1189 replies to this topic

[Ghost Dragon]

Longsword, on 01 March 2012 - 06:33 AM, said:

I doubt the trekkies would be able to come up with the technology to defeat warp entities in a reasonable timeframe, especially with daemons bursting out of the warp on every single world.

I don't think Daemons would explode out of the warp on every single world, just because we've crossed the universes over, but neither do I buy that "because subspace" the Federation would be able to artificially create shielding quickly. Subspace critters are one thing, and the Feds have a lot of experience with subspace tech. They don't have that same basis for a potential daemonic incursion. The Warp isn't subspace!

The geometry of a ship can cause it to become a beacon for daemons, or some fibrillation of its engines can cause the gellar field to collapse for example, and thats simply not something that will become immediately clear.

Having super-advanced tech doesn't exactly translate to being able to stop daemonic incursion, the Necron Codex has a short piece of text that describes Daemons versus "superscience"

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Strange Sciences
Necrons were ever masters of transcendent physics, pocket dimensions and hyper-geometry, and these sciences are put to full effect whenever they can serve useful function. Many Tomb Worlds and strongholds are far more vast within than they might appear from the outside, or are protected by energy labyrinths of impossible size. Some specialised troops, notably Deathmarks, regularly employ pocket dimensions as vantage points from which to hunt their foes, and the more accomplished nemesors can conceal entire armies and fleets in slivers of out-of-phase reality. Yet, as confounding as these techniques might be to the other races of the galaxy, there is one enemy against whom they are no defence,. To the Daemons of the Warp, such technological conjurings are merely another flavour of existence to be corrupted and devoured.

Catamount, on 01 March 2012 - 07:59 AM, said:

Which is why I'm far less harsh on the 40k universe, than I am on the Wars universe, in which philsophies almost as questionable actually are celebrated, to the point that Lucas practically states the real world should work that way (mister "democracy is stupid and inefficual"; the ideal form of government is a 'benevolent dictator', because that's how one 'gets things done'").

I'm less harsh still because 40k is a game universe, originally intended as a parody of normal Warhammer, iirc, not something that was meant to be fleshed out into an actual fiction.

Democracy IS often stupid and ineffectual, having a benevolent dictator who was competent enough to get the job done without abuses would be awesome and great.

Its just not particularly likely, nor is it, if you'll excuse the pun, democratic. I don't really think SW pushes some terrible philosophy inasmuch as its a space opera....

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Nevertheless, the Imperium is petty and evil, and okay, so maybe the writers identify them as such, but why is no one in the 40k universe in any way virtuous? Does it not speak to how the writers view humanity (or sentient life in general) that in the face of great adversity, NOT ONE SINGLE, SOLITARY RACE rose to the occasion and met these challenges by doing anything besides becoming as bad as the chaos they're supposed to defend from?


You see, either way, the writers are making a statement here, and it's one that basically holds contempt for sentient life, portraying them as incapable of reacting to adversity with any kind of virtue.

I don't think I can particularly agree that the Imperium as a whole is "petty". The word has connotations beyond a narrow viewpoint that simply don't apply. Its also not true that no one is virtuous. The morality of individuals can be seperate from the edifice they support or endure. Many "virtuous" characters are described, an entire spectrum of individual philosophies and attitudes are present across the setting, as you'd expect from a universe populated by multiple alien races, some of whom are wholly devoid of recognisable human context, as well as various civilisations.

It would seem unlikely you can describe every race, never mind the different factions of a race , with the phrase "as bad as chaos"

Eldar Exodites come to mind, as the Craftworlders obviously have the issue of occasionally sacrificing humans to save Eldar, and I'm really not going to bother with the Dark Eldar in this context. The Tau are often mentioned in this sort of scenario as well, although their gleaming image is tarnished a little by the harsh realities of the 40k universe. You cannot sensibly preach that all races can accept the greater good when Orks and Tyranids exist.

Humanity "rose to the challenge" in some respects. The Interex forged alliances with alien races, particularly the Kinebrach and Eldar, and existed without, as far as we know, indulging in obvious brutality. They contained the insectoids of Murder rather than annihilating them, made peace with and absorbed the Chaos using Kinebrach etc.

The fact that they are destroyed by the Imperium in a misunderstanding wrought by one of the architects of the Heresy stealing something isn't supposed to be a judgement on their strategy, its again supposed to be a tragedy. A missed
chance on the road to damnation.

"Reacting with virtue" in the face of such damnation and oppression is one of the ways you portray heroism in a tormented and oppressive setting like 40k. Men struggling to be their best in the face of a grim universe. You can't castigate the setting for not being star trek when it was never supposed to be!

Edited by Ghost Dragon, 01 March 2012 - 08:56 AM.

[Catamount]

Ghost Dragon, on 01 March 2012 - 08:04 AM, said:

I don't think Daemons would explode out of the warp on every single world, just because we've crossed the universes over, but neither do I buy that "because subspace" the Federation would be able to artificially create shielding quickly. Subspace critters are one thing, and the Feds have a lot of experience with subspace tech. They don't have that same basis for a potential daemonic incursion. The Warp isn't subspace!

Since neither subspace, nor the warp, exist, you have no basis to say how much the warp and subspace do have in common. They're simply extradimensional realms that behave similarly in many regards at a fundemental level, sufficiently that earlier in the thread, we all generally agreed to merge all such extradimensional realms for the sake of consideration, since almost every franchise has one. So generally, this discussion has been taking place on the assumption that the warp is subspace, for all intents and purposes.

Even if you disagree with the position, subspace isn't the only extradimensional realm the federation has dealt with (fluidic space is another, and the Equinox aliens were not stated to come from subspace either).


Look, this is what Star Trek is about: they encounter a problem, then they use Trek science to figure their way through it, because that's what they do: explore. Within the Trek universe, this is simply the nature of the powers of civilizations: they look at problems and solve them.

If you don't like the fact that that's a capability of Trek races, within the Trek storyline, to be able to look at pretty much any problem, and solve it through investigation and exploration, well, tough. That's the story.

I might as well say "I don't like the Imperium potentially having quadrillions of people, so when they meet the Federation, I don't buy that they really do". They do, because that's the story.


It's one thing if the story directly contradicts itself such as stating that their torpedoes are nuclear weapons, but then claiming larger nuclear warheads are in those torpedoes than the torpedoes themselves, but outside of that, I grant the Imperium whatever they canonincally can do (and I discount any capability in Trek that simply doesn't work, such as infinite speed ships, again, another concoction of Voyager, or if you want to go by VFX, the capability of the Defiant to spontaneously change size, the work of a single incompetent VFX person, but still, technically canonical). Insofar as solving exotic threats through investigation, and very quickly coming up with solutions, however, the Federation simply has that capability, in abundance.

Because it's the nature of the Trek universe for all problems to be solveable this way, that basically being what Trek is about (exploring and learning new things, and overcoming obstacles through those means), and because the Federation has done this with one exotic tech, after anoter, after another, there is no reason to beleive they'd have no capability to do the same with the warp, especially given the similarity to numerous different problems that they've had no trouble with, whatsoever.

Edited by Catamount, 01 March 2012 - 08:32 AM.

[Victor Morson]

I love BattleTech but no way it's anywhere near a top contender here. It's a society filled with scarcity, it takes months upon months to travel anywhere and ships must spend weeks moving to and from stars and it's weapons are insanely weak compared to the others. It's definitely not up to the other sci-fi universes, but that's what I like about it. This isn't a pick your favorite.

