One piece that never works, to the point that Starfleet should really ask themselves who designed it so badly - warp core ejection system. There's lots of episodes where their main reactor is about to explode, and the emergency safeguard designed to save them from exactly that problem suddenly malfunctions for one reason or other.
Or my favorite order never heard on the bridge of Enterprise "nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure". Fine, often it would go against the ethos of what they are trying to do. But sometimes, they could have beamed home the away team and proceeded to rain fiery death from above with photon torpedoes or whatever.
They have phasers with enough power to boil the oceans of a planet, and torpedoes that can travel faster than light. Yet every conflict takes place at extremely close proximity, often on the same plane, as if they were ships in the age of sail.
They have force fields with a critical flaw (harmonic resonance means any energy weapon using the same frequency as the shields can just shoot right through them) but whenever this is even mentioned, the shields have to be re-adjusted manually.
Unauthorized people can appear on the ship, and crew can vanish from the ship, and the computer either doesn't notice, or does and never alerts anyone or activates any sort of countermeasures. The first officer can be sucked into a pocket universe and have his organs rearranged by non-Euclidean bug monsters and no one will ever know unless they happen to ask the computer where Riker is at the moment.
It's been established that transporter buffers can be used to "back up" a person, even long term (in the TNG episode "Relics," Scotty is discovered having stored himself in a transporter buffer for decades with no ill effect.)
Replicators can't do latinum and living tissue, but they work by literally converting energy into matter and assembling it into something atom by atom. At that resolution, there's no difference between anything and anything else, so there's no reason why replicators shouldn't be able to replicate anything.
The former two items, along with the holodeck (which can create sentient life on request, BTW) should guarantee that no Federation citizen ever truly ages or dies, or even ever has to exist in a physical body. The Federation should be a post-human, post-singularity society. Yet for "plot reasons," none of these glitches (like the transporters being able to clone people simply by refracting the transporter beam) are ever harnessed for their real potential.
Larry Niven once wrote, in either an intro or separate essay, about the problems associated with building universes where you introduce extremely powerful technologies. As time goes on, it gets harder and harder to write around why $TECH can't be used to solve almost arbitrary problem.
Star Trek: TNG made a teenage me wonder why starships encountering each other always appeared to have matched their orientations.
Was there some kind of prearranged signal? A diplomatic code adhered to even by enemies? Just a general preference on all sides concerned preventing headaches and vague unheimlich feelings of discomfort? So many questions…
If I was harassing the federation I would keep my ship at an awkward angle relative to theirs at all times just to keep them on edge.
I was totally fine with the other plot holes though.
Don't think it was necessarily a plot hole, albeit after the fact. Plenty of sci fi authors have taken similar approaches throughout the years. The idea is that in a spiral galaxy the natural tendency would be to stick with the orientation that matched the galactic plane along the right-handed spin (to determine up vs down) and some authors have even extended naval directional signals into space. This is from The Lost Fleet:
"Within a solar system, directional references were always made to the world outside a ship so other ships could understand them. Anything above the plane of the system was up, anything below it down. The direction toward the sun was right, or starboard, (or even 'starward' as some urged), while the direction away from the sun was left, or port."
That just needs a few lines of plot glue to fix that problem! Like, "Warp drives need to be oriented parallel to the ecliptic plane of surrounding celestial bodies to best calculate navigation and maximize their space bending effect. Naturally, ships keep this orientation at all times just in case."
Cue the great SF writer E.E. 'Doc' Smith of Lensman fame, who went into detail on the challenges of just getting two spaceships to match velocities closely enough to allow docking at transfer of passengers and cargo. (He did handwave the speed of light away, though.)
I've always been a bit disappointed in the weapons available far into the future. I tried watching one series and the opening scene involved good guys shooting at bad guys and hiding behind boulders and such. It just looked so much like the conflict sequence in High Noon. I couldn't watch further. And they still suffered from the "good guy bullets" vs. "bad guy bullets" phenomenon. A good guy can run unscathed (or with superficial wounds, at worst) through a hail of "bad guy bullets." Then they turn and fire three "good guy bullets" and five bad guys drop.
Even my current favorite "The Expanse" has a lot of human aimed weapons. I expect that in the future that any weapons that fire a projectile would have an aiming system that would put the projectile dead on the target unless the target can take evasive action once a ballistic projectile is in flight.
