Stephen Date wrote:
I think that Gan would have been an early subject, and that limiters would have been abandoned fairly early on. Implanting and maintaining a limiter involves fairly complex neurosurgery, which doesn't make a lot of sense if the prisoner is just going to be left to rot on Cygnus Alpha. I suspect that the whole op. was just done for research processes - which bit of the brain governs the impulse to kill and can we knock it out without killing the subject ? I think that Gan's fate was an experiment in Neurosurgery, with Gan as a lab rat, not an act of penal reform.
Trevor Hoyle notwithstanding, I'm not sure I buy the experimental technology explanation. Kayn, who was not a Federation scientist, recognized the limiter, its purpose, and knew how to repair it - that suggests to me it wasn't new or experimental stuff. I'm wondering if its real original intent wasn't to control violent impulses in both directions, perhaps for the purpose of turning homicidal types into obedient Freddy Rationtroopers.
Mistral