I'd expand on that as it being a headscratcher that "manning their stations" is even a major part of Riker, Worf or even Data's day to day roles (when really unless they are Bridge Duty Officer they should be in their offices or doing inspections of the ship). Crusher and later Troi being the BDO is even worse.
Little things in Trek that just bug you...
- Thread starter Captain Killy
- Start date
I'd expand on that as it being a headscratcher that "manning their stations" is even a major part of Riker, Worf or even Data's day to day roles (when really unless they are Bridge Duty Officer they should be in their offices or doing inspections of the ship). Crusher and later Troi being the BDO is even worse.
To make it worst is I wonder if Riker's chair next to Picard counts as a "station." When you think about it even a captains chair feels pointless. "Battlestar Galatica" most likely has done the most realistic bridge in sci-fi. Not that I want the captains chair to go away. It might not make sense but it is a iconic thing in Trek.
Jason
I would assume this is for budgetary reasons. It's not like the studio was willing to pay for movie-sized sets and hundreds of extras.
As for the torches... some cultures are big on tradition. Even modern, RL traditional things are still going on. For example, some people like candles. Some use torches when they have outdoor parties. You know what the most popular crafts are now (at least from what I gather from reading my Mary Maxim catalogues)? Knitting and crocheting.
Check out the old TV series The Starlost some time (Canadian SF series; Harlan Ellison has ranted about it on occasion). Walter Koenig was in two episodes, playing an alien named Oro... who wore a gold lamé jumpsuit.- The god awful "fashion" of the Federation humans. Everyone wearing bus seat material clothes, terrible spandex leotards and stuff being shiny or metalic/sequenced looking because it's the FUTURE.
Brown and beige can be nice, but should be mixed with other colors for contrast.
Agreed. The Romulans from TNG onward are... dull. Boring. Ridiculous, with their bowl haircuts and Sue Ellen Ewing shoulder pads.
I prefer Diane Duane's take on the Romulans - the Rihannsu.
Every leader has advisors, assistants, people who help carry out his orders. It's never just one leader and the rest are flunkeys. Star Trek planets don't need to be run like the current American government.
As I've said numerous times before: The Federation has an economy. Every sufficiently advanced society bigger than a band needs some sort of economy - redistribution of goods in an orderly (and hopefully fair way) is necessary to avoid fighting over it. This whole "people work to better themselves and don't need to worry about acquiring goods" is just more of Picard's pomposity. He lives in his own little bubble and basically has no understanding of how most other people live. You can't tell me that Ben Sisko's father runs a restaurant without some expectation of profit, or that Robert Picard doesn't expect some sort of profit from the family wine business.
What you describe is more like how it was on Voyager: Every month or so (I'm assuming), everyone is issued a certain number of replicator rations. I'm assuming Janeway and the senior officers received more than the others, with the exception of Samantha Wildman (who had a baby to care for and would need extra stuff). Use the rations wisely, and you won't be stuck on a diet of Leola Root Stew for the journey. Waste them, and learn to like the stew. There's a reason why Tom Paris set up betting pools with replicator rations as the currency: That, plus holodeck time, was the currency in Voyager's closed society, and the ship bartered when they acquired stuff on whatever planets and stations they came to.
How does this explain Carter Winston, the millioniare in TAS?
I wish somebody would write a story some day that explains WTF Beverly did with that ugly cloth she bought on Farpoint Station. She bought the entire bolt of it, and I can't imagine why, since it didn't really go with her coloring.
The only TNG character I can imagine wearing anything like that would be Lwaxana Troi.
The only TNG character I can imagine wearing anything like that would be Lwaxana Troi.
She made curtains for her granny
Or Harry Mudd?
The Voyager wasn't in the Alpha Quadrant, and so didn't get the upgrade to the uniforms automatically downloaded to its replicator systems.
Kim would have forgotten about Libby, and Libby would have (most likely) forgotten about Kim and moved on to another man, just like Mark moved on from Janeway.
I chalk that one up to Barash not being as through as he should be.
Last edited:
How the main deflector dish can handle pretty much anything that comes up. Let's get dome diversity in the script for entertainment. Maybe try something that doesn't work to ad tension and suspense.
To this day not knowing what a Chief Operations Officer’s job actually is...
