enterprise d

[Raziel]

Jesus, where to start...

Do away with the pretty, swooping design. Sure it makes for nice eye-candy, but really, we're in vacuum here. NO ATMOSPHERE, NO AIR RESISTANCE! Make it a functional shape (sphere, maybe?), ie most equipment and personel in the smallest volume of space.

Paint it black. I'm not the first to suggest it, but I think it'd look wicked-cool.

Get a proper crew. Every single episode we see the same bridge officers. Do these people ever sleep? On a ship of that size, there would be three crew shifts, eight hours each. The bridge is no different. True, there would probably be a 'main' shift, consisting of especially skilled specialists, but they would still have 16 hrs off to kick back/sack out. Only in the event of a dire emergency would they (and the captain) be summoned to duty stations outside of their normal shift.

Also, what about a competant crew? Except for a couple of notable exceptions, the same battle-sequence plays out. Enemies fire zillions of times. Stuff blows up (killing hapless extra), Riker demands a damage report. Fancy maneuvering, Enterprise fires ONCE (straight ahead, I might add), repeat cycle. Doesn't anybody know how to conduct a battle? It's called SHOOTING BACK. The ship has almost a complete sphere of firepower (though there is a distinct weakness in firepower on the dorsal side, but they can still shoot there), and fancy maneuvering does NOT preclude firing at the enemy.

Oh, and I forget what they call it, but there is a ship-wide "lights-out" that corresponds with "ship's night". Why? To make the grave-yard shift crewers feel like they're getting the short end? They're in space, what difference does it make? You want it dark, go to your bunk and sleep.
Speaking of bunks, in ST6 I recall there being male and female crewers bunking in the same room. Doesn't this seem slightly unusual, even in
the 'enlightened' 23rd century? That brings up another point, co-ed crews. I suppose an arguement could be made for either side, but it seems to me that it'd be a distraction on a warship to see attractive females prancing around in skin-tight spandex. Fraternisation is most certainly frowned upon in today's armed forces.

Part of the proper crew slant is to stop mistaking security personel for actual marines. Suckurity personel are great for ship-board work; sometimes the gold shirts actually HIT stuff when they're onboard. For ground-pounding work where subtler intervention than a photon or two is needed, a dedicated marine corps is a must. Equiped properly, I might add, with such things as heavy weaponry, artillery, and vehicles.

The computer. Jesus F'ing Christ, the computer. There's a single goddamned computer controlling every singular ship function. Everything from the plumbing to the phasers to the escape pods to the water-valve in the garden. Scenario: the E-D takes a torpedo near to the computer core. Doesn't necessarily destroy the core, but floods the whole area with broad-spectrum EM radiation. I think it's supposed to be a quantum computer, but I'm pretty sure a healthy dose of EM would disable it as readily as anything we have today. Result: Ship is crippled, and is dead in space for the critical several seconds that it takes Geordi to whine about the core and re-route the core controls (propulsion and weapons) through direct command lines. Few more choice hits and the E-D is a cloud of particles before Picard can curse the ship's designers.
Nothing wrong with a central core, just make several sub-systems that control specific parts of the ship, ie power generation, propulsion, weapons, etc. that tie into the core, but are controlled individually. With this, we fix the problem of some alien intruder activating the self-destruct or seizing control from the control panel in Sewage Pit #3.

Make all the hardware accesable. In TOS Scotty could get at ANYTHING in seconds and then fix it with a paper-clip and some lint he found in his pocket. In TNG whenever something breaks it's either 're-routed' or there's a lengthy scene where Data and Geordi crawl through hundreds of metres of Jefferies tube for an entire segment and have a heart to pump about Data's attempts at laughter while they fix a buggy isolinear chip.

Positioning of the main bridge. It's a goddamned hood-ornament. 'Nuff said.

Positioning of the warp nacelles. They sit in plain view and are red and blue. How nice of SF, they even colour the damned things to look like practise targets.

The Dorsal weapons array. If I were an enemy tactical officer I'd take one look at that ship and then tell my fighters to concentrate on that angle of attack, 'cause there is precisely one phaser array that's in a position to do real damage to an attacking force.

I'm not even remembering half of the glaring problems, and I'm not about to type them all out. I think it'd be simplest to just scrap the damned thing and build a completely new ship. And to fire the entire crew and hire people who actually know how to respond to crises quickly and effectively.

If the E-D is the finest ship and crew in SF, then I weep for the species.

[Isolder74]

how about painting it navy blue?

[Isolder74]

oh, and give those stupid Presidential suites only to the ambasadors and not everyone. what a waste of space!

[Cpt_Frank]

The law is: cool spaceships need either to be sleek and black, or grey and with a structured surface (an exception are the ships of the Imperium of Mankind, which look cool yet often come in colorful variations).
E-D just looks like shit.

[Raziel]

how about painting it navy blue?

Why not? Or charcoal grey or battleship grey. ANYTHING, just so long as it doesn't look like it's made of aluminum.

But black is still my favourite