Who would win in a fight between:
- The U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701 (no bloody A, B, C, or D), commanded by Captain James T. Kirk; and
- A Manticoran dreadnought, commanded by Dame Honor Harrington?
Honor wins with a kill from 850,000 kilometers out, while the Enterprise is still trying to maneuver close enough for both ships to be visible in the same camera shot.
Upon opening communications before the battle, Kirk would see Honor and immediately beam aboard the dreadnought to seduce her. Nimitz would pick up on Kirk’s mood, disembowel him, and the HMS Sovereign would blow the crap out of the Enterprise before Spock knew what was happening.
I don’t have the specs of either ship handy. But I think Honor.
She has more experience with using older and less well equiped vessels to the best of their advantage.
Being from Sphinx and of yeoman stock, she still feels she has more to ‘prove’ with respect to the titled officers.
And she has a wonderful balance of full throttle and tactical sneakiness.
(She’s also less likely to be distracted by the random cute little ensign wandering by.)
But Manticoran missiles don’t fly at faster-than-light speeds.
Unlike photon torpedoes…
Which would go <splat> against sidewalls and wedges. There’s also the question of whether or not phasers would penetrate. Or for that matter, how well grasers would work on Trek shields (I suspect they’d work very well against the less powerful bomb pumped lasers).
If Honor’s people figure out how Trek shields work though the Enterprise is screwed. They’ll just use their missiles as kinetic/gravitic weapons, smash them directly into the shields at relativistic speeds or use the wedges to slice the ship up, since Trek ships lack point defense.
The Enterprise would seem to have a major advantage in that they can (apparently) accelerate to warp speed any time they want, where in the HH universe, I think you have to be at a certain distance from the sun. The Enterprise also seems to have sensors that are not limited by the speed of light (I don’t know this for sure, but they seem to be able to detect vessels at vast distances.) So…the Enterprise can outrun the weapons and ships of HH. And, they have the transporter and all the antimatter they want.
For raw destructive power, however, a Manticoran dreadnaught well outclasses the Enterprise. Each missile probably is the equivalent of several phaser blasts. They can launch thousands of them at a time. And the Enterprise’s shields can’t handle too many hits and doesn’t have any apparent missile defenses. So a surprise attack, or close range attack would be fatal to the Enterprise.
I’d give a slight edge to the Enterprise as the dreadnaught shouldn’t be able to hit it and they may be able to do hit and run “upskirt” shots with phasers and photo torpedos.
If by “splat” you mean “matter-antimatter explosion”, then I agree with you.
It has been some time since I have read the Honor Harrington books, aren’t there gaps in the sidewall shields? If so can’t the Enterprise use its far greater speed to get into position and blow them out of the water?
So do Manticoran ships (at least enough to pinpoint the locations of ships, and get a fair guess as to tonnage). The only real advantage the Federation has in this area is in long-range (inter-system) FTL communications, but I’m not sure how much advantage that’ll be in a fight, since we’re already positing that each side’s best tactical mind is on the spot.
I think we can safely assume that no weapon the Enterprise is packing can penetrate a wedge, and sidewalls are debatable (it’s probably simplest to treat them as equivalent to Star Trek shields, but there are advantages and disadvantages each way). The wedge is going to be problematic, though, since Star Trek ships don’t pack much in the way of indirect-fire weapons, and even if you programmed photon torpedoes to come in sideways, they don’t fire very many of them at once. Two or three photon torpedoes is going to be a cakewalk for point defense systems designed to deal with thousands of missiles at a time. And it’s going to be very difficult, even with jumping in and out of warp, for the Enterprise to maneuver into position to get an upskirt or downthroat phaser shot.
There aren’t just gaps in the Honorverse shields, the front and back ends of a ship can’t be protected at all.
Well, okay, that’s not entirely true. According to some of the later books, if you’re willing to turn off all Impeller acceleration, you can extend a sidewall over either the front OR the back end of your ship, but not both at the same time.
In either case, though, you’re right – the Enterprise can zip around the Manticoran dreadnought at Warp 9. In fact, it can probably fly around the dreadnought faster than the dreadnought can turn! Dreadnoughts are notoriously ungainly, and can’t rotate very fast.
That settles it, then. Enterprise 1, Dreadnought 0.
The latest have “buckler” walls that protect the front and back while allowing acceleration, with a gap around the edge. And the ends of the ship also have the heaviest energy weapons and thickest armor.