What's the exchange rate between Federation credits and gold-pressed latinum? Jadzia always has that around for her gambling habit.
My guess is they should be in charge of Communications, Sensors, Navigations, Supply and Logistics, Recreation, Training, Catering, General Admin.
Who knows? But in TOS, at least Roddenberry (or the writers of the episodes that Mudd was in) explained what the economic system was like, and it wasn't what was shown in TNG (it was explained in 'I, Mudd' that patents are issued for inventions, that royalties are paid for said patents just like they are now, fraud is still a crime on some worlds [with a death sentence on Deneb V], money is still used, credits can be counterfeited, and in To Serve All My Days, the UFP has an economy that can be wrecked just like the economy here on Earth can.
It isn't the technobabble, it is the subatomic particles, the "littlest" possible things in TNG, that bug me so much!
It's been a long time since I studied particle physics, but as near as I can tell only BARYONS are real or postulated out of the particles quoted. And as far as I can tell, there is no situation when a particle beam will correct a problem. Either it does nothing or it causes physical destruction and radiation poisoning!
Okay, various types of particle beams are useful in particle physics research, and if you're in a space battle particle beams can be useful for destroying and killing the enemy, but otherwise they don't have much practical use, and I am sure the targets of particle beam weapons don't consider what the beams do to them "useful".
Last edited:
Dropping The from ship names boiled my piss for a lot of years. It’s The Enterprise, The Saratoga, The Reliant, The Excelsior, so it’s The bloomin Voyager. Voyager was just the name of the show.
Failure to observe the laws of thermodynamics. Vaporising something doesn’t destroy the constituent matter.
Brightly lit ships on deep space (I know we need to see the thing, but it’s still annoying), hearing them too.
Ships getting unnecessarily close to each other, always in the same plane and manoeuvring like they exist in a fluid. The Enterprise even did three point turns.
New tech and solutions never being remembered for similar problems a few episodes later.
Humans becoming Joyless stiffs being portrayed as a positive optimistic vision of the future. WTF? Parties on Picard's Enterprise had less life than an seminar on corporate responsibility, and the bar in Ten Forward is by definition Free.
Shuttles without warp drive being used to isolate characters in obvious jeopardy when the journey represents a diversion of seconds for a star ship.
An infinite universe of story potential and we spend an hour in the holodeck. Smart phones that auto correct holodeck to homosexual.
Reset button stories.
I got more.
Failure to observe the laws of thermodynamics. Vaporising something doesn’t destroy the constituent matter.
Brightly lit ships on deep space (I know we need to see the thing, but it’s still annoying), hearing them too.
Ships getting unnecessarily close to each other, always in the same plane and manoeuvring like they exist in a fluid. The Enterprise even did three point turns.
New tech and solutions never being remembered for similar problems a few episodes later.
Humans becoming Joyless stiffs being portrayed as a positive optimistic vision of the future. WTF? Parties on Picard's Enterprise had less life than an seminar on corporate responsibility, and the bar in Ten Forward is by definition Free.
Shuttles without warp drive being used to isolate characters in obvious jeopardy when the journey represents a diversion of seconds for a star ship.
An infinite universe of story potential and we spend an hour in the holodeck. Smart phones that auto correct holodeck to homosexual.
Reset button stories.
I got more.
Was the material so special and unique it couldn't simply be replicated? Come on.
Maybe she died it colors to make that Godawful grey and rainbow things Wesley wore.
Or Neelix.
And yet, on Voyager, they can continue to run the holodecks even when they have to ration power, because the holodeck supposedly runs on some type of power that's not compatible with any other ship systems.
Let me get this straight: we can (and do!) adapt Borg components and all manner of futuristic and Delta Quadrant tech not only to work with ship systems, but also -- at least sometimes -- to make the ship exceed its original operating parameters. But we can't adapt the power generators for the holodeck -- which were built entirely by Federation technology back at good old Utopia Planetia -- to work with the systems of the same ship on which said generators were installed. Does this seem right to you?
What's worse, on at least one occasion in a later episode, when Janeway was rattling off systems they could divert power from to put into shields or whatever, she included the holodecks. Whoops.
Translation, this certificate is a paycheck. You're working for money.
