Federation Warships

Cafe Society
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Back for round three <grin>. I’ll adopt your method of quote-and-response, I think. It’s loads easier to keep track of what point I’m responding to.

…and…

Well, let us consider a few points here. First, it’s a general torpedo weapon. Sure, it’s great against the Borg, but at the future timeline, the Dominion wars are only a few decades old, and I have no doubt that the Romulans and other races are still around. You want lots of firepower for anything, not just the Borg. Second of all, Picard knew about the weakness in the Borg ship from his experience as being part of the collective. Remember that Voyager was lost before First Contact. Since the other ships didn’t know where to concentrate their fire in First Contact, I doubt it would be in Voyager’s computers either. I suspect it’s more of a “feel” that Picard has, rather than a specific hard point that’s vulnerable. Third, the First Contact cube was already heavily damaged. Fourth, I don’t really think that saying “Those weapons were designed to combat the Borg only, they’d be useless against other things” is really the way to go <grin>. Remember that these universes have never encountered each other… those SW turbolasers might just sort of “splash” the Federation shields and not do anything else, if you want to take that viewpoint. Seriously, energy is energy, whether explosive or delivered via radiation.

Nah, I think he was talking about the future Enterprise from “All Good Things” parts one and two. And tweapon that tore through two fully shielded Klingon battle cruisers. In all fairness, that Enterprise was destroyed in the rift. Not to mention that the entire timeline it was based upon sort of “vanished.” It’s already very different. Still, it is a very nice weapon.

Hey, neither do I. Then again, I certainly don’t know about all the types of planets and all the types of weapons in the galaxy. Heck, maybe the 12% was on the other side of the planet. It’s called science fiction, emphasis on the fiction. Anyway, that’s what happened. You can’t just pick and choose which parts of the episodes to ignore and which to listen to <grin>. Or shall I start pointing out discrepencies in spoken words and seen scenes in Star Wars?

A series of small points, not bothering with the quotes…

On isotons, it’s “Treknobabble.” They made up a term. Someone just didn’t think that people would try to match the prefix iso- with something.

On ramming… dude, you’re talking about a ship longer and massier (so to speak) than the Enterprise D moving at another large ship, aceclerating by hundreds of meters per second. Think of surface area alone? That broad a face hitting another ship would easily cause all sorts of havoc. If you want to speak of ramming damage, shall I cite “Return of the Jedi?”

A single A-Wing (Or Y-wing, I’ve forgotten) rams the bridge of the super star destroyer. Not only does this tiny mass blow out the entire bridge through the “tower,” the super star destroyer starts getting pulled down into the Death Star. It’s moving really slowly, comparatively, when it hits the surface and, well, destroys half the surface. Heck, I don’t know why the rebels still went for the power core after that little disaster. And you’re complaining about the Enterprise moving so much faster towards a target a little bigger than it? Please. <grin>.

On the asteroid thing… I suggest we just abandon that. I’m getting different info from you on that picture, and besides, we already know the antimatter-matter reaction energy. That’s really the only point to the whole thing…

To you maybe, sure. Not to me <grin>. I have serious doubts about his true scientific method, so to speak.

Where did I mention hitting the core? I was talking about hitting the dish, and the beam emitters. The biggest gun in the world can’t do you any good if the muzzle is stopped up.

So it would take thousands of missiles to even begin digging into the surface of the death star? Impressive armor… or maybe that’s just pathetic weaponry?

[quote]
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.”

[quote]

The problem with quoting is that bits and pieces of what I’ve said are mixed. Maybe it’s partially my fault for not being clear enough, though. I was speaking of shots in passing at the beam emitters. That “jammed muzzle” theory again.

On the TIE squadrons… well, the number out there seemed adequate to me. I mean, you don’t send thousands of fighters out to take out a few squadrons. Their missed shots impact the station too, you know. And scratch the paint and so on. The number of TIEs out there seemed adequate to me, really.

Yeah, yeah. I’ve heard this several times. My thought is that Lucas didn’t know what he was talking about when he wrote the lines, and then made up an explanation afterwards. But, as pointed out, in the Star Wars universe, galaxies can be crossed in a day. A mere matter of a few parsecs shouldn’t matter more than a few minutes. Oh, and velocity is indeed a measure of both time and distance. Miles/hour or parsecs/minute, whatever you want. I fail to see how that matters in this case…

On the Aldaraan and Death Star thing… yes, I had forgotten it was still in the system. Oops. My mistake. On the other hand, the death star was well clear of the debris field when they arrived. Considering that moon-sized chunks of matter were flying out, I don’t think they could have maneuvered out with sublight speeds in the time between Obi-Wan sensing the disturbance, and arriving. I mean, even if it does have shields and armor, you don’t want your moon-sized station running into a chunk of moon-massed rock… let alone several of them. My guess is that they’d do a miniture hyperjump to get out of the way, into the outskirts of the system.