Also, if they see the Enterprise zipping around at warp they’ll probably think of programming their fire control computers to automatically fire on anything that “just appears” like that. The Trek ship’s insistence on having someone actually give the order and press the button could get them vaporized when the computers beat them to the draw.
Trek torps. seem to gain an initial velocity advantage based upon the speed of the firing platform, but I can’t recall seeing a Trek ship in warp fighting a vessel at impulse (sublight) speeds. Honorverse missiles gain a similar advantage, with a hard number of 46,000G of acceleration. Pretty damned fast.
Honorverse vessels do fight at relativistic speeds, and do fight in hyperspace (albeit “drifitng” between grav-waves in hyperspace), but again, no Honorverse battle I can recall ever took place between a vessel or vessels in hyperspace against a vessel or vessels not in hyperspace. But Warp /= Hyperspace, so I think superluminal combat is a wash.
The Honorverse “Ghostrider” system does give their vessels substantial sensor reach and FTL (or near-FTL) comms over considerable (read: Star System) distances. These platforms are described as heavily stealthed, as well, and rely almost exclusively on sophisticated passive sensors, so no sensor emissions other than their “grav pulses” tp give them away, so Trek-verse ships might not detect them.
And when it comes to fire density, especially missiles, the Honorverse has it all over the Trek-verse. However, Trek-ships should be able to easily detect and outrun them, via Warp, or very high impulse speeds. Indeed, Trek-ships, IIRC, can accelerate to near-lightspeed in a matter of seconds, and decelerate just as quickly. This gives Trek-ships a phenominal maneuver advantage, as they can run circles around Honorverse ships without even resorting to Warp.
Honorverse DN’s and SDN’s are massive vesslels, typically comming in at 4,000,000 - 10,000,000 metric tons. They’re armored, and via “sidewalls,” shielded as well, and their grav wedges are impenetrable. Their open “front” and “rear” are their only vulnerabilities, but they still have considerable firepower available (esp. massive “spinal mount grasers”) in those aspects.
That’s an ass load of ship, with commensurate armor, shielding, and firepower, to take down. The Enterprise masses much less.
It’ll boil down to tactics. A Trek-verse Capt. must bob-and-weave in-and-out of range of the DN, getting “death-from-a-thousand-cuts” hits with torps. and phaser hits, and hope that the Honorverse DN’s fire control can’t “lock them up” and unass a broadside of grasers at them, or open them up like a sardine can with one of the spinal mounts.
Given the described fire-control capabilities of the Honorverse ships and Ghost Rider platforms, I can’t see a DN missing too many opportunities to “lock up” the Enterprise with a sufficiently precise fire solution to make the Enterprise look like so much Swiss cheese.
The enterprise, of course.
This is how I would do it. Beam every single manticoran and Nimitz into space… well except Honor. She would be beamed directly to my quarters.
By all means, please, develop tactics for my enemies.
Every description/deck plan I’ve seen for the Enterprise (TMP and later versions) has it having 4 transporter rooms, with a six-pad transporter per room. There is also a few 20-person Emergency Transporters available, as well. That’s at most 64 people per transporter transaction.
Now, for the Enterprise to transport an Honorverse DN’s crew, numbering in the thousands, we know that a Trek-verse ship must:
- Be within 40,000 km of its target,
- match velocitiy with the target,
- and lower its shields.
An Honorverse DN would blow multiple holes stem-to-stern through the Enterprise, about the time Scotty was aquiring transporter lock on his targets. And that’s if the Enterprise was directly in front of or behind the DN.
If the Enterprise is abeam the DN, and the DN get’s all of its broadside armament in play…you’d need a a vac-rated Dust Buster and an electron microscope to find and identify any of the Enterprise’s remains.
That’s a mighty big “if” there. Honorverse sensors consist of radar (which moves at the speed of light and can’t possibly track a target moving faster than that), and passive gravitic detectors (which can sense artificial gravity at FTL speeds).* As far as we know, they don’t have subspace technology and thus can’t track warp signatures. So long as Enterprise doesn’t generate any artificial gravity, they’ll be effectively invisible while at warp.
But, that’s the rub, isn’t it? Enterprise’s artificial gravity is always on. It’s what keeps the crew members wandering around on the decks instead of floating through the hallways. (It’s also, presumably, responsible for the Inertial Dampeners they use to counter the hellish acceleration of their Impulse Drive, but hey, warp drive has different rules.) Do you ever see the artificial gravity turned off on the show? Even when it would be beneficial? No! Thus, Enterprise should show up on their gravitic scans like a big stinky beacon.
