I think that's a very uncharitable reading of my argument, which, granted, does cycle back to AR-558 frequently, but it does so for good reason. AR-558 is our best view of how federation ground troop operate, and the episode gives us a good view of the entire engagement, as opposed to, say, Nor the Battle where we only see a few a rear areas and the aftermath of one vaguely described skirmish. If there was a time where starfleet was going to break out this that gizmo that's been vaguely alluded to on TNG or something, this would be it, and they not only do not do so, they act very much like Starfleet personal do in other engagements, squeezing off single shots from phaser rifles while taking cover behind rocks that, according some arguements here, might as well be cardboard (but is instead treated and used as very solid cover).
If this was, say, stargate, where SGC personnel are visibly armed with hand grenades and use them against thier enemies, you would be entirely right to argue against me if I was insane enough to argue that because we never see one used in the big battle in "Heroes", therefore grenades are only used for scouting missions and not full scale battle, because that would be a transparent effort to stack the deck against stargate.
That is not the case in star trek, where you darn well know anti-personnel grenades are never used by the federation (or the Cardassians, the Romulans, the breen, the Dominion, the Romulans, the hirogen, the borg, the kazon, the bajorians, or anyone else I can recall), and yet people insist on trying clsim this time, the feds will break out the nades they've otherwise refused to employ, because star trek debates invariably devolve into stacking the deck for the federation.
You* can't just have the grenade launcher type weapon worf had, or argue that if the klingons had anti-personnel mortars then starfleet should logically have a similar weapon, and that maybe the one Nor the battle would be on par with a real mortar and real world filming limits resulted in an implausibly weak weapon. You always go for broke and and insist they must have the one from Arena which is nuclear in yield (despite it's observed effects and the overall context being totally inconsistent with such a yield, and despite the gorn, a peer power, having much less effective weapons), and that everyone must have a bunch of hand grenades as well. You can't just argue phasers are a very likely one hit kill against enemy infantry and a bit more, it's gotta be the TM phasers that can vaporize battle tanks in fractions of a second, a claim you make with a straight face in the full knowledge that most ST firefights involve people ducking behind rock and barrels and packing crates, because we're just supposed to believe the federation was like "hey, this barrel that were going to use to store replicator feedstock or whatever? We'll need built to take damage that would cripple a main battle tank several times over".
And I'm the one stacking the deck here, because I suggest the people that usually take a few seconds to vaporize a chuck of rock probably cannot melt a tank in a fraction of that time?
*not you personally, I mean this in a generic sense
That's misrepresenting my argument. My issue with wide beam kill is not that if it existed, it should have been used at AR-558. My issue with wide beam kill is that if it existed, it should have been used in nearly every firefight in the entire series.
There is a different between shooting at stuff from a plane, and CAS.
