# Federation Warships **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [January 18, 2003, 12:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348 "2003-01-18T00:47:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Terrifel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c68b51/32.png) [@Terrifel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terrifel)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2003, 12:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348/41 "2003-01-19T00:13:15Z")
Well, I went and poked around the other threads on this particular subject (man! --quite a few), and one thing has been nagging at me for a while, so I post it here for all to view: **I want to apologize abjectly, sincerely and completely for even suggesting, as I did at the top of this thread, that Imperial ships do not have shields. Clearly, they DO. It was horribly ignorant and misguided of me to even suggest otherwise.** Thank you all for your patience. I just didn’t even remember that reference to shields in _Jedi_, it’s been so long since I’ve seen the movie, and the presence of Ewoks makes it difficult for me to recall it in detail. And you never really SEE the shields at work, so I made an assumption that I now realize was egregiously ill-informed. Not an excuse, merely an explanation. What can I say? My memory cheated me. And, as Crow T. Robot said, “When you cheat, you make an ‘eat’ out of C and H.” I’m sorry. ---
**Author:** ![robertliguori](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/46a35a/32.png) [@robertliguori](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robertliguori)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2003, 12:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348/42 "2003-01-19T00:15:14Z")
Well, as long as we’re mixing and matching sci-fi… "Captain, something just beamed on to our vessel! It’s big and it’s black and it’s spiny and OH GOD IT’S- "[slice] “Bride to transporters! Bridge to transporters! Come i-”[slice] Of course, we could bring B5 into this… ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2003, 12:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348/43 "2003-01-19T00:40:58Z")
Well, if you want to bring in _any_ sf franchise, I’m bringing in David Weber’s _Armageddon Inheritance_. You all get fleets of Warbirds or Star Destroyers, **I** get fleets of AI controlled Death Stars. About fifty of these things took out an enemy fleet composed of _millions_ of ships, and blew up an entire solar system along the way. ---
**Author:** ![SPOOFE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c5a1d2/32.png) [@SPOOFE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SPOOFE)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2003, 12:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348/44 "2003-01-19T00:48:15Z")
> [@](#): > > Anyway… I don’t keep tabs on the episodes other than a general outline of the story told within so I have to ask… was the asteroid’s make-up and density said? No, but we do know what sorts of asteroids look like what. > [@](#): > > If not, there could’ve been some sort of incredibly dense metals in there requiring some massive firepower. A possibility, but one without evidence. I imagine that an asteroid of spectacular makeup and/or density would have warranted comment, while an asteroid of average density wouldn’t have sparked any interest. > [@](#): > > I hate to do this again… but Valdore? Whassat? The Valdore’s are the new Romulan ships seen in _Nemesis_. A bunch of 'em attacked the Scimitar alongside the Enterprise-E. > [@](#): > > Are you kidding me? For one thing, after three hundred or more books, most of the stories have merged together in my mind or just been forgotten outright and for another, have you ever read an appreciable amount of Trek novels? There are tons of continuity problems. I think there are continuity problems because Paramount doesn’t consider the books to have any canon or official standing, so the authors have pretty much free reign to do whatever they want. > [@](#): > > I too recently saw Pegasus and I can’t for the life of me figure out where you are getting your data. The Enterprise (D) is about 2/3 of a kilometer long. Unfortunately, I can find no picture from the episode that I can link to, but perhaps you remember shots of the Enterprise next to the asteroid? It is far far larger than 10 km in diameter. There are two shots of the asteroid in that episode. One of the asteroid in its entirety, and a closer shot of the cavern of the asteroid as the Enteprise enters it. The cavern is also visable on the full-sized shot of the asteroid. Scaling, based on a 650 meter Enterprise, is done from there… and actually pegs the asteroid’s size at about 5 kilometers, rather than 10, but 10 is used to be conservative. The scaling pictures can be found [here](http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Database/Query-ST.php?EpName=Pegasus) (two entries down). > [@](#): > > Even were it a mere 10 km in diameter, you’re still assuming a perfect placement of energy. Not really. I’m assuming a very, very, VERY inefficient placement of energy. First off, the asteroid was mostly hollow. Second, photon torpedoes have the ability to burrow underground. Thirdly, I’m giving energy levels that would be required to deal far more damage than was necessary to ensure