Assuming Enterprise makes it to the usual seven years (which doesn’t look likely at this moment), I’m sure there will be some sort “We must never speak of this ever again” explanation.
Do you expect Archer to wake up and have it all be a dream or something?
For better or worse, Enterprise is canonical, just like the other four series. It has some glaring screw ups in the continuity of the franchise but what show doesn’t?
Klingons grew brow ridges in TMP after being smooth browed in TOS; TNG had a completely different look for the Trills than DS9 did; and VOY was … well, Voyager. All those have been accepted, flaws and all, and the apologists (like me) try to find ways to make the story make sense on the whole, either by rationalizing or by trying to forget.
Hey, if everyone—meaning “most of the fans, if not Paramount”—is willing to ignore ST:V, then I think I can handle pretending Enterprise never happened.
Oh, and my own suggestion…the unnamed “laser” weapons used by the people of Solais V, as featured on Loud as a Whisper. What makes them special (not obviously not actual “lasers”) is that after being hit a a blast from these weapons, a humanoid victim will have their flesh vaporized—leaving their skeletons STANDING in place, untouched, for a few seconds before the bones themselves disintigrate.
:eek: 
If they used those things every week, it’d more than make up for all the “generic bump-head” aliens they always use.
That, or the Varon-T disruptor, which disintigrates a target’s body from the inside out, causing an incredibly agonizing death.
For that matter…when’s the last time we saw one of the tiny, “Type-1” hand phasers used by Starfleet people? Or ANY phaser set to “vaporize”? Most (if not all) of the lethal phaser effects we’ve seen in recent years were just sparks flying from the target’s chest.
THERE WAS NO ST:V!!!
What happened to the teaching helmet of the Eymorgs? Surely somebody took a detailed scan of that little gadget! 80 years of refinement later, all they should have to do is put a cadet in the helmet for a couple of hours, and presto!-- fully-trained Starfleet officer!
If they can build an EMH, where are the EEH (Emergency Engineering Hologram), ECH (Emergency Command Hologram), EHH (Emergency Helmsman Hologram), and of course, the sorely-needed ESH (Emergency Security Hologram)?
“I am the Emergency Security Hologram. My program includes looking stupid, getting lost, standing in the open while under fire, losing my communicator, and agonized screaming. My targeting subroutines incorporate 47 different random factors, guaranteeing that I never hit my target more than 10 percent of the time.”
You guys missed the biggest one: Immortality. In the episode where Kirk and the boys got really old, didn’t they ‘cure’ them to use their younger molecular patterns to regenerate them, or some similar explanation? That would imply that no one ever be old.
Think of the possibilities - you could decide to live through to 100, using a transporter recorder to record ‘you’ at yearly increments. Once you got to 100, you could decide on the age of ‘you’ you liked best, and then just reshape your body to that age and maintain it forever. Every time you used a transporter, it could reset your age - a micro rejuvination.
I seem to recall Kirk and Spock having some sort of chip embedded that allowed them to shoot laser beams out of their wrists when augmented by an incandescent light bulb.
Came in handy for the jailbreak scene, I imagine it would have proven very usefull in a few other nasty scrapes our heroes found themselves in.
Sam, that was one of our original nits at the Nit Pickers Guild founded by Phil Farrand. Along with the (non)military nature of Star Fleet.
It came up in TNG, too, with that horrrible reincarnation of Miranda Jones.
Nice to see that other fans picked up on that, too. Because it’s a biggie! maybe the biggest nit of all.
I did a little checking, and according to this site…
Subcutaneous Transponders…you don’t see them very often anymore either, do you?
They didn’t use phaser rifles nearly enough.
[QUOTE=tracer]
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.
QUOTE]
Huh? I’m by no means a Trek Trivia buff, but didn’t they use cloaking technology on the Defiant in DS9? Or am I completely confused?
Yea, but that cloak was borrowed from the Romulans specifically for use in the Dominion war, nominally, it’s not supposed to be used without a group of Romulans on board to monitor it’s useage. Sisko completely ignores this provision as stupid.