I'm going to have to go for Star Trek. Star Trek is the oppisate of the BTU; BattleTech is all about equipment scarcity, while Star Trek is post-scarcity. They can replicate equipment and parts so fast, they can outbuild the other factions. As mentioned they can fight at FTL speeds, zip across the universe in very short spans of time comparitively and feature technologies like transporters that the majority of other universe can't match. I don't get why so many people vote Star Wars for these factors; weapon power numbers alone don't mean much.

Also one last factor. You're saying Star Trek, but assuming just humans. Maybe Humans + Allies. But what of all the other races that make this question into a complete joke? Outside of obvious stuff like The Borg, you've got races in Trek that can blink entire fleets out of existence or wipe them from time entirely for a laugh. I still think they're the winners based on that presumption but once you involve the Prophets or Q, GG everyone else.

[Victor Morson]

Catamount, on 01 March 2012 - 07:59 AM, said:

NOT ONE SINGLE, SOLITARY RACE rose to the occasion and met these challenges by doing anything besides becoming as bad as the chaos they're supposed to defend from?

The Tau. The only halfway goodguys in 40k.

[Ghost Dragon]

Catamount, on 01 March 2012 - 08:28 AM, said:

Since neither subspace, nor the warp, exist, you have no basis to say how much the warp and subspace do have in common. They're simply extradimensional realms that behave similarly in many regards at a fundemental level, sufficiently that earlier in the thread, we all generally agreed to merge all such extradimensional realms for the sake of consideration, since almost every franchise has one. So generally, this discussion has been taking place on the assumption that the warp is subspace, for all intents and purposes.

Even if you disagree with the position, subspace isn't the only extradimensional realm the federation has dealt with (fluidic space is another, and the Equinox aliens were not stated to come from subspace either).

When indulging in suspension of disbelief, I don't consider it a problem for there to be two extradimensional realms with varying features. If we are crossing these two universes over, its would seem pointless to simply "merge" two selected dimensions when as you say, trek has more than one on its own. Similarly in 40k there is more than just the warp and reality. Necrons access multiple other dimensions using their own technology, as have other races, things like the Mandrake Shadow realm, the Eldar Webway, Slaught FTL etc.

Assuming that they are the same "just because" is pointless, and leads to an argument where you are asking me to prove that they aren't the same. I don't have to. If you wish to make the argument that the Warp and the subspace are the same thing, you need to do with more than "some stuff is thematically similar".

When you start debating with such broad strokes, whats to stop me suggesting that because in 40k the "hyper science" of the Necrons can't adequately defend against the Daemons of the Warp, and the Necrons DO seek out techological solutions to their enemies capabilities, then its not likely the Federation can manage it?

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Look, this is what Star Trek is about: they encounter a problem, then they use Trek science to figure their way through it, because that's what they do: explore. Within the Trek universe, this is simply the nature of the powers of civilizations: they look at problems and solve them.

If you don't like the fact that that's a capability of Trek races, within the Trek storyline, to be able to look at pretty much any problem, and solve it through investigation and exploration, well, tough. That's the story.

Look, this is what 40k is about: blah blah, Grim Dark future, stuff can't saved, Laughing Gods, You Will Not be Missed. If you don't like the fact that this is a thematic underpinning of 40k, within the storyline, well, tough.

Thats the story.

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I might as well say "I don't like the Imperium potentially having quadrillions of people, so when they meet the Federation, I don't buy that they really do". They do, because that's the story.

Nonsense, you're advocating things like "because trek technobabbles in a story, anything can be done" as opposed to quantifiable number we can make a sensible argument for.

I'm not going to accept, "but treknobabble" as justification for anything you feel like inventing, its ludicrous and lazy.

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It's one thing if the story directly contradicts itself such as stating that their torpedoes are nuclear weapons, but then claiming larger nuclear warheads are in those torpedoes than the torpedoes themselves, but outside of that, I grant the Imperium whatever they canonincally can do (and I discount any capability in Trek that simply doesn't work, such as infinite speed ships, again, another concoction of Voyager, or if you want to go by VFX, the capability of the Defiant to spontaneously change size, the work of a single incompetent VFX person, but still, technically canonical). Insofar as solving exotic threats through investigation, and very quickly coming up with solutions, however, the Federation simply has that capability, in abundance.

I'm not really sure what the "torpedoes, nuclear weapons, larger warheads" bit is all about, so you'll have to be a little clearer. The capability of the Defiant to change size is an obvious outlier that we don't need to worry about. Any argument that even mentions it as a feasible quality of federation starships "because its canon" can be dismissed on the grounds of being specious and intellectually dishonest.

You're trying to define the plot of Trek shows as some sort of quantifiable capability. Its a characteristic of the Federation that its Starfleet officers attempt to use innovative technological solutions to resolve problems they come up against, although I think that focusing on that rather misses the diplomatic aspect of many trek episodes.

This isn't an eternal well of plenty that you can come back to for any issue in a theoretical situation such as this, and its a fallacious to attempt such.

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Because it's the nature of the Trek universe for all problems to be solveable this way, that basically being what Trek is about (exploring and learning new things, and overcoming obstacles through those means), and because the Federation has done this with one exotic tech, after anoter, after another, there is no reason to beleive they'd have no capability to do the same with the warp, especially given the similarity to numerous different problems that they've had no trouble with, whatsoever.

And what if its "the nature of X universe" that all problems "aren't" solveable this way? Arguments like this imply that the trek ships bring with them a bubble of their own reality that ignores the context of any cross over, in favour of the Trek thematic aesthetic. Why mess around trying to argue like that instead of arguing with what you can prove.

Because make no mistake, you can't "prove" that they can come up with a solution to a galactic scale warp incursion, as the other poster suggested, or even that they'll easily come up with a counter to "anything warp related".

Heck, I could just quote that "strange sciences" bit where it says "daemons laugh off technology, and view it as just another thing of reality to warp and corrupt"

Its the same sort of open ended "THEMES" argument as your own.

[Catamount]

Ghost Dragon, on 01 March 2012 - 09:29 AM, said:

Look, this is what 40k is about: blah blah, Grim Dark future, stuff can't saved, Laughing Gods, You Will Not be Missed. If you don't like the fact that this is a thematic underpinning of 40k, within the storyline, well, tough.

That might almost be a clever retort, except that the only one who seems to be taking exception with the nature of stories, in terms of the impact on a vs debate is you. I fully grant 40k's power every aspect of their universe at their disposal.



Beyond that, you seem to be dancing around the issue here, and carrying a double standard, at that.


No, I can't prove that X fictional universe can affect A aspect of Y fictional universe, since neither universe seems to exist, nor can you prove that they couldn't.

The only thing we know is that Trek deals with threats of this sort all the time, and has never had trouble, across multiple phenomena of this type. The warp is just another dimension, one of numerous such dimensions that either universe has, and Trek shows the capability to insulate against or to manipulate extradimensional realms. I think that's more than reasonable evidence that the Federation would likely be able to come up with defenses against the warp.


Also, you seem to be operating under the faulty assumption that any crossover would automatically default to 40k rules. Why would it? Trek ships aren't going to carry a "bubble" of their own reality, and I never suggested as much, but likewise, the universe will not operate on all 40k rules. In the Trek universe, the warp simply doesn't exist in any fashion, or if it does, does not affect normal space. Why would a crossover spontaneously change that for teh Trek universe? That's no more likely than contact with the Trek universe spontaneously, de-existing the warp in the 40k universe.

