The makers of "Star Trek" will likely complain about the many budgetary limitations they faced while in production on their respective shows. A lot of money went into filming starship exteriors, compositing, and photographic transporter effects back in the day, which left little room for the writers to get ultra-ambitious with their stories. Sometimes an episode's filmmakers would trek out to a location shoot in the California desert, or hire a notable guest star to play a striking villain, but for the most part, "Star Trek" makers were mostly bound to the same five or six sets that they had already built on the CBS production lot. This required the show's writers to invent stories that took place in -- for "Star Trek: The Next Generation" -- a hallway, a turbolift, engineering, sickbay, the bridge, or Ten Forward.

Of course, as the old saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention.