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TNG "Booby Trap"

I still think Federation ships should have grapplers as a stand by.

Picard could have then towed the ship out from a safe distance.
Far too low-tech for the federation. The Federation would never use something so mundane and practical as a cable with a hook on the end when they could use something fancy like a tractor beam instead.
 
Far too low-tech for the federation. The Federation would never use something so mundane and practical as a cable with a hook on the end when they could use something fancy like a tractor beam instead.

Yes but if they did that the D would have been in trouble with the assimilators in the asteroid field around the ship. Grapplers would have saved the day.
 
You could always come back with craft that used rocket power only to harvest all that.

That'd be something to see.
 
2. I think it's to avoid anyone else to check it out and get trapped. It was clear at that point that towing it out of the asteroid field was too difficult. Blowing up each asteroid would be time-consuming and it could damage/destroy the Promelian ship in the process.

Well they had options open.

1.>Restrict the sector/regio. As they did to the Mutara sector in TSFS

2.>Place a warning buoy

Given enough time the boffins might have been able to find away to neutralise the effect of the assimilators.
 
There's some talk that a grappling hook could've saved the day... But would they have been able to launch one? The energy might've been drained from the system used for the launch?

If they got a hold of something with the hook to use for dragging theselves out, how could they use a winch, that winch would be drained out of energy too?
 
Well they had options open.

1.>Restrict the sector/regio. As they did to the Mutara sector in TSFS
As it was evident in that movie, such a restriction wouldn't work. At least TWO ships went there....

2.>Place a warning buoy

Given enough time the boffins might have been able to find away to neutralise the effect of the assimilators.
It may have been in a region where folks coming across it were more likely to not give a shit about whether a starfleet captain thought was too dangerous for anyone to go in or not.
 
There's some talk that a grappling hook could've saved the day... But would they have been able to launch one? The energy might've been drained from the system used for the launch?

If they got a hold of something with the hook to use for dragging theselves out, how could they use a winch, that winch would be drained out of energy too?


Not if they were doing that from a distance out of the effects of the assimilators..... That system only drained ships energy systems but a grappler on a cable from a safe distance would have worked.
 
But they wouldn't be able to avoid it hitting the asteroids...
 
How long could the cable for a grappling hook realistically be? A few hundred kilometers? Odds are, it would be nowhere enough to cross the distance between safety and the Promellian ship (we're in space, remember?). Heck, the enemies of the Promellians would have set up their trap to categorically block such attempts at escape if they possibly could - and if they can build these fancy aceton assimilators, they surely would have all the more primitive bases covered, too.

If anything, the Promelians seemed to speak English - how did universal translators pick up so quickly their language?

The Promellian culture was a known quantity. Nothing was said about their writings not surviving, just that there are no ships of theirs to be put into museums.

And if anything anything else, in TNG-ville everyone can get near-lethal radiation exposure up until the last second and everyone is still A-OK and feeling nothing bad ever happen, not even interaction with radiation from later episodes.

This is a well-established and consistent feature of Trek, and indeed there should be nothing amiss with it. Trek has a cure that heals radiation damage, and it's a chemical they can inject or inhale ("Deadly Years" onwards). Pitting this against the accumulating effects of radiation gives you a steady state or a countdown towards healing or death. Remove radiation and the drug supposedly ultimately guarantees total healing. Which is logical, given the seemingly total control our heroes have over the human genome, the one part hurt by radiation.

Timo Saloniemi
 
There's some talk that a grappling hook could've saved the day... But would they have been able to launch one? The energy might've been drained from the system used for the launch?

If they got a hold of something with the hook to use for dragging theselves out, how could they use a winch, that winch would be drained out of energy too?

Hand crank perhaps. ;)
 
It just doesn't wash that our heroes could easily escape a trap specifically devised to stop them from escaping it. And simple distance ought to suffice for negating primitive attempts such as spacewalks, hooks and cables or chemical rocketry - the victims would perish while slowly struggling to get out by those primitive means. Destruction was a matter of mere hours, after all.

Timo Saloniemi
 
There one thing about the Booby Trap episode that doesn't make sense. How are they able to get the ship moving at the end? Throughout the entire episode the ship is literally sitting helpless in space, they aren't even able to activate the engines because of the generators. Then, all of a sudden at the end, they are able to get the ship moving with the impulse engines. There's no explanation for it.
 
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