I still don't think so. The radiation produced from energy weapons is alot more focused than a gas. And those require concentrating on a single point of the shield to breach it. An acidic gas causing catastrophic hull breaches, and respiratory distress still seems a more likely cause for crew death, IMHO.

I drove an M1A1 for 2 years in the army. Most of the time this is done "unbuttoned". The only time you "button up" is when you're going into battle, or when the bad guys throws nerve agent on you. As a driver at night, your center periscope drops out, your PVS-11 goes in, and you're now driving looking at a green shaded screen the size of a PSP, with absolutely NO depth perception. That fuzzy black line you're seeing could be either a speedbump, or a 6 ft deep trench. It's pretty hairy. Here's the thing. Even if the captain could "stick his head out" on a starship, unless they are close to a stellar body, he aint gonna see much. 99% of space is vast, dark, featureless nothingness.

I concur. Imagine the "tractor beam skill" as the expertise of a fine crane operator planetside. Sure anyone can jump in a crane and within a few minutes be picking stuff up and putting it down. But it takes someone skilled with booms/cranes to do it with precision, and without putting people's lives in jeopardy. Retaining this analogy, keep in mind that a starship is not fixed to the ground such as a terrestrial crane, and is floating around in 3 dimensional space. So concievably, not only are you messing with the beam itself, but also the inertial dampers, too. Ergo, so while any ensign could sit down and start moving things around with it, only a seasoned operator could dock vessel with it, without risking catastrophic consequences. Maybe Cryptic should make TBs standard equipment on the ships, but apply penalties based on skill level. (ie. unskilled, TB1, TB2, TB3)

Before the advent of the term "Dreadnought"(sic), most heavy warships were simply called battle cruisers. Most naval engagements still assumed a "line ahead" formation, from the Age of Sail, with battle cruisers in front, and lighter armed, but faster cruisers to the rear. The point being, while the heavier armed, battle cruisers passed each other, and slugged it out, the lighter, faster cruisers, would fan out to one side, and attempt to "cross the tee", raking the enemy line, and if possible, flanking the enemy, and catching the bad guys in the middle. At some point, some nautical engineer figured that battle cruisers weren't gonna be breaking any speed records anyway, due to the weight of their heavy guns, so if he were to put an armor belt around their gunwales, they'd be even slower, but could, theoretically hang longer in a sustained fight. These were a new class of warship, the dreadnaughts. The first dreadnaught was HMS Dreadnaught, and was so named, because she had "Zero Fear", or dreaded nothing, she was the master of all she surveyed. While these were the proto battleships of their time, it wasn't until after the treaty of Versailles that the term "Battleship" was formally recognized as a class of warship over a certain tonnage and armament class.

In space the captain obviously wouldn't literally stick his head out any more than a pilot would.

But there is not even the equivalent of that green shaded screen on the nav and helm consoles in Star Trek.

In deep space, you can just point at a point on a touch screen star chart and let the computer handle it, but in combat, you need some sort of visibility. You drove a tank. Can you imagine flying a fighter jet with that little visibility? Or even piloting a ship anywhere near shore without someone watching sonar, and (if a combat vessel) someone else watching radar for aircraft, no matter where you are?

We have the tech today to provide a helmsman much better imaging than that green screen you were looking at, but there is no indication that they even had that after TOS. Even in TOS it isn't clear... they have an astrogation screen but it is situatied for the Captain's viewing and awkward for the helmsman or navigator. The helm does have a tactical viewer though that could answer the dilemma but that is gone on all future vessels other than those of the Dominion (well and maybe the Klingons.. they seemed to have a few extra screens on their bridge).

Didn't 'battlecruiser' eventually get applied to pocket battleships such as the Scharnhorst? Are you perhaps thinking of armored cruisers instead?

The Battlecruiser is traditionally a ship in between a battleship and a cruiser, either a faster, ligher battleship or a slower, heavier cruiser depending on your perspective.

I wouldn't say 'most heavy warships' since I am pretty sure the first ironclads were not referred to as battlecruisers.

We have tractor beam Doffs though... even if the BO has inexplicably not trained in the use of them (despite no canon instances of a BO saying 'you do this, I've never used a tractor beam before), why wouldn't they be able to order the underling to run it?

Sulu didn't manually load the photon tubes by hand, either...

I think a good portion of the crew can tow a crate, I think it's a specialised skill that you can lock on and hold an enemy ship.

Do I think all Cruisers should have a Tractor Beam like all Science Vessels have Subsystem Targeting? Yes, actually that would make a lot of sense.

What do we give Escorts? Jam Sensors? One of the EPtX? Nothing? Polarise Hull? Honestly I'm leaning towards Engines or Nothing.

And while I'm tweaking powers the CRF on Fighters should be a 60s or 45s. As should all the Fighter/Shuttle built in powers. If I don't get many powers at least let me use em quicker.

An enemy ship is really just a big crate. I can see a higher level of skill being needed if the enemy ship also has some sort of counter skill, but that is what things like polarize hull represent.

Jam sensors would make much more sense for sci vessels (personally I still like the idea of sci ships being even lighter armed and being scouts rather than research vessels, with improved sensory and electronics (plus their current sci tricks) as their ability. That would likely take a lot of work though.

It would make sense for escorts to have superior targetting systems, but that might be unbalancing. Or a defense bonus to represent their agility.

All that said, there is no obligation for abilities to be completely realistic, or make any sense at all. This is Star Trek, after all

A Big Moving Crate that's actively trying to kill you.

Perhaps the Tractor Beam Console is always the first to explode and training the BOFF is really just reinforcing the console so it doesn't explode when the ship takes the lightest of hits. Battle Scenes from any TV show back up my claims that Consoles all seem to explode at the drop of an enemy hat onto your hull.

"Sir they killed the crew, they beamed hats onto our outer hull and every console on the ship blew simultaneously."