...Actually, Kirk blew the Constellation's impulse drive, that is, the fusion reactors, to kill the DDM. Which makes sense, because the DDM had somehow deactivated the antimatter in the main drive, and no doubt would have done the same to any torpedoes or other antimatter explosives fired at it.
Apart from this nitpicking, yeah, a subspace field might be a weapon. But one wonders if a field erected by a warp engine would ever be "dense" enough for the application. The most physical damage we have seen generated by a warp field was the sparkling on the tether that Tucker used for moving from the Columbia to the Enterprise...
We can always speculate that if a warp field is squeezed very, very tight and projected at the enemy, it becomes a phaser beam. Or if phasing and subspace are separate, unrelated phenomena, we can speculate that a shield is a subspace field that is stronger than any warp field, and will stop any warp field weapons with ease. The latter speculation is somewhat in line with backstage materials that describe shields as gravitons suspended in a subspace field.
If so, then in order to make a "warp gun", one would need a really badass warp drive: the engines of a mere Galaxy couldn't hurt a shielded target no matter how violently they were used.
Or perhaps one could build a "wave motion gun" into a standard starship, and fire offensive warp fields at the enemy through that. Who knows, perhaps the main deflector is such a gun, since it does need to have the ability to project a FTL field in order to perform its FTL path-sweeping duty.
In addition to using the warp powerplant as a bomb, or using the warp field as some sort of a mangler or scrambler, there's the third weapon aspect of warp drives: fly into the enemy real fast. But we've never seen a warp ramming, nor heard its effects described as particularly destructive. We only ever hear of the possibility of such a maneuver once: in "BoBW", where Riker attempts a glorious end move in a hopeless battle against the Borg. It's uncertain if Riker hoped to achieve anything beyond a defiant gesture. The lack of evidence on this third way of weaponizing warp suggests that it might not work. Perhaps ships at warp possess minimal kinetic energy and inertia, and are easily and harmlessly stopped by anything physical, such as cardboard armor...
Timo Saloniemi
