Hi! After reading opinions for a long time, I’ve realized that some episodes are quite controversial nowadays. For example, Star Trek: Voyager Season 4, Episode 17, “Retrospect,” has been compared to the #MeToo movement, with some people criticizing how it “handles rape culture unevenly” (as one IMDb review puts it).
This got me thinking: What other things do you feel Star Trek make wrong?
When being a “space military”, Starfleet is shockingly bad at being a “space military”.
Observe:
In the episode, Siege of AR-558, the Feds are defending a subspace relay behind cover, in an entrenched position with only one approach through a choke point and are getting the absolute SHIT kicked out of them. THIS IS A SOLVED PROBLEM. We solved it in the 19th century. The solution is a machine gun. Hell, put a specialized micro replicator that just makes bullets in place of the magazine and you essentially have an infinite ammo cheat.
In the episode A Fistful of Datas, Worf jury rigs a personal shield to deflect bullets. Awesome. Why is this not standard issue?
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?
Why does no one have pockets after the 22nd century?
I may be a little fuzzy on the official version of how replicators work. Do they not need feedstock?
I’ve always kind of assumed that they were basically transporters, pulling raw materials out of storage to be materialized as the requested thing. And the similarity in the special effects for the two seems to support that.
Either way, I can’t help but think that an emplaced continuous-fire beam weapon would be more energy efficient and less prone to failure than a replicator-fed slugthrower.
Replicators use a base of neutral material that the system finds easy to use for turning into other stuff. For this kind of specialized application you might use materials close to the end result lowering the energy usage to extend the life of the unit. In DS9 they had self replicating mines that were networked so that the surrounding mines would replicate a detonated mine using the material of the detonated mine.
The real problem is shields. A slugthrower would be completely negated by a personal shield. Against a beam weapon it depends on how much energy it can absorb per second vs. what the beam can shoot.