Headscratchers / Star Trek: The Next Generation S1 E8 "The Battle"

• The “Picard Maneuver” was named for Picard because he was the first one to do it. It’s a trick where a ship jumps to warp and thus appears to another ship as being in two places at once. There’s no way Picard could have invented that maneuver because this would be happening all the time. It’s inherent to faster-than-light travel. If a ship flew toward you at faster-than-light speed, for perhaps an hour, then changed direction and flew away, from your point of view, the ship would instantly appear, then seemingly split in two. One would depart in the new direction, while the other would seem to fly away from you in the direction from which it came. Depending on ship design — like maybe a cube or sphere — you may not even be able to tell which one was real.
  • Picard didn't just make his ship appear to be in another place at once by making an image in another place, he made it appear to ship's sensors as being in two places at once. Ships' sensors in Star Trek are subspace based and are therefore capable of picking up information at faster than light speed. The reasoning you're using applies where the sensor information is traveling slower than the ship (so if the ship is traveling faster than light but the image of the trip only travels at light speed). When the sensor information travels faster than the ship is travelling in warp, the effect you're describing does not apply. Picard pulled the effect off in a way that actually tricked the sensors which made what he did unique.
• Why didn't Picard self-destruct the Stargazer when it had to be abandoned? They left the ship's logs and other information intact, along with the weapons systems, meaning that he left a semi-operational starship with usable weapons and intel adrift with at least one hostile race in the area.
  • In addition, years later that hostile species did capture the Stargazer after one of its ships attacked it! What wasn't clear is what kind of fire damage was so catastrophic that they couldn't just go into the shuttles they left the ship in, vented the oxygen from the ship, and then returned to repair the Stargazer after the fires were extinguished since the ship seemed operational enough to be under its own power when the Ferengi had it auto-navigate to the position of the Enterprise.