Strum Wealh, on 09 January 2012 - 10:04 PM, said:
I want back and looked - I did indeed miss the longer range reference, that's my fault.
(Also, it's "
Wealh" with no "t"; it's an old Celtic(/Proto-Germanic) word meaning "foreigner" and one of the etymoogical roots of my surname.
)
Also, for ST yields, we have:
So, the yield for ST weapons is given only in "
isotons", rather than in a standard unit?
What kind of energies are we talking about - megaton range or gigaton range?
Also, I too did some thinking on FTL combat - something I'll address later in this post...
Well, I had a nice post that just went away because Firefox crashed... (first time that's happened in a while). } : = 8 ( But here's the two-part post I wrote up to replace it:
In brief, Trek firepower yields tend to be in the range of high-TeraJoule to low-ExaJoule range, for conventional weapons. That's a pretty broad range, to be sure, though bear in mind that most of the low-TeraJoule range weapons are very old and usually fire more than one gun at a time (and even on most older ships, the old ball-turret style phasers have almost certainly been upgraded from single-emitter designs to multiple-emitter designs by the TNG era, so only the oldest/smallest/least-upgraded ships, and shuttles and the like, would have weapons with yields in those ranges). Typical weapon yields are in the mid-PetaJoule range, with smaller guns in the low-PetaJoule range and bigger guns in the high-PetaJoule range (and some really big guns breaching into the ExaJoule range). Ship sustained outputs are likely in the mid/high-PetaJoule range, and big salvoes (opening salvoes and the like) would be in the mid-PetaJoule to low-ExaJoule range, depending on ship size and age.
In terms of explosive yield, that's hundreds of kilotons for the lightest weapons, to a few gigatons for the biggest weapons and heaviest salvoes.
Trek shield/hull endurance would generally fall into the low-ExaJoule range, though smaller / older ships would fall into the mid/high-PetaJoule range.
It's also worth noting that Trek phasers and disruptors would likely have considerably higher effective yields against non-Trek targets, because of the amplifying effect of their NDF effect. Effective yields can easily go up a couple orders of magnitude or more against targets not hardened against the NDF effect.
Strum Wealh, on 09 January 2012 - 10:04 PM, said:
I included what information I could find regarding the ROF for the Andromeda's various weapon types in my previous post:
"I don't know the actual ROF of the AP cannons, but the graphic from the wiki shows several individual bolts in close proximity, so we can not-unreasonably assume that it is fairly high.
XMCs have 12 AP cannons.
That sounds reasonable - I would expect those types of weapons to have a high RoF. I also suspect that I underestimated their effective yields. If fired at compressed density, the shots would disperse a fair amount over distance, making them more of a blob than a pulse at long ranges, though the total mass of the shot would not decrease, just its concentration, though there is an upper limit to how massive they can be. They could easily be an order of magnitude or two above the 80 TJ per pulse I originally estimated.
Strum Wealh, on 09 January 2012 - 10:04 PM, said:
Likewise, I do not know the official ROF for the point-defense lasers (35-50 MW range (high end for an XMC), range of 4 light minutes), but the graphic from the wiki shows that it is fairly high.
XMCs have 12 PDLs.
Actually, we already have the maximum possible output of those lasers, 35-50 MegaWatts, if they just turned them on and left them on as continuous beams. The fact that they don't fire as continuous beams, but instead as pulses would put their actual sustained outputs to be notably less than that. These would be completely useless against even Trek shuttlecraft, and given other stated and estimated yields and outputs, I would be very surprised if they were useful as anything other than an AMS weapon in Andromeda.
It is worth noting, however, that they would also be useless as an AMS weapon against Trek torpedoes, which are shielded to withstand moderate- to high-powered phaser and disruptor shots. So XMC point-defenses would not be able to stop any Trek torpedoes from reaching the ship.
Strum Wealh, on 09 January 2012 - 10:04 PM, said:
The ELS have a stated ROF of 8 missiles per second, and the XMCs have 40 ELS launchers - a total ROF of 19,200 missiles per minute."
So, unfortunately, I do not know the canon ROF for either of the XMC energy weapons (though, from the linked gif, I would place the ROF of the PDLs at around 8-10 salvos per second).
We do know, however, that an XMC can launch a lot of missiles very quickly...