that the Pegasus was found and destroyed. If I was assuming a perfect placement of energy, that would lower photon torpedo strength to the _kiloton_ range. > [@](#): > > I don’t think we can use the “battles at long range” thing with all that much accuracy. The problem, of course, is in the filming. You you need to fit both ships on one screen, which sort of limits your options (unless you want both ships to be mere slivers in space). It’s not a necessity to put both ships on screen at once. Furthermore, such close-up ranges are consistently used throughout the entire series… even into DS9, where computer graphics became sophisticated enough to show hundred-thousand kilometer weapons ranges. > [@](#): > > On the subject of that “billion kilometer” weapon you mentioned – hey, if you want to haul in some esoteric weapon from one book, let me take your already mentioned example of the Pegasus, “true” canon material. What use are those billion kilometer weapons if the ship you’re firing at is cloaked… and intangible while it’s on, too? Well, it’s also canon fact that objects that are phased still interact chemically with the world around them, as seen by the fact that Geordi and Ro, when phased, were still capable of breathing (and walking on the floor, at that). There’s no evidence that a phased object can merely pass through shields, and plenty of evidence that they are still affected by the universe around them. > [@](#): > > A few random thoughts of my own… it’s claimed that the Death Star had shields, right? The original one, not the one under that projected shield in Jedi? If that’s so, it seems clear that these shields are worth precisely nothing. In the original trench run against the death star, there were explosions all over the surface from random laser shots “The Empire doesn’t consider a small, one-man fighter to be any threat… or they’d have a tighter defense.” The Death Star didn’t even _have_ its shields up during that attack, because they didn’t think there was any need. HOWEVER… the Death Star fired on Alderaan from a distance of approximately 6 planetary diameters out. Based on the velocity of ejected material after the superlaser annihilated the planet, the Death Star would have been struck by trillions up trillions of tons of matter moving at velocities in excess of several thousand kilometers per second. That’s a hell of a lot of kinetic energy… and the Death Star would not have survived it if it didn’t have immensely power deflector shields for protection. > [@](#): > > Your own argument about the Pegasus asteroid works against you here, Spoofe. Without those shields, the Death Star is nothing more than a moon-shaped (and moon-massed) chunk of metal. Thankfully, it does have shields… else the Alderaan explosion would have wiped it out. 🙂 > [@](#): > > I see no reason why the same wouldn’t hold for the lesser “Star Destroyer” chunks of metal. Their shields hold up quite fine, even under the stress of mutli-gigaton blasts (or even teraton, if you want to go with absolute high-end estimates). > [@](#): > > Oh, a random comment about “canon.” In the Star Wars universe, the speed of light, c, is the same as it is in our universe, right? In that case, how can the Falcon travelling at sub-light speeds make a trip between two solar systems in a matter of days, as happened in one book that I recall? I can’t recall any book that had the _Falcon_ travel between solar systems in a matter of days. The closest that happened was the Falcon travelling from Anoat to Bespin, at sublight, presumably in no more than a couple months (the actual time period is unknown). However, it is unknown where Anoat and Bespin are in relation to each other… or even if they’re in the same system, or if they’re a binary system, or what. In any case, it’s also quite canon that Darth Maul made a trip from Coruscant, in the galactic core, to Tatooine, on the outer rim, in less than a day. That’s a distance of about 40,000 lightyears in a matter of hours. > [@](#): > > That brings up one more last thought… it’s been stated that impulse engines are easily capable of accelerating a ship up to near light velocity fairly quickly. Which is bunk, as we’ve never seen a ship accelerate rapidly at all. In fact, one episode of Voyager had the captain call for full impulse, and the next shot shows the ship accelerating away at no more than 100 meters per second squared (and that’s being generous). ---
**Author:** ![raisinbread](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8491ac/32.png) [@raisinbread](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/raisinbread)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2003, 12:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348/45 "2003-01-19T00:51:06Z")
The Shadows and Vorlons would make mincemeat out of the Federation and most likely the Empire because they are older races whose technology borders on being considered magic even by those advanced civilizations. ---
**Author:** ![Tuckerfan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/eada6e/32.png) [@Tuckerfan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tuckerfan)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2003, 1:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348/46 "2003-01-19T01:12:05Z")
Bah! Fred Saberhagen’s _Beserker_’s would make mincemeat of everybody! Giant robotic ships who’s sole purpose is to kill _everything!_ ---
