A Star Trek phaser would be extremely useful when dealing with a few of my coworkers. You’d better make sure that it could only fire in stun mode, however. Otherwise I might do something that I’d regret later.
You might be onto something there. Consider this:
Do you remember that one DS9 episode where everyone was paranoid about Changeling spies? Starfleet declared martial law over Earth! (That’s like the US Army declaring martial law over America.) And then there’s that time when Sisko poisoned a Federation planet in retaliation for the Maquis poisoning a Cardassian planet. (I know that he was trying to restore the balance of power, but he forcibly evicted an entire colony of people. Apparently there are no Due Process rights in the Federation.)
These actions suggest that Starfleet has more power than the civil authorities. Which means that our beloved Federation might, in fact, be a military dictatorship :eek:
I think people over estimate transporters. I think the shows are ALMOST always consistant that they suck… replicaters are the sort of high point of teleporting technology and they are VERY limited… some quirk of teleporter technology doesn’t allow better. I get the impression its not ‘digitalizeing’ you and sending you like a file… its physically changeing you a bit at a time and sending you somewhere. although they change it sometimes.
God…wide-field phaser beams. I sure miss those. Nowadays we’re stuck with the lame-ass “energy packet” shooting phasers, even on the “Phase pistols” from the 22nd century. (The MACOs’ energy rifles are an exception, because those guys are competant)
But do you know what I REALLY miss, phaser-wise?
There was an episode of TOS, “A Piece of the Action,” where they used wide-field phaser “stun” bursts…
…From the ship’s phaser banks.
…FROM—FRIGGIN—ORBIT!
They stunned a city BLOCK once, with that little stunt. How the hell often would THAT have come in handy on the “modern” series’?!
To explain how such a technology could actually be forgotten, I’ve just imagined that they found out that the old Constitution-class phasers caused cancer, or something.
Hey…there’s another idea. Using the phaser banks of an orbiting ship…for frontlie fire support for your “ground-pounder” troops.
Or, better yet, use those “lasers” from TNG that disintigrated the flesh first, leaving the victim’s skeleton standing in midair for a second or two, before being disintigrated itself. It’d be even better if you could modify the weapon so that it wouldn’t disintigrate the skeleton at all. THAT’D be a cool weapon to have!
Or, using a hand phaser and a small forcefield generator, build yourself a lightsaber analogue. Then you could go around lopping the arms off of Nausicans. Or sell the design to the Klingons…they’d probably deify you.
Or you could try any o’ the “Megalomaniacal projects for advanced civilizations”
I think this one’s OK. It was originally posted on the Dogbert mailing list, AFAIK, and the note “Please keep this notice with the text if you forward it by e-mail.” clearly indicates it was meant to be passed on.
Do you mean disrupters? In TNG era, they were illegal for Starfleet and Federation. (The Most Toys)
Some other races used them, though.
If you could use a video camera in the holodeck, political campains would be even dirtier.
For instance let’s say that I’m running against GWB in the next election. “Friends of Zebra” could make a holodeck program of GWB and Dick hunting poor people for sport. The ad would run and then a voice over of. “Do you really want someone who hunts poor people for spot as president?”
Then of course ‘Friends of GWB’ would make a tape of me having sex with a donkey. Followed by a voice asking Do you want a guy who blows donkeys as president?
Besides that you could never trust the news again. There have been some bad journalists that have ‘faked’ the news. Imagin if they had a hollow deck.
The “disruptor” gun that Kivas Fajo used in that episode was no ordinary disruptor. It was an especially vicious disruptor that slowly tore its victim apart from the inside out, causing horrific pain before finally killing him/her. The other races that used disruptors (e.g. the Klingons) typically did not use this particular variety of disruptor – they used the garden-variety disruptors that kill instantly (no chance your enemy will thrash about in his death throes and take one of your soldiers out that way).
Making ordinary stars “go nova”? Implying that the tidal forces near orbiting black holes will suddenly increase if the two black holes collide? Using stellar flares on one side of a globular cluster to produce “thrust” for the cluster as a whole?
Sheesh. The person who wrote that has no grasp of real astrophysics.
Excellent point. In the Star Trek universe, video evidence would be worthless because it could have been created in a holodeck.
Heck, a warp engine can destablize a star. I’d just destroy several galaxies in such a way that, viewed from the proper perspective, they spelled out a very nasty word.
“Computer…reroute the ship septic system thru the replicators. Lock the system and continue replication indefinitely.”
Simply go back in time and do anything you want.
Take over “The Guardian of Forever” if you don’t want to muck about with all that slingshot stuff.
I think Scotty already thought of one of the best abuses:
I’m pretty sure that the reason ships don’t demolish planets as they warp through the galaxy is that they’re in subspace, not normal space. Throwing a warped rock at a planet would cause the rock to go through the planet.