Star Trek technology is severely underutilised.

[uniderth]

I've been thinking about this for a while, and it really bugs me. In the various TV series and movies, we see a whole host of technologies being utilized for one thing or another, but when you take a look at the whole picture, it seems the guys who designed them had no idea what they were doing.

Take transporters for instance. They can be used to 'teleport' (actually they just move the object very fast) a person down to the surface of a planet. Do you know what they can also do? Beam 10,000 photon torpedos right next to an enemy ship in 0.1 seconds (even if you cant transport them inside shield grids, this ability is still very useful). Think about how many battles would have gone differently if they had just swarmed the enemy with torpedos, with no way of them being evaded. Imagine huge carriers, carrying not fighters or bombers, but torpedos waiting to be 'launched' at the enemy. It would be game-changing.

I think there need to be in universe reasons why they can't be used for eliminating aging, or billions of clones, etc.

But as for your other concerns, I'd say bandwidth. even if you have transporters doesn't mean you have unlimited teleportation capacity.

Or another example - warp drives. What if you were to project a warp field in front of you and stretch it hundreds of km outwards? Anything in your path will be stretched and warped beyond recognition.

Yes, but warp fields don't seem to be destructive. Yes they stretch things relative to the ship, but relative to outside space nothing is being stretched.

And it's not the tech that's native to Star Trek. A Dyson Swarm could be built in weeks with the replicators and transporters that Star Trek has,

Again bandwidth. Yes, I supposed it could be possible eventually. But maybe they do have Dyson swarms somwhere.

but when the Enterprise finds one (technically Scotty found it) they act as if it's this huge deal.

Well a Dyson Sphere is a LOT different than a Dyson Swarm.

And what about other things like pure beam-core antimatter drives for sublight propulsion,

Keep in mind impulse engines don't use newtonian thrust. Impulse drives can move a ship forward or backward without any recognizable nozzles. So it seems a bit more versatile.

planet-cracking relativistic weapons, etc?

Keep in mind that in Star Trek warp speeds tend to be slower in gravity wells. Even the Phoenix didn't travel very far at warp one while in Earth's gravity well. So that may have something to do with it. But there will always be countermeasures to any weapon developed. It would be great to see it though.

 

[Scout101]

Transporter is a terrifying device that would be an ultimate weapon almost immediately upon invention. Why beam a bomb onto a ship when you can just beam a piece of the ship away instead? No reason to blow up the hull when you can just make it disappear. Or the warp core, or just the baffle keeping the matter and antimatter apart...

Aging, disease, duplicates, clean and tidy murder, so many applications that would be disastrous. And even worse in that Trek flirted with a bunch of them and then backed away without the repercussions of what they had introduced. It's all fine in the context of the story, but would be an absolutely horrific thing if it ever existed in real life.

 

[Henoch]

Captain Pike tried to explain the transporter process to a guy at a lower tech level in the second episode of DSC S2, "New Eden". Still vague.

 

[bryce]

Another un-utilized technology - the Federation had gravity control by the 22nd century...but were still using reaction based propulsion for STL travel. And continued to do so in the 24th technology.

But once you can control gravitational fields - not to mention the ability to warp space *and* damp inertia (the same thing really) you also have the means to build a reactionless drive.

This was a plot point in Babylon-5. At the start of the series humans had no artificial gravity/gravity control, so used ships with rotating sections for pseudo-gravity, and reaction based fusion engines for propulsion (basically, engines that work by throwing something in the opposite direction of the one you want to go in, be it gas or plasma or whatever).

On the other hand, the Minbari did have gravity control, and there ships used it for propulsion. But by the 4th season of the series and beyond, the Minbari started sharing their tech with (some) humans and they developed non-Newtonian gravity-based propulsion systems. (Just ignore that awful Legend of the Rangers pilot that seemed to me written by someone who had never seen the previous 2 series, because suddenly the newest, fastest ship ever built, a joint Minbari and Human designed ship, for some reason had a big giant rocket engine on the back...)

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

On the other hand, the Minbari did have gravity control, and there ships used it for propulsion. But by the 4th season of the series and beyond, the Minbari started sharing their tech with (some) humans and they developed non-Newtonian gravity-based propulsion systems. (Just ignore that awful Legend of the Rangers pilot that seemed to me written by someone who had never seen the previous 2 series, because suddenly the newest, fastest ship ever built, a joint Minbari and Human designed ship, for some reason had a big giant rocket engine on the back...)

