The Murgatroid is Stunning
The modifications to the Murgatroid's phasers are complete; at least, as complete as can be given the circumstances. I have managed to "gerald-rig" (is that correct,
MacAllister?) an add-on module to the ship's phasers so that, in an emergency, we can stun an area of planetary surface with a radius of approximately 0.21 kilometers, from a standard planetary orbit. Obviously, if the ship is further away, the radius could be increased; but after a certain point the beams would be too widely dispersed to have the desired effect. The difficulties faced in implementing this modification were that
- we do not have access to all of the materials and information that the engineers and I would have liked to have, although we were able to replicate enough to make the unit work;
- the unit must not in any way affect the normal workings of the ship's phasers, which are necessary for ship-to-ship combat, disintegrating projectiles, and so on; and
- the unit must be easily removable so that we can hide it any time Starfleet feels the need to poke around our ship. Next time we're at a starbase for maintenance, I plan to unplug the stun module and shove it into Lothar's underpants.
Because the unit is what the engineers call a "quick kludge", it will only function a limited number of times before burning out -- which rules out the idea some of the engineering staff had of going to a few planets, stunning the major population centers, and beaming up the most comely females they could find. Not that I would have allowed such a plan anyway… the last thing we need is for the Murgatroid's engineers to breed.