That is quite a few missiles... Now, I highly doubt that the Glorious Heritage class can sustain that maximum RoF for any notable length of time (ships can only carry so much ordnance at a time, after all), but still... That's a lot of missiles. By Comparison, Trek salvoes from single ships peak at a few dozen torpedoes for the most torp-heavy ships (the Galaxy can fire a maximum of 60 torpedoes from all launchers, the Nebula with the torpedo pod 50-60, the Nemesis-refit Sovereign 29, the Akira with a torpedo pod at 50, the New Orleans with three torpedo pods 30, the Steamrunner 20), with most cruisers typically being able to fire about a dozen or so torpedoes from all launchers, and most destroyers about half-a-dozen, with small frigates and out-dated ships like the Miranda able to fire 1-4 torpedoes from all launchers. RoF per minute would fall into the 10-180 torpedo range, depending on the ship.
Now, Trek torpedoes are a bit more powerful than Andromeda missiles - the M/AM payload of the older TNG-era photon torpedoes is approximately equal to the kinetic energy of an Andromeda missile, though this would be magnified up to 1.5 times by the Lorentz factor of their maximum sublight velocity (0.75c). Late-TNG photon torpedoes are 1.5 times more powerful than a single Andromeda missile in M/AM payload alone, and Quantum torpedoes are 6 times more powerful in payload alone (and most of that payload appears to be delivered to the target, 'shaped' by the torpedoes shields). That alone will partly make up for the RoF difference, though not by 2-3 orders of magnitude (at most one, if every Trek ship is equipped with Quantum torpedoes). More significantly, however, is the fact that Trek torpedoes are shielded, unlike Andromeda missiles, enough that they would be effectively invulnerable to Andromeda point-defenses, where as Trek ships, particularly newer Federation ships, would be able to shout down swaths of Andromeda missiles. Newer Federation ships especially, with their multi-emitter phaser arrays, would be able to shoot down dozens to hundreds of Andromeda missiles at a time (depending on the ship and the array, a phaser array can have dozens to thousands of emitters). Even at lower rates of fire, the XMC would probably be able to overwhelm the defenses of any single new Federation frigate or destroyer, or any of the Federation's older designs that still use the old ball-turret style phasers, and most of the ships of the other powers (disruptors only come in fixed- and turreted cannons, not faceted emitter arrays, so the are limited in how many small targets they can fire on at once, and how accurately they can do so, but they are generally simpler, and more powerful than their phaser counterparts), but the newer Federation cruisers and capital ships, with their big arrays, would be able to swat down dozens to hundreds of missiles at a time. If the XMC can sustain its RoF for any notable amount of time, I would expect that it could overwhelm even the newer Federation Light Cruisers, but very few missiles would slip past the phaser point-defense of the newer Federation Heavy Cruisers and Capital Ships (they can fire out to 2-300,000km with a fair degree of accuracy, and they can target in real-time with FTL sensors and prepare to fire well beyond that range).
Another important point to consider is how Trek and Andromeda sublight maneuverability and acceleration compares. Trek can reach accelerations up to a few thousand kilometers per second squared. If that is sufficiently high enough above the XMC's acceleration capabilities, Trek ships could close to short range fairly quickly, enduring only a brief bombardment period before they closed to too short a range for the XMCs missiles to be effective (presumably they have a minimum effective range required for post-launch acceleration). Though that really depends on the XMCs sublight acceleration capabilities.
How well can an XMC endure one of its own missiles? Are they kill-it-with-a-plague-of-locusts weapon or are AMS generally strong enough that swarms of are required to get just a few devastating missiles through?
Strum Wealh, on 09 January 2012 - 10:04 PM, said:
Unfortunately, the only canon number I've got readily available is the one regarding the sensor resolution.
Also, we know that the range is short enough that the Andromeda can be followed by another ship in real-space (the
Balance of Judgement; see "
Star-Crossed") as well as stealthily follow another ship in real-space (the
Eureka Maru; see "
Soon the Nearing Vortex").
However, I would think it not unreasonable that the sensor range (not including use of sensor drones or communications with other ships) is
at least equal to the maximum range of the maximum weapons range - approximately 8-10 light minutes.
I would also expect the sensors to have a very rapid "refresh rate"; this becomes another important factor in a moment...
As such, I would concede that ST likely has the advantage in overall sensor range... at least, in real-space.
From the sounds of it, Trek enjoys an obscene advantage over Andromeda in realspace sensor ranges. Several light
years compared to a few dozen light
minutes.
Another important point to consider is whether or not Andromeda has any kind of FTL sensor capability in realspace. If not, that's another major advantage Trek has, though it's up in the air as far as I can tell (which isn't much).
Strum Wealh, on 09 January 2012 - 10:04 PM, said:
Which leads to the question: how good are Federation sensors across dimensions?
That is, ships in warp are still in real-space (as opposed to a side dimension, a "true hyperspace"), and thus could be detected with relative ease (by looking for pockets of distorted space).
