# 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:** 3\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![Sock\_Munkey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/aeb1de/32.png) [@Sock\_Munkey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sock_Munkey)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2003, 11:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348/101 "2003-01-24T23:41:39Z")
The superb continuity of B-5 goes a long way in inspiring loyalty. ---
**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 28, 2003, 3:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348/102 "2003-01-28T03:01:23Z")
Sorry for being late in this, I was away for the weekend… > [@](#): > > What? Cite? Specific scene? I think you’re mistaken here. Even though you already answered yourself, I’ll reference First Contact directly. Unfortunately, my “cite” is the movie itself. I can’t seem to find any script copies online, so I don’t have anything to link to. The best I can do is point out the specific line. The scene has just shifted from the Defiant to the Enterprise, entering the scene. Someone on the bridge says “Sir, the Defiant is losing life support.” Picard orders “Transporter room three, beam the Defiant survivors on board.” While there’s no reference to beaming through the shields, it’s obvious what’s happening, because they’re beamed aboard as the ship’s shields are still taking hits. Now to **Spoofe** … > [@](#): > > The most famous instance of this happening is in A New Hope, during the assault on the Death Star. The simple explanation is this: The Death Star was using heavy weaponry meant to target capital ships in order to fire at fighters. Similar to trying to use 18" guns on a modern battleship in an AA role. The fact that they did score a few hits in the first place is the amazing part. I dunno. That’s pretty pathetic weaponry for firing on capital ships. And furthermore… I know that it’s in “A galaxy far far away,” but didn’t they ever have the equivilent of World War II? Fighter aircraft easily took out big capital battleships, unless there were other planes defending them. Heck, the Bismark is one of the few big ships in the war not sunk by aircraft. And yet there are no “anti-air” guns… > [@](#): > > Point of note… in the EU, it depicts the Empire as developing a new class of capital ship, the Lancer-class frigate, which has very little heavy weaponry but is laden with smaller, anti-starfighter turrets, finally realizing just how useful fighters are for the rebels/New Republic. Yeah, they did require it. And didn’t Corran Horn easily evade all their fire in one of the Rogue Squadron books? I know he’s a hot pilot and all, but the imperials _still_ can’t shoot worth crap. And, as another note, why don’t they have an equivilent to the phalanx defense system our Carriers use? If torpedoes are _that much_ of a threat and get fired from far away distances, why not use a gatling-turbolaser (so to speak) to try and shoot them down? Yeah, I know, Trek doesn’t have them either… but there’s constant war in the SW universe. Not in Trek \. Now on the points you redirected at me… The Defiant was built specifically to combat the Borg, yeah. But the Borg are nastier than anything else in the galaxy, including the Dominion. To use another modern day example, if you build bullets that will pierce plate mail backed up by Kevlar backed up by natural skin armor… they’ll still work well against normal skin. You’re right on the future/torpedo thing, though. I didn’t think of that. Admiral Janeway would certainly be decked out with decades of Borg tactical information. But, it’s really a very small point anyway. > [@](#): > > True. Probably equivalent to three or four proton torpedoes each second (if I’m recalling the correct visual, it took a few seconds to burn through the Klingon ship… but I might be wrong). However, I contend that it’s probably not that strong enough… a BB pellet will shoot straight through cardboard, after all. Yeah, but I also think this point isn’t all that relevent. Remember that you’re basing your assessment on a future timeline. Who knows what weapons and shields are like? I’m certain that along with phaser power increases, shields have increased as well. I don’t think we can take a few shots as any sort of basis for weaponry analysis from that episode. On the numbers vs. imagery thing… you’ll find a lot more of it in Star Trek, simply due to the much greater amounts of screen time it has, when compared ot Star Wars. I have to admit I can’t think of many problems like that in Star Wars… but it has ~10 hours of movie time, vs hundreds of hours in Trek. Unfortunately, while I had scenes in mind last time I posted, I don’t now. I’ll work on coming up with a few. > [@](#): > > In other words… the kinetic energy of the Enterprise ramming the Scimitar was on par with the Hiroshima bomb. > > That may sound like a lot, but remember… these are supposed to be ships that toss around weapons that are a thousand times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb. Yeah, but we’re talking about made up technology here, really. \ If you want to rely on hard numbers