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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack7" data-source="post: 4623783" data-attributes="member: 54707">Futuristic/Sci-Fi/Mission: The Corbomite Maneuver – (I wrote this scenario as a special operations mission for the Spheres of Influence game.) A Federation inventor and scientist named Albreen Stammish pitched an idea to Star Fleet of a potentially balance of power shifting weapon. After examining the proposal Federation science analysts dismissed the idea as too improbable to ever work correctly, but Star Fleet Intelligence and Naval Command thought the idea both too dangerous and too promising to ignore. So they set up Stammish and his research team on a small but well stocked, high tech laboratory built into a small planetoid and hidden deep within an asteroid belt in an obscure system. A patrol vessel was stationed nearby as a continuous guard ship and the project was code named “Corbomite.”The Corbomite project was named, perhaps somewhat ironically, after the famous bluff, well known in official Star Fleet circles, executed by Captain James T. Kirk against the alien captain Balok. But the “real Corbomite” project did not redirect energy at an enemy vessel fired at a Star Fleet vessel. Rather it had a different, if somewhat similar, yet just as devastatingly odd effect.The shielding of most ships is designed in such a way as to allow energy fired from that ship to pass harmlessly through the shielding (its own shielding) and only damage enemy vessels or enemy shielding. The Corbomite effect, produced by the Corbomite device, was instead theoretically to function by warping the shield harmonics of a target ship, thereby causing the shielding of a targeted vessel to curve back upon itself in a state of “counter-resonance and shape warpage.” The effect being that if a target ship (targeted by the Corbomite device) fires its own weapons then the shielding of the target ship does not allow those weapons to pass harmlessly through but instead detonates such weapons upon the inner lip of her own defenses (her own shielding) causing shield (and potentially hull) damage equal to the force of discharge from the same weapons. A ship targeted by a corbomite device could easily obliterate its own shielding, perhaps even destroy itself if its weapons were powerful enough or fired simultaneously. If, that is, the Corbomite device works as theorized.The project proceeded for three years, funded in secret, with no visible sign of any real progress. Even many supporters suspected the initial analysis had been correct. The device would never function correctly. Six weeks before the project was slated to be terminated however Star Fleet received a communications from the laboratory saying that the Corbomite device had been successfully tested. Word was immediately dispatched to the patrol vessel guarding the research facility but the vessel could neither be located nor successfully hailed.Long range scans of the planetoid showed major abnormalities in structure. The USS Stark, along with the special forces Team is dispatched to the lab where they discover that the patrol vessel is missing, the research station stripped of most equipment and all personnel, and the lab partially obliterated by what appears to be advanced Romulan plasma weaponry. The investigation discovers no way to proceed.Then, six solar days later, a Federation light cruiser is apparently wrecked and has to be abandoned after encountering an Orion pirate vessel. The strange thing is the Federation cruiser apparently nearly destroyed itself with its own weaponry. The Stark races to the scene and picks up the trail of the Orion pirate vessel. Twelve hours later they overtake the pirate ship only to discover that it is not manned by Orions at all, but rather by the Kzinti. If the Kzinti are truly in possession of a working Corbomite device then that is potentially terrifically dangerous for the Federation. Just as importantly, if the Kzin do have a Corbomite device, how can the Team and the Stark possibly stop the Kzin and recover the device?</blockquote>

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