I think you’ve confused heat transfer with blackbody radiation.
There’s a page on the Atomic Rockets site that gives a good run-down on why stealth in space is, for all practical purposes, impossible. Blackbody radiation is the #1 reason.
Quoth The Tao’s Revenge:
What prevents it is monumental stupidity, the same thing that prevents them from ever using that tactic against Klingons or Romulans or the Dominion or whatever.
I’m going to point out here that you’re doing something very horrible to the Enterprise. The NCC-1701 is in service in the 2250s. 300 years of development. It’s a fragile thing, and the show knows it. A Manticorian Dreadnaught is from over two thousand years in the future. There have been stagnant times, but the ships themselves outmass the Enterprise by gross factors, the tactical doctrine is well developed and so on.
It’s not a fair fight. It might be closer to fair if you bring the D or E in, though. Quantum torpedos, tachyon torpedos, either could possibly pierce shields… but again, yield for yield, it’s going to be like sailboats against an ironclad.
Fair 'nuf. Even if I think you’re confusing chemical rocket or bomb-pumped “Orion” engines with impeller drives. But at sublight speeds, it cuts both ways. So stealth is not just a push, it isn’t even a factor.
Still, point an IR detector at a patch of sky and look for the “streak” of IR against interstellar background, and you’re only going to find out where a ship was some time ago (allowing for light-speed lag). Sure, and the tactical mobility advantage of Fed-tech allows for quicker triangulation and thus a greatly reduced sphere of uncertainty in which the Weber-tech DN might be, from Kirk’s POV. It’s not beyond the tech level of the Honorverse to do the same, but it’s not a tactic or method ever described in Weber’s books. It’s what they have Ghost Rider for. Plus, there’s the artificial gravity and inertial compensators on the Enterprise. Is that a sufficiently strong “grav signal” for the DN to detect? IF the Enterprise can accelerate/decelerat to and from near-light speed in a matter of seconds, I would think so.
But you still have vastly smaller ship going up against an armored behemoth, with a very limited damage aspect (the number of directions you can attack from and score a hit to inflict damage) due to the Weber-tech impeller wedge. And Honor isn’t exactly going to sit still or fly “straight-and-level” and allow an annoying gadfly to hit her ship with impunity. That DN will be twisting, turning, and rolling in all 3 dimensions. And the impeller wedge does not blind her sensors “above” or “below.”
Do we have any numbers on ranges for Trek-tech torps. and phasers? IIRC, I read somewhere that phasers had a max effective range of about 300,000 km. If I am remembering correctly, that is deep inside her (the DN’s) energy-weapon’s engagement basket.
So, it’s roll to bring her broadside to bear, fire-as-they-bear, keep rolling and bring the other side of her ship’s broadside to fire-as-the-bear, rinse, repeat, and Kirk is going to know he’s been kissed by one of the nastiest space-fighting bitches he’s never wanted to meet.
The Enterprise is going to have two huge advantages over a Manticoran Dreadnought, regardless of the commander: Mobility and Detection. The Enterprise can, as mentioned before, go faster-than-light just about whenever they feel like it, whereas the Manticoran ship would need to be outside of the star’s hyper-limit to avoid bouncing off the hyperwall. The other issue is that while Manticoran warships have faster-than-light sensors, they can only detect gravity anomalies or hyper footprints. Recall their preferred method of getting around being the manipulation of gravity. They would be unable to see the Enterprise in any timely fashion at any distance unless Kirk stumbled across one of their recon drones, and only if it was one of the later Ghost Rider models.
If you have read Mission of Honor, you’ll understand just how badly disadvantaged this leaves Dame Harrington. That said, since Kirk and Harrington are both on the Good Guys™ side, we can only assume that they have been manipulated into this fight, and no doubt they will (eventually) realize the logical thing to do would be for them to team up, and Boldy Go and whup somebody’s instigating ass.
Even if the drive produces no heat, the ship must. No system of electronics, living creatures, etc. is 100% efficient. There will be waste heat, and it will have to be radiated away – in fact, one of the challenges for building a battle spacecraft is being able to radiate the heat away fast enough so that you don’t cook yourselves.
But that was largely a digression – I agree with you completely that stealth will not be an issue for either side in this engagement, and as you went on to say (which I also completely agree with):
So … let’s assume, for the moment, that the Enterprise’s subspace sensors can detect where the Honorverse ship is, and the Honorverse ship’s gravitic detectors can pinpoint where the Enterprise is, both instantaneously with no light-speed lag.