calculated for every single statistic, the Death Star is alternately better armored that a planet (since it could survive all the desbris of another planet hitting it, according to you), and yet takes gigantic amounts of damage from a mere 8-km ship smashing into it. My explanation is based on energy vs. an actual physical object. Think about how much energy is deflected away from anything. Whether a shield or a brick wall, 50% of the energy from a blast (from, say, a bomb) automatically goes off in the wrong direction. A lot of the rest is deflected. To me, it seems that an actual physical object would do far much more damage. For example, do you think a bomb with the energy of the jetliner that smashed into the Pentagon would tear all the way through the five rings? My gut instinct tells me that it wouldn’t do nearly as much damage. But, as you said, Nemesis was a little disappointing \. I’m just sort of making this stuff up from gut instinct anyway, so let’s return to more facts… > [@](#): > > Yeah, but remember, the shields were down at that point (and, no, it wasn’t just two A-wings that did it… “Concentrate all firepower on that Super Star Destroyer!”, Ackbar said. And, according the the novelization, it did). Oh, I never said it took down all the shields itself. But it did blow through the entire tower from sheer kinetic energy (to paraphrase you, the knife cuts both ways… compare this to the relatively minor damage done in Nemesis). Somehow design of warships in the Star Wars universe puts _everything_ at the bridge. If the bridge goes, the ship is helpless? Apparently the engines cut out as soon as the bridge was hit, and no one in an alternate bridge or engineering thought to turn them back on… I can’t think of anything else to explain why it was drawn down into the Death Star (II). Think about it. This was Darth Vader’s flagship, and the second most powerful (behind the Death Star) in the known galaxy. It had a good percentage of the best officers and crew on board. And the best officers in the entire Imperial navy were rendered helpless from losing their bridge? Nice to know that there’s such an easy way to destroy all Imperial ships. > [@](#): > > Half the surface? Nah, man, it obliterated the Executor, that’s for sure, but did you see the horizon line of the Death Star in the background? That 'twasn’t but a scratch on the massive station’s surface. However, secondary sources DO point out that some internal explosions were due to the Executor’s ramming… but, apparently, not nearly enough to destroy the Death Star’s main reactor. Okay, maybe I exaggerated just a little bit \. Still, that’s a heck of a lot of damage. Even if the Death Star hadn’t been destroyed, that may very well have put it out of commission. Horrible structural weaknesses there, no matter how well they patched it up. On the other hand, consider the tiny speed at which it was moving , comparatively. An asteroid hitting earth only needs to be 1 km in diamater to do loads of giantic damage. What would a full-fledged ramming effort do to a “small moon” from an 8-km long ship? > [@](#): > > Sure, it could possibly have been done, but the whole time the humongous number of capital-scale weaponry on the Death Star’s surface would have been pounding on the Rebel fleet… they’d have likely lost half their ships in such an engagement. Yeah, sure, but that’s a small price to pay for the destruction of the Death Star, right? Oh, here’s an idea too… apparently the Rebels aren’t any smarter than the Imperials. Why didn’t they simply move the fleet around to the _other_ side of the Death Star? All you have to do is match it’s rotation, and you’re immune from the superlaser. Sure, there’s the Star Destroyer fleet to worry about, but like I said earlier, all you have to do is knock out their bridges and they’ll fall into the Death Star \. And your own ships fall the same way for even more destruction! The rebels win either way! > [@](#): > > Hey, if my dick were a millimeter longer than yours, I’d go bragging about it every chance I got!! (Well, not really…) Sure, but on the scale we’re talking about, I don’t think you’d be able to measure differences that were that small. I mean, we’d be talking quarter-angstrom differences, not millimeter ones \. The parsec line doesn’t make sense no matter how you look at it. > [@](#): > > It’s possible, though the Empire’s kinda big on bragging rights, itself (do you really think Star Destroyers needed to be a mile long?). And, of course, the guys who designed the station needed to consider the possibility that there might be a situation where, after firing the superlaser, they couldn’t make a quick hyperjump out of the way. Remember, gravity disrupts hyperdrives… what if the planet they destroyed had a couple of moons? Such a thing could render their precious superlaser useless if the “backlash” could destroy the station, as well. Nah. You just run it at half power. Melt the planet instead of destroying it [grin]. Or take out the moons first or something. Really, I doubt that the thing would ever really be under a time constraint… “Damn it, Tarkin! We _have_ to destroy the planet by 1800 hours or the