Ok, why does every space battle take place at ranges of a few hundred meters? I would imagine that battles would take place over very great distances.
And another question - why doesn’t Star Trek have designated ground-assault ships like the Sulako frim Aliens or the Roger Young from Starship Troopers? You know, a big troop/vehicle transporter outfitted with bulk transporters, dozens of shuttles and gunships, and maybe some guns for orbital bombardment?
Because it looks better on TV to have ships right next to each other shooting at each other, in stead of having ships shooting at barely-visible specks off in the distance.
Because Gene Roddenberry was a pacifistic weenie who didn’t want his enlightened Federation building weapons for anything other than self-defense. Which explains why the Federaion are such feebs when it comes to any serious military confrontation.
Yeah, but each of them looked like a dill pickle. How threatening can a squadron of 4 million pickles be?
“…Gene Roddenberry was a pacifistic weenie who didn’t want his enlightened Federation building weapons for anything other than self-defense.”
That right there explains practically every inadequacy in Starfleet’s offensive capabilities. Thanks to AndrewL, there’s no need for any more questions about why they can’t do this or that now. 
Still, the sdf-1 would kick the ship out of anything the Federation or the Evil Empire could assemble …
yah, okay, so it took 4 million Zentraedi warships to render the earth all but uninhabitable, but the SDF-1 then turned around and pretty much wiped that 4 million plus ship fleet out (the Grand Cannon took care of a few hundred thousand or so, and Breetai’s fleet was probably good for another few hundred thousand but the overwhelming majority were wiped out when the SDF-1 took out Dolza’s command center and the resulting barrier system chain reaction wiped out almost everything else in orbit.
wolf189
If we want to talk about planet destroyers, it only took nine highly mobile Species 8472 bioships a matter of ten to twenty seconds to fire on and completely destroy a Borg planet in Voyager’s Scorpion Pt 1. 
How ‘real’ space battles would be fought would, of course, depend on the technology used. Now, if we are going to go somewhat plausible and assume these battles are being fought after interplanetary travel is pretty common, we can probably figure on ships with constant boost engines capable of maintaining at least a good fraction of a G acceleration for long periods of time, and advanced guided missile weaponry - at the distances you are going to be fighting lightspeed delay is going to cause some problems for aiming at an erratically moving target - by the time your laser gets to him he’s somewhere else. Beam weapons would probably be used for interception of incoming missiles.
The advantage in a space battle with these kinds of ships is going to go to the ship that starts accelerating away from their target first. Even if the other guy can out-accelerate you there is still the advantage that the chaser has to predict where you are going, be ready to anticipate if you begin braking, and he has to deal with the fact that his target is always accelerating away from his projectiles, while he is forced to accelerate into the path of yours. An analogy would be chasing some guy up a hill while trying to roll bowling balls at him - since you have to roll the balls up the hill you have to put a lot more energy into them, and be able to anticipate your target’s path for the time it takes your missiles to catch up with him. The guy being chased can just roll the balls down the hill after the guy downhill from him.
Of course, you add warp drives, FTL effects, inertialess drives, and artificial gravity and who knows what it would be like.
Thanks to Chronos for bringing actual physics into this. I hadn’t actually thought of that before. If a Star Destroyer can keep up with the Falcon (one of the fastest ships in the galaxy), it says pretty poor things for the engines of the Star Wars universe. It’s that pesky square/cube law. The surface area may be squared, but the volume is cubed, and thus the weight. How can a kilometer long ship keep up with the Falcon going full speed? At least the TIE fighters could outrun it, which is logical.
You actually meant SW (Star Wars) not ST (Star Trek) here… but you did get the SPOOFE right (my apologies for not noticing your all-caps user name before, by the way). Frankly I don’t know how the heck their targeting is so bad. I mean, I can understand missing a small X-Wing going at breakneck speed, that seems logical enough (although a laser does travel at the speed of light, and there should be no need to lead the target at close range). But the opening scene of SW IV? They missed this big honkin’ target of a corvette over and over and over again. Sheesh.
