Ethics and law? They make copies of people several times in several of the series. In the original series they accidentally make two copies of Kirk - one good, one bad. In the Next Generation, they make a copy of Dr. Pulaski to cure her of some disease or something. Scotty stored himself as information in a ship's computers for decades before being regenerated by the crew of TNG. I think it happens several other times.
Stars, planets and other Sci-Fi peeves
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Ethics and law? They make copies of people several times in several of the series. In the original series they accidentally make two copies of Kirk - one good, one bad. In the Next Generation, they make a copy of Dr. Pulaski to cure her of some disease or something. Scotty stored himself as information in a ship's computers for decades before being regenerated by the crew of TNG. I think it happens several other times.
Belz...
Fiend God
Yeah, but that's such a Trek thing to do: ignore the obvious implications of the technology. Personally I think that transporters and replicators are really stupid tech, even though they're terribly convenient.
Ok, maybe the Federation can stick to those principles. But I'm sure the Romulans and Jem'Hadar have no such ethical problems to essentially creating endless armies composed of their most elite and well-trained individuals, essentially making them unbeatable. But it never happens.
Segnosaur
Penultimate Amazing
You're forgetting about the Star Trek episode with the 2 aliens, with their faces painted black and white (but on different sides). See? Totally different!
Joking aside, that shouldn't be a big issue. As a species gets more technologically advanced, they get a greater ability to interact with others on the planet. Cultures would naturally blend over time. Heck, look how much English has become the dominant language for business in much of the world, and that's only been in a few hundred years since England started to build its empire (and only a few decades since air travel and long distance communication has been relatively cheap and easy.) Give it another century or 2 and everyone on the planet might be speaking English (or some sort of hybrid English-Chinese-Hindi mix). Things like the way people dress, or the foods they eat, would probably follow suit.
Klimax
NWO Cyborg 5960x (subversion VPUNPCKHQDQ)
Actually a lot of stuff is explored. And although non-canon books have some interesting takes on things too.
Belz...
Fiend God
Not really on the show. For instance, why not replicate whole starships in gigantic production facilities? If you can have the pattern for a big dinner, you can scale it up to a ship. That's never really addressed (unless I missed a VOY episode, but I have no regrets there.)
Klimax
NWO Cyborg 5960x (subversion VPUNPCKHQDQ)
Actually how starships are built is not explored or mentioned. (Part of !lot) so that's maybe what they're doing. In last two DS9 session Federation had problem with losing too many starships without replacements but precise reason is not mentioned. (Likely lack of crews)
Hellbound
Merchant of Doom
See, they could just replicate the ship and the crew and they'd be fine.
And seriously, no one ever weaponized the transporters? That was the biggest issue I had. Every now and then you'd see a desperate gambit of some sort, but really; bring down the shields and transport a nuke to the enemy ship. For that matter, transport weapons directly outside the enemy ship (or mines into it's path) if you can't breach shields. Put heavy duty ones on the outside of the ship and transport, say, ground-based anti-ship installations into deep space. Make some on vehicles or other portable/mobile platforms to use for troop movement on the battlefield...instant flanking maneuvers. Yet we saw none of that.
ETA: Heck, for that matter, it's a device that turns matter into energy. Talk about weapons potential. Forget about transporting anything, just convert it to energy released in place. That's a freaking weapon...put those wimpy photon torpedoes to shame.
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I wondered about this once and someone said "gyros!". Though, still, the banking is redundant afaics.
Which would leave Ripley still in or around that star system. In that case the salvage vessel would need ftl capability to get out there and investigate her shuttle. Why would they do that? If The Company knew about Nostromo's demise (and I suppose they did) why would they leave investigation to some yahoo speculators when there was so much at stake?
Also, how did the Aliens grow so damn fast?
disclaimer: I don't really give a toss about science flaws in films like that, as long as they just lead into a good film rather than be at the essence of the film (e.g. Superman, which is wall-to-wall stupid)
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Belz...
Fiend God
We see ships in construction at various parts of the shows and movies, so we know they assemble them the old fashion way. Me, I'd replicate the ships, transporter-copy the best crews and conquer my enemies, building a great empire that would last forever.
Belz...
Fiend God
They weren't looking for her specifically.
I have no idea. The real reason is that sometimes they overlook those things for sequels. If I had to try to rationalise it, I'd say that some executive who ordered the first mission fell out of favour because of the loss of the ship, and the whole thing was buried, which also neatly explains why the company knew nothing about the incident in the second movie.
