Even more amusing, they never use them in the ways that would give them advantages over conventional weaponry.
I mean, you could sweep across a room killing everyone in it - but instead, they only use them to fire single shots, in a straight line, with no sweeping whatsoever. Then they stop firing, reaim, and do the same thing again. They end up having the same firing rate as a bolt action rifle. A squad of marines with M16s could wipe the floor with a squad of red shirts, with their primitive, outdated slug throwers.
IIRC, the self-destruct devices on the U2 were a thermite grenade, used to destroy classified documents, maps and codes, and a poisoned needle, designed to destroy the pilot. Francis Gary Powers attempted to use the former but failed, and declined to use the latter.
Actually, I don’t know if we ever see transporters used for most of the things you say they can be used for. If we don’t see it on screen, then it doesn’t count
Also, for whatever reason, I think they build starships largely the old fashioned way, in a giant floating dockyard where they attach all the pieces together (many of the pieces may very well be replicated though). I think it’s worth noting that we never see replicators that are big enough to make anything larger than a rotisserie chicken. It might be a case of power consumption, or just that the cooks keep all the big replicators in the kitchen, which we never see in TNG. Assuming that all the matter made in replicators comes from energy, the economies of generating enough power to replicate a fully-constructed starship may prove to be impractical compared to just putting one together (possibly from replicated parts).
Also, I don’t think we’ve ever seen the replicators used for creating living things, much less fully-trained crewmembers, and I’m pretty sure the Federation would have concerns for them being used as such even if they were capable.
You’re thinking about this backwards. A number of times members of the crew have been trapped somewhere (like a planet) and they can’t be beamed out because the Enterprise has her shields up, but is perfectly capable of firing phasers while the shields are up. If they can figure out how to fire the phasers while the shields are up, then they certainly ought to be able to figure out how to use the blinkin’ transporters!
Other people have discussed this, but I’d like to point out that if the data rapidly degrades in buffers (even though a replicator is able to store the necessary data to make any dinner you could ever want), then perhaps the Federation shouldn’t be using Microsoft software.
Good point.
IIRC, not all the anti-matter is stored in the warp core.
You’re forgetting the inverse square law of gravity. In order to warp space as much as you’re suggesting, the Enterprise would have to produce a gravitational field akin to that of a black hole, in which case, they could expect any nearby planets to be slammed into the Enterprise rather rapidly.
Everything on Federation ships seems to get fubared on a regular basis. The holodeck goes crazy and puts the ship at risk, the ship takes a hit and the Explod-O-Matic consoles immediately erupt into flames, the transporter goes wonky and suddenly you’ve got good Kirk and evil Kirk running around or you find yourself in a parallel universe, the list goes on and on.
They have something like it, since R2 is always tapping into to find plans or shut trash compactors down, and the like.
Not sure if I’ve voiced this in this thread or a similar one, but yeah, that has occured to me as mildly annoying. I blame the fact that transporters are powered by Plotonium, and thus will act in whatever manner the writers require them to. That said, I’ve always liked the sense of urgency of “Stand by to lower sheilds… NOW! Begin transport!” “Captain, the shuttle’s crew is aboard.” “Raise sheilds, go to warp 3 now!” with the ship escaping in the ta-dah nick-of-time, and the villians presumably angrily quoting some Shakespeare line or another refering to getting revenge in the future.
Duh! Deflector sheilds!
Heh, there’s a fun story about the USS Yorktown, a US Navy cruiser that was refitted with networked computer systems to reduce crew requirements and increase efficiency. If a crewman accidentally did something to make the computer try to divide by zero, the entire system would crash, and the ship would become dead in the water, a la BattleStar Galactica.
Also, on the text-commentary for Star Trek II’s Director’s Edition, Michael Okuda makes an off-hand comment about how Starfleet never seemed to equip their ships with adequate surge protectors.
I always thought it would be fun to slip an R2 unit aboard an enemy ship, and instruct it to connect to a dataport and just shut down all ship’s systems and then leave. If done during a fleet engagement, hilarity would ensue.
Actually, the sword (edged metal, not Godzilla’s glowstick, thankew) is in point of fact a better weapon than a firearm for close-in fighting, having both defensive and offensive capabilities when opponent is within arm’s length. Someone (Heinlein?) was at pains to explain this in some detail. (When your opponent is at point-blank range and you’ve fired however many bullets/flechettes/whatever your hand weapon has loaded, what you have is a pound or two of blunt object, suitable only for use as a blackjack.) However, the problem is that training as an effective swordsman takes far longer than training as even an expert marksman. So in certain limited contexts (Jedi knights, for example), a hand weapon of this sort does make sense.
Let me add one, though: you’re in an advanced spaceship, in Deep Space (where’s shallow space, anyway?), and you’ve just shot a thermonuclear-tipped warhead at the Evil Empire vessel Dark Warlord or some-such (other than a lust for power, do Evil Warlords in Sci-Fi Movies have any plausible motivations?). In real life, what happens?
