They hadn’t in 1969. Get real.
Spock’s Brain is universally declared to be the worst Trek episode.
You must have missed it. Don’t worry, it’ll probably show up in reruns some day.
Given: a cloaked vessel an’t fire it’s weapons, due to the fact that the cloaking device is such an energy-intensive
piece of equipment.
A cloaking device uses an unknown but preumably large amount of power, as does the warp drive, but the ship can fly at warp cloaked.
How much power does it take to spit out a torpedo from a tube?
Also, in VOYAGER, they attack and neutralize a culture which has discovered Omega particles, super-duper high-energy fuel which, unfortunately, has a tendancy to destroy subspace in an accident, resulting in the impossibility of using warp drive,FTL radio, Isolinear computers, and a host of other subspace based tech. When Vovager leaves, whats to stop the culture from picking up where they left off?
Its not like Janeway had the scientists and tech-support
assasinated or mind-wiped
I believe it is true that the cloaking device uses a lot of power, and that this is a contributing factor to the inability to fire while cloaked. However I think there is also a problem with the act of firing a weapon disrupting the cloaking field in some manner, rendering the ship visible. You could kinda see this in ST:VI.
You know what, I actually have a question that fits into this thread. I initally thought of starting a whole need thread about it, but then went, “Hey, what a minute. There’s a thread over in that place and I could just put it in there.”
So, here goes-
When any of the ships are traveling through space, would the stars go by the ship the way they do? That is, on the show, you see a bunch of stars whizzing by. Is that what it would look like if you were traveling and warp seven? That fast, that color (White, if I remember right), that close together?
CnoteChris:
Nope. Even disregarding the “pretty colored streaks” effect, and even disregarding the effect that you should see no starlight behind the ship when travelling faster-than-light, the rate at which the stars are seen to whiz by is ludicrous. Warp 7 is only supposed to be 343 times the speed of light in ST:TOS and 656 times the speed of light in ST:TNG. Assuming the nearest stars during an average trip were, oh, say, 5 light-years away from the Enterprise, at the speed they’re shown to zip by the hull the ship would have to be going about one light-year per second, or over 30 million times the speed of light.
Oh, I was just having this conversation a couple of weeks ago. 
Here’s some stuff that hasn’t been discussed in this thread, yet:
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Phasers. Where does the waste heat go, on a higher setting? See, on a lower power, they can boil coffee, heat up rocks…but on the higher settings, it just Goes Away. WTF?
-
Replicators. You can’t use them to synthesize vital organs. (Established in TNG.) The transporter system is sophisticated enough to reverse the aging process, but they can’t make hearts on demand.
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I’d just like to reiterate the whole “you can’t hear stuff in space.” Or see lasers, for that matter. (Granted, most ships don’t fight with them. But it happens.)
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Crusher once advised Geordi to hold his breath during explosive decompression. That’d be a neat trick.
(Moreover, nobody’s ears or eyes popped in vacuum. No pressure sickness. That was a neat trick.)
Re: Star Trek technical consultants -
You guys should read the story of a guy who was a Trek consultant for a couple of weeks.
Outlier’s Gulch. Check out the link to “Krieger Waves.”
Well that line alone made me rethink this thing. Damn, that’s so obvious.
Besides, you lost me right after that…
Oops - thought of a new one.
Voyager is always running out of deuterium, and can never seem make more on its own.
giggle
Okay…
Sisco built a replica of an ancient bajoran solar sail ship.
if such ships were made of wood, what made up the rocket that put it in space to begin with?
Actually, they had. I grew up with a 1964 World Book Encyclopedia and it had some info on ion drives and mentioned that NASA was planning using them in the future.
CNote…
Nah, those aren’t stars. That’s just a sort of “distortion” of subspace that the FX guys put in to let the audience know that the ship is moving. Kind of like when you’re driving really fast on the highway, and a big bug flies past the windshield really quick (no, I’m not saying the pretty flashy thingies are alive, I’m just saying they’re random jumbles of “subspace stuff”).
Now that’s more like the speeds you’d see in Star Wars. 
Mordax…
Dramatic license. They’re allowed.
Just to counterpick a couple of nits: First of all, you can’t complain about what they see when they look out the window, because we don’t know what they should see. The existance of warp drive is necessary for the show, and there’s vague hints in current theory that something like that might be possible. To their credit, Trek (at least initially) did a better job than any other televised fiction, then or since, at sticking to what little science knew of “warp drives”. The thing is, though, we’re far from a complete theory. Give me a complete theory of warp propulsion, and I’ll tell you what they see out the windows. Not before.
