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What device was most frequently technobabbled into a use diverse of originally intended?

which

  • Hand phaser (overloaded)

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • The Transporter

    Votes: 6 24.0%
  • The Main Deflector

    Votes: 15 60.0%
  • The Mobile Emitter

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Nanoprobes

    Votes: 3 12.0%
  • Denobulan Leeches

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • other (please comment)

    Votes: 1 4.0%
  • Odo

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    25
What? You didn't include the trident scanner?
Note: this nomenclature was introduced in "Trials and Tribble-ations"; prior to that, the usual nomenclature was "(Spock built) ray generator and energy neutralizer," from the picture caption in TMOST.
 
It's always the deflector, and most commonly in Voyager. They even made a gag of it in Prodigy, when something was happening and got fixed, and Admiral Janeway was like, "I was gonna <technobabble> the main deflector!"
 
I always think about the torpedo being turned into a flare in "Night" because Harry had to go and call it a "warp flare" instead of just a flare. The deflector being a superweapon was a pretty cool idea in BOBW and makes sense to use it to keep shooting your beams from and then even retroactively stick it back into TOS. The transporter is probably what I'd go with because it beams you to other universes, ages, deages, splits you, combines you, has whatever "Realm of Fear" had going on, time travels, and TMPs you. I like how in "E²" each Enterprise uses it to steal shit from the other. Someone said that it could be a really dangerous weapon in Trek if it was used offensively to just start ripping up ships into pieces. Yikes.
 
I had to get out my universal translator to read the title. :lol:

The main deflector, for sure.
 
I admit, the UT is one of the Trek systems I've come to dislike as a cheap plot device. I think communications and linguistics would be an important specialty, personally. Maybe if we had more eps where the UT malfunctions like Google Translate... ;)
 
Transporter. Good for moving people from place to place. Also good for killing people, healing people, de-aging people, re-aging people, storing people for decades, splitting people, fusing people, sending people through time, sending people to mirror universes, and blowing up Borg ships from the inside.
 
I admit, the UT is one of the Trek systems I've come to dislike as a cheap plot device. I think communications and linguistics would be an important specialty, personally. Maybe if we had more eps where the UT malfunctions like Google Translate... ;)

Maybe once have people on a ship speaking English, and then the translator comes on, and suddenly you realize that everyone but the new guy speaks the same non-English Human language.
 
And I say,
Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish
That's the way we do things, lad, we're making shit up as we wish
The Klingons and the Romulans pose no threat to us
'Cause if we find we're in a bind we just make some shit up
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I don’t know why the writers in the Berman era were so obsessed with the main deflector…but man, that thing was played out.

They used that and the “warp code breach” waaayyy too much.
 
I had a warp core breach when I visited Las Vegas, and it was quite tasty!

Indeed!

TFKh8vZ.jpg
 
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