You guys are great at designing the sort of terrifying battleships which are sure to strike into the heart into the federation’s enemies.
Nothing screams “diplomacy” or “establishing peaceful relations with other worlds” or “scientific research and exploration” or “humanitarian mission” like:
[ul][li]Naming the ship The USS Exterminator[/li][li]“Oh and screw the treaty and give me a cloaking device”[/li][li]“Torpedo tube that face every direction. Or torpedo like they made in VI that will track an enemy vessel”[/li][li]“Yes, more weapons… Four torpedo launchers in the front. Two in the back. At least 5 laser cannons on the saucer. A few more randomly placed around the ship. That way you just fire them one after another and achieve rapid fire.” [/li][li]“Barbs, spikes, head of your enemies nailed to the hull. Well maybe not the last one. The ship should look as intimidating as possible. That way you don’t even need to bother with shields or weapon. The other guys take one look at you and think: “Uh oh.” followed by them running away.”[/li][li]“The Exterminator will be capable of simultaneously engaging fifty or a hundred targets”[/li][li]“OK, so how about we use the same technology to “beam up” a chunk of our opponent’s hull? Except we skip the part about moving the energy to us and re-converting it. Klingons go boom, and we didn’t even need to pay for the bomb”[/ul][/li]This list could go on forever… I just think you guys are missing the whole “enlightened, humanist vision of a better future” thing
Anyone else besides me think Geordi’s just suicidal, and wants to take the whole ship with him? The guy can keep any system running, repair any problem (eventually), keep the ship at peak efficiency. Why can’t he keep the ship’s most fundamental safety system operating? If the ship is so badly designed that this system doesn’t have multiple redundancies, it should never have left dock in the first place.
“Warp Core ejection system is offline” was practically his catchphrase throughout the series. When he finally did it in Insurrection, I felt like clapping
I thought that the “inertial dampers” would eliminate the need for seatbelts. When they were working, that is. Obviously the Reliability Engineers at Utopia Planitia forgot to file a FMECA at their critical design review.
And I think you’d still need the holodeck to woo the dainty Troi. If being an uber-engineer gave you amazing seducive powers, I’d be Hugh Hefner (which I AIN’T)…Timmy
One thing I’ve never understood is the lack of Kinetic Energy Weapons. Let’s take a couple of the Iowa’s 16" guns and mount them on the Exterminator.
One minor modification to make, of course, but well within Star Trek technology.
Instead of gunpowder, we use anti-matter as the propellant. This should help us get the round up to about .75c.
I figure a 2700lb round moving at close to lightspeed is going to be pretty hard for anything to stop. It would probably have a decent chance of going through a Borg cube.
Shields might deflect the round if it comes in at a shallow angle, but I doubt they could actually stop a direct hit. If so, lets see how well the shields work at stopping the round after we add an anti-matter warhead into the equation.
Also, it would be the perfect weapon for planetary bombardment.
With the advances in AI in by then, pulling the trigger on a phaser would have it automatically locate the enemy and aim itself.
Or failing that, you’d aim the phaser and shoot. If you hit your target, you press the ‘retarget’ button, and after that the phaser will aim itself. You can point it anywhere in the general direction, and it’ll find the same target and shoot it again. And if there are two enemies, after you’ve targeted each one, the phaser will start rapid-fire shooting at each one.
There WAS an episode of Star Trek where Scotty was in Jeffries tube somewhere in the arm connecting the nacelles, as I recall. Does no one remember this? It was a race against time, and Spock gave Scotty the time he needed, because he trusted he’d manage to do it or something. Scott kept yelling at Spock to jettison, and Spock just told him to get on with the job. Kirk wasn’t there, so something tells me it might have been “The Tholian Web”, or that episode where Kirk was Kirok and married the Native chick.
How practical would it be to put holoemmiters everywhere in the ship? Think about it - the ship gets boarded. Boarding party is greeted by psychedelic colors of nauseating intensity, fake passageways (think ‘painted hole’ that Roadrunner used to fool Coyote) and about a thousand Starfleet HoloDukes to confuse them. The party’d scorch the walls a lot and get really frustrated while the real Starfleet officers pick them off.
Hey, I like it. Though we might end up having to rename the ship “U.S.S. Leary.”
Ranchoth
(They named a canon starship after Hernando-friggin-Cortez, I don’t see why they couldn’t name one after an old hippie)
Yeah, but the recoil would suck. You’d have to put a lot of power in the inertial dampeners, or maybe even use a modified warp shell or something. You might be better off upgrading the photon torpedoes.
The Exterminator needs to have fighter drones - take a shuttle, give it a combat AI, fill up with weapons and shields, repeat. As a last resort they can ram the enemy ship and overload their engines.
Finally, make some goddamn environment suits available. I’ve seen them in the movies, but never in the shows that I can recall.
Railguns, my friend. Railguns. I’m sure the Federation should be able to mount a few on their ships.
Well, we know that the Enterprise-D can withstand at least five or six Photon torpedoes. Assuming they were fully loaded - that is, equipped with 1.5 kilograms of anti-matter (and equivalent amount of matter), that’s a grand total of 384 megatons of energy that they can stave off (and I’m being conservative). Let’s say 500 megatons just to keep things simple.
Now, assuming that the projectile you wanna launch weighs one kilogram, and is moving at 99/100’s of the speed of light, that gives you an energy of about 550 quadrillion joules (550,000,000,000,000,000, or 5.50E17). Since there’s 1E15 joules per megaton, that comes out to be about 550 megatons of damage… one kilogram chunk of metal would be able to knock out the shields of a Galaxy-class ship.
'Course, I probably got a good chunk of my math wrong (I’m going mostly from memory), and it’d be pretty hard to get that slug going at .99 C, but hey… it’s better than trading Phaser fire for ten minutes without dealing a scratch to the enemy.
