Picard Maneuver

In theory, the Picard Manuever is performed thusly:

1.) The combatting ships must have a distance of several lightseconds.

2.) The ship which is attempting to perform the maneuver (the attacker) accelerates to warp with a heading towards the enemy ship

3.) The attacking ship decelerates to sublightspeed, and engages the enemy

The distance of several lightseconds is required since the enemy vessel must no be able to obtain real-time information on the location of the attacking ship. As the attacker accelerates to warp, he approaches the enemy at faster than light speed. When the distance is closed, and the attacker drops out of warp, the enemy ship will now see two images of the attacker: the real image of the ship in its current location, and an image of the ship in its previous location, as the light which it emitted before accelerating into warp has not yet crossed the distance between the ships. Thus, they might just shoot at the wrong image.

However...

There is a flaw in this theory. On many occasions, we have witnessed that the sensors on a starship must operate at faster than light speeds, as a ship has observed events in real-time through long-range sensors which took place several light years away. Therefore the Picard Maneuver is only useful if the enemy ship is primitive or damaged enough to lack FTL sensor capability, as they would otherwise be able to determine that the attacking ship is no longer at its previous location.

We may assume that the Ferengi vessel which Picard destroyed using this maneuver had already lost its FTL sensors, but certainly in the TNG episode "The Battle", the Enterprise was not lacking FTL sensors (at least no such statement was made in the episode, and no prior damage was taken) so they should have been able to easily defeat the U.S.S Stargazer. Instead, Data was forced to quickly come up with a counter maneuver, involving the measurement of differences of density in the interstellar gas; a feat which apparently had eluded the best strategic minds of the Federation for decades.

Oh well, much of Star Trek doesn't make much sense when you actully think about it.

At first I misunderstood the Picard Maneuver, since I was busy tending the popcorn instead of paying attention to the show. I like my version better:

One fires the phasers while entering warp. As the phaser beam leaves the warp field, it drops to sub-light... and is then immediately overtaken by the field and re-accelerated back to warp speeds. When the ship drops to sub-light, the phaser beam has been compressed to many times its original density, making it much more powerful. Where did this energy come from? The main engines, through the warp field. Very inefficient, and it would probably burn something out... but this is why it would be a specialized maneuver, not the standard way of attacking someone.

Alternately, one fires the phasers from a great distance, then warps in at a slight angle and fires again so that the two beams arrive at the same place at the same time. Time on impact, with the same gun.

But neither of these is the 'actual' Picard maneuver.

By the way, the 'actual' Picard maneuver relies on the victim (advanced FTL sensors or not) failing to realize that he should pay attention to the big image of the nearby ship rather than the little tiny image of the faraway ship. This might fool someone the first time, yes. But it obviates the need for Data's scientific excursions. They completely ignored the effects of perspective. Wow.