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Or for that matter, individual shields. Though, I can't remember an example showing why they. Ant or could (size of the power source, etc).

But when it comes to personal armor, you could say the same thing about actual military ground forces.

Or you could argue the way phasers and disruptors behave that you need more complete body protection than just helmets and body armor.

Work once turned a combadge into a personal shield. It only lasted a few seconds, and only against a pistol, but you have to think they could do a lot better with something the size of a tricorder, say, let alone a backpack.

As for armour, I always assumed that armour was useless against phaser/disrupter fire. In TOS at least, you shoot somebody and they glow for a couple of seconds and vanish. Wearing armour, I assume it would just vanish with the rest of you. If your armour can't stop, or even mitigate, a hit then it's a waste of weight to have it.

Which is fine for TOS, but then in TNG we start getting kill shots that leave a body far more often. And in a couple of films we see guys wearing some sort of armour, so there must be some kind of point to it.

Hell, it could be worth having security guys in armour just for the frequent occasions when enemies attack them with knives and swords because they're a bunch of dummies who think it's more honourable or whatever.

Graham Kennedy wrote:Hell, it could be worth having security guys in armour just for the frequent occasions when enemies attack them with knives and swords because they're a bunch of dummies who think it's more honourable or whatever.

... Like, say, Klingons? With their Mek'leth and Bat'leth? ... This they could have maybe even done for the dominion war scenes like AR-whatever number, when Sisko Nog and *sigh* quark, go reinforce some starfleet mariens or whatever, but the marines are just basicaly wearing normal uniforms.

Yep, like Klingons.

You know what I would have loved to see in AR-558? Fricken phaser rifles with fricken BAYONETS on them! How cool would THAT have been?

Like how early Jemhadar rifles had them?

Did they? Never noticed that.

Not sure if it was when the prop was used FOR jemhadar, but the prop itself started out looking like a vertically-aligned crossbow or something, with the blade where the arrow would be...

I'm sure there's an EAS article on re-used props about it.

Yup:
Scroll down to Jemhadar Rifle

first seen as a Hunter weapon in DS9: Captive Pursuit. then its familiar form by the Nol Ennis in Battlelines, but it DID have a blade in its Jemhadar appearance for Rocks and Shoels - The season 6 episode when the Defiant crew crashed their stolen jemhadar ship after the bombing of a ketracel white facility. (Its like, episode 2 of season 6 so RIGHT at the start of the War!)