What is/are the worst or most unbelievable plot convenience device(s)

[BillJ]

Re: What is/are the worst or most unbelievable plot convenience device

The problem is we are talking an alternate timeline universe that's so much more advanced, for no apparent reason, than the TOS timeline, that you can beam great distances with, as one user put it, something Scotty can hold in his hands. Look at the side of the JJ Enterprise engine room. Look at the friggin' girth of the warp nacelles. They can't even power the ship or go to warp with anything that could be remotely held in your hands, but somehow a small magical McGuffin device can achieve what are far beyond simple suspecion of disbelief, it's more like "Are you fucking kidding me?"

You're working under the assumption that the small device doesn't tap into a much bigger power source/infrastructure.

As far as things looking more advanced, I find it far less shocking a transition than TOS to TMP. Technology could have been moved ahead by scans of the Narada done by escaping Kelvin shuttle craft. Spock Prime was needed to make transwarp beaming possible.

What perplexes me is that fans give so many nonsensical things in the various series and movies a pass. But when Abrams does something, it becomes universe breaking.

 

[kirkfan]

Re: What is/are the worst or most unbelievable plot convenience device

...

You're working under the assumption that the small device doesn't tap into a much bigger power source/infrastructure.
...

True, it could simply be a remote and even in Kirk's universe remote control devices can be very small. Like the microscopic pellet that Kirk had under his skin in TUC and that Spock could pick up light years away.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Re: What is/are the worst or most unbelievable plot convenience device

The Enterprise is the Only Starship in Interception Range: Even when it's sitting in Earth Orbit.

 

[kirkfan]

Re: What is/are the worst or most unbelievable plot convenience device

The Enterprise is the Only Starship in Interception Range: Even when it's sitting in Earth Orbit.

Maybe the other ships are all undergoing a refit.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Re: What is/are the worst or most unbelievable plot convenience device

The Voyager episode "Prime Factors" has an alien tech which beams Harry Kim 40,000 light years.

So, basically, it's okay except for when it happens in the new movies

You're equating two different things as the same. And then mixing timelines and standard time in the original universe.

Voyager takes place about a hundred years before the TOS timeline, which JJ RebootTrek is supposed to be an alternate timeline of.

It's an alien technology, not a Federation technology. We have no idea how old the technology is; just because it is in use and advanced, doesn't necessarily mean it's old.

We actually don't know exactly how it worls; we assume it's a form of beaming.

The problem is we are talking an alternate timeline universe that's so much more advanced, for no apparent reason, than the TOS timeline, that you can beam great distances with, as one user put it, something Scotty can hold in his hands. Look at the side of the JJ Enterprise engine room. Look at the friggin' girth of the warp nacelles. They can't even power the ship or go to warp with anything that could be remotely held in your hands, but somehow a small magical McGuffin device can achieve what are far beyond simple suspecion of disbelief, it's more like "Are you fucking kidding me?"


This would be like Abraham Lincoln showing the alternate timeline of the Civil War only this time they have tanks, airplanes, and a small magical device that can allow then to cross the country in a day.

But it's technology from years after Nemesis. Can I believe TOS-era Starfleet developing it by themselves? Actually, yes (remember telekinetic superpowers via hypospray in "Plato's Stepchildren"?) BUT that's beside the point. Can I see post-"Relics" Scotty and post-Nemesis Starfleet figuring it out? Definitely, just look at the similar techs and examples in this thread. Can I see the 23rd century AU adapting that magical future formula the way we see in ID, resulting in a bag sized transwarp teleporter? Absolutely.

 

[kirkfan]

Re: What is/are the worst or most unbelievable plot convenience device

The Voyager episode "Prime Factors" has an alien tech which beams Harry Kim 40,000 light years.

So, basically, it's okay except for when it happens in the new movies

You're equating two different things as the same. And then mixing timelines and standard time in the original universe.

Voyager takes place about a hundred years before the TOS timeline, which JJ RebootTrek is supposed to be an alternate timeline of.

It's an alien technology, not a Federation technology. We have no idea how old the technology is; just because it is in use and advanced, doesn't necessarily mean it's old.

We actually don't know exactly how it worls; we assume it's a form of beaming.

