Weapons Training

Now you know what weapons your ship has and what weapons your crew uses, now you need to familiarize your crew with those weapons and make them proficient. Some of the big things in military life are the drills. When not working on maintaining the tools and systems people use or learning more about their jobs and systems, military members are drilled on what to do if disaster strikes. As far as ship weapons are concerned, that means running scenarios to prepare for any possible attack. Anything from an unnamed airplane flying too close to everything needed to keep the ship afloat after a torpedo is aimed at the ship and fired. Drill, review, maintain, train, and drill, that is what lower level military personnel do during the work day unless their job is purely to gather information to run up the chain of command. That schedule includes weapons. The military says that at a minimum military personnel need to test and qualify annually in able to carry a weapon on the job. Those that don’t qualify get sent continuously to test until they do qualify. To qualify they need to be on a military gun range supervised by specially trained military personnel. Even while deployed most people are sent to a place near where they can test and qualify. Even underway the US Navy has gunshots on the main deck of most ships to be sure all its personnel can defend the ship if something happens on the pier or if someone onboard gets a gun and tries to kill everyone. You will want to set up a training schedule for the ship wide drills and training as well as a recommended schedule for individual or divisional practice. Using energy weapons allows you to set up a fake system on ship where nondeadly lasers are used to practice and improve aim rather than the normal deadly ones. While ignoring holodecks as a lovely training environment, I can remember at least two scenes where Star Trek: The Next Generation practiced for close combat. In one scene Woorf and Guinan are practicing aim in a circular chamber with little dots that counted how many times a color of dots got hit, the other was Woorf training the crew in Klingon martial arts, rather similar to our Tai Kwon Do. In another scene in Enterprise, set closer to the current date, the crew was teaching some people how to aim and fire the weapons by aiming at floating balls in the cargo bay. As you can imagine there are hundreds of ideas on what the future can hold.