Also, contrary to popular belief (mostly resulting from other TV and movies), there’s no such thing as explosive decompression. If you get blown out an airlock, there will be tissue damage from the loss of pressure, but it won’t be instantly fatal, much less explosive. If you’re not rescued quickly enough (which shouldn’t be too hard, on a ship equipped with transporters), the cause of death will be lack of oxygen. Eyes will not bulge out appreciably. Give Trek credit for this one.
SPOOFE:
Dramatic license isn’t a license to kill. 
Besides:
a) Harlan Ellison chewed out Lucas for this very same thing: promoting scientific illiteracy. I agree.
b) Are we nitpicking, here, or what?
I can defend cloaking devices, too, if everyone wants to wuss out. They were supposed to introduce submarine warfare to TOS, in “The Balance of Terror.” They can’t fire photon torpedoes while cloaked because of dramatic license.
Chronos:
Re: Explosive Decompression -
Read what I said more carefully. I didn’t say the characters should’ve blown up, or died. Not at all.
I said:
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You shouldn’t try to hold your breath in vacuum. That’s Dumb.
-
Various squishy things in your body should rupture. Blood vessels, ears, eyes. Ever had your ears pop? I’ll bet that’s great in space. Right before you go deaf.
-
You should get very sick. (In all fairness, I’m only guessing about this one. Just strikes me as logical that you’d be puking ill after such a massive pressure shift.)
As for eyes bulging out…don’t even get me started on Total Recall. 
The only non-cringeworthy treatment of a guy in vacuum that I recall seeing was in Event Horizon: the man just started…leaking, almost. Out of his face.
Again, I thought that wasn’t the point of this thread.
If we were supposed to be defending them, I’d be on the flip side of this argument - that they couldn’t show the authentic level of ick in their timeslot. But we’re not, so strike that from the record.
Hi again, folks! Dang, isn’t this fun?
Anyway: Some of you have questioned my nitpick of the asteroid belts.
Enderw24 objected:
Hmm, good point. A sample of one is not a good sample. I think that other belts we encounter will probably be similar to ours, but I don’t know.
SPOOFE then said:
Possibly so. IANAn astrophysicist. Although I doubt it. I would be interested in seeing a computer model of a freshly exploding planet. (Links, anyone?)
So anyway, granting all your objections, and assuming such a field could exist…
:manfully resisting the urge to type the next sentence in all caps:
There is absolutely no reason to fly through it!.
As has been pointed out before, space has three dimensions, and were I a ship’s navigator, I would plot my course to go “over” such an obstacle.
Dramatic License is the license to change something to make it more dramatic. Adding sound to that massive, planet-shattering explosion - surprise! - makes things more dramatic. It appeals to the ears as well as the eyes.
Unless you were trying to hide. Or recover a starship that had crashed there.
I always found explosions in space that were shown in a realistic fashion much more dramatic - a planet going ‘BANG!’ looks like a model of a planet blowing up. A silently and slowly expanding sphere of superheated gasses gives you a sense of magnitude - even putting aside the vacuum issue, if you see something exploding so far away that you can’t hear it yet, it looks big and far away, which is how things should be in space.
You’re not the typical audience member, who likes big, loud, and flashy. They want to be deaf, blind, and spasming from aneurysms by the time the end credits start to roll. They want to stumble out of the theatre, barely able to walk from all the popcorn they drank, lurch into the restroom, and puke like there’s no tomorrow. They want to be able to giggle about all the “gigantic” stuff they saw go “boom”.
It’s just your own fault for being so damned sophisticated, I guess.
Ok, SPOOFE, I thought it was obvious, but let me clarify: If you simply want to travel from a planet to that planet’s sun, there is no reason to travel through any intervening improbably dense asteroid fields.
FTR, some additional reasons to enter an asteroid belt:
- To mine them for various resources.
- To hollow one out for use as a spaceship or habitat.
- To study asteroids.
None of which applied in the episode in question.
There’s another good reason to fly through a belt rather than over or under it: If you’re going from one planet orbiting in the ecliptic to another planet in the ecliptic (or the sun), it takes a whole lot more fuel to leave the plane and re-enter it. Of course, this shouldn’t be much of a consideration for a wessel that could easily hit every planet three times in sucession on a single fill-up, but it’s a very real concern for 20th and 21st century missions.