Star Trek: How lousy ARE their military tactics?

Janeway is obviously a lower class captain. Voyager is designed as more of a ‘police’ ship then a full blown starship. Their resources are severly limited (don’t they have something like 99 photon torps for the entire trip back). They just don’t have the luxury of opening all weapons.

Forget Starfleet, how about those Klingon? These are supposed to be the fiercest warriors in the galaxy, yet they are CONSTANTLY getting the snot beat out of them. Especially in Next Gen. Double especially with Worf. Okay, the first two, three dozen times a “harmless” alien smacks Worf around, I could say “Wow, that alien must be more than he seems if he can so easily beat a mighty Klingon warrior.” But after a while, I couldn’t help wondering if maybe Worf was just a big wuss. I kinda think even I could take him. Especially if he tried to use that goofy curvy Klingon sword (Batliff?).

OTOH, I was very disappointed when Star Trek started using fighters. To my mind, if you wanted fightercombat, you watched Star Wars. If you wanted big, beheamoth battleships duking it out toe-to-toe, you watched Star Trek. Indeed, ST was really the only sf movie or TV franchise that did good capital ship combat, that I know of. (Obviously, it wasn’t all good, hence the OP, but Wrath of Kahn and that TOS episode that was like Das Boot with Romulans: those were just awesome.)

The worst battle scene I have ever seen on film was the scewne in “Star Trek: Insurrection” where they were shooting at the drones on the planet’s surface. They’d leap, roll, take reeeeeeallllly cxareful aim, and then fire one shot and hopefully hit something.

Maybe it’s just me, but aren’t those hand phasers just about the most pathetic weapons in the history of military equipment? Yes, they’re powerful, but they ONLY FIRE ONE SHOT. (and they don’t seem to be easily aimed, either, judging from the generally horrendous marksmanship displayed by Starfleet officers.) But wouldn’t it be a hell of a lot more useful to have weapons that, say, fired a barrage of shots? Or could fire a continuous stream that swept over an area?) Brilliant engineers of the 19th century came up with such a weapon; it’s called a “machine gun.” Starfleet also seems to be a little short on the supporting weapons.

When Picard blew away those two Borg on the holodeck in “First Contact” with the tommy gun, it occurred to me that that tommy gun was the best weapon on the Enterprise. Pathetic. A platoon of reservists with M-16s and grenade launchers could clean up a regiment of Starfleet troops.

SPOOFE:

Even if the shields were down, the battle scenes in Star Trek movies have become sloppy and cheap.

The Enterprise is a BIG ship. It’s fancifully called an “Explorer,” but it’s a battleship. The Klingon ship it blew up, a Bird of Prey, is very small, relatively speaking; it’s like a PT boat going up against the USS Missouri.

IF they stuck to the ST universe’s existing technical “rules,” so to speak, the Enterprise should blow that ship away effortlessly; the Klingon ship’s shields should never have been able to sustain a full bore phaser blast. But it did, because… because, I guess, the writers just weren’t very good, and because ALL Klingon ships in the movies now are “Birds of Prey,” because it would be expensive to build a model of a different kind. But also irritating is the amazing stream of photon torpedoes the Enterprise seems to be able to take without exploding; they’re supposed to be POWERFUL, for God’s sake, but in the movie they explode with all the force of a decent-sized firecracker. (In The Undiscovered Country, some didn’t explode at all.) With its shields down, most ships should be blown to peices by a direct hit with a photon torpedo.

The ridiculous “Blow up the Bird of Prey with its shields down” schtick has been used twice now, in the sixth movie and again in Generations, and I can only assume that they just couldn’t come up with a better idea.

So, really, NOTHING in that scene made any sense. The whole “we know the frequency of their shields!” thing is stupid. The Klingon ship shouldn’t have survived the hits it took, and the Enterprise should have been in peices.

What I find hard to take, is that the weapons systems are so unreliable, three bursts from the pahsors and the damn things either burn out or they have to stop firing before they overheat, WTF, can’t they make a decent weapons system ?

Why are the shields and weapons systems not self-contained ? Any hit to the power grid inevitably seems to bring the choice of keeping sensors operating, life support going, shields or weapons, like choose any 3 from 4 huh ? Wouldn’t it make some sense to have independant systems in a vessel that is likely to sustain combat damage ?

What’s best are those hull breaches on decks 16-18 when the shields are up at 70%…

Well, it’s a diplomacy vessel. In ST, it seems that the true warships are usually SMALLER… the reason the Galaxy-class ships are so huge is that a large percentage of its volume is given over to luxurious amenities.

Further… aren’t they capable of just altering the frequency of their shields?

In the original series the Federation and was willing to kick ass when ass kicking was necessary.