**Author:** ![Terrifel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c68b51/32.png) [@Terrifel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terrifel)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2003, 1:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348/47 "2003-01-19T01:18:45Z")
Man, you’d think at some point during the “giant robotic spaceships whose sole purpose is to kill everybody” design brainstorming sessions, someone would have stopped and said, “_Hey…wait a minute…_” ---
**Author:** ![Tuckerfan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/eada6e/32.png) [@Tuckerfan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tuckerfan)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2003, 1:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348/48 "2003-01-19T01:33:05Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Terrifel \* > \*\*Man, you’d think at some point during the “giant robotic spaceships whose sole purpose is to kill everybody” design brainstorming sessions, someone would have stopped and said, “_Hey…wait a minute…_” \*\* You know, thousands of years from now a rat will post something similar about us humans and our nuclear weapons on a message board. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2003, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348/49 "2003-01-19T03:23:42Z")
A reasonable argument for “why no fighters” in Star Trek, is the relative balance of offense vs. defense. If effective shielding is available, then the trend will be towards bigger vessels that can aborb more punishment, and also mount the heavier weapons needed to overcome the enemy’s shielding. In real life navies, this was the ship of the line/ battleship approach. If on the other hand weaponry is powerful enough that shielding is of little use, then the best strategy is dispersal: lots of small, fast attack craft, such as aircraft in real life. Going by this hypothesis, the presumption would be that in Star Trek shielding is effective enough that swarms of small fighters would have little chance of defeating a capital ship’s shields, and the fighters would be too small to resist the big ship’s phasers. In this case fighters would be like sending swarms of PT boats out against a battleship. In Battlestar Galactica, either their shields are next to useless, or else the weapons mounted on the fighters can damn near punch through a neutron star. So we have a mobile “base” ship which supports fighter squadrons like an aircraft carrier and which for defense relies mainly on intercepting enemy fighters before they can close. Since Star Wars has fighters AND big capital ships, I would suppose this means an intermediate situation. Sort of like the naval situation in the 1920s- attack aircraft were a useful auxillary, but they weren’t powerful enough (yet) to defeat battleships. ---
**Author:** ![Ephemera](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8baadc/32.png) [@Ephemera](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ephemera)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2003, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348/50 "2003-01-19T03:35:18Z")
> [@](#): > > > [@](#): > > > > I hate to do this again… but Valdore? Whassat? > > The Valdores are the new Romulan ships seen in Nemesis. A bunch of 'em attacked the Scimitar alongside the Enterprise-E. Ah. I really need to start studying Trek again. Anyway, I think the new Warbirds are badass myself. But with me being an uber Romulan fanboy, that’s to be expected. ---
**Author:** ![tracer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tracer/32/20578_2.png) [@tracer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tracer)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2003, 3:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348/51 "2003-01-19T03:51:58Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Rhum Runner \* > **Personally, I always thought space battles would be more like an old sailing navy battle, two ships pull up next to each other and hammer away until one is sunk.** My brother used to imagine space battles happening in much the same way. Problem is, it ain’t **gonna** happen that way. We already have air-to-air missiles capable of locking onto a target and destroying it **110 miles away.** In space, missiles will be able to travel thousands, millions, maybe even **billions** of miles in order to hit a target. Most SF TV shows and movies feature space ships firing “direct fire” weapons at each other, like _Star Trek_’s phasers and _Star Wars_’s turbolasers. But really, if you could turn your enemy into a glowing cloud of plasma at a million kilometers with a missile, would you even **bother** with phasers or turbolasers? “Pulling up next to each other” in a space battle means closing to within extreme radar range of one another. ---
**Author:** ![Tars\_Tarkas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Tars\_Tarkas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tars_Tarkas)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2003, 6:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348/52 "2003-01-19T06:15:17Z")
> [@](#): > > _Originally posted by SPOOFE \* > The Valdore’s are the new Romulan ships seen in Nemesis. A bunch of 'em attacked the Scimitar alongside the Enterprise-E._\* According to [here](http://decipher.com/startrek/cardlists/secondedition/large/ST2E-EN01415.html), it is Norexan class, with Valdore as one of the ships. > [@](#): > > In any case, it’s also quite canon that Darth Maul made a trip from Coruscant, in the galactic core, to Tatooine, on the outer rim, in less than a day. That’s a distance of about 40,000 lightyears in a matter of hours. Yes, but any movie with Jar Jar in it is not canon. 