Just a random thought involving speeds, too… at the rate they travel, I have to wonder how many pairs of parents and children there are in the galaxy, in which the children are older than the parents. The distances they seem to travel at sublight speeds must give rise to horrendous relativity problems.

Why would the 29th century ones take it away? That technology was only from a few decades hence, after all. I have no doubt Starfleet is still busy studying the new technology and figuring out the best way to put it on new ships. After all, it’s still relatively untested stuff. Starfleet is already the baddest organization out in that range of the galaxy, so they don’t need to scramble to get new stuff on their ships. It’s one thing for Voyager to use it in desperation, it’s another thing to apply it haphazardly.

When the US Navy went to nuclear powered ships (carriers), they didn’t rip out the power plants of all the old ones. They took the new ships being built, and put nukes in them. Same with Starfleet I’d imagine. New generation will be designed for it, old generation can stay as they are. Besides, if it really does only take a week or two to fit, they can do it in time for any major conflict. Still no need to randomly go equipping ships with experimental weapons and armor when they’re not at war.

-Psi Cop

62

Oh, just as an aside, someone should start a general science fiction duke-it-out thread one of these days. As no doubt some people have noted from my username, I’m a B5 fan. I’d love to go pitting the Vorlons against the Borg against the Ringworld Engineers against the Empire against the… and so on.

-Psi Cop

63

Best. Thread. Ever. </cheerleader>

64

SAURON WILL KILL YOU ALL BASTARDS.

65

Wow. This is like arguing religion, you can yell till you’re blue in the face and, well, nothing happens.

This is not Dungeons and Dragons people, you cannot start throwing numbers around in a topic like this one!!! It’s 2 different universes!!

Do the Star Destroyers use laser cannon, because if they do, I believe that they would not be able to punch thru Fed shields. I remember in Conundrum that the Enterprise crew were surprised that their “enemies” were armed with laser cannon only as this tech was many years behind their own.

Cripes I have fallen into the trap and become one of you :smiley:

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…how about including some stuff from the anime side of things?

The SDF-1 from Robotech was possessed of a main weapon which could generate an energy blast that resulted in TOTAL DESTRUCTION of anything within it’s path (don’t have the max range numbers handy right now but as I recall the range was sufficient to allow for the destruction of several attacking ships in lunar orbit while the SDF-1 was resting on the Earth’s surface. Admitted that blast would then leave the ship all but powerless for several minutes afterwards while the ship’s systems recharged but as long as you hit your target with the first shot then that wouldn’t matter too much i guess.

And if you’re dealing with a larger group of more dispersed targets then the omni-directional barrier defense system could be brought into play (position self at the heart of the enemy fleet, turn on barrier system, watch as the enemy ships waste salvo after salvo on your shields until the barrier system has absorbed too much energy, overloads, and dumps all that energy (and then some!) back out into the surrounding attacking ships annihilating most and crippling the rest…)

Throw in the quite capable secondary weapon systems and point defense shields as well as a nifty space fold system for getting across the galaxy in one heck of a big hurry and you’ve got yourself one heck of a tough ship which would definitely be quite capable against anything from either the Star Wars or the Star Trek universe’s.
wolf189 (MY ship is cooler than YOUR ship)

67

So far, the only advantage ST ships have over SW that I feel certain of (based on direct visual evidence) is the ability of ST ships to quickly and drop in and out of warp at any time without any preperation or great stress on the ship even through unknown and unmapped territory.

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Oh yeah? Then why are each of the robots in the Berserker wargame about equal in hand-to-hand combat ability to a single human soldier?

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Hmm, maybe because the game designers were idjits? Since there’s nothing that I can recall about human soldiers engaging planet sized killing machines in any of the Bezerker stories I read.

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I’ll grant you that! I only found out about the Berserker wargame from the Murphy’s Rules collection:

“Flying Buffalo’s Berserker features a giant robot ship three times the size of Earth … It may contain a maximum of 18 robots, each of which is roughly equal to one man in hand-to-hand combat.”

The picture shows an enormous Artoo-Detoo-shaped robot cowering in fear as two ancient-Greek-looking soldiers armed with shields* and swords charge at it.

*) Not “shields” like in Star Trek, “shields” as in wooden discs strapped to the soldiers’ arms.

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That’s it, i’m uncrating the Gundums now!!!

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Actually, the X-Wing was a space-superiority fighter. The Y wing is also a fighter. Its more of a fighter-bomber, though. Given the environment, the difference betweeen a dedicated bomber and a fighter is more of concern of specialization than an absolute role. In any event, the Y-Wing was much older and rather out of date.

