TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

It's cause they insulate the wiring with a rare compound known as explodium, sourced from the Acme company

So true. Sparks are gonna fly bridge people.

More or less. The power for everything is run through the electro-plasma system, terminating in EPS conduits at every terminal. Plasma IRL is fucking hot.

The Borg don't spark, either. I think it's because they have a lot of on-board electronics that have to run from fairly beefy internal power supplies. Borg units have to function outside of broadcast power range.

Federation phasers, tricorders, things like that are probably mostly solid state with embedded power supplies; the power conduits are probably etched directly into the components at the molecular level. There's no empty space in a coms badge; it's all solid tech. Like modern cell phones, only even less componentized. In TOS, they physically modified phasers and such to make them do other things; by the time of TNG, they just reprogram them.

But mainly, the Borg a) have no sense of aesthetics, so they can just cobble together whatever tech without regard for making it look nice, and b) individual Borg are disposable. Wires hanging off to get caught on stuff and ripped out, causing an individual to malfunction or function at reduced efficiency - preventing that is not as important as growth. Borg are fungible, not unique individuals with value. Lose one, another takes its place.

The Federation values individuals, and they want to look damned good while they're doing their thing. So: streamlined, sleek, compact, safe, and reliable.

Power loss is the main issue; I think there's an inverse square law in there somewhere. But there has been progress in improving that; every do often you hear about some research that's improved the efficiency of transmission.

Nicola Tesla really believed in this, and pushed it hard. He envisioned giant towers broadcasting out power to communities.

But, to continue with my (again, newly invented head canon): it works in Federation starships because there's no loss. It's an closed environment, and they obviously have advanced field technology if they have energy shields, tractor beams, scanners, and transporters. They broadcast power throughout the ship, and as long as you're in it, you've got an essentially infinite supply (on the human scale). No energy is lost, because the ship structure/hull itself re-absorbs any energy not harvested by a receiver, so inefficiency loss is negligible. Leave the ship, whatever tech you have has to have its own power supply, and that can run out.

I believe Tesla tried tried doing this when he was trying to figure out the best way to distribute this new found electricity however it was very difficult controlling where the wireless energy enters the electronic as it would lash out to anything metal or conductive

It at least wasn't uncommon (not sure about now) for radio stations with towers ontop of or near their buildings to just use the ambient energy for lighting, so it kinda sorta exists -- it just probably isn't a great idea.