dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word?

I make knives now, too. Why not buy one at flightlessforge.com?

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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • The problem with misclassifying transporters as “non-weapons” is largely down to Starfleet and the sum entirety of its personnel being blithering idiots with the tactical prowess of a beached flounder. Even taking into account all the caveats and technicalities of how and when transporters could or couldn’t be used in canon, the combat utility of such a thing is criminally overlooked.

    Myriad are the times when it is apparently perfectly feasible to beam onto the enemy ship, or vise-versa, to engage in merry yet largely ineffective laser beam battles in the corridors wherein practically nobody hits anybody because in the 31st century everyone forgot how to put sights on their guns.

    Or, you could just use your transporters to set them up the bomb. You have got a bomb, haven’t you? I’m sure your replicators can make you one. Or you could just pull the pin on a torpedo and then park it on their captain’s lap.

    Have the Scary Dogmatic Aliens boarded your ship? Beam their punk asses out into space. Preferably sans their clothes, especially if your transporter chief is any good.

    Sustained some battle damage but your transporters are still working? Just start nicking spare parts from your enemy’s ship. Warp coils, antimater injectors, computer consoles, any or all of their guns… I’m sure you can think of plenty of things you could do with some extras of. Or, and I’m just spitballing here, precisely however many square meters of their hull can fit on your transporter pad. Like, maybe the bit of it that separates their bridge from the vacuum of space.

    Etc., etc. The possibilities really just suggest themselves. With the technology available in the 'Trek universe, space battles should be significantly shorter, much more chaotic, and an awful lot more interesting than they’re ever depicted on screen. Basically once anyone’s shields are down it should be an out and out prank war, one with lethal stakes that are decided by whoever’s engineers are the most creative and/or vindictive, and who can type the fastest.

    That’s before even getting into the wrinkle that photon torpedoes are supposed to travel at warp velocities. Faster than light. There’s no need to even bother to put warheads in the damn things, antimatter based or not. The impact energy alone should be able to core a planet, if only anyone on the writing staff could be trusted to do the math.


  • The gravity gun is definitely a weapon. Notwithstanding having “gun” right there in the name, Gordon spends much of his time in Ravenholm using it to decapitate zombies by chucking saw blades at them, flinging exploding barrels and welding cylinders around, and so on and so forth. All that’s even before it gets inexplicably powered up by the Combine’s confiscation field and turns into a literal lightning cannon that disintegrates people.


  • In the Second Scroll of Wen the Eternally Surprised, a story is written concerning one day when the apprentice Clodpool, in a rebellious mood, approached Wen and spake thusly:

    “Master, what is the difference between a humanistic, monastic system of belief in which wisdom in sought by means of an apparently nonsensical system of questions and answers, and a lot of mystic gibberish made up on the spur of the moment?”

    Wen considered this for some time, and at last said: “A fish!”

    And Clodpool went away, satisfied.