I know this link has been presented on BAUT (and probably BABB and UT) but I think it is worth another showing:

Top 10 Things I hate About Star Trek

From there:

For cripes sake Giordi, stop reversing the polarity of everything! [snip] Every time the Enterprise comes in for its 10,000 hour checkup, they've gotta go through the whole [darn] ship fixing stuff. "What happened to the toilet in Stateroom 3?" "Well, the plumbing backed up, and Giordi thought he could fix it by reversing the polarity."

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The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Sometimes I wish I had the DVDs and the time to go through them and document every occurence of something people claim happened all the time on those shows... from reversing polarities to Wesley saving the ship to Picard breaking the Prime Directive... to show how hopelessly false such claims are by getting the actual numbers.

In Asimov's "Foundation" humans had flown and fought in space for one hundred thousand years, and they STILL use two-dimensional tactics! And it's not an oversight on Asimov's part -- when Bel Riose wins a major battle by utilizing third dimension, the losing side accuses him of cheating. IOW, Asimov clearly thought of the matter, just his conclusion is flatly incredible.

I think Asimov always regarded vast majority of human beings as collectivist, tradition-bound, and unwilling to experiment. (Socially experiment, that is.) Which is not surprising for a Russian Jew who grew up in Brooklyn during Great Depression. There are few rugged individualists in immigrant tenements, and even fewer during Depression.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

Well, frankly, just about everything on the ship should be automated. You shouldn't need a navigator or a helmsman at all.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Yes, but sometimes twice is still too many. Heck, with Wesley saving the ship, once is too many!

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

"Oh, no, we're in trouble! Computer, activate Emergency Holographic Wesley!"

(Shudder)

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Don't forget the part where Indy knocks out a Nazi Officer, takes his uniform, and gets his Dad's diary autographed by Hitler himself!!!

"This is how we say goodbye in Germany Dr. Jones."

=)

"Now thats your uncle talking." -Ben Kenobi

No, it would be "E" (Star Wars is better).

The only series that it would be "100 times better" would be the Jimmy Neutron series. (I still vote "E")

Even Space Balls caould match that.

"I'd rather kiss a Wookiee!" -Leia

"I can arrange that. You could use a good kiss!" -Han

=)

They did that, in the original series, and the computer even raised shields, but there were a few bugs: The Ultimate Computer. The computers in Next Generation were a bit less buggy, and really should have been sufficient, except automation would severely limit character interaction.

The human versus automation thing gets really silly in some anime shows (such as Ghost in the Shell) where androids type at keyboards with special fingers . . .to do the work that could be done by a computer without a humanoid body hooked up with a network cable (or a wireless connection). But that wouldn't look as good on screen.

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I did a little searching on polarity. In the original series Scotty reversed polarity on a magnetic probe in "That Which Survives." Apparently the alien transporter had reversed the polarity of the entire ship. In "Apollo" the Enterprise attempted to reverse the polarity of the field holding them.

There is a major non-Trek reference. Jon Pertwee (the third Doctor) did a lot of polarity reversing, and his ultimate techie phrase was "Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow." Apparently this was deliberately copied in a ST:TNG episode.

ST:Voyager looks like it was heavily into polarity reversals. They repeatedly reversed shield polarity, among other reversals.

Data reversed the polarity of an "axial servo" in Star Trek Generations.

ST: Enterprise polarized the hull all the time. Reed reversed the polarity of the field coils in "Harbinger."

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The Leif Ericson Cruiser

There is a set of books caller The Nitpicker's guide to... (They had 2 for TNG, one for DS9, and one for TOS and the movies through 6 or 7) They have little tables throughout that have things like, "The number of things McCoy is not. such as, 'I'm a doctor, not a bricklayer.'" Many of the "it happened all the time" bits are listed along with the episode.

The problem with the shields coming up automatically would be that if a ship with no hostile intent suddenly approached and the Enterprise raised the shields it might be seen as an act of aggression, which would violate the idea that they were primarily on a mission of explorations and peace (most weeks).

A real world example of this was the Soviet Yak-28 Vtol jet. It had a sensor that would monitor the altitude and descent rate. If they indicated the plane was about to crash it would eject the pilot automatically. Reports hinted that this was not a welcome feature among many of the pilots.

I've always wondered why the phasers can't fire until the shields are down to 25%. Also, given the number of miracles the transporter could do (create a clone, raise the dead, act as a stasis chamber for 80 years), how did anyone ever get trapped on the holodeck?
Why did medical teams have to run to an injured crew member?
Why were no enemies ever beamed directly to the brig?

And why didn't phasers have any form of sighting device, and have a firing method (pressing down with the thumb) that will almost guarantee the point of aim will drop when firing?

Side note: In the game City of Heroes you can listen to a police scanner to get a short mission that is not part of the story arc. One of these was to recover the (something like) "Phase Limiting Oscillating Transceiver Device. The mission header was "Find the P.L.O.T. Device. It had a dual meaning due to the number of inside jokes and easter eggs in game.

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A Nerd can figure out how long it will take the original Enterprise traveling at warp 6.5 to travel from Regulus to Antares.
A Geek with think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

Hmmm. I take the reason for that--at least in the case of Ghost in the Shell (haven't seen it elsewhere)--is so the androids cannot be back-hacked. Plus the androids do other tasks besides just work at their computer stations.

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If we don't play god, who will?-James Watson
I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.-Albert Einstein
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits

Data from Star Trek sat as his station like a normal crewmember and didn't plug in. You wouldn't think, "I'm trying to be human," would be considered an exceptable excuse for inefficient behaviour on board a ship that is often in mortal peril.

And speaking as a non-adroid, I have to admit that people and systems are trying to hack and back hack me all the time. Darn advertising and normal human interaction! I hates it, I hates it all!

Heck, the Doctor from Voyager was a computer program and he still had to press buttons!

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

People were always getting hacked through their cybernetic implants, so I doubt that would work out very well for robots. Anyway, there are more efficient ways of setting up firewalls.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Spoken like a true apologist.

But in real life we are rarely if ever able to use such convenient numbers to accurately describe something. After the umpteenth movie/TV show where a critical factor is yet another whole number tied into a standard measurement unit, or another whole number followed by various zeros, one starts to detect a certain disconnect with reality.

Even Obi Wan agreed with that.

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