5 Best Star Trek Engineers From Every Series And Movie

Maybe I’m biased because Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is my favorite of all the series, but it’s difficult to imagine that any engineer in Starfleet has had to deal with the same challenges as Miles O’Brien (Colm Meaney); and that’s without even counting things like being cloned and used as a spy, or being sent to a virtual reality prison.

As the only Star Trek engineer — as far as the series’ principal casts are concerned — dealing with a space station rather than a ship, there are weights on O’Brien’s shoulders the others will never know. He’s not just responsible for the engineering needs of the joint Starfleet and Bajoran forces on DS9, but for those of every shopkeeper on the promenade, every civilian living on the station, and every ship that docks there.

To top it off, unlike all of the other principal Star Trek engineers, O’Brien isn’t even working with familiar Starfleet technology, but with the troublesome tech the Cardassians left behind. This regularly causes O’Brien and the rest of the station no end of problems, including early in the series the computer just straight up refusing to follow O’Brien’s orders. That he was able to manage all of this, not to mention ultimately doing it on the front lines of the war against the Dominion, makes him the best engineer of the bunch.