I would think we would find impounded vessels quite hard to move with disabled engines and no tractor beam
At a certain point cutting features is penny wise and pound foolish. It doesn't matter if we're the most manoeuvrable starship if we cannot properly exploit that manoeuvrability due to a lack of facilities.
This is the late 2100s however, as good as they are now they're still miles behind what they can and will become. We cannot assume that they will always work at 100% with no complications, that way lies with the mass proliferation of transporter blockers, technological or non.
In a lot of cases, the shuttlebay is there so that the fleeing criminal shuttle or whatever can then be brought onboard so Security can point a semicircle formation of hand phasers at it and tell 'em to come out with their hands up...
No, no it would not.
Unknown, but keep in mind before Scotty doing so it was iirc considered an impossibility. It's probably also harshly mass limited for storage capacity/duration.
Strange New Worlds S2 has an episode where they use the buffer to hold critically-injured patients.
I think a cargo bay and a tractor beam are mutually exclusive. As the update says, a tractor beam effectively makes your impounded ship into your cargo bay.
Fair enough, haven't watched that yet. However, given how the timeline thus far has gone here I think it'd be safe to ignore decent parts of it.
I thought it was the length of time he was in the buffer that was considered impossible/impressive
Fair enough, it's been a long time since I've watched that episode.