The reason the "White Star" class vessels were so agile was because it was a combination of Gravimetric and traditional Ion Engines. The new "Legends of Rangers" flying brick was just another implementation of that concept, just uglier.

 

[David cgc]

The reason the "White Star" class vessels were so agile was because it was a combination of Gravimetric and traditional Ion Engines. The new "Legends of Rangers" flying brick was just another implementation of that concept, just uglier.

The Excalibur and Vorlon ships also had high-grade gravity technology along with glowing main engines. The Minbari and Shadow ships not having any visible exhaust were outliers (along with some League ships, though it seems unlikely any of them had artificial gravity. I don't remember if it was from the AoG sourcebooks or a fanon website, but one specifically called out the Brakiri ships using smoke and mirrors to make their ships seem more advanced than they were).

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

The Excalibur and Vorlon ships also had high-grade gravity technology along with glowing main engines. The Minbari and Shadow ships not having any visible exhaust were outliers (along with some League ships, though it seems unlikely any of them had artificial gravity. I don't remember if it was from the AoG sourcebooks or a fanon website, but one specifically called out the Brakiri ships using smoke and mirrors to make their ships seem more advanced than they were).

The Minbari just used Gravimetric Drives to move their ships, ergo their large Sharlin class ships moved fairly slowly while their Nial Fighters were super agile.

The Shadows seemed to be more automated, ergo using Living Computers to run their Shadow Ships.

The Vorlons are similar to the Shadow in that they didn't need many people to operate a ship, but details aren't well known.

 

[Unicron]

Another un-utilized technology - the Federation had gravity control by the 22nd century...but were still using reaction based propulsion for STL travel. And continued to do so in the 24th technology.

But once you can control gravitational fields - not to mention the ability to warp space *and* damp inertia (the same thing really) you also have the means to build a reactionless drive.

This was a plot point in Babylon-5. At the start of the series humans had no artificial gravity/gravity control, so used ships with rotating sections for pseudo-gravity, and reaction based fusion engines for propulsion (basically, engines that work by throwing something in the opposite direction of the one you want to go in, be it gas or plasma or whatever).

On the other hand, the Minbari did have gravity control, and there ships used it for propulsion. But by the 4th season of the series and beyond, the Minbari started sharing their tech with (some) humans and they developed non-Newtonian gravity-based propulsion systems. (Just ignore that awful Legend of the Rangers pilot that seemed to me written by someone who had never seen the previous 2 series, because suddenly the newest, fastest ship ever built, a joint Minbari and Human designed ship, for some reason had a big giant rocket engine on the back...)

The races in Dropfleet Commander have variations on gravity nullifiers, which are used mainly to sustain orbits by nullifying the target world's gravity in relation to the ship. This means the ship doesn't have to expend extra power to maintain an orbit, only to modify its direction as needed, but the downside is that the system generates a lot of heat that determines how long the orbit can be maintained before it needs to cool. A damaged nullifier is naturally a great hazard to the crew, as it can cause the ship to burn up in atmosphere.

The Shaltari also use several gravity based weapons on a few vessels, which can wreak havoc on enemies by manipulating a granitic field around them and applying crushing or ripping forces.

 

[Dryson]

Not to mention that phasers should be separate from the impulse drive to reduce impulse drive failure due to phaser array overload or phaser failure due to the impulse engines being knocked out. The phaser arrays can operate freely from the impulse engines. All that needs to be done to is too create a power source for the phaser arrays that is based off of the impulse engines without the system needing to supply energy for propulsion.

I'd even go so far as to say that the processes used to create impulse thrust could be used to accelerate a phaser shot allowing for more rapid phaser to target shots than the current model of phaser arrays.

 

[Tenacity]

Do you know what they can also do? Beam 10,000 photon torpedos right next to an enemy ship in 0.1 seconds (even if you cant transport them inside shield

the power requirement of this is likely beyond the abilities of any starship. a half dozen perhaps.

A Dyson Swarm could be built in weeks with the replicators and transporters that Star Trek has,

multiple centuries, not weeks.

A Constitution-class starship's shields could take the equivalent of ninety photon torpedoes at once. They could do so a total of five times before shattering completely. (TOS: "The Changeling")

w.hen you think about it, the destructive abilities of torpedoes on the show are seen to usually be fairly minor. less equal to nukes, ang more a ton or so of conventional explosives.