So it's a double standard to suggest that Trek is automatically bound by 40k rules to begin with, certainly if the reverse isn't true.

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I'm not really sure what the "torpedoes, nuclear weapons, larger warheads" bit is all about, so you'll have to be a little clearer.

It was outlined and discussed earlier in the thread.

Edited by Catamount, 01 March 2012 - 10:24 AM.

[Ghost Dragon]

Catamount, on 01 March 2012 - 10:22 AM, said:

That might almost be a clever retort, except that the only one who seems to be taking exception with the nature of stories, in terms of the impact on a vs debate is you. I fully grant 40k's power every aspect of their universe at their disposal.

Beyond that, you seem to be dancing around the issue here, and carrying a double standard, at that.

No, I can't prove that X fictional universe can affect A aspect of Y fictional universe, since neither universe seems to exist, nor can you prove that they couldn't.

The only thing we know is that Trek deals with threats of this sort all the time, and has never had trouble, across multiple phenomena of this type. The warp is just another dimension, one of numerous such dimensions that either universe has, and Trek shows the capability to insulate against or to manipulate extradimensional realms. I think that's more than reasonable evidence that the Federation would likely be able to come up with defenses against the warp.

Also, you seem to be operating under the faulty assumption that any crossover would automatically default to 40k rules. Why would it? Trek ships aren't going to carry a "bubble" of their own reality, and I never suggested as much, but likewise, the universe will not operate on all 40k rules. In the Trek universe, the warp simply doesn't exist in any fashion, or if it does, does not affect normal space. Why would a crossover spontaneously change that for teh Trek universe? That's no more likely than contact with the Trek universe spontaneously, de-existing the warp in the 40k universe.

So it's a double standard to suggest that Trek is automatically bound by 40k rules to begin with, certainly if the reverse isn't true.
It was outlined and discussed earlier in the thread.

I'd be interesting in seeing if you could actually quote the section of my reply that said "trek should be crippled in some fashion"

Note, I don't consider the ability to say, without qualification, that trek can invent a defence against an entirely foreign set of physics quickly and easily because "subspace is sorta maybe like the warp...somewhat", and Trek has defended against some aliens from Subspace, to be a vital lynchpin of Trek that I've somehow removed. Its wishful thinking on your part that we should just assume it to be the case devoid reasoning beyond "something something extradimensional, detective work , PLOT THEMES"

I'm hardly dancing around the issue, I'm addressing directly what appears to be a blind spot you've got. I'm happy to look practically at things, and attempt to define situations in terms of physics etc, its our only real way of comparing things. I'm not willing to wave my hands and say, without qualification " Trek or 40k will be able to do XYZ because its vaguely similar to something"

Obviously if we take the attitude of "its all fiction, so nothing can be proved ever" then we aren't going to get anywhere, and I'll note you're the fellow that keeps bringing this up, not me. However if you say something like " trek will adapt quickly and easily to daemons invading everywhere" then the burden of proof is pretty solidly on your shoulders.

Its nice you've agreed with someone that subspace and the warp should be treated the same, but you don't make a very convincing argument for it. Why merge subspace and the warp, and not the Webway and fluidic space? etc

Why merge anything at all, why not have it simply be a dimension not accessed by either side at any point? I'm sure Trek at some point didn't know of the existence of subspace, similarly 40k the Warp.

Whilst this does upset your pet argument, i.e "feds build shields for anything because detective stories are good" , its a little more rational and objective than simply assuming as you have done. Don't get me wrong, I'm not insisting on incompatible physical laws, otherwise we could just witter about how one side dissolves into pink bubbles. I'm saying that both sides have knowledge of physics that the other side doesn't, and we assume this is the case when we cross them both over.

I'd also take issue with the idea that "trek never has trouble", I mean, isn't the plot of the voyager ep with Sub-space aliens invading that they are penetrating the shielding erected to prevent them from killing everybody? Sure, a solution is found, but its found using existing, mature technology. The advent of subspace didn't just happen overnight.

Without "trouble" Trek would entirely lack suspense or dramatic tension, and thats simply not the case, as the Voyager ep shows.

I cannot fathom what part of my post led you to believe that I was advocating "40k rules", I was trying to point out that your approach was doing exactly the same thing for trek, assuming that Trek themes "beat" some contrasting theme from another setting.

Its basically a case study in why arguing for "themes" and "plot" as opposed to objective analysis is utterly daft.

With regards to the "nuclear torpedoes" issue. Its a big thread, as far as I've been able to glean, you don't think that the Space Hulk torpedoes are an acceptable reference for the potential firepower of weaponry in 40k, based on russian nuclear weapons.

This seems entirely daft.


I think the bit I'm quoting below is you as well, I accidentally replied to it when commenting on something odd the illlith Dragon poster was saying.

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Besides, even if it were a battle between your preposterous "let's just throw logic to the wind" torpedoes, and TDiC level firepower, the very fact that an Imperium vessel would never be able to strike a Federation starship with any kind of weapon (almost certainly not at sublight speed, and most certainly not at FTL), renders a minor firepower advantage, one that's questionable at best given 40k's apparently inability to ever display the slightest bit of consistency, moot.

I don't quite understand how you reconcile throwing out torpedoes because you don't think science fiction should be able to achieve something we can't, and you know....Star Trek.

Why wouldn't an Imperium vessel be able to hit a Federation starship with any kind of weapon? Federation vessels routinely engage in visual range combat for a start. Imperial weaponry can hit targets at tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of kilometers, and they use a variety of weaponry, from high velocity Macro-cannons to lightspeed particle beams and lasers.

Whilst they can't hit them at FTL speeds, its not like the Federation starships can shoot at a target that isn't at warp either. Nor will they be able to shoot the Imperial ships whilst they are in FTL.

I find comments on the consistency of 40k laughable when the context is Star Trek!

Edited by Ghost Dragon, 01 March 2012 - 11:14 AM.

[Catamount]

Going back further:

Ghost Dragon, on 01 March 2012 - 03:53 AM, said:

40k ships primary power generators are plasma reactors. Plasma power generation isn't fusion power. Plasma torps and fusion torpedos are different weapons. Secondary reactors and power generation systems are also present in 40k ships ranging from bonfires to "plasma dynamo's" and blokes on bicycles!

Plasma power can use anything as fuel, its been described as "high energy plasma annihilation" and 40k plasma technology produces "self sustaining plasma storms" with some cyclonic torpedo systems. Its not fusion power.

That the word plasma is used does not mean the power source is not fusion. All nuclear fusion schemes for power that we've ever conceived of use plasma.

Beyond that, it's kind of hard to infer anything, because it seems either nonsensical, or just not enough to infer anything (which isn't your fault, if you're just quoting the lore, but creates the same problem just the same).

Plasma doesn't cause annihilation, either. Plasma is just a word for ionized gas, and ionizing something doesn't cause annhilation. If it was something like anti-matter, you don't have to ionize it for annihilation. There is also nothing that can really be inferred from the fact that it can "use anything for fuel". That in itself doesn't apply to any process we know anything about, and could therefore quantify.

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If forcefields were simulating the effect of bullets, i.e. a projectile that physically smashes things, penetrates etc, then what is the functional difference?

I thought that was made clear, perhaps not.