But really, I'd expect projectiles to be replaced by directed energy weapons by then. Maybe Star Trek gets that right with Phasors. Do Phasors ever miss? (Check that - should be Phasers. Phasors are weapons used by college math and physics professors.)
Besides The Expanse, which gets a lot of the technical implications on space battle right, there are some other examples. One that comes to mind would be Aerotech, the aerospace rule set from Classic battletech. hard to play as a table top, but in space it works with vectors, thrust and accelaration. And orientation of craft in space. You can even realative speed at the beginning of a scenarion in different vectors. As I said, hard to keep track off but quite realistic.
Another, non-game example of where weapons tech can take you, is Perry Rhoadan. german science fiction started in the 60s. Perry Rhoadan becomes immortal and leads humanity, and for periods the whole galaxy, for thousands of years. There you see actual technological progress, often stolen from other races. It leads to a point where a deus ex was used by authors to reign it back in (hyperspace resistance increased rendering everything too advanced useless). Point is, at the height of it, single shot starship weapons had aroud 2,000 GT TNT equivalent of energy, ships carried a lot of them which had and could be aimed at almost light speed to single point (in the physical sense as they had multilayered shields that could only be penetrated by point-fire, every "point" of the shiled had the same strength). i only wondered how ground combat would look like, as the battle armor and robots carried the same tech. I would assume a city would be reduced to sub-atomar dust within the first 10 minutes of an engangement or so.
but from a technical point of view it made sense, same for power generation and computers (even if computers also got the actual processing power development wrong). Nice thing, they used real world ISO units for the most part, not like start trek which just throwns around units to sound scientific.
Some ship examples: Accelaration: up to 980 km/sec^2, overlight factor up to 60 million, energy directly from hyperspace. So you can see why that, from an authors perspective, had to be rained in. when travel to the next couple of galaxies can be done in a private yacht, things get a little bit to crazy.
They miss, and they miss a lot. Firefights in Star Trek look mostly like firefights everywhere else - beams and bolts flying through the air, and every now and then someone gets hit.
One interesting aspect is that TNG-era phasers used by protagonists don't even look like practical weapons. I read somewhere that this was intentional design decision - Starfleet was supposed to be about peace and exploration, so they didn't want the protagonists carrying something recognizable as a gun. Star Trek back-tracked a bit from that later on, with introduction of phaser rifles that look not unlike something you could really see on a battlefield of the future. But back to the TNG phasers - because they're shaped more like a flat flashlight than a gun, they really must be tough to aim. I mean, try taking a laser pointer and hitting something a couple meters away from you with the first click of the button. It's hard. In my headcanon, phasers must run some sophisticated auto-targeting systems - otherwise, the feats of accuracy seen on the screen would be impossible.
Hand-held Phasers were also so small to show the power of the technology of the 24th century. Gene Roddenberry insisted indeed that they should not look like a pistol.
Source: Star Trek Design, by Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens
I have always explained it away in my head that the hand held phasers have some kind of feedback loop you learn while practicing. I.e. they have some kind of guiding or balancing mechanism, but it's not automatic, which is why you have all these training sessions on holodeck with Riker or whomever.
By the way, this is also what I love about a lot of Star Trek tech. Humans are mostly in the loop. (I am sure it's just a product of the times it was created, but I love it.) Reports are brought on PADDs walking to the captain, not emailing the captain. The computer is explicitly instructed to scan for people, it's not keeping tabs of everyone at all times. If you lose your badge, your are generally not tracked anymore. (No implants.) The badge is not always in recording or transmission mode. Sickbay does not have CCTV system always on. And so one. It seems like a culture which long ago decided on a trade-off between surveillance and privacy, and it's not the same we choosing right now.
But if I keep thinking in-universe style, the Star Trek / Federation culture on surveillance could have come from some hard won failures earlier on.
In a more realistic space battle scenario weapons would have to be able to miss. You would pick your engagement range based on it. It's kind of like sword fighting in that sense: you want to be close to the enemy, but far away enough that you can react to their attacks. The only reason that it wouldn't work this way would be if you had some incredible shields/armor/defensive measure of some kind that would protect you.
The future would likely include lasers as some kind of a weapon, which indicates to me that engagement ranges would be so massive that even light will have a significant amount of travel time.
