The problem there isn’t the premise, it’s the shitty writing.
Also, I’m not talking about that much competition - they are ultimately in the same service with the same goals. I just happen to think having *everything *be intra-ship is kind of incestuous (leading to the situation where , say, it *seems *like every featured lady on board’s taken a ride on the Worf train…) but having all relationships be one-off guests is ridiculous too.
Tell that to all the cop shows with that premise, they seem to do OK.
I didn’t say the “off” crew wouldn’t be featured in each episode, just that they’d not be the crew “on mission” (and so might be free to do the more arc-y “B” plots)
In Star Trek, the “photon torpedo” was seen to be fired as a globe of light that traveled in a straight line before blowing up at the target. There was never an indication in the original series that the torpedo was encased in something, nor that it could travel in anything but a straight line, so far as I recall.
It wasn’t until the movies that the idea that the torpedo was truly a physical casing surrounding some mechanism came into being. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan memorably shows this idea, especially at the end when one is fired down at the Genesis planet containing Spock’s body
Personally, I like both concepts. I did always question how, in the original series, the “torpedo” knew when to “blow up”. That it would do so without contacting a ship was clearly true in “The Balance of Terror”, where, of course, the whole idea was to have analogs to almost every aspect of “Run Silent, Run Deep.”
From The Making of Star Trek by Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry (Ballantine Books, 1968), page 194:
There’s nothing about a physical casing there, although admittedly the stuff about “fuses” implies some kind of physical component. But the TOS torpedoes were never visually depicted as anything but glowing blobs.
There is some debate about this in Trek fandom; here is a relevant thread from a Trek board. There are good arguments on both sides. Personally I believe they were always supposed to be energy weapons until Wrath of Khan; I think the idea of a 23rd century FTL starship shooting physical projectiles is kind of dumb.
Well, I’d say the utility is in a physical projectile that can travel FTL itself, is capable of maneuvering, various fuse settings, and with an adjustable yield of up to the megaton range. (Canon, with the amount of antimatter carried as a warhead—not that such a terrific blast was ever depicted onscreen, nor the supposedly double or more more powerful detonation of the Quantum Torpedoes introduced in later years.)
I mean, if you’re crafting your SF setting, you’re perfectly free and able to make up a weapon that functions like the above, but is composed of pure energy or plasma, sure. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable, given the setting we’d seen, for such a weapon to be realized as a mechanical device.
Which brings up a very important thing as a showrunner to insist upon:
Only ships/vessels with warp nacelles can travel at warp speeds!
I almost gave up on TNG in the pilot when they separate out the saucer, which then blithely continues on at warp speed, while the warp engine and the battle bridge, etc., turn around to face the approaching threat. :smack:
Well, now, shuttlecraft may be warp capable. It’s never exactly established what those runners they land on do, besides support the ship. As I recall, in the episode “Galileo Seven”, fuel is burned from the nacelles of the shuttlecraft; that fuel seemingly has something to do with what was transferred from the phasers to the reactor (it’s all quite confusing). But it’s not enough to conclude that the shuttlecraft has a warp-capable engine.
However, IIRC, it’s abundantly clear during TNG that the nacelles on the shuttlecraft are part of a warp-capable engine. This is made clear by shots of the shuttles going into warp, showing the characteristic glowing of the nacelles. Obviously, somewhere in the interim, between the original series and the next generation of ships, shuttles have become warp capable.
Which, of course, doesn’t absolve the writers in the original series for using shuttles to do warp travel, such as in “The Menagerie”. :mad:
Dilithium crystals. Carry extra ones at all times. Something that important, you should never have a story where you’re in danger because of a shortage of them.
That’s news to me. Cite?
I was thinking of “The Menagerie,” not “Court Martial.” DUH! :smack: