Yes, it’s possible. Hence they have the main deflector array, of which I’m dubious. But it seems to work most of the time, unlike that notoriously unreliable transporter, and of course, the warp drive.
Indeed, it is. Both phasers and photon torpedoes have been used at warp speed. Of course, the phasers shouldn’t work since they’re merely a particle/energy beam, which should still be bounded by the speed of light. But let’s not let that in the way of good graphics!
Well, the inertial dampening system, of which I’m also dubious. It comes and goes based on how powerful the writers want an enemy to appear, thus sweetening the victory.
It has nothing to do with the name of the places; it has to do with the distance between them. How far does it take to get to the east coast from somewhere within the United States? Well, that depends: leaving from Western North Carolina, or Hawaii? That’s a rough idea of the distance (though not actually scaled).
Actors want money; screen time = money. Being on the ship when the action’s on the planet makes screen time harder to get. Besides, if we didn’t see them together on the planet intermixing with low level functionaries aboard ship, rumors would be flying among the NCOs and junior officers that the Captain and First Officer were one in the same. As we all know, a conspiracy at the highest echelon of power in a particular Trek universe can lead to a 2 part show to resolve the problem.
It would suck after watching for two weeks to find out that actually the Captain and First Officer are different people when we knew it all along from merely having read the opening credits, right?
Someone did that once, but then they really beefed up starport security across the galaxy to prevent it from happening again. It became a bitch of a long line to get onto a spaceship though.
Shuttlecrafts are occasionally shown with seatbelts. Also, in a deleted scene from Nemesis, Picard is shown a brand-new automatic seatbelt function in the captain’s chair. He responds by saying something like “finally!”
Something I’ve been wondering about is when the Star Trek timeline diverges from real life – we know the Romans were the same, and WWII, but by the 1960’s there are some differences (AFAIK there were never “orbital nuclear platforms”). Is there an answer to this?
City on the Edge of Forver. 1930s. A homeless man vaporised himself with McCoy’s phaser. No one went back to prevent his death. That is in OUR timeline, because in the timeline that lead to the Federation that man sobered up and did some stuff in the 1950s that he wasn’t able to do in our timeline because he was dead.
I believe the official Star Trek position is that they still happened, but in a way that most people during the time didn’t know about it. And that World War III got pushed till later, (No reference for the first part, second part in TNG:“Encounter at Farpoint”)