The problem is we are talking an alternate timeline universe that's so much more advanced, for no apparent reason, than the TOS timeline, that you can beam great distances with, as one user put it, something Scotty can hold in his hands. Look at the side of the JJ Enterprise engine room. Look at the friggin' girth of the warp nacelles. They can't even power the ship or go to warp with anything that could be remotely held in your hands, but somehow a small magical McGuffin device can achieve what are far beyond simple suspecion of disbelief, it's more like "Are you fucking kidding me?"


This would be like Abraham Lincoln showing the alternate timeline of the Civil War only this time they have tanks, airplanes, and a small magical device that can allow then to cross the country in a day.

But it's technology from years after Nemesis. Can I believe TOS-era Starfleet developing it by themselves? Actually, yes (remember telekinetic superpowers via hypospray in "Plato's Stepchildren"?) BUT that's beside the point. Can I see post-"Relics" Scotty and post-Nemesis Starfleet figuring it out? Definitely, just look at the similar techs and examples in this thread. Can I see the 23rd century AU adapting that magical future formula the way we see in ID, resulting in a bag sized transwarp teleporter? Absolutely.

"Post Nemesis"? I don't think there is anything post Nemesis, that we know of.

 

[BillJ]

Re: What is/are the worst or most unbelievable plot convenience device

"Post Nemesis"? I don't think there is anything post Nemesis, that we know of.

Putting two and two together. We have the beginnings of long-range beaming in TNG and then we have the miniaturization of transporter technology in Star Trek: Nemesis.

 

[kirkfan]

Re: What is/are the worst or most unbelievable plot convenience device

"Post Nemesis"? I don't think there is anything post Nemesis, that we know of.

Putting two and two together. We have the beginnings of long-range beaming in TNG and then we have the miniaturization of transporter technology in Star Trek: Nemesis.

Ok, then.

 

[tharpdevenport]

Re: What is/are the worst or most unbelievable plot convenience device

The problem is we are talking an alternate timeline universe that's so much more advanced, for no apparent reason, than the TOS timeline, that you can beam great distances with, as one user put it, something Scotty can hold in his hands. Look at the side of the JJ Enterprise engine room. Look at the friggin' girth of the warp nacelles. They can't even power the ship or go to warp with anything that could be remotely held in your hands, but somehow a small magical McGuffin device can achieve what are far beyond simple suspecion of disbelief, it's more like "Are you fucking kidding me?"

You're working under the assumption that the small device doesn't tap into a much bigger power source/infrastructure.

As far as things looking more advanced, I find it far less shocking a transition than TOS to TMP. Technology could have been moved ahead by scans of the Narada done by escaping Kelvin shuttle craft. Spock Prime was needed to make transwarp beaming possible.

What perplexes me is that fans give so many nonsensical things in the various series and movies a pass. But when Abrams does something, it becomes universe breaking.

It's not buyable. If one could do that, it opens up even more huge gapping plotholes even Leroy Comrie, Chris Christie, and that guy they had to tear his house apart and air lift him for medical help because he was so huge, could jump threw after a month of McDonald's.

Just as perplexing to you, is to me fans who wave off something jsut because some past episode of one of the series has some bizarre stupid technological McGuffin device. I don't excuse all Trek, in fact I chose to ignore parts of it, such as all of Nemesis.


As far as I'm concerned, JJ gets too many allowances. Lets just shine some lens flares in his eyes and distract him with some jingly keys and hope he goes away. Not a popular opinion, I know.

 

[Cyke101]

Re: What is/are the worst or most unbelievable plot convenience device

Yeah America has fallen in love with "Gotta have the shiniest and best" Bullshit since the 70's and it's really starting to bite us in the ass in some major places now because of the cost.

We didn't want to use standard rockets anymore because it was expensive and a waste to only use them once. So we came up with the space shuttle a reusable vehicle that would be much cheaper.

Only it turns out it wasn't. The shuttle was expensive as hell because it was so complex, NASA fed us this line "Well as the program progresses the costs will come down" Which never happened.

Plus the thing was so complex and poorly designed in some ways we lost 40% of the shuttles built (not counting the never in space Enterprise) and 14 lives. And if you do some serious reading into it NASA was damn lucky all 5 weren't destroyed because many missions had an incident where disaster was avoided by the narrowest of margins. The only real benefit of the shuttle was it's carrying capacity which IMHO wasn't enough to cover the cost in $ and lives.

The Saturn V was a far superior craft and no astronaut, of any country, that has ever died did so because a conventional rocket blew up on take off or reentry. Hell the Saturn was so strong that Apollo 13 had a large part of it blown away and it survived. The Challenger was lost because of a commonly used rubber ring and the Columbia because it was so fragile that a piece of foam hitting it at high speed knocked a big hole in it's carbon skin.

Shuttle defenders can get as mad as they want but the truth is before the Space Shuttle America had never lost an astronaut during an actual mission, and we were using some pretty primitive rockets for a while. By the time the program ended we had lost 14 people and 2 ships that costs billions. But hey, we had to have the newest toy, couldn't just keep using expendable rockets.

The military is the same way. Literally 4 hours ago I read an article that they estimate China has passed us in # of subs in their fleet. Why? Because we couldn't be content with improving the Los Angeles class subs. We had to build Seawolf, which was top of the line but cost a shit load so there were only 3 built. They down scaled to a cheaper nuclear sub but still way more expensive than quality diesel electric subs that are far cheaper and can be produced in large #'s. The Navy defends this by saying....yeah but ours are better. Uh don't care when you're outnumbered 5 to 1 I don't think the quality is going so save you.

Same thing with carriers. Nimitz class are the most powerful warships afloat, no other country is close. Nope gotta develop a new class the Gerald R. Ford.....for a cool $15 billion (The last straight Nimitz class ship, George Washington, cost $5 billion.) For comparison a 1960's era conventional powered super carrier, which when you get down to the bottom line has pretty much the same destructive force as a Ford does, although it's not as sophisticated and not nuclear powered...cost about 1.5 billion in today's $ to build.

I don't give a shit how great the Ford class is. I'm positive that if you put 1 of it up against 10 conventional super carriers modernized to carry current aircraft (which they were doing when they were retired) you'd have the most expensive shipwreck ever on the ocean floor in short order.

The US military better get over this 1 of the top of the line is better than 10 less capable, but still very good, weapons soon...numbers do matter, not just having the shiniest and best.

Stepping back into fiction for a moment, isn't that what hapened with the Dominion War?

Starfleet had a proven ship with the Defiant, but instead of creating a large dedicated fleet, they still focused on creating advanced ships like Enterprise E, and the Prometheus.

The problem was, both seemed to be single prototypes, with no other ships being produced. And the Akiras, Steamrunners etc, were made in very limited numbers.

The Mirandas and Excelsiors may not have been upgraded and just thrown into the war, but that just wouldn't make much sense.

It's the same crap that happened with the M-16. The military couldn't be content to take the AK-47 design, maybe improve it some and make it the standard issue. God forbid we use some "Commie design" even if it was excellent.

Instead they had to design the most expensive fancy rifle they could. Unfortunately "fancy" often fails in combat and the M-16 was a disaster for much of the Vietnam War and got its ass totally kicked by the AK which is still the most popular assault rifle in the world today despite being nearly 50 years old.

A guy I knew from Vietnam told it like this. You could take an AK-47 put it underwater, jump on it a few times, throw it into a box of sand and mud, shake it around, let sit a day and when you put in a clip there's a 90% it would fire.

On the other hand he said 50% of the M-16's wouldn't even make it to the box because the water and jumping would break them and of the 50% that came out of the box about 10% of them would fire immediately.

The military always tried to argue that the M-16 issues were negated by the fact it was "more accurate and carried a lighter round so soldiers could carry more ammo" Than the AK-47.

Talk to guys who served in Vietnam and ask them their opinion of the two weapons.......I'm fairly certain most of the responses will be along the lines of "The M-16 was a POS that cost a lot of soldiers their lives. Would have traded it for an AK in a second."

Another irony from the DS9:

KIRA: This is a standard issue, Cardassian phase-disruptor rifle. It has a four point seven megajoule power capacity, three millisecond recharge two beam settings.

ZIYAL: How do you know so much about Cardassian weapons?

KIRA: We captured a lot of them during the occupation. It's a good weapon, solid, simple. You can drag it through the mud and it'll still fire.

Now this. (Federation phaser rifle.) This is an entirely different animal. Federation standard issue. It's a little less powerful, but it's got a more options. Sixteen beam settings.

