Star Trek: 11 Incredible New Technologies That Were Immediately ABANDONED

In Mortal Coil, Neelix discovers what truly waits for him on the other side of the great curtain. For him, it's nothing. Darkness, oblivion, and no heavenly apparitions made death seem like something he wouldn't enjoy - perish the thought. Thankfully, Seven Of Nine was there to bring him back into the light thanks to her handy leftover nanoprobes. Death is cured, and all is well, let us never speak of this again.

For episodes like Mortal Coil, the intention seems to have been exploring the philosophical nature of death, belief, and what lies between. While other properties might use heating pads and shock therapy to achieve this, Star Trek has future technology to speed things up. The problem here is that it did its job just a little too well.

When Seven brought Neelix back with the Doctor, she proved that she could reverse death. That's not just important for Neelix's story - that's the biggest medical breakthrough since retro-Salamanderism. If one were to imagine that it isn't a catch-all and that Seven's nanoprobes are finite, one would still have to wonder why catching drones isn't the single greatest prize in the known galaxy.

It certainly makes the actions of Bjayzl and her cohort a little more understandable (not that we're condoning vivisecting ex-Bs!)

In Star Trek Into Darkness, John Harrison aka Khan casually renders all space travel obsolete. This would seem like an enormous tactical advantage to anyone who got their hands on this technology so when Montgomery Scott is seen holding Khan's device, it is a good day for Starfleet.

Unless, that is, you're near Starbase Yorktown.

The invention of transwarp beaming, allowing the user to move between star systems in the case of John Harrison, was revolutionary. Rather than relying on cumbersome starships to get from point A to point B, it could now be achieved as easily as moving between transporter pads. This technology seemed to be a critical advancement that should have been implemented throughout the fleet.

In Star Trek Beyond, Starbase Yorktown is cut off from the Enterprise via the Necro Cloud. With a handy transwarp beaming device, that Cloud would mean nothing - meaning no one on the Enterprise needed to die, as usually happens within about three minutes of a mission beginning. Instead, the tech was seemingly shelved after Khan capture and the dead bodies began to rise.

The portal technology stolen from Daystrom Station seems like an odd invention from the jump. Perhaps it was never utilised to its full capabilities, unless one counts destroying a Starfleet recruitment centre or doing a switcheroo with torpedoes, as the end goal. 

Vadic certainly has fun with this tech but after she jettisons it, it is never mentioned again. Though hardly an exhaustive account of history, the third to fifth seasons of Discovery don't mention it either. It seems then that it was invented, someone had some fun with it, and it was immediately consigned to history as a bit of a laugh - unless you were caught in one of those portals.

It does beg the question - what was the point? Was it a shifty way to break into bank vaults? Did someone misunderstand the range of a Stargate? Or was it simply invented for the simplest reason of all: because we could?

With the outbreak of war in the 24th Century, Starfleet was faced with a fundamental shift in its existence. It was founded to seek out new life and new civilisations - now it had to find a way to stop them in their tracks. When going up against an enemy that makes the Klingons look tame, what's the best course of action?

Inventing a new long-range weapon seemed perfect for ground assaults. The Siege Of AR-558 remains a chilling chapter in Federation history, one marred with huge loss of life, exposure to insidious anti-personnel miles, and an ongoing slog to hold the fort. The soldiers in place relied on standard Starfleet weapons, though even those were usually short-range.

The TR-116 rifle was introduced in Field Of Fire, depicting a weapon that could now fire over much greater distances. By attaching a micro-transporter to the barrel, the shooter could pinpoint targets several kilometres away. As Chu'lak and Ezri Dax demonstrated it was at least capable of firing across the width of Deep Space Nine.

That this weapon is introduced and so quickly removed from Starfleet suggests a flaw in the design, though it seemed frighteningly capable of doing its job when the grieving Vulcan began his murder spree. 

Though both the Romulan Star Empire and Starfleet experimented with interphase cloaking, the technology seemingly was abandoned very early on. For Starfleet's example, that's understandable. Everything in connection with the experiment was a violation of the Treaty of Algeron, so they simply couldn't continue with the experiment.

What, then, for the Romulans? An Empire so concerned with maintaining secrecy - and employing a wide network of spies - would surely jump at the chance to master this incredible technology. So, what happened?

Introduced in The Next Phase, the interphase cloaking device served a dual purpose. It turned its subjects invisible but it also rendered them intangible, allowing them to pass through everything except the floor. This may have been an extrapolation of an earlier technology in use during the 2320s aboard the Space Station Baraam, though it certainly owed a lot to the device stashed aboard the USS Pegasus.

It's a little hard to believe that the Romulans simply gave up their research on this technology following the accident aboard their science vessel so this may be a case of the simple fact that you haven't heard anything more about it...means it's working perfectly.

After the crew of La Sirena crashlands on Coppelius and encounters Dr Altan Soong and his synth colony, Rios is gifted with a magical device. This device is a thought-based replicator named a Fundamental Field Replicator. Simply by using one's imagination, one can make this device fix, or create, almost anything. 

