If I were interpreting the Prime Directive while trying to lean into Picard mode, even I cannot see him tolerating a bad faith agreement to negotiate. As in, once you agree to let the Federation mediate, everything which goes on with the negotiation is the Federation’s responsibility. Meaning, Afshar will not tolerate violence in his negotiation.
If Afshar were, or is, Picard, then I would expect him to have predicted this outcome and already have a contingency in place. That could add a layer of anger to Afshar’s reaction to Delos, she is inadvertently forcing Afshar into the contingency plan and averting his primary plan to avoid violence completely.
If I were stopping the violence, going in knowing it could happen, I would have beamed the weapon energy out of the aggressive side’s weapons before my arrival. I’m fairly confident that is a trick which can be pulled. Otherwise, have a security member and transporter operator monitoring the situation, ready to beam the weapons out.
There was the time O’Brien (or whoever was operating the People Fax in that scene) detected that Data’s Noisy Cricket was “in a state of discharge; I neutralized it” as he was beaming Data off the toy collector’s ship. So that sort of capability is at least canon.
If I were interpreting the Prime Directive while trying to lean into Picard mode, even I cannot see him tolerating a bad faith agreement to negotiate. As in, once you agree to let the Federation mediate, everything which goes on with the negotiation is the Federation’s responsibility. Meaning, Afshar will not tolerate violence in his negotiation.
If Afshar were, or is, Picard, then I would expect him to have predicted this outcome and already have a contingency in place. That could add a layer of anger to Afshar’s reaction to Delos, she is inadvertently forcing Afshar into the contingency plan and averting his primary plan to avoid violence completely.
If I were stopping the violence, going in knowing it could happen, I would have beamed the weapon energy out of the aggressive side’s weapons before my arrival. I’m fairly confident that is a trick which can be pulled. Otherwise, have a security member and transporter operator monitoring the situation, ready to beam the weapons out.
There was the time O’Brien (or whoever was operating the People Fax in that scene) detected that Data’s Noisy Cricket was “in a state of discharge; I neutralized it” as he was beaming Data off the toy collector’s ship. So that sort of capability is at least canon.