Is this just a mcguffin? (Or anti-mcguffin, since stembolts always seem to be assoc. w/ ordinariness and boredom.) Or do they ever explain what these things are?
Well, at first I thought STDS9 was some type of exceptionally virulent biohazard, so I’m not likely to know the real answer.
But “self-sealing stembolt,” at first glance, looks like a cracking good epithet for use in the Pit.
It’s just one of the in-jokes the writers were so fond of, like yamok sauce, Captain Boday, Morn’s chattiness, waste reclamation, et al.
Self-sealing stem bolts are mysterious devices of unknown use or origin. The field of application of the self-sealing stem bolts is never revealed; not even Miles O’Brien, who otherwise can fix anything, knows what they are for. (DS9: “Progress”) […] Whenever something is (seemingly) useless, a metaphor or simile that includes self-sealing stem bolts might be in place.
http://www.memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Self-sealing_stem_bolt
Thanks!
They’re bolts. For sealing stems. By themselves. Duh.
There has been at least one reference on Enterprise; Malcolm walking through a warehouse and dismissively commenting “Well, he won’t run out of stem-bolts anytime soon.”
A later episode revealed they are vital components in the manufacture of reverse ratcheting routing planers. So now we know.
I forget which of the Star Trek books I read it in, possibly it was in the Tech Manual, that had an amazingly vague description - something along the lines of “Apparently very useful items”
But, where the ones Malcom saw self-sealing or not?
He didn’t say. They might have been the early manually-sealing type, in light of the fact that Enterprise is set some 200 years before DS9.
Isn’t it obvious? Self-sealing stem bolts are used for repairing leaks in all those pipes and tubes labled GNDN.
Oooh! Maybe one of the remaining episodes of Enterprise will be devoted to that crucial moment in history when the self-sealing version was invented! Wouldn’t that be great?
Maybe that’s what the whole temporal cold war (I wrote that without cracking a smile! I’m proud of myself) is supposed to be about.
Ah, Treknology rears its head once more.
Why doesn’t anyone ask why they have to modify tricorders in order for them to do anything useful? Shouldn’t all the other modifications that every other roving band of frontiersmen from the Federation have exhausted its capabilities enough for them to be all-purpose by now?
“Geordi! We’re surrounded by Mondarans! They have a magnetic pulse shield! What will we do?”
Geordi pushes a single button the tricorder, it disables all the shields.
The End.