Do 24th century Federation (Earth) citizens have the right to bear arms?

[at Quark's]

I gather the superpowers of this supertech would need to be utilized creatively there. The redshirts could close the distance by walking underground, say...

I'll agree that if those redshirts start displaying actual intelligence and creativity (which they of course rarely do) there are a lot more options. Blasting underground caverns with their phasers as they go would be an effective solution I suppose. Never understood how they can be so assured those caves won't collapse without any structural support, but then again, they seem to have a lot of expertise in any area you'd care to mention that in our world take years of specialised study and training to master.

A hundred guys with concealed sidearms would be a big threat if not pretending to be an opposing battlefield army. Instead, they could walk into cities and then stun tens of thousands long before any sort of a response could be mounted, take control of institutions and assets, and dig into undefeatable positions behind human shields millions thick.
Timo Saloniemi

Possibly. Except -- would Starfleet redshirts actually resort to those kind of tactics (human shields etc) ? Now, if they were, say, Cardassian soldiers (assuming they had had surgery to look as the local populace)....

 

[Guy Gardener]

I wouldn't be surprised if like today, it's down to individual states or whatever the future equivalent is. I imagine they'd be far more skittish about someone walking around San Francisco than they would bumfuck nowhere where that Klingon was shot. But then again, it's a world where Starfleet (who seem to be the police in the 24th century going by DS9) can beam in anywhere at 3 seconds notice.

Also people can 3D print a deadly weapon today, I'm sure there are ways to replicate one 300 years hence.

Sorry.

You fail Enterprise.

The name of the pilot is the name of the bumfuck nowhere town.

Broken Bow.

 

[Skipper]

And ears that are 2,000,000 years apart at the very least?

(What about tails? Asking for a friend, of course.)

Well, in this world, for some bizzarre reason, humans coexists with elves and anthropomorphized animals. Someone more mischievous than me could even say that they exist only to titillate teenage readers, but we know very well that Japanese authors would never resort to these cheap stunts....

There is "bunny warrior girl" (!??!) who is made by the bad guy his personal slave and she is continuously brutalized. My God i feel dirty just for writing this.

After a while I stopped reading this. The JDF made a massacre (yes, in retaliation but whatever) and they still are depicted as heroes.

 

[Skipper]

Well In no Trek production we have ever witnessed a pitched battle between phaser armed infantry (even if they are sometime hinted in DS9), so we don't know what tactics they would use. They would be routinely blasted from orbit?

 

[Guy Gardener]

1. The Piggy Dragoons from Hide and Q.

2. Transporter suppression fields... Stop the transporter from locking onto targets or viewing dropzones. Transporter scans would be very similar to weapons locks. Firing blind is fine, although when you can blow up a city with one torpedo, targeting is hardly an issue, even though photonic weapons, and quantum weapons seem on par with 20th century conventional weapons more so than atomic weapons. Although in a Piece of the Action Kirk stunned a city or more than one city, from orbit. People asleep, and no damage to the structures.

3. Planetary shields and city shields. Breaking a shield is difficult to accomplish without frying the hell of every one and every thing under that shield in the point between %3 and %0. You gotta know when to stop firing weapons at the shield before it splutters out.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Well In no Trek production have we ever witnessed a pitched battle between phaser armed infantry (even if they are sometime hinted in DS9), so we don't know what tactics they would use. They would be routinely blasted from orbit?

The Seige of AR-558?

 

[Turtletrekker]

Jean-Luc Picard is a private citizen and he had all sorts of weapons stashed about. I would say that means yes they can.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Jean-Luc Picard is a private citizen and he had all sorts of weapons stashed about. I would say that means yes they can.

Worse, his housemates were Romulans with Romulan weapons.

 

[Turtletrekker]

Worse, his housemates were Romulans with Romulan weapons.

No, all of Picard's weapons had stun settings.

 

[Ocanain]

Earth is an East Coast city. Most of Trek is the Wild West.

How is it an outlier that a character has guns? There is no contrary example anywhere, of a character who would not have a gun. That is, we never heard of one - even the single one who said he would not wield one had his wife possess one, or have access to one.

Timo Saloniemi

I meant it more in the sense of civilians. I guess we see so little of civilian life in earth that’s not tied to Starfleet anyway but I’m running in more of the political insinuations and that one episode of Ds9.

I certainly accept your view though. Nearly everyone knows more about Star Trek than me.

 

[Guy Gardener]

No, all of Picard's weapons had stun settings.

I always see that a phaser dials up to kill from the default setting, but a disruptor dials down to stun from the default setting.

 

[Skipper]

The Seige of AR-558?

Well, it was more a skirmish between exhausted and poorly armed soldiers. There isn't out there a infantry battle simulator..?

Found it!

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Ultimate+Epic+Battle+Simulator

Hurry! Someone simulate a phaser battle

 

[Guy Gardener]

Been a while, but I thought it was a soldiers trying to clear a minefield phasing in and out of subspace. I guess there were jem hadar there too i suppose.

 

[Henoch]

Kirk and the Proconsul were discussing this particular empire (items taken from the transcripts):
1. There's been no war for over four hundred years.
2. They have slavery, gladiatorial games, despotism.
3. Long ago there were rebellions, but they were suppressed.
4. And with each century, the slaves acquired more rights under the law.
5. The police are everywhere. Uniformed police like those of Earth.

The "military" appears to be just riot police with machine guns needed to control runaway slaves and prevent revolts. No major military as we know it with ships, tanks, planes, etc. Their industrial might is on building cities, toasters, highways and cars for the populous. This is not a world prepared for war is the point of their of discussion.

