Throughout the various shows and movies of the Star Trek franchise, there features a serious talented bunch of Starfleet officers. They range from decorated captains all the way down to the unsung heroes of the lower decks. Of all these incredibly skilled officers, perhaps the most gifted are the engineers.
These are the people who not only know how to maintain and fix ridiculously complicated machines and technology, but are often tasked with doing so in high pressure situations with both limited materials and time. Here are some of the most talented engineers from the franchise, each with their own distinctive skills that make them shine brighter than a polished self-sealing stem bolt.
Trip Tucker
Of all the amazing engineers to grace Starfleet, Charles Tucker, affectionately known as Trip, has to be up there for one of the most underappreciated and overlooked. Others such as O’Brien and even Scotty were using technology far superior to that found during the Enterprise series. During Tucker's time, they didn’t even have proper shields, tractor beams, or replicators. The show feels almost stone-age in comparison to the far future depictions of the other shows and movies.
Trip played an essential part in the USS Enterprise-NX-01 mission of expanse, and while others such as Torres and O’Brien can be seen as resourceful engineers, they're nothing compared to Trip. Trip not only lacked access to the highly advanced engineering tools the others all had, but he didn't even have a replicator to magic up spare parts or repairs. He had to replace things himself, creating out-of-the-box alternatives for when they lacked spares. To top it all off, he maintained and adjusted the warp-5 capable ships warp drive manually, lacking the highly advanced computers that the other iterations of the ship had. He was also able to do a manual shut down and restart of this warp engine in under two minutes, something the Vulcans said was impossible, even with their advanced technology. He was resourceful, creative, and above all, fast. He was one of the best engineers around for when things needed to be done quickly and with limited supplies.
Miles O’Brien
Miles would be the biggest contender or engineering king for many. He's certainly the most recognizable face among them all, having appeared in both The Next Generation and Deep Space 9. He was a skilled transporter technician during his time aboard the Enterprise-D under the command of Picard, but his time to shine came aboard the Deep Space 9 station, where he became chief of engineering.
His role required him to keep the ramshackle station running smoothly, which was not an easy thing to do. Not only was it outdated and falling apart, but it was Cardassian built, so a lot of the new Starfleet additions had to be made compatible. O'Brien was a genius at jerry-rigging these two incomparable technologies together, and had to constantly fight against Cardassian booby traps built into the station. What makes his character even better was that he was not technically an official Starfleet officer; rather, he was a non-commissioned officer. While he was still part of Starfleet, this meant that he never went to Starfleet academy. This makes his vastly superior skills all the more impressive, considering he never went through the rigorous training of his peers and yet was constantly much better.
Montgomery Scott
The most famous Star Trek engineer and the one that started the illustrious career is none other than Montgomery Scott, from The Original Series. His time aboard the Enterprise serving under Captain Kirk was memorable, and often filled with engineering miracles performed by the angry Scotsman. He did this with flair and ingenuity, and while the show skirted around exactly how he performed these amazing feats of engineering, it is suggested that it's because he is just that good at his job.
What’s more, in the TNG episode “Relics,” it is revealed that during an accident that almost spelled his demise, Scotty managed to do what nobody had managed to do before. He adapted a transporter buffer to sustain himself until a rescue party arrived hundreds of years later, something nobody had managed to do before, and nobody was able to recreate after. While he was a great engineer, compared to the others on this list, he is probably the most skilled, or knowledgeable in an educational sense. He literally wrote the textbook for Starfleet academy.
B’Elanna Torres
B’Elanna Torres is an odd addition to this list. While she was shown to be a remarkable engineer throughout the Voyager series, her place on this list is mainly due to the often unbelievable wizardry of a truly episodic show. She was shown to be resourceful, able to do major repairs to the ship and integrate borg technology with the previously incompatible Federation systems, all while trapped thousands of light years away from Earth. She was able to use what she could find to make the repairs.
However, the biggest sign of her skill was that no matter how damaged the ship was at the end of one episode, at the start of the next, it was in perfect running order and looking brand new. It’s perhaps a bit of a stretch that this was all her doing, rather than the magic of TV and the writers simply pressing the reset button each time an episode ended (something that caused a lot of criticism towards the show). But canonically, it must act as testament to her incredible skill.
Honorable mention: Rom
Finishing off the list with an honorable mention, Rom, might just be the best engineer ever to grace the franchise, despite not being a Starfleet officer. He worked for the Bajoran engineering crew on Deep Space 9 rather than Starfleet, and was heralded as a fantastically gifted engineer who was able to fix a holodeck with a spatula. While this is impressive just in itself, his biggest contribution to the Federation was when he came up with the idea of the self-replicating mines. This idea that managed to save the entire Alpha quadrant from the nefarious grips of the Dominion during the early stages of the war.