His pattern indicates two dimensional thinking.
Whatever happens, the artificial gravity will work - whoever built that system should have built the rest of the ship too.
And they must always dump the losers into the Core Ejection System Maintenance Department because that thing is always off line.
“Serpentine! Serpentine!”
Why do they always have to reverse the polarity? If reversing it makes it so much better, why not just make that the default polarity?
Or use alternating polarity. Everything would work half time or would it be half strength? :dubious:
Edison and Westinghouse had an ongoing argument concerning reversing polarity vs. alternating polarity.
I think we’re talking about two different types of defense. One type is detecting the attack and moving out of its way. The other type is an ongoing series of random course changes; these don’t require a ship to know where the attack is coming from or even is an attack is being made. And because they’re random, they can’t be predicted by an enemy ship, no matter hos good its computer is.
It is possible to design a weapon that will steer itself to the target. We can do it now so they could certainly do it in Star Trek times.
The problem is it isn’t cheap and it’s unlikely it ever will be cheap. Consider the RIM-66 - it’s a surface to air missile designed to be shot at an enemy aircraft. It can detect the aircraft and alter its own course to home in on it.
These are really basic surface to air missile. They’re Vietnam War era technology. They have a relatively limited range and can’t shoot down other missiles.
And they still cost three million dollars apiece.
This is why if you go on the most modern warship in the Navy, you’ll find they still have what are essentially big machine guns that fire a bunch of bullets.
I don’t imagine the numbers are going to change in the future. Doesn’t matter if it’s the Enterprise or the Galactica or the Executor, it’s probably going to have a handful of really sophisticated and expensive guided weapons and a bunch of cheaper weapons that work on the point and shoot principle.
That’s misleading; the unit cost on a regular old SM-2 is a lot less than 3 million bucks- that’s the price for the new SM-6 variant.
Plus, while they still have the 5" guns, it’s really unlikely that they’ll ever be used in an AA role with any effect. That’s the sort of thing that they’d do if they were totally out of missiles and had enemy aircraft bearing down on them. Similarly, they’re unlikely to actually engage surface warships with the gun- their max range is well inside just about any anti-ship missile range out there.
It’s that there are times when having a gun can be useful, but that time isn’t in modern naval surface-air or surface-surface warfare. It’s for sinking lesser vessels and land bombardment primarily.
Actually, I underestimated the cost. I was only using the purchase cost and not including annual upkeep and other related costs.
The annual cost per missile of an SM-2: $8,200,000
The annual cost per missile of an SM-6: $8,500,000
These are Department of Defense figures (see page 34): http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/Reading_Room/Selected_Acquisition_Reports/15-F-0540_SM-6_SAR_Dec_2014.PDF
You do realize that the table you’re referring to is delineated in thousands, not millions?
“Annual O&S Costs BY2004 $K”
On page 33, it says:
Sounds to me like there’s a nominal cost in keeping the rust off the launchers and making sure everything’s connected and talking, but hardly 8 million per year, per missile, especially with each Burke class destroyer potentially carrying 96 of the things.
The problem is that computers don’t do random. At best, they do pseudorandom, which relies on an entropy source. That means their “random” maneuvers are potentially predictable after some observation, if the enemy computer is good enough to figure out what generation algorithm they’re using. Worse, as the entropy pool runs dry, the output gets more and more predictable. Thus, my comment on crew-initiated evasive maneuvers being an entropy source. In essence, the computer is still better, up to a point, but the crew can make it less predictable by doing something “stupid” (from the point of view of the tactical computers).
Again, the computer is already presumably handling the kind of evasive maneuvers you’re talking about. This discussion is about additional evasive maneuvers manually initiated by the crew.
A photon torpedo is a stripped-down warp drive in a shell loaded with antimatter. Most SF torpedoes have nuclear warheads, at minimum. I think the added cost of basic homing circuitry is probably a trivial part of the total, especially in a civilization with replicator tech.
Naval ships are a bit different from space ships as they have to deal with targets that travel in different medium at different speeds.
The RIM-66 is good for fast aircraft and missiles while the 5" gun you linked to is better for other ships, shore targets and slow moving aircraft. This big machine gun that fires a bunch of bullets provides a last minute defense against missiles and aircraft. This big missileis good for far away stationary targets while this oneis good for other ships.
It’s not really clear to me why fictional space ships need missiles or torpedoes (or why they would even be useful weapons) when they have limitless energy weapons that are just as destructive. There’s no horizon to shoot beyond and the enemy ship’s beam weapons should be able to knock any incoming projectiles out of the sky.
You’re right. I was reading the article off a small screen and I mistook the decimal point for a comma. My mistake.
So I’ve checked around some more. I found this site which states the unit costs of the Standard group of missiles:
Standard SM-1 ER: $409,000
Standard SM-1 MR: $402,000
Standard SM-2 Block II: $421,000
Standard SM-2 Block III: $421,000
Standard SM-2 Block IIIA: $750,000
Standard SM-2 Block IIIB: $2.7 million
Standard SM-3 Block IA: $10.0 million
Standard SM-6 Block I: $5.6 million
Some of the rising costs are just reflections of inflation. The SM-1 MR was put into service in 1970. $409,000 in 1970 dollars is the equivalent of $2,540,000 in 2016 dollars. cite
It depends on the setting. In some settings, like Trek and Alan Dean Foster’s Commonwealth, the missiles are FTL and pack a bigger punch than beam weapons. Trek ships also seem to generally have more torpedo tubes than phaser emitters. Commonwealth stingships only have a single missile launcher, IIRC–the missiles are so effective that they don’t really need anything else. Babylon 5 mostly seems to have conventional homing missiles used in large spreads, which might have area denial uses, since it’s hard to avoid/intercept all of them. Schlock Mercenary has smart (though not very) missiles that can be spread through a potential battlespace, waiting to “wake up” at an opportune moment, and meanwhile providing a long-range sensor array. (Also, if the target doesn’t have a denial field up, the missiles can be teleported inside an enemy ship.)
So, sometimes they make sense. It depends on the tech and the tactical situation.
“Set course 87 degrees east, at 400 feet AGL, and make revolutions for 14 knots!”
Meanwhile, on the alien ship, “Maybe we should have brought more than two torpedoes…”
If your target is FTL, your beam weapons can’t get to him.
I wonder what happens if you fire your beam weapons while traveling FTL.