Run Away!

You drop out of warp, not far from the K8 space station. You see right away what the problem is - the station's been taken over by Klingons. They're everywhere - at least a dozen battle cruisers. Almost as if they're expecting you, they immediately begin to close in.
Captain Smirk: Sensor sweep.
They're powering up weapons. There's no way your Scout ship's going to be able to take them all on. They're hailing you.
Captain Smirk: Raise shields. Power up phaser banks.
You realize that if you open fire you'll be nothing but dust. The Klingons are demanding that you to stand down.
Captain Smirk: We won't surrender. If we're going down we'll take as many of them with us as we can. Ready photon torpedoes.

Oh boy! This isn't how this was supposed to go. The scenario, as planned, called for the crew of the USS Perry to surrender. They get taken captive and find out what the Klingons are up to. Then they find a tricky way to escape and defeat them. How many times have we seen Kirk do this? This actually happened to me when I was running Star Trek many years ago. (Still own and dig the FASA rules)

This is a common GM dilemma. You place the characters in a situation where they're sure to be destroyed. The goal is to get them to either surrender or run away. I faced a similar problem in a Call of Cthulhu game recently. The characters arrived at a lost city. Their guide was immediately killed by overwhelming forces. I wanted the characters to run away. The rest of the scenario is about how they get home without their guide. The problem is that the Players want their characters to be heroes that fight to the bitter end. Makes for a short game if this is the beginning of the adventure. I blame this mindset on combat oriented games with easy resurrection.

After my Cthulhu game, one of the players asked me how I knew the characters would run away. I had a 3-tiered plan. In order of preference:
1. Hope that the Players are smart enough to have their characters run away. My description should let them know that they are not going to survive any other way.
2. One of the characters is a Naval Officer. I could tell him that in his military experience, the best solution here is to run away. This allows the Player to deal with the problem in character. He tells the other characters to split.
3. I just flat out tell them that their characters are going to die if they try to fight it out. I'll try to drop it casually, something like, "It's clear that If you stay and fight the oncoming horde, you're all gonna die. You might want to run back to the boat and cast off."

Run away and live to fight another day. I'm sure I'm paraphrasing here, but even Troupe Monty Python figured this out.