Star Trek, Star Wars, Cats and Buttered Toast

Most nerds and geeks are familiar with the "cat and buttered toast" paradox, illustrated at right.

It goes like this:

1. Cats always land on their feet.
2. Toast always lands buttered side down.
3. Therefore, if you strap buttered toast to a cat's back, it will spin rapidly as the laws of physics attempt to make the cat land on its feet and on the butter at the same time.

Below, YouTube user JazzmanSA80 has created a video demonstrating the Cat/Buttered Toast dynamo. He supplements the theory with several creative industrial applications, and has discovered an exciting yet dangerous result if you stick the toast to the cat's feet (an inside-out Cat/Buttered Toast dynamo).

While practicing archery at the archery range -- this is connected, honestly! -- I was pondering the Cat/Buttered Toast dynamo. I'm beginning to suspect that I've discovered a similar principle, which is that my chance of hitting the target decreases by 25% for every subsequent arrow loosed. At least my aim is better than an Imperial Stormtrooper's.

That thought put me in mind of Star Wars vs. Star Trek. Suddenly, I realized something extraordinary.

In Star Trek, as any Trekkie knows, wearing a red shirt is the kiss of death. Security guards wearing red shirts beam down to the planet with Kirk, Spock and friends, and never beam up. "Redshirts" are killed by monsters in rubber suits, blasted to smithereens by explosions, or are overcome by a sudden desire to eat a random poisonous fruit. This is the reason for Mr. Scott's well-known aversion to shore leave: he's afraid of leaving the Enterprise wearing his red engineer's uniform.

In Star Wars, there is another universal law: Imperial Stormtroopers cannot hit a target. Ever. Put Luke and Leia on a small 8x3 foot platform with no way to escape, put a squad of Stormtroopers on a bridge opposite them with fully loaded blasters, and the Stormtroopers will shoot and shoot without so much as grazing Leia's cinnabuns.

The Redshirt/Stormtrooper Paradox is thus:

1. Redshirts always die.
2. Stormtroopers always miss.
3. Firing squad of stormtroopers vs. away team of redshirts...?

Dammit, Jim, I'm a humanities major, not a physicist, so I'm having trouble figuring out what would happen. Please help me out in the comments. If you locked the Stormtroopers and Redshirts in a secure compartment, would the energy from all the disrupter weapons ricochet until the local space heated up enough to ignite into a small sun? At the very least, could the heat generated by the Stormtrooper/Redshirt compartment be used to power a starship?

(Alas, it turns out that other people have thought of the Stormtrooper vs. Redshirt paradox as well, as this pithy cartoon demonstrates.)