By contrast,
slipstream is such a side-dimension ("Slipstream is an extension of our reality, an additional dimension that's integrally intertwined with our own."), and a slipstream-capable ship would need to be able to see both slipstream and real-space (to avoid opening an exiting slip-point inside of a star, for example), necessitating both cross-dimension scanning and a rapid refresh rate on sensor data.
So, in theory a High Guard ship could see a Federation ship coming, even in warp (just in case the Federation ship in question were going to try something like the
Picard Maneuver), as well as target and track said Federation ship from slipstream (assuming it's in range, of course).
But, would a Federation ship be able to see/track a High Guard ship while it's in slipstream, or would it have to wait for said High Guard ship to exit slipstream (and thus pick up the exit slip-point or the ship itself)? If not, would Federation ships have to worry about High Guard ships executing their own variant of the Picard Maneuver?
Generally, it would seem that Trek ships can be seen by conventional ElectroMagnetic Radiation detectors while at warp. Their EM emissions are probably stretched and distorted and scrambled to some degree by their warp field, but at the very least, the EMR sensors on the XMCs should be able to see a Trek ship at warp, and get some kind of measurement of the emissions strength, however distorted that may be (resolution beyond that is hard to say). So they should at least be able to see a Trek ship in FTL, and get some idea of what kind of ship it is. How useful that would be would greatly depend on whether or not they have any kind of FTL sensor capabilities of their own while in realspace themselves. If not, then they wouldn't be able to detect the Trek ship until after it had already flown past them.
As for detecting things in slipstream... Slipstream sounds to be more or less the same thing as what Trek calls subspace, close enough to consider it to be the same thing. The ability of Trek sensors to detect things in subspace generally tends more towards hit than miss, especially when it comes to energitc and/or moving objects, especially later in the TNG era. Some things they have trouble detecting, like the Transwarp Conduit the E-D stumbled across in TNG "Descent", though that was a more or less stationary object not really doing much of anything except when triggered. Trek sensors can routinely detect and catalogue subspace anomalies, even at notable ranges (at least in areas they have decent sensor coverage of). I would say that it's fairly likely that Trek ships would be able to at least detect and track Andromeda ships at warp, and possibly get some idea of the power outputs of the ship based on the subspace/slipstream distortion, so much like Andromeda ships tracking Trek ships at FTL, Trek ships can probably see them and get some idea of what kind of ship, but not necessarily much more than that.
Presumably, Andromeda ships have SOME kind of FTL sensing capability, since they would need it while traveling at FTL. Do we have any idea of what capabilities these FTL sensors have? Are they even able to be used in realspace, or are they limited to slipspace usage?
Strum Wealh, on 09 January 2012 - 10:04 PM, said:
I was emphasizing depopulation of a planet to differentiate "planetary
depopulation" {orbital bombardment, to the point of a.) eliminating nearly all lifeforms on the planet in question as a direct result of the bombardment itself rather than its after-effects and b.) severely compromising or outright destroying the biosphere, such that anything not killed by the bombardment would find it very difficult to survive for very long thereafter} from "planetary
destruction" (compromising the physical integrity of a planet to the point where it can no longer maintain
hydrostatic equilibrium).
It apparently takes a single volley from 20 Federation ships to devastate and (most likely)
depopulate (but not
destroy) a planet.
Did all 20 ships have to fire at one point, or was their fire spread (more-or-less evenly) across the planet's surface? How big was this planet?
Will 20 volleys from a single Federation ship have the same effect? And how long would it take for a single Federation ship to deliver 20 volleys from the necessary weapon systems?
By contrast, a single XMC -
one High Guard ship - seeking to completely depopulate a presumably Earth-sized planet can do so in two minutes with its normal offensive armament...
Well, I doubt a single Trek ship can match the sheer salvo strength of an XMC, with its 19,000+ missiles-per-minute, so a single XMC can probably achieve a faster rate of depopulation purely because it can go ZOMGLOLMISSILES and pepper a planet with hundreds or thousands of Tsar Bombas all across its surface. Trek ships can't match that kind of weapon spread, not even a Galaxy or Negh'Var. I do expect that a Trek ship can significantly exceed the
sustained output of an XMC against a planet, however. Against unshielded planetary targets, which by nature cannot be hardened against NDF effects, Trek effective weapons yields for capital ships can easily jump into the ZetaJoule range. They won't be able to spread that kind of firepower all around the planet all at once, but they're hitting single locations with giga- to teratons worth of effective yield,
per shot. The XMC can certainly spread that kind of firepower all across a planet in a very short period of time, thanks to its ZOMGLOLMISSILE swarm, something that single Trek ships can't match, but single Trek ships can hit still hit with that much firepower in concentrated areas, and
maintain that firepower output.
