T156

When being a “space military”, Starfleet is shockingly bad at being a “space military”.

In their defence, they explicitly say they are not space military. Everyone else just treats them as such. Just because they’ve got exploration cruisers armed like warships.

Why is the bridge, the nerve center of the ship, put on the top center of the saucer where it can be easily targeted and blown up?

It’s not any more or less explodable than the rest of the ship. But we do see a good reason. The main screens on the bridge are physical on most ships. So if the master computer fails, they don’t lose visibility completely.

Hell, put a specialized micro replicator that just makes bullets in place of the magazine and you essentially have an infinite ammo cheat.

Only if you can power it, and if you can afford to power a replicator, chances are, you can power a phaser enough to be useful, and they’re far more versatile devices.

A regular gun using bullets is just a wasteful toy by comparison.

If anything, there’s the question if why they didn’t just run their phasers at wide beam, and deal with it that way.

In the episode A Fistful of Datas, Worf jury rigs a personal shield to deflect bullets. Awesome. Why is this not standard issue?

There’s no good point. From memory, Worf has to dismantle his badge for it, and it doesn’t last for very long.

Most people just don’t go down where there are bullets flying, and most civilisations use energy weapons like laser cannons.

If bullets were more common, they probably would have them. Similar to why the Borg don’t block bullets with their shields.

Why does no one have pockets after the 22nd century?

Why have pockets if you can have everyone look like they’re in wetsuits? It’s like why no-one has first aid kits, or emergency supplies on them. Who has time for sensibility if you can have the ✨Aesthetique✨?

For example, maybe the Benzites require a gas that is poisonous to some other species?

They do, yes.

But I wonder if every species actually needs its own atmospheric mix? Maybe every species has its own ideal mixture of oxygen, nitrogen, CO2, etc.

I don’t think that they do, or if it does, it overlaps enough that it’s effectively a non-existent difference. They would be much more visibly impaired going planetside otherwise, since the ship wouldn’t be able to sustain it.

Change.

Star Trek seems to be allergic to any deviation from the status quo. Everything forward must be recognisable to the past, whereas reality is not like that. Everything has to look recognisable, and be recognisable, even when it doesn’t make sense.

Everything has to have impulse, warp drive, for example, or engines that make it behave much the same. All the alien ships work like that, even centuries into the future, when that makes no sense at all. There has to be a Federation.

There’s very rarely any sort of major lasting change that we see on-screen, and I think what Star Trek needs is that growth.

Star Trek’s biology also tends to be infamously awful. It’s always played fast and loose with it, arguably more so than a lot of the other scientific disciplines it covers.

Barclay’s Cold Virus cure causing Worf to devolve into a precursor species, and several of the crew to evolve into hybrid creatures just because it altered the introns and exons. Doing that doesn’t automatically turn you into something else, or else radiation would be far worse than it is.

Same for the Klingon redundant organs. It’s still the same system, so the Klingon redundancies wouldn’t do much good, unless they had something on their planet that meant they needed it, that isn’t just being a fighter planet.

And it doesn’t really address the physiological differences very well. A human and a Klingon hit the same, and have much of the same vulnerabilities. Worf has slight super-strength, but that’s about it.

Not long after Walter Koenig (Chekov) too.

At the same time, it was also good enough that it made Paramount want to pop out more shows.

SNW couldn’t exist without DSC giving us a taste of Anson Mount as Captain Pike, for example.

If people had left it, chances are, they’d have left it buried for a few more years.

DIS was shit but the worst thing about it was really that it was the first thing after the pause.

Honestly, I don’t think it was that, as much as its production was just a mess. Showrunners and writers were consistently fired partway into the season for at least the first two, and it shows, because the plot would just suddenly fly off in another direction mid-season, which doesn’t exactly work well for a serialised show.

Past that, it basically turned into an experimental testbed for show ideas, and never really seemed to find its own identity before it ended (though it came close in its last season).

Trying to monetize the piracy of your users. That’s a bold business strategy.

Some time ago, never mind how long precisely, Plex were trying to legitimise themselves, by adding streaming from official sources, etc.

I would be curious if this is meant to be a deterrent, or just to look like one by making piracy expensive.