Star Trek, on the other hand… they have decent targetting computers. I can only think of two occasions in Star Trek where a phaser missed the target (at least in TNG). First, when they fired a warning shot at a ship and missed purposely, and second in Nemesis, where the target was entirely cloaked, and they tried a general firing pattern. Note that this doesn’t apply to the Defiant pulse-phasers. But seeing as how the Enterprise, for example, is probably just a bit bigger than a Corvette (like in SW IV), they could just pace the Star Destroyer and destroy it at leisure while Imperial gunners missed it over and over and over again. Again, sheesh.
For Star Trek assault ships… why do they need them? The Federation doesn’t actually launch ground assaults of planets very often. Until the Dominion War, battles were almost exclusively fought between Starships in space. And I’d hardly call Roddenberry a “weenie.” TOS might not have been all that big on battle, but Roddenberry was also involved with the movies (every one except 4 and 5 involve battle), and TNG (also more battling).
Further concepts about Transporters… back in the days of Kirk, any sort of shield could block them, even the ship’s own shields being raised. By TNG, holes could be dropped in the shields to raise people, but it was still risky. By First Contact, a ship’s own transporters could penetrate their own shields to beam people over. But they still can’t beam over to another ship until the shields are all the way down. And if the shields are all the way down, all you have to do is fire a single torpedo at their warp core anyway to destroy it.
Oh, in terms of World Destroyers, I say that nothing beats the Vorlon Planet Killer. One shot, no more planet. And unlike the Death Star, it doesn’t have that pesky moon-mass to deal with. It isn’t as well armored or defended, of course, but when your ship is capable of blowing up planets, you can sort of go about your business at will.
By the way again, SPOOFE, notice how the Vorlon Planet Killer doesn’t need shields. That means that either it’s a heck of a lot tougher than the Death Star, or it’s firing range is many many many times greater. I don’t know how much you’ve watched of B5 (if any), but I’d say it’s a heck of a lot tougher, judging from how close it got to Centauri Prime in preperation for firing in season 4 (Episode 4, 5, or 6, I believe). It just left again in a hurry, needed at Coriana Six, big time.
-Psi Cop
What? Cite? Specific scene? I think you’re mistaken here.
Crap. Right after I posted that, I recalled at least one instance of transporting through shields on DS9. But that was Section 31 technology wasn’t it?
o’brien can beam through shields, they target holes in the shields used for scanning. he did it on TNG and DS9 (most notably to get on the enterprise in the tribble episode)
Whoa, I wondered where this thread went (maybe someday I’ll learn the subtle nuances involved in the mysterious “Page 2”…). Anyway, dealing with Fugazi’s question first before movin’ on to Psicop…
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.
The other scene that shows anti-fighter weaponry was the Falcon’s attack by four TIE fighters, and, well, they didn’t use any computer guidance for that. The EU (Expanded Universe… novels and such) explanation is either, A: Han doesn’t trust artificial intelligences on his ship, or B: can’t afford it or can’t maintain it.
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.
Now, Psi Cop… (don’t worry about the username, man, I don’t care :D)…
This is true. On the other hand, we have witnessed the Feds trying to come up with Borg-specialized weaponry before… namely, the Defiant class of starships. They were originally designed specifically to fight the Borg (supposedly)… it was just coincidence that it worked equally well against the Dominion. Supposedly.
Remember, the Transphasic Torps were brought back from the future (in a Dolorean, t’boot!). When they were originally developed, it would supposedly be from a time period where there’d be plenty of knowledge on the Borg… and the Future Janeway would presumably know (unless Alzheimers hasn’t been cured by the 24th century) that anti-Borg weaponry would be needed.
Of course, none of this constitutes proof, I admit.
I agree. I concede the point.
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.
