Star Trek: Most annoying contradictions

Tracer, ranks can be just names. The Salvation Army has captains, but very few guns…

Yeah, but it’s pretty impressive when a non-military exploration agency can muster a 600-ship fleet to recapture a strategic space station from an invading enemy…

Why are transporters not used as weapons?

Grab 'em with the beam, and just scatter their molecules like so much dust!

OK, I’m totally twisted. I just had an image flash thru my mind of a CITY STREET, WITH one guy with an assault rifle saying to another with a kettle hanging from a tripod.

“Captain Rogers, take that street corner! I’ll cover you!”

One of the non-canon books explained that Vulcan males were given five-letter names beginning with “S” in honor of Surak. This is carried throughout the series and the TOS cast movies (including Sybok from ST V). I think “Ston” is actually “Stonn.” I’ve not seen an explanation for the “T’” convention for female names, but then we only saw two of them in TOS, T’Pring and T’Pau. I think the novelization of one of the TOS movies identified Saavik as a Vulcan/Romulan hybrid so she may not have been named under any Vulcan naming tradition. I don’t know if the novelizations are considered canon. But yeah, I wish they’d maintained the S for men and T’ for women throughout all the incarnations.

They may not tell people they are a military organisation, but considering the number of wars they have been in, the firepower they can muster and the hierarchy I would say they were.
The Salvation Army may not carry guns but Star Fleet do, and big ones.

This particular debate always cracks me up, because it’s angels dancing on pinheads. The best comment I ever heard on it comes from Harve Bennett, who produced the second through the fifth Star Trek movies.

Gene Roddenberry was reportedly very upset with the strong naval flavor that Nicholas Meyer insisted on for STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN, conveniently forgetting that it was he who came up with all the naval trappings in the first place. He used to complain to Bennett: “Harve, Starfleet * isn’t the Navy*!” To which Bennett would always answer, “But, Gene, it used to be.”

Another annoyance rather than a contradiction.

Why are there no cameras on the ship? All of the captains have, at one time or another, spoken to starfleet and other ships with visual contact, but all communication between decks is audio only. Why? If you could see who you were talking to, many problems would be solved, like detecting those pesky androids and aliens that have the ability to mimic voices.

More importantly, what about security. I can understand not having cameras in peoples living quarters, but why not the hallway. When the computer says “intruder alert”, a good security officer would immediately try to identify the treat with a camera, but what do Tasha Yar, Worf, Odo and Tuvok do? Send the security officers blindly down the hallway to get the #%^@ beat out of them. Great location detection system. With all their technology, they can’t put in the level of security surveilance system found at the local Walmart.

For that matter, how can the computer detect an intruder, but can’t tell where the intruder is. A simple ship scan will detect microscopic and subatomic particles by location on the ship, but they can’t find the Romulan that just beamed in, or “Crewman Johnson” if he takes off his com-badge.

OK, I’m done now.

Red shirts distort the camera lens.

My worst gripe was with TOS. The transporter is down, the landing party is in peril. Nobody sends a shuttle craft after them. Sulu is shooting a rock with a phaser to keep warm. They should at least make a ten second excuse, like ion storms or something.

I think the excuse was “the writers haven’t thought up shuttles yet,” or maybe “the builders haven’t built shuttles yet.”

Speaking of locating intruders, the internal sensors can and do pinpoint intruders, but apparently can’t always tell what kind of intruder it is. But I think on all the series except maybe TOS at least once the security person has said “intruders on deck ____ !” The newer series have gone back and forth a number of times on whether the ship uses combadges to locate specifc crew members, but the obvious answer (as well as the answer to the “crew is captured and we need to lock onto their combadge to beam them back” problem) is implant combadges into the crew members. In TOS Kirk and Spock got implanted communicators before being captured by the Space Nazis (and used them to escape but not by calling the ship but by making a crude laser from a light bulb…riiight). Riker and Troi got them when they were undercover among the “proto-Vulcan” Picard worshippers, and I think Riker had one in another episode. So why not equip everyone with an implanted transponder as, if for no other reason, a back-up or GPS-like function?

Also regarding communicators, who can hear the voices coming out of a communicator mounted on someone’s chest? Not really a contradiction, just an annoyance. We don’t hold out our cell phones so that everyone around us can hear both sides of the conversation, so why would a “non-military” organization let anyone who happened to be standing around hear everything?

Someone tell me how a red-blooded woman (Amanda, Spock’s human mother) gave birth to a green-blooded baby? And remember, the reason Spock has green blood is because it’s based on copper instead of iron.

(Oh, and I know of at least one real animal that has copper-based blood, the horseshoe crab. However, its blood is pastel blue, not green.)

Ah this is easy. Transporters don’t work through sheilds, unless the writers really really really need them to. So you can’t beam out the Klingon Captain unless both ships have their shields down.

And the reason you can’t use the ships transporters as weapons on a planet, well, there’s so much interference that you can’t get a good lock on anyone who doesn’t have a com-badge. Now, I could imagine a weapon that “paints” an enemy with a transporter signal, so the ship can beam them out. And several times they’ve used the transporters to beam out bad guys. But if you want to kill someone with transporters it’s easier to just shoot them with yer phaser.

A character in a non-canon novel answered that question thusly:

“In vitro, actually.”

I believe it was mentioned in several noncanon novels that the T prefix to a Vulcan womans name indicates that she is betrothed or married. If she has a name that starts with a S then she is still single. However, I am not sure how this applies to Vulcan males or if it even does. Tuvok is an exception as well as a few others. Perhaps we can attribute this to different cultures within the Vulcan race. Perhaps each one has a diffenet traditon. Or is the race is entirely homogenous, then such dissidents can be explained as being non-traditional Vulcans.

Heh heh, it is exactly that kind of double speak I’d find scary if Star Fleet was part of my government.

Marc

They actually had this in TOS, but dispensed with it later on. Recall how Kirk would turn the desktop monitor toward him to see who was calling him from the bridge?

In fact, in “Amok Time,” Kirk receives a message and points the monitor right at his crotch. I always wondered what exactly Sulu was looking at at that moment. (Especially since the only display available at the helm is the main viewscreen. Yikes!)

…Unless, of course, the writers choose to do otherwise.

Say it with me, people: Star Trek writers are the most overpaid globs of axle grease on the planet.

I know that, my point was that they beamed him back into the plane just before the plane was going to fall apart due to stress caused by the tractor beam. Then when they showed him in the plane, the Enterprise (from earlier in the episode, not the one from later that beamed him back) was no where to be seen, and the plane didn’t fall apart. I suppose the Enterprise doing the beaming into the plane also slapped a pressor beam onto the plane just long enough to cancel the effect of the tractor beam, but that scene was editted out…

Okay, I don’t get how com badges work. Sometimes they seem to allow two people to speak only to each other, and sometimes they seem to allow the captain to speak to the entire ship.

Also, they changed the name of Bajor. The first time it was mentioned, in the ST:TNG episode “Ensign Ro”, they called it Bajora.