“Hey Picard. You know how you just made a tommy gun magically appear and then killed two Borg with no effort? Maybe you could make a couple more and take back your ship or something”.
-Joe
They do adapt to different frequencies of phaser fire, so perhaps they adapt to .45 slugs when they figure out what they are. 
They ain’t the sharpest sticks in the pile, what with being assimilated and all.
In which case they have never, in all their galactic conquests, actually encountered a species that uses kinetic energy as a weapon. Like Data and Worf did early on by, you know, hitting them with fists.
-Joe
Heck if I know. It’s a TV show. Maybe they clicked in the little box that says “Turn off Borgamatic Update.” (Not recommended.)
I hate almost all the “planets just like Earth except…”
I’ll except gangster planet because it was a case of contamination… but man that gangster book must have had a hell of a lot of information to make pre industrial culture recreate a North American urban early 20th century world. right down to the small details.
Hated Nazi planet… I mean the guy is a historian and his excuse was that the Nazis were efficient because they recovered from the depression. What kind of historian is this guy!!! I’m surprised he hadn’t modeled on Mussolini based on trains running on time fallacies. But hey if we can get two jewish stars to dress up as SS officers I guess it was worth it. (Yeeeagghh that gives me the willies)
Worst though is planet Rome!!! Truly goofy, with a basic 1st grader Sword and sandle understanding of Roman culture. The ending is so goofy it is annoying. The “it’s not the sun in the sky…” bit comes out of of left field then having Spock wax on about Rome falling because of this philosophy was embarrasing.
I just discovered a Web site that lets me watch every episode of TOS, and after watching the second pilot episode, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, I’ve discovered something that will probably annoy me for years: why in hell couldn’t they have found a way to get Andrea Dromm’s Yeoman Smith character into every episode that followed? :mad: My god, that has to be the most beautiful woman to appear in any episode of ST, in any of its incarnations (save perhaps Ashley Judd in a couple TNG episodes)!
I mean, Grace Lee Whitney (Yeoman Janice Rand) was certainly very nice to look at, but Andrea Dromm … damn!
Oh, whilst we’re on the subject: care to show me where on the periodic table latinum is? Can’t find it? Well, what about dolomide? Duranium? Thorium? Tritanium? More to the point, where the fuck is dilithium?
There was an episode of TNG where Geordie asks the computer how many elements are non-detectable by ships sensors and the answer is something like 10,000. Whoever decided to include all these mythical materials clearly flunked their basic chemistry classes, as otherwise they’d know that there are only 117 elements (and 30-odd of those are so unstable they don’t exist very long before decaying). Even if you’re talking about isotopes/nuclides there are still way way less than 10,000.
I once read a different sci-fi author who explained away his unobtainium as having been discovered as part of an unanticipated stable “island” of artificial elements WAY up the periodic table around atomic weight 900 or so.
Have they ever said it’s an element? Ignorance of the Periodic Table is rather bad, I agree.
Oxmyx or whoever says, “the guys in the other ship, yeah, they let us lots of stuff, books about how to make radios and stuff like that, but that’s The Book!”
He says while he’s croaking, “I thought I could control it.”
Yeah, that really sucked.
I wonder how many elements (stable or not) there can be in theory. I think I’ll post it in GQ.
-FrL-
Stupidest thing on Star Trek? Jeez. Let me count the ways . . . .
Yup. Q. I hated Q with all my heart and soul. I will forever hate Q and all the Q represents.
Keep god off space ships and things will be much nicer. I promise.
But, there were a lot of other things that were so stupid they will be burned into my brain until I am Transported to the Great Beyond. Too many to list, actually.
Positions 90 and 3, respectively?
Agreed; infantile wish fulfillment, used (in the first episode) to heap scorn on barbaric 20th-century types as only pussified Hollywood can.
Element 3 is Lithium. What’s “dilithium”? Also its crystalline state is important somehow.
Nothing about crystals, though.
“Dilithium’s chemical symbol is Dt, its atomic weight is 87 and it is a member of the hypersonic series of elements, according to a periodic table graphic seen in episodes of The Next Generation[1] and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.[2] The dilithium crystal structure is 2(5)6 dilithium 2(:)l diallosilicate 1:9:1 heptoferranide, according to the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual.”
They explore a strange new world, naturally with near-earthlike conditions of gravity, air pressure, oxygen content, etc.
They beam over to a derelict starship/space station, uninhabited for years or centuries, and the gravity plating in the floor still works.
Somewhere near trilithium ? 
I’ve mentioned this on this Board before, but it’s too good a story not to repeat.
Some twenty years ago I was working on research on Laser Propulsion. No joke. We were shooting at homemade targets the size of a dime with very powerful lasers and blasting them all over the place. I extruded the targets from a special plastic that had all sorts of things mixed into it. We needed something that could ionize easily, so we looked into alkali metal compounds, looking for something with a low ionization potential. One compound struck our eyes.
Dilithium Tartrate
http://www.somerslithium.com/Dilithium_%20Tartrate.htm
It didn’t have a very promising IP (or other features), but we HAD to get it. We did, and mixed some into the witch’s bew that was our target material.
It didn’t work noticeably better than any other compound we tried. But we are, as far as I know, the only group that ever tried to perform space propulsion experiments using Dilthium Crystals.
Lithium, by the way, is element #3. The third element on the table, and the first one that’s solid at room temperature. It’s soft as butter, and reactive, although nowhere near as reactive as the heavier alkali metals:
Hey, I gave a pass on THAT part because, well, it’s Trek, man! Where 4 out of 5 advanced aliens agree that 20th-century mankind were uncivilized heathens! They’ve been at it since TOS…
(though I wonder how upset would people be if ,when Picard says Q’s wearing a “silly costume”, instead of a mid-century US Marine uniform he wore that of, oh, a SAS commando or a Central American dictator … or a Red Army commissar… just wondering, y’know)
Then when they reinserted Q as a recurrent character at first I thought to myself, hmmm… OK, so this not really the God of the quadrant, it’s a grownup Trelane, a rogue trickster-deity nemesis who’ll dog them… hey, maybe he can be put to good use placing them in really fantastic scenarios… but of course I must have been drinking. Just as was done to just about everybody, but specially in their case, the presumptively awesome Borg and Q were eventually totally emasculated and stupidified.
I think it’s fair to pick on Trek if the plot doesn’t make sense or is inconsistent. But you can’t pick on it because it’s limited by being a 20th Century television show made on earth and designed to entertain.
Of course the planet matches earth; It’s filmed on earth. Of course the abandoned ship will have gravity; how the hell else could they shoot the show, have everybody floating for a whole hour, pushing the practicality of shooting over its limits, and boosting the budget by 500%?