Balance of Terror: In this episode a cloaked Romulan ship has entered Federation space and destroyed a few outpost along the neutral zone. The Enterprise responds by attempting to blow the ship up before it can ever get back to Romulan space. I didn’t see any lame passifism in that episode.

The Gorn episode: A mysterious new race has destroyed a Federation colony and the Enterprise responds. The Enterprise responds by attempting to destroy the alien threat by destroying the ship before it could flee Federation space. Granted later on they wuss out with some pacifism stuff on the planet but that was only because of a Q like race that interfered.

The Federation has grown soft since then and they’ve become a bunch of wussies. I liked it better when the Feds actually tried to kick ass when someone screwed with them. Typically the orginally Enterprise wouldn’t sit and get shot 3-4 times before responding.

Marc

Two things about ST have always bugged me:
First- why have ranged weapons at all? You’ve got he capability to yank chunks of thier internal support frame off with the transporter or destroy the warp core by beaming the control system out into space. Or beam a bomb into jean-luc’s fistank- but they blaze away at visual range with Megawatt beams?(granted they say you can’t beam thru a shield, but they get past this at times also.)

And how is it that any alien that wants to can just materialize through the hull and harrang anyone it wants w/o so much as setting off a motion detector? I mean, come on, most 16 year olds have better protection on thier cars than this 'Flagship",Sheesh

“Balance Of Terror” IMHO, the best episode of TOS. Probably the only example of adapting real military strategies to starship combat.

 In an espisode of DS9, a serial killer uses a SPOILER

gun that fires a bullet to lethal velocity then beams it directly in front of the target. Since shields block transporters (at least most of the time they do. “we know their frequency” etc) these guns are no use on ships. But the writers never gave a reason why they were not used on the battlefield. I agree with the above posts about disappearing super weapons.

In Undiscovered Country, a protoype Klingon ship that

can fire when cloaked. I’ve never seen one of these in TNG, or DS9 (I never really watched Voyager)

 The exhaust seeking photon torpedo used to destroy the prototype Bird of Prey.

       The phase-cloaking device in TNG is a violation of a treaty. Picard destroys it.Presumably enough Star Fleet officials want to uphold the treaty, that the Federation does not engage in cloaking device research.

Two reasons:

  1. Transporters are notoriously unreliable. Seems that anything can jam them… even some little kid sneezing a spray of snot in the path of the transporter beam.

  2. “Unethical” warfare. It’s not “fair” to the other ship (see, toldja that the Feds were wussies).

Uh… not easily. And not in the middle of a battle.

I always enjoyed how, mostly in TOS, all power surges were directed in such a way that bridge consoles exploded into characters’ faces. I’m pretty sure that the sickbay had a specialized facial reconstruction pod, even though they never showed it.

Re: the “offensive transporter” issue:

I don’t think it’s a matter of Feds being weak-willed when it comes to such tactics. The fact is, no-one in the Start Trek universe does it. Which leads me to one of two conclusions:

  1. The writers don’t want to allow it, since it would unnecessarily complicate everything (transporters would become the only weapon necessary!)…or they just plain haven’t thought of it yet.

or

  1. If we accept the technology at its face value (as in, ignoring the fact that what happens on the screen is at the whim of writers), then there must be some technological reason why it isn’t feasible - otherwise, someone would do it. The Borg are the only race I know of which comes close - but they use cutting beams and tractor beams to remove sections of ships, not transporters.

Obviously, #1 is the real reason, with #2 probably being the rationale (supported by some incomprehensible technobabble).

The Enterprise is the wrong class for the missions it performs. Virtually all navies have two types of ships; small independent ones (frigates, corvettes, submarines) and big fleet ones (ships of the line, battleships, aircraft carriers). It’s the small ones that do the kind of missions the Enterprise does; traveling around without escort, relaying messages, carrying diplomats or other important officials, performing recon or survey missions, sneaking into enemy territory, showing the flag against less powerful countries or planets, etc. The big ships act as flagships for fleets of smaller vessels and in peacetime generally either stay near their homeports or patrol in a fixed defensive zone.

Now obviously the Enterprise should have been a Star Fleet frigate or some similar rating. However, the producers and writers of the show were apparently unable to accept the idea of their heroes serving on anything other than the biggest baddest starship in the galaxy.

Another big gap in the Enterprise’s operations was the absense of marines. Any ship with the Enterprise’s size and mission should have had a detachment of a hundred or so marines on board. How many times would Kirk have been able to quickly resolve a problem if he had been able to beam down a couple of platoons of ground troops? Instead all he could send in was a couple of red-shirts and all they ever did was get killed.

It’s both.

The transporter is in Star Trek because it A) looks really cool, B) gives you the opportunity to do cool stories, and C) lets you spend less money on sets and models.