😉 > [@](#): > > Which is bunk, as we’ve never seen a ship accelerate rapidly at all. In fact, one episode of Voyager had the captain call for full impulse, and the next shot shows the ship accelerating away at no more than 100 meters per second squared (and that’s being generous). \*\* neither is Voyager! 😉 So what about batmobile armor and those super torpedoes in the last Voyager episode? or the Future Enterprise’s Phaser canon? The twenty ship task force that destroyed like 12% of the former Founder Homeworld’s crust in one volley in DS9? Torpedo yeilds are very inspecific on the show, the only fair one to use is the yeilds listed in the technical manuals, 18.5 isotons. Oddly enough, isoton is a made up term. Q-torps are listed at 52.3 isotons. There were q-torps in ST:FC, but none in Nemisis, another of the many combat flaws. But since we can use nemesis, keep in mind the enterprise crashing into a vessel with shields at 70% did little more than wreck ten-forward. Plus, all the enterprise has to do is hit the droid control ship, and all the droid goons will turn off and fall apart. ---
**Author:** ![Psi\_Cop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/c57346/32.png) [@Psi\_Cop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Psi_Cop)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2003, 7:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348/53 "2003-01-19T07:55:44Z")
Okay, more stuff \. I disagree with you on the Pegasus asteroid, but seeing as how I don’t have the actual episode with me, I can’t really say more about it. I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t take that Star Wars site as canon for Star Trek… its estimates are designed to minimize Star Trek. Based on my own estimates of that second picture, I’d say there were 10 ship lengths or so visible, which is 5 km right there. The asteroid isn’t even halfway shown… not even a quarter. That site goes out of its way to insult Trek and Trekkies. I mean, I could take a more “professional” site and give it more credit, but not that one, I’m afraid. Not to insult it or anything… \. And the point about screen time was really meant as more of a joke, as well. Ignore it. Oh, and lastly about the cloak… of course it interacts with the universe. Still doesn’t mean it can be seen. And, of course, it would be really interesting to do what was done in that asteroid… drive a ship inside “Imperial Ship X” and disengage. Like near the power plant of the Death Star, say? On shields, I have doubts about your argument. The Empire wouldn’t bother putting up shields because they didn’t consider the starfighters a threat? In that case, why didn’t those three or four squadrons of fighters simply fire full loads of torpedoes into the death star? I don’t know how powerful they are in comparison to photon torpedoes (probably not very), but I think a salvo of, say three dozen torpedoes at that dish would dent it quite nicely and keep it from firing. As you implicitly agreed with, without shields, it’s merely a large hunk of metal. My guess is that shields were up, and would have deflected most of the energy from those blasts (weaker shields, but weaker weapons… it evens out). Otherwise, why wouldn’t they have at least done a few shots in passing? Nothing to lose, after all. Second, if the fighters weren’t a threat, why did they scramble their own TIE fighters and mount such a terrific defense outside? Third, why leave the shields down regardless? According to your argument, they have enough power to fire their superlaser and “raise shields,” because of what happened at Aaldaraan. I mean, they’re going to have to replace all those weapon emplacements and repaint the hull, and so on and so fourth. Sure, they could have been showing off to the rebels, “We don’t even bother with our shields, you’re so puny,” but they were sort of planning to kill everyone. I think at that point, their shields would be up just so they wouldn’t have to bother spending more credits to fix the hull. Note that I’m not claiming the Imperials don’t have shields… I’m just claiming they’re worth, well… crap. > [@](#): > > HOWEVER… the Death Star fired on Alderaan from a distance of approximately 6 planetary diameters out. Based on the velocity of ejected material after the superlaser annihilated the planet, the Death Star would have been struck by trillions up trillions of tons of matter moving at velocities in excess of several thousand kilometers per second. That’s a hell of a lot of kinetic energy… and the Death Star would not have survived it if it didn’t have immensely power deflector shields for protection. This scene also came from the guy who gave Han a line about “Making the Kessel Run in \ parsecs.” Yes, I know the various arguments about this line, but why on earth would “parsecs” matter more than time in any case? Especially to a smuggler, whose business is hasty delivery, not shortness of route (although the two often coincide). That aside for a few moments (I don’t really mean it as a cheap shot), let’s look at it more logically. If I was the captain of that vessel (or Admiral or whoever the actual operational commander is below Tarkin), I’d be thinking something like this: “Big laser blow up planet. Pieces of planet start flying towards us. We’ve only got a few minutes before they hit us. Maybe now would be a good time to flee?” …and then engage the hyperdrive. Nothing to say they didn’t do this, after all. I think it’s at least as reasonable an expectation as yours that it just sat there and let tons of rock bombard it. After all, that much material around you would keep you from reaching hyperspace quickly, if I recall the mechanics correctly. It has to make a “run up” to near lightspeed before making the barrier. While it takes seconds, even a pebble impacting the shields at that speed would give massive impact energy. For the engines thing… I think we have two different “quicklys” in mind. I’m think battleship quickly, you’re thinking motorboat quickly. The Star Destroyers don’t accelerate tremendously fast, it’s the TIEs and X-Wings that do. Besides, if you’re not going beyond 1/4 _c_, you really don’t need all that much acceleration. You’d go to warp instead. On _true_ canon material, reference the last episode of Voyager (last two, really). From the future, Admiral Janeway brought back two nice pieces of technology. Ablative Armor and a new type of torpedo… Transphasic, I believe? ONE of these torpedoes destroyed a borg cube (or was it two?) The same type of cube that scoops cities whole out of the ground, obliterates planetary surfaces, and eats fleets for breakfast. The ablative armor easily withstood the fire from said cube. Since Voyager made it back to Federation space, with this technology intact… I think the next few Starfleet ships will have it fresh out of the shipyards. Bring on the next round of arguments! By the way, **Spoofe** , I’ve been wishing to have this argument with you since I saw the original SD vs. Enterprise thread… I just wish we could have argued it from the beginning \. Let me know whenever you want to do another ST vs. SW thread. -Psi Cop ---
**Author:** ![Psi\_Cop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/c57346/32.png) [@Psi\_Cop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Psi_Cop)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2003, 7:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348/54 "2003-01-19T07:58:31Z")
Oh, **Tars** , incidently, there _were_ quantum torpedoes in Nemesis. Remember when Deanna was trying to track the Scimitar empathically? When they fired based on that lock, it was the (much more) powerful quantum torpedoes. They hadn’t been using them earlier, because more than half the torpedoes were just flying off into space, since they couldn’t lock on. You save the big guns for when you have the target. -Psi Cop ---
**Author:** ![Psi\_Cop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/c57346/32.png) [@Psi\_Cop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Psi_Cop)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2003, 8:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348/55 "2003-01-19T08:01:30Z")
Oh, one last thing… There’s a good site called the "[Daystrom Institute Technical Library](http://www.ditl.org/) that’s good for most Trek stuff. It does it in an impartial way, even going out of its way to point out weaknesses. Listed under the Soverign-class starship (What the Enterprise E is), there are 250 normal torpedoes, and 50 quantum torpedoes. When you have five times the normal torpedoes as opposed to the “BIG” ones, you use the normal ones until you’ve got a total lock \. -Psi Cop ---
**Author:** ![SPOOFE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c5a1d2/32.png) [@SPOOFE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SPOOFE)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2003, 8:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348/56 "2003-01-19T08:26:09Z")
> [@](#): > > According to here, it is Norexan class, with Valdore as one of the ships. Thanks. > [@](#): > > So what about batmobile armor and those super torpedoes in the last Voyager episode? What about 'em? The batmobile armor seemed a little more resilient, but not much more so (the Borg were eating through it at an accelerating rate, for instance… another two minutes and Voyager would’ve been dead). And the transphasic torpedoes… frankly, we don’t know much about 'em. They could be significantly more powerful, or they could be primarily designed to fight the Borg… dunno. > [@](#): > > or the Future Enterprise’s Phaser canon? What Future Enterprise? You mean the future version of the ship that was destroyed in _Generations_? 