There are a few fundamental reasons why Star Trek sucks. As I go into them I intend to point out a redesign of the Star Trek universe that I think would allow a new show to carry on the ideals and basic concepts that hold Trek together. Without some of the more horrible features that lead to such boring movies.
First off: Star Fleet should not be and should never have been the Federation military. Star fleet ships and crews are obviously incapable of performing that task. They should be a coast guard type organization. The ships are built for exploration, diplomatic transport and scientific research. They have some weapons, on account of space being dangerous and exploratory vessels are often alone in unknown places. Seeing as being alone where no one has gone before is their job description.
But, there should be an actual Federation navy with warships and a far larger number of vessels.
The ships need smaller crews. The Enterprise-D has a crew count of 1017 fully staffed. This is preposterous. What do these people do? The ships functions can all be handled by machinery. We only ever seen maybe 3 dozen engineering people, what possible purpose could such a large crew have? The food and laundry are dealt with by the replicators. The ship is cleaned with automated systems. Ninety percent of everything is fully automated. No get rid of that nonsense and drop the crew count down to about 16-30 plus marines.
Ships security and Ships weaponry are two completely different unrelated jobs. Ever since Worf we have seen both of these disconnected concepts handled (terribly) by one person. This is idiotic. Knowing how to operate anti-capital ship combat and weapon systems is as different a job as is possible to get on a warship from knowing how kung-fu. These jobs should be kept as far apart as possible.
The ships need marines. It is a silly idea contemplating boarding actions on a space ship. But, plot requirements of a tv show will insist that these sort of things happen. So get people who can and do look like they know what they are doing. The old plan of idiots in primary colours running around corners and getting shot does not make the situation look desperate. It makes the heroes look stupid. Don't ever make your characters look stupid in dire situations. It sucks the drama out rendering the scene comical.
Phasers kill people. This is important. As Jack O'Niel once said in "This is a weapon of war, it is designed to kill your enemy." Phasers must have some stun settings as per default and they must stun. Maybe once per series you get an enemy on whom a "kill" setting only stuns. Only once a season and the vaporize setting had better darn well kill them. On vaporize the phaser should transform the person into a massive cloud of super-heated steam. Damaging and melting anything nearby. For that reason alone, never mind the moral difficulties, kill is not everyones favorite setting.
Patience is a virtue. Star Trek has become a nightmare of people rushing into stupid decisions, while the episode maintains an intolerable slow pace. The movies are even worse for this. Characters could spend days orbiting a planet with an interesting episode. With the virtue of decent character interaction and an interesting subplot of some of the features of the planet itself.
Offline, characters use this word all the time. It doesn't mean what they think it means. A device goes offline when either its power supply fails, or its connection to the network fails and you can no longer operate it. If a device stops working because somebody shot it, it is not offline. It is broken. While something can be 20% broken, that is not how you describe it. In fact measuring the point of 20% brokenness is distracting in its stupidity. Imitating Robocop II is not in any way a good idea.
Never use the word isotope either. Just don't.
If you must say quantum, please for the love of all that is good in this universe, do not ascribe it to anything larger than its own wavelength. Ie subatomic particles. If its bigger than a proton it has no quantum properties.
Back to the plan. Can not mention star trek without pointing out some errors.
Star trek episodes spend minutes at a time talking about made up space politics. Babylon 5 spends episode after episode showing made up space politics. Babylon 5 is good. If you are going to do politics you need interesting representatives of the governments and they must be reoccurring characters. We will care about the human-Klingon interactions. Those occur daily and have long lasting implications. We will never care about the Syadot Sresol and Ambassador Ricky who we will never see again.
Klingons should be more predator like. Big imposing alien creatures who value the hunt. But, who truly value hunting monsters, hunting things large enough or powerful enough to fight back. They should take this same combination of patience and ferocity to everything they do. Excelling in science and engineering and even farming. Hunting out weeds and bad ideas with an anger a vengeance. Make them alien, they have no males, no females, they have four eggs in their bodies and when they die the little klingons burst out consuming the flesh of their parent until they are large enough and powerful enough to survive on their own. Give them no upper age limit. But, after a certain age they begin to truly desire death. No cloak on their ships it doesn't make sense any more get rid of it.
Romulans should be sneakier, they should be more enigmatic and difficult to understand. They should be creatures of strange passion and desire. I think they should be like the rulers of a more serious Ank Morpok. With a proper thieves guild and assassins guild and a cold logic of collecting debts and arranging events. Every Romulan should always have an ace up his sleeve and a knife up the other one. We should see an overpopulated collection of worlds where life is cheap and death has very little paperwork. We should see cruelty and inhumanity to fellow creatures. To a Romulan human life should have no value whatsoever. But, human technology could be worth a decent price.
Vulcans have throughout trek only ever been straw vulcans. Not a one of them has ever even approached being a logical creature. Spock is the only one to actually say anything remotely logical. Here's a simple hint. If you say the word logic. You are being illogical. Logic is the process in which problems are solved. It is the set of tests used to find if a statement is true. Vulcans should be logical beings tempered by emotion. The emotion part is important.
Because the Borg are beings of pure logic. They are also space zombies. That should be the important part. Make them like space zombies or Daleks. People should be scared to death when a borg is on or offscreen. Blowing up borg cubes does not show how powerful your new toy is. It shows off how pansy you think the borg are. They should be used sparingly and they should be overwhelmingly scary when they show up.
The Federation itself represents Earth. In point of fact it represents the best that there is in humanity. It should be united and happy. There should be no fear of the government, no hunger, no want. The people should spread out and occupy the heavens and all should be good. It is important that this is not a thin veneer over a rotten core. The Federation represents all that we can hope life will one day become. To tarnish that is to destroy the very purpose of Star Trek.
But, we shouldn't be stupid. There should never ever be only one ship available. Particularly near Earth. There should be hundreds of space craft in the solar system at any given time. Same with Vulcan, Betazed and at least a dozen other major worlds/systems. If holodecks are rated for shipboard use on diplomatic transports, like the Enterprise so often is, it had better be safe. If a ship has little in the way of spare power the holodecks had better be the first darn thing they turn off.
Life support takes next to no power. In fact it takes less power than any other function on the ship. Cutting power to life support gets you nothing. So don't do it. It doesn't add to the tension any more anyways.
You can't have transporters on the ship. Transporters in the shuttles. Dozens of shuttles. More transporters in the ships cargo area. And transporters go offline. It doesn't work. All that does is raise legit questions with stupid answers.
When writing any story goal number one has to be: Raise no legit questions with stupid answers.