Well, there is no loud sound. You’re in space, where there’s no air or other fluid to transmit sound. You also don’t get shook around. Same problem – there’s nothing to transmit the blast wave. And you do not see a brilliant burst of light – it’s a frimpin’ H-bomb you’ve set off within a fairly short distance. If you’re not within its range of total destruction (which is probably a smart move), what happens is that the thermonuclear blast burns out, probably melts, the sensors that were turned in its direction, and any others on that side of the ship if not somehow protected.
By the way, there’s a really good reason why the Captain/Admiral/commander-in-chief/ heir apparent Prince/whatever does not risk himself in a death-defying feat of derring-do, except in the last extremity when the enemy is about to take over his command post. Think about it.
In a gravity field – as nearby a planet, for example.
One of my friends insists that all the sound and motion effects we see are the result of special inventions created because humans react better with auditory and tactile cues to go with the visual cues.
So, if a Tie fighter zooms past your X-Wing but in your blind spot, speakers in your helmet make “ZOOOOOM!” sounds so you’ll check to see what’s there.
And on the Enterprise, when the deflector shields take a direct hit, the inertal dampers twitch the ship so that everyone knows they may be vented into open space soon, since there aren’t a lot of windows to look outside and see that the Klingons have us surrounded, again, and Kirk’s up there just making goo-goo eyes at whichever female alien dignitary we’re transporting to a diplomatic conference this week.
During WWII, American infantry fighting in the pacific had standing orders to shoot at any Japanese soldier carrying a sword first. This was for two reasons: A Katana (and many of these were heirlooms from the days when katanas were made specifically for combat) could cause all kinds of horrible mayhem if the guy got amongst a group of soldiers armed only with carbines and bayonette-equipped rifles. An M1 Garand with an affixed Bayonette is merely an unsuitably short spear if you get into sword-fighting range with someone.
The other reason, of course, was that the guy waving the sword around and screaming things was usually the officer commanding the soldiers, and killing the officer could do much to disorganize and demoralize the attacking troops.
I’m a big fan of bad guys who don’t think they’re the bad guys. He’s not overrunning various smaller nations to add to his empire, he’s trying to unite the various peoples so they won’t fight eachother. He’s not using a private military force and biological warfare to wipe out millions of innocent humans, he’s trying to ensure that the human race will be made up of those strong enough to be able to fight off some long-prophecied alien asswhupping comign down the tubes. In the case of Darth Vader, he did what he did for True Wuv (yeah, his actions were foolish and didn’t make much sense, but love makes you do the wacky).
Some friends of mine once theorized that a sufficiently large vessel (containing air, fuel, etc.) would generate it’s own sound-transmitting atmosphere apon exploding (assuming the whole thing just whent KWAFOOOOMM like they do in the Star Wars movies, and didn’t just vent itself through a few ruptures in the hull). Of course, to hear this, you’d have to be dangerously close to the thing, and assuming that suddenly going from flying through a vacuum to flying through a vicious crosswind didn’t tear your ship apart, one of the chunks of the Starship Dark Warlord might just fly up and smack you in the face, a la the White Star #2 on Babylon 5.
Duh, it’s more dramatic if he doesn’t fight until the last minute! That reminds me, in some militaries, say the British military, you find members of the Royal Family serving in the armed forces (IIRC, Prince Charles was in the Royal Navy, and I think one of his sons recently joined too). If war breaks out, is the Prince pulled from front-line duty to serve in a more royal fashion, or is he allowed to stay on the front lines until such time that he has to carry out his duties as the heir to the Crown? Would it largely depend on the relative personalities of the Royal family, the military brass, and the officer in question?
That’s another thing: why would you ever go to the expense of connecting a trash compactor this way? It serves on useful purpose, and adds expense and risk of failure.
In current kitchens, the garbage disposal is always controlled via a hard-wired switch, set nearby, within sight of the disposal. You can’t turn it on remotely via a network. You would NOT WANT this to be possible, for safety sake! Surely the same design principles would apply in a starship (this is assuming any design went into them, other than scenery design!)
Actually, I can think of a couple of reasons why you’d want it connected this way. First of all, by having it automated, you don’t have to send some flunky around to flip the switch whenever the thing gets full. Next, you don’t want it siphoning off power when you’re doing important things like vaporizing planets. Third, we know from ESB that the fleet always dumps their garbage before they go into hyperspace, so you’d want to make sure that the stuff was ready to go before you moved out.
However, the folks at Alderaan must have seen the Death Star show up before they got vaporized. Are you going to tell me that an entire planet somehow missed the fact that there was now a giant metal moon where none had been before? Did they all just stand there, turkey-like, staring up at the thing? Didn’t anybody think (since the planet apparently had no weapons), “Hmm, you know, now might be a really good time to get the fuck out of here!”? Or were they all busy rummaging around the files of their local planetary department to see if their planet had been scheduled for demolition to make way for a new hyperspace bypass?
First of all, the Death Star was a military vessel of their legitimate federal government, not an invading force. Something like that appears nearby, you might get nervous, but you don’t automatically run away. I’m sure the vast majority of the population of the planet simply assumed it was there as a show of force. Remember, Alderaan may have had Rebel sympathies, but it wasn’t in open rebellion.
Second of all, you can’t just evacuate a planet of several billion people on a whim. I doubt they even had enough spaceworthy ships.
