Sigh-Fi

Prokopetz: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn't just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it's because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles, tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they don't really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullsh-t space-magic countermeasures out of their arses - but they're as likely as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn't actually happen to anyone else; it's literally just the Federation vessles that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.

Writebastard: So to everybody else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown

Prokopetz: Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally don't realize that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They're just like "yes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experience."

Roachpatrol: The only reason Scotty is chief engineer instead of someone from a species with a higher technological aptitude is becasue everyone from those species took one look at the the Enterprise's engine room and ran away screaming.

Roachpatrol:

Vulcan science academy: Who do you ned another warp core?

Humans: We're going to plug two of them together and see if we go twice as fast.

VSA: Last time we gave you a warp core you threw it into a sun to see if the sun would go twice as fast.

Humans: hahaha yeah. It did tho

VSA: It exploded.

Humans: It exploded twice as fast

Underscorex: Reminds me of the thing I wrote a while back about humans in high fantasy realms - they're basically Team F'it Hold My Beer I Got This.

Impulsive, passionate to a fault, the social structures they build to try and regulate this hotheadedness ironically creates even greater levels of sheer bull-headedness. Even their "cooler" heads take action in months or weeks.

All their great heores of the past were impossibly rash by galactic standards. Humans just go with it, which is their great flaw but also their greatest strength.

Roachpatrol:

Klingons: okay we don't get it

Vulcan science academy: what what?

Klingons: You Vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you're also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way. Why do you let them run your Federation?

VSA: Look. This is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they don't do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up. This is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they're offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby star into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn't want to waste a trip.

VSA: They did that last week, we have the write-up righthere. It's getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little experiment has just called into question. Also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how.

VSA: This is why we let them do whatever the hell they wnat.

Klingons: Can we be a part of your Federation?

dragon-in-a-fez:

You know what the best evidence for this is? Deep Space 9 almost never broke down, minor malfunctions that irritated O'Brien to hell and back, sure, but almost none of the truly weird sh-t that befell Voyater and all the starships Enterprise. What was the weirdest malfunction DS9 even had? The senior staff getting trapped as holosuite characters in Our Man Bashir, and that was because a human decided to just dump the transporter buffer into the station's core memory and hope everything would work out somehow, which is a bit like swapping your computer's hard drive out for a memory card from a Play Station 2 and expecting to be able to play a game of Spyro the Dragon with your keyboard and mouse.

You know what? I'm not done with this post. Let's talk about the Pegasus, USS F'ing Pegasus, testbed for the first Starfleet cloaking device. Here we have a handful of humans working in secret to develop a cloaking device in violation of a treaty with the Romulans. They're playing catchup, trying to develop a technology other species have had for a century, and what do they do? Do they decide to duplicate a Romulan cloaking device precisely, just see if they can match what other species have? Nope, they decide 'hey, while we're at it, while we're building our very first one of these things, just to find out if this is possible, let's see if we can make this thing phase us out of normal space so we can fly through planets while we're invisible.

"But why" asked the one Vulcan in the room.

Because that would F'ing rule! said the humans, high-fiving each other and slamming cans of 24th-century Red Bull.

There must be like twenty different counselling groups for non-human engineering students at Starfleet Academy, and every week in every single one of them someone walks in and starts up with a story like "our assignment was to repair a phaser emitter and my one human classmate built a chronometric flux toaster that toasts bread after you've eaten it."

Deadcatwithaflamethrower: MacGuyver is the equivalent of Vulcan vintage human horror television.

thefingerf--kingfemalefury: This is why the Federation is the only organization to ever stand a chance against the Borg. The Borg can adapt to the brilliant military strategies of the Romulan Star Empire, the Klingons and even the cold logical intellectual prowess of the Vulcans. The Borg weren't prepared for a startship captain to lure them into his 50's noir detective holo-novel and then machine gun them to death with a weapon made out of hard light.