prokopetz:

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

tharook:

quasi-normalcy:

saathiray:

buttstothemoon:

quasi-normalcy:

What if, and hear me out, in stead of constantly telling Star Trek stories about science vessels that are “reconfigured to be vessels of war”, we tried telling a Star Trek story about a science vessel that is a vessel of science?

What about a war vessel that was reconfigured to be a vessel of science? Those are wayyyyyyyy more common in real life.

“What the hell is this place?”
“Map says this used to be the ship’s armory. This is where they kept their warheads.”
“This is where we’re keeping the busted LCMS stuff.”
“We…we really can just get new ones.”
“But what we NEEEEEED them for parts?”
“Uh.”
“Start putting the LC pumps here. Don’t tell the captain.”

Or a ship that they use to explore particularly dense plasma nebulae because it has a thick hull and reinforced shielding to withstand Jem’Hadar attacks or the like.

“Are those quantum torpedoes!?”

“Negative. Well, affirmative. Well, they were quantum and they are torpedoes, but they have been retrofitted for probe deployment.”

“What happened to the payloads?”

“They have been repurposed for experimental generation of SUSY particles from vacuum.”

THIS SOUNDS LIKE IT WOULD BE SO NEAT 😀

The thing that gets me about this proposal is that it’s basically canon that Federation vessels are absurdly overpowered compared to just about anything else in space, to the point that a Federation science vessel can tangle with multiple dedicated warships from just about any other faction and reasonably expect to come out on top. Like, they’re packing “sampling lasers” that can drill holes through planets.

If that’s what you get when a science vessel guns up, what on Earth does it look like when you go the other way? We’re talking about a continuum of force where “enough directed energy to crack a planet in half” is your baseline.

(Of course, the reasonable answer is “they take out all the big guns when they convert it to a science vessel, because trying to repurpose planet-cracking firepower for research purposes is deranged”, but where’s the fun in that?)