Post by trekee2018 on Nov 17, 2018 19:16:26 GMT -7
Or why MACO sucks.
Every naval force that wants to be taken seriously has a branch of hardy, salty, a little bit crayony, marines. Star Trek solves the problem of what to do with all those marines when they are sitting around doing nothing. The answer is of course not to even have any! Because why would any space faring branch of the military need specialized ground combat units deployed on ships carrying out long and dangerous missions? Or a fighting force always ready to defend the ship from anyone trying to board?
Starfleet does of course have experience fighting all sorts of engagements on the ground, and in hand to hand combat during ship to ship engagements.
Which brings me to my first talking point: MACO. Apparently before the Federation there was the United Earth, and at this time in history humans hadn't forgotten the necessity of a dedicated ground combat force. MACO stands for Military Assault Command Operations, they are essentially SOCOM with more futurey looking stuff to play with. Out of the entirety of Star Trek we only get to see MACO in action throughout a whole 21 episodes of STE. Multiple times we get to see MACO kick some serious alien butt from repelling multiple boarding parties, (Zero Hour, Chosen Realm, Rajiin,) to hostage rescue and retrieval (Countdown), to a good ole planet side firefight (Extinction.)
These men and women are depicted to be motivated, experienced, well trained warriors up to any task they've been given. Unfortunately this is a very cool but entirely too late of an idea to introduce to Star Trek, and thus MACO had to be abolished at the end of Enterprise to maintain Trek cannon.
So what kind of equipment do our super serious ground force Starfleet counterparts use to do their name taking and gum chewing? Well, firstly you get a pretty crappy looking brown undershirt, and you get a camouflage pattern that is so entirely pointless it makes you wonder why anyone ever even wasted brain power designing it, let alone the resources required to issue it.
Oops wrong photo!
There we go!
Fortunately MACO has adapted the strategy of always making sure the camera can see them standing in front of the only part of the shot that even remotely matches their grey brown splotch suites. (Note to the guy standing in the background! DON'T MOVE! THAT'S THE ONLY PART OF THE SHOT THAT MATCHES YOUR CAMOUFLAGE EVEN REMOTELY!) Don't know what the blue boys are going to do about this either, but seeing as nobody feels the need to take cover they'd all be just as well off wearing neon-orange unitards. To be fair though to both the US Army and MACO, if you were only meant to operate on board a spaceship whose only color palette is metallic grey both uniforms would work very well with their surroundings. Unfortunately though for MACO their entire point to existence is ground operations, and unfortunately for the US Army the Space Force already beat them to that field of operation.
Apparently western militaries aren't that great at implementing a working camouflage pattern but at least MACO brings serious firepower to the table. The only phase weapon MACO gets to touch is the phase-pistol which is the typical Star Trek handgun fare. It has a stun setting, a kill setting, and can be set to overload as the most expensive IED ever devised. Unfortunately what MACO's early 22nd century phase-pistol can do is just shooty shooty a little, unlike in TNG where we can see Riker wiping out an entire building with one blast (I'll come back to this later.) Before this MACO used a plasma weapon, the EM-33. As far as I can tell it can kill guys dead just as well as a phase-pistol with the only real upgrade being that you don't have to compensate for some sort of "particle drift" with the phase-pistol.
MACO also gets the particle rifle which is literally just a phaser rifle with the word particle slapped on it to make it sound less sophisticated just like they did with the phase pistol. They are issued stun batons? Which makes absolutely no sense to me, because I'm pretty sure these guys are special operations and not trailer park security. And they get stun grenades, but only stun grenades, because a real fragmentation grenade would make no sense for an early 22nd century military rearming after a devastating nuclear war. /s
Basically these guys suck. Their reason to exist sucks, there's no cool narrative explanation for MACO. What happened was the Iraq War was in full swing and CBS didn't want anybody to question why their show didn't sport cool future looking army guys running around, and then entirely forgot that MACO was supposed to be a group of cool looking future army guys, and subsequently armed, and wrote, MACO like they are Starfleet officers with a different uniform. A true travesty of world design and writing if you ask me. So in retrospect it's actually not that hard to see why MACO was disbanded in the first place seeing as in later Trek canon Starfleet officers perform way better with much less.