Forcefields aren't bound by the power limitations of a traditional bullet. Whereas bullets tend to top out in energy at a few kilojoules (upward of 20 for the .50BMG), there's nothing that limits how much velocity you can bore through an object with using a holodeck, besides the amount of energy the ship could input (and ships generate a lot more than kilojoule-level power, even on auxiliary power). What else would limit it?

It's a fictional bullet; the holodeck could have given it the energetic properties of any projective desired, in theory, again, the only known limitation being how much power is available to the holodeck from the ship. If you want to be a little more creative, a ship could really kill something with forcefields in all sorts of ways. Why not just have a forcefield start inside the drone, and then just expand outward? Or start around it and crush it by shrinking? It's a holodeck; it's not bound by the actual properties of the object it's imitating if one doesn't want it to be. It would just theoretically be limited to the energy input from the ship.

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Do we know that a "properly equipped" Trek soldier is equipped to survive the attentions of the proposed "upper outputs"? We see Jem'hadar, Klingon boarding troops, and they aren't equipped with bullet proof armour, shields etc.

Trek is inconsistent on this point. So if it's only displayed sometimes, do you assume races possess it, or not? It's been seen on screen, so clearly they do. Laziness by the storywriters and budget limitations of the VFX crew at some points don't change that. You're also exaggerating the number of contrary instances. The Jem'Hadar have never been shown to use them (okay, no surprise, they're quick to produce, and thrown away en masse). However, there really aren't that many instances where we've seen well-equipped boarding parties in TNG era Trek in total in the first place. In TMP, ship's security always wears such armor (again, bigger VFX budgets), but outside of that, we haven't seen that many major threats in the first place.

I'm not saying it excuses the inconsistency, because it shouldn't be there at all. But we just don't see that many kinds of combat operations in the first place during the era in question.

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While we are at it, they don't open proceedings with vast death ray blasts disintigrating huge volumes either.

Not true, we see phasers cavalierly vaporize people all the time. It makes little sense to do, most of the time, since that's a drain on the power of a phaser you may need to continue to use; phasers are rarely fired at maximum setting. However, it's clearly established time and time and time again that said setting vaporizes (read: magically makes go away) vast sums of matter.

The various settings are listed in the TNG TM; phasers are lethal at setting 6 of 16. Why always fire at maximum. It's also noted that personal shield penetration is listed in some of those settings as well, yet again referencing the fact that the technology exists.

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Trek body armour stopping any bullet "40k" fires seems a wholly ridiculous statement to make, given the existence of bolter rounds, high caliber sniper rifles, railguns, monomolecular rounds etc.

You know, listing the names of nonexistant nonsense weapons doesn't make an argument

If you want to suggest that these weapons are powerful, you have to give us some information on them that backs that assertion.

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Armour cannot defend universally against all things

No, but armor can defend against most things. Many franchises feature general personal shielding or armor, and all they have to do is block heat and kinetic energy (and NDF, if it's against Trek weapons).

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and the one Trek guy in DS9 we see with something that vaguely resembles armour (mr injured trooper fighting klingons) wasn't wearing anything that screamed "I can take full auto machine gun fire)

I'm pretty sure the armor didn't scream anything, since it didn't speak, but let's see what we can infer:

1.) It must block, to some degree, Trek weaponry (otherwise he wouldn't be wearing it)

2.) Trek weaponry is clearly more powerful than "machine gun fire" in terms of energetic output, being shown to have maximum outputs at least in the low gigajoules.

3.) As per 1 and 2, energetically, a machine gun should not penetrate said armor.

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He also didn't have an energy shield.

Since he wasn't being struck by weaponry, or otherwise in any form of combat, you have no idea whether he was equipped with a shield. It hardly makes sense to always have one on. It's a waste of power, and potentially hinders interaction with objects outside of combat that aren't already in the shield. Further, iirc, the armor was severely damaged anyways.

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Some things, like Gauss Flayers or Wraith Cannon , both carried by "infantry", if souless robots, and robots powered by souls can be called infantry, can ignore shields, blast through material regardless of material properties, or simply suck someone into the Warp.

We have no idea how that would affect Trek shields/armor, but presumably there's a fair probability that that would circumvent unmodified Trek shields.

Of course, Trek has dealt with that kind of threat too. Dominion weaponry ignored Federation shielding; that one actually took the Federation a little bit to figure out a defense to.

The part about penetrating material, however, is unlikely. It's vastly more likely that it simply has the energy sufficient to easily penetrate the particular materials it affects (unless it just circumvents normal space altogether, in which case, I'll grant that).

Edited by Catamount, 01 March 2012 - 11:36 AM.

[Catamount]

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The Imperium of Man might be the biggest coherent civilisation in 40k, but the Necrons, Eldar, Chaotics, Tyranids and Orks are its "peers". Any one race would be a significant, apocalyptic threat in Trek, outnumbering and outgunning most Trek polities on their own.

That depends on just what kind of energetic outputs their technology is capable of, something that seems less-than-easy to determine definitively.

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I don't quite understand how you reconcile throwing out torpedoes because you don't think science fiction should be able to achieve something we can't, and you know....Star Trek.

At no point was this the reasoning behind any statement.

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Why wouldn't an Imperium vessel be able to hit a Federation starship with any kind of weapon? Federation vessels routinely engage in visual range combat for a start. Imperial weaponry can hit targets at tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of kilometers, and they use a variety of weaponry, from high velocity Macro-cannons to lightspeed particle beams and lasers.

This HAS been covered already, as you admitted your post might be, so I'll just summarize.

There's little advantage in sustained, long range combat for Trek ships. It confers an advantage on neither. However, long weapon ranges have been both stated and observed. Standard range for Voyager's torpedoes was 8 million kilometers, more at FTL, of course (something else that's been covered). Other weapons vary in maximum effective range, from hundreds of thousands of km, out to low millions.

Ilithi made a post earlier with many instances of said ranges.

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Whilst they can't hit them at FTL speeds, its not like the Federation starships can shoot at a target that isn't at warp either. Nor will they be able to shoot the Imperial ships whilst they are in FTL.

The first part is just patently not true. Torpedoes launched at FTL sustain the ship's warp field. Those sustainers have to remain active to keep the torpedo in FTL. So clearly you can exit FTL with torpedoes; you just don't continue running the sustainers.

Phasers can be fired at FTL, but their range is such that it's ineffectual usually, since you'd enter and leave phaser range in a fraction of a second. FTL torpedo runs do not suffer this limitation, however.

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I find comments on the consistency of 40k laughable when the context is Star Trek!

Trek has its inconsistencies, but overall no worse than a typical franchise, and 90% of that is just in Voyager.

Ghost Dragon, on 01 March 2012 - 11:09 AM, said:

With regards to the "nuclear torpedoes" issue. Its a big thread, as far as I've been able to glean, you don't think that the Space Hulk torpedoes are an acceptable reference for the potential firepower of weaponry in 40k, based on russian nuclear weapons.

This seems entirely daft.

"seems entirely daft" isn't an argument.

Unless you can suggest even a hypothetical means for a nuclear fusion weapon to specifically exceed the capabilities of nuclear fusion in terms of energy density, the argument is perfectly valid, unless you have a narrowly tailored reason as to why that should be considered invalid. Nuclear fusion doesn't spontaneously change as a process just because a weapon isn't Russian, afterall, as I'm sure you know.