Feel free. We get a problem of visuals vs. dialogue numerous times throughout Star Trek’s run. Another example is in Yesterday’s Enterprise, where one character says something like “The Klingon ship is 500 kilometers away”, but in the very next scene it shows the ship at less than one kilometer away. The problem is in trying to resolve the two… in that episode, a resolution is difficult to arrive at, so it’s essentially an arbitrary decision on how to choose which is correct.
HOWEVER, in The Die is Cast, we do have a solution. After the bombardment on the part of the Romulans, they later discover that a Dominion device is sending the Romulan fleet false sensor readings (to make it seem like an uninhabited planet is covered with Founders). The explanation to explain the discrepancy between visuals and dialogue is that the dialogue is wrong, because the false sensor readings also involve false damage readings. A flimsy explanation, in my opinion, but, frankly, it reconciles the problem quite handily, and has the episode jive with the rest of the series (you think Pegasus was the only episode that showed the Enterprise having trouble blowing up asteroids? :)).
I agree. And besides, the DS9 tech manual says that one isoton is equivalent to something like 2.6 megatons, or somesuch (don’t hold me to that. The exact number eludes me. But it’s less than 10, I remember that).
I’m not big on math, but someone else did some calculations (the OP to this thread on a much nerdier message board than this one… yeah, Mike Wong’s message board), and, assuming a mass of 3.5 billion kilograms on the part of the Enterprise-E, its kinetic energy was 7,778,000,000,000 joules (7.778 terajoules). To put things into perspective, one megaton of energy is equivalent to 4 terajoules (4,000,000,000,000,000 joules). 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.
Of course, by all accounts, Nemesis sucked, so we’ll ignore it if you ignore The Phantom Menace. Fair 'nuff?
(In all seriousness… one explanation for that scene was that the Scorpion had lowered its shields to allow Picard to beam over, which was what Shinzon wanted. A little odd, and the scene still demonstrates some oddities - such as poor propulsion - but it explains the discrepancy quite well.)
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).
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.
Here’s an analogy: Think of a paper cut… a tiny lesion caused by a thin, weak, flimsy material, won’t stand any chance of killing you, and is barely noticeable… yet it still hurts like the dickens. Same with the Executor ramming… it did superficial damage which only affected the surface. Constant bombardment from the Rebel fleet would have only resulted in similar (though wider-scale) superficial damage. 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.
Feel free to mention them. I hardly worship the man, but he definitely has a strong grasp of the physics involved.
Y’know, I’ve never thought about it. Perhaps the individual emitters had their own mini-shields? Perhaps the emitters were hardened against the energy they were spitting out? Or maybe there just wasn’t any clear, easy-access corridor to fly down from to be relatively free of enemy fire (only two guns down their in the trench, though lord knows why, and lord knows why the friggin’ trench was built in the first place…).
Or maybe Lucas just didn’t think it’d be cool. Remember, Independence Day didn’t come out 'til two decades later.
Careful, there. Once we start down that dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny… In other words, that knife cuts both ways.
But, really… the whole nerd community (of which I am proud to be part of) has this covered. They start by trying to figure out how powerful the weapons are, and then figure out the boring crap like shields and armor from there. If you want me to get into details, I will, but for now I’ll just say that, similar to the Pegasus incident mentioned above, there are scenes (in Empire) where we see their weapons blowing up asteroids… and some people have derived weapons calculations from there.
Then there’s EU publications, which, in some cases, give quite clear, definitive statistics on weapon strengths.
Well, WE all know that Lucas couldn’t tell a tater-tot from a tauntaun… and I think the infamous “parsec” explanation was made up by someone else. I’m just pointing out that such things are explained, as it is…
Hey, if my dick were a millimeter longer than yours, I’d go bragging about it every chance I got!! (Well, not really…)
I guess the Kessel Run wasn’t so much a measure of speed - just pump a few more fictional joules of starwarsium energy into the hyperdrive - so much as it is a measure of balls.