😃 > [@](#): > > The twenty ship task force that destroyed like 12% of the former Founder Homeworld’s crust in one volley in DS9? I dunno, I saw the damage their weapons supposedly dealt to the Founder’s faux planet… but if 12% of the crust was destroyed, where was the glow of magma and superheated rock? Why did the cloud layer remain undisturbed, instead of dissipating from the heat of such blasts? Nah, what we, the viewers, saw was apparently different from what the Romulan sensors saw. I don’t know why, frankly. > [@](#): > > Torpedo yeilds are very inspecific on the show, the only fair one to use is the yeilds listed in the technical manuals, 18.5 isotons. Oddly enough, isoton is a made up term. Actually, “isoton” is an actual term. The prefix “iso-” means “equal to”. Ergo, if one wants to be technical about it, an “isoton” is equivalent to one ton of TNT. Of course, if you want to use the technical manuals, it mentions that a photon torpedo carries 1.5 kilograms of antimatter and 1.5 kilograms of matter for reactant. At perfect efficiency, this comes out to be about 64 megatons, as I already mentioned. > [@](#): > > But since we can use nemesis, keep in mind the enterprise crashing into a vessel with shields at 70% did little more than wreck ten-forward. Also using Nemesis, we saw that a very slow-moving Enterprise did more than twice as much damage to the Scimitar than a single torpedo could do. The Enterprise wasn’t moving much more than a few hundred meters per second, _at best_. That’s not a whole lot of energy, there. If anything, Nemesis just showed how pathetically weak the Enterprise’s weaponry is. 🙂 > [@](#): > > I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t take that Star Wars site as canon for Star Trek Don’t take the site’s word for it… the pictures are right there for your examination. You can see the two dark spots from picture two in picture one, right next to the S in “6 pixels”. That’s where the scaling comes from. > [@](#): > > Based on my own estimates of that second picture, I’d say there were 10 ship lengths or so visible Well, in picture 2, about a third of the ship is already obscured by beind inside the mouth of the cave. > [@](#): > > That site goes out of its way to insult Trek and Trekkies. I mean, I could take a more “professional” site and give it more credit, but not that one, I’m afraid. Eh. Style over substance, in my opinion. The author may be quite free with the insults, but in my opinion, he’s withstood the test of criticism of his actual work. His character is irrelevent to his findings. > [@](#): > > The Empire wouldn’t bother putting up shields because they didn’t consider the starfighters a threat? In that case, why didn’t those three or four squadrons of fighters simply fire full loads of torpedoes into the death star? One: Because the ships didn’t have full loads of torpedoes (I believe it was the ANH novelization that mentioned that material was so tight for the Rebellion that Luke’s fighter only had two torpedoes), and two, the station was 160 kilometers wide and quite heavily armored even without its shields. You’d need thousands of missiles to even begin digging through all the outside mass to hit the core. > [@](#): > > My guess is that shields were up, and would have deflected most of the energy from those blasts (weaker shields, but weaker weapons… it evens out). Otherwise, why wouldn’t they have at least done a few shots in passing? There WERE a few shots taken in passing. At one point, Luke says, “This is Red 5, I’m going in!” He then takes a nice strafing attack of the Death Star surface, vaporizing a nice chunk of metal, and creating an explosion that nearly engulfed his fighter. Biggs then says, “Are you all right?” to which Luke replies, “I got a little cooked, but I’m okay.” (Yeah, I’ve seen the movies WAY too often.) OF COURSE… I’m not trying to pass off my “no shields up” explanation as absolute. Others have theorized that the shields on the Death Star were designed in overlapping segments that, while they would repel direct fire from large ships, had tiny cracks that allowed snubfighters to slip through. Either explanation fits the events, in my opinion. > [@](#): > > Second, if the fighters weren’t a threat, why did they scramble their own TIE fighters and mount such a terrific defense outside? The TIE fighters seen in the film were Vader’s own squadrons, not Grand Moff Tarkin’s. Otherwise, you’d have seen thousands of TIE’s swarming about the place… > [@](#): > > Third, why leave the shields down regardless? Imperial haughtiness, I guess. Remember what Luke said: “Your overconfidence is your weakness.” (“Your faith in your friends…” nevermind.) > [@](#): > > This scene also came from the guy who gave Han a line about “Making the Kessel Run in \ parsecs.” Yes, I know the various arguments about this line, but why on earth would “parsecs” matter more than time in any case? Because the Kessel Run involved a black hole cluster. The closer you got to the cluster, the shorter the run was… but it also meant you had to be going faster in order to avoid the gravitational pull. Remember, velocity is a measure of both time _and_ distance. > [@](#): > > If I was the captain of that vessel (or Admiral or whoever the actual operational commander is below Tarkin), I’d be thinking something like this: > > "Big laser blow up planet. Pieces of planet start flying towards us. We’ve only got a few minutes before they hit us. Try “a few seconds”. Watch the film again. The debris from the explosion easily flies out farther than double Alderaan’s diameter in less than a second. > [@](#): > > Nothing to say they didn’t do this, after all. Except that the Death Star was still in the system… “That’s no moon… that’s a space station.” > [@](#): > > For the engines thing… I think we have two different “quicklys” in mind. I’m think battleship quickly, you’re thinking motorboat quickly. The Star Destroyers don’t