Okay, that might make sense. But that wasn’t the first time that some alien had come along and “souped up” a starship’s warp engines.
In TOS “By Any Other Name”, a race from the Andromeda Galaxy called the Kelvans fiddles with the NCC-1701’s warp drive so that they can accomplish intergalactic travel. They exceed Warp 12 (equivalent to about Warp 9.3 on the TNG scale) and break through the energy barrier at the edge of the Milky Way galaxy (c.f. “Where No Man Has Gone Before”) with ease.
In TOS “The Changeling”, the insane Nomad probe does what appears to be some minor tuning to the NCC-1701’s warp engines. The ship exceeds Warp 14 (equivalent to about Warp 9.7 on the TNG scale) before Kirk orders the engines shut down.
Now, admittedly, the technological secrets revealed in these two episodes may have been studied and copied by the Federation. The U.S.S. Voyager is able to cruise safely at over Warp 9.7 (TNG scale), after all, and they may have used some of the Nomad or Kelvan tricks to accomplish this. But in TOS itself, both of these incredible breakthroughs in warp propulsion technology were conveniently ignored in subsequent episodes, and were never heard from again.
And don’t get me started on the Voyager series episode “Threshold”! :mad:
Well, perhaps but the Enterprise did have to get back. So the assumption would have been that the alian would have wiped their brains and computers after they returned. Barkley also increased the shields 300% to survive the probe’s blast. Then, if having gone through all of this trouble, it seems that they would have wiped their brains of the experience completely.
I did like how the shield allowing a ship to hide in a star’s corona was brought back in a later episode to defeat the Borg. That was a nice touch.
Re: Undiscovered Country- The Klingon Bird Of Prey that can fire disruptors while cloaked.
IIRC, they actually learned before it was destroyed that the Klingons would not be able to make another.
Which I nominate as one of the top ten stupidest things in the Star Trek universe. Did they accidently erase all the plans for the ship and all the documentation from the research that led to its design, and all the people who worked on it died or got Klingon Alzheimers?
For that matter, why bother training cadets? Really, all they have to do is train one crew and then use transporters to clone as many copies of those people as needed.
Do we know whether Data’s lab was in the saucer section or the drive section? If it was in the drive section, then Lal, and possibly Lore, are definitely destroyed. If it was in the drive section, then they might or might not still exist. Given how much time Data spent with Geordi, I would think that the drive section would be a more convenient location for his lab.
As for Moriarity and the Countess, I seem to remember that Picard kept that device on the coffee table in his quarters. Thus, I would assume that it got bashed around pretty well when the saucer crashed, and probably broke.
The Treaty of Algeron between the UFP and Romulan Empire specifically states that the Federation is not to develop or use any cloaking devices. It’s not much of a leap of logic to assume that the theft of the cloaking device had at least something to do with that.
Plus, there’s the entire episode of “The Pegasus” where an Oberth class vessel uses a phase cloak to be able to go through asteroids. It’s entirely possible that that was a direct result of the original theft as well.
You can blame the Treaty of Algeron for that. It was incredibly stupid for the Federation to promise not to use or develop cloaking technology, yes, but at least we do have an excuse for why we never hear of it again.
Which is more than I can say for the stun setting on the ship’s phasers, the Genesis Device, transporter duplicates, transporter de-aging, torpedoes that can home in on a cloaked ship, …
Along with the technology, how about the people? Remember the Medusan navigator from “Is There In Truth No Beauty?” He brought them back from some strange space by mind-melding with Spock.
Lazarus 1/2 and their dimensional warp. The universe almost exploded; what did they learn from the ship? They had it guarded for a while, and Spock had access.
Why did they just leave the Doomsday Machine hull out in space? I’d build a ship inside the indestructible hull. you could use the pointy end to ram battleships or Borg Cubes.
The Guardian of Forever! Why do they not have a base there, with the best and brightest scanning the history of various planets for the secrets- and missions like recovering data from disasters so that all is not lost, or rescuing people from their fates in history so that they could live in current times and share what they know.
