10 Dumbest Things in Star Trek The Original Series

As demonstrated in “Mudd’s Women” (where they were just lithium and not yet dilithium crystals), “The Alternative Factor” and “Elaan of Troyius,” without a handful of these (sometimes clipboard-sized, popsicle-shaped) crystals the USS Enterprise becomes the USS Just Can’t Even. It's stated that all the ship's power is channeled through them, and without them the ship can't even maintain an orbit (which means they're routinely going into crap orbits). They not only regulate the power flow, but they store energy. Um, what? 

How many crystals the ship requires is unclear. "Mudd's Women" refers to four being lost, but Kirk asks for six from the miners, so we might assume four replacements and two spares. In "The Alternative Factor" we see two each in the two drawers Lt. Masters has open, but there are six drawers, which suggests 12 crystals. In the engineering muddle that is "Elaan of Troyius" we see a single burnt paddle crystal in a frame, but Scotty refers to crystals plural. 

The silly thing about the crystals is that they're essential for just about everything, but the ship doesn't appear to carry any spares. But, why? Harry Mudd describes them as worth three hundred times their weight in diamonds, thousands of times their weight in gold. But in "Catspaw" Kirk dismisses platters of precious gems, saying, "We could manufacture a ton of these on our ship. They mean nothing to us." And Kirk is authorized to offer a fair price for six of them,  so they can't be impossibly expensive to Starfleet. So why not carry a closetful of them as standard equipment? Is Starfleet really willing to risk losing top-of-the-line starships for want of the warp drive equivalent of spare tires?