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Fact remains the UFP had Worfzooka a year before the Siege of AR-558. Why were none of those UFP troops armed with worfzooka they would been a great deal of help during all fire fight with the Jem Harder.

Because there's only one Worf. Once you launch him then that is it.

Except Worf was obviously not the projectile, as he was demonstrably around after the use of the Worfzooka. Clearly, the problem is that nobody but him can use it.

1) There's no real evidence that design was in wide spread use. AR-558 (and DS9 as a whole for the most part) didn't have access the advanced phaser rifles seen in the movies and Voyager. They stuck with the old TNG supersized dustbusters.
2) Even if they did have some, they'd been there for far longer than they were supposed to. It's possibly all their Woofzooka were broken by that point.

The Federation was shown to be minting out tons of experimental shit that basically ends up being mothballed or created in limited quantity.
Intrepid classes were never seen, Bio-Gel packs were never seen, blah blah.

Simplest reason for a lot of the shit you see on the Enterprise is they get first dibs on experimental technologies to try out in the field. Then they report back the feedback for the Federation techboys to think over wether things are working as intended. Based on the fact the thing wasnt that impressive to begin with. I would expect shoulder mounted cannons were not really useful. DS9 did just fine with the standard phaser rifles they were using since TNG.

Alternatively, Worf found the schematic in the database and replicated it for personal use while the Federation shit canned the proto-type. They did this with that silly Bullet-gun as well.

We do see at least one other Intrepid class ship, but it appears that there weren't that many built since they don't appear in the big fleet battles of DS9. But we should consider that the Enterprise never showed up either, so it could be that thanks to the speed of the Intrepid class (similar to the presumably fast Sovereign) they were used as a fleet in being to patrol large amounts of territory to free up lots more vessels for the fleet actions. (The Intrepid class that we do see in DS9 that isn't Voyager is used to deliver personal to Romulus and is secretly working with Section 31. Personally I believe that every Intrepid was a cover for Section 31, after all the one official mission that Voyager went on was an Internal Security mission to arrest Maquis and it was carrying weapons that weren't supposed to be part of her arsenal, ie tricobalt warheads, and was carrying otherwise the most advanced personal weapons of the federation [both types of phaser rifles already mentioned.] Makes sense to me that the entire class was a shell for S31, but that's just fannon.)

I always thought they ran ammunition for their Worfzookas. That was just my theory.

Maybe there would be no reason to use it, it didn't seem very fatal to the surrounding Sona when we did see it used so if the end result of using it against the screaming hoard of Jemhadar was that it throws a few of them around only for them to get back up and continue the screaming charge then their better off shooting them with their ray guns. Also it clearly would use up a lot more ammo/logistics than their ray guns so maybe as others have said they ran out or don’t bother bringing them alone that often.

JasonB wrote:I always thought they ran ammunition for their Worfzookas. That was just my theory.

Jason, are you just not bothering to make an attempt to to write English correctly?

Lonestar wrote:

JasonB wrote:I always thought they ran ammunition for their Worfzookas. That was just my theory.

Jason, are you just not bothering to make an attempt to to write English correctly?

That is how he is. Apparently he claimed in asvs.org that he's autistic.

To remotely stay on topic. As bad a design as the Worfzooka was, it did have one thing going for it. Concussive damage. In the relatively close quarters combat that was AR-558, a couple of these could certainly have been useful for disrupting clusters of Jem'Hadar. I say clusters because there were no formations of any sort and any grouping was pure coincidence.

More useful than simply sweeping a phaser on minimum kill across them? We know hand phasers can be employed as continuous beam weapons for quite a while. Heck sweeping a phaser on stun across them would have sufficed.

Batman wrote:More useful than simply sweeping a phaser on minimum kill across them? We know hand phasers can be employed as continuous beam weapons for quite a while. Heck sweeping a phaser on stun across them would have sufficed.

Energy consumption demands and n-square law would mean such a tactic would rapidly lose effectiveness.

Sweeping the standard narrow beam across the targets. Not going widebeam, which indeed would entail the problems you mentioned.

OK. What the fuck is the 'worfzooka'. Can someone refresh my memory please? Pictures appreciated.

Its a grenade launcher thing that Worf uses in Insurrection, if I recall the main site's commentary on the subject correctly.

Behold! The Worfzooka!
(AKA isomagnetic disintegrator)

Was Worf at AR-558? If he wasn't, it's pretty understandable that the weapon wasn't employed. It is the Worfzooka, after all. He's probably got a patent on it.

