No episodes featuring holodeck malfunctions. No episodes where the primary plot involves a holodeck adventure.
No plots where the only thing that saves the whole thing is the last 2 percent of the shields or phaser power or whatever.
Well, yeah you CAN do such a plot, but it should be some lazy assed tacked on shit near the end.
Entirely this. That is the very reason why I gave up on TNG.
I want to see episodes about space travel and aliens and photon torpedoes and shit. Not a fucking holodeck where Sherlock Holmes prances about.
Either NO ONE can have cloaked ships or EVERYONE can have them. The idea that the Federation doesn’t use them because of some treaty is beyond stupid.
Bridge crew no longer goes on away missions. Have personnel specially trained for that.
AND NO MORE DOCTORS ON THE BRIDGE!!!
Goes along with my rule: If you’re going to have them doing Military stuff and giving them military ranks, then make the ship and crew act in a military way when combat is imminent (evacuate air from all compartments so you don’t have air (and people) escaping from a breach, every crewmember in sometype of spacesuit (in case of hull breach), restraints, secondary bridge (TNG tried this very early and discarded it almost immediately), CiC…
And also, they are not Security: THEY ARE MARINES! It has been a perfectly good name for armed personnel serving on ships for centuries, I see no reason to make them sound like some secret Russian agency…
No kids on the ship. If they must be there, no stories about them.
If there’s a really interesting character on one episode, bring her or him back at least once. And don’t think it’s necessary to kill them off when you do.
In other words - Don’t make Star Trek.
I remember being especially disappointed with TNG over this. I thought that Hill Street Blues had shown everyone the proper way to make a show like Star Trek: have some bridge personnel making decisions, and have several lower-decks people who were regularly shown carrying out the on-surface stuff. Maybe then the occasional red-shirt would survive. 
The idea, as I understand it, was that Roddenberry was deliberately downplaying the idea that these people were in a military organization. They used military ranks, it is true, but so does the United States Maritime Service. But you don’t put marines on a civilian ship.
Besides, one quibble I have is that, even if they are marines, on the ship itself they perform the function of security. When I grew up on a Navy base, the marines who took care of such things weren’t called “marines”, they were called “security.” You didn’t say, “Call the Marines, my daughter’s lost on base!”, you said, “Get ahold of Security.” 
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A sense of optimism and hope. This is what makes Star Trek, Star Trek. Humanity and Earth are in a good place.
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A sense of wonder and fun. Space is neat. Exploring space should be exciting and fun.Speaking of…
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Exploration. Politics can be interesting but it shouldn’t completely take over the show. I want the crew to mostly looking to see what’s around the next bend because no one else ever has before. Speaking of…
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It’s set on a Star Ship. I love Deep Space Nine but Star Trek needs to be on a Star Ship.
This would be an entirely different show.
Star Trek is about exploration. It’s the Age of Discovery several centuries in the future, complete with a mixed bag of missionaries, scientists, merchanters, settlers, and conquistadores.
Which is why TOS had the ship’s captain and senior officers personally carry out the majority of away missions- the idea was to replicate the hands-on approach of the age of exploration, when the captain in fact did lead parties ashore.
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No more plots revolving around rogue admirals coming in, hijacking the ship/mission, and requiring the crew or senior members of the crew to disobey orders/mutiny (a favorite TNG plot setup)
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Overall arcs to a season, with at least half of the episodes being standalone with “B” plots that deal with arc issues
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Have character conflict and less-than-perfect characters with different points of view (and not just an alien with no real ideology whose only purpose is to comment on the human condition)
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Have crew members with families - spouses and/or children
No… I think you’re missing his point. What he’s saying is the equivalent of saying that if you are expecting to engage in combat, you do some smart precautions- evacuate the air, wear space suits/body armor, seal the compartments, shut down the food replicators, turn down the lights, have everyone go to their battle stations and do their battle jobs, etc… All measures to get people in the right places, conserve energy and air and thereby enable the ship to fight more effectively.
This is opposed to merely saying “Red Alert!” turning some red lights on, and maybe dimming the lights a bit. To their credit, you DO see them do this in Wrath of Khan, I think it was.
Even Age of Discovery ships cleared the decks and sent the noncombatants down to the orlop deck when expecting to fight other ships. He’s just suggesting the Star Trek era equivalent.
I suppose maybe the “Red Alert!” is supposed to be a sort of shorthand for coming to General Quarters/Action Stations, and they don’t actually show what’s going on.
Nah. This is my bugaboo with most modern television. Some shows – relatively few, IMHO – work well with “story arcs.” Star Trek has never been one of them. Standalone episodes is the way to go.
I think so, and I’m ok with it because it wouldn’t be very interesting to watch people getting into space suits or pushing a button to decompress a compartment. Watching armor cover a ship is pretty cool, though.
I’m torn on having bridge crew on away missions. I like lumpy’s assertion that they should be the frontline explorers, and Kirk and Spock were incredible together, but Scotty at the helm made me nervous (Sulu was ok). I guess Riker had it right that the captain should stay on the ship.
My new rules :
- Fix warp at some multiple of c, and set that as a hard, universal limit for anything to travel. No transwarp, no instantaneous travel.
- No faster-than-warp comms. If we’re replicating the Age of Exploration, then by damn the ships are going to be out of touch while on their missions, and their captains are going to have real power.
- No more pandimensional all-powerful godlike beings like the Q, it’s old and boring. Take a leaf from B5, where even the almost godlike beings needed space ships.
- Set it on more than 1 ship with a similar mission - a friendly rivalry between crews, different captaining styles (A Vulcan captain would be cool), some cross-crew romances, alternate which ship is doing the mission-of-the-week, a season-long arc leading up to some sort of stand-together-or-hang-separately situation.
- No time travel
- A need for space/environment suits at least a few times a season.
- One really alien crew member - alien CGI starfish, silicon lifeform in an encounter suit, insectoid Muppet, I don’t care, just one non-humanoid who *thinks *like a non-humanoid. NOT a shapeshifter, though.
- Put it on a channel that allows near-nudity, alternative sexuality, light swearing, adult themes and violence. Like Killjoys-level SyFy adult, not HBO-level orgies, I mean.
- Set up a system for how psi works, and stick to it.
- no more monocultures.
M’Ress is now captain of her own ship.
It might be presumed that if the shields fail the ship is going to be a ball of plasma shortly thereafter. Maybe air loss while the ship is still intact is considered unlikely.
My general rule for all science fiction is that unless it’s part of the plot that the planet is habitable, there’s no oxygen. All the times Kirk & Co. beamed down to a barren expanse of rock and sand, they should have been wearing respirators at least.
I liked a lot of the DS9 episodes involving the holodeck, especially the Vic Fontaine episodes.
Except that we have definitive, actual canon proof that it doesn’t. The whole first combat between the *Enterprise *and the Reliant shows what happens when ships duke it out with phasers and without shields. Terrible damage, but not necessarily instant destruction. Torpedoes OTOH, are way more destructive, but presumably limited in some scope versus phasers.
And we have no proof that I’m aware of that Alpha Quadrant weaponry changed appreciably in the *Enterprise * - Voyager time frame. They’re still firing photon torpedoes and firing phasers.