Reply #47: The only way to screw it up [View All]

would be to somehow lose control and go around the beam, and then end up directly in front of it somehow without it running into the warp field while you were spinning out of control. :P Any other scenario where something goes wrong would probably involve the ship dropping out of warp and the concentrated phaser beam speeding on ahead of it, or the ship just going off course and having the beam spread a bit.

I actually thought it up when I was toying with making my own RPG universe, and one of the RPGs set in it would be a space-flight era one. But since they used hyperspace rather than some form of warp for FTL travel in my universe, that didn't end up working for it.

I did come up with a nifty idea involving transferring momentum of a ship going a reasonable fraction of lightspeed into what was basically a focused tractor beam. Slowed the ship down nicely, and blew a hole in whatever it was pointed at. :P Which was handy because in that universe ships come out of hyperspace pretty fast.

But I decided that despite the difficulty in aiming such a thing (you have to be close enough to aim properly, but far enough away to jump into hyperspace and back out again without flying past your target.), it was too powerful. So I just had it show up once as the invention of a mad scientist type character, and nobody else ever figured out how to get something like that to work. Too much high-energy application needed to distribute the kinetic force evenly across the entire ship so that the tractor beam projector didn't just tear itself right off the ship with the force of the kinetic transfer.

... yeah, I think about weird shit like that waaaaay too much.