The Borg made TNG the best TV series. Even Chuck Norris would have trouble with them.

You know why the Borg are no longer around? Chuck Norris assimilated them!

(Resistance was futile!)

I see your inertial dampeners and raise you a Heisenberg compensator!

The length writers will go to allow plausible sex with sexy aliens.

Blue Orion slave girls? It could happen! Heh.

I managed to overlook the fact that every single alien in the galaxy spoke perfect English, too.

And an improbably high percentage of them were bipedal, too!
I blame the chauvinistic humans in central casting.

lioncourt:

“I see you managed to get your shirt off.”

Chuck Norris might be the only one to take Kirk

Yeah, Proof, but even Norris had trouble with Tribbles. OK, OK no more lame references to past Star Trek episodes.

I’m hungover and cranky this morning

OT, but I’m an expert with that condition, try pancakes or waffles (no, not John Kerry) with plenty of syrup to get sugar back up and wait a little while for the coffee, go with water. Once the sugar level comes back up hit the coffee, or take a nap, you’ll feel great.

Or just have another drink.

I tried that once at one place I worked at after our “Wednesday even attitude adjustment meeting” I was advised that I was lucky to still have a job, driven home and sent had to attend substance abuse training. For a while the company got their moneys worth out of that training!

An ancient alien race which was bipedal seeded many planets with life’s basic building blocks, sparking the explosion of biology on those planets. This is also why so many aliens are biologically compatible: they share the same genetic basic system of A,C,G and T and it is merely the actual arrangement that differs, not the basic geometry of the system.

The length writers will go to allow plausible sex with sexy aliens.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4d7qptGDfA

I’ve always been a star wars fan over Star Trek Voyager ..

Proof:

And an improbably high percentage of them were bipedal, too!
I blame the chauvinistic humans in central casting.

This was covered in the ST:ToS episode The Paradise Syndrome and the ST:TNG episode The Chase.

An ancient alien race which was bipedal seeded many planets with life’s basic building blocks, sparking the explosion of biology on those planets. This is also why so many aliens are biologically compatible: they share the same genetic basic system of A,C,G and T and it is merely the actual arrangement that differs, not the basic geometry of the system.

As to why phasers can be aimed off centerline, it is because they were always designed to be more like phased array radar emitters than actual cannons. The ST:TNG Techinical Manual goes over the Enterprise-D’s phaser technology and in the new movie Star Trek, the phasers are rationalized as looking like spotlights mounted on swivels. In Kirk’s day, they may have been until phaser phased array technology was developed.

Like many Sci-Fi fiction writers (read text writers, not screenplay and visuals writers) Scalzi has a problem with suspending disbelief based on his obsession with his own work. That’s almost always what it comes down to. Many tend to become hooked into one way of thinking about the sci-fi “rules” and don’t have much ability to think beyond them. The so-called “hard sci-fi” writers are probably the worst at creative thinking.

It’s sci-fi. It’s supposed to be out there.

BTW, Scalzi might take note that the rationalizations for Trek technology given in the ST:TNG Technical Manual are right on the money. Dilithium as a complex crystalline material based on metastable superheavy elements and able to channel charged particles is right in line with experimental and theoretical physics. Meta-elements where other than spheroidal nuclei made of multiple sub-nuclei loosely bound together largely by a shared electron shell set are considered theoretically possible if beyond actually making right now except by accident in accelerators.

Crystal channeling of charged particles is already known. The Russians and the USA/Europe have done work on it. Look up Channeled Particle Acceleration By Plasma Waves In Metals by Dr. Pisin Chen. This sort of thing also lends itself to cold fusion by way of Bose-Einstein condensate behavior of some charged particle clusters in suitable confinement such as a crystalline lattice. Think of a fifty lane highway of deuterons being accelerated to high energies and necked down to three lanes all at once at the other end. Collision and fusion can become statistically unavoidable.

Structural reinforcement is not beyond the pale either. We know that all matter properties are determined by the electromagnetic forces between the atoms and beyond that of the electrons around the nuclei. Every atom and molecule has a different fundamental series of frequencies and multiples at which they respond better than others, and we know we can excite electrons to meta-states causing them to behave entirely differently in the bulk properties such as solid, liquid, gas, conductive, non-conductive, soft, hard, etc.

The uniforms were already rationalized as changing due to constantly shifting political movements between the civilian governments in Starfleet both human and alien. This is not unlikely as Starfleet is NOT the US military, but a military arm of the United Federation of Planets. Think UN indecisiveness and vague wandering of ideas on a galactic scale.

Scalzi is entitled to his opinions, but winning Hugo awards and the like doesn’t make you a decisor of what is proper in sci-fi.