What kind of Martial Arts would StarFleet be teaching to it's Officers?

[fireproof78]

Reminds me of dialog from Starship Troopers (the book). "So, supposed we ruined the productive surface of Klendathu (bug planet). It wouldn't reach the leadership castes, and would destroy resources. It wouldn't stop them."

To me, using full power is always a tactical decision, and the consequences can have deleterious effects on the overall mission.

 

[Skipper]

If you have "Earth-Shattering levels" of fire power, you usually don't want to collapse the building on top of yourself if you're in a fire fight in-doors. Or if you're outdoors, you don't want something with the blast radius of a 2,000 lb JDAM to explode near you given how close most Star Trek Fire Fights are. You'd literally get caught in your own blast and that would be counter productive.

Also, you don't want to burn through all your energy for your ammo unnecessarily and try to not damage the surroundings / facilities / vessel that you're in.

So that's why you turn down the power on Phasers and make sure they don't get turned onto "Earth-Shattering levels" that would bring the house down.

You also don't want to run out of ammo in a Fire Fight, so you learn to turn down the power settings to conserve ammo.

I don't think a desperate outnumbered villain would have any qualms.
And in the open, one could use their phaser as an RPG and the other use their phaser for covering fire. But in all the firefights seen so far they just do "pew pew". Which makes absolutely no sense. It has been seen time and again that a phaser can fire as if it were a flashlight for a long time. So it would be enough to fan it around to make a massacre.

But the authors continue to show the use of these phasers as if they were 6-shot revolvers in the Far West. Only DSC has once tried to do something different in a phaser shooting.

 

[fireproof78]

I don't think a desperate outnumbered villain would have any qualms.
And in the open, one could use their phaser as an RPG and the other use their phaser for covering fire. But in all the firefights seen so far they just do "pew pew". Which makes absolutely no sense. It has been seen time and again that a phaser can fire as if it were a flashlight for a long time. So it would be enough to fan it around to make a massacre.

But the authors continue to show the use of these phasers as if they were 6-shot revolvers in the Far West. Only DSC has once tried to do something different in a phaser shooting.

Well, given how TOS was conceived this doesn't seem that far of a stretch.

Also, didn't Tuvok use a wide angle stun to cover an entire bridge.

 

[Farscape One]

Tuvok did, while possessed, in "CATHEXIS".

 

[Christopher]

I can think of only two uses of wide-angle stun with a hand phaser, "The Return of the Archons" and "Cathexis," plus the wide-angle stun with the ship's phasers in "A Piece of the Action." Presumably it isn't used more often because it's too easy a way out for the heroes. But that does create the question of what the characters' reason is for not using it more often, as opposed to the writers' reason.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

I can think of only two uses of wide-angle stun with a hand phaser, "The Return of the Archons" and "Cathexis," plus the wide-angle stun with the ship's phasers in "A Piece of the Action." Presumably it isn't used more often because it's too easy a way out for the heroes. But that does create the question of what the characters' reason is for not using it more often, as opposed to the writers' reason.

My main reason for not using it more often is due to the "high energy consumption".
Think of the "Inverse-Square law" and how much more energy you need to consume to meet the same energy intensity output as firing a single Phaser Bolt or beam.

At lower settings, what could've been 1000's to 100's of shots at lower settings could be down to Double-Digit to Single digit "Wide Angle" shots for equivalent power.

 

[Christopher]

My main reason for not using it more often is due to the "high energy consumption".
Think of the "Inverse-Square law" and how much more energy you need to consume to meet the same energy intensity output as firing a single Phaser Bolt or beam.

At lower settings, what could've been 1000's to 100's of shots at lower settings could be down to Double-Digit to Single digit "Wide Angle" shots for equivalent power.

The bigger issue for me is that different people react differently to things like anaesthesia. You hear about cases like that mass hostage situation in Russia some years back where the police (military?) used knockout gas to subdue the hostage takers and ended up killing a number of the hostages. And tasers are sometimes lethal too, and sometimes don't subdue someone at all, since different bodies react differently. Anything you use on a bunch of people that's powerful enough to knock all of them out is almost certain to kill the more vulnerable ones.

in one of my novels, I posited that hand phasers have feedback sensors that let them calibrate their stun blasts to the metabolism of their targets, which is the only way the stun setting could be as reliably nonlethal as it's shown to be; but the reason Starfleet stopped using wide-field stun from orbit like in "A Piece of the Action" is that there was no way to guarantee that firing on a whole crowd at once would be consistently nonlethal.