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.
Ah, hell, you accept the fact that they’re travelling faster than light, but beyond THAT you’re worried about relativity problems?
Well… two points. One: Supposedly, travel in hyperspace magically eliminates such a relativity problem (don’t ask me how, it’s magic! Or the technological equivalent…), and two: Supposedly (and this is a more tenuous source), there’s some technobabble “dilation shields” in Star Wars ships, to prevent them from worrying about such relativity problems in realspace.
Of course, my theory is much more elegant… simply that you run into time dilation when you’re at or approaching the speed of light… if you’re travelling much slower or much faster, you encounter no such problems. Then again, seeing as how nobody’s travelled faster than light, it could also be possible that going faster than C could make time run backwards…
BUT, as you so aptly pointed out, it’s fiction. It’s allowed it’s magical technology, so long as it remains internally consistent.
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?
Up Berman and Braga’s asses, I imagine.
(Yeah, I’m pissed at them for ruining Star Trek, too.)
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.
Heck, I can bring up all sorts of magic-technology that is used for one episode as a deus ex machina but then never seen again… like all the times they “channel energy through the main deflector”. Why don’t they just accept what that thing is and change its name to “UberMegaCannon of DOOM”?
(Yeah, that’s another of my pet peeves with Star Trek…)
Correction: One megaton of energy is equivalent to 4 exajoules (an exajoule is a thousand petajoules, which is a thousand terajoules, which is a thousand gigajoules… etc. etc.)
…admit, SPOOFE, your just playing with these guys, aren’t you!!!
The only problem is that they were always coming up with “secret codes” or “new technology” which instantly made their foes shields useless.
And if they are going faster than you can see? In any event, SW fighters can have shields. ANd I think you underestimate the power needed to actually destroy a fighter plane. Remember, it has to actually deliver enough power to a spot or strip along the plane. Since the plane is traveling so fast, it will have to be a bloody powerful weapn. Proably not cost-efficient.
Of course it was. However, we have a fact to be explained and a logical explanation which has been written into the canon of Star Wars - and created an interesting plot point.
Acrtually, we never see what it does. We do find out it kills planets, but never how or to what degree it does.
Banquet Bear…
If you mean “You’re not making your posts nearly as long or full of pointless nerd information as you could,” then yes… I’m enjoying a low-key, casual debate that doesn’t involve insults being flung back and forth (man, some Star Wars vs. Star Trek debates get REALLY heated!)
Smiling Bandit…
I believe it happened maybe three or four times in the course of the three most recent series. I think only one of them involved a Federation ship.
However, those episodes, in my opinion, are counter-balanced by other instances in which a Federation ship would encounter a species that didn’t have transporters, didn’t know about transporters, and thus couldn’t “specifically design” their shields to block transporters, but their shields blocked transporters anyway.
I believe there’s a list out there somewhere of how many things - natural and man-made - actually made transporters impossible. Some things were like “minor atmospheric disturbance” and “background radiation not strong enough to be harmful to humans”.
True… one of the better plot points that Kevin J. Anderson came up with.
Well, that’s a whole 'nother argument (and, in my experience, Fivers get far more vicious and bloodthirsty about their series than either Trekkies or Warsies… :)).
Nuts to that! One blast from the Death Star (either of them), and the SDF-1 would be a radioactive plasma cloud. The SDF-1’s magical “backlash barrier system” would never be able to absorb even 1/100th the energy that the Death Star’s superlaser could deliver.
Unicron would just eat the Death Star before it could turn around!! And then Rodimus Prime would open up the matrix!
Autobots, roll out!!!
You could argue that they were trying to just barely miss it. Rember, they wanted to capture the the ship alive, to find out if the stolen Death Star plans were alive. A direct hit wouldn’t have left anything but flaming wreckage to search. They were trying to disable the ship without destroying it - a much harder job.