Allow me to explain:if your goal is to immobilize a starship, rather than beating on its shields with weaponry then shooting the engines, wouldnt it make more sense to target the life support and damage the inertial dampeners? While on the face of things it would seem cruel , but id imagine any spaceworthy ship would have an emergency system to keep the dampeners on until the crew had time to slow the ship down-or conversely, a safety ciruit would stop the ship before the dampeners failed completely. There it is: a stationary starship that doesnt posess the ability to escape, at least as long as the inertial countermeasures are offline,giving our heros/villians time to handle their business without worrying about an annoying coutner-attack.
targeting life support or dampers (dampeners make things moist ) still requires you to find a hole in the shield, same as targeting engines or weapons . . . also knowing where to hit to disable life support or inertial dampers could be a bit tricksy compared to engines and weapons which you can usually discern just by looking at a ship
To again say nothing of visually targeting something thousands of kilometers away that moves faster than the speed of light. But, sure, good luck with that.
Aren't life support and inertial dampeners generally ... inside the ship? Once you're capable of pinpointing numerous distributed nodes inside the ship, you might as well target crew members or the bridge consoles that run the ship
They are also likely a distributed system with multiple redundancies and fail-safes, even if dialog makes it sound like they are single, physical constructs in a specific area of the ship. As such, it's about as likely to be effective as to targeting and destroying the third bar stool in 10 Forward. There would still be other places to sit.
Targeting shouldn't be a problem . . . note "The Changeling"[TOS2] in which wee little Nomad is hit with a photon torpedo at tens of thousands of kilometers, or "The Wounded"[TNG4] in which a Cardassian ship is blown apart with phasers and torpedoes at ranges of around 200,000 kilometers. Even an old Cardassian junker freighter has a range of tens of thousands of kilometers with its little pop guns in "Return to Grace"[DSN4]. The whole reason ST2's final battle was in a nebula was to give a reason for the face-to-face combat ranges.
^That and to pretend spaceships are submarines. Das Boot II: The Wrath of Khan. I'm surprised they don't target the antimatter containment pods. A picosecond of interruption in one of the magnetic bottles, and it's done, and it'll cook off the rest when it goes. No more ship. Apparently, though, they're the most robust thing on the whole vessel, which is sensible.
Or just go for the warp core. At least in some of the Fed designs, those aren't too deep at all, and the way they were gouging each other out during the Dominion War... In any case, it's easy to hit something from a long way when the relative velocity and acceleration are so low. Flying in straight or near-straight lines, whether at impulse or at warp, is not exactly a recipe for effective evasion.
The air in, say, Voyager weighs more than Voyager aside from the warp coils and antimatter generator. No big problem with rapidly running out there. It's going to take a good while for it to get cold in there, too, and we have seen in numerous episodes how the gravity doesn't go right out (if you count that as life support, which I wouldn't). Knocking out inertial dampening or something might qualify, but this is obviously a series of fields that affect different parts of the ship simultaneously and not necessarily identically, so it's clearly not a centralized thing you can "shoot out."
Not as much sense as it would make to target the computer consoles on the bridge. After all, if they have no consoles, they can't push any buttons to shoot back at you and then they'd have to go all the way to the battle bridge to find a whole new set of buttons to push. Neither does a starship with its bridge shot to hell. If you can target an enemy ship with that kind of precision and gaurantee knocking out a vital system, then you might as well keep it simple and just whack the captain in the balls with your main phaser banks.
Where IS life support? Is it one room someone in the 2ndary hull? Or is it a complex system with components networked throughout the ship? How does the attacking ship's gunner KNOW where it is? If it's a single control room in the middle of the 2ndary hull (and it would be stupid to have it in one location without backup), what's surrounding it? Quarters? Labs? Deuterium tanks? Power conduits? Antimatter bottles? If blasting life support means you have to bore through a deuterium tank a plasma conduit and a power generator room, well, you're already blasting a deuterium tank a plasma conduit and a power generator room, so who cares if you hit life support too? The ship's screwed anyway!