You seem to agree that real-world rules are a constraint here. Things must at least behave logically (eg: Trek doesn't have infinite speed ships, and the Defiant doesn't magically shift sizes). Assigning an attribute to a process (nuclear fusion) that it necessarily does not possess, does not fit into that, hence, I have no idea how to treat it, but it's not with uncritical acceptance. It's the same standard we've used to discuss treatment of multiple franchises, from EVE to Wars.


The rest of your post I can't say I disagree enough with to take the time to quibble over, not at this time, in any case.


EDIT: Pending more time, there is one quibble: If 40k rules aren't defaulted to, then why would Trek have to deal with the warp? Within the confines of the 40k universe, sure, I would expect that, but within the confines of our galaxy, where the warp never affected Trek races before, should we not expect that it wouldn't after encountering the Imperium?

Of course, then you run into all sorts of trouble. There's no "warp" in Trek, and no "subspace" in either, so do we just assume both spawn in the others' universe? Do we assume neither works in the other's universe (which means whatever race invaded would instantly lose FTL capability)?

That's part of why we just assumed equivalance between them, and not just in Trek/40k. Neither exists, so you can make any assumption you want there (again, since neither really exists), and that particular assumption solved a lot of problems, though not all.


So how would you approach that particular problem?

Edited by Catamount, 01 March 2012 - 11:51 AM.

[Ghost Dragon]

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Going back further:




That the word plasma is used does not mean the power source is not fusion. All nuclear fusion schemes for power use fusion.

Beyond that, it's kind of hard to infer anything, because it seems either nonsensical, or just not enough to infer anything (which isn't your fault, if you're just quoting the lore, but creates the same problem just the say).

Plasma doesn't cause annihilation, either. Plasma is just a word for ionized gas, and ionizing something doesn't cause annhilation. If it was something like anti-matter, you don't have to ionize it for annihilation. There is also nothing that can really be inferred from the fact that it can "use anything for fuel". That in itself doesn't apply to any process we know anything about, and could therefore quantify.

I thought that was made clear, perhaps not.

The simplest thing I can point out here is that you've been arguing based on a simple comparison of Antimatter to some sort of fusion technology. This simply isn't appropriate when the technology involved manifestly isn't a fusion device. These are present in 40k, and are explicitly different to plasma reactor power generation.

I thought that I made this clear, perhaps not. It doesn't mean we can quantify or use information about 40k power generation. It just means we don't understand how all of it works. Also, I think someone mentioned the Calth defence grid earlier in this thread. Antimatter explosive projectiles most specifically,

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Forcefields aren't bound by the power limitations of a traditional bullet. Whereas bullets tend to top out in energy at a few kilojoules (upward of 20 for the .50BMG), there's nothing that limits how much velocity you can bore through an object with using a holodeck, besides the amount of energy the ship could input (and ships generate a lot more than kilojoule-level power, even on auxiliary power). What else would limit it?

It's a fictional bullet; the holodeck could have given it the energetic properties of any projective desired, in theory, again, the only known limitation being how much power is available to the holodeck from the ship. If you want to be a little more creative, a ship could really kill something with forcefields in all sorts of ways. Why not just have a forcefield start inside the drone, and then just expand outward? Or start around it and crush it by shrinking? It's a holodeck; it's not bound by the actual properties of the object it's imitating if one doesn't want it to be. It would just theoretically be limited to the energy input from the ship.

Forcefields might not be bound by the power limitations of a traditional bullet, but for you to argue its some sort of super bullet, you'd really need a little more proof than "it might have the entire starship powering it". I'd also point out that the holodeck is meant to be simulating a tommy gun, with all the attributes associated with such a device.

Its not simulating a forcefield gun powered by the entire starship, and its still a physical impactor puts holes in a borg drone, without shields stopping it. All the interesting things that "might" be done by the forcefields the ship can make aren't, so they are irrelevent, but serve as a reminder that this is supposed to be a simulated tommy gun, not a simulated Forcefield death pulsar.

Burden of proof time again I'm afraid. If you want to prove its some sort of hypersonic forcefield of doom, please give it the old college try. I'll be over here laughing.

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Trek is inconsistent on this point. So if it's only displayed sometimes, do you assume races possess it, or not? It's been seen on screen, so clearly they do. Laziness by the storywriters and budget limitations of the VFX crew at some points don't change that. You're also exaggerating the number of contrary instances. The Jem'Hadar have never been shown to use them (okay, no surprise, they're quick to produce, and thrown away en masse). However, there really aren't that many instances where we've seen well-equipped boarding parties in TNG era Trek in total in the first place. In TMP, ship's security always wears such armor (again, bigger VFX budgets), but outside of that, we haven't seen that many major threats in the first place.


I'm not saying it excuses the inconsistency, because it shouldn't be there at all. But we just don't see that many kinds of combat operations in the first place during the era in question.

If its only displayed infrequently, we don't assume that its ubiquitous or common. I'm not exaggerating much of anything, we seem Jemhadar and Klingon boarding parties repeatedly. They never have combat energy shields. Nobody ever uses them for their guys onscreen, and we have a single reference to them having to be stockpiled on the capital planet of the federation for use.

You've also made reference to body armour that can repel anything from 40k, have you got anything to explain why you think this is going to be the case?

As I said before, we have a glimpse of a Fed ground trooper, he's not demonstrated to have any of the stuff you're claiming for Trek troopers.

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Not true, we see phasers cavalierly vaporize people all the time. It makes little sense to do, most of the time, since that's a drain on the power of a phaser you may need to continue to use; phasers are rarely fired at maximum setting. However, it's clearly established time and time and time again that said setting vaporizes (read: magically makes go away) vast sums of matter.

The various settings are listed in the TNG TM; phasers are lethal at setting 6 of 16. Why always fire at maximum. It's also noted that personal shield penetration is listed in some of those settings as well, yet again referencing the fact that the technology exists.

Please remember the context of my statement. I didn't say that they never vaporise people (although its perfectly appropriate to say that, Phasers don't vaporise people, ). I said that in combat, people shoot beams or bolts at each other, we rarely, if ever see them decide to simply blast through cover and concealment with their apparently super potent doom beams.

They hide behind doors, behind crates, behind rocks that their phaser rifle or weapon should be able to obliterate. Also, the tech manuals aren't canon.

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You know, listing the names of nonexistant nonsense weapons doesn't make an argument


If you want to suggest that these weapons are powerful, you have to give us some information on them that backs that assertion.

I was actually suggesting that there are multiple types of weaponry with different characteristics beyond conventional "bullets", and that your statement was unsupportable in the face of this. I wasn't just listing some weapons and mumbling about "power".

You've cropped the context that accompanied this section of my post, so thats why you got confused I imagine.

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No, but armor can defend against most things. Many franchises feature general personal shielding or armor, and all they have to do is block heat and kinetic energy (and NDF, if it's against Trek weapons).

You've cited trek armour as being capable of blocking any 40k bullet. In case you'd forgotten.

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I'm pretty sure the armor didn't scream anything, since it didn't speak, but let's see what we can infer:



1.) It must block, to some degree, Trek weaponry (otherwise he wouldn't be wearing it)

2.) Trek weaponry is clearly more powerful than "machine gun fire" in terms of energetic output, being shown to have maximum outputs at least in the low gigajoules.

3.) As per 1 and 2, energetically, a machine gun should not penetrate said armor.