The device fixes critical components on the ship, bringing the ship back to full power. In the skies orbiting the planet and facing Commodore Oh's fleet, it creates images of hundreds of La Sirenas to confuse the Romulan sensors.

This magical doohickey, similar to the Doctor's Sonic Screwdriver, can seemingly do whatever is needed for the plot at that moment in time - until it can't. It surely would peak the interests of any engineer or scientist desperate to understand its flagrant shattering of the laws of physics. However, instead of becoming the new golden item at the Daystrom Institute, Rios obviously breaks it a moment after La Sirena goes to warp at the end of Et In Arcadia Ego Part 2, never to be mentioned again.

For this entry, we are talking about the specific type of holo-communicators that were featured on Deep Space Nine, which at least projected an image that didn't flicker every five seconds. Honestly, for Discovery and Picard, we're still unsure what happened. The USS Defiant was able to project a sustained, seemingly solid image. 

Both the Discovery and La Sirena struggled to project images more stable than a CD player trying its best in the boot of a '90s-era car. Play, bump, skip, repeat.

In Deep Space Nine, the tech at least projected an image that didn't flicker every five seconds. This proved handy for face-to-face run-ins with former security chiefs, and also essential for allowing courtroom dealings with Admirals back at Starfleet.

The main issue with this technology was, at least in the case of the USS Defiant, it took up a sizable portion of the bridge. Whether it was the captain himself, or a beleaguered Miles O'Brien, the tech was stripped before the end of the show's fifth season, never to be mentioned again.

While there has been a certain amount of retconning through the years, Tricobalt Devices were introduced in Star Trek: Voyager's debut episode Caretaker. They were fired like photon and quantum torpedoes, though their yield was significantly higher. They were slower to detonate than normal torpedoes, making them relatively useless in battle.

Tuvok fired two tricobalt devices at the Caretaker's Array, effectively vaporizing it (despite what a paranoid Seven-Of-Nine might claim). It was unusual that Voyager would carry these devices - and they were evidently the only two aboard, as they are never depicted again.

While the technology has been mentioned from time to time in the years since (and chronologically beforehand), Tricobalt Devices were effectively a handy MacGuffin to strand the ship in the Delta Quadrant, covering the bases before disappearing back up those tubes into the dark. 

In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, a group of renegade Klingons, working alongside Starfleet and Romulan operatives to ensure the continuation of galactic hostilities, managed to overcome the problem that prevented firing while cloaked. Though the extent of Starfleet and Romulan innovation remains a mystery, those serving under General Chang must have taken this particular secret to their graves.

Firing while cloaked is arguably the greatest military development of the 23rd Century, finally allowing fleets of secret ships to be built and setting the scene for a grand conquest of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants. However, rather than usher in a new era of glory for the Empire, some idiot in Chang's crew didn't save the files to the cloud and the technology is never seen again.

While the technology existing on one ship alone certainly adds stakes and tension, it doesn't make an awful lot of sense. In truth, it gave the Klingons too much of an edge in galactic affairs so when Chang's Bird-Of-Prey exploded (for the first time) it took with it all of the secrets of this outstanding discovery, presumably to the rest of the Empire's chagrain. 

Spore Drive technology was an odd invention in Star Trek and not simply because of when it was introduced to the franchise. Though the issues of the timeline have been well covered at this stage, the logic behind Starfleet's apparent embracing and shunning of the propulsion system is confusing.

In the 23rd Century, it was an experiment with dangerous possibilities, as the crew of the ill-fated USS Glenn discovered. The supposed destruction of the USS Discovery put the project on ice for almost a millennia though, as we've said before, not informing Janeway was a bit of a dick move.

By the 32nd Century, though the project specifically had been shelved, the USS Discovery arrived almost one hundred years after warp drive had become allegedly obsolete. Honestly, did no one think to blow some dust off some classified folders? And. if that was indeed the case, the arrival of the Discovery should have heralded a new golden age of science for Starfleet. Instead, the ship had barely stopped spinning before Staments was informed the spore drive was once again being shelved, this time in favour of a Pathway Drive.

Its hard to be a mycologist in the universe, it seems. 

This is an odd one as it reared its head a couple of times, though just as quickly seemed to be swept under the carpet. With the invention of the transporter, Star Trek seemed to have found a way to extend life indefinitely. Although Scotty and M'Benga both used the device to put themselves and their loved ones in stasis, they could just have easily turned the clock back.

In The Counter-Clock Incident, Robert and Sarah April manage to restore everyone on the Enterprise to their correct ages (they'd been turned into children, just go with it) thanks to their patterns being saved in the transporter logs. Dr Pulaski is rejuvenated in a similar style in Unnatural Selection.

While there may be a caveat on this - the transporter remembers the last pattern that went through - this could easily be co-opted to reverse the ageing process altogether. Consider this: Pulaski, for example, retains her memories from her aged self, though is returned to her usual age. If that pattern was saved in a separate folder, does it not stand to reason that she can live indefinitely, even if she always remains the same original age?

The Aprils elect not to use the transporter for this handy age hack, though the technology is certainly effective. Perhaps it is this existential capability of the transporter that caused it to be quietly swept away, never to be mentioned again.