Why do they never go back to the Shore Leave planet?
Or visit Harry Mudd and all the Stellas! The android replication equipment on that planet and Exo 3000 (discovered by Roger Corby) could make armies of Datas.
Where are the First Federation, with their immense globe-ships?
What happened on Eminiar 7 after the Vendikar treaty?
Did the New Romans or the Iotian gangsters ever make it out into space?
How about the machines: Spock’s Brain controller, the remains of Baal and Landru, the body-change machine in “Turnabout Intruder,” the remains of Sargon’s technology, and others…
It’s not an “ignored” technology, but I think Scott Adams in The Dilbert Future had the Straight Dope on the holodeck. Can’t put my hands on the book, but, best as I remember, Adams says: “In Star Trek, the holodeck is used by crew members as occasional recreation in their leisure time. I think this is unrealistic. If I had a holodeck, I would lock myself inside and never come out until I died of starvation. . . . I’m afraid the holodeck will be humanity’s last invention.”
It’s been established, in a couple of obscure episodes, that not only can your ship’s transporters not beam anything through an enemy ship’s shields, they can’t beam anything through your own ship’s shields either.
In light of ST:TNG “The Wounded” (season 4) and “Relics”, though, this makes no sense.
In “The Wounded”, O’Brien was able to beam onto the Phoenix despite the fact that its shields were up. He accomplished this by knowing when the Phoenix’s shields had their “scan window” open for a fraction of a millisecond. Also, in “Relics”, Scotty and LaForge were beamed off the Jenolan, while its shields were up so that they could brace open the door to the Dyson sphere.
Clearly, if you know the “scan window” of a ship’s shields, or if you know the “shield frequency,” your transporters can operate through them.
So … since, presumably, any given ship’s crew would know what their own ship’s shield frequency and scan window are (even if they were being randomly changed to avoid having an enemy discover them), why do ships still have to lower their own shields before they can beam anything in or out of them?
As for the torpedoes, they are merely set to detonate after a given # of seconds after launch. So, they fire near the Romulans, & hope they hit. Like hunting subs.
A separate thread on “Forgotten/Ignored Star Trek Aliens” seems warranted here. (Heaven knows, TNG was a never-ending parade of one-shot throwaway alien species.)
You know, in the novels (yes, not canon, I know but I used to read them from the library until they started making all sorts of lame multi-book series), many of those alien races show up again and again - and there are several Horta in StarFleet (I think one DS9 novel had as a secondary story a small Horta child running around DS9, mucking things up - I remember distinctly a scene when it crashed into Quark’s holodeck because it sensed copper, only to enter upon some guy’s holofantasy with a Vulcan ‘slut’ [which simulated the copper in her blood])
Actually, the most “recent,” in terms of timeline, of the Trek films, Nemesis (AKA Star Trek, Plot Holes in the Dark). HAD a ship that could fire when cloaked, as well as yet another Soog type andriod.
Or is everyone, like me, trying to pretend that that film never happened?
Although the animated Trek is generally not considered canon, they did return to the Shore Leave planet.
They also had the ridiculous belts than projected a force field around the wearer for use on planets that did not have oxygen/nitrogen atmospheres.
Site-to-site transporter ability was used once or twice. If they can transport some several hundred miles to the surface of a planet, why can’t they precisely transport someone a few down feet within a starship?
Also, here’s a question about the holodeck:
Let’s say your program is to run in the Olympics. Since the holodeck isn’t all that big, how would be able to run (or walk for that matter) great distances with hitting a wall? Wouldn’t you have to run on a treadmill?
I thought about this several times when TNG first came out.
Apparently, the holodeck fools you by “moving” the ground underneath you in direct corolation to your movements, so that you are kept centered in the holodeck.
This theory works quite well, until that one episode where Riker throws a stone to show a visitor where the actual wall is. – The stone should have kept on going, to give the illusion that they’re in open space.
Back to the OP
In TNG, one episode had part of the crew use an armband that allowed them to be out of TIME from the other TIME they were transporting into… why not use that to some advantage elsewhere?