I'm pretty sure for a guy who likes to talk about thematic analysis, you should be able to appreciate the value of metaphor in communication. Also, you should usually infer based on information we have, not wishful thinking.

1: It not actually clear it even IS armour, given the paucity of functional combat armour in Trek. But I'll let you have the concept it can reduce, to some unknown degree, the damage caused to a human by some form of trek weaponry.

2: Trek "weaponry" generally causes damage in a different fashion to machine guns, and only certain settings will manage to achieve superior damage to this theoretical random machine gun. Your logic is based on the idea that we can use the maximum possible setting to "ball park" the resilience of the armour against all applications of energy.

This is a bit of a naff way to do things I'm afraid. It assumes that the trek "armour" is capable of taking a significant fraction of a maximum output shot. This seems unlikely, given that these effects aren't commonly seen in trek firefights, and you have no evidence that is the case. Also, lets not forget that phasers have been described as having a 94% efficiency, this means that 6 percent of their output is waste. Unless we decide that the weapon is firing something only weakly or non interactive with matter, then I'd be interested in hearing your reasoning for why more people don't set on fire when firing their phasers on "gigajoule" settings.

3: As per 1 and 2, the "energy" argument is quite silly. You know that energy can be applied in different fashions right, or that momentum can be extremely relevent?

Look at Kevlar, stops bullets, not knives.

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Since he wasn't being struck by weaponry, or otherwise in any form of combat, you have no idea whether he was equipped with a shield. It hardly makes sense to always have one on. It's a waste of power, and potentially hinders interaction with objects outside of combat that aren't already in the shield. Further, iirc, the armor was severely damaged anyways.

I mentioned that in the context of it being another example of trek ground combat where no shields were even referenced, never mind present.

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We have no idea how that would affect Trek shields/armor, but presumably there's a fair probability that that would circumvent unmodified Trek shields.


Of course, Trek has dealt with that kind of threat too. Dominion weaponry ignored Federation shielding; that one actually took the Federation a little bit to figure out a defense to.

The part about penetrating material, however, is unlikely. It's vastly more likely that it simply has the energy sufficient to easily penetrate the particular materials it affects (unless it just circumvents normal space altogether, in which case, I'll grant that).

Ah, so now we have no idea? But thematically, XYZ weaponry penetrates shields, and so on and so forth. see how puerile such arguments are?

Please don't try and assert Trek has dealt with "that kind of threat" when its not some sort of trek beam or whatever, you can't claim that because they've fought people whose guns defeated their shielding before, it gives them a leg up against something different.

And like I said, its a puerile argument to claim that any material can be penetrated, regardless of composition, because some weaponry in a setting has some special quality.

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That depends on just what kind of energetic outputs their technology is capable of, something that seems less-than-easy to determine definitively.

Outnumbering Trek polities doesn't require an energy output for it to be the case. The Imperium has, at the very least, a million planets or systems under its control. 32 thousand of them minimum are highly populated manufacturing worlds.

As far as smashing through say, the Federation. Their weaponry outputs range from high megatons to gigatons for single torpedoes or weapon emplacements like bombardment cannon. "Stellar" level outputs are often citing for Imperial ships, and they can hide in the corona of stars for days, even blue giants a million times more energetic in their output than our own.

Bigger ships, bigger guns, more of them.

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This HAS been covered already, as you admitted your post might be, so I'll just summarize.

There's little advantage in sustained, long range combat for Trek ships. It confers an advantage on neither. However, long weapon ranges have been both stated and observed. Standard range for Voyager's torpedoes was 8 million kilometers, more at FTL, of course (something else that's been covered). Other weapons vary in maximum effective range, from hundreds of thousands of km, out to low millions.

Long ranges might have been stated and observed, it doesn't mean they are the basis for Trek combat, as you've said...its inconsistent.

Most trek combat takes place at visual ranges, close in, not at millions of kilometers. This is undeniable, we watched several wars play out on DS9 if you recall.

The trek combat paradigm at no point includes FTL torpedos being shot at targets not already at FTL, so don't waste my time with ancient warp strafing arguments.

I mean, can you even find an example of such

[guardian wolf]

JESUS you guys could write a book about this!!!

[zorgoth]

i gotta say my favourite space battles were none of the above. homeworld and star ruler had some good stuff. homeworld for being actually 3 dimentional (that is, the movement), star ruler for the accurate physics (barring the part about ignoring gravity from planets, stars, etc.) if you're not careful, you can send your guys into a losing fight, and only be able to watch while they drift to their doom! only a problem if they're over halfway to the fight though.

i'd say that the beast infection (homeworld cataclysm) would be a threat in startrek but....
a: kirk.
b: a buncha miners beat the snot out of it. yes, miners.

take a look at star ruler's ship systems sometime, you may enjoy it. suspension of disbeleif isn't always necessary!

whats with the heated discussion anyway?

[Catamount]

Ghost Dragon, on 01 March 2012 - 12:46 PM, said:

The simplest thing I can point out here is that you've been arguing based on a simple comparison of Antimatter to some sort of fusion technology. This simply isn't appropriate when the technology involved manifestly isn't a fusion device. These are present in 40k, and are explicitly different to plasma reactor power generation.

If the reactors are explicitly differentiated from fusion, then I conceded the point. They are not fusion. It's unfortunate that little to nothing else can be inferred.

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Forcefields might not be bound by the power limitations of a traditional bullet, but for you to argue its some sort of super bullet, you'd really need a little more proof than "it might have the entire starship powering it".

If I were arguing that that was necessarily the case, then you're right, but since I wasn't, I don't.

I'm merely suggesting that there's no reason to assume it did have the properties of a normal bullet, hence, the "bullets defeating Borg" argument rests on little to nothing.

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I'd also point out that the holodeck is meant to be simulating a tommy gun, with all the attributes associated with such a device.

Not true; the holodeck was meant to be used as a weapon against Borg drones. That's the only thing we know. Picard wasn't there for recreation; the only reason to turn off the safety protocols is to weaponize the holodeck. If he's weaponizing the holodeck, then there's not necessarily any limit as to how much energy he could have been using with it to inflict damage upon the Borg, again, hence the argument that bullets necessarily kill Borg is basically nonsense.

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Burden of proof time again I'm afraid. If you want to prove its some sort of hypersonic forcefield of doom, please give it the old college try. I'll be over here laughing.

You mean like I'm laughing at the fact that you're so busy making an *** of yourself, that you don't even bother to see what it is that people are arguing?

Maybe if you bothered to read some of the thread, before charging in here and making assumptions about peoples' arguments, we wouldn't have this problem.

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If its only displayed infrequently, we don't assume that its ubiquitous or common. I'm not exaggerating much of anything, we seem Jemhadar and Klingon boarding parties repeatedly. They never have combat energy shields. Nobody ever uses them for their guys onscreen, and we have a single reference to them having to be stockpiled on the capital planet of the federation for use.

Jem'Hadar wouldn't necessarily be equipped with expensive gear one way or the other, since they're throwaway soldiers. They can be grown in days, in pretty much any quantity desired.

Beyond the Dominion, we don't actually see that many boarding parties in TNG era from proper and fully-equipped militaries. Really, how many instances can you cite?

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You've also made reference to body armour that can repel anything from 40k, have you got anything to explain why you think this is going to be the case?

Unless there's a reason to doubt the figure for the Leman Russ gun used several times before, 40k weapons, even mounted weapons, don't display great energy outputs, certainly not on the infantry scale. It's that simple.