There could be a few external components connected to life support. Radiator fins might be necessary to disperse heat, especially in combat operations. Not so much on Starfleet ships, but a Starfleet tactical officer or AI could probably recognize them. Exterior connections for air and liquids could be visible from space and targeted in combat. Imagine breaking through the enemy's waste extraction hardpoint and boiling every cubic centimeter of raw sewage aboard the ship....
It must be acknowledged that aiming at life support is a valid tactic at times. Riker managed to do just that against the Son'a command ship in ST:INS, although it could be argued that the ship was not exactly a combat vessel and thus might have been a bit more vulnerable than usual. And the conspirators managed to rather specifically knock out an element of life support, namely onboard gravity, in ST6. I doubt it was internal sabotage by Chang or his cohorts - the torpedo hits probably did the lion's share of the work, or at least forensic analysis would establish that they dunnit... Timo Saloniemi
^That bit always bugged me. Why didn't it just vaporize the ship? And, other than Chang being onboard (he could've arranged to have been on the Enterprise, or beamed over to the bird of prey at the moment she fired) why not vaporize the ship? Actually, though, it raises a point about the gravity generators being the most robust piece of hardware on the ship... although I'm sure the cost of filming microgravity has nothing to do with that.
I'd gather that it was important to leave evidence of Starfleet specifically assassinating Gorkon. General destruction of the ship would not have been personal enough - it had to be an explicit assassination, with plenty of evidence and witnesses left lying around. OTOH, I'm far from convinced that Chang was aboard the targeted ship. After all, one possible outcome of the incident would have been a battle where the Enterprise resisted Chang's demand for surrender, and that battle might well go very badly for Kronos 1 because she had been damaged already. It thus sounds likely that Chang was aboard the cloaked BoP all the time, and only faked being on the cruiser when hailing Kirk. When Kirk didn't opt for a battle, Chang beamed back and put Plan A2 into action. Probably it takes very special inside information to knock out the gravitics of a K't'inga. And perhaps a bit of internal sabotage, too. Timo Saloniemi
That's an interesting idea, Timo. I'll admit I hadn't really thought about that possibility before. And it makes Gorkon's order to find Chang a little more interesting.
The exchange with Kirk and Chang is a little odd since it's clear from the film (going by the chronometer on the top of the viewscreen) that it was meant to be a conversation taking place almost immediately after the torpedo strike, when Kronos-1 had not yet restored gravity and when Chancelor Gorkon was probably still alive. I don't know what to make of Chang's vow "I shall blow you out of the stars" if it comes several minutes before Gorkon was actually killed; on the other hand, it doesn't change the fact that Kronos-1 was clearly torpedoed by Chang's bird of prey, so it doesn't really matter where he was when the torpedoes were fired, only that he was on board--at some point--while gravity was off. Back to the point, though. Knocking out life support or even artificial gravity is probably a lucky accident of targeting nine times out of ten. In this case "They knew exactly where to hit us" is the operative phrase.
I might argue that Chang's transmission was faked from aboard the BoP to falsely show him inside the crippled cruiser - but Chang's folks didn't anticipate how quickly the damage control teams of Kronos 1 could restore gravity, so his simulation was not in synch with the actual status aboard the cruiser... OTOH, even if gravity was partially restored, people inside the cruiser might need to hang on for dear life when the ship made the quick flip-flop that put her torpedo tubes pointing at Kirk! Indeed, the accelerations involved would probably kill most of the crew unless gravity/inertia control was working perfectly. Timo Saloniemi
To follow Timo's idea,I believe Changs idea was to come to the chancellors 'rescue' by decloaking and blowing away a surprised Enterprise with 'his' BoP-after which a war with the Federation would be more or less de facto then.A grateful chancellor(Gorkons daughter) would then promote ' heroic ' Chang to a leadership position-but Kirks surrender killed all of that.
Now that sounds like a superb Plan A1! (Even if it would mean killing all the Fed witnesses and erasing the Fed evidence and making collateral damage of the conspirators aboard Kirk's ship...) Chang would probably have been prepared for what transpired, too. And even for the possibility that the assassination failed, since the mere intent would have been incriminating enough. Gorkon could have died later, in shadier circumstances. Probably very little was left to chance. The death of the ship's surgeon can't have been an accident, either... Timo Saloniemi