Its a familiar scene Starfleet on one side of the room, hunkered down behind a pile of crates, and Orion smugglers, Klingon marauders or other generic villains on the other. Someone shouts cover me! and scuttles around to a better position while behind them, shots rain down like gunfire. Its all very exciting, but Starfleet really does like to make life hard for itself. Lets pick on Worf, partly because everyone else does and partly because he spends all his free time practicing combat in the holodeck and hes still a terrible shot. What youre holding in your hand, Worf, is not a gun that fires discrete shots that either hit or miss their target. Its a beam weapon, and if you keep holding the button down, the beam keeps going, which would allow you to do really advanced things like adjusting your aim. So the next time someone dives sideways to avoid your attack, you could adjust your wrist slightly and hit them with the beam anyway. Its a strategic revolution! Alas, while the Feds are happy to use a continuous beam of energy for the day-to-day stuff, like heating rocks to keep warm or carving Janeways effigy into the side of a mountain, the idea of using a sustained blast to melt away their enemys cover seems to be viewed as unsportsmanlike behaviour, even though its the only chance theyve got of hitting anything. If they ever do a Star Wars crossover and fight Stormtroopers, well have the worlds first gunfight where everyone dies of old age.
