I noticed the other day when rewatching TOS:The Deadly Years…Chekov turns off his tricorder and wanders into a dark room fumbling around.
Meanwhile 300 years earlier, MY little handheld computer has a flashlight built into it.
My bone of contention with later continuity was the assertion beginning in the movie series that TOS took place in the 23rd century. That’s way too early in my opinion. The original show never mentioned specific dates but seemed to imply centuries of backstory- lost ships and colonies for example. In The Squire of Gothos, an away team member mentions that Trelaine’s concept of Earth (roughly Napoleonic era) seemed to be based on what would observe through a telescope watching Earth “900 light-years away”.
I’m pretty sure “Space Seed” and “Tomorrow is Yesterday” established ~200 years in the future as the setting, though there’s some wiggle room. And I agree that’d be way too short a time for all the backstory they tried to cram in, and “Squire of Gothos” is completely anomalous. At the very least, even if he could see (with an impossibly powerful telescope still limited by the speed of light) 19th-century Earth, how does he know what a harpsichord sounds like?
What if he wanted iced Pekoe tea with sugar and lemon for a change of pace? :dubious:
Nowadays they dispense with the Star Date altogether and say something happened in 2267 or 2345.
The whole point of using Star Dates in the first place was to avoid attaching significance to any particular year in terms of events or technological developments.
On TOS, it was the job of the Story Editor and Producer to ensure continuity. Dorothy Fontana and Gene Coon did it admirably.
Then he’d state that as an option, but the Earl Grey would be the default if he just said “tea.” Jeez, my iPhone can remember shit like that without me doing a thing. The Enterprise computer has to have repeated directions?
Then wouldn’t he have to say “Tea, default”? :dubious: Doesn’t seem like much of an improvement to me. 
Couldn’t the computer recognize Picard’s voice pattern and remember that his default tea was “Earl Grey, hot,” if he didn’t say anything else in addition to “tea”?
I can’t make the population demographics on planet Ba’ku work.
According to the movie Insurrection, and some of the secondary associated material, the planet was settled about 300 years earlier by a group of about 500 people. The planet has a magical radiation field that makes everyone on it young and healthy forever. This does not cause sterility or a lack of desire to reproduce, and we see that there are plenty of children among the population. Yet during the time of Insurrection, the population of the planet is only about 600. That makes no sense. Even assuming a fairly low reproduction rate, there should be hundreds of thousands of people, not only 600. The only way to make the numbers add up would be to assume that 99 out of 100 children are being sacrificed to space gods or eaten by bears or something before reaching the age where they could have kids of their own.
Gentlemen, the important thing is that someone should take Earl Grey out in the alley behind the bar with a baseball bat and have a discussion with him about what tea is supposed to taste like.
ST VI: The Undiscovered Country
Excelsior should have been obliterated at the beginning of the film. a vessel of that size being hit that hard would break up into smithereens.
This (even the first crack. 
) is actually pretty on the nose, when you check the original TNG series “Bible” (see page 28), where it outright states the position of “Counselor” has evolved from a psychiatry/psychology position into a sort of Interpersonal Interactions Specialist.
Kind of an interesting concept at least, aside from the question of how well that would mesh with the established setting, but also at the very least not very well implemented, and fairly quickly degrading into merely “ship’s shrink,” which later Trek outings would run with with the other Counselors we see.
And, badly implemented and/or ill-conceived as it might be, it does lend itself to looking like “New Age Zampolit” onscreen.
“What are you doing, Counselor?”
“Overseeing the feeeeelings of the crew.”
“By invading my privacy?”
“Privacy is not a major concern in the Federation, comrade captain. It is often contrary to the Technology Unchained Utopian good.”
Yeah, I hate bergamot. Yeccch! :mad:
What if he wants something different, but doesn’t say that in time? Then he’d have to repeat the order and waste precious replicator resources!
See how complicated such a simple thing as ordering tea can be?
The Prime Directive is actually a monopoly tea company. That’s why no one wants to violate it.
An episode of VOY had Neelix delivering what were basically emails from the Alpha Quadrant to the crew by carrying around a bucket of PADDs. :smack:
Ever seen Hyperdrive? Miranda Hart plays the ship’s Diplomatic Officer. She’s completely incompetent and only has her position due to nepotism (her father is a prominent ambassador). Sound familiar?
Meh, he’s a Captain, used to the power trip of giving orders. Just because he likes to say the full spec doesn’t mean the computer requires it.
All those years he was haughtily ordering “tea, Earl Grey, hot” but all the computer ever recognized was “tea” and he’s been drinking generic Lipton’s.
I would certainly like to see the Enterprise computer mouth off like that at least once. 