This is something that has always bothered me not only with the ST Universe, but in Babylon 5 as well. All these ships with Western Mythos names and the like, but not a sign of a Chinese or Hindu ship name or crew.
To be sure, it’s aimed at an American audience, which explains the composition of the cast and the focus, but damn it, it bugs the shit out of me.
Even Firefly, with it’s synthesis of Chinese and Western elements, seemed suspiciously devoid of a Chinese population.
But then again with Star Trek, we never do see much beyond a few token aliens on the “Star Fleet” vessels. Where the fuck are all these hundreds of other species that comprise the Federation?
Yes, this was patently ridiculous. The Federation is derisively referred to as a human organisation lots of times but the Federation is comprised of roughly 150 species. How is it that one race has so much clout when it must comprise less than 1% of the population?
I seem to recall Tian An Men and Yangtze appearing as ship names in TNG and DS9.
When I was writing fanfics, I threw in a runabout (following the established convention that they be named after rivers) called the Saint Laurent. Canada rocks!
I think they’ve said at various times the Federation consists of hundred of “worlds”. This opens the possibility that many (if not most) are actually populated by independent colonies established by the races we’ve already seen. It’s been shown that humans have numerous colonies, implied Vulcans have at least some, Andorians some, etc. There might be a thousand member worlds, but only twenty or so identifiable species.
On the question of beaming dynamite, why not beam through the shields? The shields don’t actually prevent the use of transporters; they just scramble the transporter signals. OK, if your boarding party gets scrambled, that’s bad, but a scrambled pile of antimatter should still work just fine.
For that matter, transporters supposedly work by converting matter to energy at one location, transferring that energy to a different location, and then converting it back into matter. Why not just beam up part of your enemy’s hull, but skip the last two steps? Convert a portion of the klingon hull to energy, and then… Just leave it there.
It always bugged me when Picard said they’d moved beyond the need for money. Yeah, right. Try buying a black market temporal device without money. What, the Ferengis don’t exist?
I’m fairly certain the shields actually block the signal outright. So your transporter beam wouldn’t even be able to get a “lock” on the hull portion, and the antimatter you beamed over would just get deposited on the outside of the shields, in the middle of space (if you’re lucky…if you’re unlucky, it gets sent back to you…right in the middle of your transporter room!)
That doesn’t count. The “cameras” used there are clearly shots from teh filming of Star Trek II, which is nonsense.
Meanwhile, in Star Trek VI, a huge mystery on who shot who and where’s the bad guy occurs on board, and they don’t check any security footage on the Enterprise. Though they do have security footage on the Klingon ship when the shooting happens.
Most of the aliens look like white people with a clitoris on their forehead. And they’re very one-dimensional. There are no emo Klingons, or charitable Ferengis.
Most problems are resolved in the last 5 minutes of the show by reversing the polarity on the technobabbler.
It bugged me when they showed the Doctor from Voyager sitting there working on his computer. Uh, he IS a computer, can’t he just hook himself up to it or do it all over some wireless network? And I remember at least one occasion where he had to “stay up and study” some condition. On the ship’s computer’s records. Couldn’t he have just copy and pasted the file into his own database? Or couldn’t he have just accessed it as he went along?
At the end of the original story, McCoy left his communicator behind. The story based on this had the planet basing their technology on the communicator, eventually emerging as a planet of nerdish fans, resembling one giant convention.
They have those on Space: 1999, but they only seem to let you know when someone’s dead
[fanwank] The Doctor’s program is a complex set of heuristic algorithms designed to mimic human learning processes, much as neural net computers do today. His program is constructed so as to be able to use the information best when digested in a bit-by-bit fashion.
In addition, the Doctor spends much of the show expanding beyond the behaviors of a simple medical hologram. He strives many times and many ways to be seen as an equal member of the crew by the others, so perhaps this is a Data-esque way to increase his humanity. [/fanwank]
Ah, you all and your techno-babble. You want a real trivial, stupid thin in Star Trek that has bugged me for years?
Here ya go: Kirk’s uniform sleeves are too short. Everyone else is wearing long sleeves–Kirk’s look like he washed his in hot water. It’s not an elbow length sleeve; it’s a too short long sleeve. Bugged me no end as a kid. Yes, I am serious.
Data speaks more formally and uses few contractions to reinforce his otherness; he also does not use slang or colloquialisms, IMS.
This is easily explained. As everyone knows, Starfleet uniforms are manufactured from xenilon algae, an organic fiber with biotrophic properties. This “intelligent fabric” behaves as a living organism in certain respects, exhibiting a self-bonding quality that enables Federation garments to close securely without need for buttons or zippers, as well as a pre-sentient ability to tailor itself to the wearer for maximum environmental comfort.
Unfortunately this pre-sentient quality also accounts for the occasional awkward appearance of Kirk’s uniform tunic. Simply put, his shirt is afraid of him. It senses, as all intelligent upper garments do, that Kirk is its natural enemy; and it realizes that ultimately it is doomed to be shredded dramatically in the line of duty. As a result, Kirk’s shirt often finds itself unconsciously attempting to creep away from the source of its imminent demise.
It was even more advanced than that! 5 centuries, unless I’m forgetting a bit of dialogue from the episode. The time traveller the technology was stolen from was from the 29th century, the TNG/DS9/VOY era is the 24th.
Also, from various sources of varying canonicity - including some that only appeared in ‘okudagrams’ - there have been: a Yamato, Akagi, Kyushu, Musashi, Okinawa, Yamaguchi, and several other Japanese names. Let’s not forget the Kobayashi Maru, though it’s fictional even within the ST universe.
Non-Japanese, non-Western (presuming Native American names are included in ‘western’) human names are a little harder to find (though not that much). Aside from the Tian an Min and Yangtze Kiang, there’s the Al-Batani (Arabic), Mekong (All through Asia), Ganges (Indian), and Suleiman (Persian).
Alien ship names include the ShirKahr, T’Kumbra, Sitak, and Sarek (all Vulcan), the D’hjty and G’mak (unknown origin).
And lo and behold, in a later Season One ep. (Devil in the Dark ), they beamed down this silicon cement ostensibly to be used to build shelters of precisely the kind Sulu and Co. needed.
I thought nobody was going to mention this one, until I found you mention it, Illuminati. My beef isn’t so much that Klingons always get subtitled while even newly discovered races speak English, but rather how a universal translator actual manages to make their mouths move to form English words. It’s a translator, not a mouth manipulator. Even assuming the universal translator worked in real-time and could decipher a new language instantly from the moment it was first spoken, that doesn’t mean it can alter the movement of the speaker’s mouth to match the translation. In reality, you would hear the foreign language being spoken either before or during the translation, and even if we assumed it could somehow nullify or cancel out the native language so that only the translation could be heard, it would look like a kung fu movie with the words not matching the movement of the mouth.
That’s a rarity. Many’s the time you see Sulu or Spock reporting from the Bridge, and the camera is looking at them from in front of Sulu, or with Spock’s console behind him, so the camera would have to be hovering in midair.
Terrifel, your explanation of Kirk’s shirt’s fear of him is wonderful! (IRL, the shirts were made of velour, which shrank every time it was washed, so the wardrobe department had to be constantly restitching them. And still we sometimes see zippers! Source: Stephen Whitfield’s The Making of Star Trek, a book no Trekker should be without: Amazon.com)
