For all his cowboy reputation, Kirk is actually generally very good on military regs and chain of command. Even when he'd clearly much rather beam the admiral/commodore/ambassador to the nearest asteroid without a vac suit.

Yeah, that's the reason not to speak of it again.

And O'Brien's already built a weapon to do the job once, under the orders of the Pah Wraith that possessed Keiko. Given the motivation and means, it'd be a pretty poor Klingon who shirked such a quest.

Say what you will about Starling City's crime and injustice, its citizens just can't get enough particle physics news.

I'm not supposed to get arrows in it!

Ollie's son Connor, under attack and having lost his own weapons, scrambling through dad's cache in the JLA trophy room:

I personally prefer my superhero origins crazy and varied. But practically speaking, that kind of thing never lasts. No matter how thoroughly you lay down the law that everything must be traced to mutation/the metagene/the White Event/that one chemical accident/the Wild Card virus, some creator will inevitably…

In the initial post-Crisis version, it was all Earth fabric. John Byrne seemed to really love drawing torn-up capes.

In the Silver Age it was explained by an "electrochemical aura" that protected him from friction and any other inconvenient physics. Probably, as others have said, rolled into the Speed Force these days.

Of course DC only did that after four races in which it was a tie or two close to call. Yes, retconned a few years ago with "those were for charity, Clark", but for decades that was the official editorial line. Because DC superheroes were editorial fiefdoms, and neither camp was going to admit their guy was…

That's exactly what I'd expect a TNG-era Federation prison to be like.