10 False Star Trek Facts You Probably Still Believe

10. Wearing A Red Shirt Means Certain Death

So, going by this image, let's get an order of six coffins put together, right?

Family Guy manages to capture the ludicrousness of the Red Shirt Conundrum up in one of its early episodes. Kirk assembles an away team, in which one of the team will almost certainly be killed. The team will be Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Ensign Ricky.

Ricky, you're a dead man.

This one is a popular gag that is debunked by percentages rather than anything else. On the Original Series, security personnel wore red. In the Next Generation, security wore gold. Both red and gold are within a few points of each other on the death ratio however when this is compared to the number of red/gold shirts on the ships, statistically, their survival rates were quite high.

As there are usually far fewer science and command division officers on board the various ships, their percentage rates are much higher in terms of mortality. Does this sound like splitting hair? To be fair, yes it absolutely is.

Perhaps another way to look at it is this: was Kirk really an awful captain who always got his crew killed? The answer to that is emphatically no. In terms of sheer numbers, in Kirk's first five years, 96 crewmen out of a compliment of 430 died according to Roddenberry's novelisation of the Motion Picture. In contrast, out of 85 crew members on Enterprise, Archer had almost one-quarter of them die during the Xindi arc alone.

So, while wearing red may have invited a bit more rough and tumble than the other colours, its not actually the death sentence it seems to be!