Magic.
That whole business of magically fantastical and rapid growth (take the Hulk) has bugged me for as long as I can remember. How the hell does an organism accrue mass (and good muscle tone in the bargain) without ingesting other matter? Alien's chest burster went from maybe squirrel size to big-man size in what, a couple or few days, without apparently eating. Does it grow on air? Space 1999's Alpha Child went from infant to adult in a few days, on a normal diet. DS9's Odo can in a few seconds alter his mass enormously (such as when becoming a bird.)
RecoveringYuppy
Penultimate Amazing
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Doesn't really sound so sillly either. Using proper stereo effects to help locate the ship other ship and simularing doppler shifts to indicate approach and recession speeds. Sounds very useful.
Alien vs Predator was much worse. The whole Alien life-cycle was condensed into a few hours (story time, not real time).
But I liked that film. Too short though, imo.
Belz...
Fiend God
If only it was days, we could say it ate stuff around the ship. But it seemed only a few hours. In subsequent movies it only gets worse and worse.
rwguinn
Penultimate Amazing
So what happens to the momentum of the spacecraft as a whole? How does the forward velocity of the craft get cancelled and moved to the new vector?
HansMustermann
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While we're at the topic of bogus science, the whole representation of science in movies bothers me majorly. And mostly because it's bogus for no good reason.
A) Scientists work alone and jealously guard their secrets.
While that may be true in secret wartime projects, the fact of the matter is that even then it's mostly the engineering parts that are secret, not the science part. Scientists actually SEND their work to other scientists for peer review, and publish it in publically available journals.
And really that's why science works. Nobody can discover and process everything. You have to base your work on the works of others. Any nation where every scientist is working by himself is going to fall behind very quickly.
B) Scientists would sabotage and even murder each other to steal each other's work. See, for example, the STNG episode with the new heat shield.
In reality, what happened to just subscribing to a journal?
C) The only way to present a discovery is to present a fully working model that works on a full scale shuttle or even warship, and if it doesn't work the first time around, you're a failure and disgrace.
There are several problems with that, not the least of which being that it fails to even comprehend the differences between theoretical science, experimental science, and applied science a.k.a. engineering. It's highly unlikely that some guy working in secrecy on an old abandoned space station, with no more help than his wife, would even have the skills or knowledge to not only do the science, but also engineer something that's fully commercially viable at large scale.
In modern terms imagine requiring that a new rocket propulsion (say, antimatter heated plasma) isn't even acknowledged theoretically until one guy can do all the stages and build one that can lift a fully loaded space shuttle. And you test it directly with a crewed shuttle.
That's not how it works. That goes through several staged and iterations of published theoretical papers, experiments to try to disprove the theory, small scale prototypes that couldn't even push a snail on teflon, and so on.
A) Scientists work alone and jealously guard their secrets.
While that may be true in secret wartime projects, the fact of the matter is that even then it's mostly the engineering parts that are secret, not the science part. Scientists actually SEND their work to other scientists for peer review, and publish it in publically available journals.
And really that's why science works. Nobody can discover and process everything. You have to base your work on the works of others. Any nation where every scientist is working by himself is going to fall behind very quickly.
B) Scientists would sabotage and even murder each other to steal each other's work. See, for example, the STNG episode with the new heat shield.
In reality, what happened to just subscribing to a journal?
C) The only way to present a discovery is to present a fully working model that works on a full scale shuttle or even warship, and if it doesn't work the first time around, you're a failure and disgrace.
There are several problems with that, not the least of which being that it fails to even comprehend the differences between theoretical science, experimental science, and applied science a.k.a. engineering. It's highly unlikely that some guy working in secrecy on an old abandoned space station, with no more help than his wife, would even have the skills or knowledge to not only do the science, but also engineer something that's fully commercially viable at large scale.
In modern terms imagine requiring that a new rocket propulsion (say, antimatter heated plasma) isn't even acknowledged theoretically until one guy can do all the stages and build one that can lift a fully loaded space shuttle. And you test it directly with a crewed shuttle.
That's not how it works. That goes through several staged and iterations of published theoretical papers, experiments to try to disprove the theory, small scale prototypes that couldn't even push a snail on teflon, and so on.
Skeptic Ginger
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In the recent movie, Life, the alien had absurd strength for the size of its muscle when it was only a couple inches long. It crushed a man's hand.