Add to that, that while the Klingons talk a good game, from what we've seen on screen they really aren't very skilled fighters.
NO ONE in Star Trek is a "very skilled fighter" if you go by the visuals. The hand-to-hand and melee choreography is pathetic. It wasn't AS bad in TOS, there were a couple of fight scenes that actually looked decent, but it still wasn't
great on the whole, and everything from TNG on was ridiculous. There are only two ways to look at it.
1) In the Trek universe, people (EVERYONE, not just humans) have forgotten how to fight. They all suck at it. But since
everyone sucks equally, it's ok, no one has the advantage.
2) It's just another visual discrepancy, and all the fighting wouldn't BE as lame as it appears if it were all "really happening."
#2 is what I tend to go with.
That's one of the many continuity errors they should have gotten rid of. Especially in the TNG movies they had enough time and money to get Dorn proper martial arts training, and could have written a scene where Worf shows some real skills. Especially Nemesis had that potential, with Worf in a big hand to hand/knife to knife scene against the Remans.
Would've been nice. I love Trek, but man, their fighting is
awful. STXI, at least, has broken this trend a bit. The fights were much better than in previous Trek productions (in particular, Sulu vs. the Romulan on the platform was pretty well done).
Since Starfleet sends its people into battle wearing pajamas (they can't invent personal force fields? I guess they value spaceships more than people), it would be a sick joke to issue them knives. Hey how about some body armor at least?
Why single out Starfleet? NONE of the major races employ any kind of body armor or similar defensive measure for ground troops.
And a knife, though it would be potentially useful during combat situations (since hand-to-hand combat comes up a LOT in Trek, much more than it reasonably should, really), it would actually be
more useful as a tool for times when they found themselves without access to their normal technology.
As for "personal force field generators", while it might make sense to US, the real-life audience, that such a thing should be possible given Trek's tech, it's just "not how things work" in this universe (again, evidenced by the fact that NO ONE else uses such things either, including various nations that are far more aggressive than the UFP, save the Borg. And their personal shields are treated as something unique and extremely advanced). That said, the mention of such tech by Admiral Leyton in "Paradise Lost", and the makeshift personal force field Worf makes in "A Fistful of Datas", are both unfortunate. I've said it often about a variety of Trek problems: if something seems dumb from a real-life perspective, but is just a tradition in the franchise for the sake of good drama/exciting TV, we'll probably be willing to just look past it, maybe make fun of it a bit, but accept it. When you call
attention to the thing IN THE SHOW, however, then you are in trouble. We see a force field being used in this way, and hear it referenced; and we start to wonder, "So where are those things the rest of the time?"
For another example of this phenomenon, see: the bridge always being super exposed.
It will be discovered at some point in the future that clasping your hands together and hitting your opponent with an invisible hammer is actually more effective than any knife.
Oh geez, the two-fisted hammerblow.
That's one of THE dumbest things that has ever come out of the Trek franchise. Whose idea was that, anyway? And how did it catch on SO completely, to the point where people use it
all the damn time in the later Treks?
On a serious note they should have either refrained from stating that Klingons were much stronger than humans or just directed any fight scenes in a way that shows it takes several humans to subdue one Klingon.
If Klingons are on par with Vulcans as implied in the DS9 baseball episode, then Sisko fighting a Klingon would look like a 10 year old trying to fight his dad.
Hmm... did they ever actually
say that Klingons are stronger than humans to a degree that beating one in combat would be extraordinarily difficult? If they did, I can't remember when.
Regardless, I think that Klingons ARE on par with Vulcans, and both are
slightly stronger than humans (on average, of course). I think Vulcan strength has been overblown to ridiculous levels, and if you examine the entirety of the filmed canon, there's no consistency with regards to certain races being supposedly so much stronger or weaker than certain other races. What I take away from it is that some races are slightly or moderately stronger than others, giving them slight advantages on paper in physical competitions that a "weaker" race would have to overcome, but that the actual
effect those differences have in a given combat situation are quite miniscule.