Fully autonomous recharge, multiple target acquisition, gyro stabilised, the works. It's a little more complicated, so it's not as good a field weapon. Too many things can go wrong with it.

Point about the Defiants -- they seemed to get produced fairly well. The giant Fed klingon fleet at the beginning of the war had several Defiants. Apparently Starfleet had two more to spare to go after Prometheus shortly before. Then Endgame showed two more. So it could be that they just dont seem to be mass produced because it's still a young class compared to the Mirandas and Excelsiors and Akiras.

 

[kirkfan]

Re: What is/are the worst or most unbelievable plot convenience device

^At what point does a ship qualify as being mass produced?

 

[tharpdevenport]

Re: What is/are the worst or most unbelievable plot convenience device

^At what point does a ship qualify as being mass produced?

If I had to venture my own guess: a ship class is mass produced beyond the standard need. If there's a war or some need that requires more than vessels than Starfleet even readily has captains for, it is mass produced.

 

[MacLeod]

Re: What is/are the worst or most unbelievable plot convenience device

A class of ships might never be mass produced, no doubt Starfleet develops many prototypes of vessels and only some of those make it to the production stage and even fewer make it to the mass production stage

 

[kirkfan]

Re: What is/are the worst or most unbelievable plot convenience device

^At what point does a ship qualify as being mass produced?

If I had to venture my own guess: a ship class is mass produced beyond the standard need. If there's a war or some need that requires more than vessels than Starfleet even readily has captains for, it is mass produced.

Thank you but that wasn't my question which is: At what rate must a ship be produced to qualify as being mass produced?

 

[Cyke101]

Re: What is/are the worst or most unbelievable plot convenience device

^At what point does a ship qualify as being mass produced?

If I had to venture my own guess: a ship class is mass produced beyond the standard need. If there's a war or some need that requires more than vessels than Starfleet even readily has captains for, it is mass produced.

Thank you but that wasn't my question which is: At what rate must a ship be produced to qualify as being mass produced?

Your guess is as good as mine. My point is that there's more than a couple Defiants in Starfleet. I'd have to hazard a guess that we'd eventually see Defiants more often in a couple decades, simply because there'd be more time to actually build them, like how we started gradually seeing more and more Akiras.

It could very well be that Starfleet decided to move more Defiants into production because of the looming threat of the Dominion. Valiant could be an example of this.

 

[Kobayshi Maru]

Re: What is/are the worst or most unbelievable plot convenience device

I'd have to say the whole nexus thing. I mean so Picard can enter it and leave it when he wants but how about Soran, once he's in the Nexus, why can't he do some temporal manipulation himself to insure that Picard can't prevent him from launching the missile. It's a two-way street.

 

[wildsulu]

Re: What is/are the worst or most unbelievable plot convenience device

3. different starships, like the Ent.D and a Warbird, always meet up in exactly the same orientation, on the same horizontal plane. While in space they would probably arrive at an angle or upside down.

2. Transporters. Who on earth would step in such a death-ray and cloning machine?!

1. Humanoid species. Arggh#@! I want more horta's, shape shifters and cat paws!

 

[Vger23]

Re: What is/are the worst or most unbelievable plot convenience device

The overuse of the main deflector dish for various purposes in the TNG era was almost inconceivably ridiculous.

 

[BillJ]

Re: What is/are the worst or most unbelievable plot convenience device

The overuse of the main deflector dish for various purposes in the TNG era was almost inconceivably ridiculous.

The Swiss Army Knife of the 24th century!

 

[Kobayshi Maru]

Re: What is/are the worst or most unbelievable plot convenience device

3. different starships, like the Ent.D and a Warbird, always meet up in exactly the same orientation, on the same horizontal plane. While in space they would probably arrive at an angle or upside down.

2. Transporters. Who on earth would step in such a death-ray and cloning machine?!

1. Humanoid species. Arggh#@! I want more horta's, shape shifters and cat paws!

3. Maybe their computers arrange those ships to be oriented the same way. There could be a standard procedure that all ships agree to perform.

2. They keep saying it's safe but I remain unconvinced.

1. They look humanoid but sometimes they have a different color of blood (when it's plot convenient) and different internal organs. The klingons have pink blood!!! (of all people, huh?) Pink blood does seem kinda sissy, doesn't it?