Okay now that EnTeRpRiSe is out of my hair let's get to the real Star Trek ground weapons.
The phaser can defeat anything and everything under the sun! Honestly, the phaser rifle or compressed phaser rifle is meaningless to Star Trek as far as a literary sense goes. Seriously. Show me what your carbine, recoilless rifle, and 120mm main tank cannon has got on this thing? You can't. The phaser has sixteen settings, from a light stun all the way to cutting through meters of concrete. You can set the beam to be extremely narrow for precision shooting or extremely wide if you don't feel like that enemy command structure deserves to have a wall anymore. I could presumably shoot straight through an aircraft carrier with one of these things. Honestly Star Trek gave themselves such a ridiculously overpowered weapon we almost always see the writers deliberately making our main characters use these things to as little affect as possible.
Why was the entire Siege of AR-558 a thing when all you have to do to defend your front is set one of these bad boys to a large beam and just vaporize the entire enemy army in one shot? Because we need a story to watch, that's why. But if Star Trek writers did stay true to the canonical power we've seen come from these things then it's entirely possible that a single Ensign could stand off against a battalion of tanks and be no worse for wear.
I guess this is why redshirts are around to just stand there and get shot - to make it look like our heroes are actually in trouble somehow.
A compression phaser rifle can do everything your standard Type 2 can except it's huge, unwieldy, and really just serves to make Janeway look as silly as possible while using one.
This is just your standard phaser rifle. It is supposedly more powerful than any hand phaser but it still has just as many settings (16), still is shown to do just as much if not less damage than a Type 2 phaser, and is ultimately less accurate being a carbine with no stock.
By the way I'm not even going to attempt to find Wharf's little shoulder carried RPG-ish monstrosity from Insurrection or the buggy from Nemesis that looks like you'd be better off in a Suzuki Samurai. Those were both terrible, one off weapons which technically canonical, I won't count as Star Trek weapons or ground equipment.
TL;DR I don't like MACO, I don't like phaser rifles; the type 2 is god.
Every naval force that wants to be taken seriously has a branch of hardy, salty, a little bit crayony, marines. Star Trek solves the problem of what to do with all those marines when they are sitting around doing nothing. The answer is of course not to even have any! Because why would any space faring branch of the military need specialized ground combat units deployed on ships carrying out long and dangerous missions? Or a fighting force always ready to defend the ship from anyone trying to board?
Starfleet does of course have experience fighting all sorts of engagements on the ground, and in hand to hand combat during ship to ship engagements.
Which brings me to my first talking point: MACO. Apparently before the Federation there was the United Earth, and at this time in history humans hadn't forgotten the necessity of a dedicated ground combat force. MACO stands for Military Assault Command Operations, they are essentially SOCOM with more futurey looking stuff to play with. Out of the entirety of Star Trek we only get to see MACO in action throughout a whole 21 episodes of STE. Multiple times we get to see MACO kick some serious alien butt from repelling multiple boarding parties, (Zero Hour, Chosen Realm, Rajiin,) to hostage rescue and retrieval (Countdown), to a good ole planet side firefight (Extinction.)
These men and women are depicted to be motivated, experienced, well trained warriors up to any task they've been given. Unfortunately this is a very cool but entirely too late of an idea to introduce to Star Trek, and thus MACO had to be abolished at the end of Enterprise to maintain Trek cannon.
So what kind of equipment do our super serious ground force Starfleet counterparts use to do their name taking and gum chewing? Well, firstly you get a pretty crappy looking brown undershirt, and you get a camouflage pattern that is so entirely pointless it makes you wonder why anyone ever even wasted brain power designing it, let alone the resources required to issue it.
Oops wrong photo!
