One that always got me is: why does no one think of using the transporter as a weapon? Once the enemy's shields are down, you can just beam the entire enemy crew into space and have a relatively undamaged enemy ship to capture.
One of the things I loved about the Stargate series is that they took a lot of these questions somewhat seriously. Transporters are used as weapons in Atlantis to beam in big ol' bombs until the enemy eventually works out what's happening and how to prevent it. In some ways you can still tell it's ultimately a Star Trek sequel, but they did a reasonable job of thinking it through much better.
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.
Stargate does mostly avoid that issue, but it falls down on the fact that the Goa'uld are ridiculously incompetent at both a strategic and tactical level. The most obvious being the fact that they never developed the iris that humans managed to develop almost immediately.
My theory is that they actually had an incentive not to be too competent. As long as their squabbling just gets a bunch of minions killed, it's fine. But suppose that one Goa'uld decided to fortify stargates, use a bunch of secret weapons simultaneously, and begin conquering in earnest. This guy would be wildly successful, for a while -- until the rest of the Goa'uld power structure decides to take him down.
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.
There is an episode which explicitly makes the point that the Goa'uld make very sure not to arm their minions with too much weaponry or tactical skill. The Goa'uld are very aware that they are not Gods and there isn't anything in particular preventing the Jaffa from overthrowing them.
I always wondered this as well. It seems like with the transporter accidents that occasionally happen where someone's pattern is lost, they could even just dematerialize the enemy and then memset(0) the transporter buffer.
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.
Once the enemy's shields are down it only takes one or two photon torpedos, much more efficient. In addition, I don't know of any species in star trek with the technological capability to transport hundreds of people from a ton of different locations simultaneously. The federation transports only a dozen or so people max at a time, and they're usually all standing together.
I always wanted to weaponize the borg. Capture one drone, keep him in statis, and then beam him onto an enemy ship. Wait thirty seconds, and open fire.
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...
My mom's company knows when she logs back in after signing off for the day on her remote workstation. A big no-no, and grounds for termination or losing your telecommute privs. It's a big insurance company, go fig. The point is, you think the Collective doesn't know when a drone is put into stasis? The Collective would be like, "Whoa, drone 0x1ffe5ac3409f just went offline, hostiles encountered, last known location Sector X Quadrant Y. WTF? Imma send a squad cube on over to check that shit out." Congratulations, you're dead.
