Actually…
The 7 kinds of Bad Bosses according to Star Trek.
Tends to point out the down side of working for these people that most of us never consider.
Of course, I always thought Spock was an unmitigated prick, especially after one episode where he’s in command on the bridge and goes from station to station berating people. I just don’t get all the hero worship of Spock.
Then too, the whole Vulcan “brutally supress our emotions and pretend they don’t exist” thing is insanity beyond reason.
That’s a good rule of thumb in any situation.
He wasn’t that way before the beard.
Mmm. If only the little-explored Trekverse had been adequately documented on teh intarwebs so people could check spellings, huh? 
Riiiiight… before the beard he had come across as an ass-kissing boy scout. I suppose it makes sense that he would find Pickass’s little philosophical speeches impressive, but it was way overdone. If I ever get all the episodes to review I’m gonna check to see whether the big boss glances behind himself when stopping suddenly. 
This is a general problem with sci-fi shows, but a particular problem with Star Trek. The people responsible for actual scrapping are utter chumps, the people in charge of designing their equipment are utter bozos, and the people responsible for their procedures are as bad as both of them put together.
This is one particular example, the bizarre phaser pistols have been alluded to earlier, but when you put together the total lack of any sensible protective equipment, basic lack of common-sense behaviour and piss-poor planning you have to assume that the Federation is running some sort of large-scale eugenics programme by the simple method of putting all their sub-standard citizens into Away Teams, after a stint designing equipment and drawing up SOPs for Away Teams.
Twenty-fourth century or whatever and their boarding/exploring/combat parties are universally pathetic compared to what any half-decent navy would put out today.
An old complaint, probably already raised here, if not, raised now, about the original series was the silly practice of sending the ships most important officers (captain, science officer, doctor and mechanic) into potentially dangerous and always unknown situations. The “Next Generation” corrected this somewhat by usually sending Riker and Worf first to at least check out the situation before letting the captain get involved.
I just remembered one…
Those two stranded bastards in red shirts.
In the craptastic episode “And the Children shall lead” Kirk has two security personel on the planet to… I don’t know, guard the corpses, I guess. The percosious little jerks that were brought on board with their friendly invisible lawyer in his bathrobe are starting their evil plan. The Lawyer tells them to take over the ship to be a travelling showcase of his poor acting skills throughout the galaxy.
They go to the bridge wank their fists and make Sulu take the ship out of orbit (except he thinks he’s still in orbit thanks to cheesy 60’s bluescreen technology). Meanwhile, Kirk decides that the guys planet side need to be relieved bacause Redshirt local 201 has very specific guidelines on shift times and starfleet can’t afford both the overtime and expenentionaly large cost for insurance on redshirts.
He beams two guys down… without, you know, checking the co-ordinants or making sure the really pissed off lower deck technitian who had been muttering angrily to himself while cleaning his phaser in the cafateria for the last few weeks hasn’t been screwing around with the controls. Lo and behold he is horrified to find he just beamed two guys into space. Now he has to deal with the paperwork, the union and trying to somehow convince teh insurance company that this was indeed and accident and that the “Capatin’s incompetancy” clause doesn’t come into effect thus making his paycheck the source for funeral payments.
Ok so far so good. Kirk ends up defeating the lawyer with death by acne and makes teh kids cry for good measure. Alls well that ends well. “Mr Sulu take us to our next destination.” Ship takes off the credits roll all is happy.
Well, except on the planet they left behind where two security officers have suddenly stopped calculating the fat amount of overtime money they’ve been racking up and are deciding who gets to eat who once the corpses have been used up.
Exactly the sort of thing I was referring to. Replicating little one-shot scout probes that you can beam down and straight back to double-check the destination coordinates aren’t under attack/water/a mountain before every transmission? Not done, despite it being a trivial thing do to.
“How unusual, captain. The planetary coordinates where we beamed down to last time now seem to be in the middle of interplanetary space. Perhaps Something Is Up, and perhaps we should not send transmit two chumps who are wearing their alien-planet-visiting-pyjamas instead of proper suits” :dubious:
The perils of magical technology.
Of course, in one of the DS9 episodes you have Rom (I think) designing and creating what is basically a self-regenerating minefield around the wormhole
Holy hell! Why aren’t these things everywhere? Why don’t they do the same thing with…well, shit, EVERYTHING?
-Joe
Maybe they were made of protomatter. 
Seriously though, if you want a fanwank, there ya go. The mines were easily duplicable because they were made of protomatter, which only has sufficient explosive yields when bombarded with nutrinos from an impending wormhole event.
Man, that was easy. No wonder so many people do it.
Substitute “area of high verteron flux” for “nutrinos” and you’ve got something there…
But how to they spontaneously regenerate?
-Joe
Well that’s easy. The other mines have replicators.
That’s hardly the only case. No matter how many planets, ships, or red shirts get offed in an episode, Kirk, McCoy, Spock and Scotty always make a little joke in the end. The only exceptions are when Kirk loses a girlfriend.
If only they’d had the technology to do a mid-eighties freeze frame while they were all laughing!
-Joe
remind me, what about the phaser pistols?
I picked up some kind of “Star Trek Technical Manual” back in the late 70’s. In that book (which had a completely different “pre-history” than the one shown on Enterprise or First Contact), Phaser’s were supposed to be some kind of amalgamation of Laser’s (which had penetrating power) and Particle weapons, which imparted some kind of impact force.
Oh, yeah. No diplomat ever had an uneventful visit to the Enterprise. They were always either schemers, had a secret, were actually assassins, or got whacked.
I feel bad for Ensign Ricky