Well, Jake obviously doesn't have Tom's level of training, and given what he and Nog did to the runabout before trying to fly it, it's easy to imagine that its performance at that point would be suboptimal.
One might speculate that it's not easy to totally deactivate an automatic safety feature... The runabout could be constantly fighting Jake's piloting because part of the lobotomized autopilot is still trying to do its best. Small craft in Trek could be difficult to fly, though. In TOS, shuttles were seen launched by some sort of a guide rail system; when TOS-R showed "free" launches, the shuttles wobbled all over the place, despite supposedly departing an extremely stable platform that was not under acceleration at the time. Or is this just an issue with the artificial gravity field of the launch bay not being perfectly homogeneous? The same shuttles seem to ease themselves to very tight spots planetside (say, "Way to Eden" with an amateur pilot or "The Galileo Seven" with a shaken/stirred pilot in a damaged craft) just fine. Timo Saloniemi
I think Jake had to completely pull the autopilot to activate manual controls, so there should have been no automated aid at all if we take it at face value. On the other hand, he is surprised there is no automation at all after pulling autopilot, so maybe there was something supposed to help manual control which he has to do without, not because it is pulled too but because he still lacks authorization for proper manual-ish controls, leaving only true manual controls like what the Moon landers had. Controls like that without a deft hand would result in lots of overcompensating and sliding about. I imagine the cliff like switch from artificial gravity to no gravity would be the real tricky part of leaving a horizontal shuttle bay. The NX-01 has the right idea. That's why I like the idea of needing a tractor beam for pulling shuttles in and pushing them out of the bays, it should better compensate for the weird gravity shift, not to mention the push through the air barrier shield.
I don't think we need to sweat the details of what and how went wrong with Jake's "completely" disengaging the autopilot - we can rest assured that something did, as he had no idea of what he was doing... But I agree with your interpretation: even at best, the manual controls of a runabout didn't appear to be all that user-friendly. In "Playing God", individual thrusters are fired for fine control with keypresses - an awfully clumsy way to maneuver. Much the same happens when Picard manually pilots the E-D in "Booby Trap" or the pilot shuttlepod in "In Theory". Flying straight should still be easy, but that's not what Jake is seen doing or even attempting doing. As suggested by his own words, he instead is trying to learn how to fly the craft through maneuvers that might eventually be necessary. From the ST:TMP cargo bay scene, we could deduce that the shuttlebay has no gravity above the floor, only on the floor. That is, the workbee train clearly hovers effortlessly in ST:TMP, even when the movie does its damnedest to downgrade Star Trek technology to 1970s NASA levels and portray the workbees as no different from Mercury capsules. Possibly floor gravity dies out rapidly above 1.5 meters, and perhaps not just here but elsewhere on the ship as well... (We do know it dies out rapidly eventually, so that Deck 3 doesn't pull people on Deck 4 upwards but OTOH Deck 11 can lose gravity while Decks 10 and 12 don't notice.) The difficult part would then be the vertical takeoff, which we see is wobbly in TOS-R "Doomsday Machine" and "The Galileo Seven" alike (although of course worse in the former, and with good multiple justification - ship under acceleration, madman in a hurry doing the flying). Timo Saloniemi
I flew a plane for the first time last year, and without autopilot, tapping the yoke just a little bit without correcting for it WILL send you off course. You have to tap it back, compensate the other axes, and also mind the throttle - to say nothing of the prevailing wind condition and minor fluctuations thereof. When the instructor handed me the yoke, I suddenly felt a LOT like Jake Sisko in "The Jem'Haddar" - there may not have been any wind, but as MIlhouse once said, "Perfectly level flying is the supreme challenge". Mark
I would imagine that ships would fly in close formation to minimize their exposed shield area. They could then reroute shield power to the shields that are still exposed. They can also concentrate their fire in a specific firing arc.
This is true of pretty much any large organization, especially a top-heavy organization with the emphasis on the upper ranks (at the moment, the U.S. Navy currently has more admirals than it has warships) and it's a form of workplace dysfunction that should be familiar to a lot of people here. It happens, IMO, when passivity sets in and workers/soldiers take a passive "Do nothing until it becomes an emergency" stance, particularly in situations where those higher up on the chain of command are engaged in collective ass-covering and discourage the lower ranks from showing initiative or pro-active measures that might otherwise embarrass their bosses. A similar thing happened with the Soviet military in Afghanistan: unit and regional commanders were so afraid of violating the chain of command that they kept having problems with fire bases and field units being ambushed and requests for evac or reinforcements not being answered until days later. The North Vietnamese Army had a similar problem with its air defense units: NVA pilots were kept on such a tight leash by defense coordinators that some of their pilots literally went through whole dog fights just by following the instructions of their air coordinators, like a couple of show dogs doing tricks (they got away from this after a while because it was a terrible idea, but still). An organization that exists primarily to preserve itself or the position of those at the top OF the organization will almost always have this problem. U.S. police departments are another very good example: structural, cultural and organizational problems are all glossed over and ignored -- if not outright suppressed -- until one of those problems explodes and ends up on the evening news and suddenly you're in crisis mode.
That was the order. RIKER: Mister Crusher, ready a collision course with the Borg ship. You heard me. A collision course. WESLEY: Yes, sir. RIKER: Mister La Forge, prepare to go to warp power. LAFORGE [OC]: Aye, sir.
Just put warp cores and some impulse engines in the warp nacelles. Instead of ramming, you just detach the warp nacelles and use them as giant, warp-speed photon torpedoes. "Dodge this!"
That could actually work, because of the episode with the subspace ruptures and the warp speed limit. To escape the ruptures, the Enterprise-D pre-charges its warp coils to turn them into warp sustainers, then launches itself with a single quick high power warp power burst. It coasts at warp until out of the danger zone. So, precharge the warp engines, then use an even faster higher power warp energy burst to launch the nacelles as they detach. Or, precharge and take the ship to warp, then release the nacelles, and have the ship alter course. The nacelles stay on course to the target. Timing of release would be critical because a target ship could move just a few dozen meters and result in a miss. Point blank from sub-warp seems best. If I were writing a scene, I would have it so the crew can dump antimatter into the Bussard collectors to work as impromptu contact warheads. Really cool idea.
In "The Best of Both Worlds" I don't think that Riker intended to ram the Borg ship at warp speed. I thought that when he said "prepare to go to warp power" what he meant was for LaForge to redirect the power of the warp core into the impulse engines allowing them to overpower the Borg tractor beam holding Enterprise so the ship could then smash into the Borg cube.