Toilets. Lots of toilets. Kubrick thought of toilets in space, but not Roddenberry. (I’m turning into my father.) What does it take to be assigned to an away team? No wonder the red shirts are willing to risk it. How long do the anonymous crew members have to hold it anyway?
“Make it so Number One!” How about Number Two damnit!
“Fire torpedoes Mr. Worf!” No wonder the guy is so grouchy all the time.
And who cleans up on the holodeck when Wesley is done with his imaginary “counseling” sessions? Ewww!
It seems to me that the concept of interstellar war is really pointless. I mean, eventually, someone says “Screw this, we’re killing all of the bastards,” flies a drone ship towards their home planet, and beams a goodly chunk out of the planet’s core into the planet’s capital city, causing massive earthquakes as the planet “falls back” on it’s center of gravity. Basically, any transporter is essentially a planetbuster. I would imagine that the political situation would be one of mutually-assured destruction.
Robetliguori. I imagine planets are defended… perhaps they even have a shield. But the concept of defending the planet is great for a “sci -fi” marshall. I remember reading in “Ender’s Game” that it is impossible to defend a planet because it can be attacked from every direction.
In one episode of “deep space 9” the dominion launched a suicide attack to earth and they were succesfull
So, I’m not so much an engineer as a biologist, so I’ll confine my comments to living things, and let you clever people work out the force fields and holograms.
1: Can we come up with a new way of making aliens? The ever-increasing variety of forehead ridges is very puzzling to me - what is the selective advantage to ridges? Unless it’s a matter of mate-selection, and in some species these are seen as eminently more attractive traits than smooth faces. Generally, physical features that aren’t functional are lost over time (e.g, all but one toe on a horse), but somehow, many humanoid species seem to be retaining these apparently uneccesary features. Very odd. In the original series, there were lots of crazy beasts; great furry things and so forth. I’d like to see more of that.
2: Can we have more non-Americans among the human crewmembers? I know they try to include token internationals, but it still seems American heavy. Let’s have more Canadians, Italians, Moroccans, Australians, Tahitians, etc.
Oh, I was going to have some more thoughts, but I keep getting interrupted. I’ll save it for a later post. Stupid job.
Somebody was talking about using weapons when the shields were up.
If the shields were up, wouldn’t the phaser beam or torpedo just richochet around the inside of the shield? :eek:
I once thought that the shields were switched off at that instant and re-powered up, or a hole was opened along the weapon’s trajectory, but in ST:Generations, it was pretty much established that the phasers and torpedoes were keyed into the shield’s frequency, thus making those weapons “transparent” to the shields. This frequency is a closely guarded secret. That is why the Duras sisters grabbed hold of Geordi to stick a transmitter on his VISOR, and the minuite he happened to look at an engineering panel displaying the shield frequency, the sisters were abel to “tune” their own torpedoes to effectively deal a lethal blow to the Enterprise-D
You can’t use this method for transporters, because the amount of the nature of quantum resolution transportation for beaming over a living being must require an entire spectrum of frequencies: using a molecular resolution transporter to beam over a bomb might work, though.
Another problem with Federation ships is, why do they put the Bridge…the very heart of the ship’s operations…at the top of the hull, exposed to enemy fire? MY ship wil have the bridge buried DEEP within the geometric center of my vessel.
Also, all Starfleet vessels should have their main deflector dish purposely designed to effectively employ the “Warp Cannon” effect first used…unsuccessfully…in “Best of Both Worlds”. Make it so that surrounding decks need not be immediately evacuated and have the dish burn out after one shot.
And my men will be armed with a personal force field. That’s a must.
Out of curisoty, what happens if a vessel in warp speeds disable inertial dampers and crashes into something?
And screw this shield/phasor frequency crap. A goodly chunk of my uber-computer’s resources will be devoted to randomly retuning all frequency systems.
What happens when two ships with shields run into each other?
It seems to me that a planet is the mother of all exposed targets. What would happen if the ‘invaders’ camped out in a local asteroid belt, strapped warp cores to asteroids, and took potshots?
And the cube-square law is a bitch, defense-wise. How much energy would it take to shield an entire planet?
The Federation consists of 150+ Member Worlds, not including Associate Members, Colonies, and other examples of Federation real estate.
Starfleet dosen’t have enough capital ships to guard them all.
I propose a resolution to place enough capital ships…or orbital platforms…to monitor and safeguard each federation Asset from Threat Forces; the catch is, these ships/platforms are NOT Starfleet.
Make them a combination Coast Guard/Militia Force, employing the inhabitants of THAT world. No one fights as hard as someone trying to save his own home.
The command hierarchy would be entirely sepparate from Starfleet Command.
Not only will this alleviate the defense aspect of Starfleet, this will also create an interesting internal dynamic should the Federation Council attempt to cede territory for peace again.
When one of the crew gets some bizarre illness or wounded almost fatally and the nearest base is too far away to save them stick them in the pattern buffer of the transporter(Didn’t Scotty get stuck in one for decades in an episode of NG and he was OK afterwards) and whip over to the nearest starbase with the appropreate facilities…hell take the long way…no hurry