Whew! I’m relieved no one’s still talking about taking out the holodeck. The discussion has turned to putting projectors all over the ship for deceptive operations against hostile boarders.
But to me, it means the chance to boink Counselor Troi:
in the captain’s chair. (come look at the Captain’s Log.)
bent over the engineering console. (Cap’n, I cannae hold her!)
in the crew lounge. (Come here often?)
in the brig. (ooh, you’re a BAD boy!)
in the sick bay (I AM the doctor of love!)
Of course, only when the ship is in dock and the crew on leave…
Ok I would have the holodeck not to boff Troi but to boff 3 Trois, a couple of Beverlys, Grace Kelly, 4 Yars and for a while after
Wes left his seat on the bridge was the rotating babe chair and there was this one with short brown hair who I’m pretty sure was on the Scotty episode, that one I’ll like half a dozen. Hammish how about;
Lots of extra sensor arrays and a bigger geology lab.
Oh wait we have no idea how big the geology lab was on any of the Enterprises becasue we never saw those. For all the talk about the enlighten humanist future they sure got into a lot of fights.
More microscopes for eveyone!
That’s because Star Trek is/was a prime-time television show and battles=ratings.
The writers were pretty good, though, at hinting that most of the time, the Enterprise’s missions were pretty routine, almost dull. But would you watch an episode about diligent scientific research? Or honest negotiation of a trade treaty?
IIRC, one of the reasons the first pilot for TOS was rejected was because it was “too cerebral.” And so in the second pilot, Kirk gets in a fist fight. They had to write in pointless violence every episode to satisfy Paramount.
If we’re going to be redesigning the weapons systems, instead of going for massive firepower, let’s go for pinpoint accuracy, and work on some sort of shield-piercing technology. Let’s get something that can knock out enemy weapons and engines without endangering their ship.
Otherwise, I’d like to add one suggestion – a larger medical facility and more doctors. Crusher and Nurse Ogawa seemed to be responsible for the lives of about 1000 crew, even in times of war, and even during emergency evacuations.
Well this thread is certainly getting interesting. One thing that always bother me about the job is how they manage the battle scenes. I know they are “peace loving”… so am I but I am certainly not stupid.:
Land battle: I remember a DS9 episode in which the fleet has to keep a position from falling in the dominion power. Several thinks bothered me about this episode:
Weponry: The best we see is a couple of rifles and mines. What about artillery, tanks, etc. I imagine that someone can put a shield in an M-80. I am sure one would have slaughtered the enemies. Also grenades, bazookas, etc. I am sure the Quarter master of the fleet as more in his armory than a couple of phasers.
Tactics: If the planet was surrounded by a dominion fleet the federation didn’t have a chance, and viceversa. Also with the help of transporter technology clausewitz editor would have to rewrite his book. They can have more imaginative tactics.
Concerning the whole show:
Why can’t you destroy a torpedoe with your laser beams? they surely seem to be pretty slow, with the computer power of an starship, targeting wouldn’t be a problem. It’s a shame that those ships does not have point defense technology. As many have pointed before starships should have massive stockpile of weapons (mines, torpedoes, missiles, phasers, plasma cannons, etc) then a battle would be more interesting. Imagine dozens of torpedos launched against a ship, the defenses take many out the rest impact against the shield. Battles would be more real in that way.
Combat uniforms: pressuriesed suits, completely armored and perhaps (like in foundation books) with shields. They can have light, medium and heavily armored troops. Again it would make more sense.
Different kinds of ship: Exploration and scientific vessels (like enterprise) kind like a general porpouse vessel. Also troops transport (improve trasnport technology, for example), battleships, defense ships, etc.
I think they missed a hell of chance when they created the show to make battle more realistic. I mean regarding cloak technology. I would have made a cloak ship similar to a submarine. For example when cloaked a ship can only use passive sensors, if they go active they can be located and destroyed easily. In the show all of this is poorly done. The cloaked ship always know the exact status of the uncloked one.
I have more ideas but they are more geeked than this ones.
In the book “Ship of the Line” they got hostile Klingons to chase Riker into the holodeck, he jumped out of the way and Scotty immediately started a program that could not be shut down of a chicken farm-50,000 chickens, and for every one the Klingons killed, the computer created 2 more. They then locked the door.
Has the Enterprise had to deal with multiple small armed targets? Fighters, in other words? And about using the holodeck, why not pop a bunch of holonasties down to where ever invaders are, or even down to a planet, with the safety features turned off so they can do some real damage? Some of the guys from Worf’s training scenario? (Who was that skull-faced guy, anyway?) Or a couple Gorn?
Federation Marines, specializing in small units tactics and small arms (the best guy at the ship’s weapons is not necessary the best guy with a rifle, otherwise whoever aims the cruise missles would be the baddest mofos in the military).
Make a shuttle that is designed for reentry and suboribital flight, where it acts as a flying APC/gunship.
When on the ground and cut off from orbital support (which would be rare, standing protocol calls for surgical orbital bombardment followed by marines to secure and occupy a planet), the marines have special equipment. firstly, scramblers to preven transpot within their perimeter, which extends far beyond any force fields/shields they would also set up. Heavy artillery. A two man crew should be able to work a ICBM by now. Automated gun turrets that kill everything that enters the perimeter without an encoded transciever (and even then, sometimes).
And yes armor, maybe even active camoflage. not necessary a personal cloaking field, just something that blends into the environment, like a cameleon.
Well, considering the full title is Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, there are similarities to Star Trek. The space fights are similar to your description, they actually reference “point defense systems” in the show. Not to hijack, but more info found here: http://www.andromedatv.com/homepage.html
