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star trek - Why didn't the Ferengi just steal the whole NX-01?


In Episode 1x19, a couple Ferengi manage to stun (almost) the entire crew of the Enterprise NX-01 and board it wearing gas masks to steal valuables:


Ferengi with gas masks boarding the Enterprise NX-01


We see the four Ferengi dock with a pretty pathetic little ship and loot all decks basically grabbing everything they consider remotely of value (including chairs!), plus a couple of crew members -- apparently to sell as slaves.



At any rate, why don't they just take the entire ship? They're probably not ruthless enough to just kill everybody; But they could search the ship for all crew members (I think they have technology that is sophisticated enough to detect life signs, right?) put them in escape capsules / shuttle pods / whatever, and then just steal the whole ship, including all its valuables. The ship itself is probably worth more than any of those Ferengi could heist in their lifetime. Additionally, they'd have all the time they need to find that elusive vault.



Answer



There's a simpler reason, as well: The NX-01 is an alien ship, with unfamiliar controls, from a species they've never seen before. Universal Translators work well for spoken language, but not so much the written language - especially the Ferengi ones, which are implanted in their ear.


To use a parallel, how long do you think it would take you to figure out how to use this console without blowing up the ship, given you know nothing of their language or culture (so you can't assume red is danger, for example)?


enter image description here


And that's something that sort-of familiar to us, since we've seen Klingon ships and the Klingon language on and off throughout most of the series. Now, how different would a computer console based off of the Ferengi language be? This image isn't even a computer console, it's the Ferengi written language:


enter image description here


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