Star Trek/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions
→Boarding Party Massacre
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== Boarding Party Massacre ==
* Given the amount of control over the environment that we see on starships, it beggars belief that any hostile boarding party could ever seize one... yet they do with some regularity. As people have suggested elsewhere, if somebody beams on, beam them back. Or beam them to the brig. Or if you're feeling nasty, decorporalize them and leave them that way. Transporter not working? Turn off the lights. Turn off the heat. Turn off the gravity... or ramp it way up. Drop force fields wherever you feel like it. Worst comes to worst: open an airlock. Some of these strategies would be more drastic and risk more collateral damage than others, but the point is that there should be about a billion strategies to stop or at least slow down intruders, yet in episodes like "Rascals," "Basics, Part I" and too many others to count, our heroes just lean back as the bad guys waltz in.
** 1) Transporters don't work like "snap your fingers, thing A is suddenly in place B" and they never have. Someone needs to be standing still long enough for you to get a lock and initialize the beam, which boarding parties obviously don't want to do. 2) Remarkably, people who want to break the law tend to come up with technology that helps them thwart the technology that lets people enforce the law, so a really dedicated boarding party probably has devices that inhibit getting a signal lock on them. 3) Generally the first thing a ''successful'' boarding party does is either capture the systems that would make all that transporting, climate alteration, and gravity control possible, or take a bunch of hostages. While you might be willing to risk turning up the gravity on a roomful of people to get at the boarders holding them hostage, most Starfleet captains take their duty to their crew a little more seriously.
== Genetically engineered half-humans ==
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