Really, though, phaser fire from orbit shouldn't work at all, since the hundred kilometers or more of intervening atmosphere would absorb or scatter the energy before it reached the ground, especially on low power like a stun blast. The Earth's atmosphere shields us from a constant barrage of lethal cosmic radiation all the time. (The B plot in TNG: "Final Mission," where a planet was endangered by a barge of radioactive waste in its orbital space, is nonsense for the same reason.)

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

The bigger issue for me is that different people react differently to things like anaesthesia. You hear about cases like that mass hostage situation in Russia some years back where the police (military?) used knockout gas to subdue the hostage takers and ended up killing a number of the hostages. And tasers are sometimes lethal too, and sometimes don't subdue someone at all, since different bodies react differently. Anything you use on a bunch of people that's powerful enough to knock all of them out is almost certain to kill the more vulnerable ones.

That's true, but that's why there are many levels to the settings and you can fine tune how much power you want to send out.

in one of my novels, I posited that hand phasers have feedback sensors that let them calibrate their stun blasts to the metabolism of their targets, which is the only way the stun setting could be as reliably nonlethal as it's shown to be; but the reason Starfleet stopped using wide-field stun from orbit like in "A Piece of the Action" is that there was no way to guarantee that firing on a whole crowd at once would be consistently nonlethal.

The problem with firing from Orbit is that different planets / atmosphere compositions affect the Phasers differently, so to have one universal formula for calculating stun setting from orbit is REALLy difficult because you need to tune it to the specifications of each planet.

That's not worth the trouble for most StarFleet officers when they can send in ground teams to take care of the problem with far less collatoral damage.

If you get the stun setting wrong from orbit, you could look like you've melted half the town or set the town ablaze if you're not careful.

Really, though, phaser fire from orbit shouldn't work at all, since the hundred kilometers or more of intervening atmosphere would absorb or scatter the energy before it reached the ground, especially on low power like a stun blast. The Earth's atmosphere shields us from a constant barrage of lethal cosmic radiation all the time. (The B plot in TNG: "Final Mission," where a planet was endangered by a barge of radioactive waste in its orbital space, is nonsense for the same reason.)

It's not that it shouldn't work, it's that factoring all the environmental and atmospheric factors along with the composition of every person in the targeting field plus the facilities / buildings in the area is hard.

What if you accidentally set a building on fire while trying to stun somebody on the ground, then you lit up the town and trapped the towns folk in fire. You just made the situation infinitely worse.

James T. Kirk got lucky that it worked the few times he did it. I wouldn't count on every civilization that you encounter to have buildings that are tough enough to not catch on fire from Phasers on stun in wide area enough coverage to cover several city blocks.

 

[Christopher]

That's true, but that's why there are many levels to the settings and you can fine tune how much power you want to send out.

That's my whole point. You can calibrate for an individual target, but not for a whole group of simultaneous targets, which is my argument against using wide-field stun. (Although "Cathexis" rendered it as a series of multiple narrow beams rather than a literal wide field as in "Archons," so maybe there was some individual calibration going on there.)

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

That's my whole point. You can calibrate for an individual target, but not for a whole group of simultaneous targets, which is my argument against using wide-field stun. (Although "Cathexis" rendered it as a series of multiple narrow beams rather than a literal wide field as in "Archons," so maybe there was some individual calibration going on there.)

Could be, but the less collatoral damage, the better.

 

[publiusr]

I can think of only two uses of wide-angle stun with a hand phaser, "The Return of the Archons" and "Cathexis," plus the wide-angle stun with the ship's phasers in "A Piece of the Action." Presumably it isn't used more often because it's too easy a way out for the heroes. But that does create the question of what the characters' reason is for not using it more often, as opposed to the writers' reason.

Wink of an Eye showed hand phasers all but filling a room—non remastered…about 4:05 here:

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[Christopher]

Wink of an Eye showed hand phasers all but filling a room—non remastered…about 4:05 here:

Hmm, yeah, "sweep the area." I guess that counts.