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As I said before, we have a glimpse of a Fed ground trooper, he's not demonstrated to have any of the stuff you're claiming for Trek troopers...


1: It not actually clear it even IS armour, given the paucity of functional combat armour in Trek. But I'll let you have the concept it can reduce, to some unknown degree, the damage caused to a human by some form of trek weaponry.
2: Trek "weaponry" generally causes damage in a different fashion to machine guns, and only certain settings will manage to achieve superior damage to this theoretical random machine gun. Your logic is based on the idea that we can use the maximum possible setting to "ball park" the resilience of the armour against all applications of energy.
This is a bit of a naff way to do things I'm afraid. It assumes that the trek "armour" is capable of taking a significant fraction of a maximum output shot. This seems unlikely, given that these effects aren't commonly seen in trek firefights, and you have no evidence that is the case. Also, lets not forget that phasers have been described as having a 94% efficiency, this means that 6 percent of their output is waste. Unless we decide that the weapon is firing something only weakly or non interactive with matter, then I'd be interested in hearing your reasoning for why more people don't set on fire when firing their phasers on "gigajoule" settings.
3: As per 1 and 2, the "energy" argument is quite silly. You know that energy can be applied in different fashions right, or that momentum can be extremely relevent?

1.) Name something else a combat trooper would plausibly be wearing that would be so bulky, if not bodily protection.

2.) The argument is silly, because if you made armor that could only withstand light-medium settings, the opposing force would simply turn the power of their weapons up a bit and make the armor nothing but cumbersome decoration.

As for why people don't always fire phasers on the highest settings, a reason has already been given, and if you don't like that reason, then make one up; I frankly don't care.

Phasers are canonincally capable of those outputs, and they aren't always used, but clearly the setting is always available. Unless you can offer a reason as to why it would be advantageous to always fire them at an order of magnitude and change beyond what's needed to kill a person, then pointing out that they aren't always fired at that setting isn't any kind of argument for you, whatsoever. It's about as relevant as me pointing out that Federation officers don't always wear blue; is there some reason they should be?

3.) Can you cite an example where a material capable of taking hundreds of megajoules of energy (at least) over a relatively concentrated area, can be taken down by a bullet? The Federation has kinetic weaponry; if defeating defenses were as simple as deploying it, soldiers would have TR-116s instead of Type III phasers.

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Look at Kevlar, stops bullets, not knives.

Give me a bullet with enough energy, or a small enough area over which the force is applied, and it won't stop it at all. Knives penetrate because of the small area that the force is concentrated on. Since phasers already fire narrow beams unless set to do otherwise, that particular difference isn't going to favor a bullet in any meaningful sense.

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Ah, so now we have no idea? But thematically, XYZ weaponry penetrates shields, and so on and so forth. see how puerile such arguments are?

Please don't try and assert Trek has dealt with "that kind of threat" when its not some sort of trek beam or whatever, you can't claim that because they've fought people whose guns defeated their shielding before, it gives them a leg up against something different.

I see, so even though any franchise's shields are generally relatively modifiable, and I would wholly expect any franchise, including 40k, to modify shields for increased effectiveness against new weapons, since most do that on a regular basis, Trek apparently has to be excluded from that. I see

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And like I said, its a puerile argument to claim that any material can be penetrated, regardless of composition, because some weaponry in a setting has some special quality.

It's asinine to suggest that a weapon can penetrate "any material" or "any shield" to begin with.

If a weapon has been known to penetrate certain barriers, that's evidence of its effect to penetrate certain barriers, not "anything", as you imply.

Edited by Catamount, 01 March 2012 - 02:51 PM.

[Catamount]

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Please remember the context of my statement. I didn't say that they never vaporise people (although its perfectly appropriate to say that, Phasers don't vaporise people, ). I said that in combat, people shoot beams or bolts at each other, we rarely, if ever see them decide to simply blast through cover and concealment with their apparently super potent doom beams.



They hide behind doors, behind crates, behind rocks that their phaser rifle or weapon should be able to obliterate. Also, the tech manuals aren't canon.

Since Trek materials are fairly dense, something that's observed when you see phasers used as cutting tools for said alloys, and I'm not sure what use it would be trying to bore through someone's cover onboard most ships or installations. What are you going to do, stand up in plain sight of everybody and make yourself a target for 10 seconds while you melt someone's cover away? Imparting even low gigajoules seems to take a fairly long, concentrated shot, and we have never seen mass obliteration of, say, tritanium. Like I said, we've occasionally seen Trek phasers used as cutting tools, and they seem to take awhile getting through Trek alloys. They can do it, certainly, but it takes a bit.


Also, you're not entirely correct about the TMs. Viacom employees have made statements implying canonicity for them. To what extent has not been elaborated on, to my knowledge, but it has nonetheless been said. It's no surprise, really. TAS was canonized relatively recently as well. Even before that, the TMs did demonstrate the intentions of the writers for the shows. It's the same with the Writers manuals. I have no idea if they're considered canon or not, but the information inside of them was a consideration for writing episodes (hence why they were there), which means the canon was written whem them in mind.

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Outnumbering Trek polities doesn't require an energy output for it to be the case. The Imperium has, at the very least, a million planets or systems under its control. 32 thousand of them minimum are highly populated manufacturing worlds.

which means nothing if they can't actually hit a Trek ship, and impart notable quantities of energy and sustain notable fire in return

To suggest that this point is irrelevant to a conflict is more than a bit silly.

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As far as smashing through say, the Federation. Their weaponry outputs range from high megatons to gigatons for single torpedoes or weapon emplacements like bombardment cannon. "Stellar" level outputs are often citing for Imperial ships, and they can hide in the corona of stars for days, even blue giants a million times more energetic in their output than our own.

Trek is pretty close to being able to do that with a shuttle craft as of the late 2360s, so I'm not sure what your point is there.

Actually, as I recall, the shuttle was able to. It's not because shuttles are super awesome and powerful; it's just that the shuttle in question used a modified shield.

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Bigger ships, bigger guns, more of them.

Several franchises have big ships that aren't particularly useful (EVE being the worst offender there); I still haven't see any compelling evidence as to how "big" 40k guns are, in terms of energetic output, and without that information, numbers are of limited utility here.

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Long ranges might have been stated and observed, it doesn't mean they are the basis for Trek combat, as you've said...its inconsistent.



Most trek combat takes place at visual ranges, close in, not at millions of kilometers. This is undeniable, we watched several wars play out on DS9 if you recall.

Ships have no reason to engage each other far out. That they can is established in literally dozens of instances of stated and observed weapons ranges, dozens.

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The trek combat paradigm at no point includes FTL torpedos being shot at targets not already at FTL, so don't waste my time with ancient warp strafing arguments.



I mean, can you even find an example of such

I'll tell you what: you give me one reason as to why a torpedo can't exit warp, and I'll concede the argument.

Otherwise, we know torpedoes can fly in warp, and there is absolutely no reason to believe they can't exit it. In fact, if torpedoes were stuck in warp permanently when fired, they'd have infinite energy reserves, since it takes energy to maintain a warp field.


So we have what reason to believe this capability isn't possessed, exactly?

Honestly, both components need for torpedoes to do this are here, entering (or at least being launched at) and exiting warp. One is explicitly observed, while the other is implicitly stated (warp fields require power to maintain, so a torpedo couldn't stay at FTL indefinitely even if they wanted to). If, given that fact, you can't accept that a torpedo can do both, and therefore can assault a stationary target from FTL, on the rather asinine grounds that "well we haven't seen it yet", then we're not going to get anywhere, because by that standard, neither of us is going to allow any amount of even reasonable assumption, or even simple extrapolation, so frankly, you've just robbed us of all reason to have this discussion, IF this is to be the standard of how you debate.

Maybe it isn't. Maybe you're really more reasonable than this. I'd like to think so.

Edited by Catamount, 01 March 2012 - 03:40 PM.

[Catamount]

Also, on the topic of the previous poster who suggested an Imperium go back in time (accidentally) and conquer an infantile human race, I realize the comment was in jest, or at least seemed to be, but I feel obliged to point out that the 29th Century Federation, which is time-travel capable (very much so), and watches the Timeline closely, would be obligated to stop any such effort.


In fact, technically they'd be obligated to stop any incursion that resulted in the Federation being conquered or destroyed, because that's clearly not the timeline they exist in (and wouldn't you stop any such changes to ensure your own survival?), so technically, any war the Federation would otherwise lose would be subject to intervention from the future anyways. So how powerful are their ships? Well a ship the size of a shuttlecraft effectively obliterated the solar system in one particular incident (later stopped because, as I said, LOL time travel). So I can only imagine what, say, the USS Relativity is capable of.


I choose to typically exclude that particular consideration, because it represents a deus ex machina for the Federation, but it's still occasionally interesting to bring up, and worth nothing that any consideration of the Federation is with us tying its hands behind its back, because in reality, they can time travel back with absurdly powerful ships (unlike the Imperium, the Federation makes absolute quantum leaps in spans of a few hundred years), and are obligated to.

Edited by Catamount, 01 March 2012 - 04:27 PM.

[Strum Wealh]

Actually, I'd like to know where the argument that the Imperium's ships aren't fusion-powered comes from.

The 40k wiki article regarding the Imperial Navy specifically states:

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Torpedoes are long-range missiles carried by many Imperial Navy vessels. From ~60 feet (on Destroyers) to ~200 feet (on Cruisers) to ~300 feet (on Battleships) in length, these weapons are powered by a fusion-based plasma reactor which also doubles as its warhead. Once launched, the plasma drive propels the torpedo towards its foe, whilst starting an energy build-up that will detonate the projectile once it reaches its target. Most torpedoes only have limited detection capabilities and will not track and engage its target unless its passes within a few thousand kilometres of the target vessel.

and

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However, those remaining in service have been recommissioned for a variety of purposes; various pattern Ironclads may be retrofitted with a gargantuan, ship-, station- and even planet-killer cannon running the entire length of the ship's keel, linked directly to the stern fusion reactors; others may simply be braced and reinforced for the purpose of ramming into -- and through -- enemy vessels.

and

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Every Imperial starship is equipped with a fusion-based Plasma Drive for normal propulsion through the depths of space. Running up to a third of the starship's length, the aft section is a mass of drive tubes, engine compartments and plasma reactors.

The franchise's own wiki states three times in the same article that their power sources are ultimately fusion-based - I'm pretty sure that means that they are using fusion to generate the plasma that they then use for other tasks.

For example, a "plasma reactor" can be something as relatively straightforward as a tokamak or similar device (which, incidentally, is also pretty much what a BattleMech's fusion engine is) - real-world examples include JET, ITER, and DEMO.

[Catamount]

Hmm, well okay then, let's just put it to Ghost Dragon.

Ghost, is there is a source you can show us that explicitly differentiates between fusion and plasma reactors? A wiki isn't definitive, but it's not generally something to be ignored. I'm sure MORE than a few people here have been relying on Memory Alpha and Wookiepedia for certain information; in fact, I even have recognized the examples used in some posts as the prominent examples from M-A, suggesting as much.

Strum Wealh isn't wrong. Fusion reactors are plasma reactors. I've mentioned that as well. So is there a citable source which contradicts the assertion through said explicit differentiation, as has been implied?


I'll look into some of the wiki discussion pages later, see what I can find on their reasoning. It might well be speculation on their part, but then, the only reason I accepted a claim to the contrary in the first place was because of a claim of an explicitly defined difference being stated to exist between the technologies in 40k, so I guess sources all around would be good to see there.

Edited by Catamount, 01 March 2012 - 05:50 PM.

[Strum Wealh]

Longsword, on 01 March 2012 - 05:17 AM, said:

Also, with the nature of warp travel, it is very likely that at least one imperial fleet would arrive at star trek earth at the wrong time- possibly hundreds or thousands of years in the past, and conquer earth while the trekky earthlings are still in the renaissance. (Its commonplace for fleets to arrive at planets 150 years too late or too early)

Catamount, on 01 March 2012 - 04:00 PM, said:

Also, on the topic of the previous poster who suggested an Imperium go back in time (accidentally) and conquer an infantile human race, I realize the comment was in jest, or at least seemed to be, but I feel obliged to point out that the 29th Century Federation, which is time-travel capable (very much so), and watches the Timeline closely, would be obligated to stop any such effort.


In fact, technically they'd be obligated to stop any incursion that resulted in the Federation being conquered or destroyed, because that's clearly not the timeline they exist in (and wouldn't you stop any such changes to ensure your own survival?), so technically, any war the Federation would otherwise lose would be subject to intervention from the future anyways. So how powerful are their ships? Well a ship the size of a shuttlecraft effectively obliterated the solar system in one particular incident (later stopped because, as I said, LOL time travel). So I can only imagine what, say, the USS Relativity is capable of.


I choose to typically exclude that particular consideration, because it represents a deus ex machina for the Federation, but it's still occasionally interesting to bring up, and worth nothing that any consideration of the Federation is with us tying its hands behind its back, because in reality, they can time travel back with absurdly powerful ships (unlike the Imperium, the Federation makes absolute quantum leaps in spans of a few hundred years), and are obligated to.

And here I thought that we were specifically disallowing time-active groups/technologies and time-travel in general (in addition to gods/demons and pseudo-gods/demons) for exactly that reason...

Otherwise, groups like the Time Lords and the Daleks just conquer the ancestors of their opponents or prevent said opponents from having ever existed or trap said opponents in a time-lock or something like that...

Edited by Strum Wealh, 01 March 2012 - 06:56 PM.

[Catamount]

Again, that's why I'm choosing to leave that consideration out (even though technically, that is part of the Federation, and a deus ex machina with which they would basically plow over anyone, given certain circumstances (like the Federation facing a galaxy-conquering army early in its history, thereby altering said history vs normal canon)).

As I said, the fact that it's a deus ex machina means it's not much fun to include, so it was only brought up in response to Longsword.

I agree, no time travel, at least right now; we can discuss that another time. It's only fair, afterall for all those, umm... less sophisticated franchises

Edited by Catamount, 01 March 2012 - 06:02 PM.

[Ilithi Dragon]

A note on warp-straffing: Trek ships canonically CAN fire on sublight ships while at warp. In TOS "Journey to Babel", the Enterprise's engines are disabled by sabotage, and she is engaged by an Orion vessel that is making warp-speed strafing runs. Also, in TOS "The Ultimate Computer", the Enterprise, while under the control of the M5 Computer, engages a sublight transport without dropping out of warp. Trek ships most certainly CAN fire on sublight ships while at warp. Conversely, they can be fired upon by sublight ships while at warp, though hitting them is the trick.