It may have been a military vessel of their government, but IIRC, it was pretty much built in secret, so they’d have no idea of who/what was running the thing. One would think that they’d be curious enough to radio up to the thing (if they didn’t send a couple of ships to investigate) to find out what was going on. I don’t know about you, but if I was in charge of a planet, and I found out that the big metal moon which showed up and responded to our hails with, “This the Imperial Military Battlestation Death Star.” I’d pretty much be crapping my pants.
Who said anything about an organized evacuation? Given that people tend to evacuate on their own, when a military force from an opposing side shows up (Alderaan may not have been in open rebellion, but you have to figure that the general population must have had some idea that the planetary government didn’t get along with Imperial government), I’d think that folks would have decided on their own to get the hell out of there.
I do believe this was the explanation given in the X-Wing game. Not sure if it was in game or in the massive manual I bought which played like you were a recruit to the Rebellion. And I accept it. That way you don’t have to take you eyes off the TIE in front of you to look at the radar screen to know if there’s something behind you. And if that something is another Y-Wing, a TIE, a torpedo or just some blaster fire.
Who’s to say the Death Star didn’t announce its presence using all the proper military codes? Seems like SOP to me. Why wouln’t they do that?
Remember, we never saw the Death Star communications center. It’s not as if the Grand Moff or Vader would handle that sort of thing personally
Who says they - or at least their leaders - weren’t? Besides, I doubt most Alderaanians even realized what was going on before their planet went ka-blooey. After all, they weren’t watching the movie.
First of all, nothing in their past taught them that New Imperial Spacecraft=We’re all going to die. Maybe the next planet would have acted differently (although I don’t remember Leia et. al. evacuating Yavin, either).
Second of all, how many people do you think had immidiate access to spacecraft? It’s not as iff every Tom, Dick and Anakin had a Corellian Transport in his back yard. Remember, for all we know, the Death Star was only in orbit for five minutes before it blew the place up.
Third of all, as mr. jp said, who’s to say a couple thousand foreward thinking (or just majorly paranoid) people didn’t get off? There’s probably a book about it somewhere.
My biggest quibble with the Death Star and the destruction of Alderaan is how quickly
it happened. I can’t imagine what kind of energy source would be capable of
blasting an object many thousands of miles wide and many zillions of tons in mass
into tiny bits virtually instantaneously. It is likely that any such weapon would
probably blow up the delivery vehicle too (as it would need massive amounts of
unobtanium to shield the laser cannon). A sustained planetary bombardment over
many days yes, leaving the planet uninhabitable, but not what we saw in ANH.
I’m sure there have been threads before about how ridiculously overpowered the Death Star’s main weapon was. Is it really necessary to not just erase all life on a planet, even render it an uninhabitable rock, but actually blast it into asteroids? One would think that something like the planet killer in Battle Beyond the Stars would be more practical: you fire your main weapon and in a few seconds the planet’s crust is a sea of incandescent magma. And I agree about the time scale. Assuming Alderaan is about the size of Earth, it was not only blown apart but the fragments were accelerated to tens of thousands of kilometers per second almost instantly. People can’t seem to understand that a planet isn’t really like a big rock.
UNLESS… now that I think about it, maybe it’s because they don’t have a choice. Maybe the Death Star’s main weapon is an “all or nothing” application that can’t be scaled down. I can just picture the physicists who first develped the theory behind the main weapon: “Well in theory if you could integrate a negatively polarized Higgs beam with a precisely phased source of virtual gravitons, you could produce a destructive beam. But there’s nothing you could ever use such a beam for; it would powerful enough to blast a planet into shards”.
Good point - but I’m afraid that what we’ve actually seen of Star Trek battles tends to call it into question. It’s not uncommon on TNG/DS9/Voyager for the shields to fail - when they do, weapons impacts inflict a LOT of damage, but Federation starships don’t simply fall apart with one hit. They retain some limited capacity to resist weapons fire, and that capacity would likely be maximized as close to the center of the ship as possible.
I’d also point out that starships do face non-ultratech hazards - radiation, space debris, attacks from lower-tech species. Again, these are circumstances where you could benefit from having a bridge that’s protected even if the shields fail.
Hehe, that said, at least in the Kirk era, we saw that Starfleet vessels were pretty much totally vulnerable to weapons fire without sheilds, with Chang’s Bird of Prey blowing holes clean through the ship. I think Excelsior fared a bit better. 80 or so years later, when we see Commander Riker commanding the Enterprise of that era against an obsolecent Bird of Prey… but with their sheilds rendered useless, their combat effectiveness was pretty much chat of a panicked guy in a bar swinging desperately at a much more focused opponent. I’ve noticed that TNG-era Federation starships (pre-Defiant) that loose use of their sheilds tend to loose much of their other combat effectiveness once they take damage.
But yeah, sticking the bridge way the heck up there doesn’t quite make much sense in Star Trek. It’s worth noting that it doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense now when the US Navy does it on their own ships. I mean, we’re talking about a battlefield involving missiles that can nail you from a hundred miles away, and we still put the Captain in a room full of windows on the top of a tower?