Most of the Star Trek universes’ background was designed AFTER ideas were introduced in the series, and transporters were the original wrench in the works, so to speak. (Holodecks have just completely lapped them for continuity errors, though.) IF you have the ability to zap matter from place to place at will it makes for all kinds of problems with handling stories.

  • Why have a ship at all? Why not just beam around?
  • Why can’t you destroy other ships by meaning nuclear bombs aboard, or by transporting away hull sections?
  • Why have Turbolifts? Why not just beam around the ship?
  • Just where the hell does the matter go? Can you clone people or things?
  • Why can’t people commit theft on amazing scales?
  • Etc.

The basic answer to everything is power. They put in a lot of limitations by simply making it so that power was an issue. Starships, no matter what, can only produce X power, and if they’re using all their systems - like in battle - there isn’t enough power to do everything at once. If you want to fire more phasers you have to get power from another system. So they not only made it so that transporters have limited range and can’t go through shields, they made them suck up a lot of juice. You wouldn’t want to use them much in battle; you need the power. Similarly, you wouldn’t want to use them for unnecessary stuff like having everyone beam around the ship rather than walk and taking the lift, because you’d always be taxing the system, and everytime Troi holds one of her “gentlemen only” “Counselling sessions” in the aft holodeck, the damned lights would dim.

One explanation (a lame one, but an explanation nonetheless) that I once got from a Trekkie fan is that they can’t teleport sections of a chemically-bonded material. In other words, they can’t just teleport your arm off and leave you to bleed to death.

Although I don’t buy it… I see no reason why a transporter beam couldn’t be modified to obliterate chemical bonds. Hell, they can modify everything else… just route the transporter beam through the All-Powerful deflector dish.

One of the things I couldn’t understand in ST:TNG was during the early battles with the Borg. Away teams beamed into the Borg ship a couple of times, but no one said “Hey, why don’t we take along a couple kilos of anti-matter and release it from magnetic containment when we’re safely away???”. They transported a small quantity of anti-matter to a planet’s surface in the original series to destroy an alien creature (the episode “Obsession”) and said it would take only a very small amount (a couple grams, IIRC) to rip away the planet’s atmosphere.

This always makes me laugh. Here we’ve got a technologically advanced culture who seem to have forgotten about a humble 20th century invention; the fuse. Sheesh.

[possible spoiler]

I watched an episode of Voyager the other day where Tuvok’s mind gets zapped by some invisible alien. They need to know about the frequency of the zapping (which Tuvok was measuring just before the event) to help cure him. By now Tuvok’s a different character (gives Tim a chance to smile a bit) and can’t remember anything. He’s into cooking, and ends up unconsciously drawing a sine wave in icing on top of a cake. Now, there’s no scale (either x or y). How in the name of God’s green earth could they hope to get any useful information from it. Geez.

It’s worse than you think. They use plasma conduits to bring power to EVERYTHING. EVERY SINGLE FUCKING THING on the ship. Even when simple copper wires would do the job.

I mean, how much power does a friggin’ keyboard NEED, anyway?

Apparently quite a lot, to explode so spectacularly :smiley:

That’s the answer then. At least it’s consistent.

      • I agree with others that one reason these shows aren’t interesting to me is that the “advanced” combat they use is inconsistent and nonsensical. Like for instance, aiming guns at all: if you’ve ever seen someone play a videogame using an aimbot, you know what I mean. A computer can aim any (automated) weapon far quicker than a living organism can.
        Also it’s interesting about how it portrays war: guided by some UN-type Universal Organization concerned about peace and prosperity for all (a very liberal concept), but at the same time it seems to show that advancing technology will be able to shield individuals from the personal horror of war, which hardly discourages engaging in it. Healing is instantaneous and nobody hardly ever dies. War, anyone?
        ~
        Poor writing, plain and simple. No overall concept.
        ~
        -I think the whole concept just falls flat for me: I understand it is intended to be showing particular characters facing particular situations, but I liked Blade Runner far better because even though the image of the future it showed was rather depressing, it was far more believable than any Star Trek or Star Wars episode. Star Wars showed different species getting along far too well, IMO. Star Trek is way too clean and tidy.
  • Well it is rather lame how the keyboards keep exploding (maybe they should stop making them with nitroglycerine in them) but in this instance, the writers actually did okay. Standardization of systems isn’t all that dumb. Have you ever noticed how every wall socket in US houses is capable of delivering 120 volts@10 amps, even when the only thing plugged into it is a 15-watt nightlight? If you wired the outlet for only a 15-watt output, building the system would be more complicated at the outset and you’d never be able to use that socket for anything else that needed more power. - MC