

Most importantly, the enemy suddenly has a much bigger problem gauging what your forces are capable of. That's not to say that these are actually the reasons for using it or that they are consistent with the use of the ship in universe, but they are possible reasons why starfleet might want to use a MVAM. There do seem to be a couple of possible advantages to having a Prometheus instead of say three Defiants (assuming that each chunk of the Prometheus is roughly equivalent to a separate ship). Return, repeat, then beam the surviving enemy female crew members into your Holodeck, and tell the crew that you are having a live action hentai night. Both sides repair, but the damaged/destroyed section will be harder/impossible to repair. When one section has been destroyed/severely damaged and your ship is starting to take damage, leave the area. Keep your beams available for if the others expose a shield facing for any reason.

Whichever one has taken the most damage, focus on it until it is destroyed. My suggested tactics vs a vessel using MVAM (assuming both vessels are otherwise identical): Hit all the targets with an equal spread of weapons in the first pass. The cloaked ship is behind the enemy lines, where it won't get shot, and its buddies have excellent targeting data for their own attack runs. That would have been something the Romulans could have used, where one ship is cloaked, and feeding targeting data to its squadron buddies. Repeat multiple times, until the datalink capabilities are understood, then transmit the data to Starfleet HQ, using encrypted comms. The three sections would test the systems before spearating to make sure the system appeared to be working, then separate for real. The other option was that it was a prototype datalin platform. It separates into the component parts (defenses are only expecting one ship from the signature) and hits three separate locations simultaneously, while the defender was anticipating more time to get ready. Now what it can do is charge up all the shield generators, and make an infrastructure raid. Short version is that comparing two ships, one with, and one without MVAM, the one with the mode will have more surface area to protect (requiring more mass for armor, or existing armor will be thinner), more shield surface area to power, and if one section runs low on power, the other two sections can do squat about it. I posted an idea on Spacebattles that illustrates several problems with the multi-vector attack mode.
