This one comes from World of Science Fiction on Quora, where Michael asks: among all the engineers on Star Trek, who was the most proficient and knowledgeable? What distinguishes that person from other engineers in terms of proficiency and knowledge?

Right below the question, there was a guy who’d put, “Why do you want to make everything a competition?” And I’m like, well, because we’re humans. The idea of quantifying traits is literally in us, and it’s been in us since the first Viking tossed a log, looked at his buddy and said, “I bet you can’t do any better.” You know, translated from the original Viking.

So I’m going to do this thought exercise. When you really line them all up, and we’re talking about the main shows, it comes down to difficulty for me.

Number Three: Miles O’Brien

Miles O’Brien starts at number three. He had to do an awful lot with another species’ technology when Starfleet took over Deep Space Nine for the Bajoran government, when they called us in and said, hey, we want you guys to take this little thing over.

O’Brien had a huge, Herculean effort in front of him, which was translating. How are we going to get their technology to speak to our technology? At its core, a lot of our technologies are the same. They serve a lot of the same purposes. Whether you have a food replicator or a food synthesizer, it’s ultimately the same idea, the same concept. So for him to have to rethink how they think into making it work with how we think, that’s a huge leap, and I think it definitely puts him on the list at number three.

Number Two: B’Elanna Torres

Number two, and you’re going to stay with me for a second: B’Elanna Torres from Star Trek: Voyager.

She had an even more Herculean effort than Miles O’Brien. She had to maintain a Starfleet vessel basically on hopes and a prayer, 70,000 light years away from Earth, with no actual viable repair options. They didn’t have full-on industrial replicators like they have now. They could replicate some smaller parts, but ultimately she had to do what she could with nothing. Sometimes they found people they could trade with, and then hopefully she could jury-rig something together.

So she not only had the job Miles O’Brien had to do, she also had to do it in another place, with no connection to Starfleet and no ability to get regulation parts whatsoever. I think that’s a massive, massive win for her. She worked really hard, and they got from point A to point B. They got there, and it’s all on the back of what she had to do as an engineer. That’s worth noting for sure.

Number One: Scotty

Now listen, before I get all the hate, I want you to hear me out very clearly. This is not pandering, and I’m going to explain it. My number one is none other than Scotty, from the original series.

I believe Scotty the character is pivotal and monumental in a major way. He pretty much had to do a lot of what the others had to do, except he had nobody who had done it first. O’Brien and Torres had the journals. He wrote the book that those two followed to become amazing. He set the stage and he set the tone in a way that is unbelievable, because they had never been out there before.

He went where no one had gone before, and he actually had to make sure the ship survived not one but two five-year missions. I think that’s massive. Ten years in deep space, deep exploration, with very little touchback with Starfleet other than occasionally at far outlying outposts. Not to mention the times they got in trouble.

So I feel like Scotty is definitively one of the best, if not the best.

Where That Leaves Geordi La Forge

Where does that leave someone like Geordi La Forge, and some of the others?

La Forge gets an honorable mention. I’m a product of The Next Generation, okay? My future exists in the 25th century. And I feel like Geordi was amazing, a miracle worker in his own right, based on what Scotty did. Scotty laid the foundation and the groundwork that everyone else followed. But Geordi did enough impressive things on his own that he definitely gets the honorable mention.

I do believe, however, that B’Elanna Torres and Miles O’Brien had to deal with things and circumstances well beyond anything Geordi had to deal with on a regular basis.

So those are my top three, if I had to quantify them, because we’re human beings and it’s kind of what we do. Miles O’Brien at number three, B’Elanna Torres at number two, and of course Scotty at number one.

If you want to go into Enterprise, or you want to go into Discovery, I’m totally down. But I definitely feel like when it comes to people who had to do a lot with a little, you start with Scotty and move forward from there. Arguments can obviously be made for many others, and I’d love to hear those arguments.

Give me your top three Starfleet engineers. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.