But here’s where the Enterprise could do something the Dreadnought can’t:
I know there’s never been an instance on film where a Trek starship was at warp while firing its weapons at a target that wasn’t at warp. BUT, there have been several cases where the Enterprise has been at warp and fired its weapons at other warp-speed targets (“The Ultimate Computer” and, in the TNG era, “Encounter at Farpoint” both spring to mind). It is not at all unreasonable to assume that a Trek starship at warp can hit a slower-than-light target if it can also hit a faster-than-light one. Warp drive isn’t like hyperspace, where a ship in it is on a different “plane of existence” from normal matter. Ships at warp can and do interact with sublight objects, and that interaction goes both ways.
Therefore:
The Enterprise backs up at warp 1.1 (like they did in “Balance of Terror” when the Romulan plasma torpedo was closing in on them), and lobs photon torpedoes at the Dreadnought. The dreadnought’s weapons will not be able to touch the Enterprise, unless the dreadnought translates to Hyper – which it can’t do inside of any star system’s Hyper Limit.
(I was going to say they’d also have to give up their impeller bands if they did so, but then I remembered you only need Warshawski Sails when you’re inside a grav wave. Enterprise, since it uses an entirely different form of FTL travel, might not even know where the grav waves are.)
If the Dreadnought rolls to interpose its impeller wedge between itself and the Enterprise, the Enterprise can alter course (at warp) to move to a different attack angle. It could literally fly circles around the dreadnought. Eventually, the Big E is gonna get lucky.
If it doesn’t run out of torps before then. How many does a ship like the Enterprise carry? A few dozen? And what do they do after they run out?
Warp away, build/get more, and come back.
And little did Kirk ever suspect that he would end his career by being beaten to death by a 6 foot plus genetically engineered cyborg woman…
The massive ECM suites, particle fields and antirad fields under the sidewalls and wedges? Transporters are notoriously easy to block.
And if we are allowing that kind of surprise attack, what’s to stop Honor from hiding behind a planet and deploying “Mistletoe” armed Ghost Rider drones? I doubt the Enterprise would do well if a 500 megaton nuke suddenly went off next to it while it was orbiting somewhere with its shields down.
They contain and redirect the heat. From Mission of Honor:
Still, they can detect ships by heat & light and so forth - that’s an important plot point in one book. They just usually rely on the longer ranged and FTL grav sensors.
This might work for the second Federation starship that goes up against Honor. But no Fed ship we’ve ever seen on screen has used tactics like those. It follows, then, that in the initial encounter between the Federation and the Star Kingdom, the Federation does what it always does in combat situations, which is sit in one place and pound away at the other guy at knife-fight range. In that situation, any Federation ship is so much drifting plasma by the end of the fight. Now, if the Enterprise is, say, the fourth or fifth ship to show up for a fight, then there’s a good chance that the Captain will come up with an inventive new tactic to defeat this dangerous new foe. But even that’s only a temporary reprieve: in the Honor-verse, a groundbreaking new tactic is studied, refined, and taught to other officers as part of an intense and on-going fleet-wide training effort . In the Trek-verse, a groundbreaking new tactic is used once, and then completely forgotten about. 
Look, its simple.
If the Enterprise is losing, the Trek writing idiots will simply change the way their things work so that transporters can work for hundreds of parsecs, go through any shield/sidewall thanks to a magic new particle. Or they will decide that the weapons on the Enterprise can be ‘adjusted’ to punch through the sidewall. But by next episode that amazing, universe-changing breakthrough technology will be forgotten.
If Honor is losing, the David Weber will grumble and a slowly develop the Manticorian fleet technology over the period of 2-3 books and adjust the Universe’s reaction accordingly.
- also optional for Trek writers is to have Honor get a papercut and die right in front of the Medbay after giving a long death speech.
True. They can be blocked by bad weather, for crying out loud.
Relativistic physics, not a sneak attack. What I’ve outlined is a particular nasty version of the Picard Maneuver. Enterprise encounters hostile ship which fires sublight missiles. Enterprise exercises the better part of valor and gets the fuck out. Spock being logical notes the sub-light nature of the advisory’s systems, and bam effective strategy, if Scotty can make the transporters lock on to an opening in the “wedge”
I assume that Spock and the Enterprise’s sensors will be able to detect the gravity anomalies that make up the wedge and sidewalls. It’s a pretty powerful focusing of gravity. Someone on the starship Enterprise is going to wonder if their phasers and torps can penetrate such a highly stressed band of space. (I’m doubting they can.)
