Who writes these ridiculous action sequences in Trek?
This is not unique to Star Trek, nor did it originate with Star Trek.
There's a reason they call it the "Stormtrooper Effect."
Perhaps, but since TOS precedes Star Wars, you can't really say it
originated with the latter. That said, I wouldn't assume that Star Trek was the first show or movie (sci-fi or otherwise) with this issue, either. And your point is taken, as well, in that Stormtroopers do seem to suck a
lot.
Most warships can be killed with a single shot today. It's just that one needs a big shot... But one knows this in advance, and indeed prepares a sufficiently big shot.
Warships today don't have
shields. And the Klingons certainly weren't intentionally preparing a "sufficiently big shot", since they were trying to cripple, not destroy, the
Grissom.
...Hell, when they do, or can be expected to do, the result indeed is more devastating. In TNG, ships could slug it out for several minutes because there was a logical, dramatic reason for not destroying the opponent outright. In DS9, ships at war may die in seconds.
But it's much easier in a wartime scenario to assume - when one sees a ship go down after only one or a few hits - that there are other factors involved: other hits previously taken from other enemy vessels, the ship has been in combat for some time and some damage wasn't fully repaired before the engagement in which the ship goes down, etc. That said, I did find that every now and then, a ship would blow up during a DS9 battle scene a bit TOO quickly, even with the wartime circumstances in mind. And this wasn't confined to one side or the other, either.
It might compromise the photography, though. One can't move too fast, or hide too well, or act too unexpectedly, if one hopes to remain cinematographically interesting.
I dunno... that would work if there weren't other shows and movies in which hand-to-hand looks MUCH better/more realistic, yet don't suffer in the way you are talking about. To be fair, though, even TNG and DS9 are old enough that the technology and technique of filming have progressed since they were made. Making it look better would no doubt be a LOT easier now than in, say, 1995.
I had no problem with that (I wouldn't have any problem with a pho-torp destroying a Connie, if the Connie wasn't ready). The problem with the Grissom was that it was operating, by itself, in a system that had been declared off limits. I mean, in the Federation, are military quarantines enforced by the honor system?
You bring up an interesting point about the
Grissom's location, actually. But I still don't buy the one-hit-kill.
The
Grissom had shields up. This was never stated, but they had plenty of time from the moment the BoP appeared to the moment it fired, so if the shields
weren't up, then the ship was crewed by idiots. I'm going with the shields being up.
This is not a civilian vessel, a freighter, or a transport ship. This is a Federation starship, crewed by Starfleet officers. The fact that it's a science ship can indicate a lesser defensive capability than, say, a Constitution-class cruiser. Far less, perhaps. But not THAT much less. Not so much that it literally would have zero chance of surviving an encounter with the small, 12-man crew variety of Bird of Prey (hardly the heaviest hitter among Klingon ships). And again, the Klingon gunner had been ordered NOT to destroy the ship! So if anything, he was attempting to fire a shot that
wouldn't be a one hit kill.
The Oberth-class in general always seemed ridiculously weak, though. Practically every time a ship of this class showed up in TNG, it was destroyed, or the entire crew was killed by some radiation or phenomenon, or some such.
Well, yeah, that's usually pretty terrible. Purely speculating, the actors seem to be bad shots--or to be directed to take bad shots--so that's what the VFX people have to work with. Perhaps additionally, the directors may or may not just be using the first takes.
I wouldn't think it would be THAT hard to get them to just aim toward other actors, if they really wanted them to. I think a lot of it boiled down to wanting fight scenes to stretch on for a certain amount of time, and thus not too many people on either side can go down, but their choreography just wasn't up to doing that and making it look believable. Whatever the cause, the end result looked pretty bad more often than not.
The really weird thing is that a phaser ought to be its own aiming system. We've seen them operate for cycles of several seconds with no ill effects to the mechanisms. It's not very hard to track a laser pointer onto a target, even if the beam misses it at first; so why is it hard to track a phaser?
Well, there may be some property of phasers (and disruptors) that makes this impractical. Though such a limitation would be hard to reconcile with the long, extended single beams we've seen, as you point out. So I dunno. Best solution going forward may be to stick with pulses for hand held weapons (as they did with the
rifles in the latter three TNG movies; just make it so hand phasers make the switch from beam to pulse type - everyone's phasers, and disruptors too, not just Starfleet - and throw in some technobabble reason why they are better that way. Then we can't ask why they don't aim in the manner you suggest.
)
Not that we're likely to see any more 24th century TV shows or movies, and in Abrams' movie, all the hand-held weapons already DO fire pulses instead of beams, so "going forward" may be moot, but you get what I'm saying.
Apropos of nothing, but related to goofy Trek hand-to-hand combat scenes, they're pretty bad but Babylon 5 challenges them. I was watching that the other day, and some bar brawl, every random person appears to know kung-fu. Spontaneous, inebriated, poorly photographed kung-fu is really kind of hilarious to watch.
Oh god, I remember that. They did scenes like that a couple of times, as I recall. I'm not sure what's worse, in the end: the Trek way (people who are supposedly well-trained in close combat and SHOULD look like they are good fighters, yet look like imbeciles who couldn't outfight a blind Pakled), or the B5 way (all these random civilians are badass - yet REALLY badly choreographed - martial arts masters.)