However, for the particular mission in “Star Wars”, the difference was academic. In any event, the rebels had so few fighters and ships available at that time they had little choice but to use them all.

Star Wars has these:
A-Wing -> Light Attack Fighter. USed for fast rading and slashing attacks.
B-Wing -> Heavy Fighter-Bomber. Used for pinpoint assaults on larger ships.
X-Wing -> Space Superiority Fighter. Crush your enemies.
Y-Wing -> Aging design, but still sturdy.

The Empire went with another philosophy. They used heavy ships that fighters couldn’t hit easily, at least not without taking down the shields first. (Notice that the A-Wing that took out the bridge of the Super Star Destroyer did so long after Ackbar ordered the Rebel fleet to fire upon it exclusively.) This meant they could use TIE fighters almost totally as fighter defense: they were counting on their big iron to kill capitol ships. Later Tie models matched the X-Wing for space superiority duty.

They can’t afford to be that specialized. They’d get blown away. Unlike the US of A, no one in Star Wars has the technological superiority capability to launch stealth pinpoint bombing missions. It simply isn’t an option for them.

Who could only engage several small, weak primitive civilizations by guerrilla tactics and deception. And their engineering sucks. Have you seen that peice of refuse the Shadows call warships.

In any event, this is the “technology level” myth. It does not matter how old, advanced, or cool it looks. the question is, “How well does it function?” In this case, how much energy is being imparted to the target, and in what time and what manner? The “advanced” Shadows and Vorlons have puny fleets and are easily defeated by a wise enemy with “inferior” technology.

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If we are talking of Robotech, those ships weren’t that fancy. It took 4 million Zentraedi ships to devastate Earth.

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I know that the topic has shifted somewhat, but in short term engagements, one would, in fact, expect space fighters to be “faster” (meaning higher accelerations) and more maneuverable than capitol ships, so carriers would be potentially useful.

The thrust produceable by a ship can be assumed to be approximately proportional to the area of engine nozzle (or equivalent) exposed on the outside, whereas the mass of a ship (assuming a fixed density) would be proportional to its volume. For structural integrity reasons, one would expect most ships to be approximately the same shape (approximately spherical). What this means is that while a large ship can mount more powerful engines, it’s more massive by an even greater amount. A 100 meter long fighter would have a maximum acceleration a hundred times greater than a 10 km long capital ship.

Of course, total fuel supply would be proportional to volume, as well, so a small fighter wouldn’t be very good for long missions, or for flying to the theater from home base. That’s why you want the carrier, to bring them along on the long haul.

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Your facts have no place in this discussion! :wink:

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Of course, the problem with the Empire building too many Death Stars is that the Vogon construction fleet would likely destroy a vast majority of them, just to make room for the hyperspace bypass …

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Actually, Star Wars uses laser blasters, which is a sublight energy packet wrapped around an explosive Tibanna gas core. So while ST shields might stop the laser, the explosive gas would still cause damage.

I blame SPOOFE for me knowing that.

78

One thing I never understood about the mealy mouthed Federation’s battle tactics is… they’re just not very creative. If I had to command, say, the Enterprise in battle I’d do things like use the transporter to teleport a golfball sized lump of antimatter onto the bridge of the ememy ship. There, battle over. Or even just transporting their bridge crew into space would do the trick.
And what about a Federation Special Forces unit? Why don’t they have that? The Star Trek universe has some pretty ruthless people in it, you’d think somebody would have thought of that somewhere along the way.

And what’s with those wimpy assed guns? Pathetic.

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I’m sure ** SPOOFE ** can answer this, but I’ve always been curious about one thing in ST. Why can’t they seem to hit the side of a barn? Seems to me you’ve got these turbolasers blasting away at the fighers, but not hitting a damn thing. Any kind of decent targeting system and computer should be, one shot - one hit.

Back to the OP about fighter carriers in space. IMO there won’t be any because fighters will be obsolete before we ever get to building one in space. Once we have a laser powerful enough to destroy a figher, fighters will be obsolete here on Earth. They’ve already worked on a system that tracks where your eye is looking and aims the weapon.

The only way fighters will survive is if they can absorb or redirect the laser.

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Shields in ST ships are made to BLOCK transporters specifically to prevent anyone from pulling that trick. It was stated in many episodes “We can’t beam you aboard with our shields up.” Even after battering a foe’s shields down you still have to lower your OWN shields and come well within weapons range to transport anthing aboard their ship, leaving you vulnerable to that same trick. Therefore, before attempting anything of the sort one has to totally disbale an enemy ship before one can board safely and by that time you don’t have to blow it up.