Its the 24th century and they can't even replicate some razor wire in those DS9 'industrial replicators' to beam down to the defenders, nor craft punji sticks or even dig in or pile up a proper rock breastwork after what was it, 70 something days? Not to mention the defense was in a bowl with high ground all around it. For all we know the Worfzooka has a 100 meter minimal range for reasons related to the Federation being run by idiots and simply could not be effective in such a close range defense. Did they even try to explain why the openly suicidal Jem Hadar didn't just beam down into the camp? Its been a while.

They actually have [=http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Transport_scrambler]a countermeasure for that[/url]

As for the worfzooka, he might have bought it on ebay or similar.

Wouldn't a really great battlefield weapon be the rifle that targets and shoots through walls? If I'm trying to clear a tunnel complex, me and 20 friends can just stand outside and shoot everyone inside with those rifles that the vulcan serial killer made.

In my mind the biggest issue is that the post TNG federation was basically trying to "re-learn" warfare. Hints in the TOS era suggested that there was an effort or trend towards the mentality of the TNG era (away from militarization and such) which accelerated after things with the Klingons started settling down (I remember a point from the TMP novel stating that pretty explicitly, IIRC.) It seems to me that warfare (esp ground warfare) seemed to be "going out of fashion" in even the TOS era and moving towards more limited types of conflicts rather than conventional "combined arms" style stuff with tanks. Weapons and artillery seem to be man portable (or easily transported) and easily operated, and mostly relying on shuttles or orbital support for heavy firepower. The logistical side of things also seems to favor small numbers of tropos rather than massive armies (thousands rather than millions.) by the time of the tNG era, they seem to have believed war was a thing of the past.

Then they run into Q, who tells them "nuh uh, the galaxy is still a mean place" and they run across the Borg, Dominon, and so on. Now they have to undo decades, if not centuries (or more) of habit and cultural conditioning and re-learn how to fight wars. You have to do this in months or years, when you spent decades or more un-learning it. You have to struggle against your prior conditioning and beliefs. And it is generally easier to tear down something than build it back up, and who knows what you have to build back up - (design the right weapons, build the right weapons, set up the logistical train that will supply and maintain those weapons, arrange the transport and shipping for all that, etc.) And you have to pay and supply for all that (despite what some have claimed I still think that the ST universe is subject to those considerations at least on some level. No free lunches and all that.)

Any one of those reasons can explain the Worfzooka, or really anything (like Sea Skimmer pointing out the lack of razor wire replication.) Any number of logistical concerns could have hampered Isomagnetic Disintegrator usage (lack of ammo, lack of parts, or simply not having gotten them due to shaky logistics.) Maybe the logistics officers are still learning their job and fuck up ("hey we sent you 20 tons of entertainment discs and high quality cuisine instead of the ammunition and spare parts you needed. Hope you don't mind.") It could even be that the ID was still in the testing/development phase, or in limited production, and thus either saw restricted or early deployment to the "elites" (The flagship of the federation obviously qualifies.)

All of the above for the ID could apply to say, the Intrepid class as well, or Quantum Torpedoes, or any other nice/fancy neat doohickey you could think of that gets mentioned or shown in some cases but not elsewhere (case in point "personal forcefields" mentioned but never ever seen.)

I have to say that if you look at the technology used during the dominion war it looks like the federation mostly learned from the Soviets about the necessity of Logistics. They keep the old stuff in manufacture instead of going on too more advanced designs and keep the logistics nice and simple since maintenance and other things are known variables rather than having to learn totally new systems.

Not saying that them not deploying simple things like physical barricades is right, but in keeping to known weapons systems they are staying wise to certain types of failings.

CaptainChewbacca wrote:Wouldn't a really great battlefield weapon be the rifle that targets and shoots through walls? If I'm trying to clear a tunnel complex, me and 20 friends can just stand outside and shoot everyone inside with those rifles that the vulcan serial killer made.

One would assume that it would be very easily jammed by a conventional enemy given some time to tinker with one; given that just about anything can jam Trek sensors and transporters in the first place.

With the huge bottlenecks on AR 558, there is no reason why they'd need a bazzoka. The episode was silly as fuck.

Alyeska wrote:To remotely stay on topic. As bad a design as the Worfzooka was, it did have one thing going for it. Concussive damage. In the relatively close quarters combat that was AR-558, a couple of these could certainly have been useful for disrupting clusters of Jem'Hadar. I say clusters because there were no formations of any sort and any grouping was pure coincidence.

If the Worfzooka had real long range it is possible that they used we just did not seen it on screen. If they had able fire beyond visual and they trying lower number cut number Jem Harder that reach that chook point. We would have never even notice the different. The amount blast gave off was extreme smell and even if it had higher setting it not per say most likely great deal light when hit target and not even big bag either. While it just another possible I am adding.