You can fucking reproduce historical figures with incredible fidelity, but you can't have a swarm of tiny battleships piloted by equivalent AI? Instead, you send your best people in a small warship right into the enemy lines, where they can be picked off at leisure?

Why aren't you people just firing a solid wall of torpedoes at the enemy? Why aren't you flinging black holes around like birdshot? Considering how many ships are lost per battle, why aren't you just launching cloaked warp cores at the enemy and decloaking & detonating when they're in their midst?

Did they completely forget about the self-replicating mines? Ignoring where they get the energy, why not fire a wall of those at the enemy? Right before the first wave hits, it should replicate another wall right behind them, and so on and so forth.

I've seen a moderately serious treatment that suggests that in a fight between our modern military and the Enterprise, the modern military might very well win. The Enterprise does have the ability to slag its choice of ground target, and we'd have a hard time retaliating as long as it stayed in orbit, but that is pretty much all they could do. It seems it would be trivial to block their transporter, shuttles may be shielded but they seem to be slow and one imagine we could wear them down even with conventional weaponry, and Federation ground troops are laughably incompetent by real military doctrine standards, armed with a single line-of-vision ray weapon that immediately gives away their position every time they use it, somehow no air support, and their use of this weapon is also incompetent. Any modern military would chew them up on the ground, to say nothing of the elite ones.

Also it seems like any ol' script kiddie from real modern Earth would be able to penetrate their computer security by accident. The Federation seems to be incapable of writing a login screen without a cross-site scripting arbitrary code execution attack built right in and easily accessible in seconds from the keyboard.

Seems the Reddit-originated movie-bound story Rome Sweet Rome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_Sweet_Rome has a similar issue with the Roman military vs well-equipped (but no resupply) Marines gone back to that age. Modernity works up to a point, but eventually it takes "boots on the ground" with massive resupply chains to win.

Just tractor some asteroids and drop them in the ocean. Aside from the tsunami's, a few weeks of saltwater rain would make it really tough to feed 6 billion people.

Swing back by in a year, and then really fight with whoever is left.

It also doesn't suffer from "Cool Technology in one episode -> never heard from again" syndrome, to give another example of an improvement over Star Trek.

If you've never watched it, I recommend it. It sort of dies with a whimper rather than a bang (opinions on the spinoffs are mixed), but SG-1 was very good for a very long time. Mainlining the first season episodes without commercials and in sequence is really a spectacular experience if you can stomach the "time wastiness". The first couple of seasons in particular really captured the sense of humans being thrust extremely suddenly into a new, huge universe without guides very well.

It's well established that all Goa'uld have the vast knowledge required to pull miracles out of their hats at will. They can and will punish any defector who doesn't have a huge advantage. Just look at how they allied against Anubis, when he made his bid for supremacy.

The Goa'uld are not pathologically incompetent; they're just wary of being disruptive.

My theory is that there are some rules of war that most people with transporter technology follow. We've already seen examples of similar conventions in Trek; for example those banning thalaron & subspace weapons (Nemesis & Insurrection movies respectively).

I think a more realistic theory is that the script writers simply had to draw a line somewhere and ignore the obvious inconsistencies from that point, or they would have never finished an episode.

It was an entertainment TV series after all, not a scientific paper...

I do agree anyway that many episodes were real turds. Personally I hated every single one with "Q" in it. Often those were not even internally consistent.

The trick is doing it right after it starts assimilating the ship, but not after it's successfully done so and suddenly turns on you and everyone else in the sector...

Not to mention perching all of your senior officers in a bubble, on top of the ship.

It's our Alamo :)

> Even such old chestnuts like "Why did the Enterprise actually carry families?" are old chestnuts precisely because it really, honestly doesn't make sense. Starships are blowing up all the time in Star Trek, usually not even due to hostile action (or at least, conventional hostile military action).

Time to pick some nits. Sure, we see ships blow up all the time, but we also see shootings, explosions and robberies on the news every night, but I've only dealt with a break-in at my apartment once, and I've never been shot at in the street, and the only explosions I see are on the fourth of july. Statistically, I'd wager that people are just as safe on a Galaxy-class vessel as they are in San Francisco. (Although, the Enterprise was on a mission of exploration, where you never know where you might end up - it's about as dumb as, say, packing all of your stuff into a wooden box on wheels and heading west... hm.)

But you're right. It's all terribly inconsistent. I'd wager that Futurama is probably easier to rationalize, because at least they portray a lot of the people as human, making dumb mistakes and irrational decisions. "Why is this so?" "Because Fry is an idiot." "Oh, okay." The only difference, really, is in rationalizing the technology, but how different is a self-sealing stembolt from the smelloscope?

No, definitely not. Over the course of TNG I think the Galaxy-class death rate was at least 33% in ~10 years. There weren't that many deployed at the time, and we see several of them blow up, and the carcasses of a couple of others.

It is kind of suspicious that most of the characters are from Earth; Tasha Yar is from a colony but there aren't any other major examples.

> combined with the way the Enterprise in all its incarnations is always the only ship in the sector

Space is big, and sparse. There are apparently hundreds of planets in the Federation (explicitly stated at times). There are also hundreds of starbases. And while in the original series there are only about a dozen ships in the same class as the Enterprise, by the time DS9 rolls around we see huge fleets of hundreds of ships on screen.

The TOS Enterprise didn't carry families because it worked in a frontier with considerably more outright dangers. I think in early TNG, it's implied that the Enterprise has what it thinks to be a much safer job, what with all the diplomatic missions and always being in closer contact with Starfleet. There's an entire episode where Q introduces them to the Borg just to remind them the galaxy is still dangerous.

Given how often Earth itself seems to be attacked, maybe they just realized there's no safe place in the galaxy so the families might as well be around to keep up the morale of the troops.