In short, an XMC can spread its firepower across a planet much faster and much more easily than any single Trek ship, but most Trek ships can maintain that firepower level over a long period of time, and achieve more overall destruction.
Strum Wealh, on 09 January 2012 - 10:04 PM, said:
I would think that that depends on the actual numerical disparity - a 5-on-1 advantage probably wouldn't make that much of a difference, while 50-on-1 most likely would...
I think it really depends on the specific ships engaging the XMC than anything else. A single XMC could probably easily take out several Excelsiors and Mirandas in very short order, just with it's ZOMGLOLMISSILE swarm ability (even if it can only sustain it for a minute). However, I would expect a single Galaxy or Nebula class to be able to put up at least a solid match for the XMC. That ultimately depends on how many missiles the ship carries, and how long it can maintain its ZOMGMISSILE swarm ability, and how quickly the Trek ships could close to phaser range.
Strum Wealh, on 09 January 2012 - 10:04 PM, said:
Hence my focus on the pre-Fall High Guard: for most of the series (set ~300 years after the fall of the Commonwealth), the Andromeda herself effectively is the High Guard fleet, and I'm quite certain that, in the vast majority of instances, one ship - even one as formidable as the Andromeda Ascendant - cannot expect to take on all of Starfleet and emerge victorious.
Prior to the TNG era and the advent of the phaser array and SIF field, it just might have been able to. Partly because Starfleet was smaller in the 2200s/early 2300s, and partly because the XMC's ZOMGLOLMISSILE swarm would have ripped through fleets of Trek ships. With only ball-turret defenses, and without the Structural Integrity Fields that crompise so much of 24th Century Trek hull resistance (and weaker shields and weapons in general, to boot), any Trek fleet that could not close to short range and stay there would be ripped apart by the XMC's missiles. A large enough fleet could probably put up enough point-defense to stave off the missile swarm, but Starfleet was very dispersed back then and fleet sizes large enough to challenge an XMC with TMP-era ships (when the Type-A and Type-B Excelsiors were the biggest and badest ships in Starfleet) were not heard of until the Dominion War (especially since a good chunk of the fleet would have still been made up of TOS- and Pre-TOS-era ships).
Now, if a Trek ship could survive long enough to close into phaser range of the XMC, it may well be able to do significant damage, and if it could close to within transporter range and survive long enough to beam a torpedo into the XMC's reactor room, that would be the end of it, but it would not be something easy for Trek ships to do, not at sublight, anyway. If they engaged the XMC at warp speed, however, they would likely still be able to win, if the XMC stayed around to take the pounding.
TOS is the earliest that the Federation could have any realistic hope of defeating a single XMC class, and then only if the engaged it exclusively at FTL (and the XMC stayed around to take the pounding). Pre-TOS the ships are too weak and too few in number to be able to pose a serious threat to an XMC.
Strum Wealh, on 09 January 2012 - 10:04 PM, said:
As for the Commonwealth's "mainstay ships", I assume you mean their most common combat-capable ship? That would seem to be the
Righteous Fist of Heaven class "Deep Stand-off Attack Ship I" (together with the
Pride of Kaldera class "Group Defense Frigate").
The
XMCs and the
Siege Perilous class "Deep Stand-off Attack Ship II" (the successor to the
RFoH class) were relatively new designs, and so would not have been too numerous.
Interesting... From the looks of their missile armaments, it seems that anti-missile defenses are very significant, such that large swarms of missiles are required to get a few to penetrate... That puts the XMC's ZOMGLOLMISSILE swarm ability into a bit more reasonable perspective, especially given the listed yields for a number of their other weapons. That ZOMGLOLMISSILE swarm would be very brutal against Trek ships, which have insignificant anti-missile defenses because their torpedoes are shielded heavily enough to make them effectively impossible, or so impractical as to make it not worth attempting in most circumstances. Newer Federation ships would be able to hold out fairly well against them (and depending on how densely they cluster together, photon torpedoes might be useful in clearing out swaths of them in area-effect detonations), but all but the bigger and newer Federation cruisers and capital ships would be overwhelmed by them in single-ship combat (if engaged at sublight), and even a Galaxy or Nebula class would be hard-pressed to fend off the missile salvoes of a Siege Perilous class while engaging at sublight. They would probably be much easier to defeat at close range, however.
13
)
(our hypothetical Trek episode, not the awesome Stargate 200 reference)
