YMMV / Fortunes of War

• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: The Dreadnought-type starship was first posited in the Starfleet Technical Manual for The Original Series. Even the name Star Empire was one of the noted names for Starfleet Dreadnoughts. The novel Dreadnought! is pretty much the only place they've appeared aside from Starfleet Battles, and thus is a main source of their popularity within a segment of the Star Trek fandom. . . and yet the entire point of the book is that the Federation has no reason to build ships like this unless they're planning bloody conquest, which is exactly what the Federation is not.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Merete's description of the time she spent alone as a child with the massacred crew and passengers of the ship she was on, including her family.
  • Klingon disruptors in the books. They have five settings: A light stun which leaves the target dazed, a heavy stun which knocks them out for quite some time, an even heavier stun, a basic kill, and a "kill while disintegrating painfully." Oh, and that "stun" setting in the middle? it's technically a stun setting, but promotes necrosis of tissue in the victim, essentially rotting them. It's a "stun" setting, but the victim isn't meant to live very long after being shot. Piper has to clarify when she tells her pals with captured Klingon disruptors to set for "heavy stun" that she means setting two, not three.
  • The uncalibrated transwarp drive is basically an accidental superweapon that triggers blasts of Reality Is Out to Lunch. Starships get torn apart, partially melted, fused together, and in one memorable scene an entire crew got wiped from existence. Even Spock isn't sure what happened to them. Both Kirk and Piper look like they're about to throw up.

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