I’ve written before how I love Star Trek above nearly all other sci-fi shows.  I’ve always loved the characters, the stories, but most of all I’ve loved the tech.  Part of it was that it never seemed too fantastic or out of reach.  It always made dreaming about a future in a spaceship that much easier.

There’s a good reason why much of the tech seemed grounded in modern day.  When Gene Roddenberry first pitched the idea of Star Trek he based a lot of the story as “just like things are now, only in the future”.  He named the ship after the world’s first nuclear power ship and even made it the same size.  Everything that was on the original Enterprise seemed like a natural progression from what we had in the 1960′s.

"You, too, can fly in any one of our armored death-traps!"

Fast forward to The Next Generation and the designers took many of the same design cues as The Original Series; much of the technology in TNG seemed like a simple progression from where we were in the late 80′s.

In my mind, however, there are some fundamental issues with how Starfleet ships are designed.  As cool as some of them are, it seems like many design elements are maintained simply as an homage to TOS . . . and that’s it.  Now, a lot of problems with Star Trek physics have been brought up before (so many there’s a Wikipedia page) but that’s not what I’m going to do here.  Instead, I’d like to break down to individual parts of the ship the Federation uses.  So, without further ado: