Awesome / Star Trek The Kobayashi Maru

• Kirk gets two significant moments:
  • His solution to the Kobayashi Maru is to bank on his future reputation and ask the Klingons for assistance. As Kirk noted in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, "It had the virtue of having never been tried."
  • His solution to the Aslan scenario. Cadets are put in an abandoned facility, each given a phaser set permanently on stun, told a hit represents a "kill", and told there is an assassin among them, and that they must survive. Kirk, realizing it was a test of command, not survival, gets cadets he knows he can trust to stand guard at the cafeteria where the food replicators are, and then tells everyone who comes inevitably to get food that they're free to enter, provided they surrender their phaser. Where every other class before or since had descended into fear and paranoia, Kirk's class all "survived" the test.

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