The sensors on the Enterprise are shown to be pretty good (and long ranged) when the plot calls for it, and I don’t think that Kirk is going to get in close without a detailed study. He’s probably going to want to strike a heroic pose and try to introduce himself. Starfleet seems to use subspace radio to communicate with everyone they run across. Honor may be immune to Kirk’s charms for a little while simply due to the fact that the HMS Audacious communicates by old style radio and/or laser. 
I don’t recall any plot on the TV shows that mention this oversight in communication capabilities.
According to the Honorverse wiki, Honor’s missiles have 180 seconds of controlled flight time (after that they “coast”). With the acceleration they pull, they can still reach impressive ranges (30 million klicks?). Pretty long range by Star Trek standards.
Actually, wouldn’t he end up with a 6 foot plus genetically engineered cyborg woman’s corpse in his quarters? As soon as Nimitz hits vacuum, Honor’s dead…
Not necessarily dead, but crazy IIRC. Suicidal…but if she’s suddenly presented with someone to blame while in that mental state…
The Enterprise has another big advantage I forgot about: It’s got demonstrably superior Plot Armor than any of Honor’s ships have. Kirk has had a grand total of one starship blasted out from under him (and that was only because he set the self destruct on it). Honor has on at least three occasions only survived the mortal wounding of her ship because other ships came to her assistance at the last moment, and on a couple of other occasions, mainly because she was operating near a friendly base.
Also, what time settings are we dealing with? Kirk with the Enterprise from during his 5 Year Mission sounds about like what everybody is discussing, and Honor with a dreadnought would have to be around Flag In Exile at the earliest (actually, she went from commanding a Battlecruiser straight to a squadron of Superdreadnoughts; sometimes nepotism works out for the best).
Since the Enterprise is generally called a cruiser whenever such designations come up (or a battlecruiser if you ask the Klingons), we’d be putting Kirk up against Captain Harrington in command of either HMS Fearless (the heavy cruiser in Honor of the Queen, not to be confused with the light cruiser of the same name in On Basilisk Station) or HMS Nike (her Battlecruiser in A Short Victorious War). If Kirk doesn’t get to bring Starfleet along, Honor has to leave her fellow ships behind too so they can proceed to blast the atoms out of each other like civilized gentlepersons without outside interference.
If they go hand-to-hand, Honor only gets to bring Nimitz if Kirk gets to bring Spock. Also, Kirk is not allowed to sneak aboard Honor’s ship and talk the ship’s tactical computer to death. 
And for the purposes of discussion, let’s say that the Enterprise’s sheilds are a bit thicker than Sidewalls (they are shown to put up much more resistance to incoming fire than the Sidewalls, which never seemed so good at actually stopping anything so much as trying to slow it down a bit.) Also, Wedges, while up, are to be treated as impermeable (Scotty only gets to win by reversing the polarity if he reverses the polarity on Honor’s ship somehow). If Kirk’s crew takes Chief Harkness prisoner, Kirk loses by default. If Honor takes Spock prisoner, expect the entire battle to be derailed so the two of them can debate politics and philosophy in depth for a few hours.
Yes, the Salamander certainly has a talent for getting ships blown out from under her, but she’s got an even greater talent for getting the other guys’ ships even more blown out from under them. How many enemy ships has Kirk ever actually destroyed?
I was thinking the opposite, actually. Sidewalls deflect incoming fire. Usually, they end up deflecting it to miss the ship entirely, but it’s somewhat random, and occasionally (a few percent of the time) the deflected beam still hits something. But if it misses, then there’s no damage whatsoever-- The only reason sidewalls seems so porous is that they’re typically hit by dozens or hundreds of beams at once. By contrast, a single hit might take a Trek ship’s shields down by 5% or so, but even with the shields still running at 95%, things still go all 'splodey on the bridge and everyone gets knocked out of their seats.
But he always really hoped so.
One more point in the Enterprise’s favor – they’ve essentially done this already in the “Doomsday Machine” episode. Hugely massive enemy, capable of destroying planets, indestructible from any direction but right down its throat. Of course, the solution requires having a spare star ship to send down its maw and self-destruct.
But…worst case is that the Enterprise flies head on into the dreadnaught at warp speed and self-destructs. Don’t care how massive you are – if a 1,000,000 ton vessel impacts you at multiples of light speed, it’s game over. And Kirk would do it too. Look how many times he put the ship on self-destruct in three years.
Assuming the Dreadnought doesn’t see him coming and turn so that its sidewalls (or impeller wedge) are facing Enterprise.
Unless Enterprise at warp is agile enough to fly on a curved trajectory that keeps it always at the Dreadnought’s nose, regardless of how rapidly the dreadnought turns. (And if it can do that, it can also lob photon torpedoes down the dreadnought’s exposed throat while it closes.)