accelerate tremendously fast, it’s the TIEs and X-Wings that do. Well, the Millenium Falcon manages to keep up with TIE’s and X-wings… and a Star Destroyer manages to keep up with the Millenium Falcon… Although a Star Destroyer’s maneuverability ain’t that hot, I’ll give you that. > [@](#): > > ONE of these torpedoes destroyed a borg cube (or was it two?) The same type of cube that scoops cities whole out of the ground, obliterates planetary surfaces, and eats fleets for breakfast. Yup. However, we don’t know if it accomplishes this by utilizing sheer firepower, or if it manages to automatically take advantage of the “Borg Cube Weakness” that Picard showed Starfleet in _First Contact_. Remember the scene where Picard had the fleet direct their attack on a certain, supposedly useless spot of the cube? The thing went up like a firework after a few shots. > [@](#): > > The ablative armor easily withstood the fire from said cube. We-e-e-e-e-e-e-ell… not really. The first two shots were pretty weak (brought down the armor strength by like 2% and 4%, respectively). But after that, the armor strength started sapping pretty quick, which was when Janeway ordered the firing of the transphasic torpedoes. Ultimately, the armor wasn’t more than an order of magnitude stronger than Fed shields, and the torps… well, we really can’t classify its yields, either. And, of course, the technology seems to have been lost or suppressed (perhaps those pesky 29th-century time-travelling Feddies took it away), since it was totally absent in the entirety of _Nemesis_, even though it took less than a week to equip Voyager with the technology… ---
**Author:** ![SPOOFE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c5a1d2/32.png) [@SPOOFE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SPOOFE)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2003, 8:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348/57 "2003-01-19T08:27:20Z")
> [@](#): > > Oh, one last thing… There’s a good site called the "Daystrom Institute Technical Library that’s good for most Trek stuff. It does it in an impartial way, even going out of its way to point out weaknesses. Ah… Warsies seem to have the same reservations about the Daystrom Institute that the Trekkies have about [SD.net](http://SD.net)… ---
**Author:** ![Shortie](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecd19e/32.png) [@Shortie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shortie)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2003, 8:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348/58 "2003-01-19T20:50:50Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by SPOOFE \* > \*\*Ah… Warsies seem to have the same reservations about the Daystrom Institute that the Trekkies have about [SD.net](http://SD.net)… \*\* To be fair IIRC Kennedy does do a colour-code thing to show which stuff is canon and which he put in 'cos it sounds right. In that particular case the numbers of torps are marked speculation (as are the vast majority of hard numbers he gives, so don’t get too attatched). ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2003, 10:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348/59 "2003-01-19T22:17:50Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by tracer \* > \*\*We already have air-to-air missiles capable of locking onto a target and destroying it **110 miles away.** In space, missiles will be able to travel thousands, millions, maybe even **billions** of miles in order to hit a target. > > Most SF TV shows and movies feature space ships firing “direct fire” weapons at each other, like _Star Trek_’s phasers and _Star Wars_’s turbolasers. But really, if you could turn your enemy into a glowing cloud of plasma at a million kilometers with a missile, would you even **bother** with phasers or turbolasers?\*\* Y’know, firing a missile from a billion kilometers away is going to give the other guy a lot of time to lock on his ECM. Assuming highly sophisticated targetting computers that can knock down hundreds of missiles a second, it might just be necessary to pull up to knife-fight range and cut loose with your energy weapons or dumbfire missiles. ---
**Author:** ![Malacandra](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Malacandra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malacandra)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2003, 11:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348/60 "2003-01-19T23:00:02Z")
A couple of weapons I always had lots of time for, both by Larry Niven out of the “Ringworld” books: a) Ringworld - the Wunderland Treatymaker. It fires two parallel beams. One of these suppresses the negative charge on the electron and the other suppresses the positive charge on the proton. Both cause the affected matter to blow apart in a cloud of monatomic dust and, as an added bonus, you get a bar of lightning twenty miles long jumping between these two points of absurdly different electric potention. b) Ringworld Engineers - the Ringworld meteor defence. A humungous electromagnet (the entire Ringworld - a million miles wide and 600 million miles in circumference) manipulates the photosphere of the Sun to induce a solar flare. Then, when this is a few million miles long, it lases. An unwieldy weapon, but a doozy. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348.md?page=4)