There we go! Fortunately MACO has adapted the strategy of always making sure the camera can see them standing in front of the only part of the shot that even remotely matches their grey brown splotch suites. (Note to the guy standing in the background! DON'T MOVE! THAT'S THE ONLY PART OF THE SHOT THAT MATCHES YOUR CAMOUFLAGE EVEN REMOTELY!) Don't know what the blue boys are going to do about this either, but seeing as nobody feels the need to take cover they'd all be just as well off wearing neon-orange unitards. To be fair though to both the US Army and MACO, if you were only meant to operate on board a spaceship whose only color palette is metallic grey both uniforms would work very well with their surroundings. Unfortunately though for MACO their entire point to existence is ground operations, and unfortunately for the US Army the Space Force already beat them to that field of operation.
Apparently western militaries aren't that great at implementing a working camouflage pattern but at least MACO brings serious firepower to the table. The only phase weapon MACO gets to touch is the phase-pistol which is the typical Star Trek handgun fare. It has a stun setting, a kill setting, and can be set to overload as the most expensive IED ever devised. Unfortunately what MACO's early 22nd century phase-pistol can do is just shooty shooty a little, unlike in TNG where we can see Riker wiping out an entire building with one blast (I'll come back to this later.) Before this MACO used a plasma weapon, the EM-33. As far as I can tell it can kill guys dead just as well as a phase-pistol with the only real upgrade being that you don't have to compensate for some sort of "particle drift" with the phase-pistol.
MACO also gets the particle rifle which is literally just a phaser rifle with the word particle slapped on it to make it sound less sophisticated just like they did with the phase pistol. They are issued stun batons? Which makes absolutely no sense to me, because I'm pretty sure these guys are special operations and not trailer park security. And they get stun grenades, but only stun grenades, because a real fragmentation grenade would make no sense for an early 22nd century military rearming after a devastating nuclear war. /s
Basically these guys suck. Their reason to exist sucks, there's no cool narrative explanation for MACO. What happened was the Iraq War was in full swing and CBS didn't want anybody to question why their show didn't sport cool future looking army guys running around, and then entirely forgot that MACO was supposed to be a group of cool looking future army guys, and subsequently armed, and wrote, MACO like they are Starfleet officers with a different uniform. A true travesty of world design and writing if you ask me. So in retrospect it's actually not that hard to see why MACO was disbanded in the first place seeing as in later Trek canon Starfleet officers perform way better with much less.
Okay now that EnTeRpRiSe is out of my hair let's get to the real Star Trek ground weapons.
The phaser can defeat anything and everything under the sun! Honestly, the phaser rifle or compressed phaser rifle is meaningless to Star Trek as far as a literary sense goes. Seriously. Show me what your carbine, recoilless rifle, and 120mm main tank cannon has got on this thing? You can't. The phaser has sixteen settings, from a light stun all the way to cutting through meters of concrete. You can set the beam to be extremely narrow for precision shooting or extremely wide if you don't feel like that enemy command structure deserves to have a wall anymore. I could presumably shoot straight through an aircraft carrier with one of these things. Honestly Star Trek gave themselves such a ridiculously overpowered weapon we almost always see the writers deliberately making our main characters use these things to as little affect as possible.
Why was the entire Siege of AR-558 a thing when all you have to do to defend your front is set one of these bad boys to a large beam and just vaporize the entire enemy army in one shot? Because we need a story to watch, that's why. But if Star Trek writers did stay true to the canonical power we've seen come from these things then it's entirely possible that a single Ensign could stand off against a battalion of tanks and be no worse for wear.
I guess this is why redshirts are around to just stand there and get shot - to make it look like our heroes are actually in trouble somehow.
A compression phaser rifle can do everything your standard Type 2 can except it's huge, unwieldy, and really just serves to make Janeway look as silly as possible while using one.
This is just your standard phaser rifle. It is supposedly more powerful than any hand phaser but it still has just as many settings (16), still is shown to do just as much if not less damage than a Type 2 phaser, and is ultimately less accurate being a carbine with no stock.
By the way I'm not even going to attempt to find Wharf's little shoulder carried RPG-ish monstrosity from Insurrection or the buggy from Nemesis that looks like you'd be better off in a Suzuki Samurai. Those were both terrible, one off weapons which technically canonical, I won't count as Star Trek weapons or ground equipment.
TL;DR I don't like MACO, I don't like phaser rifles; the type 2 is god.
