10 Weirdest Laws In The Star Trek Universe
8. General Order 6
General Order 6 calls for a starship to self-destruct is all life on the ship has expired after a period of 24 hours. This is aimed at preventing the spread of any illness that targeted or wiped out the crew and to prevent the ship from falling into enemy hands. However, this is another law that is either frequently broken or easily disregarded.
The USS Glenn was an early example of this law going unused. While the tardigrade still lived aboard the ship, the crew had perished. As this is the earliest example, it is possible this law was not in effect by this point. Can the same be said of the USS Defiant in The Original Series, whose entire crew perished at the hands of the Tholians, yet then turned up 100 years later in the Mirror Universe?
What, then, of the USS Lantree in The Next Generation? The entire crew was wiped out by a disease that caused them to age rapidly. The Enterprise-D then finds the ship adrift, with no self-destruct activated. The SS Tsiolkovsky suffered a similar fate in an earlier episode, in that the crew had died but the ship remained abandoned.
It seems as though this law, while a militarily sound one, is easily circumvented.