Emperor will have my heart for lunch! …What’s that? Oh, you want to gratuitously blow up their moons and make them quiver in fear for an hour or two? Well, I suppose the Emperor would see that as a reasonable use of time. Go ahead.” On a more serious note, judging by other shields in the Star Wars universe, you just can’t build them that powerful. A Super Star Destroyer’s shields (this ship was the pride of the fleet next to the Death Star, remember) get destroyed from a few minutes of concentrated fire? Compare this to the mass of an entire planet smacking into you, while super-hot and traveling with gigantic amounts of kinetic energy. Shields wouldn’t survive a second. > [@](#): > > Ah, hell, you accept the fact that they’re travelling faster than light, but beyond THAT you’re worried about relativity problems? Sorry, I should have been more specific. I don’t care about hyperdrive, or warp drive, or anything like that. It’s the sublight speeds _approaching_ light that I was concerned about. Crossing planetary systems in mere minutes means you’re going at a pretty high fraction of _c_. That’s really all I meant. It was in like that 1/4 speed-of-light impulse limit that I referred to earlier. Warp doesn’t matter, sublight does. > [@](#): > > One of my favorite jokes… in a few of the more craptacular episodes of Voyager, the 29th-century Feddies were protrayed as being near-omnipotent… and then disappear. Where were they BEFORE Voyager? There was plenty of time travel going on then. Where were they AFTER those few episodes? Nobody knows. And where, WHERE, did all that super-technology from Endgame go? Oh, you must be remembering the pre-timeline change episodes \. They don’t exist anymore. The new “old” episodes have time traveling 29th century people showing up too \. Rewatch them and you’ll see them everywhere! Oh, and while I’m at it… “These are not the droids you’re looking for. Move along.” Seriously, again it’s fiction. There are all sorts of conceivable reasons they didn’t show up before. By “conceivable,” I mean “ones that I can randomly generate if pressed,” of course. Besides, Star Wars has time travel too. With the New Star Wars Timeline, it wasn’t Yoda that taught Obi-Wan after all! \. Along with a host of other changes. > [@](#): > > It’s still quite odd, you have to admit. Here’s a technology which, if Future Janeway is to be believed, has ALREADY been tested and perfected… that can be installed on a ship, without the benefits of spacedock, in less than a week? I find it doubtful that, a year or so later, it’s utterly absent in Starfleet’s first-line warships. Just because you _can_ do something doesn’t mean you have to, remember. If your ships are already top-of-the-line and beat up everything else, maybe keeping that technoloy in reserve would be nice? Think about the Trek universe. Once someone has a technology, the other major races quickly follow. Transporters, cloaking devices, the works. If they deployed such technology on a widescale basis, a single traitorous captain could turn it over to someone else. Or a bribable starfleet engineer. But if they keep it locked up in the Starfleet Vault, they can deploy it when needed within a week or two, without worrying that someone else will take it. Oh, and on B5… I think that B5 and Trek fans (that don’t like both) have heated arguments because of a number of similarities between DS9 and B5. Both are based on a station, both have big wars, and so on and so fourth. I remember a few times when very similar episodes came out within weeks of each other, and insults were flung back and fourth about one side copying the other. And on the Planet Killer thing… true, we never see it fire. But on the other hand, we do know what it does. Reports reach B5 of Death Star-esque destruction of planets that the Vorlon Planet Killer reached. -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 28, 2003, 4:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348/103 "2003-01-28T04:14:11Z")
Well, the post did go through. I’m glad I didn’t try to repost. That’s enough of a gigantic text block without putting it in twice \. As a bit more on B5… I have no doubt that the Federation or the Empire could beat up on the entire B5 galaxy without much trouble, due to the comparative tech levels. On the other hand, the Vorlons could probably take on the Emperor and other force-users without much trouble on a one-on-one basis. On the third hand, a Vorlon fleet meeting an Empire fleet of equal size in open space… that would be a lot more of a tossup. Shields vs. really durable living ships that repair themselves, even from a point of near total-destruction. The Vorlons have the Empire well beat in terms of compact power. Their ships are far far smaller than the Empires, with equal power. On the fourth hand, unless they took out the Death Star right away, the Vorlon homeworld would quickly be a glowing pile of desbris. On the fifth hand, the Federation fleet might come in to ally with the Vorlons… \. I still think someone should make a general Scifi duke-it-out thread. -Psi Cop [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/federation-warships/149348.md?page=5)