Two thoughts:
The Klingon proto-type ship that could fire when cloaked. It was destroyed by the Federation. Thus no more prototype ship. Additionally- it was destroyed while cloaked. Not good. So even if the Klingons did have the technology around- they also knew the Federation blew it up. Maybe they simply abandoned the program once they learned the Federation was able to destroy it. To them it may have looked like a complete failure.
The whole heatseeking torpedo. Well, maybe everyone figured out a way to cloak the exhaust through disappation. Or through the use of decoys. Think about today’s heatseekers and flare decoys.
While duplicating humans with the transporter system seems a little ethically shaky- why not Data?
If site to site transporters work so well- why is anyone able to invade the ship? Just beam them into the nearest sun or outside at “maximum dispersal”. Why did the transporter even have that setting if they only used it once. I would have used it all the time. The welcome mat is not out on my ship!
Holographic people are restricted to moving only within those areas of the ship where holoemitters have been installed. Installing extra holoemitters in the ship’s Sickbay to accomodate an EMH is one thing, but for an ESH to be even marginally useful, there would have to be holoemitters everywhere. And, of course, the ESH couldn’t beam down to the planet with the rest of the crew, and so the ESH’s valuable Red Shirt would be wasted.
Despite what the name implies, Site-to-Site does not beam someone from one site directly to another.
The transporter beams from one site, stabilizes the pattern in the buffer, then re materializes the subject at another site instead of the pad.
Unused tech, the replicator used to replace Mr Worf’s damaged spine, something not used to replace Nog’s leg.
But … but … but, the reason the prototype fire-when-cloaked ship was destroyed was because of the “heatseeking” torpedo! If everyone has figured out a way to cloak the exhaust through dissipation, so that a “heatseeking” torpedo would be useless against a cloaked ship, then there’d be no reason not to resume the fire-when-cloaked development program!
There were some DS9 and TNG episodes where people seem to forget that hand phasers have a stun setting. Any episode where a crew member gets his/her mind taken over by some alien is a good use for stun setting.
Also there was a DS9 episode where Kira was up agaianst some her resistance pals, they could have used stun there also.
Enterprise is actually pretty good in this respect.
Brian
Exactly. In fact, if with transporter technology you can store molecular patterns, why would you need a sick bay? Save an optimized person’s structure, and you should be able to also fix anything, possibly even bring them back from the dead. Why not use the transporter for enhancing a person, programming genetic changes with a quick tweak of the program? As mentioned, why not create clones? All you need is the raw genetic material, disintegrate it, and then reform it using the stored pattern as a template?
I would think that replication of people and objects must be almost certainly possible if you can store molecular patterns. Every Starship could have a Data. Why try reverse engineering the teaching helmet of Eyemorg? Scan it to determine what raw materials are needed in which quantities, and make a thousand of them. Etc, etc, etc.
If I were in charge, I’d have nixed that episode, where the loophole was created whereby molecular patterns could be stored. I can just hear myself, “CONTINUITY, GET IN HERE NOW!!”
I’d have closed that up by stating at some time during the series that due to some quantum effect such as Spooky Action at a Distance, the atomic particles would be entangled so that they automatically reassemble when "encouraged " to do so. However, other properties of entanglement would make it impossible to ever be able to store a pattern or figure it out.
For instance, it’s been suggested that one could potentially send a message faster than light using this property while at the same time making it impossible to figure out where in the universe the message originated from. Likewise, one would not be able to discern how the atomic particles pattern themselves.
OH YES, BY THE WAY, THANKS FOR REMINDING ME ABOUT MY BIGGEST PET PEEVE! Star Trek, and most other Science Fiction serials had a chance in every episode to take a minute or two to teach a bite sized actual bit of science to the people watching.
A little bit each episode, building on what they’d already given you before. If you explained some scientific principals or theories and wrote part of the script around them, the stories might have been able to take on a greater complexity over time. One basic premise per season all leading to the finale. Less mumbo-jumbo solutions and some real options and resolutions to the stories.
SF programs do a real disservice by not doing that if you ask me.
Oh yeah. I also agree that using the Enterprise’s phasers on a stun setting would be a very useful tool that could have been used more often. I also liked the wide coverage feature for the hand held phasers that was mentioned earlier.
This was an experimental treatment. Realistically, it would take at least a few years before it was used in the field.