*) Interesting side note: I’m currently on the 4th book in the Honor Harrington series, and thus far no starship seems capable of detecting thermal emissions. You’d think the amount of heat a starship would have to generate would make it impossible to hide in space, but the super-advanced Manticorans don’t seem to have something as mundane as thermal-infrared detectors.
Yeah, I just checked it out on memory-alpha.org. The Constitution class, of which NCC-1701 is a member, has a mass of “almost one million gross tons.”
Maybe I should’ve had them face off against a Manticoran Battlecruiser instead. Oh well, too late to go back and change the parameters of the battle now.
What would prevent the Enterprise from issuing magnetic boots to the crew, turning off artificial gravity, warping in to the edge of transporter range, beaming photon torpedoes with a full 3 kilos of antimatter load into sensitive parts of the ship and then warping out before they could return fire?
Other than ripping Stargate: Atlantis of course.
Come on. How long do you think it would take for someone to crawl down a Jeffries Tube to reconfigure the deflector dish to detect grav pulses?
Phyhsics 101. Vacuum is a poor heat transmission medium, and near-solar space is already awash with lots of energy from whatever sun is pumping it out in that system, so the IR signature of a starship would probably be lost in background stellar emissions, unless it was fairly close and fairly hot.
“Edge of transporter range” is 40,000 km. The maximum effective range of Honorverse energy weapons is vague, but generally given as 1,000,000 km.
So by all means, match velocity for a zero/zero intercept at 40,000 km with a DN and drop your shields. And then watch your transporter beam “go splat against a gravity sidewall,” or try to synchronize your transporter to the brief openings in the sidewall that allow grasers to fire out.
The DN could roll in that short a time and impose its upper or lower wedge, and shoot around its own wedge with 72 Mk19 anti-ship missiles, each with upwards of 40,000+ G’s of accel at “half-speed” setting, or 90,000+ G’s of accel at full-throttle.
As far as “sensitive parts of the ship” are concerned, you assume the Trek-verse ship can just sit out of range of the DN and “scan” through the DN’s ECM to even find these “sensitive parts,” and that the DN is just going to sit there stupefied at Kirk’s awesomeness and let the Enterprise do its thing. Yes, the DN’s radar and lidar fire control are light-speed restricted, but for a transporter-bomb scenario, the Enterprise is sitting there 40,000 km away at most.
That’s little more than 1/4 second for the DN to get a return “bounce” off the Enterprise with radar/lidar; this isn’t “deep scan” for find out what kind of phlebotinum is surrounding the neutrino flux capacitors in the ancillary warp matrix, just basic range/direction data. The time to compute a fire solution, and adjust the lasers and grasers, is unknown, but given that the Honorverse has anti-missile energy mounts that track and engage, at ranges of 100,00 km - 250,000 km, incoming evading missiles travelling at up to .8c relative, I have no reason to believe it would take some unreasonable amount of time for the DN, with its broadside armament under Central Fire Control, to aim and fire 18 295cm anti-ship lasers and 20 360cm anti-ship grasers into the Enterprise sitting 40,000 km away.
I honestly don’t believe even Spock would have enough time to do more than think “?” before the Enterprise got hit with enough energy to punch not only through its shields like they were so much tissue paper, but to also make it’s hull glow white-hot. There’s tracer’s IR signature.
The Honorverse uses directional grav pulses as their FTL comm system, in drones that are also moving and evading under maximum stealth. I’m sure Spock would detect these grav pulses, and may even deduce what they’re for. He’s good like that, and I give him his props. I’m just not sure there’s fuck-all he could do about it, except pull some Trekkian techno-babble out of his ass, like, “Captain, I’m reconfiguring the secondary tachyonic pulse array in an attempt to attenuate the enemy’s grave-pulse comm system by disrupting the tertiary harmonic resonance if the emitter arrays.”
If the scenario allows such ham-handed plot contrivances, then the Enterprise wins hands-down. Every. Single. Time.
The thing I really like about Weber’s Honorverse is that he applies his technology pretty consistently throughout, and technical innovation is the result of an entire branch of the Maticoran Navy pouring billions of dollars/credits/whatever into years-long R&D projects, not some plot device whipped out of some writer’s anus to magically extricate the Enterprise from whatever plot-corner he’d written them into just so he can make deadline.