The expanse is very Low tech in SF terms, certainly when building top end Traveller forces you tend to have individual point defence built into the armour.
Ok at that point the avionics fit for a fire team would buy a small starship.
If I remember correctly, in Banks "Against a Dark Background", space battles must follow strict rules including no-AI assistance. But there are cheaters.
"It's been established that transporter buffers can be used to "back up" a person, even long term (in the TNG episode "Relics," Scotty is discovered having stored himself in a transporter buffer for decades with no ill effect.)"
Well, teck-nik-ally,...
Didn't another officer enter the transporter with Scott but not survive the process?
Don't forget that they do not have auto-aiming for their phasers and despite their advanced photonic torpedos, these are usually not homing either. (It might be that the Defiant's phasers, which were shooting these bolts instead of the continuous beams, were auto-aimed)
(Don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved Star Trek. TNG and DS9 in particular).
In my headcanon, the somewhat low accuracy of weaponry in Star Trek even at close range is explained by ridiculous amounts of trek-tech electronic warfare going on. Every ship emits enough jamming, sensor ghosts, fake warp fields, whatnot, to keep enemies' computers busy trying to make sense of it. At long range you're guaranteed to not hit anything, so ships have to fight pretty close - which explains the ranges we see on-screen.
Their torpedoes don't even have to be "homing." It should be possible for them to have onboard AIs smart enough to allow them to develop complex strategies, use swarming tactics, evasion, etc.
Given the strength of Trek weaponry, one photon would do. I remember reading somewhere that a standard photon torpedo carried 1.5 kg of antimatter on board, which is yield-equivalent to a Tsar bomba (almost 60 megaton). However, phasers could have been easily used for close air support, even from orbit - AFAIR Enterprise-D used them once as surgical tools for geoengineering.
Most episodes seem to script around the need for air support, but I remember one case where it was at least acknowledged on-screen - one DS9 episode had a ground assault at an enemy position to destroy a under-repair gateway in it, and it was said early on that the surrounding building was strong enough that a torpedo strike from orbit would not necessarily destroy the target.
Edit:
My personal favorite case of missed opportunity is the use of transporters to beam armed torpedoes directly onto enemy ships. It was used once in a Voyager episode. It's an obvious, but sadly plot-killing tactic, that hasn't been sufficiently hand-waved away in the lore, so one has to wonder why nobody uses it.
The StarGate series actually took that option seriously (the series was much smarter when it came to combat). In it, to the dismay of the species that provided humans with transporters, human ships often beamed nuclear warheads onto unsuspecting enemy vessels, achieving seemingly impossible victories.
"My personal favorite case of missed opportunity is the use of transporters to beam armed torpedoes directly onto enemy ships. It was used once in a Voyager episode. It's an obvious, but sadly plot-killing tactic, that hasn't been sufficiently hand-waved away in the lore, so one has to wonder why nobody uses it."
Akshually...
Transporters cannot penetrate shield, usually either incoming or outgoing. Usually.
> Transporters cannot penetrate shield, usually either incoming or outgoing. Usually.
Except when they can, due to frequency matching, "technology generation" mismatch between shields and transporters, and countless of other one-off workarounds that happened. Think of every episode in which the Enterprise/Defiant/Voyager was boarded while in combat.
But even when considering the regular case of shields blocking incoming and outgoing transport, there's plenty of opportunities to use transporters offensively. They could be used as surprise first strike weapon to initiate hostilities by immediately taking enemy ship out. They could be used to finish off an enemy in a one-to-one fight. They could be used in coordinated fashion in fleet battles, where whenever an enemy ship loses shields, one ship drops their own shields and transports some photons over while other ships cover the vulnerable friend from immediate fire. Etc.
All in all, there are plenty of opportunities for offensive transporter use which were never explored in the series.
Akshually... it depends on the writer, series and episode.
The shields have the fatal flaw that anything operating at the same frequency can go right through them, including a transporter beam. That's come up as a plot point more than once.
In the good old days, of usenet, James D. Nicoll had a signature that read:
"Frankly, Captain, I feel interstellar diplomacy is out of our depth."
"Ah, hence the nuclear weapons."
Oh, and to make it less obvious, you better announce a few minutes earlier that a plasma storm is forming in the upper atmosphere.