“Crewman Daniels was the latest one to be disemboweled by the computer”
“Don’t they have that targeting function fixed yet?”
“I guess not.”
“Redshirt, right?”
“It is, now”
When you get disemboweled during a transporter fecal removal, they call that a, “Red Shart.”
We were doing a survey on Arcturus Delta Minor when the shuttle experienced a major systems failure, forcing us to land. Fortunately, it was an M-class moon of the Gas giant, so we were able to wander around a bit, but we were stuck there for three days without power before a ship was able to get us out of there. We had sufficient food and water on board, but we had to relearn how to shit for ourselves. Let me tell you, that is a satisfying experience. I am going to have them install a crapper in my quarters and never going back to getting the shit transported out of me.
I caught a clip from Voyager recently, that featured the ship coming out of a wormhole, with this sort of unhelpful response from the helmsman:
Captain Janeway: “Where are we?”
Lieutenant Paris: “Right where we expected to be!”
Now, I never served in the Navy or Coast Guard. But I have a feeling that if the quarter master of a RL naval vessel said that in response to the captain’s request for the ship’s position, she’d be reporting subsequently to the sickbay to have the XO’s boot removed from her ass.
Disappointing. The belt-worn communication devices in the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet (one of the undoubted inspirations for Star Trek) could transmit images as well as voice.
There was a scene in, I think, a David Weber Honor-verse novel, where a high tech marine gets his ass chewed out because, during a combat op, he saw the enemy and called out, “There they are!” over the comms, instead of something useful, like a position or heading.
So your job is to seek out new life and new civilizations and boldly go wherever. Sending away teams on class M planets is your MO, you must have a cloning device for Red Shirt wearing fools cause you never seem to run out.
But no one ever bothers to wear a mask of any sort planet side. It doesn’t matter if you CAN cure all known illnesses, you keep spinning the Russian Roulette wheel of Communicable Diseases and you’ll discover what natural selection on an alían world can do. The last thing you want is Bones inhaling ‘new life’ and IT then boldly seeking out new life and new civilizations.
When you look at it, Star Trek looks like an exercise in “shall we see how many foolish, short-sighted mistakes we can possibly fit into one ‘futuristic’ series?” It makes you feel like people in the 22nd and 23rd centuries must be mind-numbingly stupid. Idiocracy on (electrolytic) steroids.
Perhaps humans put too much faith in and workload on their computer systems, allowing their grey matter to slump into little more than oatmeal. Sounds like a valuable lesson. Does anyone under 50 even know what “slide rule” or “vernier scale” mean?
Or just transport pieces of the enemy’s hull and structure away until their ship is disabled. Transport pieces of matter so they intersect with moving parts, or just superimpose them on existing matter (that should cause an explosion at best)
Maybe we’re thinking about this backwards. What if the crew of the Enterprise et al aren’t the Federation’s best, bit it’s worst? Sent off to get boldly slaughtered, thereby ridding the core planets of their Biggest Bores At Parties and That Annoying Guy By the Water Cooler. Make the “Prime Directive” and other rules as nebulous as possible so the idiots you send out have plenty of rope with which to hang.
And it all would have worked if it wasn’t for those damn Q!
IIRC, antimatter can only beamed to another ship if it’s inside a special container, which prompted Scotty to propose beaming a special container of antimatter over to an enemy ship.
Scotty also came up with the idea of then beaming back just the container.
All well and good, until these dregs bring home VGer or Borg or Klingons or Dominion or Romulans or any other races that don’t send their dregs and misfits and idiots out into space, and the next thing you know it doesn’t matter because Earth is destroyed.
Nobody said the plan was perfect!
So you saw that episode?
I’m reminded of an episode of the animated series that begins by establishing that the Enterprise has been sent to a sector of space where a ship vanishes every X amount of time like clockwork, the current stardate being X minus a smidgen since the last disappearance. Maybe Kirk banged the wrong admiral’s wife or something…
Do they include any telephone sanitizers…?
Gives whole new meaning to the phrase “Captain’s log.” 
Actually, I think that’s a perfectly good answer. Telling the captain that they arrived exactly on target is more useful than giving her three-dimensional spatial co-ordinates.
I heard that Mr. Spock spent a year dead for tax purposes.