 

[AlanC9]

What else could they have? There isn't anyone left to fight with a real military.

 

[Guy Gardener]

I imagine that there are holo-emitters everywhere on Earth.

A clever person can't just replicate a phaser for a well regulated militia, they can generate a well regulated holographic militia.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

That's why you prepare yourself with your own arms ahead of time. For when you would need it.

 

[Nightdiamond]

Except not. If the Starfleet team had assault rifles, they would have run out of ammo long ago. With extreme firing discipline, a modern force might be able to retain a clip of ammo per man after two days of fighting; these guys had been down there for five months. Any USMC unit and even Chuck Norris would be dead many times over.

No doubt the last grenades would have been expended months ago, too. Which is why the heroes had to make use of scavenged enemy mines instead, and did.

But firing at this enemy charge with the last of the energy remaining in the phaser clips is not a valid tactical option. The previous such charge had been a holographic feint: firing would be tantamount to surrendering, if it merely deprived the heroes of ammo before the real charge came.

Notably, all the heroes check their phasers for remaining ammo at the start of the battle. Nobody ever does that in Star Trek; these folks must be desperately low on energy there. Timo Saloniemi

But now at this point, you have to ask, what type of military is Starfleet running? You have the Defiant, a warship, which should have been able to supply more than enough supplies, like grenades or bullets, (if they were still making them).

If this is really the post scarcity or replicator driven society it appears to be, then producing grenades or bullets in large numbers should be easy.

And lobbing some grenades should have easily taken care of that squad since they were basically just running at them. With no helmets!

No sheilding systems? No one in sniper positions higher up in the cave?

It looks like the desperate trench conditions were created for dramatic effect, I think.

It exaggerates in the opposite direction with starship phaser and torpedoes. One starship with phasers or torpedoes can destroy an entire planet or its crust?

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

It also seems like Dominion have Medieval level tactics once they run out of Ketracel White to Cloak themselves and ambush people. Charge the enemy through a valley where you are in a kill box? Obviously the Jem Hadar have to follow orders, but to do it so blindly.

But I guess that's a effect of "Hollywood" level of tactics.

 

[Timo]

But now at this point, you have to ask, what type of military is Starfleet running? You have the Defiant, a warship, which should have been able to supply more than enough supplies, like grenades or bullets, (if they were still making them).

And indeed a ship like the Defiant was supposed to replenish the ground unit. Like, three and a half months ago.

It's just that Starfleet forgot the unit was there, in a repeat of a surprisingly common real-world mishap. But we learn that it was not supposed to fight unreplenished for five months. Which already explains pretty much everything we see happening and not happening...

If this is really the post scarcity or replicator driven society it appears to be, then producing grenades or bullets in large numbers should be easy.

The one piece of equipment we still haven't seen is a field replicator. The smallest unit witnessed was the fridge-sized thing beamed down in TNG "Survivors"; the ground team here didn't appear to have one of those.

And lobbing some grenades should have easily taken care of that squad since they were basically just running at them. With no helmets!

I'm not quite sure what difference helmets would make. I mean, no Star Trek chest armor so far has been effective against knives, kicks or punches, and probably wouldn't help at all against bullets, either; a helmet made of the same stuff would be equally useless, and thus better left home.

Whatever protection that Jem'Hadar or Klingon or Cardassian armor offers, it apparently doesn't work too well, not even against the most common battlefield threat of the day, the death ray. Perhaps these folks wear the body armor because it helps against death rays a little, but a helmet made to similar levels of protection would be unbearably clumsy, as impractical as an armored aircraft. Certainly Starfleet thinks that body armor serves no purpose whatsoever, and is probably correct. It would be akin to modern troopers donning medieval armor "because it's better than nothing". It isn't; it's much worse than nothing.

No shielding systems? No one in sniper positions higher up in the cave?

We never heard of shields capable of protecting an individual trooper; when the Borg have those in "Q Who?", it surprises the hell out of our heroes.

We have seen bulletproof riot shields in action in ST5:TFF, though. But obviously they wouldn't be used by battlefield troops that aren't threatened by anything as wussy as bullets. The "personal shields" mentioned offhand in "Homefront"/"Paradise Lost" are possibly of the same sort, as they were going to be deployed for the purposes of controlling Earth's citizens.

As for snipers, who knows? We saw fairly little of the action in the end. But in other Trek shows, sniping has not called for special gear, merely for a special setting of standard gear - so perhaps the unit did a tactical analysis and decided it was better to utilize all the guns as trench LMGs rather than waste the firepower of one by using it at long range mode?

It looks like the desperate trench conditions were created for dramatic effect, I think.

And it worked pretty well...

It exaggerates in the opposite direction with starship phaser and torpedoes. One starship with phasers or torpedoes can destroy an entire planet or its crust?

Yup. And for a long time, we wondered how wars could be fought if and when this were true. Then DS9 provided the answer, in a battle directly relating to this one: we saw a planetary defense system in action, and it almost cut a thousand-ship fleet to pieces before the heroes pulled the plug.

Starships are strategic weapons against undefended targets, just like battleships were in WWI and prior. They are impotent against defended targets, though, except when deployed en masse.

I guess this tangents on the thread subject somewhat: handguns, even ones as potent as Trek ones, would not protect anybody's home because they don't make targets defended. Any two-bit villain with a spacecraft can eliminate handgun operators at will. So when we see frontier homes defended by handguns, we may suspect there are a couple of anti-starship howitzers stacked away out of sight, too, or else there would be little point.

Timo Saloniemi