Trek, but the implication from the Proto Data pilot The Questor Tapes as to how Rodenberry might have viewed Data and his backstory. )

 

[The Old Mixer]

Yet TOS encountered entire races of Androids. Perfect mechanical copies of humans down to almost the cellular level.

Which androids were these? The Korby and Mudd androids where both obviously artificial on the inside.

 

[Griffeytrek]

Which androids were these? The Korby and Mudd androids where both obviously artificial on the inside.

The Spocks Brain ones took a bit to detect as such if I recall. Plus the Ilia'bot and later Data's Mother who fooled most cursory sensor scans and were only detected via deeper examination.

 

[The Old Mixer]

Were there androids in "Spock's Brain"?

Androids created by V'ger were likely beyond human science. Doesn't lessen the importance of human development in cybernetics.

Data's mom was presumably like Data on the inside, just built to fool scans and such. Hardly indistinguishable down to the cellular level.

 

[Shawnster]

Ilia probe was scanned and those records remained with the Enterprise. It's not easy to reverse engineer complicated machines, but the Federation had 100+ years to study the data the Enterprise collected.

 

[The Old Mixer]

Whether or not that's the case, the assertion was:

Yet TOS encountered entire races of Androids. Perfect mechanical copies of humans down to almost the cellular level.

Yet to be given an example. The Ilia probe wasn't depicted as a race. The only races of androids we met in TOS were obviously artificial on the inside.

 

[F. King Daniel]

The subspace transporter that Bok uses in the 7th season episode Bloodlines. Apparently it can circumvent shielding. The Feds thought it too unstable to use, Bok, apparently on his own, gets it up and running though.

You'd think they'd use it to beam photon torpedoes onto enemy ships, but no.

Perhaps they think that's too unsportsmanlike and elect to have bloody protracted space battles with massive casualties on both sides.

 

[UnknownSample]

I forget if this has been mentioned. It's a big one. The ban on warp travel over warp 5 because it was destroying space. I know they keep that in for a few stories, then they might have whipped up some half-ass remark that got them out of it...maybe they didn't even do that.

 

[The Wormhole]

I forget if this has been mentioned. It's a big one. The ban on warp travel over warp 5 because it was destroying space. I know they keep that in for a few stories, then they might have whipped up some half-ass remark that got them out of it...maybe they didn't even do that.

Behind the scenes sources claim the engines were modified to be able to safely travel faster than warp 5. Some sources even suggest that's why the Intrepid class nacelles rise.

 

[Richard Baker]

I forget if this has been mentioned. It's a big one. The ban on warp travel over warp 5 because it was destroying space. I know they keep that in for a few stories, then they might have whipped up some half-ass remark that got them out of it...maybe they didn't even do that.

They were given 'permission' to exceed the w5 speed limit a couple of times IIRC. The pivoting engines on Voyager was supposed to be a new type of drive which did not hurt anything. I don't think anybody gave a damn during the Dominion War -

 

[flandry84]

That entire storyline(the warp ban) seemed a mis-step.
Big consequences from a rather unremarkable episode.

 

[JD]

Janeway assigned them to "help" Neelix in the kitchen. Protein is Protein after all. And Janeway can't abide witnesses.



You know, referencing those would have made DS9's Self Replicacting Magic Minefield make a helluva lot more sense.



That actually does make sense, and is addressed in a few of the series, just subtly. It's the long term fallout from and cultural disdain for such things following the era of Khan and the Eugenics War. Similarly Trek's earth or humans have a clear disdain for more traditional robotics at least where it might replace human effort or achievement. One of the original Rodenberry rules was no classic style SF robots. All we ever see are Androids (we will get to them in a minute.) And let's not forget the shear prejudices Data often faced.

This is not to say Trek was against technological replacements for medical purposes. See Picards Heart, Geordi's Visor and Nog's Leg as clear examples. Just that such technology be used to make a person whole, not enhance beyond expected norms.

Which brings us to the other elephant in the room, Androids. TNG acts like Data is this unique thing. Yet TOS encountered entire races of Androids. Perfect mechanical copies of humans down to almost the cellular level. And then we saw that the Federation, or at least some individuals had the ability to not only create such, but transfer memories or consciousness to them. Heck it may be speculated that Dr. Noonian Soong himself was not human, but anAndroid of one of those alien extractions. ( ok not from Trek, but the implication from the Proto Data pilot The Questor Tapes as to how Rodenberry might have viewed Data and his backstory. )

The TNG novel Immortal Coil and the followup trilogy Cold Equations do address some of these issues.